Bento

I've been in love with Japanese bento boxes from the very first time I saw them. I've looked all over town for a place that might serve them. There were a few false claimants, but no luck so far. Which makes sense. I mean, these are homemade school lunches for Japanese school children, after all. But they are also fantastic food art.

The Times just published a fun article on bentos. Don't miss the slideshow.

Baker, Baker

I was lamenting the other day the absence of mince pie at my local supermarket, but I was very pleased to have one (just one) turn up last Saturday for Mother's Day (yes, Tani loves it too). But, I confess that it was not quite as good as I remembered. Too sweet. Unfortunately it is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), one of the great scourges of our day. Anything sweetened with HFCS is yucky sweet. So, with no other options, I'm going to learn to make it myself. The difficulty of pie crusts has stopped me in the past from pie making, but I'm steeling myself for another go. I have no other choice, it seems.

A Most Pleasing Ghost Story

A shoutout to Mr. Fweem for conjuring McBroom's Ghost. I remember this book very well, though I'd forgotten the title. Actually, I just remember keenly the illustration of villainous Heck Jones imperiously eating his shoofly pie. Nowhere else have I ever seen pie eating portrayed as an act of intimidation. It is a small stroke of genius.



As a foodie adult thinking back on it, for several years I've been wanting to try shoofly pie. I have little chance of finding it locally. These kinds of traditional pies are rarely sold commercially. They've even quit stocking mince pie at my local Smith's, which I'm am very sorry about (I still look every time, and hope). But it does not look hard to make. I expect I'll have to give it a go myself.

Yea to Fish, Nay to Beef

This article in the NYTimes discusses the results of a new study on the long-term effects of beef and processed meat consumption. To no one's surprise, I should think, the results showed that high levels of consumption of beef and processed meat is linked to an increased mortality rate of "20 percent to nearly 40 percent." Very interesting as well was the finding, "In the study, the largest consumers of 'white' meat from poultry and fish had a slight survival advantage."

The article also mentions the results of other studies on the consumption of fish:

[F]ish contains omega-3 fatty acids that have been linked in several large studies to heart benefits. For example, men who consume two servings of fatty fish a week were found to have a 50 percent lower risk of cardiac deaths. . . . Data from one million participants in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition trial found that those who ate the least fish had a 40 percent greater risk of developing colon cancer than those who ate more than 1.75 ounces of fish a day. Likewise, while a diet high in red meat was linked to an increased risk of prostate cancer in the large Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial, among the 35,534 men in the study, those who consumed at least three servings of fish a week had half the risk of advanced prostate cancer compared with men who rarely ate fish.

Similar health results were reported for women.

I do not eat a lot of red or processed meat, but I do eat a lot of poultry. I think I'm probably OK there. Likewise, I should eat less dairy fat, but I'm not too bad there either. But while I do take omega-3 supplements, I really ought to be eating more fish. There is of course some concern over mercury and other toxins present in seafood, but the prevailing opinion is that, unless consumed in unusual quantities, the health benefits of eating fish outweigh the risks.

Flan-tastic

A senior and very conservative colleague once observed, to everyone's mild surprise, "One never regrets extravagance." He did not mean buying a McMansion. This was said during a fine meal.

I'm feeling a little extravagant just today, too, du fait de la cuisine, and not regretting it. I've posted before about my area's best bakery, Eliane's. I go there very rarely, in fact, due to cost and the calories. But yesterday I was driving by and stopped to get something to spoil our office staff. And, as it happened, I spoiled myself too with piece of flan.

I was shocked at how incredibly good that flan was, in every detail. I'm not a pastry crust connoisseur, but even the crust was just perfect to me. I paid $3 for it. I know they do most of their business as a provender. I'm sure other people are paying $8 for the same flan at some upscale Valley restaurants.

The extravagance, though, is that I went to Eliane's again today with my family. Two days in a row. It's too much bliss. And that was after lunch at Provo's best restaurant, the Chef's Table. Really, it's just too much bliss.

All this has me thinking back to a conference I attended in Boston last year. The conference was fine, but the weather was grim, and I saw little of Boston. However, I did take advantage of one conference excursion, a culinary tour of Little Italy in Boston's North End.

