"One Man Band" Diner

 The "One Man Band" diner in the very strange town of Nephi, Utah, is a fun place to eat. The menu has a long list of instructions, beginning with the directive that you should decide exactly what each person at the table wants to eat, and then phone in your order on the red telephone beside the table (where the juke box should be, I guess). The kitchen is open to the dining room where tables are formica-topped and benches are naugahide. We watched the kitchen staff assemble the meals:

 

 I loved the eggs, hash browns, toast, and melted cheese I ordered -- breakfast for dinner!


 After we ate, we took a ride (yes, even though we drove for 8 hours today) up a mountain into the Uinta National Forest. It's amazing how Utah scenery is spectacular even when it's in an obscure place off the beaten track (like this isn't Zion, Arches, Capitol Reefs,
Brice Canyon, etc).

 

Dinner in Cheyenne

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The Albany Bar in Cheyenne has been in business since 1942, and the building is at least half a century older than the business. I think the menu may have been updated -- though not too much. I had trout with a baked potato (the trout isn't local) and Len had a steak sandwich (maybe the cow was local). The interior of the Albany is full of old-style wooden booths and fixtures from the past -- the exterior has the typical extra-tall front pediment of a 19th century frontier building. It's across the street from the old Union Pacific Railroad Station, now a museum, and not far from the Capitol building.

For dessert, I had lemon cheesecake, which I would call New York style. I wonder what they would have served in the 1880s when the railroad station was new. Above our table was a photograph of the construction of the station with the workers standing on the partially built walls. Cheyenne history photos were on all the restaurant walls.

 

The Albany atmosphere contrasted with that of the very up-to-date brewpub in Des Moines where we ate dinner last night, though the menus had quite a bit of overlap, such as several Mexican-style offerings and of course hamburgers of various types (more trendy at the brewpub, naturally).

"Tomatoland"

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook is a very focused book. Too focused. The tomatoland he describes is in Imolakee, Florida, and almost nowhere else. The most startling fact of the book is that Florida isn't really a very good place to grow tomatoes. The soil is sandy and poor in nutrients for the crop, and there are too many insects. As a result, the big growers who have considerable political clout have received exceptions from many regulations of the use of dangerous and disgusting chemicals on their tomatoes -- bad for consumers, much worse for field workers.

The humanitarian issues of Estabrook's tomatoland include underpaying workers, cheating them of wages, exploiting their ignorance and frequent status as illegal aliens, ensuring that they are poorly housed and fed, carelessly exposing them to hazards like pesticides, and at worst, brutally enslaving them. He clearly explains that this is real and total slavery with only a slim chance of escape. He describes several lawsuits and campaigns for fairer treatment of workers, and profiles various victims and advocates. He's especially detailed about the well-known campaign to increase the pay of tomato pickers, and corporate resistance (from businesses like Trader Joe's, which I think by now has conceded) even to a token increment of a penny per pound of tomatoes.

The culinary issues are predictable: why don't tomatoes have any taste? Estabrook describes the indifference of the major growers to whether their tomatoes do in fact taste like tomatoes. He acknowledges that no mass-market, high-quantity agriculture could produce garden-ripe, fresh-picked taste -- but goes to some length to clarify that the extremes of tasteless tomatoes could be addressed, and how a few experimental labs are working on tomato taste and on preserving and incorporating genes from wild plants that grow in South America. The large-scale growers, however, just don't care. Yes, organic farmers have some success, as do farmers in other places, but the demand for a cheap product overwhelms them.

True, most tomatoes consumed in America are grown in Florida (the book is rich with statistics), and tomato-growing is an area of many important issues, humanitarian, political, nutritional, and culinary. However, I was disappointed by the lack of contrasting stories about organic farmers, farmers with alternate methods, or about farms in Canada, Mexico, or other states -- that is, the producers of the tomatoes that I actually eat when fresh local tomatoes aren't in season. He describes only one or two farms that serve a small part of the population of New York City, and a brief description of an organic farmer in Florida.

In sum, the material in this book is important, but I wanted a broader look at the tomato.

Mexican Food, American Promoters

As I said in my most recent post, I couldn't resist reading Gustavo Arellano's new book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. It's every bit as good as I expected. I liked the organization by food type. First, Arellano discusses the tamales that were sold by street vendors in many US cities in the 19th century.  Then chili, tacos, enchiladas, burritos, salsa, each becoming well-known, popular, and highly profitable in non-Mexican communities throughout the country. There's also a diversion into the history of a famous tortilla with the face of Jesus on it.

