Food city area

Sunset Memories

Today's New York Times has a great review of the century or more of Sunset Magazine. See this: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/dining/20sunset.html">The Original California Cuisine, Courtesy of Sunset Magazine</a>. In my early days of cooking, I lived first in Berkeley, then La Jolla, and tried many recipes from Sunset. For a year, I worked in an office with a number of clerks and nurses who talked cooking all the time, and they recommended it. I've always regretted that its focus is so totally on the West, while I live here in Michigan. Reading it makes me too sad -- though I continued to subscribe and use the Sunset cookbooks for many years after I moved away from its region. I think my favorite recipe was for a cheesecake with a swirl of chocolate on top. It's been decades since I made that cheesecake. Sunset was especially my frequent source of Thanksgiving ideas. Since it's coming up, here's one recipe: <style>@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h4 { margin: 4pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 18pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.Heading4Char { font-family: Times; font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <h4>Wild Rice and Sourdough Stuffing with Almonds</h4> (Sunset, Nov. 92: for a 17 lb. turkey or a smaller turkey with some in a pan) 1/2 loaf of sourdough bread (1.5 LB loaf) 1/2 c. sliced almonds (1/4 LB by wt) 1 lb. Italian turkey sausage 2 large onions, chopped 1 TB. each rosemary and sage 1 and 1/2 c. wild rice, rinsed and drained 6 c. turkey stock, made the night before from turkey neck etc. (see below) Night before: cook rice in 4 c. broth: bring to boil in 3 qt. pan, turn down, simmer 60 min, stirring occasionally. Leave in pan overnight on back of stove. Rice will absorb liquid. (When we didn't have enough time, we did this just before making the turkey, with less liquid, and it was not bad.) Just before stuffing bird: spread bread cubes on rimmed cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for 20 min; set aside. Then bake almonds on same sheet for 10 min; set aside with bread. Crumble sausage onto pan and mix with onion and herbs. Cook for 1/2 to 3/4 hr. Discard any fat. Pour remaining 2 c. broth over bread, allow to absorb. Mix all ingredients together, stuff and truss turkey immediately. Original suggests baking dressing in a separate pan, but I stuffed a 17 lb.. turkey, including much stuffing between the skin and the breast and cooked for 5 hours with an aluminum foil tent, first half hour at 425 degrees, remaining at 325. This is as I made it, with adaptations to published recipe. If made in a pan, should have some butter added. Here are some other recipes that I saved: <style>@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h4 { margin: 4pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 18pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.Heading4Char { font-family: Times; font-weight: bold; }p.Hangingindent, li.Hangingindent, div.Hangingindent { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 12pt; text-indent: -12pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <h4>Sunset Green Chile Strata</h4> A Sunday Brunch dish. 3/4 LB cheddar, Swiss, or mozzarella 1 LB bulk sausage or ground pork 5-6 slices white bread, buttered & cubed 4 oz can Old El Paso green chilies 4-6 eggs 1-2 cups milk Salt, pepper, Chile powder Brown and drain sausage. Shred cheese. Layer half the bread- sausage-chilies-cheese in buttered casserole dish. Repeat layers. Pour mixture of eggs, milk, and spices over all, and let stand over night. Bake 1 hour at 350 degrees. <style>@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h4 { margin: 4pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 18pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.Heading4Char { font-family: Times; font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <h4>Italian Pickled Vegetables</h4> Made for Evelyn's Recital, 1986 and Evelyn & Tom's Wedding, 2000; these are Evelyn's instructions for making it in 2000, as I long ago gave her the edition of the Sunset Italian Cookbook in which it appears. 12-18 small carrots, about 3/4 in in diameter 1 small bunch celery 2 large red bell peppers 1 large (about 2 lbs) cauliflower 1 cup salt 4 quarts cold water 1 pound onions peeled (calls for pickling or tiny white, but we cut regular) 2 quarts white vinegar 1/4 cup mustard seeds 2 tablespoons celery seeds 1 small dried hot red chile 2 1/2 cups sugar Peel carrots; cut in half lengthwise and then into 1 1/2-inch lengths; measure 4 cups. Remove strings from celery; slice lengthwise and then into 1 1/2-inch lengths; measure 3 cups. Remove seeds and stems from peppers and cut into 1-in-wide strips. Break cauliflower into 1 1/2-in-thick flowerets and trim stems. Stir salt into the cold water until dissolved. Add measured carrots and celery, peppers, cauliflowerets, and onions. Let stand, covered, in refrigerator for 12 to 18 hours; then drain, rinse in cold water, and drain again. In a 6-quart pot, combine vinegar, mustard seeds, celery seeds, chile, and sugar. Bring to a boil and continue to boil for 3 minutes. Add vegetables and boil until vegetables are almost tender (10 minutes); discard chile. Store in refrigerator in jars. (They have instructions on canning. We didn't do that though.) I made it two weeks in advance.

Sunset Memories

Today's New York Times has a great review of the century or more of Sunset Magazine . See this: The Original California Cuisine, Courtes...

