Holiday Wine Advice

I asked three wine experts, who do not also sell wine, what wines they like for the holidays. Here's their answers:

From "Wine Wars" author and Stir (food and wine consulting company) President Joyce Locke:

“Tis the season to try new wines and let go of favorites is my wine manta for the holidays. We have many meals--fancy, homey, and cuisine specific that may include serious to not-so-serious wine drinkers. With such a wide range of wine opportunity, it's a great time to discover new wines. I don't have go-to-favorites.

“My strategy is to visit my trusted wine merchant with menus in hand. We discuss the menus, wine demographics of the guests (adventurous, traditional, new wine drinkers...) For some menus I want wines from the same country as the cuisine, for special menus I don't mind stretching the wine budget, and some menus will be great with a good $10 table wine.”

From Che George Formaro (South Union, Centro, Django and Gateway Market Café):

“Small Gully Mr. Black's Concoction GSM $22.99, Luca Pinot Noir $32.99, Clos Otto Boxhead Cabernet Sauvignon $12.99, Willow Crest Pinot Gris $11.99

From restaurateur chef Linda Benignant (Chuck’s), who also hosts the largest free turkey dinner in Iowa - Park District Thanksgiving dinner.

“Anything Brut with bubbles.”

In Praise of Ancient Grain

Quinoa 365
By Patricia Green & Carolyn Hemming
Whitecap, 195 pages, $29.95

Quinoa 365 authors Patricia Green and Carolyn Hemming are sisters trying to eat well and prepare healthy food for their families. They are not nutritionists, just grateful daughters who dedicated this book to a mother who made them eat alternative, healthy things until they began to enjoy how such foods horrified their friends.

This is not your typical healthy life style food book. Instead of preaching to a choir of cultists, they stick to their kitchens and create 170 recipes that employ the ancient grain in most diverse ways. Personally, I have long enjoyed using quinoa as a substitute for lentils in soup and for rice. Thanks to the sisters’ book, I now use it liberally in making desserts and breakfast items like chocolate cake, pecan pumpkin pie and cranapple crisp, pumpkin pancakes and crepes. I wouldn’t think of mixing up a fruit cup without it.

The quinoa-crusted fried chicken recipe ranks with chicharon-crust for crispy frying. As expected, the soup recipes are quite good, in part because the sisters do not abstain from employing chicken stock.

Sample recipes are available on line at http://quinoa365.com/recipes.html

A Crock Work Orange

Carrots Make a Culinary Comeback

In proverbial wisdom, the carrot is a symbol of reward and inspiration, representing the kindly alternative to the punishment of the stick. Yet most Americans know carrots in rather uninspired ways - raw as dipping sticks, or boiled with overcooked peas. Today, more sophisticated applications, like carrot mousse, carrot cake and caramelized carrots, could be changing the taproot’s image. If they succeed, it won’t be the carrot’s first comeback.

From the same Umbelliferae family as parsley, anise, caraway, celery and dill, wild carrots (Daucus carota sativa) were native to Afghanistan. Upper class Romans appreciated that they were the sweetest of all vegetables (until the sugar beet was developed in the 19th century). Apicius wrote a carrot recipe and the physician Galen wrote that domesticated carrots were superior to wild ones, implying that Romans gardened them. After the Roman Empire fell, carrots pretty much disappeared from Europe until Arabs brought them back to Turkey in the tenth century and to Spain in the twelfth.

Those early carrots were black, red or purple and rarely used in cooking. They became more popular after a yellow strain, which didn’t discolor sauces, was developed in the 16th century. The first orange variety was cultivated in 17th century Holland, to honor that country’s royal House of Orange. After that, carrots spread quickly through the Mediterranean region with very different applications.

Turkish chefs have been serving them batter fried with yogurt for 1000 years. Sicilians like them seared in olive oil, caramelized with sugar and braised in Marsala wine. In Provence they are most famously associated with new peas in cream sauce. Greeks prefer them with scallions in olive oil. Tunisia’s best known carrot dish (ma’cuda bi’l-Jazar) is a heavily spiced omelet. In Algeria, whole cooked carrots often garnish couscous. Carrot soup is popular in most Balkan countries. Beyond the Mediterranean, pickled carrots are as common as pickled cucumbers in most of Asia. India’s most popular uses are in soups, almost always with ginger and coriander, and in desserts like halwa, and condiments like chutney.

After coming to America with some of the first settlers, carrots escaped cultivation to become Queen Anne’s lace. Yet their edible taproots didn’t became as popular here as in Europe, Africa and Asia. Americans only began to grow them in serious numbers after World War I and they are still mostly consumed raw or boiled, as in baby food, here.

Heirloom Revivalist

Jennie Smith’s Butcher Crick Farm of Carlisle raises customized foods for Iowa restaurants like Centro, Le Jardin, Django, Phat Chefs, Dish, Raccoon River Brewing Company, Mojo’s and the Embassy Club. Smith farms several heirloom carrots from Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Last year she had good luck with Purple Dragons, Tonda de Parigi, White Belgian, Lunar White, Nantes and White Satin. She said she discovered that carrots had an unexpected reward.