The most salient fact about each popularization, is that Mexican restaurant owners or food vendors or more recently food trucks have developed the foods for American taste, but in every case, it was non-Mexicans who cleaned up by amplifying sales. Taco Bell, the late (unlamented) Chi-Chi's, Chipotle, etc. were all the result of a non-Mexican amplifying what Mexicans had invented. There's really no implication of theft, just that the non-Mexicans seemed to have had the capital and know-how to scale a good idea into a national or regional restaurant chain -- and make a lot of money. Similarly, Arellano describes how most high-profile grocery products like Old El Paso tortillas and salsa, Newman's Own, Pace, Gebhardts, etc. were developed by non-Mexicans, based on the recipes and expertise of Mexican cooks and sauce makers.

Arellano also has a very interesting chapter called "How Did Americans become Experts at Writing Cookbooks on Mexican Food?" I never thought about this either. Non-Mexicans study regional cooking, become well-versed by interviewing Mexican cooks, and they write the books.

The book reminds me of Jennifer 8 Lee's book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which explores how Chinese food became so popular throughout the USA. Both authors have a fantastic grasp of the way Americans of many ethnicities think and how they form food tastes. Both present the experiences of ethnic food producers and what it means to them, not just to the consumers.

Where do tacos come from?

How many really intriguing reviews does it take to get me to buy a book? I've been reading quite a few reviews of the newly published book Taco USA by Gustavo Arellano. Julia Moskin's review, featured on page one of the online New York Times (shown above), made me do it. From the reviews and amazon's Look Inside the Book feature, I'm convinced that Arellano will enlighten me about many features of American food  history. He emphatically says it's not a book about Mexico, and not a book about fancy "authentic" Mexican restaurants with that weird corn fungus and epazote. I wonder if he'll mention Xochimilco which used to be in downtown Detroit (maybe still is). And I wonder if it served his sort of American Mexican food or something else.

Maybe the first reference I saw to Arellano's book was L.A.'s Idea of Mexican Food vs. What Mexicans Really Eat last March. A Venn diagram from the article appears below -- it's one of a series of Venn diagrams about what various ethnic groups eat and what we think their cuisine is about. It's a fun article, with quite a few other ideas about "real" Mexican food.

See "Gelatina" in the list of things that Mexicans in Mexico eat? It's Jello with fruit in it. Colorful. Who knew?

The next thing I'm probably going to do: open my iPad to the Kindle app and start reading Taco USA. I'll write my own review some time soon.

Mysterious Edible Mona Lisa

Depicted here on the blog The Amateur Gourmet -- but who is she, this mysterious woman made of something edible but unidentified. Is she warm, is she real? Or just a cold and lonely work of salami?

Meat

The New York Times recently ran an online essay contest about the ethics of eating meat. Thousands of entries were reduced to six finalists, published here: Put Your Ethics Where Your Mouth Is. Among them, one point of view favoring ethical meat consumption created a real learning experience for me. The surprising argument in favor of ethical meat-eating is that farming vegetables is impractical without animals. Here is the paragraph, by a former vegetarian, that I find most convincing:

"I became interested in growing vegetables and found myself apprenticing on a farm in Massachusetts. Still a vegetarian, I was surprised to learn that we amended soil fertility by applying bone and blood meal, both slaughterhouse byproducts, and we regularly dipped young transplants in fish emulsion. I realized then what farmers have known forever: the domestication of animals and the cultivation of vegetables go hand in hand. Growing vegetables is an inherently extractive process, removing nutrients from the soil, so a sustainable system requires other inputs to replace them. Every backyard gardener knows that animal manure enriches the soil, so it should come as little surprise that the animal-vegetable connection is so basic that it’s built into the words themselves: the word 'manure' is rooted in the Latin manuopera, meaning manual work. Through my first season on the farm, I gradually came to terms with the idea that using animal byproducts made good sense, especially in contrast to the alternative of synthetic chemical fertilizers."

This author concludes: "There is an ethical option — a responsibility, even — for eating animals that are raised within a sustainable farm system and slaughtered with the compassion necessitated by our relationship."

