Archives for January 2008
Foie Gras Protesters Try to Take ‘Charm’ Out of Charm City
Predictably shrill foie gras protesters — of the variety that’s previously yelled at peaceable diners in several U.S. cities — have invaded Baltimore, seeking to force first Salt and now Kali’s Court to stop serving the wonderful delicacy. The Baltimore Sun has a relatively good account of the mess they’re causing — see haggard, whiny-looking megaphone woman above — and of the diners who are fighting back.
Salt, like many restaurants, buys foie gras from Hudson Valley Foie Gras, a farm in New York’s Catskill Mountains, the largest producer in North America. Farm Sanctuary has targeted it.
Marcus Henley is Hudson Valley’s operations director and a member of the Artisan Farmer’s Alliance, a nonprofit charged with countering the protests. Calling objections to his farm “completely unfounded,” Henley repeatedly points out that anyone can visit the farm anytime to see scores of healthy, happy ducks.
“If you could come here, you can go in any building, you can watch every part of the operation,” he says. “The people who come here walk away and say, ‘Wow, that is not like anything depicted on the foie gras Web sites.’”
Protesters incorrectly imagine people in the birds’ place and how torturous it must feel to be force fed, Henley says. The procedure simply doesn’t hurt ducks, he contends.
The activists who’ve taken pictures of sick birds, he says, have documented the exception rather than the rule.
[…]
Meanwhile, Baltimore food enthusiasts are coming to Salt’s defense. In fact, they’ll celebrate foie gras there at a dinner on Thursday - four deluxe courses, starting with sugar cane skewered foie gras and closing with the famous (or infamous) beef slider with foie gras.
Lars Rusins, who founded Baltimore Foodies, said his group’s dinner, which will cost about $100 a person, sold out in 48 hours. As it is, the party of 20 will take up about half the restaurant.
“I have no problem consuming the product - none at all,” said Rusins, who calls foie gras “silky” and “fun on the taste buds.”
Check out the Baltimore Foodies here. Me on similar efforts in Chicago here. The Grinder linked to my piece on Anthony Bourdain in discussing his winning foie gras politics here.
This Week in Bacon
Via Gridskipper, Chicago’s Menu Pages has a cool, nationally tinged photo roundup featuring a drink that makes perfect sense but that I didn’t even know existed: the Bacon Bloody Mary. Included are shots from bacon Bloodies from far-afield bars in Boston, Brooklyn, DC, Chicago, Milwaukee (note the cool squat High Life chaser bottle in the shot), and someone’s kitchen.
Those of you (like me) in DC can find the Tonic Bacon Bloody here. Our friends at EatFoo hit the bacon-infused vodka tip over the summer. Finally, Milwaukee’s Comet (from whence the High Life shot at right comes) — in addition to its Bacon Bloody — hands out free bacon each and every Sunday evening, according to Bacon Unwrapped.
Whales: Big, Cute, Lovable, Edible
If you listen to pint-sized actre-vist Hayden Panettiere**, whaling is all about cruelty, mercury, and Osama bin Laden. But if you choose to shape your views with the input of people who are not 18 years old, and who are not best known for wearing a form-fitting cheerleader’s outfit, you might learn that people eat whales because whale taste falls somewhere between excellent and passable.
You might also be interested to learn that sixty-five years ago, Time reported whale steaks (which were being reintroduced into the U.S., presumably to broaden the American diet during wartime) were set to sell at about 35¢ a pound in the U.S.
Norwegian recipe for whale steaks with herbs here. In lieu of buying illegal whale meat online, check out Carvel’s Fudgie the Whale MySpace page here. Amazon’s Japanese shop sells no whale meat, but does sell a Happy Whale mobile. Celebrate the late Swedish pop group Whale here.
**Panettiere’s opposition to whaling at least seems more rational and genuine than that of this Aussie columnist, who would “eat the sucker” abroad but doesn’t want it sold at home under some convoluted theory of cultural imperialism. His basic argument is that it’s wrong to impose his moral views about food on the world when he’s abroad — which is probably right — but he’s fine with telling his countrymen that they can’t eat what he’s just eaten abroad.
Surviving University One Value Product at a Time
The eminent Times of London enlisted a college student in an experiment to see if he could live for a week only buying Tesco Value products. The results proved hilarious:
If I have breakfast at all it tends to be soggy cereal shovelled down my throat from a mug as I walk to a lecture, or possibly an under-toasted slice of bread with some cut-price jam slapped on it. Having said that, Tesco Value cornflakes taste disgusting with or without milk. I do not encourage anyone to eat them, although I’m sure they’d make very cheap confetti. Their version of Coco Pops is to be recommended however, as it has two crucial points in its favour: it contains sugar, and is packaged in a plastic bag, allowing for easy access as you place fistfuls of the stuff in your mouth.
