A quick note:
Check out this clever new way to protect your lunch from thieves. The Anti-Theft Lunch Bag is a great idea for throwing off those with sticky fingers who might be inclined to steal your lunch. One look and they’ll move on to someone else’s stash in the fridge at work.
Funnier and more legal than rat poison.
Bravo to the creator of this one!
“Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize.”
While rummaging about in the fridge for the makings of today’s lunch, I found a way-past-its-prime tomato hiding in the bottom of the veggie bin. Not moldy and unsafe, just soft and a bit leaky. It was one I’d gotten from my friend, Ann, who lives in a community where they compost to beat the band and grow an amazing garden full of great vegetables, including some intensely flavorful tomatoes. What it was doing in there I’m not sure, since I don’t usually refrigerate tomatoes–that environment is tough on them.
Rather than toss out the sad specimen of my neglect, I puréed it on the grater and used it as the base for a salad dressing. I whisked in some banyuls, a splash of garum, some chopped shallot, salt, pepper and olive oil. Of course, this is completely open to interpretation–it would still be good with sherry vinegar or balsamic, a bit of anchovy paste, a touch of dijon, maybe even the yolk of a boiled egg and some smoked salt.
When there’s a really good tomato at stake, why toss it out? It’s loaded with flavor, and that would be a pity to waste. Using a grater is the way to go with this, because it’s a quick, easy clean up, and since you’re not mechanically puréeing the tomato, you don’t have to worry about the bitterness of its seeds. And the skin stays in your hand while the flesh goes into the dish beneath the grater.
The tomato dressing was great on my salad, and I mopped up the remaining juices with a piece of crusty bread. I just can’t let any of the good stuff go to waste.
As much as I appreciate the anarchy of the occasional food fight, I’ve never understood what takes over people in Bunol, Spain, who annually engage in a citywide tomato tossing frenzy. I’d rather fling something I’m not so crazy about (I once accidentally instigated a food fight in my college cafeteria when I chucked a dish of fried okra at someone, but that story’s for another time.)
It would be okay by me if the tomatoes they throw in Bunol’s “Tomatina” were of the hothouse variety. However, I have a feeling that if I were to blow into town during that event, I’d be mopping the streets with loaves of bread. And I’ll bet that if the citizenry of Bunol were ever forced to eat hothouse tomatoes, that’s the only type they’d ever throw.
Canning tomatoes is good, but could you canonize one?
I attended Slow Food Nation in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend and am still processing the experience. I belong to Slow Food but have had a love-hate relationship with it all along. Love its great intentions but strongly dislike (perhaps hate is too strong a word) the self-importance I perceive in of much of its hierarchy.
My impressions from the weekend? There’s more to love than to hate, as there typically is with most things in life. I was glad to find such an array of people interested in the work of Slow Food–not just food professionals and not just the wealthy. I was surrounded by everyday people who appreciate good food and who realize that you won’t find it in a fast food restaurant or in the local mega-grocery with its canyons of processed, oversalted, oversugared, partially-hydrogenated, artificially colored and high-fructose-corn-syrup-injected body rotting tastelessness. (But tell me, Carol, how do you REALLY feel?)
We talked about and explored good food, from how to grow it, make it, prepare it and enjoy it, to how to teach kids about it, push for legislation to ensure it and make it available to everyone.
I met some really inspiring people. Among them: a young man who works as an engineer but who enjoys curing meats in his free time. He makes his own pancetta, bacon and the like, in his tiny apartment. He says they taste vastly better than what the grocery offers and cost a fraction of what the grocery charges. And I met a woman who tired of a career in information technology, so she’s opening a gourmet store in a rather smallish town in the Midwest. I found similar stories again and again.
It amazes me how many professionals decide at some point to ditch their careers and plunge into some aspect of food. Perhaps it’s more than the desire to eat something tasty and healthy. Perhaps they crave the social aspects of it and the goodwill you generate when you share good food with others. I don’t know. But I DO know that that works for me.
Slow Food Nation’s Taste Pavilion, along with workshops and author readings, took place at Fort Mason on San Francisco Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
In the end, I appreciate that Slow Food provides an outlet for learning about and sharing responsibly produced food. Decent food shouldn’t be exclusive or out of reach for anyone. And insofar as Slow Food is able to chip away at the problems in providing an adequate, safe, nutritional food supply for all, I’m on board.
This time of year a lot of attention is paid to putting up fruits and vegetables for the winter. Since I live in southern California with its year-round growing season, it doesn’t seem quite so crucial, although the nesting impulse is always there that makes me want to put things back for a harsh season that just never seems to materialize out here in the land of endless summer.
No, now that summer is winding down, it’s about time to pull out the stockpot and make chicken and beef stocks. It’s great having both in the freezer–along with a bit of demi-glace–for making great soups, stews and sauces during the coming months, especially when holiday cooking time rolls around. But I employ that giant stockpot for another reason–to make what we in our household call “nuclear soup.”
Looks mild mannered but it packs a punch!Nuclear soup has no set recipe. Essentially, it is a chicken and vegetable soup that includes grain–sometimes barley, sometimes brown rice, sometimes something else–and that’s loaded with as much garlic, onion and cayenne pepper as I dare put into it. This stuff is purely medicinal. Whenever one of us starts to sneeze, cough or feel the familiar malaise that signals the impending arrival of a winter cold or infection, we thaw some nuclear soup and shovel it in. It has the power to loosen the tightest head cold and ease and warm the passages from skull to chest.
I don’t know if there’s any hard science behind it–although for many years garlic has been touted as Russian penicillin–but I just know what happens when one of us eats it while we have a case of the winter miseries. Or the summer miseries–my husband, Andy, is suffering with a summer cold right now, which feels particularly bad when the temps reach into the 90s.
We’re out of nuclear soup, so I just popped out for some chicken to make a new batch, enough to last us through this cold and, I hope, through several more. Each batch is different, depending on what’s on hand, but I prefer to base the soup on lots of dark chicken meat, because it has better flavor and doesn’t dry out. Sometimes I use a whole chicken, so I get the stock-enriching benefits of the carcass. I always have carrots and celery to go with the onion and garlic. Today I’m adding fennel and leeks, because they’re languishing in the veggie bin, and farro, because I have a new bag of this grain and I’ve never made soup with it before. Sometimes I toss in potatoes, parsnips, turnips or rutabagas. As I said, whatever is on hand will do (well, maybe not gummy bears or miniature marshmallows!). I’ll also add a fistful of fresh herbs from the garden, just to jazz it up.
The idea isn’t to kill the person you’re trying to nurse back to health, so I try not to get stupid when it comes to the cayenne, but rather I seek a balance between reasonable and bold. As for the smelly stuff, I typically use one large onion and one full head of garlic, sliced or minced.
It’s possible to make nuclear soup so that it’s both tasty and health restoring, so I do taste as I go. Once when Andy had a particularly bad cold and his head was completely blocked, he started into a bowl of nuclear soup, and by the time he was halfway through, everything opened up. After an extended nose-blowing session, he resumed his meal and then said, “Hey, this tastes good!”
And so it should. Being sick is punishment enough without having our tastebuds dulled by whatever it is that’s responsible for such evil.
Soup’s on, and Andy’s home, so it’s time to feed him and burp him and put him to bed.