 Another excellent article among the top six states:

"While most present-day meat production is an ecologically foolish and ethically wrong endeavor, happily this is changing, and there are abundant examples of ecologically beneficial, pasture-based systems. The fact is that most agroecologists agree that animals are integral parts of truly sustainable agricultural systems. They are able to cycle nutrients, aid in land management and convert sun to food in ways that are nearly impossible for us to do without fossil fuel. If 'ethical' is defined as living in the most ecologically benign way, then in fairly specific circumstances, of which each eater must educate himself, eating meat is ethical, in fact NOT eating meat may be arguably unethical."

And I also find this statement of the issue enlightening:

"We need to seek balance in our land and in our kitchens. However, I also ask my vegetarian friends to consider that if they are eating eggs, then someone had to cull the roosters or mature hens, and I hope those animals were not wasted. If they are drinking dairy, someone had to cull the males from the herd, since a world where every animal is maintained would be unsustainable. And if there are no animal inputs on the farms, then that energy has to come from fossil fuels and other nonorganic sources."

I'm familiar with the usual discussions of animal welfare, planetary welfare, and global human welfare. I had often heard these questions, asked by several of the contestants:

• Is it ever ok to slaughter a living being?
• Do cows or pigs or chickens know what's happening to them?
• Is meat eating "natural" for humans?
• Does a vegan diet in humans lead to brain damage or other deficiencies?
• Does the raising of grain-eating animals for some populations cause other humans to starve for lack of the grain that feeds the animals?
• Is large-scale meat agriculture ruining the planet because of rain-forest destruction, methane gas production, toxic runoff, or whatever?
• Is small-scale meat-raising sustainable and would it be less ruinous to the planet?

But I found the common-sense approach of asking about farming vegetables without animals very fascinating.

Barbie's Kitchen

Alice's Barbies turn out to have a kitchen; one of them agreed to show me the refrigerator. I like this better than the earlier Barbie kitchen I posted here.

Passover is Coming Soon

Last night I attended a wonderful baking demonstration by Lori Shepard, chef and owner of a catering company called Simply Scrumptious Catering.

Above, you can see the demo table which had been painstakingly prepared by Lori (left) and Esther, our hostess. Throughout her demo, Lori fielded questions from attendees, who included novice cooks as well as those who were highly experienced. She showed a number of techniques, such as beating the egg mixture for a Mexican flan, folding the dry and then the wet ingredients into beaten egg whites (to prevent them from deflating), tapping a pan of cake batter before baking (to remove oversize air bubbles), and turning a cake upside down with a bottle in the center of a tube pan (to prevent the cake from sinking as it cools). Lori showed us an incredible variety of Passover desserts. Some were conventionally kosher for Passover; others were ultra-kosher, meaning they not only were free of flour, corn products, and leavening, but didn't even contain any matzo products.

Though I do not change dishes or remove any foods from my home or from my diet during Passover, I was fascinated by the demo. Passover, I believe, ties all Jews together, whether they are secular and minimally observant like me, or like Esther, who is highly observant. Esther reminded us that among many meanings, Passover represents the birth of the Jewish people. In her view, the careful and limited diet at Passover represents the care with which one feeds a newborn baby!



The ingenuity of Passover desserts also fascinates me. Without careful thought, what baked goods could be made without flour or leavening? And for those who keep kosher there's the added requirement that a meat meal (the usual choice for the Seder) include only non-dairy desserts. Well, in the photo above, you can see three classics -- left to right: sponge cake, carmel fudge torte (in Lori's extraordinary version), orange and nut torte with non-dairy frosting. Everyone was offered full-sized portions of every dish -- I opted for small bites, but we were made welcome to also take home what we couldn't eat.

My friend Abby is the master of the nut torte, but otherwise among the versions of these desserts, Lori's were far better than most that I remember. These three cakes, along with some extraordinary brownies, were waiting for the participants when we arrived; we also watched demonstrations and tasted several other baked goods.



Also on the demo table, were both basic and unusual ingredients for Passover baking. The usual: matzo cake flour, nuts, eggs, coconut milk (to substitute for heavy cream), lemons, and oranges. Unexpected: confectioner's sugar made without cornstarch; vanilla extract made without grain alcohol; specially handled chocolate and cocoa powder. For pie crusts, Lori makes her own graham crackers from Passover ingredients -- another unexpected item.

Lori's Simply Scrumptious Catering provides meals or pastry for weddings, family reunions, business meetings, holiday parties, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and many other celebrations. Menu choices include a variety of ethnic and American dishes; while she offers kosher catering, she also does lots of work outside this area.

