Archives for February 2009
Dog Days on Capitol Hill
It has been a big week in the U.S. Senate. Yesterday, the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body passed a bill granting voting rights to the District of Columbia. Today, it got hot dog vending machines.
I hit up the newly installed machine in the Hart Senate Office Building to try out this miracle of modern vending science. Since it was the machine’s first day, a technician from LHD Vending Systems was there buying a few dogs on house (err, House?) for interested passers-by. No word on whether accepting a $2 dog violates ethics rules for Senate staff. Beware the wrath of the guardian of integrity, the two-headed monster known as McCain-Feingold!
I went for the $2.50 all-beef Kunzler dog. The machine has a glass window in the front, you can see your hot dog get plucked from the refrigerated section, cooked (with “infrared,” according to Alex Cifuentes, the helpful on-scene technician/spokesman), deposited in a warmed bun, and delivered though a sliding door.
The dogs are pretty decent—better than boiled or microwaved, if not quite up to true grilled standard. And more miraculous even than the existence of a hot dog vending machine: Normally fast-walking, busy-and-important Senate staffers stopped to gawk at the machine and kibitz while it did its thing. None would go on the record with their observations about hot dogs, though. Let’s just say that several high ranking Senate staffers are pro-hot dog.
Just in case the old saw about Washington being recession-proof turns out not to be true, you can cobble together your very own D.C. version of a Gray’s Papaya Recession Special right on Capitol Hill. Gray’s price these days is $4.45 for two dogs and a drink. At $2 a pop for the dogs and juice and soda machines flanking the dog machine, a similar package is yours for the making.
Sorta Food-Related: Miss America in DC to Speak on Eating Disorders
Anorexic beauty queens as a topic is only tangentially related to food. More like unfood.
But if you’re in DC today and want to check out a formerly anorexic, currently blonde beauty queen talking about what it’s like to be a formerly anorexic, currently blonde beauty queen, American University invites you to come gawk at listen to the current Miss America opine tonight on the school’s main campus:
Miss America 2008: Kirsten Haglund
8:30 p.m., Ward 1
Kirsten Haglund, Miss America 2008, will be speaking about overcoming an eating disorder and redefining the Miss America crown. The event is part of Body Image Awareness Week. AU ID is required for free admission. Non-AU admission is $5.
Sponsor: Wellness Center, Student Health Center, Office of the Dean of
Students, Women’s Initiative, KPU
Contact: Alan Duffy, x3276
For what it’s worth, Haglund’s sun-cluttered MySpace page lists her as “single.” Perhaps she’s looking for the right guy to make her champagne wishes and caviar dreams come true.
Chat with Top Chef Finalist Carla Now!
Top Chef finalist and DC native Carla Hall is online right now (2p EDT) at the dying WaPo taking questions about everything except what we really want to know. Which is to say she won’t be talking about who won.
I saw Top Chef head judge Tom Colicchio on a kids & food panel (with Rachael Ray!) at SoBe Food & Wine Fest over the weekend. Tom, who was great, also failed to mention the winner.
I’ll have more on the SoBe panel in an upcoming article. But like tonight’s Top Chef finale, you’ll have to wait for it.
Mmmm….Doughnuts….
In England, Shrove Tuesday is the day to eat pancakes. (Unless you’re Anglo-Catholic apparently. The local parish is having crepes, not pancakes. Sounds very Catholic and not so Anglo to me.) On the Continent, Fastnacht, Mardi Gras, Carnevale, etc. is the day to eat fried dough. Who, I ask you, has chosen the better part?
I plump (literally I fear) for the Continent and started off the day frying up Krapfen, Shenkli, and “Naked Ladies with Their Legs Crossed“. I remain skeptical of the fried cookie (the Shenkli were not that great), but the Naked Ladies are–as I guess one should expect naked ladies to be–winners.
Bottled Watergate?
Forget unpaid taxes and illegal nannies, there’s a new ridiculous scandal in town: Possession of…bottled water?:
This week, the City Insider spotted an almost empty case of bottled water in the back of [San Francisco] Mayor Gavin Newsom’s hybrid sport utility vehicle as it was parked in front of City Hall. At least one full bottle of Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water remained under the plastic covering.
Newsom has no one but himself to blame for this one, though. He issued a bottled water fatwa in 2007:
This from the mayor who in June 2007 issued an executive order directing city government to no longer purchase bottled water, saying the containers clog landfills while the city owns a pristine reservoir in the Sierra Nevada that produces some of the country’s best-rated tap water.