“Next to tomatoes, carrots are the most exciting thing to smell in the garden. You can’t help but get excited pulling them from the ground. The smell makes your brain anticipate the taste of sweetness,“ Smith said.

Smith offered these tips to Iowa growers.

~ Carrots like soil that is loose, with equal parts sand, peat moss and sifted, limed compost. If soil isn’t loose enough, roots will fork.

~ Plant carrots in straight rows, so you can distinguish weeds from carrot tops.

~ Sow seeds about an inch deep, one or two weeks before the last frost.

~ The denser your planting, the smaller your carrot roots will be. Plant seeds about 12 inches apart.

~ You can eat young carrots pulled out for thinning.

~ Keep the greens on to sell, but get rid of them to store. Greens really shorten your storage window.

~ White carrots are the most sensitive by far and all heirlooms take longer to germinate. Fifty days is normal for hybrids but heirlooms take 70 to 80 days.

Recipes

Jennifer Strauss’ Spiced Carrot Cupcakes with Honey Cream Cheese Icing

Jennifer Strauss owns Carefree Patisserie in Valley Junction where cakes are the specialty and cupcakes are a popular way to sample her vast repertoire. This is her favorite carrot cupcake recipe. Strauss uses the super fine grate on an ordinary vegetable grater to produce more carrot juice for a moister cake.

Makes 12 -14 cupcakes

3 and half cups super fine freshly shredded orange carrots
4 eggs
1 cup granulated white sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
Three fourths cup Canola oil
Third cup buttermilk
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
Fourth tsp. salt
Half tsp. vanilla extract
Half tsp. orange extract
Half tsp. ground cassia cinnamon
2 tsp. Garam Masala (Punjabi style curry mix includes coriander, black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, charmushka, caraway, cloves, ginger and nutmeg)

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Sift together baking soda, baking powder, salt, flour and spices. Set aside. Combine sugars, oil, buttermilk, eggs, carrots and extracts in mixing bowl. Mix until combined (about 1 minute on average). Add dry ingredients and mix on medium for 3 - 4 minutes.

Scoop into cupcake pans, lined with papers. Bake 12 - 14 minutes @ 350 degrees F. Test with toothpick until it comes out clean.

Allow to cool before icing.

Honey Cream Cheese Icing

10 oz. cream cheese, softened
8 oz. Butter, softened
1 cup powdered sugar
Fourth cup honey

Cream the butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Add sugar and honey. Whip for 4 minutes.

Tag Grandgeorge’s Butcher Crick Farm Carrot Mousse

Tag Grandgeorge is owner-chef of Le Jardin in Des Moines, a French café that buys produce from Butcher Crick Farm.

Yield: Eight servings of 4 ½ ounces each
4 cups carrots, peeled and small chopped
1 and a half cups chicken stock
1 cup cream
4 medium eggs
Half tsp. ground cumin
Nutmeg to taste
Salt and pepper to taste

Bring carrots and stock to a boil, cover and simmer under carrots are very tender. Puree until smooth. Add eggs and process for 45 seconds. Blend in cream, cumin, salt and pepper to taste. Prepare moulds with no-stick pan spray and grate nutmeg into bottom of each mould (any round bottom vessel may be used for the mould - I use coffee mugs). Fill each mould with four to four and a half ounces of puree. Cook in a 340 degree F oven in a bain marie and covered with foil for 40 - 45 minutes, or until mousse is set. Let cool 15 minutes before unmolding. Serve warm! This may be made ahead and warmed in microwave oven for 15 - 20 seconds individually.

Tag’s serving suggestions:
Serve with mixed salad greens, roasted baby turnips, shredded duck, poppy-seed dressing and fresh baguette.
　
Fact or Fallacy

Carrots have inspired much lore, some fact, some fiction.

~ Fact - eating too many carrots can turn your skin orange, a benign condition known as carotenosis.

~ Fallacy, consuming carrots regularly can not help humans see in the dark. This urban myth was intentionally circulated by the British in World War II to cover up their use of radar. Many believed it because a lack of Vitamin A, plentiful in carrots, can cause poor vision.

~ The verdict is still out whether purple skinned carrots can prevent cancer. Texas A&M scientists have developed such a carrot for that intention but it will be years before its effectiveness can be evaluated.

Types of Carrots Carrots are divided into Eastern and Western varieties. Eastern carrots are also called from Anthocyanin carrots because of their purple roots, even though some have yellow roots. Western carrots evolved from the first Turkish cultivars and have orange, white or red roots. Western carrots are divided into short-rooted varieties that mature quickly, medium-rooted varieties that are the most common commercial carrots, and long-rooted varieties that require deep, soft soil.

Rocketfish- NoCal's Best Sushi Happy Hour

Rocketfish, a new joint in Potrero Hill, has the best of many sushi Happy Hours in San Francisco. Sushi Happy Hours are a very happy trend with amazing values. Such as this $3 seaweed salad with kikurage mushrooms, akamodoki, hanasakuraso, wakame and agar,

or this $3 langostinos fritos with Japanese aioli,

or the $3 spicy tuna roll,

or the $8 walu carpaccio, with with salty lemon confit, caperberries, jalapeno vinaigrette, and sprouts ( my favorite dish)

and especially the $3 wok roasted shishitou chilies.