Fluxus Food

The art movement "Fluxus" is the subject of an exhibit here this month. It seems to me that this movement, which mainly dates from around 50 years ago, owes a lot to Marcel Duchamp. For one thing -- the use of boxes of chosen objects to illustrate a point, often an obscure point. Also the use of "ready-mades" or found objects. As I have said, Marcel Duchamp is a favorite of mine, so I enjoyed this exhibit of his followers, and appreciate that some like Claes Oldenbourg and Daniel Spoerri produced work outside the confines of Fluxus.

Quiche = Pie for Pi Day

Here's the pie -- in this case a Quiche Lorraine -- for this year's Pi Day, today, 3-14. I like the idea of round food for Pi Day! I baked the big letter PI separately and added it as a decoration.

For my quiche I started with my old standby piecrust recipe from the Cuisinart cookbook. I adapted this evening's method as well as filling from Julia Child's first great cookbook. That was the first quiche recipe I ever made, to me the authentic and original (not any of those debased concoctions from the 1980s!) Tonight, heretically, I used skim milk in place of cream.

Below you can see the ingredients, ready to assemble: a partly-baked 8 inch pie shell, a mixture of eggs, milk and spice, and some lightly browned bacon, for which I used pancetta. Note that pancetta is a less-heavily smoky bacon than the usual kind, so I didn't blanch it. Blanching smoky American bacon was a step that Julia Child needed because the lighter European style bacon varieties weren't then available here. So I don't feel that was a heretical choice at all!

I arranged the bacon on the crust, poured in the eggs, dotted the top with a few pats of butter, and baked it as directed. It did puff up and was very delicate and good!

The first time I ever ate quiche was at my friend Olga's college apartment. She was such a sophisticate! I had never heard of it, but not long afterwards, I also tried quiche in France, and then came back to learn to cook French food from the recently-published Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche was published quite a lot later, after the crimes against quiche that were propagated by second-tier restaurants that made it days in advance and thought you could just warm it up and put a leaf next to it and call it French. No way. This is the real deal.

Pi Day Reposted

From two years ago, for Pi Day -- 3-14. Circular food. Also see this and this.

Breakfast: a round omelet, round tomato slices

Lunch: 2 Pi inches as measured along the edge of the 8 inch pita bread

Dinner: Chicken Pie with a mashed potato crust AND the Pi Day masterpiece --

Be-Bop-A-Re-Bop Rhubarb Pie

A Few Great Restaurants

Last week in Hawaii, we ate out several times, using the kitchen in our condo the remainder of the time. The photo above is a visual summary of the foods we ate and the presentations of food we enjoyed. To see the individual photos at full size, check out my Flickr site here: Kona Dining Out 2012.

Over the years, the food in Hawaii has developed in a most wonderful way. On our early visits around 20 years ago, most restaurants served vegetables and salads made from Mainland produce -- neglecting the possibilities of local farmers. Meat was probably frozen, and the food was typical of big hotels, or was the fake Trader Vic's type of Pacific made-up exotica including overly sweet cocktails etc. Even restaurants that served fresh fish didn't pay much attention to the side dishes or create very exciting results with the remarkable ocean products they could easily obtain.

Back then, local farming wasn't very noticeable -- maybe a farm stand with a few bananas and papayas from the tree. Farmer's markets were maybe just getting started, but they aren't my topic today.

The exception to this sad situation, beginning in the late 1980s, was Merriman's Restaurant in the upland community of Waimaea, where Peter Merriman had worked with local farmers to develop the types of high-quality produce that were in fact natural to grow in the wonderful Hawaiian climate. He contracted for lettuce, tomatoes, corn, and many other kitchen-garden crops, as well as special pork, lamb, beef, and fresh local fish, and the result was then and continues to be highly satisfying.

Merriman also was a founding member of an association of Hawaiian restaurants from other islands that was developing its own style, originally called Pacific Rim Cuisine. (The term has been misused and appropriated since then, I'm afraid.) As the current Merriman restaurant website says: "In a time when a typical restaurant's fresh ingredients were sourced only from large distributors, and local producers were forced to sell at the same price points as their imported counterparts, Merriman went against the grain. He was the first in Hawaii to go directly to local farmers and ranchers to source his menu, and was happy to pay a higher cost."