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04.47

"Four Meals"

The novel Four Meals by Meir Shalev portrays several strong-minded characters living in Israel before and soon after Israeli independence. The book is very sensual, describing tastes, smells, the beauty of the landscape, and deep feelings among the characters. It's hard to describe the technique of writing -- reading is almost like looking close up at an impressionist painting and then stepping back and seeing a street scene or a row of trees or a grain field. Each section of the book describes a meal served to the narrator by Jacob, one of his three possible fathers. The meals take place at very long intervals and different stages of their lives. The food at each meal includes a delicious dessert, a foamy combination of wine, sugar, and eggs that the father learned once from an Italian POW during the war -- a man who made a big impression on him. Tastes and smells echo throughout the book, gathering significance. The book begins: <blockquote>"On warm days, a soft smell of milk rises from the walls of my house. The walls are plastered and whitewashed, tiles cover the ground, but from the pores of the walls and the cracks of the floor, the smell rises to me, persists, steals in like the sweat of an ancient love. "Once my house was a cowshed... And a woman lived in the cowshed, she worked and slept in it, dreamed and wept. And on a bed of sacks she gave birth to her son." </blockquote>Much is hinted in these initial words, along with a glimpse of the mother's eccentric nature. As the novel proceeds, more and more tastes, smells, and complex Israeli experiences merge into an overall impression of life in that long-ago time. One taste that recurs is salt. A character named Judith may have been the narrator's half-sister. Or not. But she made cheese and pickles "salty-spicy little cucumbers she pickled in jars in the window of the cowshed ... Many times I have tried to make pickles like hers, and didn't succeed, but I can evoke the memory of their smell in my nose and then I slide my tongue over my teeth... salty salty salty salty salty salty salty ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas..." (p. 132) Jacob, who cooks the four meals, says "cooking salt is better than table salt that dissolves altogether. But in the soul, love with worry and with hate should be mixed together, and anger with longing with fear with a little joy should be mixed together. Otherwise it cuts you up in pieces." (p. 164) Much later at another meal Jacob describes how he felt very sorry for Italian who taught him the key recipe: "Not because he escaped from the POW camp... But because he sat down at the table and three fingers he put into the bowl of salt and put some for himself on the palm of his other hand and from there he licked the salt with his tongue just like a cow from her stone in the trough." (p. 262) Each meal ends with the key dessert: "Jacob boiled a pot of water on the fire, cracked an egg into the palm of his had, slipped the white between his spread fingers, and put the yolk into the bowl. A little wine, a little sugar, and the whisk was gleaming in his had, steam rose, and the warmth emitted the smell of wine in the air." (p. 248) Finally, the narrator makes the dish for himself "and all at once the rich fragrance of zabaglione rose in the air. ... I stood up and slid my tongue over my top teeth from right to left and from left to right sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews" (p. 282) The aromas and tastes that support this story, which is at the same time realistic and fairy-tale-like, are presented in a very special way, making it a quite imaginative book.

"Four Meals"

The novel Four Meals by Meir Shalev portrays several strong-minded characters living in Israel before and soon after Israeli independence. ...

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13.23

Buying Honey

Buying Honey

Elaine and Larry at the Lafayette Farmers' Market.

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13.45

Lafayette Farmers' Market

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5087165858/" title="laf3 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="laf3" height="473" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4110/5087165858_493d18af63_z.jpg" width="640" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5086569631/" title="laf2 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="laf2" height="513" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4149/5086569631_1b175f5f6d_z.jpg" width="640" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5087165394/" title="laf-farmers by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="laf-farmers" height="571" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4113/5087165394_71bcb2a9d4_z.jpg" width="640" /></a> At the market in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, many of the sellers are farmers selling their own produce, but others sell produce from other locations. The tomatoes in the photo, for example, were from nearby in Indiana, but the same farmer was selling Idaho onions. No frost yet -- so lots of beautiful things are still in season that often have disappeared by mid-October.

Lafayette Farmers' Market

At the market in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, many of the sellers are farmers selling their own produce, but others sell produce from other ...

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11.28

Food Communities

Rob Walker began his current NY Times column "Consumed" -- <blockquote>"For some, the old cliché that you are what you eat has taken on increasingly complex implications: food choices can be a stand-in for social, ideological, even political identity and beliefs. Eaters can form communities of a sort, and businesses are built catering to them."</blockquote>I think this is a useful observation about one current view of food, and helped me to expand my recent thoughts on how we decide what to eat. I think this helps to understand the recent trend towards making arbitrary commitments that select food for a single reason (such as limiting one's diet to <a href="http://regional-food.blogspot.com/2010/10/local-eating.html">local food </a>or so-called <a href="http://regional-food.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-im-not-pledging-anything-about-food.html">unprocessed food</a>). Interesting idea. Walker's article, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/magazine/10FOB-Consumed-t.html?ref=magazine">Shared Tastes</a>, continued with a discussion of "incubators," that is, communal kitchens where small-scale entrepreneurs can begin a business of food preparation and sales. He offers examples from a number of cities where women (especially) without investment capital can begin to produce and market food items. He makes the point that the usual motives for food purchases -- taste, familiarity, cost... -- are often more important to buyers than the theoretical ideas of the incubator founders: "the most successful food entrepreneurs put the least emphasis on the societal impact of their mission." For example, he cites one cook from such a project "telling an interviewer that she didn’t use organic ingredients. She finally admitted that, actually, she does — but avoids saying so because to many of her customers it simply 'sounds expensive.'"