All of which encourages the drinking of a little midori, with a choice of cups

or this And some more serious plates like the $8 ceviche of shrimp, clams, ocotpus, salty lemon confit, caperberries, jalapeno vinaigrette and sprouts,

or the Kamehamela Roll, featuring more walu, escolar and cucumber salsa,

or some baby calamari tempura, with more shishitous,

some wagyu carpaccio with green mango,

and some skewers of chicken and pigs ears.

Finally, dessert - a little roasted fig with cinnamon,

and a trio of ices, raspberry-cabernet sorbet, green tea and Kahlua ice creams

Breakfast At Gourmet Village

First, a little Oaxacan tamal at the Orange Farmer's Market

Then on to Gourmet Village. This little spot in Millbrae packs them in on weekends. By noon they were sold out of pork cheeks and marinated duck tongues. By 12:30 there was a line waiting outside. Family dinners include shark's fin, abalone, birds nest, squab and other dishes for less than $50 per person.

A breakfast amuse bouche of pork belly
A tofu skin salad - my favorite dish.

Seafood chow fun included ling cod and several shell fish

"Farm chicken" clay pot included whole heads of baby cabbage, black mushrooms and some Loondu style streaky pork.

Osteria Coppa

New joint in downtown San Mateo uses local farmers and fishermen for fresh & local menu. Salami, pizza (650 F gas oven with Italian stone) and pasta are all scratch made in house.
Bigoli with with cranberry beans from Iacopi, home made pancetta and PR - excellent flavors, my favorite pasta

Fettucine with lobster, celery root and lemon verbena - nice pasta, semi bland sauce

Halibut tartare with winter radishes and cucumber and preserved lemon - this worked

Calamari babes, garbanzos, padron peppers and chile oil - my favorite plate

Artichoke pizza with Paremesan fonduta and lemon thyme
- pie looked better than it tasted. Onions overwhelmed all other flavors. Could barely taste cheese or chokes and didn't really like the flavor of the perfect - tavern style crust.

Renewable Energy Is All Hot Air

Research released to day by Bloomberg New Energy Finance exposes the political stances of progressive pols as hopelessly hypocritical. The news reveals that despite the hot air of politicians, governments of the world are spending 13 times as much money subsidizing dirty forms of energy over renewables and biofuels.

Governments provided $43-46 billion to renewable energy and biofuels technologies, projects, and companies in 2009, BNEF concludes in preliminary analysis. That total includes: feed-in-tariffs (FiTs), renewable energy credits or certificates (RECs), tax credits, cash grants, and other direct subsidies. It does not include subsidies to corn farmers to grow feedstock for use in US ethanol plants nor any value transfer due to carbon cap-and-trade schemes.

The figure contrasts $557 billion spent on subsidizing fossil fuels in 2008, as estimated by the International Energy Agency last month.

The full story http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100729006007&newsLang=en

O Holy Cow

Radiance Dairy: Fairfield’s Milk Cult

(Editor's note - this story was written in 2002. Francis Thicke is now running for Iowa Secreatary of Agriculture & Land Stewardship. We will update our Thicke file soon.)

The food of 21st century Iowa tells a tale of irony. During the last 50 years we homogenized the foods we grow, as corn and beans replaced diversity from border to border. At the same time, the foods Iowans eat diversified, with regions holding on to unique specialties. Northwest Iowa is steakhouse country and the southwest is scalloped potato and ham land. One goes to the Loess Hills for apples, Fort Madison for fried strawberries, Scranton for loganberry pancakes and Fairfield for paneer.

Why do paneers, those ambrosias of fresh made cheese and vegetables, taste richer in Fairfield than anywhere else this side of India? Some credit the peaceful town’s good vibes, but the real secret is more physical than mental. It’s Francis Thicke’s divine cows. Radiance Dairy’s organic milk is the only milk in Iowa still bottled on the farm and it is only available in Fairfield.

The man behind the happy cows and their adored milk has an office appropriate for a “Goethe farmer,” as writer Parker Forsell labeled him. When we visited, a music stand held the score to Herbert L. Clarke‘s “Carnival of Venice.” Thicke played its wistful melody on his trumpet and told us how music changed him.

“I wanted to be a musician, thought I was pretty good within the context of my small Minnesota school. So I went to North Texas State, the second largest music school in America, and found out quickly that I was not professional class. That gave me perspective. The trumpet had been my whole life, but I soon noticed that outside the narrow world of trumpet players, no one much cared about the things that had consumed me,” he recalled. So after a Bachelor’s degree in Music and Philosophy, he went for a Masters in Soil Science and a Ph.D in Agronomy, then worked at the US Department of Agriculture.

A sign in the office read: Born Again Pagan.

“In Catholic school growing up we would put our money in a jar to buy ‘pagan babies,’ so that priests might convert Third World children in whom they saw no divinity. Now, I think there is divinity in all things. I call myself a ‘Born Again Farmer’ too, because I went off to be a bureaucrat. There’s a joke about a USDA worker who is crying, so his colleagues ask him ‘What’s wrong?’ and he says, ‘My farmer died.’

Thicke told us he has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for 30 years, but dissociates from the TM movement.

