Perpetual Carouse

Beard Papa.

OK, nevermind, whatever. Everytime I think of the name I can’t help but hear Notorious B.I.G. shoutin’ out from beyond the grave for a cream puff.

So, trendy as fuck Beard Papa has landed in SF. After taking NYC hipster-foodies and apparently all of Japan by storm, the Papa has finally set up shop in the Bay Area.

Yesterday over beers and BBQ, I made plans with a friend of mine to trek out to the SF store so we could taste the legendary cream puffs ourselves. The verdict?

Meh….

That’s it. Just…meh.

I mean, it’s hard to make an inedible cream puff, right? After tasting the Papa’s wares, I’m beginning to think it’s even harder to make a cream puff that lives up to the hype that Beard Papa’s been getting in the food press. Maybe it’s just me. I mean, it was ok. But
really, just ok.

I like the fact that they are filled to order, so you get a crisp cream puff, not some soggy mess that’s been sitting in a case for a while. And they’re small-ish, which is nice. All the better to lessen your guilt about eating it in the first place. And I really like the Japan-tastic logo of the old man smoking a pipe. I desperately want one of the “Who’s your Papa?” t-shirts.

On the other hand, I thought the cream filling was a bit grainy, and it wasn’t particularly vanilla-y, which is a shame, because vanilla is one of my favorite flavors. And the plasma screen showing the industrial-sized baking that brings Beard Papa cream puffs into the world seemed a little unappetizing, but that’s probably just my California showing. It’s probably big in Japan

Some friends of mine are getting married in a few weeks. Among other
wedding-related activities, they’re planning a picnic. A few nights
ago, the bride-to-be calls up and leaves a voicemail:

“We’re testing out recipes for the picnic. Do you want to come over and taste test fried chicken Wednesday night?”

Do I want to taste-test fried chicken? As in, multiple versions of fried chicken in the same night? Hell yeah!

If Jay-Z and Donald Trump’s interior decorator collaborated on an ice cream sundae, here’s what it would look like.

This sin against humanity and hard-working cows is known as the “Golden Opulence Sundae,” costs a grand, and is made (with 48 hours notice) by Serendipity 3 in NYC. Looking at it, I wonder if whoever green-lighted this photo has ever seen a food magazine. General tackiness aside, this picture doesn’t exactly look appetizing. Not to mention that for a grand, I feel like I should be able to climb into my ice cream sundae. Get a foot in there at the very least. This thing looks practically diet-sized.

I can’t imagine who would be stupid enough to pay for this, regardless of the size of their wallet. Interestingly, all the descriptions I’ve read, which presumably draw heavily from S3’s marketing materials, stress the expensiveness of all the ingredients, while making little mention of the deliciousness of the actual sundae. Perhaps I’m a mere plebeian, but caviar on my ice
cream sounds grody.

I spent Sunday evening in a cool Oakland loft, listening to a guy do Sigur Ros on a double bass, while Cynthia Washburn’s amazing food filled my belly. Most excellent.

Yes folks, it was another fantastic Ghetto Gourmet. The meal kicked off with a wild mushroom tempura and a shiso slaw. The shrooms came with lemon wedges and some most excellent coarse salt with some sort of herbal somethingorother in it. Hard to tell by candlelight exactly what it was, other than wonderful

Second course was an amazing yam soup with black sesame seeds. I can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s getting me jazzed for the forthcoming eating– er, I mean holiday– season.

The main event was a soy-glazed pig chop over an edamame succotash. Oh how I love me some pig. Delicious! And educational, as I learned from Chef Peter Jackson sitting downtable that a succotash is what happens when corn and any
sort of bean-like edible join up to use their powers in tandem.

The wine flowed, the conversation wandered, and the double bass did whatever double basses do. Had a great conversation with the folks at the next table, which is exactly the reason why GG is so great. Try chatting up the folks at another table the next time you’re at a
restaurant and see what happens.

As an undergrad, I used to live in a student co-op. Amongst the freaks and geeks I lived with was this couple, whose names escape me at the moment. They were both skinny and pimply and extremely malnourished.

