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I encourage everybody to check out Kirk’s dispatches from Vietnam, which are now being showcased at his most excellent blog.
Check out Portland food blogger Veronica’s colorful Flickr gallery, which includes some incredibly twee and delicious bento. So damn cute!
Never underestimate the strength of the human spirit.
Tony Bourdain Would Pimp for Prada. (Chowhound)
What about a place like Mario’s with the Spotted Pig? Let’s say Fergus [Henderson] wanted to open a place?
Fergus? I’d do anything with Fergus. Anytime. Blind. I don’t care. We could kill 17-year-olds with regularity! I will personally serve 17-year-olds if I’m in business with Fergus!
Fast Food Items Highest In Trans Fat - The 88 least healthy foods. (A Calorie Counter)
Keeping in mind just how terrible trans fat is and all of the terrible things it can cause, I have given this the very catchy nickname of “The 88 Fast Food Items Most Likely To Kill You.” When you look over this list with the understanding that you should be eating 0 grams of trans fat per day, you’ll realize that my little nickname really isn’t that much of an overstatement.
Jack-in-the-box, Burger King, White Castle — the usual suspects.
What are you doing the evening of Sunday, November 11?
Perhaps, if you have some free time and a few bucks to spare, you can make your way over to AudioCinema to attend a benefit for my friend Chad, who was diagnosed this summer with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. There will be music, beverage, food (for purchase — provided by the cafe@AudioCinema), and a raffle. If you’re lucky, you might see yours truly popping and locking to those new-fashioned musical beats all the kids are listening to these days on their Zunes and Packard Bell MP3 devices, while stuffing my face with free-range hot dogs while drinking Zima-and-Grape-Kool-Aid cocktails (aka the “Ryan Seacrest”).
As much as I hate the term, the Portland food “blogosphere” continues to expand in scope.
- Cuisine Bonne Femme (of PortlandFoodandDrink.com) just launched Portland Food Carts, an excellent compendium of the various food carts and trucks that serve the metro area (but mostly downtown).
- Tommy @Macerating Shallots continues to impress with his prolific and varied posts.
- Brownie Points is not exactly new, but new to Portland.
- Veronica (who is a rockstar for claiming the grand prize in the Tillamook Mac ‘N’ Cheese Regional) @cap’n blog and salty has been food blogging for a year now, but only recently came to my attention.
- The folks at the cleverly named eat (503) are doing quick hits of dining options in our fair burg.
- Lady Concierge gets out a lot, and she’s busy dutifully and gracefully documenting her experiences.
- Lizzy has been dishing Portland in very high gear this year.
- The owners of the recently opened Little Red Bike Cafe in North Portland allow you into their world.
- Portland Hamburgers have an admirable, singular focus.
Via her sweet curtsy @Portlandfood.org, we are introduced to McAuliflower’s Brownie Points and her very naughty X-Rated Cupcakes.
I would try this with mini-meatloafs, but that would be getting way too uncomfortable. On many, many levels.
I encourage you all to check out Jeni’s fantastic series of posts from her recent travels in Vietnam.
Via Je Mange la Ville, we get this totally awesome and mesmerizing clip of amateur gourmand Christopher Walken.
Let us also take this opportunity to pay homage to Walken’s ode to hotdogs.
Check out Cabel’s place. He does yeoman’s work in telling us what the corporate taste alchemists have been cooking up via focus groups.
I received Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen as a gift some time ago, and I must say it is the best Vietnamese cookbook I’ve owned.
The design, layout, and organization are all wonderful. The photography sparkles, and Nguyen herself brings a confident and welcomed voice to the recipes and chapter intros.
It is quite a comprehensive tome, running the gamut from simple sauces to Vietnamese charcuterie. Nguyen provides a slick primer for bringing authenticity to the table, whether by describing various techniques or detailing a taxonomy of Vietnamese herbs complete with accompanying photos, descriptions, and corresponding Vietnamese nomenclature.
Ms. Nguyen also runs her own web site and blog, Viet World Kitchen, that is a great companion to the book. Graham @Noodlepie has recently published a Q&A with this great new voice in Vietnamese-American cuisine.
Via Adam K @Serious Eats, the burger with a patty made entirely of ground bacon.
This is like the first time I saw somebody do a windmill without allowing their butt to touch the cardboard, or ollie over a park bench. I didn’t believe it at first, shaking my head in amazement, and then basked in the awe of witnessing the occurrence. Over time I came to grips with my own inadequacy, and ultimately gave up breakdancing/skateboarding.