The first stop was (per my guide) the most authentic Italian bakery in Boston, Maria's Pastry Shop. As you can see here (click "Street View"), it's just a hole in the wall, but the pastry is authentic and wonderful. They had a few heavier pastries, more suited to American palates, but most were surprising light, as is traditional. While the Italian-American food we all know is very heavy, much real Italian cuisine (especially from the North) is comparatively light. They do not eat heavy pastries after a big meal. You're more likely to have millefoglie or cannoli at a wedding than after a huge spaghetti dinner. Cookies will most likely be set out with coffee.


Amaretti with pignoli nuts.

I sampled a little of a lot at Maria's but just had to bring home some Italian macaroons, called amaretti. You've never had a macaroon until you've had one of these, smothered in pignoli nuts. A favorite flavoring in Italian cookies is anise, which is a digestive. Whence the British term "digestives" for these kinds of "biscuits." Very distinctive flavor.

Our guide did not have a warm recommendation for Boston's most famous pastry shop, Mike's Pastry. He said it's not as authentic as Maria's. But I went there anyway, after the tour. It may not be as authentic, but it is not to be missed.



Cannoli and sfogliatelle (Lobster Tails) from Mike's.

Mike's is a pastry Disneyland. The store is not especially large and was (always is, I'm told) very crowded. But its wall-to-wall cases are packed with a huge variety pastry, of all kinds, but especially the heavy creamy kind.They have every kind of cannoli and sfogliatella imaginable. I tried a chocolate lobster tail and was in pastry nirvana.

The take-home message? One never regrets extravagance. If you have the chance to eat great pastry, forget budgets and waistlines. Just do it.

The Existential Muffin

I just typed the title to this post, and then wondered, has anyone else written on this topic? Yes, of course, and Pamplemousse makes some good points on the nature of muffiness. A muffin should be more than just a breakfast cupcake.

But this post is not really about muffins. It's about culinary disappointment.

So, I go to the dentist this morning and, on my way back to work, I notice a new eatery, the Paradise Bakery and Cafe. I love great pastry and, ever hopeful (and peckish), I have to stop. This is a big and beautiful cafe, with professional menus and a throng of smiling staff. I should have walked straight out over that fact alone. Unless you're eating haute (out? haute? eating out haute?), if a place looks great, the food is probably not.

The "bakery" section was a joke, about 6' of single-shelf counter. They had big signs about their "famous cookies," but the sample they gave me could have come from a Keebler box. Maybe did. The only thing with any promise was their muffins. I bought the Apple Cinnamon. It was ok, I guess. But just a breakfast cupcake.

This small dissappointment should not have put me in a funk, but as I've blogged before, I love great food. But it is so hard to find. Now, if I had the money, I'm fortunate to live just an hour's drive of many great restaraunts. During ski season, there are probably twenty that would not disappoint any reasonable foodie just in Park City and the resorts. We even have two hauts restaurants local (the Chef's Table in Provo and the Tree Room at Sundance). But these belong to an entirely different catagory of eateries. Dinner for two will cost you at least a Benjamin.

I love good eats on the cheap, but there is a reason why it is a commonplace for greasy spoons to advertise "home cooking." For a variety of reasons, restaurant food is rarely better than even modestly competent home cooking. I'm no cookie wizard, but I can certainly bake for myself a better cookie than those to which Paradise claims fame. In fact, that is the challenge I've set for myself—find affordable restaurants that can beat our home cooking. Sounds easy, but it's not.

Cookies and box-baking aside, real baking is a real challenge, and good commercial bakers can produce breads and pastries that only accomplished home cooks can match. We're very fortunate to have a couple of good bakeries local. Kneaders is spotty with pastries, but they have some great specialty breads. For your basic cinnamon rolls and such, I love Shirley's. If you get out to Midway, then Bäckerei & Eis at the Zermatt Resort is worth a visit. Their bleu cheese bread is unbelievable and their pastries fair to great (skip their Napoleons). If you're into it, they also have great gelato.

But I'd trade them all for Provo's only French patisserie, the Eliane French Bakery (sic). Eliane's is nothing to look at, but their pastries are the real thing. One reviewer complained they did not "taste as good as they appeared." I think that's because Americans expect a blast of sugar whenever they bite into something creamy. Sorry, in my very limited experience, that just is not French, who use sugar as a flavoring and not the main ingredient in pastry. Authentic or not, Eliane's is very good, and as close to real patisserie as you are going to get in Happy Valley.