“I am a TM heretic. I run on instinct, not intellect. Bertrand Russell said that solutions come to problems, if you just forget about them for awhile. Einstein said his discoveries were not made through processes of rational thinking. I don’t make quick decisions,” he said, deliberately.

Thicke liked his work in D.C., but the lifestyle was not what he and Susan, his wife and business partner, sought. His ten mile commute to work took an hour. The city’s crime and violence interfered with his peace of mind. They knew Fairfield was a unique place.

“People who meditate think about what they eat, they care as much about the purity of their food as the purity of their thoughts,” he explained.
So the Thickes bought a Fairfield dairy business and its twenty-two cows in 1992 then relocated them to a 326 acre farm outside town. As he showed us around, the philosopher rose within the farmer.

“The farm is an organism. Diversity empowers an organic farm’s ecosystem.”

“I come from a part of southern Minnesota which is hilly, almost mountainous. Such land encourages independent thinking and diversity in farming - it was never appropriate for single crop agriculture,” he explained.

The rolling hills are better suited to the pastures Francis has created, than to the cornfields that were here when he bought it. At that time, there was only one field and a corn crib. The Thickes first built a processing facility and lived above it for four years. Francis has now divided his pastures into 60 paddocks, with moveable electric fences, water tanks and high grass, which is nutritionally better for the milk. Francis plants brome, timothy and various clovers and lets the cows graze in each paddock half a day. That pasture then is allowed to rest 20-40 days, depending on how fast the grass is growing.

“You should be careful of what kind of energies, or products, are brought onto the farm, or are taken off, because you really have an organism here and you want it to grow with its own integrity,” he explained.

Earthworms have returned in multitudes, a sure sign of healthier soil. Like manure, worms excrete rich organic matter and aid in recycling and building up the soil. Other things came back since converting to pastures: song birds; cow birds; meadowlarks; and bobolinks. Cowbirds help control flies, so do wild turkeys.

We saw waist high grass, but no weeds, nor bare spots of dirt. The cows were all clean, the day after heavy rains had made some roads to the farm too muddy to drive. How different from typical dairy farms where filthy cows have to hosed down before every milking and grass is rarely more than 2-4 inches high.

Thicke likes honey locust trees because they have a porous canopy, allowing enough light to promote grass growth. These trees also have pods that are high in protein and good nutritionally for the cows. He is planning a solar pump to a large water tank that would service several paddocks.

“Grass loves by nature to stay in one place. Cows love by nature to graze. The madness of modern agriculture reverses the process.”

Thicke’s cows were friendly, happy, if humans can judge that. One kept nuzzling my arm, like a dog. “Our cows harvest their own food and spread their own fertilizer and they love their work. This makes more sense than the modern mode of hauling fertilizer and feed in trucks going opposite directions. Production isn’t as great, but profitability is greater and energy use is significantly less, self sufficiency more,” he explained.

His cows are all Jerseys, a breed Francis finds best for grass diets. Cows are ruminants and more modern breeds have been cross bred for grain diets and short lives.

“Industrial agriculture is non-competitive. It’s a common myth that each farmer feeds 130 people, but that number doesn’t include all the people in each farmer’s support group: the people to build and service the combines and John Deeres; the fertilizer production plants and staffs; and the environmental clean-up crews,” he noted.

Francis’ milking parlor is “New Zealand style,” meaning a low cost, low maintenance operation that does not push cows to overproduce. The Thickes milk 60 of 130 cows and sell all their milk in Fairfield, where it is a civic heirloom. They deliver milk twice a week and each delivery sells out by the next. Three supermarkets and twelve restaurants consume all of Radiance’s production- milk, cheese and yogurt.

“Expansion misses the point,” Francis answered a question we wished we hadn’t asked.

At Every Body’s supermarket, probably Iowa’s best stocked store for organic and conscientiously raised foods, Radiance actually outsells all other milks, even at a premium price. It’s deep yellow color contrasts with other milks. Co-owner John Dey told us that he never has any returns, or any spoilage on Radiance products.

“We learn as we go along.”

Gurus admit imperfections. Francis is still short of one goal - total grass diets. He feeds the cows 6 pounds of barley a day, because barley is still an old crop that has only recently been biogenetically modified.

“It hasn’t been over bred. With corn, there are always some low levels of GMO contamination,” he said.

Other lessons required patience.

He used to keep cows in the loafing barn all winter until he realized they wanted to be out in pasture, even in cold weather. “This way, the manure is spread all winter and Spring springs quickly.”

Originally, Thicke thought cows’ horns were natural and fit his biodynamic agriculture model, so he let them all grow. But young cows used them as weapons on older cows, not a good situation during twice a day milking. So he stopped letting them grow out.

He used to truck chickens to help keep the flies off the cows, but in the pastures chickens became coyote dinners. Now he keeps them in the loafing barn with the calves.

“It’s as important for me to learn from the farm as it is for the farm to be improved by my activities. The land itself has the answers and its own organizing power. That’s part of this co-creative process, we have to be involved and give our best creative input, but it’s all there anyway,” he said, with an acquiescence unbefitting a heretic.

Consuming Radiance

Some of the health benefits of organic milk are obvious. Several studies have shown pasture-grazed cows produce up to 500 percent more of the anti-carcinogen Conjugated Linoleic Acid, than confined cows. Other benefits are subtler.

