A couple weeks ago I reordered from Anson Mills. Whenever I order from Anson, I always say I’m just going to get the grits, but they have so many other alluring products. This time I threw in a bag of Carolina Gold rice and a bag of farro.

Farro is the Italian word for emmer wheat, which is, well, a kind of wheat. You can cook it like a risotto (*farrotto,* this is called) or make a salad, or put it in a stew. I’d been reading Lorna Sass’s book Whole Grains: Every Day, Every Way, and there’s a recipe in it for farro, asparagus, and prosciutto salad that looked delicious.

The grains arrived, and I went to the Anson Mills web site for advice on cooking the farro. Here’s their recipe. I like that it called for “a fine, footed colander,” which is fun to say in a fake Irish accent.

The first step of the recipe is:

> Turn the farro into a large bowl and cover it with 2 cups of boiling water. Skim off chaff and hulls with a tea strainer. Soak the farro overnight.

I did as suggested. A few hulls floated to the surface, but a lot of them seemed to be holding tight to the grains.

The next day, I drained the farro and simmered it in salted water for about half an hour. The result was both tasty and inedible. The edible groats were delicious, but the ones with hulls could not be chewed by humans. We ended up making the salad with pearl barley, and it was very good–chewy kernels with a nice lemony tang and plenty of asparagus. The prosciutto could have been lightly cooked first to give it a more compatible, snappy texture.

I sent an email to Anson Mills. Isn’t it great when a mill has tech support? I heard back almost immediately. They accused me of using the grits recipe to make farro. I categorically denied this accusation. We exchanged a couple more emails. Then I realized, hey, why am I trying to describe this problem when I could just take a picture? It was the mill tech support equivalent of VNC.

The grains in the lower right are the hully, livestock-oriented ones.

That solved the case. The tech support guy wrote:

> Perfect, these are hulled parched french oats that we have been working on for a new product, not Farro, so now I understand and we do apologize again. Thanks for your patience and thank you for the image, we are studying it to determine how oats appeared in a Farro bag. We’ll send “real” Farro, tomorrow.

(Incidentally, if you’re wondering how to pronounce “farro,” it rhymes with “tomorrow.”) He also included instructions for hulling the parched French oats, but I had already thrown them out, and it sounded like a lot of work.

I’m sure Anson Mills is a little embarrassed about sending me the wrong grain, but not as embarrassed as I am for not being able to tell the difference between wheat and oats.

The real farro arrived last week. It does not have hulls. Other than that, it looks an awful lot like oats. I would not have been able to tell them apart in a grain lineup. I served some tonight with leftover beef stew.

In a word, it’s chewy, but not unpleasantly so. If you like wheat berries or French green lentils, you’ll like farro. I also recommend it for fans of hulled parched French oats.

Over at 43 Folders, Merlin is decluttering. If you’ve got a clutter problem, Merlin’s got your back.

> Clutter of every kind has been the default state of my physical world forever. Although no official record of the conversation exists, I would not be surprised to learn that I tried to talk the staff who delivered me into letting me keep my first diaper; just because — y’know — you never know when it might come in handy.

I’m good at tossing out most things, but when it comes to cookbooks, I turn into a whiny “I might need it someday” person. This summer, once again, I have “weed cookbooks” on my summer projects list. This time, however, I have a plan.

Are you familiar with [LibraryThing.com](http://www.librarything.com/)? It’s a place to catalog your books online. You can tag, share, rate, discuss, and all that, but I have in mind something simpler. My cookbooks, which fill an entire large Dania bookcase and then some, fall into two categories: (1) books I actually cook from or refer to regularly, and (2) books I feel like I might refer to at some point if I’m writing an article.

The second category doesn’t really belong on the shelf, but I worry that if I don’t see the category 2 books while reaching for the category 1 books, I’ll forget the category 2 books exist, and then when I go to write that article, I will not be able to find any information about the topic whatsoever. Because there are no web sites where you can, like, search for books.