Batali and Bourdain Argue Over Adam Platt, the Egg Thief, and Much More. (New York Magazine)
Batali: It’s amazing, these fucking Websites, these blogs. [Otto co-owner] Jason Denton hasn’t even thought about this pizza restaurant that isn’t even a pizza restaurant across the street from Otto, and he’s getting quoted. I call him and say, “Lips. What are you doing?” and he’s like “I want to tell you, I’m never planning on opening a pizza restaurant … I don’t know what happened on the blog this morning.” Whatever the blog heard is now fact.
Bourdain: I think it’s great. They’ve beaten down the wall, and everybody’s invited to write whatever shit they want about you. It’s democratic.
Batali: I’m not so much about these blogs by anonymous people saying nasty things about you. I think it’s getting pretty stupid. If there’s something interesting, and there’s somebody editing it and taking care of it, I’m down with it. But some of those people are just bit with vituperative anger and just want to rail on you.
Bourdain: It’s inevitable, it’s the tide, there’ s no fighting it. There’s a bunch of these guys that are like Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, whipping out their fucking little cameras, and five minutes after one of them says it’s the greatest, the next will say that’s so last week. That’s inevitable. I go to all those sites and enjoy them, especially when they’re about people I don’t like.
Batali: Well, I don’t like them.
Speaking of Comic Book Guy…
HUMAN BREAST MILK CHEESE MADE IN FRANCE. (Why Travel to France)
Le Petit Singly is a farm that specializes in making cheese from women’s breast milk. Are you imagining the milking process? Admittedly, that imagery makes me come to the conclusion that it’s an absolutely bizarre and crazy world of cheesemaking in little ole Singly, France. But, no. I think the “donors” bring their milk to the farm, or something like that.
The cheese is produced exactly like it would be for cow’s milk and apparently tastes like it has hints of hazelnut. I still have my doubts about its existence, though. The farm says the cheese is rich in vitamins and nutrients but I don’t think these survive after being ultra-pasteurized. Also, they have an “AB” label, which is the official label for organic products. Does that mean that the women all grazed on organic?
That’s nothing. You should taste the truffles that grow on my taint.
Off the Broiler visits Momofuku Ssäm Bar and indulges in the Bo Ssäm food “orgy”.
When I’m finally brought to justice for my various transgressions and crimes against humanity, this is my last supper before lockdown.
Last thoughts on a dead pig. (Ed’s Diner)
Driving from the slaughterhouse in Kapowsin to Cheryl Ouellette’s farm in Summit one morning this month, it barely registered: dinner – 90 pounds of whole pig, freshly killed and USDA approved — was riding in the jump seat behind me.
On the way to the slaughterhouse two hours earlier, the pig, then 160 pounds and breathing, rode in a wooden crate in the back of Ouellette’s red Dodge pick-up truck. Now, with hair, blood and entrails removed, the pig, now pork, was wrapped in plastic and stuffed in a cardboard box about the size of a bag of golf clubs.
Acoustic Stove Could Aid Third World. (Discovery News)
An appliance being designed for developing communities in Africa and Asia not only generates electricity, but also cooks and cools using acoustic technology.
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The efficiency comes from a technology known as thermoacoustics, which produces sound waves from heated gas and then converts them to electricity.
Here’s how it works: wood is placed inside the stove and burned. The fire heats compressed air that has been pumped into specially shaped pipes located inside the stove’s chimney and behind the stove.
The heated air begins to vibrate and produce sound waves. Inside the pipes, the noise is 100 times louder than a jet taking off. But because the pipes are stiff and do no vibrate, the sound waves have nowhere to go. So outside the pipe, people hear only a faint hum.
Firing up the grill? Make it a ‘rare’ occasion. (LA Times)
Nothing that good can be good for us, of course. And yes, the natural chemicals that give barbecued foods their trademark crusty-brown smokiness are toxic and carcinogenic. Researchers have linked consumption of flame-grilled meat to all sorts of ailments: breast, prostate and colon cancer; diabetes; glaucoma; heart disease; and Alzheimer’s disease.
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But you don’t have to convert to a raw food diet yet. Barbecue chemicals may be potent toxins in petri dishes and mice, but the evidence that they do the same in humans, at the doses we’re exposed to, is weaker.
Most studies find a significant increase in cancer risk only for people who eat several portions of well- or very well-done meat a week. And even then, the risk is often small. For example, a 2005 study in Cancer Research found a 21% increase in the risk of developing colon cancer precursors for people eating as much as 18 ounces of well-done red meat per day. The bottom line: A twice-weekly date with a medium-rare steak is unlikely to give you cancer any time soon.
