Author Archives: mamster

Hungry hungry hippos

My brother and his girlfriend took Iris to the zoo today. She went hoping to see penguins, lizards, and monkeys. The penguins and lizards had the day off, but she did see giraffes, tigers, orangutans, elephants, and monkeys.

After dinner, Laurie and Iris were discussing the zoo.

> **Iris:** The elephants were eating grass. Mama tell Iris what are tigers eating.

> **Laurie:** Tigers eat meat. Should we invite a tiger over for dinner?

> **Iris:** Yes.

> **Laurie:** We could make it some meatballs. Maybe chipotle meatballs.

> **Iris:** BIG chipotle meatballs.

> **Laurie:** What would the tiger like for dessert?

> **Iris:** Pocky sticks. Strawberry flavor.

Endive on in

There, with the big messy polemic out of the way, let’s talk about endive.

The Wednesday Chef made an awesome looking endive gratin from the New York Times. I wanted to make it, too, but by the time I got all the ingredients home, I realized that endive gratin alone didn’t really sound like dinner, although with some crusty bread…but anyway, I decided to convert it into creamy endive pasta sauce.

Using a recipe from Biba Caggiano’s Italy al Dente as a guide, here’s what I did. I’ll put it in gossip column form because it’s really simple. (The original recipe called for Worcestershire sauce, but we didn’t have any, so I substituted fish sauce.)

Heat several tablespoons of **olive oil** in a large saute pan. Add 3/4 pound shredded **belgian endive**. Cook until wilted. Add 2 ounces diced **black forest ham** and cook a couple more minutes. Add 1/2 cup **white wine** and 2 teaspoons **fish sauce**. Add 1/3 cup **heavy cream** and 1 cup **low-sodium chicken broth**. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and simmer until reduced to pasta-coating consistency, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Stir in 1 tablespoon **butter**, 1/4 cup grated **Parmigiano-Reggiano**, and salt and pepper to taste.

Meanwhile, boil 1 pound **penne rigate** in salted water until al dente. Drain and add to the sauce, cooking them together in the saute pan until the pasta is well coated. Serve with additional grated Parmesan.

Iris absolutely loved this. She ate all the noodles and scraped her bowl to get all the endive and ham. Maybe next time I’ll make the actual gratin.

City of industry

I’ve made no secret of my love of the farmers market and of local food in general. So when I went to see Michael Pollan read on Friday night and he said pretty much the same thing, why did it make me uneasy? It’s probably because of the chocolate factory.

Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire and the new book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. _The Botany of Desire_ is a great book about how plants have used humans–not consciously, of course–to propagate the plant genes by stumbling upon features that humans find highly desirable. (One of the plants Pollan explores is _Cannabis sativa_, and he does hands-on research in Amsterdam.)

His new book, which I haven’t read yet, explores three aspects of the food chain: the industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer. An excerpt, about Pollan going boar hunting, appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine (it’s now in the TimesSelect ghetto).

As I understood Pollan’s gist, he would have us abandon industrial food production in favor of small organic farms and cooking with whole foods. I’m sure that’s an oversimplification, but that’s how it sounded.

The problems with industrial food have been so often recounted that there’s no need for me to repeat them here, but just to take a stab at it: soil erosion, eutrophication of water, factory farm animals living in misery and squalor, dangerous reliance on monocultures, antibiotic resistance, vegetables devoid of vitamins and minerals, and bland food.

All of these problems are absolutely real. I have a degree in ecology, and I consider myself an environmentalist. Where I part ways with Pollan–well, let’s get back to the chocolate factory.

In the current (May) issue of Seattle Magazine, I have an article about [Theo Chocolate](http://www.theochocolate.com/), a new chocolate factory in Fremont. A new chocolate factory is not a common thing. There are less than two dozen chocolate factories in the US, and most of them are operated by huge conglomerates like Hershey and Nestle. Theo is aiming to be the greenest chocolate producer around–all of their beans are organic and fair trade. Also, they painted their machinery green. It’s pretty awesome. I got free samples. (Sadly, the article isn’t online, but I’ll put it up as soon as my contract allows.)

If you go to an artisan bakery, you’ll see people forming loaves by hand, maintaining buckets of sourdough starter, and basically doing things exactly how they were done five hundred years ago, but with larger ovens and electric mixers. Chocolate isn’t like that. Making chocolate bars is a truly industrial process. (It’s possible to do it by hand, but it’s absurdly labor-intensive. Scharffen-Berger has a handmade three-ounce bar that sells for $8.) Sure, Theo is my local chocolate factory, so in that sense it’s local food, but the beans come from half a dozen tropical countries around the globe. Even if they were making the chocolate by hand, they’d be relying on the shipping industry.

> Likewise, I wish Pollan would stick his neck out and be more prescriptive about how we might realistically address our national eating disorder. We can’t all go off the grid like Salatin, nor can we just wish away 200 years of industrialization. So what to do? Is the ever-growing organic-food industry already on the right path? Or is more radical action needed?

That’s what the New York Times Book Review said, and it’s my critique of Pollan’s talk in a nutshell. On the one hand, you have a Valrhona Le Noir Amer 71% bar. On the other, high-fructose corn syrup. Both are products of the industrial food chain. If I have to give up the Valrhona to get rid of the HFCS, well, forget it.