At The 2nd Street Coffee House in downtown Fairfield, owner Bonnie White told us that her customers wouldn’t tolerate a less expensive milk in their lattes. White is Asian, an ethnic group that is often lactose intolerant.

“I grew up only able to drink soy milk, but this milk is just fine, no problems at all,” she told us.

Thicke said he had heard the same thing from several others. “But I wouldn’t make such a claim because I haven’t seen the science,” he admitted, still learning.

Paramjeet Singh’s India Café on Fairfield’s town square serves a full menu of South Asian cuisine, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. They are one of Radiance’s best customers, mainly for their exquisite home-made paneers, made from organic milk and paired with different vegetables..

Paneer Recipe
for 6

4 cups whole milk
3 tablespoons vinegar

Boil the milk, after it starts boiling, add vinegar. When the vinegar makes curds out of the milk, put the curds into a cheese cloth and tie it with a small rope. Place the curds in the cheese cloth onto a plain surface and weigh it down with something heavy. This pressure makes the curds into cheese in about 3 hours. Cut it into bite size pieces.

Fairhope: Iowa Seeds Bear Alabama Fruit

A wise bear, Wro says that "History loves irony." From a tree on the Grand Hotel grounds in Mobile Bay's Eastern Shore, he's meditating on the intermingled destinies of Fairhope, Alabama and Des Moines.

Had Ernest Berry Gaston been born when Iowa farmland was not considerably more expensive than waterfront property on the Gulf Coast, he might very well have changed Iowa dramatically. Iowa’s loss became Alabama’s gain when the Des Moines expatriate fathered one of America’s most eccentric communities on populist, utopian principles that survived the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1889, even before graduating from Drake University, the precocious descendent of French Huguenot nobility bought the Suburban Advocate which served University Place, now the Drake neighborhood of Des Moines. Gaston used that newspaper as a platform to develop his ideas about social justice. During the next four years, he made a fortune in Iowa real estate, got married, started a family, invented a snow plow and was elected justice of the peace, town recorder and fire chief. He developed his "Single Tax" philosophy from a mixture of Henry George‘s social theories, Populist Party platforms and personal notions about human behavior.

Gaston organized his followers into "The Fairhope Industrial Association" (FIA) with the purpose "to establish and conduct a model community or colony, free from all forms of private monopoly."

Unfortunately, Iowa’s fertile land was prohibitively expensive and other utopian communities had already formed in the West and Great Plains.

Gaston’s followers researched several locations in the South and voted to plant the seeds of their dream on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, in Baldwin County, Alabama where a wealthy Ante Bellum community had deteriorated into shanties. Land sold for just fifty cents to a dollar an acre.

Like today’s snowbirds, Gaston and his followers left Des Moines in November of 1894. Unlike other utopian communities, the heart of Fairhope remains free of private property today. That has attracted a community of artists, dreamers and utopians who anchor the Eastern Shore’s unique life style - called “Carmel on the Gulf.” Fairhope’s 13,000 current residents include colorful professional athletes like World Series star JC Romero and Leon ’”Wrong Way” Lett of the Dallas Cowboys, authors like Fannie Flagg ("Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe") and Winston Grooms ("Forest Gump")

and artists like Nall (pictured in the Grand Hotel lobby), whose eccentric art is as well known in Europe as Christo‘s is here. Fairhope and its cool image has attracted resorts, golf courses and some of the wealthiest zip codes in America, in all directions around it.

A master gardener and student of history, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie confesses a long fascination with the Fairhope experiment.

“My ancestors moved to Des Moines the same time that Gaston lived here. I like knowing that the seeds of that town came from Des Moines, especially because it has blossomed into something so interesting, attractive and unique,” Cownie said.

Last spring, the mayor sent heirloom seeds to the eastern shore’s historic Grand Hotel, which has an illustrious guest register that includes nearly every US Presidents since the Civil War. (The hotel in Point Clear ooutside Fairhope, was recently named to Conde Nast's list of the world's greatest hotels, at #31.)

Grand Hotel Executive Chef Michael Wallace planted Cownie’s seeds in the resort’s Chef’s Garden. By late summer, guests from Iowa were being treated to the bounty of those seeds.

Sometimes, it takes years for a seed to bear fruit. Sometimes it takes centuries.

Fast Food Goes Green?

A "salad" at Wendy's

Is That Even Possible?

Nearing the tenth anniversary of the first “fast food made me obese” lawsuits, marketers are busy crafting a new “healthier” image for McIndustry. Most fast food chains have reduced calories, fats, trans fats and sodium in their fare. Marketers for industry whipping boy McDonald’s now point out that their signature Big Mac has fewer fats, half as many carbs, and only 38 % as much sodium as a burrito from Chipotle - the Oprah-approved, green darling of the food media. Most fast food giants promote salads now, some with recently reduced calories, and sodium. Press releases for Wendy’s “apple pecan chicken salad with pomegranate vinaigrette” enticed me into the brave new world of fast food greens.