The house featured a large kitchen, stocked to the gills with all sorts of tasty food, and there were daily dinners cooked by residents which were surprisingly good, stupid hippy girls’ flavor- and spice-free meals nonwithstanding (It took me years after that to learn that
“vegetarian” doesn’t mean “tastes like nothing”).

Skinny Pimply Girl was kind of a bitch. She didn’t really have many friends, other than Skinny Pimply Guy, and neither of them interacted much with anyone else in the house. The one thing I remember about them is that for dinner, they’d cook themselves this enormous plate of
steamed (frozen) corn and peas, and sit at the far end of the dining room eating their plain veggies and whispering to each other.It was fucking weird. That was all they ate…ever.

I was reminded of Skinny Pimply Couple recently when I stumbled upon an article about calorie restriction in New York Magazine. Julian Dibbell spent two months following a strict CR diet, and writes about his experience and hosting a dinner party for the CR elite.

The basic premise of calorie restriction is that by severely limiting your food intake, you get better nutrition, and live significantly longer. On the front page of Calorie Restriction Society
website, there’s even a helpful graph that shows that lab rats given severely limited diets live significantly longer than rats fed normal rat diets. Which so obviously makes calorie restriction a great idea.

Everyone knows that humans are practically identical to lab rats, plus,
it totally doesn’t matter that we can’t actually talk to the rats to
hear about how fucking starving they are and how much they hate their
calorie-restricted lives.

At first, Dibbell seems to be getting into the whole calorie restriction thing. He’s losing weight, feeling better, but getting together with big-time CR folks, he starts noticing things. Like how CR
blogger April Smith loves the “pretty” way her boyfriend’s hands are turning orange because of all the carrots and such that he’s consuming. Or how the CR gold-standard protein is Quorn, some fungus-based, highly processed pseudo-meat product that actual food-eating people seem to hate. Or the obsessive-compulsive measuring and calculating that a CR diet
requires. Or how CR folk manage to spin the loss of muscle and bone (in
addition to fat) positively.

It’s all very interesting, and by interesting I mean “fucking weird.” Admittedly, I’m not the healthiest guy on the planet, but it seems to me that a food philosophy that requires a thorough explication of how it’s not anorexia is suspect from the get-go. I fear the lady doth protest too much.

Despite all the CR folks’ claims that the diet is about health, not about appearance, April Smith seems a bit bummed that she looks “bizarrely chunky” in the magazine.

[Note: Sometime after I read her blog, Smith edited the entry to remove her complaints about looking fat, although comments remained that alluded to the text that she deleted.]

Me, I’d rather eat bacon and drink beer every now and then. What good is living to be 120 when you’re orange, without strong bones or muscles, and tricking yourself into believing that fake meat products are actually enjoyable to eat?

I spent last weekend visiting some friends and eating my way through Portland, OR. Friday night I finally got to check out Apizza Scholls, otherwise known as The Pizza Nazi. The restaurant had been on my to-do list since before Bourdain got there, and I have to admit I was a little afraid the buzz might have killed it.

Last week, NPR did a story on the quest for the Holey Grail, a trans-fat free donut. Voodoo Donuts, birthplace of said donut was also the birthplace of the bacon-maple bar, which was also on my "to eat" list in Portland.

I got quoted in a Budget Travel article about Ghetto Gourmet. I'm reasonably certain I had something far more insightful to say than "It's great," but then again we had polished off a bottle before I spoke to the writer, so I'm just glad she didn't write "...slurred Ray Aguilera."

The highlight of my recent trip to Portland (food-wise) had to be Saturday dinner at Le Pigeon. It's the new place to be (apparently), and Chef Gabe Rucker definitely proved he's got the chops to live up to being on Food & Wine's list of the best new chefs.

"While potatoes may be deep-fried in the nude, most foods require protection."
-John Hodgman

John Hodgman has a 2003 Men's Journal article on his blog about his experimentations deep frying various and sundry food items. Definitely worth a read, even if the deep-fried Twinkie craze is now behind us.

