Archives for July 2008
German High Court Sides Against Smoking Ban
Europeans have always been known as smokers, and Europe their happy bastion. That latter reputation has, of course, suffered mightily over the last 5-10 years, as countries from France to Ireland have limited or banned smoking in restaurants and bars.
Is this nannying tide against smoking an overwhelming inevitability? Maybe. But as events in Germany indicate, there may be a sliver of reason to hope not.
Germany’s top court upheld complaints Wednesday against anti-tobacco laws in two states, in a ruling with broad implications for a country once seen as a smokers’ paradise.
The Federal Constitutional Court said clauses of laws in the city-state of Berlin and the southwestern region in Baden-Wuerttemberg were unconstitutional because they threatened the livelihood of owners of small bars and clubs.
The six-to-two ruling means that customers in one-room bars and discotheques in the two states can keep lighting up until at least the end of 2009.
More here. Small steps in the right direction closer to home here.
Democratic Presidential Candidates… Snap!
John Kerry–Membah him?, Perez Hilton might ask–recently took the unusual step of posing for photos with bunches of boozing coeds (pictured). What gives, wonders the Boston Herald.
The shots show the former White House wannabe posing with a pack of young ladies who are wielding cups, beer cans and straws shaped like penises.
Par-tay!
In other pics, the gals are carrying on sans the senator. In one snap a reveler, who appears to be three-to-five sheets to the wind, is having a panty-exposing wardrobe malfunction as she’s helped up from the floor.
…[A Kerry aide] said Kerry and two friends were walking on the dock after having dinner at the Straight Wharf restaurant when the senator was recognized by “a large group” on a boat who asked if they could get a photo.
Right. Sure. Just happened that way. I always get accosted by coeds wielding straws shaped like…
Barack Obama, meanwhile, is telling a similar ambush story. Seems Obama told Maureen Dowd he got pwned at a Berlin restaurant by a German tabloid. A resulting article referenced his “firm rear end,” and shows him posing with a comely journalist. Those Dems.
Dogs Developing that Whole Love/Hate Thing with Rachael Ray
Those who love to hate Rachael Ray and her crap food will be pleased to learn that it’s been repackaged… as dog food. Ray’s Nutrish line–no, seriously–will, in her defense, go to help at-risk dogs. To her credit, too, she seems to have picked actual animal-rescue benefactors, rather than groups like PETA that would rather kill dogs than place them in loving homes.
Now a bit on the foo and Isaboo:
My dog Isaboo loves how good these foods taste. Lucky for me, she has no idea just how good they really are for her. They’ve got Omega Fatty Acids with a dash of EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) to keep her skin and coat shiny and healthy. A blend of fiber including oatmeal makes Nutrish easy for her to digest. Calcium helps to keep Isaboo’s bones strong and her teeth healthy. For her immune system, there are antioxidants like vitamin E and selenium. Plus high quality proteins like real beef or chicken help support healthy organs and lean muscle mass.
More at Marketwatch.
While Radar went there by kind of refusing to go there, I’m going there by going there. Which not-so-delish Rachael Ray recipe was so bad that someone suggested it was more fit for the dogs?
Why I Love Globalization: Reason #752
For what seems like centuries, Jews have found solace in Chinese restaurants, which were once the only eateries in small towns across America that were open on major Christian holidays. Chinese restaurants gave hundreds of thousands of American Jews like my mom the wished-for excuse to scarf down non-kosher, Americanized platefuls of pu-pu platter and other exotic-sounding dishes.
Now, with the Olympics approaching, and the eyes of the world focused on Beijing, Jews visiting the city will have literally millions of Chinese culinary options. Included amongst those options will be exactly one kosher restaurant: Dini’s Kosher Restaurant. YNet News reports:
This diner is not just the only place in China that offers its guests matzo ball soup, kugel, and Moroccan cigars eaten with chopsticks, it’s also the only place where a mitzvah-keeping tourist can sample local delicacies such as dim-sum and Sichuan chicken made with all-kosher ingredients, while listening to the head rabbi’s daughter answer questions about the Torah’s Portion of the Week every Friday evening.
[...]
“The days in which Jews had to wander through China with suitcases full of preserved food are over,” said Rabbi Shimon Freundlich, Chabad’s envoy to Beijing.
According to the restaurant’s manager, Ohad Tiktinski, locals have also begun to frequent Dini’s, due to their belief that kosher food is healthier and cleaner. However even the Chinese people, who are rumored to consume everything that has four legs other than the kitchen table, have their limits. They refuse to touch the gefilte fish.
Who could blame them? Dini’s extensive tri-lingual menu (English, Mandarin, and Hebrew) here (PDF).
California Says Farewell to Freedom Fries, Bans Trans Fats
California on Friday became the worst first state to completely ban trans fats from state restaurants. That sucks.