On our first trip, Merriman's was still unusual, though it had one direct competitor called The Palm Cafe, which closed a few years later.* Our lunch at Merriman's last week demonstrated the continued quality of the restaurant -- despite the fact that it's now one of several Merriman's restaurants on other Hawaiian islands.

The influence of Merriman's and of the local produce movement is highly visible in other restaurants where we enjoyed a variety of dishes. For example, Island Lava Java was originally a cafe and bakery, and is now serving locally sourced lunches and dinners -- I don't know when they expanded their menu, but the cafe has been in business for a long time. I had a really good Salade Niçoise with seared ahi tuna, local greens, and other local vegetables when we ate there. I also had Salade Niçoise at Merriman's a couple of days before: the Lava Java one was comparable, and Merriman's does not include tuna, only anchovies, alas.

Another restaurant that's been around a while serving fantastic local foods is the Keei Café, in one of the small towns going south out of Kona. We've been there on several recent trips, and again found it very enjoyable. After several fish dinners, I ordered rack of lamb, and found it delectable. Their desserts are most tempting, but I always seem to order the mango cobbler, which I love.

On our early trips we ate at a small Indonesian place in town called Sibu in a picturesque old shopping area under a gigantic Banyan tree. A few years ago, this went out of business and was replaced by Rapanui, a sort of general New Zealand and Polynesian restaurant. Wonderful fresh fish! You can get lots of Asian-style vegetables and flavored rice, OR for the really lazy eater, you can do what I did and order fish and chips. Also a delightful coconut cream pie in an individual tart shell all covered with whipped cream, which I seem to order every vacation.

Two other restaurants I like are Kenichi Pacific and The Coffee Shack. Kenichi Pacific is oddly located in the same shopping center with our main grocery store, Long's Drugs, and a movie theater. But it has really nice but pricy sushi, beautifully presented, as well as elegant and quite delicious fish entrees.

The famous Coffee Shack -- mainly a breakfast or brunch place -- is most of the way to the Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park and to one of the world's best snorkeling beaches. We stopped there on the way from snorkeling over the most amazing yellow, purple, and greenish coral and seeing every type of fish we could imagine. It's a very nice life in Kona!

* As I wrote in 1999: Our favorite restaurant has been replaced by a Hard Rock Cafe. This lamented location was called the Palm Cafe (upstairs) with a less formal version Under the Palm below, in Kona. It featured Pacific Rim or fusion cooking, very delicate. I had delicious ravioli filled with chicken and ricotta in a vinegary sauce, followed by local swordfish. For dessert, the creme brulee (3 little dishes, coffee, coconut, and chocolate) is marvelous, as is the ginger creme caramel. Between 1993 and 1996, I think the Palm Cafe improved on an already good thing. But I guess it wasn't really making it.

Kalidescope

Our dinner tonight was made from local food from the Farmers Market in Keahou. Above: salad of local lettuce, tomato, and avocado with lime juice; a bowl of exotic fruit -- rambutans and dragon fruits! Also a sandwich (maybe not so local). Earlier, we enjoyed some sweet Hawaiian bread with locally grown & made lilikoi jam. Lilikoi is the much superior Hawaiian name for passion fruit.

At the market, I used Photobooth to take kalidescopic photos of fruit, vegetables, local food products, and crafts. It was a lot of fun, and included some of the Kona Lisa logos from my favorite Kona coffee.

Kona Lisa Logo

White and purple eggplants

Tumeric in raw, unprocessed form (which I had never seen)

Persimmons

Painted gourds -- the artist suggested that I get this turtle...

Another painted gourd

Market stall for painted gourds

Rambutans

Dragon Fruit

Kona coffee

We are in a small condo with a nice view of the pacific ... Krona coffee for breakfast and a ripe papaya in the refrigerator for later ... Photos when I figure out the slow Internet Which wasnt even expected.

King of the Beasts?

Yesterday we went to a lecture by Brian Polcyn, a chef who specializes in charcutrie (right). He gave an excellent and amusing talk on pork, including raising, slaughtering, and butchering pigs and making many types of European salted and preserved meat dishes from the pork. "The Pig is King," was the title of his powerpoint presentation, and he says that pasture-raised animals from various heritage breeds make fatter pork, which is better to eat. "Fat is your friend," he says.

Polcyn showed us many photos of special types of pigs, both very large and very small, including one type, the Mangalitsa, a Hungarian breed with curly, woolly coats. One Michigan farmer is now raising them, and the chef pays several times the price of ordinary pork for the very special meat they produce.