I had a deep-fried Twinkie once, sadly. Even worse was the fact that I had spent about 20 minutes walking around a street fair seeking it out. 20 minutes walking around in the sun with no beer is too much expectation to put on a Twinkie. It was doomed to fail.

The part that most surprised me was that the Twinkie itself seemed to vaporize under the fried batter. I was expecting a crunch, then that rubbery sponge cake. What I got was crunch, then this weird liquidy mush inside. I'm fairly certain I threw the rest of it away.

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Chocolate-covered pluots from the farmers' market.

Delicious...although some serious dark chocolate would have made these suckers just that much better.

[TasteSpotting #1404]

Everyone is obsessed with where their food comes from. We love to talk about it, read about it, think about it. People go to the farmers' market once a month for three heirloom tomatoes and pat themselves on the back for eating locally. The sad reality though is that we're not exactly eating the way we pretend to be. Three tomatoes does not a factory-farm-crushing movement make.

I'm guilty of it myself. I live close to a good-sized, well-priced, year-round farmers' market. For the first few months, we went pretty regularly, almost every Saturday. Almost every Thursday, we'd end up throwing out about 50% of the stuff bought the previous weekend. We always had the best intentions, and the best food-porn fantasies of some sort of urban (urbane?) Martha Stewart-ish life overflowing with the freshest local products consumed at their nutritional and culinary peak.

Unfortunately, it always seems easier to stock up on more shelf-stable, reliable (read: imported from Chile in the off-season) produce at our local chain store. Now add in the fact that, contrary to farmers' market propaganda, eating locally and seasonably translates into spending more cash. It's easy to see why most people most of the time just say "fuck it" and go to Safeway instead.

This idea of eating locally has always appealed to me for both reasons of taste as well as politics. Food that ripened on the vine tastes better than food that ripened in a box on the floor of a food distributor's warehouse. The closer it was made to you, the better it tastes, and the less time it spent traveling in a big-rig wasting gasoline and getting old. Buying local products supports local people. I probably buy a lot more locally than the average American already. But can I live on local products alone?

I recently stumbled across the The Eat Local Challenge, a bunch of food folks basically challenging themselves to eat food produced within a one hundred mile radius of home for a week.

Further, this challenge is about trying to eat local within the budget for the "average" American family. Whoever those people are, they must be eating like crap. For a household with two working adults, that budget is $144.

Why do this?

To prove that it can (or can't) be done. And to raise questions about the state of food production and consumption in this country.

$144 a week. I hate to say it, but that's only a bit more than we spend each week on lunch in downtown San Francisco. But that's what we're going to try and live on for seven days.

Wanna rock out some sous-vide, but you don't happen to have a $4000 thermal circulator?

Throw your protein in a freezer bag with some yummies, place the bag in a pot of water, and put the pot in your oven on low. So says the L.A. Times.

I'm also wondering if this might not be a good way to re-purpose a crock-pot. I was just reading one of Jeffrey Steingarten's essays the other night, and he clocked a crock-pot around 180 degrees I think.

[Via Megnut: Ziploc officially doesn't dig on the idea of people boiling its bags. Don't say I didn't warn you.]

The Chron's got pretty extensive coverage on The Eat Local Challenge. As I mentioned, we're going to be giving it a whirl starting tomorrow.

Already I can see some of the difficulties. Sticking to the budget is going to be the big one. The other is that there isn't really salt, pepper, flour, or a zillion other things I cook with all the time within a hundred miles of my kitchen. I was talking with a friend of mine, and he asked about restaurants. He pointed out that even restaurants that emphasize local products get a lot of stuff from far-away lands.

The way I look at it, this isn't an exercise in limitation. I'm taking it on as an opportunity to enjoy exploring the things around me, rather than fretting over where I'm going to find locally-produced cornmeal. It's rather telling that the most successful of the Chron's guinea-pigs were a retired couple who've been doing this for years, and restaurant-owners, although the less-connected, more time-constricted city-slicker made a good go. I don't have the time, or the experience required to spend my week hunting down every last ingredient. And that's fine for me.

