Mama, Say It Ain't So

It has been quite awhile since I last posted, but inspiration has its own clock, I suppose.

Ultimately, when I read that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is trying to force Ben and Jerry’s to forgo cow’s milk in favor of ice cream made from human breast milk, I could be silent no longer. What are they gonna call it? Your Sister’s Cherry—Garcia? Chunky Mommy? Peanut Butter D-Cup?

Branding issues aside, my opinion on this matter is not polemic. There is some merit to PETA’s case. For example, we finally have a cogent argument to persuade Bill Clinton to do a “Got Milk” commercial. Perhaps white mustache and white cigar . At 25-cents per 8-ounce serving, we are looking at a tremendous material cost-savings over bottled water during the upcoming economic nuclear winter, many unqualified observers are predicting. And imagine the self-serve possibilities—which would greatly reduce labor costs at most eating establishments as well.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s is only the beginning. What about picketing the folks at Yoplait until they offer a human replacement for their trademark brand? I humbly suggest “Yo Mama”. Natural food for the hood!

Imagine the opportunity to change the shape of the milk carton to more closely resemble the swelled-form of the nursing mother. Mrs. Butterworth went down this road with syrup, but “shapely and sticky” is no match for “milky white and wholesome”. I can envision legions of strippers with tattoos of missing children needled to their mammaries. I will try hard to not lose sleep over this image now that I said it out loud, but I bet we find more of them this way.

Still, we must remain cautious. The possibility of tainted Chinese milk will require close inspection of the source of imported dairy products. OK, let’s not always see the same hands. And please, no jokes about Mad Cow Disease being the new name for PMS. That is purely and simply disrespectful and I will have none of it.

Joking aside, the PETA people have a point about how we treat animals, but somehow I don’t think the solution is to herd nursing mothers into feedlots and force them to gorge on vegetable remnants until they burst with metabolized fats and proteins. (Oh no—another image that will haunt me the entire evening.) Turns out, Fresh Choice has been doing this for two decades without noticeable relief to our bovine cousins.

In the end, we should probably keep milking cows, sheep, goats, yaks, rabbits, whatever, while treating these lactose dispensers with more respect than—well—than we would treat the average nursing mother just trying to stop her baby from crying on the bus. Factory farms are a scandal, be they dairy- or meat-inspired. We are daily turning a blind-eye to a situation that none of us would put up with if it were occurring within our ability to observe directly—and it is time to observe directly. Perhaps that is PETA’s genius—create an image we want to observe to make us conscious of one we are ignoring.

Dessert Matters

It isn’t often that you can get your wife’s permission to spend three-days with a dozen attractive, passionate women. And to do so, without the excuse of an old buddy’s bachelor party in Vegas is completely unheard of. But that is exactly what happened to me last weekend, when I joined Tori Richie’s Food Writing Class, courtesy of Tante Marie’s cooking school in San Francisco. Three days with a group of women passionate about food. How good was it? Well I missed a Forty-Niners game to attend the final session. You do the math.

If any of you guys are considering following in my footsteps, you ought to know a couple of things up front. First, when you break bread with a group of women over three days, don’t worry about dessert. Some one will always bring dessert. On the other hand, you likely will have to BYOM—bring your own meat. Maybe it’s that animal carcasses don’t fit neatly into their bags, or perhaps it’s the threat of blood drippings breaching a butcher paper barrier. But whatever the reason, if you want to eat meat, bring it yourself.

I did meet one classmate, who is planning an October trip to New York and already has reservations at—not Per Se, not Babbo, not le Bernadin—but Peter Luger, the venerable Brooklyn man-joint and steakhouse. I did not get to know her very well over only three days, but this one piece of data suggests that she might, in fact, be the perfect women.

Second, when women think “food”, the context of the meal is at least as important as the quality of the actual hydro-carbons they consume. So expect a great deal of conversation about candles, centerpieces, scents and other accrutements. The good news is they don’t seem to notice when you completely glaze over during these discussions.

The class itself was at once inspirational and cautionary. Writing for a living is hard work, and much of the reward comes from the act of writing itself, rather than the resulting fame and fortune. The people I met were “hungry” to become accomplished food writers, which was inspirational. Even more inspiring were the chocolate chip cake and lime macaroons these ladies brought for sharing. Tangy molten centers oozing fresh citrus oils. Did I just say that? I must be succumbing to their influence. Somebody bring me a pork chop!

Some gems from the weekend:

Tuesday Recipe www.tuesdayrecipe.com . Sign Up.