Newsom wasn’t short on real scandals to begin with, but will Bottled Watergate bring him down?’
Fattening Tuesday
I pride myself on making the finest etouffee east of the Mississippi Hudson. Here’s my recipe, which was originally the crawfish etouffee recipe rustled from The New Orleans Cookbook but since modified (little hard to find crawfish or crawfish fat in Connecticut). As I tell Mrs. Kuhl, it’s basically health food — except for, you know, the sausage and the six tablespoons of butter.
Colicchio Does Coke (Diet)
This Week in Bacon
It’s 2009. The most common New Year’s resolution people make is probably to get healthy or to lose weight. Deciding how to accomplish this is the hard part. You could do Atkins or South Beach or the Tabasco sauce/water/lemon diet. But those aren’t enjoyable, and they require too much effort. What if your diet could consist of something you actually LOVE to eat, like, say, bacon! Well, that’s exactly what a San Diego man decided to do: an all bacon, all the time diet.
The San Diego resident has embarked on a month-long “nothing but bacon” diet. He’s eating just over a pound of bacon a day–that’s bacon for every meal for all of February. Why? Well, as explained in an NBC video report, he’s an SD website personality, and the site’s readers have joined the rest of the country in having an obsession with the divine pork product. The fondness for pork fat inspired Nelson to go on a bacon-y trip down memory lane and then the idea of “the bacon diet” was born.
“There can never be too much bacon,” says the man who admits he’s “not a huge fan of vegetables.”
Sure, this sounds like a great diet, but the point of a diet is to get healthy, right? Is this realistic on a nothing-but-bacon diet?
Well, Nelson says he’s lost weight and his blood pressure has gone down. He attributes this partly to his getting full pretty fast and not leading him to eat starches. Nelson also rationalizes that “pork fat is very similar to olive oil,” so you’ve got “perfect proportion of protein and fat.”
It’s worth a try, right? Bacon: cheap, easy, and delicious. And if I can lower my blood pressure and lose weight . . . sounds like the perfect diet to me! Now, all I have to worry about is my cholesterol. And I’m pretty sure it’s not safe to continue the diet past a month . . . you remember what happened to Morgan Spurlock, from Super Size Me. You don’t want to end up like that.
Friday Food Song: Drink! Drink! Drink!
I have been busy baking in the Viennese style for a Fasching party, so my offering for the Friday food song is a song that has the Fasching spirit: The Student’s Drinking Song from Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince as sung, but not acted, by Mario Lanza.
Yes, I know. The Student Prince is set in Heidelberg, but the music is clearly Austrian in spirit and sound. After all, Romberg was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire (the Hungarian part), served in the army, and studied engineering and music in Vienna before moving to the United States in 1909. A song about drinking written for Germanic students by a Jewish Hungarian engineer and sung by an Italian–yep, that about sums up the Austro-Hungarian empire
Let’s drink!
New Law Protects Customers from Murderous Restaurateurs, Peanuts
A new Massachusetts law sponsored by the marvelously named state Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem (D-Middlesex and Norfolk) aims to protect food allergy sufferers from the scourge of restaurants keen to kill their customers, and restaurants from the scourge of allergic customers keen to kill themselves.
In addition to basic awareness-raising poster and video mandates, the law contains this forehead-slappingly stupid requirement:
Every person licensed as an innholder or common victualer, when serving food, shall…include on all menus a notice to customers of the customer’s obligation to inform the server about any food allergies.
That’s right: The law requires restaurants to use their menus to remind people whose throats will close up upon encountering a peanut to ask if there’s any peanuts in their food. Really? We needed Sen. Stone Creem to make that conversation happen?
The law graciously allows restaurants until January 1, 2010, to add the warning sentence to their menus. Meanwhile, allergy sufferers will likely be dying in droves, without that vital reminder to ask if the food they’re about to eat will kill them.
There’s also a voluntary program where restaurants can create a book with all the ingredients they use in every dish and thus be certified “Food Allergy Friendly.” Hilarious syntax aside—are the restaurants pro-allergy?—this program is a classic example of legislation that need not be. If restaurants want to make their ingredients list available and advertise that to allergy sufferers, more power to them. In fact, Chef Ming Tsai of Blue Ginger, who has been pushing this legislation for years, already does this at his restaurant.
***
My former boss and New York Times science columnist John Tierney like to tell this tale of pro-regulation bias in the media:
I once sat in on a newspaper story conference the day after an armored-car company was robbed of millions of dollars bound for banks. The first idea that came up for a follow-up story was: Does this robbery show the need for stricter regulation of armored-car companies?