Bottom line, stay away from well-done meat. Not only does it ruin the cut, IT WILL FUCKING KILL YOU. It should be reserved for those with suicidal tendencies and corrupt congressmen with homo-erotically polluted jacuzzi fetishes. My main man Jeffrey Steingarten speaks truth to power:
Jeffrey Steingarten, food writer for Vogue magazine, thinks very critically about what he puts in his mouth and has yet to find sufficient evidence to steer clear of a perfectly done steak — which, in his estimation, is somewhere between rare and medium rare.
For those who choose to grill their steaks to the blackened point of well-done shoe leather, his tongue-in-cheek opinion is simple: “If you eat a steak like that, you don’t deserve to live.”
For the Love of a Good Burger. (NYTimes).
Mark Bittman throws down the burger-fu.
The grilling is the easy part. The more important steps are shopping and grinding. The difference they make, you will find, is astonishing, and will change your burger-cooking forever.
The man who made Gordon Ramsay cry. (Salon)
Marco Pierre White, the original bad-boy chef, talks about taking over “Hell’s Kitchen” from his rival, his scorn for molecular gastronomy and kitchen rage.
Some choice bits…
[…on Alinea]
I went to Chicago, and I went to Alinea. The boy there [chef Grant Achatz] has got extraordinary technical ability. This boy, I believe, can win three stars in the Michelin guide. But do I want to sit in that environment, where I’m dictated to? No. I’m told these are my two choices, 12 courses or 24 courses. It’s not my thing. It’s just too much; I get bored by it. You just lose your place. It’s like having six bottles of Cheval Blanc. In the end, you forget, and think, “What have I drank?’ It’s a bit too much of an indulgence.
I’m very happy with two great courses, with my freebies and my little amuse gueule, the little things like that. It’s enough for me. And then give me a pudding, and then I can go home.
[…on MG]
Molecular gastronomy, I don’t see the point of it. It’s a stamp, it’s a label — let’s get a few column inches, let’s make it interesting. My wife’s mother, without a doubt, is one of the great chefs. When I eat her food, it’s the most delicious food. She has no training. She just had a childhood in ’30s Spain; she was brought up by the nuns. But when I sit and eat her food — delicious. Fabulously seasoned. Great textures. It’s peasant food. What I love is it gives me an insight into the world that she came from. She’s eating today still what she did as a little girl being brought up by the nuns. This molecular gastronomy, it’s soulless.
David Chang’s recipe for sustaining food/business mojo. (Signal vs. Noise)
The driving force behind NYC’s Momofuku on being down-to-earth and not getting caught up in the bullshit continuum.
I’ve been grooving on Culinate, a new-ish entrant to the web food scene. Clean, user friendly and functional design, and great content. Portland’s own Jim Dixon is a contributor, spreading his olive oil wisdom and giving tips on how to feed your dog without killing it.
Most restaurants don’t make their own desserts. They farm that work out to local bakeries or mega-dessert conglomerates like Bindi. I’m not saying these outsourced desserts aren’t good – they’re just not homemade.
Agreed. I’d rather sport for another appetizer to round out the meal. Why waste 700 calories on something sweet and cloying? Bah.
Food bloggers dish up plates of spicy criticism. “Formerly formal discipline of reviewing becomes a free-for-all for online amateurs”.
If you think restaurant critics from mainstream newspapers, television and magazines are tough on the food industry, you haven’t spent much time in cyberspace. Online message boards, gossip columns, city restaurant guides and food blogs are proliferating and having a profound influence on where consumers spend their eating dollars. The once-genteel discipline of restaurant reviewing has turned into a free-for-all, celebrated by some as a new-world democracy but seen by others as populist tyranny.
Jared @The Carnivore Project, timed perfectly with March Madness, has posted the final round of The Meat Bracket, which aims to crown THE ULTIMATE MEAT.
It’s Bacon vs. Roast Chicken in the finals. Vote early and often, and don’t let bitter grapes about Tofu being shut out prevent you from performing your civic duties.
On the heels of my own Pho post, both Eat,Drink&BeMerry and Wandering Chopsticks have excellent, comprehensive posts on this Vietnamese beef noodle soup.
Dark Restaurant: Where one eats in total darkness.
The first dark restaurant in Asia is officially opened on the 23 December 2006. This restaurant, located in Beijing, China, has its interior painted completely in black. Customers are greeted by a brightly lit entrance hall and will be escorted by waiters wearing night vision goggles into the pitch dark dining room to help them find their seats. Flashlights, mobile phones and even luminous watches are prohibited while in this area.