Tesco Value offers two varieties of soup. Both are bad in my opinion. The soup in sachet form results in a slightly chalky concoction that leaves an unpleasant scum on the bottom of your bowl. This particular scum is oh-so-difficult to remove when it comes to washing up - using Tesco Value washing liquid.
Read on to learn exactly just how unfortunate the tomato soup tastes here. Tesco site here.
Thank Heavens This Show Didn’t ‘Stay’
Today is the four-year-and-fifteen-day anniversary of the debut of the worst food TV show of all time. Let’s all celebrate Dweezil & Lisa — or at least relish in the fact that it’s no longer airing. Here’s a sample episode highlight:
Lisa and Dweezil visit with maestro guitar maker Bob Taylor who also can create his famous shovel burgers.
No kidding? Bob knows how to make his own famous burger recipe? Who knew? (Well, besides Bob).
The Food Network seems to have rightly purged all links to the show from its website, but a Google site search does the trick. The Today Show let Dwee-sa near a hot stove here.
Beware the Impending Carrot Shortage
Can several thousand people buy out the entire supply of a vegetable in one day? Of course not. But that won’t stop them from trying.
More than 60,000 people from an online group have pledged to swarm supermarkets and buy out their supply of carrots in one day in a bizarre mission labeled “impossible” by vegetable growers.
The “On May 15th 2008, everybody needs to go out and panic buy CARROTS” Facebook group was created earlier this month in London and now attracts more than 10,000 members a day — many of them Australian.
“If everyone does this, we can make this global shortage of carrots happen,” writes the group’s creator, Freya Valentine.
More here. Facebook page here. How to manage your carrot crop here.
Read about rising carrot prices in the Ukraine, where “Ukrainian custom officers rather stringently repress contraband supplies of Polish carrot,” here.
How Much Would You Pay for a Sears Hot Dog Charm?
I bet you didn’t know that the Sears Catalog moved online at some point since coming to life in the 1880s. That’s right: Sears has a website!
They sell all sorts of cool stuff you’d never want to own (like most anything with the word “Kenmore” on it). They also sell mystifyingly overpriced crap, like the 14k Yellow Gold Enameled 3 Dimensional Hot Dog with Bun Charm pictured at left.
If the bun charm doesn’t do it for you at $234.98, you might find other slightly less expensive hamburger, cheeseburger, or pepperoni pizza charms (ranging from $149.98 to $184.98) more to your liking. But then again, maybe not.
Pigs Shudder in Blankets During Cooks’ IHOP Knife Fight
With chefs a combustible lot and surrounded by knives, it’s surprising we don’t hear more about kitchens plagued by battles between one, say, fancying himself Bill the Butcher and a fellow combatant acting out a Sweeney Todd fantasy in the other. I’m always waiting for this sort of thing to happen on Top Chef or Hell’s Kitchen, but I guess (let me be the first to break the news) reality TV isn’t always as real as reality itself. Which takes us to an IHOP in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood:
A knife duel between two workers at a Brighton greasy spoon turned the eatery into the International House of Pain.
The fracas broke out about 5 p.m. yesterday inside the International House of Pancakes on Soldiers Field Road, just as early dinner guests were sitting down to enjoy the food chain’s all-you-can-eat pancakes. But in short order, the clinking of coffee cups was replaced by the sounds of battle.
“We heard someone say, ‘Fight! Fight!’ And we heard a ruckus,” said a departing diner who was quizzed by cops before he and his wife were let go. “I think the cooks were going at it.”
More here. To see IHOP presenting a less dystopic vision of society, let’s venture back to 1969…
Actually, that was downright creepy. Instead, learn more about IHOP’s charitable doings with Miss America, as part of its sponsorship of the 3rd annual National Pancake Day, here.
Mystic Pizza Dough
Sam’s Italian Foods has called Maine home for nearly 70 years. It’s safe to say they know a thing or two about dough — the Famous Breakfast Pizzas notwithstanding.
That’s probably why officials in Lewiston, Me. seem to be leaning toward a theory that a Sam’s location there may be responsible for a “50- to 60-foot doughy mass” that’s clogging up a city sewer that runs underground in front of the pizzeria. Sam’s employees refused comment.
When asked about the clog, city public services director David Jones commented the city will likely have to replace a section of pipe. Jones’s description of the situation makes it sound like a X-rated version of The Blob.
“We have to go back in and pump out the manhole every eight hours,” he said… “We’ve tried punching through it, but each time we do, it just oozes back over the hole.”
More in the Sun Journal. Baseball writer Rob Neyer somehow predicted all this, back in 1999, when he wrote about a “wad of dough thick enough to clog a Paris sewer”.