Food Communities

Rob Walker began his current NY Times column "Consumed" -- "For some, the old cliché that you are what you eat has taken on...

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04.45

Really good point about processing food

<blockquote>"I write to sing the praises of processed food... . Without food processed in traditional, healthy ways, mankind would have become extinct long ago."</blockquote>So begins <a href="http://www.eatingrules.com/2010/10/traditional-food-processing/">a post by Cynthia Harriman</a>, Director of Food and Nutrition Strategies for <a href="http://www.oldwayspt.org/">Oldways</a>, a Boston-based non-profit. Guest blogging for the promoter of "October: Unprocessed," she makes some really useful points that I think put the idea of "processed" food in perspective much better than most of the previous writers there have done. For millennia, perhaps even before settled agriculture, herdsmen processed fresh milk into yogurt and cheese harnessing natural and beneficial bacteria, she observes. Bacteria allowed processing of cabbage into Korean kimchi or German saurkraut. "In fact," Harriman writes, "one of the common features of most traditional processing methods was this: they worked by encouraging the proliferation of good bacteria, which crowded out the dangerous bacteria that cause food to rot and that threaten our health and our lives." I commented recently about October: Unprocessed -- people pledging to eat no processed food for 1 month. As I said here -- <a href="http://regional-food.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-im-not-pledging-anything-about-food.html">Why I'm not pledging anything about food</a> -- arbitrarily limiting one's diet is a tricky thing. Processing food even with harmful chemicals has a long history -- consider the olive, cured in lye or else inedible. And the redefinition of beer, wine, and bread as "unprocessed" creates some questions in my mind. I enjoyed reading Harriman's interpretation of traditional food processing, and respect her conclusion: <blockquote>"It’s not realistic to sit in the middle of a field or orchard and eat foods just as they come off the stalk or the branch. We all love the convenience of modern foods, but we want – and need – them with the health benefits and good taste of the old ways of food processing. The food companies that figure out how to offer us all of this, in one neat package, will have my food dollar, and, I suspect, that of many other people reading this blog."</blockquote>

Really good point about processing food

"I write to sing the praises of processed food... . Without food processed in traditional, healthy ways, mankind would have become ext...

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11.53

Good Local Food

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5067171671/" title="chicken4296 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="chicken4296" height="500" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4144/5067171671_fdd9af75d4.jpg" width="375" /></a> Though the day was warm and beautiful, the sun sets early in October. So here is Lenny, grilling in the dark. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5065947881/" title="chicken4297 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="chicken4297" height="375" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/5065947881_ea8741f20b.jpg" width="500" /></a> Chicken from Ernst Farm is available about once a month at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market -- and you have to order your chicken well in advance. Ernst Farm chicken has more flavor than any other chicken that I have found at the market or elsewhere (including Whole Foods' air-chilled chickens, which are good, but not that good). Some day I hope to visit the farm, which is around 45 minutes drive from here. Today's chicken was quite large (over 4 lb.) and we spatchcocked it (that is, cut out the backbone and flattened it, using skewers to hold it in place on the grill and bring heat to the inside of the meat. Fresh rosemary was available at another of my favorite market stalls this morning. I cut it up, inserted under the skin, and sprinkled the rest on the chicken along with a little orange juice and oil. Lenny patiently grilled the chicken, burning the rosemary stems and unused leaves -- this takes quite a while. He also grilled some eggplants that I used for baba ganoush. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5065948015/" title="chicken4300 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="chicken4300" height="374" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4132/5065948015_9a562108ec.jpg" width="500" /></a> The result was subtle and delicious. The first frost seems to be rather late this year. Raspberries, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and other items that are often out of season by October are still on sale at the market. Besides chicken, herbs, eggplant, beautiful little raspberries, tomatoes, and peppers, I bought apples and a blue pumpkin -- though it looks greenish in the yellow indoor light in the photo. The woman who sold it to me said that her blue pumpkins were good to eat, as well as making unusual jack-o-lanterns. The orange pumpkin is also local, and sold as a "pie pumpkin." <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5065947033/" title="pumpkin4298 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="pumpkin4298" height="375" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4132/5065947033_04cbc243c8.jpg" width="500" /></a> Yes, that's a pomegranate in the basket too, mainly for decoration.

Good Local Food

Though the day was warm and beautiful, the sun sets early in October. So here is Lenny, grilling in the dark. Chicken from Ernst Farm is ava...

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18.31

Food city area

Sunset Memories

"Four Meals"

Buying Honey

Lafayette Farmers' Market

Food Communities

Really good point about processing food

Good Local Food

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