The meal will be taken in this environment with the complete loss of vision. By starving one’s sense, your other senses are stimulated to full alert – all so the theory goes – and your food will taste like it’s never tasted before. In case you are wondering about the washrooms, they are all brightly lit.
I’m not sure if I’d be too eager to sign up for this. First of all, it’s pitch dark, so what’s to prevent some perve with a night vision scope from sneaking up and giving you a finger bang against your will? And if something is shaved with truffles and you’re paying $75 for it…how do you really know? Then again, nobody is going to see you if you want to pick up your plate and hoover every last truffle to make sure.
Come to think of it, this would be a concept better suited for, say, a rib joint, so you can go totally atavistic on a bone or a plate of chicken wings without caring a whit about appearances. And truly, whoever smelt it dealt it — no need for a poker face after ripping one.
Click through and check out the masked waiters, who look like (straight out of Blade Runner) industrial designers of frozen, biorobotic Replicant eyes.
After getting an earful (get it?) from those advocating for bunny wunny, food blogger makes peace. Sort of.
Lesson here? I dunno. Something. Does everything need to be distilled into an easily consumed, after-school-special-like sound bite?
Eating mammals is a messy, complicated business. We are all death merchants.
High-brow brews. “Boulevard joins brewers creating beers with the complex characteristics of wine.”
And to drink better, they’re willing to pay a premium. A Rogue Imperial India Pale Ale from Newport, Ore., goes for $13 for 750 milliliters, a price more comparable to wine than a six-pack. Even the O’Fallon Smoked Porter, which is best enjoyed with barbecue ribs, rings up at $4 per 22-ounce bottle. Boulevard craft beers will cost $7 to $13 for 750 milliliter bottles (about 24 ounces).
“A growing segment of the population wants more flavorful products, more premium products,” Gatza says. And, like wine, “they will have several different beer styles in the refrigerator, from several breweries, so that they can match beer to the occasion.”
Built for Speed, but Looking for Love.
WATCHING a three-and-a-half-pound chicken roast in 14 minutes, time loses all meaning. The skin turns gold and crisp, juices immediately rise to the surface, and the flesh firms before your eyes. It’s dizzying and seductive, like the home makeovers on TV that compress a six-month renovation into a single afternoon.
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TurboChef, however, has put an unusual amount of research and design energy into adapting its product for residential use. It will be introduced next month, priced at $5,995 for a solo unit and $7,895 for a TurboChef combined with a conventional oven. The company is pitching — hard — the notion that its appliance will do no less than revolutionize American home cooking.
Time to sell the Jetta.
But for some reason I watched it three times straight.
I blame fluoride.
Via Serious Eats, the $14 hot dog.
The “Texas Haute Dog” at Max’s Wine Dive, the wildly popular new wine bar and restaurant on Washington Avenue, goes for $14. It’s a grass-fed beef frankfurter on a Kraftsmen bun, topped with “house-made” pickled jalapeños, venison chili, cotija cheese and crispy fried onions that look remarkably like the Durkees canned onions of green bean casserole fame. The dog is served on top of a pile of hand-cut frites (that’s French for French fries) that have been garnished with more venison chili.
“Haute Dog”. Get it? Har har. In Houston, of course, the land of defense contractors that routinely defraud the American people of billions of dollars. It would only make sense that’s where the $14 hot dog lives and breathes.
First of all, check out the photo. That thing is so monstrous it looks damn near inedible, thereby violating the axiom decreed by The Hot Dog Council that you should not take more than five bites to eat a hot dog.
Second of all, shut the fuck up.
SDF deploys perky mascot to boast cuddly image.
“Prince Pickles is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for,” said Defense Ministry official Shotaro Yanagi. “He’s our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery.”
Graham at the excellent noodlepie pulls together a very comprehensive anthology of Vietnamese food videos.
Holy OMFG. Via The Great Taco Hunt — World record pastor.
A group of businessmen in the Mexican city of Chihuahua broke a tasty record Friday, making a hunk of meat on a skewer big enough to serve 24,000 tacos….the meat for a pastor taco, a variety of the Mexican dish that consists of pork squashed onto a stake, weighed 3.9 tons and was 13 feet high…
Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records recognized the hunk of meat as the world’s “largest skewer of kebab meat.”
Where are they gonna get all the radishes? How come nobody told me about this? This was the Hajj of my lifetime. Oh well. Hello empty, meaningless life.
EatDrinkandBeMerry goes on the fusion tip and imagines a world with Korean taco trucks.
What kind of world would that be? A better world. A better tomorrow.