You can see that I should just dump these extra books. However, that’s too painful. So I’m going to enter each category 2 book into LibraryThing, give it an “ex libris” tag, and then it’s going to the library book sale or out on the curb. Keep your eye on my curb.

In Anne Fadiman’s latest book of essays, At Large and At Small, she writes about her brother and his obsession with ice cream.

> Although Kim works as a mountaineering guide, leads kayak expeditions, plays jazz recorder, teaches courses on snow morphology and the aerodynamics of bird flight, takes nature photographs, and manages a small investment fund, I think of him primarily as Wyoming’s Emperor of Ice Cream.

Like most ice cream freaks, Kim Fadiman is perturbed by overrun, the extra air beaten into ice cream to give it a lighter texture (if we’re being charitable) or to sell air for the price of ice cream (if we’re not). Unlike most ice cream freaks, Fadiman doesn’t just complain; he does something about it.

> Kim likes to reduce the overrun of Breyers Coffee, which he rates excellent in flavor but excessively fluffy in texture, by placing a few scoops in a plastic bag and smashing them with a meat-tenderizing mallet. (“How often do you do this?” I asked. “Always!” he answered. “Why eat all that air when it’s so easy to get it out?”)

I imagine the siblings having this conversation with raised voices, wearing those construction-site ear protectors, while Kim bashes away at a bag of ice cream.

Naturally I had to spend some of the R&G research budget on coffee ice cream. The pounding regime really works, although the end result is no better than Haagen-Dazs.

Number of times I have had Japanese food in Japan: 1. (Bad katsudon at Narita airport, 2000. $12.)

Number of times I have had Chinese food in China: 2, if you count the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan); otherwise, 0. (Skewer of chicken and green peppers on the street in Taipei; congee for breakfast at Taipei airport, 2001.)

Not the highlights of our brief world traveling phase, perhaps.

I’ve recently read two nice books about fish.

The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket, by Trevor Corson

Let me tell you the history of sushi. We begin in feudal Japan, where…zzz…

Corson does not begin in feudal Japan. He begins in modern day LA, where Kate is beginning an intensive sushi class. It’s not going well. Her knives are dull. She has no skills. She thinks dead fish is kind of gross.

It’s obvious how this story is going to end, but the way Corson weaves in the history of sushi–including, yes, feudal Japan–is inspired. The fun facts pop up like nigiri pieces at an omakase session. Did you know that sushi rice is made with vinegar because the rice was originally fermented, and the vinegar emulates the fermented tang? I didn’t.

Corson and his characters are dismissive of American-style sushi: big chunks of fish, tightly packed rice, dipped rice-side down in a slurry of soy sauce and fake wasabi, plus big, creamy inside-out *uramaki* rolls so no one has to touch actual seafood. But by the end I found myself appreciating it as an art form in its own right, with its own forms and rituals.

“The Young Man and the Sea: Recipes and Crispy Fish Tales from Esca”, by David Pasternack and Ed Levine

[Esca](http://esca-nyc.com/) is Mario Batali and David Pasternack’s Italian seafood restaurant in New York. It’s most famous for crudo, basically Italian sashimi: a piece of raw fish with olive oil, maybe a squeeze of citrus, a bit of vegetable accompaniment.

I have no desire to cook from this book–there’s a lot of east coast fish that’s hard to get here, and they’re restaurant-style recipes, albeit simpler than, say, an Alfred Portale book. It does make me want to eat at Esca.

More to the point, though, I’d like to see chefs in other cities use this book as an instruction manual. Seattle and seafood are forever linked in the popular imagination, but we don’t have a seafood restaurant like this, one with an overriding philosophy and singleminded focus on fish. There’s the Oceanaire, which is part of a chain and does good basic stuff, and Flying Fish, which I like, but the menu is freewheeling in a way Esca’s isn’t, and it’s starting to feel a bit, well, 90s.

I don’t know if Seattle can support a place like Esca, but I’d like to see someone try.