Bay Area Burger Blog http://bestburgersfbay.blogspot.com/

The Politics of Eating at My House: Part I

Since when did it become essential to reference a laminated wallet card to figure out what constitutes acceptable cuisine? Wild Salmon from Alaska—Good. Wild salmon from the Atlantic—Bad. Farm-raised salmon—Bad, unless you know what it has eaten. Farm-raised shellfish-Good, however. Foreign shrimp—Bad. Domestic shrimp—Good. Yellowfin tuna—OK. Bluefin tuna—Bad. I don’t know about you, but most of the tuna I eat doesn’t have the fin attached to the can.

And how was it caught? Longline-Bad. Trolling-Good. Floated to the top after above-ground nuclear test—not referenced, but probably bad. Coaxed into the boat with soothing music and the promise of paradise in the next life—probably Good. Fresh? Good if caught recently. Flash frozen—OK if you must. Left on the loading dock in Honolulu for six hours, while some one tracks down the truck driver—Skip it. And, if you ask Thomas Keller, you should also know if it was packed in ice upright or flat on its side.

AND THAT’S JUST FISH.

Chickens should range free, but what constitutes a “range”—certainly not a 20-foot by 4-foot wire enclosure attached to one side of an 80,000 square-foot, artificially-lit and heated windowless warehouse? Pigs should be pen-less; and cows grass-fed. Turkeys—heritage breeds only need apply. Tomatoes—heirloom! Mushrooms—foraged by some one you would trust with your life. Soon they will be telling us not to eat white asparagus, because the fact that it is shielded from the sun’s verdant-producing rays in its own vegetable-Guantanimo, constitutes a false imprisonment and an unprovoked denial of its God-given right to photosynthesize. And speaking of incarceration, my home state of California is changing its State motto from “Eureka, I found It” to “Eat a duck liver, Go to Jail”.

It is getting so it easier to do my taxes than to order a meal.

What about an organic approach to food? Well, it turns out this label means only no chemical fertilizers, antibiotics or hormones. It does not necessarily mean the animals were treated well or that the food is safe. After all, wasn’t it organic killer-spinach that Soprano-ed half a dozen people in 2006.

And the “industrial organic” food chain, Michael Pollan tells us, is not a substitute for sourcing our food locally and seasonally. We can get organic strawberries from Chile for Christmas, thus expending 50 calories in fossil fuel to deliver 12 calories of nutrition. Just last week, instead of contemplating the succulent flavors of my bowl of PEI mussels in their own broth, I found myself trying to remember where the hell Prince Edward Island is, and how far these briny morsels traveled to get to my dinner plate. Yes, I was actually calculating the carbon footprint of something that doesn’t have a foot.

But if we buy local, how do we support free-trade farmers in the Developing World. This is giving me a headache. All I want to do is have lunch without pissing people off.

Some believe the only safe and responsible way to eat is to gather and hunt one’s own food. Might work. Earlier this year, Gourmet Magazine encouraged New Yorkers to forage their way around their metropolis munching through the urban edibles available in parks, gardens and the cracks in sidewalks. An interesting idea, but is it scalable? Lets say only 10% of New Yorkers take the Gourmet sages up on their suggestion. Central Park would, in a fortnight, resemble the Bonneville salt flats, save for a few sunburned waterfowl cowering behind toxic rhododendron bushes.

Perhaps if the article had had less of a veggie-bent, the available rats and roaches could sustain the populace a bit longer. But in the end, my math says that the only way we survive a year as a society of hunters and gatherers is if we commence hunting and gathering each other. Trouble is that in the places on the planet where this is actually going on, real estate values are plummeting. No free lunch it seems.

So far we have merely scratched the surface of the politics of eating at my house. Next, we have to deal with my family’s idiosyncratic issues. My 3-year old sustains himself on fresh fruit, broccoli with chilies , blood orange juice, farmstead cheeses and pizza. Thank God for pizza! To get him to eat any meat, we have to tell him it is sausage. Ergo such inventions as steak sausage, roast sausage and my personal favorite sausage loaf.

My wife, who will unabashedly dismember a well-roasted six week old chicken, acts wounded when I attempt to serve rabbit or, my favorite, kid goat. Moreover, she is proselytizing her Save-the-Cute culinary philosophy to young Max with, I am pleased to announce, only mixed results. Last month, when Max spied a display of homeless animals at the Mall, he bee-lined to the rabbit cage. When the joyless but sincere PETA representative asked Max if he liked rabbits, my son replied “Yes. Bunnies are Deeeeeeeee-licious. Some days they just make you proud.