Excuse me as I go into hyperbole mode, but this is THE BEST FREAKING FOOD INVENTION SINCE MSG.
For some reason, this tickles my fancy as very few things can. The ultimate in fusiony goodness — IMO the justification for the interracial relationships.
Mark this day on your calendar…the birth of the Korean taco.
If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in Asia have a headache?
Good question. Not since the false demonization of the tomato as a poisonous cousin of the deadly nightshade has another ingredient usurped such mythical and misbegotten ill repute.
What does chiefly animate Japanese soups and broths is an amino acid called glutamate. In the best ramen shops it’s made naturally from boiling dried kombu seaweed; it can also come from dried shrimp or bonito flakes, or from fermented soy. More cheaply and easily, you get it from a tin, where it is stabilised with ordinary salt and is thus monosodium glutamate.
This last fact is of little interest to the Japanese - like most Asians, they have no fear of MSG. And there lies one of the world’s great food scare conundrums. If MSG is bad for you - as Jeffrey Steingarten, the great American Vogue food writer once put it - why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?
I liken this to the Reefer Madness scare of the 20th century. MSG has been demonized from the bully pulpit, scandalized by a generation of shucksters perpetuating false truths and slanderous lies. Armchair chemists and erstwhile nutritionists, burnishing speciously gained junk science, falsely projected their own hypochondriac ill-conceptions upon a gullible population so quick to scapegoat any perceived threat to their imagined, self-absorbed pollyanna-ish reality. Stop the madness, I say. Back off that ledge, come back from the brink of insanity, embrace the M to S to the G. MSG!
It is your obligation, no, your mission, dear reader, to walk into any Asian restaurant who proudly proclaims “No MSG!” and tell them to cease with the lies. Demand that they exhibit the moral conviction to make a stand, to end the illusion. There’s no impropriety; alas, no reason for shame. We need not adorn this scarlet letter. Wear it proud, and wear it loud.
Everything has MSG. MSG is everywhere. MSG is taste. MSG is living. MSG is life. Long live MSG.
Oh my lord, chicken fried bacon (via Megnut again, from whom I am stealing all my blog posts, apparently).
This is Texas, after all. And Snook, TX, at that. One must admire the way they approach their food with such reckless abandon.
Up here in Portland we would use an artisanal smoked wild boar jowl, panko batter, expeller-pressed hazelnut oil, and serve it with a side of self-righteousness, white guilt, and the expressed stipulation that you must also adopt a third-world Asian baby.
Cabel’s Blog LOL has issued a Subway challenge (and even provides templates) for those enterprising enough to pull a fast one on a sandwich artist. If you order the cheese “steak”, they will turn their back to microwave the meat, and the opportunity will present itself, natch.
Here are my entries.
Via Dethroner, a breakfast sandwich fit for a king.
I’m counting 16 quail eggs. I’m not sure if there’s magical quail factories in France, but one can only dream.
The Dude over at PortlandFoodandDrink.com likes to pile on Michael Hebberoy, he of ripe/Gotham/clarklewis infamy, and who can blame him? It’s low hanging fruit. I take Schadenfreudian pleasure in reading his posts regarding boy wonder (here, here and here). Partly because I’m a dick, but also because it’s still fairly entertaining. To draw a parallel: tonight I watched the puffy shirt episode of Seinfeld for the sixth time.
Anyhow, a fellow blogger took umbrage with one post in comments.
…the amount of negative attention that you focus on Michael Hebberoy is a little sad. Don’t you have someone else to focus on, or is the food scene in Portland really that small and pathetic that the antics of one ex-restaurateur are blog fodder for months? Maybe you got personally burned by Hebberoy and that’s where the vendetta comes from, but the name-calling and childish “nyah-nyah”-ing really detract from the credibility of what is otherwise a decent blog.
Later, she expounds, “I guess I don’t know enough about the Portland food scene to be ragging on you guys for harping on one man. Could the swath of destruction he left really be *that* bad??? I met the guy and really found him to be a food-revolutionary.”
To my discredit, I’ve never eaten at ripe, Gotham, or clarklewis. The latter I might still venture to in the near future, if it’s still around and I’m not feeling too self-conscious. I’ve heard good things about the food at all the aforementioned places. But “food-revolutionary”? Having a few dozen people over to your house for a dinner party is not revolutionary. If you are asking them to pay, it’s a business, you know, like a restaurant. If you think people should be grateful for the opportunity to pay good money to eat at your house, you’re an egomaniac.