The images of these pigs were so cute that I am including a photo that was published in the New York Times a couple of years ago, along with an article about this breed of pigs and their recent introduction into American pig breeding and fine dining.

Polcyn explained how every few weeks, he purchases whole or half carcasses and butchers them in one of his two restaurants, where he has a small area in his wine cellar that's temperature and humidity controlled for best hanging of salted prosciutto, pancetta, and sausages. He also uses a laboratory kitchen in the culinary science department of a local college. The entire process takes several months to a year, before he can serve these appealing products in his restaurants. His lecture included a small plate of samples for each attendee -- mmmmmmmmm!

By coincidence, yesterday in the New York Times a pork farmer with a very different point of view wrote an op ed titled "Don’t Presume to Know a Pig’s Mind." Blake Hurst, the author of this op ed, is finds problems in the recent pressures from Chipotle and McDonald's to improve the lives of pigs. He's in a completely different camp from Chef Polcyn, who finds the pigs' quality of life to be very important for many reasons -- including his own ethics for humane treatment of animals and also that better treatment creates better meat (if there's an ethical contradiction in treating an animal humanely up until you kill it, that doesn't figure in his lecture).

Here's what mass-market farmer Blake Hurst has to say about happy pigs:

"According to Chipotle’s Web site, the company uses only “happier” pigs. It doesn’t say how it measures a pig’s happiness, and I can’t help but picture porcine focus groups, response meters designed for the cloven of hoof. We can all agree that production methods should not cause needless suffering, but for all we know, pigs are “happier” in warm, dry buildings than they are outside. And either way, the end result is a plate."

And here's his view of the greater expense of raising pigs with more space and imputed happiness:

"Since we can’t ask the pigs what they think, we know only one thing for sure about the effects of scrapping our most efficient farming systems: the cost of bacon will rise. Wealthy consumers will reward farmers who are able to pull off the Chipotle ad’s brand of combination farm/tourist attraction and are willing to trade efficient animal husbandry for political correctness. Many big multistate operations will also be able to afford to make the changes, or will at least have the political sway to resist them. But the small farmers now raising hogs will be pushed out of the industry."

So, he concludes, farmers are being asked to do two contradictory things to try to satisfy both the humanitarians (or in other cases, ecologists or advocates for other changes in farming practice) and those who want cheap or affordable food. I assume he knows pigs, and that the humane treatment will really cost more -- and Chef Polcyn definitely confirms the much higher price for differently raised animals and small-scale farming. However, I think the generalization is subject to much more analysis, especially when you consider all the other interests that are pressuring the food industry. I wish this discussion didn't remind me of how Monsanto has misled the public about what's good for anyone but Monsanto!

Another Look at Carbon Impact

Interesting article in the Guardian: "Local farms are vital to communities, but we shouldn't dismiss larger ones" by Jason Clay. He makes this point:

"Just because you bought your chicken from a local farm, that doesn't mean it has less impact than a chicken from the local grocery store, which may have been shipped from thousands of miles away. It all depends on how that chicken was produced."

In the article is something I've been looking for: a collective look at carbon impact of various foods. Instead of trying to show the impact of what's on your plate, this graph shows the total for all US food usage. It turns out that transport is the least significant part of the picture:


The author's conclusion about local foods: they aren't necessarily the only solution to global problems. He says:

"With a majority of our citizens living in cities, local agricultural production – from hydroponic greenhouses to small urban vegetable gardens – can help address the growing demand for nutrients and fresh produce in urban areas, and become key strategies to reduce overall food waste. However, it will be very difficult to produce our daily calories in cities, specifically bulk calorie crops such as cereal grains, roots and tubers, sugar and bananas that today still need to be produced where vast areas of land are available for cultivation."

Fritz Brenner Cooks... so does Nero Wolfe

What's fun about my new Nero Wolfe cookbook? I find it fun that throughout the entire book, it keeps up the fiction that Nero Wolfe is a New York detective who almost never leaves his home -- he solves crimes by thinking and interviewing people who come to him, and by sending out Archie Goodwin, his trusty sidekick. The recipes are attributed to his cook, Fritz Brenner, or to the other characters in the stories where the recipes are mentioned or described, including the chefs of "famous restaurants" or hotels, and even a few suspects.