Eating the Friendly Skies

Some might assert that the most positive development during the last thirty years of the human experience was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Others might point to the decoding of the humane genome with the potential this holds for extending quality life.

However, I am pretty secure in my belief that the most positive development of the last thirty years for mankind is the decision of most airlines to no longer serve food in flight. This single set of corporate edicts has improved the existence of millions of annual travelers and spared the lives of billions of no-range chickens, flavor-deprived cow-food and overcooked carrot spears.

These days you’re lucky if you even get a beverage on some flights. On a recent flight from L.A. to San Francisco, I was told they had no orange, apple or tomato juice—only cran-apple. I have never even seen a cran-apple. And on a late flight from Chicago I was offered a choice of light snack—a package of cracker-cheese food sandwiches or a ginger biscotti, with the half-life of Dick Clark. I had the cookie, and if I deciphered the date code correctly, it had been flying around the country long enough to achieve Platinum Status. This might explain why it had been upgraded to business class.

Still as bad as it is, I am appreciative that they no longer attempt to serve an airline meal on most flights. Historically, experiences in this regard have been less than encouraging for me. The worst one followed a post-meal movie on a flight from San Francisco to London. Some time between the last bite of my chicken cordon-beige and the rolling of the credits on the first Indiana Jones movie, the fourty-ish guy seated to my right passed to the great beyond. I had fallen asleep just after the big round ball chases Indiana out of the cave and managed to get two hours of shut-eye before the kid to my left, on his first ever plane flight, tapped me on the shoulder and awakened me with a head-gesture toward our window-seated aisle mate and the words, “I think he’s dead”.

I swiveled my head from left to right and back left again to reply “Yep he’s dead”. Stiffer than my mashed potatoes and paler than an airline green been, the poor guy needed no official coroner to put an exclamation point on his fate. He was dead and the only consolation was that I had, at last, an opportunity to use my call button for a matter of import. “Ding”.

“Yes Sir, what can I do for you?”

“Well you can’t do anything for me, and I think it’s too late to do anything for him”.

The look on the young attendants face was—well special, as she nearly suppressed an “Oh my God!”, not wanting to alarm other passengers.

I will spare you the details of the subsequent ordeal that led to me and the kid standing in the back of the plane for several hours before finally being relegated to the attendants’ fold-out seats for the rest of the full flight. The young attendant was herself attended to, by a more experienced colleague who assured her that “this kind of thing happens all the time” on the “geezer-flight” from London to Sydney. “Just close their eyes and put a blanket up around them”.

In due course, the first flight attendant came ostensibly to check on us, but her first question was, “I have to ask you, what was your first thought when you realized the gentleman next to you had died?”

I replied that I was “glad I didn’t order the fish”. Now I can’t say for sure that the mini-brick of Chilean Death Bass, was the cause of this poor soul’s demise. But when I asked an official in London to share with me the cause of death, he replied ominously, “don’t worry sir, we’re quite sure it wasn’t contagious”.

Hmmm, not contagious. I could see he wanted to add, “You did have the chicken, right?”, but he maintained his Buckingham Palace guard stoicism in the face of a possible admission of liability. Clever, those Brits.

These days, while we are spared the threat of airline food poisoning, we are left to worry about what the passengers near us are going to bring on board to eat. Used to be you just sat there hoping that the fat guy (or in my case the other fat guy) doesn’t sit down next to you. Or if traveling from Paris, you try to fly on Sunday because you know Saturday is “bath night”. Now it’s “God, please don’t let the vegan-looking anti-shaver woman with the tupperware container sit next to me.”

So in the interest of good human relations, let me suggest the following rules for bringing food on to airplanes.

• Nothing with fish sauce
• No cooked fish whatsoever, sushi is OK
• No blue cheese, Roquefort, gorgonzola, etc.
• No BBQ sauces
• Leave the onions off the chili
• Come to think of it, No Chili
• No organ meats
• No leftovers prepared more than 24 hours ahead

I am soliciting other rules of thumb to add to this list in order to create the comprehensive “Let’s All Get Along” heuristics for bringing food on planes. Please send yours to paul@foodcrunch.com.

In the meantime, don’t eat the fish!

I'll Take Manhattan

In the latest James Bond movie, Casino Royale,we finally understand why our hero chooses the vodka martini as his signature cocktail. It has nothing to do with the inherent sensual allure of this tasteless concoction, but rather, it is the easiest drink in which one might be able to detect poison. And, when you spend your most productive hours killing people and sleeping with women others hold dear, the possibility of poisoning is more than an academic consideration.