I began with McDonald’s “premium bacon ranch salad with crispy chicken.” Its greens impressed me with their freshness and generous ratio of mesclun to iceberg. Grape tomatoes were crisp but carrots were pale with age. A chicken filet was served hot on top of cold ingredients. A light Paul Newman dressing tasted like buttermilk. A fistful of shredded cheeses plus swarms of bacon bits challenged the claim that this salad has only 370 calories, 200 grams of fat, and 970 mg of sodium. All those numbers are down significantly from similar reports on the same salad a couple years ago.

I found the best presentation of the week at Taco Bell (TB).

“Chipotle steak taco salad” was served in a crisp tortilla bowl with beans and rice on the bottom. Lettuce and tomato topped that, covered with tender seasoned beef, cheddar cheese, sour cream, salty chipotle dressing, and multi colored tortilla strips. TB made no health claims for this salad’s 900 calories, 57 grams of fat, and 1700 mg. of sodium - numbers unchanged from a couple years ago. The lettuce was iceberg and TB’s condiment bar had no fresh salsas at all.

At the KFC by Drake, the company-promoted “zero trans fats KFC crispy chicken caesar salad” was not available. No specialty salads were. Does the company think college kids don’t eat salads? This was not the first time that KFC innovations have been withheld from the Des Moines market.

At Wendy’s, the new salad that had inspired my quest was not available either. In my mind, franchisees should not be the last people to know about a company‘s new products.

I tried a “Mandarin chicken salad” that had similar nutritional numbers to the one that had teased me. It included a good mix of greens, including mizuna and tango. Roasted almonds tasted strangely like peanuts. Crispy noodles tasted like salt. Mandarin oranges tasted like sugar. Chicken was bland with just a trace of paprika and garlic salt. White sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, and pineapple juice dominated the sesame and ginger flavors in the sweet dressing. At 570 calories, 25 grams from fat and 1370 mg. of sodium, nutritional numbers were second to McDonald‘s.

Burger King’s (BK) “TenderCrisp chicken garden salad with Ken’s caesar dressing” defied the trend toward “healthier” salads. Its 1070 calories, 86 grams of fat and 2900 mg. of sodium (almost double the CDC recommended daily allotment) were up from numbers on a previous nutritional check of the same salad. The difference might result from three kinds of cheeses not included in the previous count. BK’s packaging was true to their motto “Have it your way.”

Tired lettuce was packed in a salad bowl with baby carrots, tomatoes, and shredded cheeses compartmentalized in a different bowl. Additional packets included dressing, croutons and a chicken breast. That created a lot of personal plastic and paper to rip open. This salad was named one of six “diet destroyers” by business travelers’ web site Divine Caroline.
Bottom line. Costing around $5, most of these salads are not bargains. Less costly burgers were actually “healthier” choices than most too.

Beautiful Buglers of Henry County

Elk’s story is an All American tale. They are descendents of fearless explorers who migrated, like most native Americans, across the Bering land bridge from Asia during the late Ice Ages. Once in North America they became indomitable pioneers, adapting to all ecosystems except tundra, deserts and the gulf coast. They lived symbiotically with American Indians of the west where Kootenai, Cree, Blackfoot and Ojibwas fashioned blankets, footwear, clothing and housing from their hides. Plains Indians considered elk holy. Their teeth symbolized the life force to the Lakota.

Elk population in America grew to 10 million before the coming of the first Europeans, who misidentified them and named after German-Scandinavian words (elch, elg) for moose. With bulls weighing 700 pounds and sporting antlers four feet long, elk came to represent all the Europeans thought brave and fearsome in the wild. Males would fight, sometimes the death, during the rut, or mating season. Females would kill anything that threatened their young. Their bugle, or mating cry, became the mighty music of the frontier.

Elk were so successful adapting, they became a threat to more domestic livestock. Farmers and ranchers feared their fierceness and their susceptibility to infectious diseases. Unlike the Native Americans, Europeans hunted them to near extinction. Less than 1 million exist today and of the six subspecies that inhabited North America in historical times, only four remain. The others have been gone for over a century.

“Elk flourished in Iowa but the last wild elk here was believed to have been killed in Kossuth County in the mid 1880’s, though one stray was seen in Marshall and Jasper counties in 2006,” explained Richard Garrrels, a past president of the Iowa Elk Association.

Today, Garrels is one of about 30 Iowa ranchers have re-introduced elk to the state. A retired schoolteacher/farmer from Henry County, he decided to convert some corn and bean fields into an open range for elk in 1995.

“I had arranged to go elk hunting out west and that didn’t work out. So I decided to raise my own right here. I had raised quarter horses for years, so this wasn’t anything too new. Elk have breeders associations and pedigrees just like other livestock,” Garrels stated matter of factly, adding that elk are a transitional step into full retirement.

“I rent most of my acreage for cash crop farming and save this section for the elk. And I don’t ever have get up before dawn for chores. The elk are pretty independent and low maintenance,” he explained.

Garrels’ 30 head of elk are all Rocky Mountain sub species. He’s never had a problem with diseases.

“I have never had a veterinarian visit other than for calving,” he said.

Garrels thinks that’s a result from the measures he takes to keep his elk up to safety standards for meat sales. He tests his herd regularly for brucelosis, TB and chronic waste disease. That also facilitates sales of live elk across state lines. Meat sales weren’t the main motivation for most elk ranchers.