Porcine Superbugs

Just a quick shoutout to a recent NYT column by Nick Kristof on MRSA "superbugs," staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics. These seem to be transmitted from pigs to humans and are near-epidemic among people who work with hogs. I was shocked to read that 18,000 people a year die from MRSA infections, more than die annually from AIDS. The pig MRSA problem is probably linked to the extreme overuse of antibiotics with industrial-farm pigs, as with all industrial livestock. After reading about "pig brain infections" a while back, I personally am feeling even more put off by pork. Risk of parasites is bad enough. It really is a high-risk meat.

Update: If Kristof's first column wasn't enough to put you off pork, this follow-up may do the trick.

Foodie Mags

Another throwaway post, I know, but I liked this writeup on some changes afoot in food publishing. All positive, I think. One of my main complaints with most food mags is that they are aimed either at soccer moms or economically unconstrained super-foodies. I'm not interested in either more creative cupcakes or truffles and fois. But it looks like Gourmet may take a step towards the proletariat. Smart move, I say.

Reflecting the bad economy, Gourmet, which usually writes about expensive restaurants and faraway travel, has added a feature about what to do with leftovers, and put a ham sandwich — albeit a fancy one — on its March cover. . . . “There is an incredible opportunity,” said Ruth Reichl, the editor in chief of Gourmet. “People need help learning to cook again, and they need advice on less-expensive ingredients, and we’re trying to give it to them.”

Orthorexia

First, a word of explanation and apology. Almost all my reading right now falls into three categories: I read for work/school, I read in service of my hobbies and interests, and unless I'm on a media fast, I read a bit most days from the New York Times online. Some of all that turns up here, but if it seems like most of my general interest posts come from the NYTimes, well, that's about all the general reading I do.

Now, if that wasn't enough of a turn-off, I'll warn you that this post is really nothing special. Just an "I need a break so I'll blog something" post. And it's a little depressing. But this article from (you guessed it) the NYTimes gave me pause. I am, compared to most people, food obsessed, and on two levels. First, as I've blogged before, I love really great food. And when it comes to great food, nutrition is not a consideration. I'm very happy to eat 1500 calories of fat and sugar in one meal, if it's a truly great meal. Otherwise, as a National Weight Control Registry candidate, I am usually quite careful about what I eat the rest of the time. I have a definite personal list of "good" foods and "bad" foods.

But in spite of that, I believe strongly that moral categories like "good" and "evil" should not be applied to food. It's a good thing to eat "bad" food sometimes, if truly pleasurable and celebratory. (I speak nutritionally, of course. Lousy cooking and spoiled food are rightly called "bad" and should not be eaten).

Speaking of good or bad eating makes more sense. But as this article illustrates, obsessing about healthy eating can itself become a destructive eating disorder. We have to be especially careful around our kids, who are less able than adults to moderate or interpret hyperbolic comments we may make about "evil" foods.

Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietitian and the director of sports nutrition and performance at the University of Miami, says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed “bad” by parents. “It’s almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general,” she said. “I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can’t eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats.”

A Better Breakfast

I've long been disappointed with the traditional breakfast foods, except for eggs, which I eat by the dozen (we buy five dozen at a time). I have a friend who used to challenge tradition and cook himself a full spaghetti breakfast. For good health and weight maintenance, breakfast should by all rights be our largest, richest, and most indulgent meal of the day. It's the Cary Grant Diet: Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.

It's the lack of breakfast variety that most disappoints, and this week Mark Bittman of the NY Times took that on. His article was less interesting to me for the recipes it offers than for its challenge to American breakfast culture. I am inspired. We'll see what happens. An excerpt:

[I]t could be that I’ve traveled enough to learn the joys of jook, the Chinese rice porridge also known as congee, which is among my favorite ways to start the day even when seasoned with nothing more than scallions, soy and chopped peanuts; of the kipper, baked beans, broiled mushrooms, tomatoes and other staples of the traditional English breakfast; of cucumbers, feta and olives, which I ate daily in Turkey; of ful medames, the lemon-kissed fava concoction of Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East; and, one glorious day about 10 years ago, of kao tom, the Thai version of jook, loaded with sausage, eggs and nam pla. Everything is fair game at breakfast — and long has been, of course — but to most Americans it doesn’t seem appropriate to start making what amounts to dinner at seven in the morning. It’s one thing to eat leftover pizza, pasta, roast chicken, soup, whatever; it’s entirely another to start cooking them while your tea or coffee is still brewing.