I come by my personal drink, the retro, straight-up Manhattan, by a different route. But, like Bond, it gives me the excuse I need to drink my favorite distilled beverage, 90-proof All-American Kentucky Bourbon, in as pure a way as possible, without feeling like a complete degenerate. A large splash of vermouth, a shake of bitters and a cherry or lemon twist, give the bourbon a degree of respectability.

Manhattans were medicine, not cocktail, in the Matteucci household of the last century. My Nonnie (deal with the fact that a middle-age man is using the word “Nonnie” with a straight face), who lived with us, used to “put them up” in old Canada Dry ginger ale bottles, so that there would always be 64-ounces available in case some one came down with something. Nonnie would “take” one Manhattan-a-day prophylacticly to ward off the possibility of disease. The $5 per bottle Old Crow whiskey, which the family would buy multi-case from “some one in the business”, was the central theme of this miracle drug.

Others of my relatives would show up for their doses occasionally--I assume mostly during cold and flu season, which apparently lasted pretty much year-round in San Francisco.

This wasn’t the only family snake-oil. Nonnie would also drink, each afternoon, a concoction of lemon juice, water and ginger ale, which may have been medicinal, but I think was just her way of emptying Canada Dry bottles. In the sweltering 68-degree San Francisco summers she might augment all of this with one 18-cent Brown Derby beer.

Now, one drink a day as a tonic strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution to viral invasion. My mother, on the otherhand, drank not at all, except for soaking fruit cocktail in crème-de-menthe and scooping it over vanilla ice cream during the holidays. After a second helping, we might find her dancing with her sisters in the kitchen as they slurred Italian songs and waved dish towels. My father didn’t drink much—well not much for a man, who lived with his mother-in-law.

Like most Italian children, I enjoyed a taste of fermented grape now and again, with permission, from my parent's glass at family gatherings. I didn't drink alcohol with a purpose until the morning of my Junior Prom, when I proceded to exhale the remains of a pint of Old Minors Gin into the face of my buddy's silky terrior. I thought it might be funny. The dog, apparently a comedy-critic attached its jowels to my face in protest. It took several seconds of shaking my head back and forth to get the two-pound rat-mammal to disengage after which I wore make-up to the Prom.

My life and Nonnie’s intersected for approximately two decades, during which I came to understand the concept of personal power. At 4-foot nothing, and 16 years young, she emigrated alone to America to marry a man she had never met. Upon arrival, she decided she did not like him, so she broke up the deal and eventually married another man. True-love #2, legend has it, was a familial non-entity, who died shortly after fathering his third daughter, my mother. Nonni raised her three girls during the depression by taking in laundry and boarders, one of whom eventually became a son-in-law. I was actually conceived in her Hattie Street house in the Castro district of San Francisco. It has been suggested that I may have been one of the last people conceived in the Castro district of San Francisco. Who knows?

By the time we met, Nonnie was commanding a hundred-plus extended family of sisters, half-brothers, third cousins, nephews, nieces, son-in-laws, daughters, grand children and a couple of cats. She held this group of gumba-misfits together by the strength of her will and her high expectations of all of us. Lots of love; no excuses. She communicated without English, even to us youngsters, who knew no Italian. To this day, I can understand a language I cannot speak.

No one made an important decision without consulting her. No one wanted to disappoint her, let alone cross her. Yet she had no material currency, save for the $1 a month us grandkids lined up to receive from her meager accounts. She had no ability to affect our lives except by her opinion, and by what control we willingly allowed her. And, amazingly, virtually all of us, dozens of children of the ‘50s and the ‘60s, made something of our lives.

She accomplished this while traveling life’s highway, first with a cane, then a walker, then a wheel chair and finally by being carried as arthritis riddled her body. In short, she was the most powerful person I have ever known.

This explains why, as a twenty-year old man, I spent her last summer at her side, some days literally—lying next to her as stomach cancer took her from us. That summer, I would make the daily trips to Fred’s Pharmacy to pick up the opium enemas that would ease the pain, and listen to her last stories, admonishments and instructions. Finally, I witnessed her last breaths.

I think this might also explain why I have so little tolerance for a culture where a hangnail apparently entitles some one to victim status and collective retribution. When you watch a diminutive, crippled, non-native speaking, poor, female emigrant run the micro-world that is most significant to your existence with imagination, love, strength, determination and multi-generational perspective, you want to say to those with moderate obstacles not of there own making:

Get Over It, and Use the Gifts God Gave You To Conquer Your World. And If You Don’t Reap the Reward Directly, Your Children or Grandchildren Will, Because You Gave Them the Life Skills They Needed to Thrive. And if You Don’t Believe In God—Then I Submit that Evolution Teaches the Same Lessons More Mercilessly. So, Again, Get Over It.