My hunch is that Pollan’s critique begins with aesthetics. There’s nothing wrong with aesthetics–I believe beautiful and delicious things have value for no other reason than their beautiful deliciousness. But everyone wants to bolster their aesthetic argument with something meatier. A pasture full of contented cows is beautiful. Organic heirloom tomatoes are delicious. A McDonald’s drive-thru is ugly, and supermarket tomatoes are nasty. It’s very easy to jump from there to saying that McDonald’s and supermarket tomatoes are not only unwholesome but (the most damning word of the moment) *unsustainable*.

Maybe they are. But I don’t think you can win this way. I don’t shop at the farmers market because the farmers are nice. I shop at the farmers market because *that’s where the best food is*. And I usually stop at the supermarket on the same trip.

That’s the direction I think we’re headed in: not a wholesale abandonment of industrial food, but more and more a mixture of industrial and artisanal, local and global food. I think it’s at least theoretically possible to put those things in healthy balance.

Of course, that could be the Valrhona bar talking.

Be a rube

Today is St. George’s Day, an important English holiday that I learned about yesterday on Becks & Posh. If you don’t know who St. George is, this web site informs you that:

> One of the best known stories about St. George is his fight with a dragon. But it is highly unlikely that he ever fought a dragon, and even more unlikely that he ever actually visited England. Despite this, St. George is known throughout the world as the dragon-slaying patron saint of England.

I’ve never fought a dragon, but I have been to England, so I guess that’s why I was passed over for sainthood. Hmm, I’ve never been to Belgium. I could totally be patron saint of Belgium. Or of fries.

Er, anyway, to celebrate St. George’s day, we slew some rhubarb (meaning Iris and I bought some at Frank’s Produce, at Pike Place Market) and made Nigella Lawson’s rhubarb crumble. Actually, we made it yesterday.

If rhubarb crumble isn’t the national dish of England, it should be.

Aside from the fact that rhubarb crumble is delicious and appropriate to the holiday, I wanted to do a little science experiment. Last time I made rhubarb crumble, I thickened it with cornstarch. It was good, but had a distinct chalky cornstarch texture. So this time I made two batches, one with cornstarch and one with arrowroot starch. I got the arrowroot at Uwajimaya. Iris was also along for that shopping trip, and when we got to the starch aisle she said in a booming voice, “Dada, GRAB. THAT. STARCH.”

I grabbed that starch and noticed a couple of things about arrowroot, or at least this particular batch. First, it comes in hard little chunks rather that smooth powder like cornstarch. Second, when you mix it into a slurry, it has a weird smell. I was afraid the smell would permeate the crumble.

No worries! The arrowroot crumble won hands-down: it was less runny but had almost no artificial starch texture, and no weird smell, either. Iris cleaned her plate. If she keeps this up, she will be patron saint of rhubarb farmers.

Here’s one of the crumbles coming out of the oven, still bubbling:

Rhubarb

We attacked it, St. George-style, and soon it looked like this:

Rhubarb

Here it is, plated up with whipped cream, since we had no double cream:

Rhubarb

And here’s the recipe:

**RHUBARB CRUMBLE**
Adapted from Feast by Nigella Lawson
Serves 2

*This recipe is halved from the one in the book; feel free to redouble it.*

*For the filling:*
1 pound rhubarb, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon arrowroot starch, dissolved in a couple of teaspoons of water

*For the topping:*
1/2 cup (2-1/2 ounces) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
4 tablespoons (half-stick) butter, cold and diced
3 tablespoons (1.25 ounces) sugar
3 tablespoons (1.25 ounces) brown sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 375. Combine the filling ingredients in a saucepan. Set over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until the butter is melted and the sugar is well dissolved, about five minutes. Turn out into a small baking dish.

2. Combine the flour and baking powder in a mixing bowl. Add the butter and rub into the flour mixture with your hands until you achieve a coarse, powdery texture. Stir in the sugars.

3. Pour the topping evenly over the rhubarb filling. Bake 35 to 45 minutes or until bubbly and well-browned. Let cool at least five minutes before serving; serving at room temperature is fine.

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Rock the broc

I cook broccoli all sorts of ways–boil, steam, stir-fry, braise, roast. Everything short of blacken. But a recent issue of Fine Cooking introduced me to an entirely new way of cooking it. I couldn’t find the issue last night, but the recipe is so simple I recreated it from memory and it was totally fine.

The author, Tasha DeSerio, calls this method “slow-cooking,” but that suggests that you’re going to dump the broccoli into a Crock-Pot and leave it all day. Really you’re only cooking it for an hour, but it comes out transformed, like broccoli-garlic candy. Okay, that sounds gross. It’s like broccoli as Smoove B would serve it. It’s broccoli confit.

**SMOOVE BROCCOLI**
Adapted from Fine Cooking Dec 2005/Jan 2006
Serves 2-3

*The amount of oil may sound excessive, but don’t cut back or it’ll end up dry. Besides, it’s olive oil, right? The garlic will turn into irresistible brown, chewy slices by the end.*

3 tablespoons olive oil
4 cups small broccoli florets and peeled, sliced stems (about 1-1/2 pounds)
2 ounces pancetta, diced (optional)
2 large cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
crushed red pepper flakes
salt

1. Heat the oil in a large skillet (not nonstick) over medium heat. Add the broccoli, pancetta, garlic, a healthy sprinkle of salt, and crushed red pepper flakes to taste. Stir well.

2. Reduce the heat to low. Cook uncovered one hour, stirring occasionally.

3. As you approach the hour mark, taste a piece of broccoli. If it’s still crunchy, put a lid on the pan and cook covered for five minutes or until broccoli is tender. Season with additional salt to taste and serve hot or warm.