As I mentioned to my friend, I'll be happy with an organic scone or loaf of bread from a locally-owned bakery. If the flour wasn't made in a shed in the back, it's not going to ruin my day. I'm approaching this whole thing as realistically as possible. We can't eat entirely locally. But that doesn't make trying to eat closer to home not worth working on.

Besides, anything that gives me an excuse to eat awesome cheese and drink good hooch can't be bad, right?

Dining Out For Life is next week in most cities (Click for SF and East Bay restaurants).

Go out, eat tons of food, and support local AIDS charities in your neck of the woods. Spend lots of money. Order two desserts.

Shopping trips: 2
Total spent: $59
Remaining budget: $101

Two local/ sustainable/ (mostly) organic grilled cheese sandwiches with diet Cokes: $20

Being annoyed that you forgot the lunches at home during the Eat Local Challenge: Priceless.

That leaves us with $81 and three days to go.

Photo by Denise Siegel

The show was awesome, and only slightly marred by the woman in front of me who would turn around and glare disapprovingly anytime anyone would hoot or holler or otherwise make it known that they were indeed alive and breathing and enjoying this here rock and roll music that was being played. Pity the poor souls who had any sort of real-life emotional response. If you're that picky about your listening experience, stay the fuck home with your iPod, methinks.

Grant was in rock-tastic form, accompanied by a drummer and bassist. It was a much more "plugged-in" show than the last time I saw him, focused on material from the new record, Strangelet. There were a few bones thrown to the Grant Lee Buffalo die-hards, including a killer acoustic version of Honey Don't Think [from Mighty Joe Moon] and an awesome version of Truly, Truly [Jubilee].

When I first discovered Grant via Grant Lee Buffalo, I was living in a student co-op. There were about 150 people in the house I lived in, and we had this giant commercial kitchen. The organized meals usually sucked, so I'd head in there after dinner to cook for myself. I used to cook up a storm in there, and I can remember listening to a lot of GLB on the shitty stereo. One song in particular, Dixie Drug Store [Streaming MP3], captured my imagination, with its tale of a traveler in the French Quarter seduced by the ghost of Marie Laveau. Now I can't help associating Grant's voice with New Orleans, which is funny because he's actually from the same California town that I grew up in.

It's strange how taste memories manage to permeate seemingly unrelated things. Listening to Grant's records now remind me of meals I had in New Orleans and the steak sandwiches with caramelized onion and pepper jack cheese that I used to cook up on the flat top in my Berkeley co-op.

Hangar One's got a new limited-edition hot pepper vodka, made with chipotles smoked by Anthony Paone at T-Rex Barbeque in Berkeley. Get 'em while they're...um...hot.

Incidentally, I'm a big fan of T. Rex, but I have to say that their ribs are neither all that nor a bag of chips (as the kids say). As a food-nerd and a huge BBQ aficionado, I'd ordinarily write off any BBQ place with mediocre ribs, but T. Rex does everything else so well that I am willing to look past such a major flaw. But really, what up with that? They aren't exactly a hole-in-the-wall 'Que joint, but Barbeque is in the name. If you can't throw down mad ribs, calling yourself a barbeque restaurant is suspect.

Today is Day 6 of the Challenge, and... we're going to go over budget.

Tuesday night, we both had dinners out that were at least semi-business related, and thus unavoidable. I also went to see Grant Lee Phillips, so I ended up spending $12 on a couple of beers. They were local beers, at least.

I made another shopping trip for a few things for Wednesday dinner/ Thursday lunch, and since we didn't cook Tuesday night, I bought lunch out. Michael got a free lunch from work, so I'm not counting it.

The money breaks out like this:

My Tuesday Dinner before Grant Lee Phillips show + beers at the show: $32
Michael's Tuesday Dinner: $24.50

Software for Wednesday dinner & Thursday lunch:
2 organic red bell peppers: $5 (probably local, but I'm not 100% certain)
1 loaf of organic local bread: $3

2 local/ sustainable carnitas tacos w/ chips & salsa: $11.50

That brings our total spent this week to $155.