We kicked this idea around until I suggested that companies in the business of transporting cash already had a fairly strong incentive not to lose it—presumably an even stronger incentive than any government official regulating their security arrangements. That story idea died, but not the mind-set that produced it.
This goes double for legislators.
Via Mike Riggs
A “notoriously cryptic and unobtrusive family of birds”
More from the Dept. of Eating Strange Beasties:
A rare quail from the Philippines was photographed for the first time before being sold as food at a poultry market, experts say.
Found only on the island of Luzon, Worcester’s buttonquail was known solely through drawings based on dated museum specimens collected several decades ago.
Scientists had suspected the species—listed as “data deficient” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s 2008 Red List—was extinct….However, the buttonquail is from a “notoriously cryptic and unobtrusive family of birds,” according to the nonprofit Birdlife International, so the species may survive undetected in other regions.
He did not add: “Also, they are delicious with a little cumin, so I sort of understand why you’d want to eat the last one.”
The whole thing is reminiscent of the pretty great/terrible 1990 Marlon Brando/Matthew Broderick movie The Freshman, which features a club of the ’80s ultra-wealthy organized around consuming the final specimens of endangered animals while wearing velvet mini dresses and black tie.
Clark Kellogg (Broderick): But it’s an endangered species!
Carmine Sabatini (Brando): Not any more. It’s in New Jersey, it’s fine.
Rent it today, and enjoy the next best thing to roasted endangered buttonquail.
The Savory Breakfast
I am officially overdosed on Mark Bittman after flying JetBlue between SF and DC several times a year and mindlessly watching him on the limp New York Times channel to pass the time. But this I like.
Bittman, like me, is a fan of the savory versus sweet breakfast and has some great suggestions, though I doubt that people will want to undertake the long cooking time of quinoa as they are rushing off to work.
He explains his love of the savory breakfast:
…it could be that I’ve traveled enough to learn the joys of jook, the Chinese rice porridge also known as congee, which is among my favorite ways to start the day even when seasoned with nothing more than scallions, soy and chopped peanuts; of the kipper, baked beans, broiled mushrooms, tomatoes and other staples of the traditional English breakfast; of cucumbers, feta and olives, which I ate daily in Turkey; of ful medames, the lemon-kissed fava concoction of Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East; and, one glorious day about 10 years ago, of kao tom, the Thai version of jook, loaded with sausage, eggs and nam pla.
Tony Bourdain frequently chronicles savory breakfasts, such as a spicy noodle soup, in his travels to Asia. My personal favorite savory breakfast is the Japanese buffet at the Nikko Hotel in SF. There is something positively wonderful about entering a dining room at 7am and smelling miso soup.
The Voice Gives Foie Gras Farming Thumbs Up
Is foie gras a humanely produced product, as proponents like me contend, or is it something sinister, as the folks at PETA and HSUS claim? Village Voice food writer Sarah DiGregorio decided to find out.
If I had seen with my own eyes that Hudson Valley produced foie gras by abusing ducks, this article would have turned out very differently. But that just wasn’t the case.
Read DiGregorio’s brilliant, 400+-word investigation here. And feel free to follow that up with a helping of my own foie opus here.
Famine naturally
Apparently stem rust has returned, and as usual the people most affected by such disasters are those who can least afford it: the subsistence farmers.
While his article is blessedly free of political angles–it mainly looks at fact and science and reports on what agronomists, most notably the great Norman Borluag still cracking away at 94, are doing to combat this threat–it’s only a matter of time however before the political angle becomes more prominent, and I wonder what the organic crowd will make of this. I am sure they will blame biotechnology, modern agricultural techniques, and globalization. Norman Borlaug would vehemently disagree.
(And now I have to tell my one second-hand Norman Borlaug story. A friend of mine, a strapping 6′2″ or so and in his 30s, picked Dr. Borlaug up at the airport to take him to a conference. Said friend met Dr. Borlaug at the gate and went with him to baggage claim. He ascertained which piece of luggage was Dr. Borlaug’s but as he prepared to pick it up, he heard a merry cry of “Look out, young man, that’s heavy!” Dr. Borlaug, then age 91, elbowed my friend out of the way, grabbed the bag, swung it off the conveyor, and then started trotting for the exit. And that, my friends, is how they breed ‘em in Iowa. )
This Is Why You’re Fat
No, really. This Is Why You’re Fat.
Click through for hot dog pie, the McNuggetini, bacon cheeseburgers with chocolate covered bacon, and so much more.