This Week in Bacon
The weekly feature returns with Spam with Bacon. From the product description, which was clearly written by someone who ties happiness to canned pork:
Ever wonder what would happen if something great got even better? Well, quit it. Since we’ve combined Spam Classic and bacon you’ve been thinking too much. Stop staring off into space like that and be happy. Now that Spam is flavored with bacon, happiness is everywhere, but mostly in the frying pan.
Pick yours up here. More varieties here. If this also makes you so very, very happy, map your way to the Spam Museum.
NYC: Where the Menu Police Never Sleep
New York City is again attempting to unconstitutionally require some chain restaurants to post calorie information for all foods in GIANT TYPE alongside food listed on menus.
Chuck Hunt of the New York Restaurant Association summed up the new regulation, calling it “cumbersome” and noting “it really isn’t going to work.”
Self-important city health commissioner Dr. Thomas R. Frieden says chain restaurants — most of which already voluntarily provide such information on company websites an in smaller restaurant displays or handouts — deserve to be treated badly by the city because their “business model depends on keeping information from [their] consumers”. Right. Because the medical profession — doctors generally, government doctors even more so, and New York City public health doctors especially (recall this last group was responsible for imprisoning Mary Mallon on a city island without any sort of due process) — are known for their openness.
All this doesn’t mean New York is done spiterzing fitzing futzing with restaurant menus. Not one bit. As the NYT’s Jennifer 8 Lee (note: “8″, not “B.”) notes, the state is also set to crack down on evildoing New Yorkers who hand out menus, employing “pentalingual” sings that seem to show a brick with an arrow on it crushing a four-fingered humanesque hand.
This law would seem to raise many of the same First Amendment issues as does the calorie requirement regulation. But instead of fighting back in the courts, it might be best from a legal perspective for restaurants in New York to simply post no menus at all — at least until the city and state change these stupid laws. With no menus to display or hand out, they’d probably be exempt from the calorie requirements, and certainly not running afoul of the menu police.
Starbucks for a Buck
Starbucks, responding to competition from McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, is testing a $1 cup of coffee in the Seattle market. It sounds like it’s basically a short coffee of the day. It’s also offering free refills as part of the test. Both of these approaches actually undercut the competitors.
At least one stock analyst is skeptical, saying the coffee giant should be focusing on competitors in its own market — Peets and Caribou — but last time I checked, I didn’t see one of those everyplace I turned.
Floridians Freaking Out Over McDonald’s French Fries
You’ve probably heard by now about the grandmother who was arrested yesterday at a Clearwater, Fla. McDonald’s drive-thru after refusing a police officer’s order to move her car while she waited for her special no-salt order of fries.
An anomaly? Not for McDonald’s, and not for Florida, either. Just days earlier, across the state, police say a “31-year-old man in Jacksonville was arrested after he rammed his car into a McDonald’s after not receiving two bags of french fries he ordered earlier”.
Just to be safe — bad things happen in threes, you know — Floridians might want to limit their fast food side dishes to some fried plantains at Pollo Tropical until this fry craziness dies down.
McFlurry of Activity Shows Amy Winehouse Can’t Get off the Sauce
Super-troubled, super-ugly British singer Amy Winehouse (of “Rehab” fame) “ran around [a] parking lot clutching packets of McNugget sauce” after a recent trip to a McDonalds near the location of her super-troubled, super-ugly husband’s trial, according to The Superficial. Winehouse, who should be Exhibit A in the argument against Morgan Spurlock and others who like to bash McDonald’s for causing obesity, ordered “a couple of burgers, 6 chicken nuggets and a caramel McFlurry”, according to ShowbizSpy.
Caramel McFlurry? Those lucky Brits. All we get are Oreos or M&Ms or the occasional squirt of Dulce de Leche in our McFlurry. Though if I was really jonesing like Amy Winehouse, I suppose I could just buy my own McFlurry maker.
Raccoon Goes Haute in a Blaze of Gory
Ranger Rick was the first magazine to which I had a subscription. (Mother Jones was the second.) Perhaps that’s why I’ve always had an affinity of sorts for raccoons. And so while they frequently scare the living hell out of my girlfriend and her sister in the parking lot behind our apartment (which is in a building that abuts federal parkland on three sides), I actually dig the little fellas.
But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t eat one if I accidentally backed over him. Thankfully, I have a template (well, besides the one I might have used — the fried squirrel recipe in my 60’s edition of Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook) to follow in case one of Rick’s peers were to meet his unfortunate demise under my UniRoyal, courtesy of Monica Eng in today’s Chicago Tribune.
Eng’s friend acquired a bargain-basement raccoon carcass, bringing it to Moto on the city’s west side. There, the kitchen sliced, diced, simmered, and braised said raccoon until it offered up to Eng this brilliant recreation of a roadkill scene:
That is nothing short of staggering brilliance. Stunning. I can only guess that Moto chefs must have looked at a current craze (i.e., chefs cooking and writers and travel hosts downing bats, balls, brains, & blood), seen it had clearly jumped the shark, and applied culinary standards to it (i.e., presentation, whimsy) in order to rein it in and make it something fresh and new. Bravo!
