Sunny and Windy

Here's a view of the water from the end of a short walk this morning. We had a very easy day. We walked across Key Largo to this very small beach access point among huge fenced-in houses.

After a late breakfast, we got in the car and took a ride down Route 1. We stopped at a historical park where we heard about the railroad that ran through the keys until the famous Labor Day hurricane of 1935 destroyed the tracks. What I learned: the use of mile markers to designate location along Route 1 is the legacy of the railroad, where it's a standard way to indicate location. Also that the bridges survived the hurricane, while the tracks were twisted and thrown around. A train trying to save people was derailed, with horrific loss of life.

Finally we stopped at one of the few bookstores in the area. Near the bookstore I saw two advertising signs on opposite sides of the road:

We had a quiet and very nice dinner -- I couldn't resist another local lobster. First we had smoked fish spread, made from local fish that are smoked at the restaurant.

A straw-wrapped wine bottle

What could be more retro than a straw-wrapped wine bottle? Music by Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra? Red and white checked tablecloths? Candles in little jars? Garlic bread and cruets of oil and vinegar? If you know what's more retro than all that, please don't tell me.

The stuffed lobsters we ordered were very good. And we did enjoy the atmosphere. Those were good old days, and the AAA guide knows it.

For what we did before dinner see Everglades and Zombie Vultures ate my T-Top.

Key Largo, not just a great movie

Our expert sources (the AAA guide and iPhone apps) told us to eat at The Fish House. We are predisposed towards any restaurant that also has a fresh fish market and buys from local fisherman. No exception here. Grouper, yellowtail snapper and mahi-mahi were the fresh catch tonight, with a variety of preparations on offer. Key Lime Pie for dessert.

The menu says they've been in business since the founding of the Conch Republic, but the web site says 20 years. Whatever. It's lovely.

Speaking of No-Knead Bread

Sunday evening we were treated to a beautiful meal at some friends' house. It included a loaf of no-knead bread that was incredible. Of course I'd heard about this recently-developed technique for bread-making, and maybe tried someone else's version without discussion. Yesterday the bread-maker/hostess sent me copies of the two articles from 2008 that she relied on. On the same topic: the current blog post, Do You Really Want to Make French Bread? by editor (and now blogger) Judith Jones. AND...

Now Harold McGee has spoken! This week's New York Times column is about the famous no-knead breads, including experimental and theoretical information. Don't miss

The Curious Cook

Better Bread With Less Kneading

By HAROLD McGEE

A chef's job

Time magazine recently ran a somewhat surprising article: McDonald's Chef: The Most Influential Cook in America? by John Cloud. The chef, Daniel Coudreaut, grew up in Ossining, N.Y., went to business school, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and has worked in new product development at McDonalds since 2004.

Coudreaut's test kitchen at McD's headquarters, according to the article, is beautiful and modern and very unlike any stereotype of McDonald's. He and his staff experiment with new products only for American sales -- McDonald's adapts its products for each major marketing area. The emphasis is on keeping the successful products and building on them: "you don't mess with the fries."

The ivory tower nature of Coudreaut's outfit -- described at length -- upholds the expectation that "every great manufacturing company runs a crazy R&D department, a place where mad scientists get to fiddle with toys and produce one or two breakthroughs a year."

From this test kitchen have come a number of recently developed McDonald's products. The latest is Mac Snack Wrap -- a tortilla filled with "about half the interior of a Big Mac — a single beef patty, three quick squeezes of special sauce, less lettuce, less cheese, fewer pickles, fewer onions." It costs $1.50 and 330 calories. Coudreaut has lots of leeway to play with exotic or specialized ingredients like endive, dried cherries, wine sauces, and celery root, but his products must appeal to typical McDonald's customers. Further, chosen ingredients must be available in unimaginable quantities, and their preparation must be "so simple that a high school dropout can make it." So he has a challenging job despite his apparent freedoms.

Recently, I read the autobiography of Jacques Pepin, the French-trained chef and early TV food personality. (See "The Apprentice" for my thoughts on it.) Coudreaut provides a striking parallel: Pepin, along with another then-famous chef, Pierre Franey, worked for a decade at Howard Johnson's, which was at the time, the 1960s, the largest American fast-food chain. Pepin described his efforts to create more palatable dishes for the mass market. He had to make sure they could be scaled up in quantity and kept consistent in quantity. They had to be distributed and sold at hundreds of restaurants. He also worked in the hope of encouraging Americans to slightly (at least) expand the range of their tastes. If Coudreaut ever writes an autobiography I wonder what comparable things he will say about his leadership of McDonald's test kitchens.

Thanks to Evelyn who told me to read the Time article.

Why people like fast food breakfasts

From the Washington Post, an article about the effect of high unemployment on breakfast sales at fast-food chains -- sales are in decline. The unemployed don't have money for a fast-food breakfast, and besides, they don't have to get up and go in the morning. No big surprise, but then there was a very interesting observation:

Cultural historian Barry Glassner said Americans have an unusually complex relationship with food, influenced by convenience and status. We want our food quick and easy, and at the same time we use it to show our rank in the pecking order. Fast-food breakfasts, he said, can fulfill both purposes.

"In America, it's considered a mark of our industriousness that we're very efficient in our meals," said Glassner, a professor at the University of Southern California. "In other times and places, you would be seen as a little crazy."

I never thought about eating fast food as a marker of American industriousness. I just thought we were always in a hurry, and liked to avoid waiting. When he put it this way, it seems obvious, like a lot of ideas that one has not quite formed. I'm re-reading the book Chop Suey by Andrew Coe, tracing Chinese restaurant food in American life -- in the early days of Chinese restaurants, a similar combination of convenience, status, and low prices drew Americans to Chinese restaurants, then often called Chop Suey Houses. I'm not sure that they had yet started eating on the run, though.

Ginger

So many ways to eat ginger! I didn't realize I was so crazy about it, and then began to count. In the pantry and refrigerator I found raw ginger root, Chinese candied ginger, crystalized ginger, Lebkuchen from the German Christmas box, English ginger cookies, English ginger preserves, and an ancient (and often refilled) tin of powdered ginger. One small piece of my friend Elaine's gingerbread cake in the freezer didn't get into the photo. More great ginger items are Japanese pickled ginger to eat with sushi, ginger ale, ginger ice cream, chocolate-covered ginger, and good old-fashioned American ginger snaps. In Australia I once ate a ginger candy bar: jellied ginger covered with chocolate.

Its origins are in east Asia, but ginger has definitely traveled widely.