…Tammy Perez, owner of the Pizza Club restaurant in La Habra (Orange County), says the transition is not so easy. She switched to oil free of trans fat 18 months ago – and paid twice as much, she said. The bad economy is making it hard enough for restaurants to survive, she added, and now the new law is “pushing some of us over the edge,”
The law requires professional cooks to purge their kitchens of all ingredients containing more than half a gram per serving of artificial trans fat by Jan. 1, 2010. Inspectors could impose fines of $25 to $1,000 for violations.
Bakers have an extra year to adhere to the ban because pastries are the most difficult products to make without trans fat-laden oils and shortenings. Packaged foods are not affected by the law.
[...]
“As a former fourth-grade schoolteacher in East L.A., I saw firsthand the problems of obesity,” [Assemblyman Tony] Mendoza said Friday. “AB97 is a culmination of these concerns and works to benefit the well-being of kids and California.”
More politicians pretending to do stuff for kids here in the SF Chronicle.
Of course, until California’s overlords are nannying vegans–a distinct possibility in that state if any, frankly—it will be impossible to completely banish trans fats, since about 20% of the trans fats we eat occurs naturally in beef and the meat of other tasty ruminant animals. Though that 20% figure will rise as restaurants (but not, yet, grocers) are forced to cook how the state wants them to.
What’s Your Beef?
I’m a flatiron guy. It’s the right size (about 0.9-1.1 lbs per steak), it’s got tenderloin-like texture, and its’ got good flavor along the lines of a sirloin.
More here–including photos of recipes for the mercado hispano and beef training camp–from the graphic’s originator, Beef Retail.
Thanks to beef-eating partner in crime Jerry Brito for the steak tip.
Wrestler Tosses Glasses at Cops’ Heads in NY Restaurant
In a tenuously food-related story, a former WWF wrestler is in trouble, this time after causing a ruckus at a NYC-area restaurant.
A gathering for professional wrestlers at a suburban New York City restaurant ended with the arrest of a wrestler known as “The Sandman.”
Yonkers police say that when officers arrived at the restaurant Sunday night, 45-year-old James “The Sandman” Fullington was flinging glasses from a tray at employees.
A police spokeswoman says the 6-foot-4-inch, 280-pound Fullington also threw several glasses at police, injuring two officers.
This the biggest controversy to hit wrestling since that episode of Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling where the Iron Sheik’s nephew Ahmed played in the Junior World Series and the Sheik–who I met in the 1980s at a wrestling match held at a bar in Alexandria, Va.–cheated in an attempt to make Ahmed’s team win.
Note: Look for a Mean Gene Okerlund cameo about 6:20 into the video.
Note II: Bringing it back to food, fans do throw food at the wrestlers at about 7:35.
Chicken Kebob Tequila
Friend Bill’s friend Mel sent Bill an email containing this photo to Bill, who sent it to me, along with Mel’s ’splaining about what this CKT is all about.
We had our first taste test tonight and it was awesome! Exactly like kebob. In a week we will be straining it to get our end product. Right now it has a good layer of the meat juice & fat. When we strain it that will be eliminated. A few days before we do strain it-it will sit in the freezer to help coagulate all that fat -easier for straining. We have decided a slice of lemon with it , will help enhance the flavor (as well cut some of the oiliness).
I’ll update you on how it all goes over at out camping trip. If it goes over well, I’ll make another batch – if people are not feeling so well – we know not to go there again. And no – the meat will not be eaten. Okay maybe a bite……
It looks truly disgusteresting (disgusting + interesting). I’ve eaten my share of pork and chicken marinated in tequila, but I like the idea of vice versaing things.
This Week in Bacon
Westerners become accustomed at an early age to the idea that Eastern cultures engage in a bunch of wacky practices. China is a particularly strong example of the type–whether its people getting their ears cleaned with a metal rod in a public park or eating countless and incomparably bizarre foods. We grow so used to the idea that China = Strange that it is probably easy to forget that a lot of the crap we Westerners do is equally strange.
Take the Dunmow Flitch Trials, which pit married couples against one another in a storytelling contest, with the winners getting a “flitch”–a whole side of bacon.
What the hell’s up with that? Let’s let the incredulous Chinese news agency Xinhua explain:
A bizarre ritual dating back to the 12th century was staged on Saturday in Essex of Britain.
The “Dunmow Flitch Trials,” held every four years, requires each couple, who should be married for at least a year and a day to tell the story of their marriage, from how they met to the proposal and how their families reacted.
The winner can win half a pig by trying to prove to a mock-court that they have the happiest marriage.
Several couples won this year, including (and I had no idea what this meant until I looked it up) “Des Raynor and his agony aunt wife Claire.”
More here from the trials’ official website.
1983 ‘Burger Time’ Commercial
Jamie Oliver’s Obesity Fearmongering Reaches New Lows
Just in time for Christmas, Atari is set to launch a Jamie Oliver cooking game. It’ll celebrate Oliver, “a phenomenon in the world of food… [who is] one of the world’s best-loved television personalities and one of Britain’s most famous exports.”