Dinner last night was roasted red pepper, caramelized onion and Fatted Calf bacon sandwiches with Happy Boy greens from the farmers' market on Saturday. I had wanted tomatoes, but there were no local tomatoes to be found. Paying $5 for two smallish peppers totally sucked, especially since I know the non-local, non-organic variety would have cost about a buck at the Korean market where I usually buy them.

My lunch yesterday was also illuminative. I spent almost $12 for Traci Des Jardins' designer Mexican street food. The tacos were delicious, no doubt, but I could have had the exact same meal for about $5 from the taco truck a few blocks away. The taco truck doesn't use Niman Ranch pork, or local organic produce though. I also cheated, and used the excellent (and imported from Mexico) Valentina hot sauce on my lunch. Traci's salsa may be local and sustainable, but it's also somewhat lacking in the flavor and heat department. For twelve bucks I was going to enjoy those suckers.

We're left with five bucks in the budget. Five dollars would probably be enough to get us through the next 24 hours via a flank steak or something and the odds and ends around the house. Today is Dining Out For Life though, and some friends invited us out to Cesar for dinner. If it weren't a fundraiser, and just a regular night out, I would have postponed until after the challenge. It does raise an interesting point though, namely that this sort of conscious eating can make having a social life somewhat challenging.

Ironically in our case, it seems to have supercharged our social life. In an average week, we might dine with friends once... and yet somehow this particular week gave us four opportunities to eat out, only one of which was planned before the week started. I suppose we could have taken a more hardline approach to the challenge and declined these invitations, but we don't get to spend enough time with people as it is. The fact that all these occasions happened this week is purely coincidence.

So tomorrow we're off the hook, and I'm kind of looking forward to it. Not because of the food... we've had great stuff this week. I'm looking forward to not having to bean-count. We've definitely incorporated more local products into our diets than usual, and that's something I'd like to carry forward after this week.

Had dinner the other night at César during Dining Out For Life. As always, the food was amazing. We started out with some excellent chorizo, and the tocino de pato, smoked duck breast that we affectionately re-named "duck bacon." We also had a wonderful cheese plate, bocadillos of manchego cheese and greens, salt cod & crab canalones, aparagus salad and patatas bravas, fried potato wedges with a delicious spicy sauce that reminded me of harissa and amazing sauteed mushrooms redolent with garlic and guindilla peppers. Mexican chocolate sundaes and orange-caramel bread puddings rounded out the meal.

My only quibble was that the waitstaff were tossing down plates at our table without so much as eye contact, much less explanations of the dishes. Admittedly the place was crowded, but it's always crowded, and with tapas-style service where the plates are coming out in random order, it's even more important to help people understand what's what; especially since the menu includes many Spanish words that even experienced diners are bound to be unfamiliar with. The cheese plate we ordered had two cheeses I was particularly fond of, but my chances of enjoying them again are slim since I have no idea what any of them were, besides tasty.

I've been going to Cesar for years, since stumbling upon it while waiting for my table next-door at Chez Panisse. Thankfully, the larger second location on Piedmont Avenue maintains the upbeat casual vibe of the original, and if anything the food has improved over time. The new store also houses the Cesar Mercado, with a selection of wines, specialty products and even tapas to go. The mercado also features Black Maple Hill bourbon.

Everybody needs an I Like Bacon T-shirt, right?

The other day I was at the supermarket, and I couldn't help but pick up this strange fruit, apparently called a horny melon. I haven't tasted it yet, but some Googling tells me that it's supposed to taste like a cross between kiwi and cucumber.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around that particular flavor combo, but I'm certainly curious to see how it all works out.

[TasteSpotting #1621]

Kool-Aid pickles violate tradition, maybe even propriety. Depending on your palate and perspective, they are either the worst thing to happen to pickles since plastic brining barrels or a brave new taste sensation to be celebrated.
-NY Times, on Kool-Aid pickles

The article is definitely worth a click, especially for the photos. Even though it sounds utterly disgusting, I'm fascinated by the idea of a Kool-Aid pickle. I haven't encountered them in the wild, so something tells me I may have to do a little experiment.