“Killing” the restaurant is not revolutionary — it’s delusional. Like as if I claimed I’m subverting and reinventing journalism with my piddly keystrokes on this lame blog. It takes plenty of cocaine and stiff cocktails, while locked in a bathroom for extended periods with your closest admirers, for anyone to foment that sort of delusional hubris.
The conscious omission of capitalization is not revolutionary unless you’re E. E. Cummings. And having a “writer-in-residence”? That’s not revolutionary — merely whimsical. And to me makes as much sense as a Nascar pit crew employing a poet laureate, or a street magician needing an accountant.
Revolutionary? Fire. The cultivation of crops. Pasteurization. Food revolutions are epochal. 80,000 B.C. 8,000 B.C. 1862 A.D. Even taking into account the entropic evolution towards singularity, we still aren’t due for another food revolution for a few more years. Give me a ring in the year 2050 when organic, nano-robotic spores successfully spawn a chateaubriand in a laboratory vat.
Helping to cook and organize a meal for Kylie Minogue’s cousin and Norman Mailer’s butler doesn’t make you a revolutionary — it makes you a caterer. And I’m sorry, but catering is not revolutionary. It’s a profession, and, when done well, a craft.
Chow explores the epistemological underpinnings of America’s aversion to horse meat.
Passon emphasizes a key point: Since Americans have never had to eat horse, unlike the historically impoverished peasantry of Europe, the meat’s never become normalized. “If we train Americans, they would eat it,” he says. Asked if he would serve horsemeat to New Yorkers if they’d order it, Passon is enthusiastic: “Oh, definitely.” Horse is typically compared to beef—although it is lighter and less fatty—and Passon, who loves its taste, likens its texture to that of skirt steak. “It’s very sweet and it’s very bloody,” he adds. Traveling in Italy recently, he purchased a horse salami, or salami di cavallo. (Horsemeat was traditionally used for sausage in Italy’s north.) “I compared it to the pork one, and it was ten times better,” he says. “I gave it to my partner, and he’s like, this is the best sausage I’ve ever had.
So true. After the Kentucky Derby winner broke its leg last spring, it was the top story in the American media for weeks (incidentally, soldiers killed in the battlefield were lucky to be mentioned — so much for supporting the troops). While I’m not too keen on chowing down on Seabiscuit anytime soon, I can’t really fault the rest of the world (including our Canuck neighbors) for finding deliciousness in the saddle. Chez Pim recently posted about her experience with horse fat fries, and the subsequent revulsion.
As gourmands (and dilettantes) are forever pushing the envelope in terms of the market for high-end ingredients, imagine what thoroughbred horse meat would fetch? Fuck Kobe beef, get me a Secretariat filet, stat!
Cabel’s Blog LOL explore’s Kettle’s new beta chip program.
The Aztec Chocolate (”That’s right, a chocolate potato chip, made with actual organic Dagoba chocolate powder, cinnamon, chili.. wow. I can’t imagine eating a bag, but I’m glad I got a chance to eat at least one.”) sounds…erm, interesting (maybe still “alpha”). The Royal Indian Curry sounds like a must-have release.
I bet Kettle still beats the launch of Windows Vista.
There was a post today at Food Dude’s place about local exotic meat and game purveyor Nicky USA, and their recent score of some choice goose livers. In that post, Nancy Rommelman briefs us on The War Against Carnivores™, including a recap of the last few salvos. She frames Portland’s latest engorged goose liver capture within that context.
In comments, I linked to a post by Michael Ruhlman wherein a colleague of his describes visiting a duck foie farm in France and witnessing the ducks living humane lives, gracefully force fed a diet that includes what one gathers to be the RENDERED FAT OF ITS OWN KIND.
When I first learned of this a few months ago, I was pretty creeped out. The last time I’ve had foie was last year as part of a 7 course chef’s tasting menu at the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach (thx bro!), and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It can be quite a tasty piece of flesh, though I would opt for a seared, savory preperation rather than some cold, compressed terrine. That night we ate pan seared Hudson Valley foie gras served atop a seared rare duck breast with some sort of black truffle something or another — it was pretty damned amazing. The foie literally melted away with each bite.
However, I’m not too eager to dive back in. Look, I’ll be honest, the inhumanity angle vis-à-vis force-fed fowl never really gave me much pause. First of all, I eat the stuff infrequent enough (if I have the coin to splurge, you’re more likely to see me opt for marbled steak). And in the back of my mind, just postulating the kind of horrors that are practiced at, say, commercial chicken concerns, why would I of all people draw some imaginary line? Last month, I uncomfortably shadowed an 18-wheeler on the interstate stacked with 2×2 crates, each occupied by a live, hapless chicken. I couldn’t help but to steal glances at the wall-of-poultry monstrosity and shudder at the sheer miscalculated application of cold, free market principles.