Easy for me to say since I am the Grandchild--huh!

Anyway, this is why I drink Manhattans. Now for the important question: how do you get a good Manhattan. One way is to befriend Robin Selden at Logitech and convince her to let her young son, Spencer, make one for you. Spence has a knack for the perfect Manhattan, and I don’t believe he actually drinks them.

Barring this eventuality try the following:

Standard Manhattan

Fill a shaker with ice then add:

2 parts excellent bourbon like Knob Creek or Woodford Reserve (I like saying "parts" because then you can make them as big as you want).

1/2 part (or a little more) sweet vermouth

2 dashes of angostura bitters (available at your liquor store)

Shake well and pour into a wide-rimmed cocktail glass

Finish with a marachino cherry or twist of lemon

TO MAKE IT MORE FESTIVE, TAKE IT UP A NOTCH WITH THIS INFUSED BOURBON:

In a pitcher or a jar combine:

750 ml of good quality bourbon like Woodford Reserve.
3 cored and diced (large) Jonagold apples (you can use Granny Smith in a pinch)
4 cinnamon sticks
2 whole vanilla beans, sliced open longwise

Refrigerate 2-5 days stirring or shaking daily.
Strain back into the original whiskey bottle.

For the Manhattan make as above but substitute Amareno cherries from Sicily.

Here’s lookin' at you, Nonnie!

Sweating from the Heat of the Bamboo Pickle

It has been more than a year since we heard from FoodCrunch buddy Adam Grosser on these pages. This time Adam is in India reporting on the most important meal of the equatorial day. My regular postings will return soon with dispatches on the politics of eating at my house and the perfect Manhattan. Talk with you soon.

For the business travelers among us, the stultifying routine of waking up in a distant hotel, on some one else's clock, and choosing between the standard array of disappointingly prepared western breakfast choices – American Breakfast, Continental breakfast, and the newly invented but no less grim Fitness Breakfast - can only reinforce that you’d rather be home with some cherry scones in the oven. If you’re really lucky, a high-end hotel will offer a Japanese breakfast, which, while usually wildly over-priced, offers some welcome diversity, or at the very least a box of Total.

Enter the lucky visitor to India. I, know, it’s really far away. Especially from California. But, turns out, it’s worth the trip just for breakfast. I started my first day with Akuri eggs, a dish common to the Parsi region of Western India. The eggs are scrambled with red chilies, ginger, turmeric, tomatoes, and freshly milled cumin. They are served with mango chutney, and a griddled paratha (whole wheat flatbread) to scoop it all up. The eggs are cooked in ghee (clarified butter), so they have a light, fluffy consistency, and the fresh spices are in full song. The chilies are bright, but not overwhelming and the resultant mélange turned out to be the ultimate breakfast burrito sans pico de gallo. My traveling companions thought I was nuts.

The next morning, I ventured further afield and had a Dosa – a staple from Southern India. Dosas are a thin – perhaps 1.5mm thin - crispy slightly tart pancake made from a batter of fermented rice. They are typically cooked only on one side, which forms their famous crust. You can order dosas filled, buttered, or plain. I had the Masala Dosa, which consists of the aforementioned giant pancake folded in half, with a dollop of soft potato and lentil curry in the middle. The curry was rich with ginger, mustard seed, and coriander. Words do not begin to do the flavors justice. It was perfect. When I had the first bite, I couldn’t speak for at least a minute. My traveling companions thought I had graduated from nuts to bananas.

The last morning I realized I needed to try everything on the breakfast menu I hadn’t yet ingested. I had no idea what some of the dishes were, but given my early triumphs, I was boldly optimistic. I ordered the tomato Upma, the Vada Sambhar, and another Masala Dosa in case I didn’t like my first two choices. The Upma is made from a semolina batter that’s prepared similarly to soft polenta. Compared to the other foods I’d had, it was more lightly spiced, but that only allowed the freshness of the tomatoes, onions, and coconut to shine through. The Vada is a savory donut made with lentil flour and spinach, served with a thin spicy curry for dipping. It was a more substantial breakfast – the Indian equivalent of bacon and eggs. All of these dishes were served with mint chutney and a large bowl of pomegranate seeds. By this time, my traveling companions had not only decided I’d gone completely native, but went so far as to suggest that perhaps I should eat at my own table. Sweating from the heat of the bamboo pickle, but thoroughly content, I managed to ignore their feeble attempts at conversation.

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