But that’s not all Oliver is. He’s also a tremendously wealthy prattling twit whose “woefully” ineffective yet mushrooming anti-obesity hysterics I’ve gone on about from time to time.
But even I was unprepared for his latest export–the docudrama Eat to Save Your Life–which is debuting this week in foodielicious Australia:
It is also tough-love Jamie-style: he calls all the ladies “darlin” – and then makes a particularly rotund one submit to a bath in which she is doused in slithery liquid to represent all the excess fat she’s consuming. The piece de resistance, however, is expert Gunther von Hagens: at Jamie’s request the good doctor cuts up the innards of a 28-stone corpse in front of all of us. It’s very, very tough love – and very watchable.
Jamie, darlin’. I met you a few years back, and I have to say you seemed a pleasant and charismatic enough chap. But, dude, the only autopsy I want a chef taking part in is the slicing and dicing of a cow, pig, chicken, or other non-human carcass for purposes of making me dinner.
If you really want to do something about obesity–and this advice is as free, moneywise, as the change people need to make to lose weight–cut the showboating, stop trying to scare everyone to death, stay away from quacks like von Hagens, stop grossing people out, and remind your fellow countrymen how to go for a walk.
Why I Love Globalization: Reason #481
SourcingMap, where I most certainly did buy my girlfriend the form-over-function cheeseburger phone from Juno late last year, is now offering a cool, PlayMobil-like catering truck.
But it’s another food product they sell that caught my eye–the super hand crank food mincer. (It looks a bit cooler than the handle manual food fruit grater peeler w/ transparent container) The mincer slices, it dices well, minces, and is “[r]ecommended food such as meat (beef, chicken, ham), fish, vegetables (peanuts, walnut), beans, [and] dried scallop.”
Dried scallop? Yes. Apparently goes well with minced pork and mushrooms or tofu and mushrooms.
L.A. Councilwoman to South Central: No Fruit and Walnut Salad for You!
An L.A. councilwoman is making good on her longtime “health zoning” threat to ban new fast-food joints from her South Central neighborhood, the WaPo reports:
Citing alarming rates of childhood obesity and a poverty of healthful eating choices, a city councilwoman is pushing for a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South-Central Los Angeles.
“Some people will say, ‘Well, people just don’t have to eat it,’ ” said Jan Perry, the Democrat who represents the city’s overwhelmingly African American and Latino District 9. “But the fact of the matter is, what if you have no other choices?”
I don’t know South Central, but I do know that its things like this, from the LAT last year, that tend to limit choices:
[British grocer] Tesco has said it will put stores in low-income neighborhoods, including one that’s planned for Los Angeles at East Adams Boulevard and South Central Avenue.
[...]
A coalition of 25 community organizations in Southern California is set to call on Tesco today to sign a “community benefits agreement” that would bind the British retailer to its previous promises to pay its Southern California workers well above the minimum wage, offer health benefits and to be environmentally responsible when it launches its Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market chain of small grocery stores this fall.
Right. Way to encourage choices. As the excellent Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in the latest issue of Reason, “Few sins are less forgivable in polite society than offering poor people products they actively seek.”
Note the evil McDonald’s “fruit and walnut salad” in the WaPo’s story photo, btw.
So Awesome
Via Serious Eats.
This Week in Bacon
Marco Pierre White’s revelation of the secret behind his renowned bacon sandwiches has caused a backlash worthy of Carla Bruni’s new album. White, the eminent restaurateur and chef who has had a hand in the careers of chefs like Gordon Ramsay and is revered by guys like Batali and Bourdain, says the key to a great bacon butty is… the microwave.
He demonstrates his technique in the latest episode of his ITV1 show, Marco’s Great British Feast.
Not only does it taste good, but it saves on washing up, according to White, who claims to have employed the technique for the past 15 years.
“Why do I want to wash a grill tray? Why do I want to make a mess? When I cook my bacon I have only one plate to wash up. It tastes better and it’s practical. Every household needs one,” he proclaims in the show.
Food writer Tim Hawyard takes White to task at the Guardian’s Word of Mouth.
As I watched last night’s edition of Marco’s Great British Feast, with hot, salty tears in my eyes, Marco Pierre White sat in a cabman’s hut and ordered his bacon microwaved.
[...]
Why would it be necessary for a man with MPW’s towering talent and stunning technical ability to go so insanely off-piste? Microwaving bacon, if my interpretation of McGee is correct, would sort of steam it from within. There’s no crispiness, no caremelisation, just a hot floppy cured product.
I must come to White’s defense (defence?) here. I know from crispy. I appreciate microwaved bacon, not surprisingly, for its crispiness, and also for its lack of mess. But too often microwaved bacon is burnt, and (like most microwaved food) is unevenly cooked. And, frankly, there’s still usually a grease splatter and a hot-ass plate to deal with as well. So it’s not perfect. But it’s hardly deplorable, right?
How about you, dear reader. How do you prefer your bacon?
Note: I found the foreign bacon controversy more interesting than the domestic one.