If you check out the website for Sonoma Foie Gras, the farm mentioned in the post, you’ll learn:
Guillermo and Junny Gonzalez left their homeland of El Salvador in 1985 to pursue a new venture: The establishment of a foie gras farm in the United States. They traveled first to France where they apprenticed in foie gras production with the respected Dubois family in the Perigord Region.
It could be that the farm that supplies Portland with their foie feeds their ducks their brothers, sisters, and cousins. Or not.
I posted some feigned outrage, but it fell on deaf ears (as a friend of mine says, “I draw the line at deliciousness”). But the more I think about it, the more potentially creeped out I become. Fuck ethics and debating any particular merits of “humanely” prepping an animal for its eventual slaughter. That has little to do with this. There has to be some sort karmic retribution to force feeding an animal, any animal, TO EAT ITSELF. You’re crossing some sort of line of self-restraint — violating some ancient Hammurabic-like code — with this weird, disturbingly fucked practice, like when the dude from INXS hung himself trying to wack off. Mad cow disease seems to me prima facie evidence.
Sure, call me a pansyweight plebe who doesn’t appreciate the delicate art of fine delectables. I mean, look at the title of this blog. But I would feel a bit weird about serving my dog a diet of rendered beagle jowls, or my cat its own testicles.
Quick note on some of the culinary going-ons currently happening on these here Internets. These are blogs I like to frequent due to their writing style and breadth of content.
- Delicious Days features stellar entries for the jam-and-sweet-preserves theme of the latest installment of Sugar High Friday.
- 101 Cookbooks tells us what to do with Halloumi Cheese. I want to do this! Anyone know where I can score Halloumi in Portland?
- Becks and Posh keeps meme alive. Five things to eat before you die. I agree wholeheartedly with the wanton immolation of the lamb chop.
- Tuna Toast gets her seafood on at Roy’s in LA. Delish.
- Chubby Hubby exhalts the big breakfast. Doesn’t Singapore seem like such a perfect amalgamation of some bizarro world culture where the food is meticulously arranged and presented?
On the Portland tip:
- Gastronaut drops in on Andina and has a deep, meaningful, eHarmony-type connection with the waitress as she breathlessly explains the specials in an anglicized Latin patois. That would get me all hot as well.
- ExtraMSG finishes his Tip Sheet 2.25 despite all the backseat drivers and Monday morning quarterbacks at Portlandfood.org.
- Hungry T lives the good life for his birthday weekend. We all wish we could live like that for a day, much less three.
- And last, but definitely not least, Je Mange la Ville continues to make everything look easy and effortless, such as Killer Zucchini Casserole, Falafel, Pork Tenderloin with Fig-Orange Jam with Cinnamon & Sesame Seeds, and, amazingly, her home makeover mosaic project.
If a blog falls in the forest, does anyone trackback?
I know, it’s been a while. For the .34 readers of this blog, you’ll be ecstatic to hear that rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. I’ve been very busy with work and traveling this month. I promise to implement a pre-fall solstice resolution and pick up the pace of content creation on this erstwhile blog.
Why has happened since my last post? The Middle East has exploded into…well, business as usual, I suppose. It’s just that everyone’s punching in early for work, skipping lunch and putting in overtime.
The United States continues to inch closer towards Einstein’s definition of clinical insanity. Mel Gibson has confirmed our suspicions that he is officially batshit crazy.
On the food front, the War Against Carnivores™ remaines unabated, and threatens to wage another trans-fat battle in Chicago (which incidentally is the central front, what with the foie gras ban and what not…we fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here).
So instead of actual, original content, here’s a rundown of some of the culinary trees falling around the Net that are indeed making a sound.
Pok Pok, everyone’s favorite Thai love shack, is officially closed. Check out the thread at Portlandfood.org (and get a lesson in Restaurant Econ 101 from Mr. Pok Pok himself) and get Hungry T’s recount of his Last Supper.
There’s a lively discussion at Food Dude’s place regarding the aforementioned Great Chicago Trans-fat Parade.
Chez Pim and the Amateur Gourmet make a cute couple (if only the AG wasn’t taken (and gay)).
Extramsg is close to finishing his Portland tip sheet, and has a particularly great line in his writeup on the American Cheese Society’s Festival of Cheese.
Gastronaut finds evidence of the world’s best branding. I think this has “What the Pho?” beat hands down.