“Lots of people got into elk in the 1990’s when velvet was going for $60 a pound,” Garrels explained.

Male elk bulls grow and shed their antlers each year. Growing antlers are covered by a soft layer of vascularized skin known as velvet. Velvet is shed in the summer when the antlers have fully developed and is medicinally valued, particularly by Asians, for is aphrodisiac and mood elevation properties. A male elk can produce 25 pounds of antler velvet annually.
“This decade, the price went down to $10 to $15, after Asians backed out of the market after the mad cow scare. I don’t even bother with it. There’s more value in selling whole antlers without the hassle. I just sold a bull for $5000,” he explained.

“I can cover my costs selling elk meat to four restaurants and a few private consumers, plus selling at my concession stand at the Old Threshers Reunion (Labor Day weekend in Mount Pleasant). What I can’t cover of course is the lost income from prime farm land that could otherwise being earning with cash crops. The people making real money are the ones with low overhead, meaning cheaper land than this, who raise elk to sell for hunting,” Garrels explained.

Garrels keeps his bulls separated by a system of double fencing he developed over the years.

“If I leave the animals in one pen, the dominant bull will wear himself out keeping the others away from his cows. If I separate them with a fence, bugling will go on 24 - 7 during rutting season and the fence will come down. I lost one bull that way, gored to death by another. I don’t keep a bull who’s too aggressive.

Both Richard and his wife Liz described bugling as “beautiful sound” - the males whistle and the females chirp, “sort of like a cat’s meow.” They said they have never heard a complaint from neighbors.

“Compared to peacocks, it’s musical,” said Liz, who has raised both.
Richards feeds grain to the elk grain for a few months before rutting. Otherwise, their diet consists of grasses in warm weather and leaves after grass goes dormant. The fall and winter diet has a particularly Iowa adaptation.

“They love oak leaves but they seem really disappointed when I throw out a bag of maple leaves. They also prefer leafy alfalfa to grasses. It works out well, I get leaves from the city.

Elk ranching is seasonal. During the summer, elk eat almost constantly, consuming between 10 to 15 pounds daily. Fall brings rutting season and since gestation periods are 240 to 262 days, all Garrels’s calves are born between mid May and June.

Richard has won blue ribbons for his elk recipes at the Iowa State Fair, Taste of Iowa, Farm Bureau’s cook-offs “Wine & Tuxedo” and “Buckskinner.” He divides his elk meat into backstraps, which include tenderloins and ribeyes, and burger trim. Elk has a very healthy profile for a read meat, with only about 40% the calories, 20 % of the fat and 80 % of the cholesterol of lean ground beef. Tasting somewhere between beef and venison, elk is also higher in protein than either beef or chicken, and it’s a good source of iron phosphorous and zinc. So burgers are guilt free for dieters.

Four restaurants use Garrels’ elk burger. Jerry’s, Keo’s Bar & Grill, and Butch’s River Rock Café in Mount Pleasant, plus Short Stop in New London. The BrownStone in Mount Pleasant uses his steaks.

“I sell the elk burgers like crazy,” explained Kim Butch Bittle, who owns both the River Rock and the BrownStone.

Both Bittle’s restaurants have an pioneer spirit in which elk fits well. On a Skunk River park site, the River Rock building was built as a railroad depot in the mid-1800s. It has been a restaurant since the late 1940s.

The Brownstone has the look of Victorian hotel, with a lobby and different dining rooms. Bittle named one Edison, the other Carlyle, and there is the ballroom which is intended for banquets. Bittle said the building's history includes being a stop on the Underground Railroad, a vocational school and an elementary school.Bittle was chef at the Iris, an icon itself. After closing of Iris, after more than 50 years, Butch opened Brownstone for a test run one Sunday last fall and 175 guests showed up.

Richard Garrels’ Elk Ribeye

4 rib eye elk steaks
For marinade
Fourth cup honey
Three fourths cup vegetable oil
Fourth cup soy sauce
Clove garlic, minced
1 T. dried minced onion
2 T. white vinegar
Half t. ginger

Marinate steaks overnight.
Sear both sides of steaks. Grill to desired doneness. 140 degrees (rare) is recommended for flavor.

Hydrocodone King

He wanted customers to have a really ahppy meal.

News 4 in Jacksonville FL reports a Burgeer King employee who pled guilty to slipping painkillers into customers' food has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Woody Duclos was initially charged with poisoning food with intent to kill or injure a person. He was facing up to 30 years in prison.

Duclos was arrested in February after one woman got sick from eating a sandwich from Burger King. Another man said he found a blue pill in his burger at the same restaurant.

Police said the 21-year-old woman spit up a pill of the painkiller hydrocodone out when she took a bite of her sandwich, and she ended up having a seizure.

Duclos and another Burger King employee accused of selling him the pills were each fired.

Some people have been asking what could possess Duclos to do this. I doubt they ever worked at a Burger King in Florida.

FDA Wimps Out Shamefully

In response to public health concerns, on Monday the Food and Drug Administration urged meat producers to limit the amount of antibiotics they give animals. The FDA admitted that antibiotics in meat pose a "serious public health threat" because the drugs create antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect humans who eat it. But the agency only “is recommending that producers use the drugs judiciously, limiting their use unless they are medically necessary and only using them with the oversight of a veterinarian.”