According to the Times, pickles made with "the red flavor family" of Kool-Aid are the most popular.

Well, not me thankfully.

Over at Applesauce, there's a post about a woman accidentally eating a $62 burger at Laurent Tourondel's joint in NYC. Bummer! Apparently she ordered the American Kobe burger ($12) and received (and was billed for) the $62 Japanese Kobe version. If she was indeed served the Japanese version, I figure it's the restaurant's problem. If you've got two items with nearly identical names and vastly different prices on your menu, your staff better be making damn sure they're getting the orders correct.

I've never had Japanese Kobe, but I can't imagine it would be that much better than any decent local beef, Kobe-style or not. I'm guessing that whole point-of-diminishing-returns thing probably kicks in at around $10 for a burger. I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong; if you've got some Kobe to send me, get in touch.

Come on. You know you've always wanted to try Dwight Yoakam's Chicken Lickin's Buffalo Style Bites.

Thankfully, Biggles over at Meathenge sacrificed himself to the bites, so nobody else has to.

Do the Buffalo Style Bites belong to Chicken Lickin, or does Dwight Yoakam just have apostrophe-abusing copywriters?

Went to a hole-in-the-wall Southeast Asian restaurant for dinner tonight. It was definitely the kind of place that gets by on good word-of-mouth. The storefront looks pretty desolate and run down, but the food was delicious. The glassed-in back patio was an extremely pleasant surprise, and the "Beer Chicken" was a definite winner. Papaya salad was also excellent, and the lemongrass beef was also worth another go.

The waitress gave us these strange candies with the bill. They has an almost butterscotch-y creaminess, but also an earthy, fruity flavor. I can't put my finger on it. Tamarind maybe? The scan didn't come out too well, but the wrapper is metallic brown with magenta, silver and yellow.

Popped into farmerbrown last night for a bite and a cocktail. They serve up one of my favorite drinks right now, the Dark & Stormy. Dark rum, house-made ginger beer, lime, and a touch of nutmeg. It's awesome.

I've eaten there several times at the bar, but this time opted for a table. We weren't in the mood for a full meal, but shared a salad of sweet potatoes and greens in a bright vinaigrette and the cheese grits. Lately, I've been having a fascination with grits and/or polenta. Being freaked out by the amount of corn in everything we eat nonwithstanding, I think I'm on something of a grits kick.

Anyway, the grits were delicious and creamy, but they could have used a good pinch of salt. I suspect that had I eaten them in their true role as a side to something else on the menu (chicken and dumplings, maybe) the salt wouldn't have been an issue.

Every time I go to farmerbrown, I like it more and more. The food is simple and well-executed, and the vibe of the place makes for a fun time out. Chef Jay Foster has a deep commitment to local, sustainable food, which allows me to put fried chicken and po' boys in the "virtuous food" category... plus those firey peanuts at the bar are addictive, man.

In the grand tradition of enbacon'd sweet things, Vanilla Garlic has a recipe for bacon maple cupcakes.

Oh yeah!

Photo: Roger Kisby

As promised, here's an extended version of my interview with Kara Zuaro, author of the new cookbook I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands. The book's got recipes from a wide range of indie-rockers, including Death Cab for Cutie, The Hold Steady, The Decemberists, The Violent Femmes and about a jillion other awesome bands.

Dying to know which Scottish band's cuisine would reign supreme in an Iron Chef-style battle? Read on. And stay tuned in the next few days for an exclusive recipe straight from Kara's grandma.

Everybody's got their own favorite "weird item available via Japanese vending machine." This is a new one, though: lobsters.

For all you meatball fans, a couple of bonus recipes, courtesy of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good author Kara Zuaro.