Chubby Hubby celebrates the simple shrimp cocktail. Except he calls them prawns cuz that’s what they do in Singapore.
There’s lots more happening out there…have fun exploring the interwebs!
Michael Ruhlman, guest blogger at Megnut, spews a delicious rant regarding the recent, frenzied mobilization of the anti-food faction that has wrought foie prohibition in Chicago and lobster deification at Whole Foods. His post, a worthy salvo in the crescendoing War Against the Carnivores™, brings out an equally justified tirade from Tony Bourdain in the comments. A choice nugget:
The fucktards at Whole Food, however, have done us a real service by providing the most ludicrous example of “animal welfare” concerns with their public hand wringing over the fate of shellfish. Comedy Gold. Extraordinary that in a time when we’re force feeding PEOPLE at Gitmo–and when hundreds of thousands of PEOPLE are starving to death in the Sudan and elsewhere, that there is no more burning issue on the minds of educated, well-fed, financially comfortable citizens than whether or not a clam feels pain–or whether a duck can handle what any respectable adult film ingenue considers routine.
Comedy gold, indeed.
On another front, Los Angeles chef Robert Gadsby leads a charge with his Outlaw Dinner that, in addition to featuring absinthe and hemp, is built around the showcasing of foie gras, including Foie Gras Bonbons with Pop Rocks that sounds straight from the kitchen of Chicago’s Avenues.
Über food blogger takes on the Rose City.
Kirk runs mmm-yoso!!!, a San Diego-based food blog that sets a new bar in comprehensiveness. His Vietnamese cross-section is amazing.
He recently visited Portland and details all aspects of his visit and food experiences in our fair city. Park Kitchen, Pok Pok, Murata, and our sea of downtown food carts are profiled.
I’ll be visiting San Diego next week for a wedding, I wonder if there’s anything good by the beach outside of the overpriced, touristy and gimmicky joints like George’s at the Cove or the Rusty Pelican? Though I do remember back in the late nineties I used to get a pretty good $3 happy hour lobster taco at World Famous in Mission Beach.
Via the newly minted and delicious Megnut, who has switched formats (all food, all the time!), we discover the existence of Alinea, the zenith of haughty-taughty cuisine on this continent.
The kitchen is helmed by one Grant Achatz, whom Megnut credits as “creating the most exciting food in the United States.”
You can find some fine photos and in-depth color commentary of a recent 5+ hour meal at Alinea here.
Now, nobody has ever confused me for practicing gastromique extraordinaire, and my tastes and culinary ethic are a bit plebian to be certain, but I would have to say a big fucking whoop-to-do. What Alinea seems to be doing is injecting an overwrought, effete sense of artifice and pretension into the act of eating. Fetish cuisine.
After all, all we’re talking about is sustenance, the act of sustaining your life though the intake of energy by way of esophageal sphincter. It’s man’s basest instinct, outside of breathing, which, alas, has also been ruined with the introduction of oxygen bars. God I hate people.
What, you say? What about architecture? Isn’t that the same premise - at the end of the day, these are just buildings people live and work in? To me there’s a huge difference between the Bilboa and a peanut butter sandwich wrapped in edible gold bowstrings, molded in semifreddo blood orange brioche, topped with kumquat foam, and served suspended from the ceiling with titanium chicken wire.
Seeing the “granola” suspended in its rosewater enveloped on a thin wire was seeing food transformed not just to art, but to sculpture. Eating off a pillow as it slowly deflated and perfumed the air with the scent of orange blossoms sounds overwrought; it was intoxicating. The interplay between device and delicacy was uplifting and fun, yet in no way detracted from the usability [emphasis added]. In fact it made the experience quite intellectual, as you were confronted not just with the flavors of the meal, but with expectations of how it could be consumed. Why do we need forks again?
Anytime you have to discuss the finer points of usability when it refers to the act of feeding oneself, we have crossed a line. Soon forks will be anachronism and we’ll all feed by osmosis.
Here’s a screen cap of Alinea’s $175 “tour” menu, with 24 items. The tasting menu consists of 12 items for $125 and presumably buys you larger portions, since it is only half the amount courses in the tour menu yet 71% of the price. Not sure if a reacharound from Mr. Achatz is included in the pricing. Considering the aforementioned 5 hour lifespan of a meal, that comes out to less than $25/hr, which is what it costs for someone to mow your lawn, so consider it a bargain!
So if you have a few hundred bucks to throw down next time you’re in Chicago and still have an appetite despite all that cocaine, bring your model girlfriend and check Alinea. I know I would.