Epiphany

An epiphany is a rare event, by which I mean, a moment of fundamental insight that instantly and permanently changes your perception of life and the world. But I had one such in Nov. 2006 when I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., as I was in town for a conference. I've been to the National Gallery a number of times, and each visit seems more rich and meaningful than the last. But this time I was struck by two paintings in particular, not so much for their artistic merit, but for an insight into the human experience that they communicated to me.

I will not say too much about them. You can click on the images below and get a fuller description. The first is a Dutch still life by Willem Claesz Heda of a table laden with food, a common painting subject at the time and his specialty. I was first drawn to the realism. Then I thought, "You know, that kind of looks tasty." Then I began to think more deeply about food as an object of art, its inherent aestheticism, its timeless and universal desirability, and its centrality in our hierarchy of pleasures.


Willem Claesz Heda, Banquet Piece with Mince Pie (1635)

The second painting is another Dutch work, this time by Jan Steen. It shows a "scene of daily life," perhaps a wedding feast, and while the dancing couple may be at physical center, food obviously plays a central role in this celebration. With this painting I reflected on how timelessly central food is to most all of our festive occasions, and how communal eating (feasting!) is the quintessential festive act.


Jan Steen, The Dancing Couple (1663)

These two paintings worked together with a really great meal there (at Ten Pehn, fantastic) to convince me that, while food is a quotidian necessity, great food should be a bigger part of my life. And thus was a passion born.

Gastronomic Racism

There is arising in Italy a movement to ban ethnic food restaurants, anything that is not Italian. This would be nothing too concerning, a nationalistic lark, except it is actually getting some substantive political support (read here). While I like to see enthusiasm for traditional, regional and ethnic cuisine, like the French passion for raw milk cheese, I find the legal suppression of competing food cultures pretty shocking. Though I'll admit, the legal suppression of McDonalds I might be open to.

Give Up Orange Juice, Save the Planet

PepsiCo, which owns Tropicana, just completed a study of the carbon footprint of a glass of its orange juice.The damage? "[T]he equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice." Most of this comes from the effects (both manufacturing and use) of the fertilizer used to grow the oranges. Of course, one can grow oranges without using nitrogen fertilizer, but this makes them more expensive. Which makes no sense to a for-profit corporation, so instead they are just debating whether to spin this statistic or bury it. Too late to bury it.

Fine Food Causes Brain Damage

Or, brain damage causes you to eat fine food. While precise cause and effect is not clear, a new "benign" eating disorder has apparently been identified. Termed "gourmand syndrome," a new study "describes a preoccupation with food and a preference for fine eating."

Analysis of the clinical and anatomical data of 36 patients who displayed this behavior revealed, in 34, a strong association with lesion location in the right anterior part of the brain involving cortical areas, basal ganglia or limbic structures. Our finding provides further evidence of a correlation between right hemispheric damage, eating, and other impulse control disorders.

I admit that I'm becoming a bit of a foodie, so I'm not sure whether I should be worried at this or just amused.

Felicitous Minimalism

I used to be a devoted follower of the NYT columnist, the Minimalist (Mark Bittman). But I've gotten out of the habit of reading him. Yet every January we seem to catch a new wave of enthusiasm for cooking, and for any enthusiastic home cook, Bittman is a must-read. This is one of those great general hints and tips columns he often does that I find among his very best. I'm definitely making a simple stock, which Significant Other has been threatening to do but which I have not been too enthusiastic for. The tipping point was Bittman's inclusion of celery in his stock, which I don't like to eat but is delicious in soup base. Time to boil some chicken bones. Maybe I'll make it into a spicy chicken soup.

My Kind of Touring

I love food and I love to travel. Ideal travel to me is "culinary touring." Most every destination has something unique to offer the foodie, if only you know where to find it, as food gurus Alton Brown and Calvin Trillin show so well. Trillin's Trilogy is high inspiration to me.

But if you have a fetish for chocolate, REAL chocolate (yes, that's another post), there is really only one locale that will offer you satisfaction: Paris. This article offers a short connoisseur's tour of that chocolate-lover's paradise. Proceed from there immediately to Mort Rosenblum's Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light, best read with a bar of Valrhona in hand.