One of my favorite meals to share with hungry touring bands is spaghetti with my Grandma Martha Zuaro's meatballs and sauce. This is so good that whenever my big, loud Italian family sits down to eat it, a quiet falls over the table. Then, Grandma always breaks the silence by asking, "So, how do you like my balls?" Or, if the little cousins aren't around, she'll say, "How do you like my freakin' balls?" See for yourself – but I think they're pretty freakin' delicious.
-Kara Zuaro

Grandma Martha's Freakin' Meatballs

• 1 pound chopped meat (I use 85% lean ground round)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup Italian-style breadcrumbs
• 1/2 cup grated Pecorino-Romano cheese
• 1/2 cup Italian (flat-leaf) parsley, chopped
• 1 packet of onion soup mix
• 1 teaspoon of soy sauce
• 1 capful of Kitchen Bouquet (browning and seasoning sauce)
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• salt, pepper, and garlic powder, to taste
• 2 tablespoons ketchup
• 1 teaspoon basil
• olive oil, for frying

When all the ingredients are combined, roll into small, golf ball-sized meatballs, and set aside on a piece of waxed paper or on a cutting board.

Coat the bottom of a pan with olive oil, and place over medium-high heat. Fry the meatballs in batches until they are well browned. Don't fill up the pan to tightly – you'll need room to roll the meatballs around so they cook evenly.

You can test for doneness by cutting a meatball in half – if it's not rare inside, it's ready to go.

Drain meatballs on brown paper bags to absorb excess oil, and start making some sauce. My grandma makes her meatballs in the morning, and then simmers them in homemade sauce all day.

Yields 15-18 small meatballs

Grandma Martha's Sauce

• 1/2 large onion, chopped
• olive oil
• 4-5 (or more) cloves of garlic, sliced or pressed
• 4 28-oz. cans crushed Red Pack tomatoes (put through the blender for a smoother sauce)
• 4 28-oz. cans of water (measured after you dump out the tomatoes)
• 15-oz. can of tomato sauce
• 1 packet of onion soup mix (mixed with a little hot water to help dissolve it)
• 2 capfuls of gravy master
• salt and pepper
• red wine
• oregano
• basil
• 4 bay leaves

Sauté the onion in some olive oil over medium heat until it's soft and translucent. Add the garlic and stir for a minute or two.

Add the tomatoes, water, sauce, onion soup mix, and gravy master. Turn up the heat and bring the sauce to a low simmer.

Add the salt, pepper, red wine, oregano, basil, and bay leaves to taste, and adjust the seasonings as needed as the sauce simmers. Grandma starts early in the morning and lets it simmer all day – the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.

Lately I've been kind of obsessed with Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. That book, combined with the recent Eat Local Challenge is changing the way I think about food and food production in this country. Admittedly, I still fall short when it comes to eating totally locally/sustainably, but I'm certainly trying a lot harder than I ever did before, which has to count for something.

Via Ruhlman, I found an article about the National Animal Identification System. Ostensibly, NAIS is a plan by the USDA to track farm animals in order to reduce outbreaks of disease. Sounds like a good thing, right? Everyone wants to eat a nice clean rib-eye steak.

The jist of NAIS is that every location where livestock is grown would be assigned a numeric code, and every individual animal would also be given another code, via an implanted RFID tag. All this data gets pumped into some ginormous national database, and then the government could track disease outbreaks, and have the ability to find any other animals a diseased animal might have had contact with. Healthy food for everyone, in theory at least.

Alas, it turns out that NAIS is less about food safety than it is about presererving business interests: the interests of factory farms, and the interests of companies that manufacture the equipment that would be used to track the animals. The plan was hatched by a private organization that consists mostly of factory farming interests like Cargill, Monsanto, the National Pork Producers Council and the National Renderers Association. Oh yeah, the guys that make the tracking devices (Cattle-Traq and Digital Angel) are down with the plan too. There's a bazillion cows and chickens and pigs out there, and at about a buck a head, there's lots of money to be made microchipping our future food.