"Developing strategies for reducing (antibiotic) resistance is critically important for protecting both public and animal health," the agency said in draft guidelines printed in the Federal Register.

The FDA also admitted that antibiotics are given continuously through feed or water to entire herds or flocks of animals. Then the agency said it is expecting to issue more specific guidelines soon, but FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner of Food and Drugs Joshua Sharfstein was not sure when that might be. He would not say whether the agency eventually plans to issue stricter regulations. He said patheticalaly that the agency will be watching industry response and also patterns of antibiotic resistance.

Goodstewarding’s bottom line - The FDA could not have been any wimpier if it were a lamb going to Smithfield for slaughter. MRSA has been killing more people than AIDS-HIV now for many years and the FDA is still “watching” the industry respond to their "urgings." Grow some balls FDA if you are able to after all these years of eating the crap that Big Ag has been feeding you.

Chicken leg bailout

USDA announced that it will purchase $14 million in dark meat chicken products for federal food assistance programs such as food banks. This IS likely the same bulging inventory of chicken legs that have been piling up since Russia banned US chicken legs imports from plants that use chlorinated water in processing.

So, once again, the Europeans will not eat the shit that our governement feeds to our chicldren with our tax dollars.

Old Skills & Sneak Previews

Cochon 555

Last month, Cochon555 brought its Midwest Regional championship to Des Moines for the second straight year. This Taste Network national tour puts our city in the select company of serious culinary destinations - New York, Napa, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Portland, Seattle, Stillwater and Washington D.C. Cochon is an elite event hosted by several of America‘s most famous hotels and resorts. Chefs come from the country’s best restaurants (Boulud and Blue Hill in New York, The French Laundry in Napa). Time magazine and the New York Times cover the tour. In prestige, it’s the culinary equivalence of hosting an NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It might not return to Des Moines though. Ticket sales slipped and the event hasn’t interested any civic or state group that promotes this city’s image.

Five chefs competed by utilizing five heritage hogs, snout to tail. Guest-voters sampled pork while being treated to excellent wines from five boutique vineyards. Mike LaValle (Embassy Club) said that Chase Family Cellars’ Zinfandels were the best he’s ever seen in Iowa. This year’s competition included local chefs George Formaro and Hal Jasa, defending champion Matt Steigerwald from Mount Vernon, and two chefs from Kansas City - Cody Hogan and Howard Hanna.

Formaro and Jasa debuted some new applications for future restaurants. Using a Farmers Cross/Berkshire hog, Formaro premiered an all Mexican menu he’ll selling at the Downtown Farmer’s Market, and hopefully in a new East Village café soon.

His pozole was the best I ever tasted.

He fried carnitas in duck fat and coated Milanese style cutlets in pumpkin seeds. His huevos motuleños were a poached, Yucatan variation on bacon and eggs. His chiccarones were tender enough to pass for shoulder meat.

Jasa, who’s also hoping to open an East Village café this summer, presented ten dishes made from a Duroc. A deeply flavored consommé with pork cheeks and goat cheese tortellini stood out.

So did a fried ear salad of watercress with quail egg, and his corned tongue with pickled ramps. Jasa fried his rillletes, served his trotters with blinis, and presented a liver/heart pâté with a pistachio puree.

He served belly with poached grapes, cassoulet with orange gremolata, and sausage with parsnip puree and a pâté of roasted dates.

Recreating personal pan-served pasta from Lidia’s, Hogan kept things simpler with his Berkshire hog.

Ravioli were stuffed with braised whole hog and served with roast pork and headcheese. His ravioli were the most popular single item of the night with the public.

At Hanna’s River Club, members pay dues to support things that Cochon advocates - preserving heritage breeds, and utilizing whole hogs. Like Steigerwald, Hanna brought a staff familiar with butchering, brining, rendering, smoking and pickling. Using an endangered Glouscestershire Old Spots hog, they executed five familiar dishes exquisitely: headcheese; trotter garlic soup with fresh nettles pesto; a Cuban sandwich made with sous vide of shoulder, ham and organ pâté; pork & beans made with legs, heirloom beans, sausage and “KC salt” (crushed cracklings).

Hanna said he harvested the main ingredient for his stunning blood pudding “by squeezing every vein and artery.” It also included chocolate, hazelnuts, cinnamon and shortbread.

Steigerwald, whose Lincoln Café purchases whole hogs exclusively, won the competition again with a Red Wattle hog a breed that would become infamous three weeks later when it was again the pig of a winning Cochon chef, in Portland, Oregon. That so incensed another Oregon chef that he attacked both a winery representative and Cochon organizer Brady Lowe, sending the latter to the hospital with a broken leg and concussion.

His menu began with pork belly spring rolls with kimchii and an avocado/yuzu puree. It progressed to a “wattle head slick” with boiled peanuts and greens. He served a white sausage that included innards with fennel kraut. His hickory smoked shoulder was served on corn masa with turtle beans and pickled chilies. His ciccioli (compressed, dried fat) was treated to pickled ramps. He also served charcuterie that included ham and capicola. I have been dreaming of them ever since.