More from the Trib (including video) here and here. Moto site here.
This Week in Bacon*
Not to be confused with that other TWIB acronym, this here bacony-good item of the week is Country Bacon Quaker Instant Grits.
Pick yours up here. Quaker Grits page here.
*Note that I’ve launched (what I expect will become) a weekly food meme featuring bacon products with a product that — while a “good source of calcium and iron” — is not a good source of bacon, as it contains exactly no bacon at all.
Food News from Middle America
Calling Michael Ruhlman. Cleveland, home to the best urban American public market I’ve ever been to, isn’t just a destination for food-travel hosts anymore. It’s where the Chicago Tribune sent an “intrepid reporter, who had never been there”, to sample the food culture.
The Deseret Morning News’s Valerie Phillips has an excellent piece up today on the fight over foie gras in Utah. Not surprisingly, some opponents of foie have resorted “to vandalism and criminal behavior.” Reader comments, though, are running strongly in favor of restaurant and consumer choice.
The National Journal’s catch-all blog, The Gate, says The Economist got it right last month when it tied rising food prices — which the U.S. government noted increased by the highest margin in 17 years — to abominable U.S. government farm subsidies (especially ones promoting biofuels made from interior-state corn).
Culinary snark in Minneapolis, as an Andrew Zimmern column causes fellow MSP foodies to seethe. Zimmern tries to turn that frown upside down.
Miami Beach Bans ‘See Food’
Miami Beach has had enough of all those public displays. “Of what,” you ask? Bronzed, naked women exposing their breasts on South Beach? Old Canadian men prancing about in mere banana hammocks?
No, those are still fine. Instead, the city has outlawed public displays of… restaurant food.
Yes, in an effort to cut down on eye-pleasing food displays, the city commission last month passed a law, now in effect, that bans “the plastic-wrapped food samples, saying they cheapened the Beach’s image.”
Right. It’s not the ever-prevalent violence in Miami Beach that hurts the city’s image, it’s those handsome displays of quality food set outside many small businesses.
So how’s that new law working out? It seems it’s getting exactly the respect it deserves.
So far, defiant restaurant owners have largely ignored the law, which went into effect Dec. 22.
This sort of blatantly anti-restaurant, anti-consumer ordinance isn’t all that unusual. For proof, check out Drew Carey’s great new video at Reason.tv, in which Drew exposes the idiocy of a targeted anti-dancing ordinance (obligatory Footloose references included) that’s putting a serious squeeze on exactly one Arizona restaurant.
Scrambled Message Leaves Oliver With Egg on Face
Updating my earlier post on Jamie Oliver, it seems the chef has outdone his previous hypocrisies. First, to demonstrate the purported evils of poultry producers, Oliver put on a nice suit and sat some well-off folks down for a studio-audience dinner. Then he had the assembled watch him gas some live chicks, and feed one to a snake. Here’s the video:
Today’s NYT notes that Oliver is part of a movement of chefs seeking to get closer to their food. I see it differently. Oliver is instead the hypocritcal figurehead of an anti-business movement seeking to compel government to enforce the movement’s views of what is right and ethical in the kitchen. As the NYT puts it:
Mr. Oliver’s message to supermarket shoppers is clear: the only reason for the miserable lives lived by most chickens is your insistence on cheap food. After the broadcast, as reported in the British press, supermarkets across the United Kingdom quickly sold out of free-range eggs and chickens.
I love free-range chicken. But as a full-time student, I also have to eat what I can afford, which means I also eat my share of inexpensive food. Perhaps it’s that wealthy people like Jamie Oliver can no longer fathom that quality and price are often at odds with one another, and that some people don’t always have the luxury of making a choice between the two. (One Guardian commentator understands how off Oliver is here, though the last thing the world needs is anyone urging Oliver to seek costly legislation.)
But maybe Jamie does understand the tension between keeping costs down and buying highest-quality goods. Else why, hot on the heels of the broadcast, would one of Oliver’s restaurants switch egg suppliers (why switch so soon after the broadcast if the restaurant was serving eggs that conformed to Oliver’s professed ethics?) and start buying exactly the type of eggs he damned on the broadcast? Beats me.
Peyton and Eli Face Off, Start Licking
Oh thank heavens! Peyton Manning and his fivehead finally landed an endorsement deal.
Learn why he and brother Eli are sitting in an empty stadium and licking Double Stuff in front of a grumpy-looking zebra here. More on Indiana’s rich culinary scene (written with only half a snicker) here.
Update: I should have noted that this is the only time you’ll see the Manning brothers facing off during the playoffs.