NAIS would definitely hurt the little guy. The costs associated with tracking are fairly fixed, but a small farmer with less livestock has fewer opportunitites to recoup that cost. The result? Prices go up, and it's one more way the small farmer can't stay competitive with the big boys. Factory farms, on the other hand, can spread the costs amongst thousands of animals they "process" every day, and the new systems are easy to integrate into tracking systems they already use.

The worst part is that, while factory farms are the only ones that would benefit from the system, (mostly in the form of better PR) they're the ones with the conditions that cause all of the nasty diseases that NAIS is claiming to try to prevent. And to add insult to injury, all NAIS proposes to do is track animals. There's nothing in the plan that attempts to address the problems with factory farming that would actually make our food safer. It's all just number crunching... and dollar signs, of course.

For more information on helping to protect the little guy, check out NoNAIS.org.

Inspired by Off the Bone, I recently whipped up a batch of pig candy. In the process, I learned a few things, namely that once it sits for a day or so, eating bacon is sort of like chewing on pencil erasers. Sort-of bacon-flavored pencil erasers, but stil....

That said, when the pig candy was fresh, it was pretty damned good. Sweet and savory and crunchy and bacony all in the same bite. Interestingly, after just a few hours, the bacon flavor seemed to dissipate, leaving what was essentially a good, if basic, toffee with a hint of smoke.

I interpret this unanticipated ethereal quality of bacon as further proof that bacon is something to be considered thoughtfully and understood for the wonderful and delicate gift that it is.

Anyway, if you want to make your own pig candy, a few pointers:
Start with good bacon. This isn't the time for the cheap supermarket stuff. I'd also recommend cooking your bacon in the oven on a wire rack over a half-sheet pan. That way all your slices stay nice and pretty and not all shriveled. Plus then you get nice clean bacon fat in the sheet pan to use for other things. You do keep a jar of bacon fat, right?

The original recipe called for stirring the bacon into the toffee mixture, but that ended up looking kind of gross, and the bacon all clumped together. If I did it again, I'd lay the cooked bacon on a sheet pan in a single layer, and pour the toffee over the top.

Pig Candy (or Bacon Toffee, if you prefer)

• 1/4 C. Water
• 1 stick unsalted butter
• 1 C. sugar
• 1 heavy pinch kosher salt
• 1 # thick-cut bacon, cut into 2 inch pieces and cooked crisp

The pig candy can be stored for a few days in an airtight container, but you're really better off only making as much as you're going to eat. It's not nearly as good once it has sat for a while.

The Boston Globe is reporting that Pamela Low, creator of Cap'n Crunch has died. It's a sad day in cereal land. I have fond memories of eating bowls of Cap'n Crunch with my sister and watching Soul Train. It was either that, or Oscar Meyer liverwurst on saltine crackers.

Turns out the flavor of Cap'n Crunch was inspired by a rice dessert that Low's grandmother would make, which was flavored with brown sugar and butter. I always wondered what the hell Cap'n Crunch tasted like...and now reading that, it makes total sense.

By the way, I still dig on Cap'n Crunch. Oscar Meyer liverwurst, not so much.

Inspired by a boudin run in Louisiana, Peter Jackson is throwin' down a "Back From New Orleans" Dinner on June 23.

Peter is one of my favorite chefs doing the whole underground dining thing. I got my first taste of his food last summer at at Ghetto Gourmet event, and then we met again sitting at the same table at another ghet event a few months later. Cool guy, awesome food... and his pickled watermelon rind blew my mind. Who knew the rind of the watermelon could be better than the actual melon part of the watermelon?

The Menu

• Cajun Liberty Duck Boudin Sausage with pickled watermelon rind and whole grain mustard
• She-Crab soup
• BBQ White Boot Brigade Shrimp and Sweet Potato Tart
• Organic Greens with Pumpkin Seed Brittle and Pumpkin Seed Oil Vinaigrette
• Summer Berry Napoleon with Caramelized Pecans and Lemon Bourbon Sauce

Go. Eat. Tell Peter I said hello.

Why?

And what exactly is a "Cereal Water Straw?" A distant relative of "Processed Cheese Food," I presume.