The recipes sound marvelous! Will I ever try them? Well, some are ruled out by my lack of access to wild ducks, foie gras, chickens fed only with blueberries, hogs fed only with peanuts, and other exotica like caviar. Or by my reluctance to try really challenging techniques. But maybe I'll try something from this amusing book. I've been wanting a copy for a long time.

Pizza

Americans ate pizza yesterday -- one estimate, 4.4 million pies. Why should we be different? Well, for one thing, we weren't watching the super bowl, we went to see "The Iron Lady" with Meryl Streep instead, as I wrote here. But I did make pizza, using my old recipe and my new cookbook stand. I have now stored my recipes on the iPad, and the plexiglass stand keeps splatters away, at least so far. Much better than splashing tomato sauce on the back of the large screen of the desktop computer, which is now upstairs. Plus the screen is right where I need it, not facing some other direction. The result was our cheese pizza with Newman's Own Sockarooni sauce, crushed garlic and extra herbs and fennel seeds, and good imported French and Swiss cheese:

As far as I can see, I've never posted my pizza recipe, and if I can't find it here probably no one can. So here it is.

Pizza Dough

Mix and let stand for 10 minutes:
1 package dry yeast
1 cup water at 105 degrees (test on forearm -- same temp. as baby's bath water)
1 tsp. sugar
Place in food processor, using metal blade:
2 and 2/3 cups flour: up to 2/3 cup can be whole wheat flour
Pinch salt -- optional
1/2 tsp. oil

With food processor running, add the liquid slowly . Process until dough forms a ball and pulls away from sides of bowl. Add more flour if necessary to make this happen. This is a very sticky dough. Knead in more flour if you like, and place in large oiled bowl. Allow to rise for 1 hour at warm room temperature or several hours in refrigerator (if you want to make the dough in advance and go see a movie).

After the dough has risen, oil a round pizza pan and pat dough into place. It will rise a little again while you are placing the toppings on it and heating the oven to 425 degrees F. When the oven is hot, bake for 15 minutes, check for nice brown done crust and browned cheese on top; bake slightly longer if necessary. Allow pizza to firm up for 5 minutes before you cut and serve it.

If you want twice as much pizza dough, make two recipes separately in food processor, do not double recipe.

Alternate proportions for dough: use the same method with 1 and 1/4 cups water, 1 pkg. yeast and pinch salt. For dry ingredients, use 3 and 1/2 to 4 cups flour, no oil. Makes a heavier dough. Allow this to rise 1/2 to 1 hour at warm room temperature, more in refrigerator.

As I said, I topped yesterday's pie with Newman's Own sauce, garlic, herbs, and freshly grated cheese. Other possibilities include using whatever other sauce you prefer (even your own); adding lots of vegetables like onion, olives, sliced tomato, or cooked eggplant; adding salami, meatballs, or ham; or making white pizza with 3-4 oz. goat cheese, herbs, and an egg instead of red sauce and hard cheese.

"Hungry Town" -- All about New Orleans

Tom Fitzmorris, whom I'd never heard of before reading his memoir Hungry Town, is a food journalist with a widely followed radio show originating in New Orleans. I have only spent a few days in New Orleans in my life, having made several short visits. I already admired the cuisine: he didn't need to convince me of its greatness. Over the years, I've bought regional cookbooks (though none by this author) and remember when NO cooking was a fad in the 1980s.

My slight knowledge of NO food doesn't make me an ideal audience for Fitzmorris's memories, but I found the whole book highly readable and enjoyable. He has a way of making each story vivid and making each dish he describes sound delicious beyond imagining. A small selection of recipes adds to the fun.

Three themes intertwine in the book. First, the history of NO cooking and restaurants, beginning mainly with the mid-20th century food trends. Second, the intense importance of food in NO culture. Fitzmorris makes a pretty convincing case that NO people have a deeper interest in food and what he calls a lust for food than those in other parts of the country. Third, the history of the damage and recovery from hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster to strike anywhere in the US, at least the largest in any recent memory. His selection of memories of cooks and waiters who died in the floodwaters or otherwise as a result of the storm is poignant (and I usually hate that word).

I like Fitzmorris's view of food, food fads, food celebrities, and food hype. His observations of trends that started in NO and were misappropriated elsewhere are interesting -- blackened redfish would be one of them. I've definitely eaten some bad burned fish as a result of that fad, and he suggests that I can't blame the originators as much as the pathetic imitations. Since he has spent his entire life in NO (except a few weeks as a refugee from Katrina) his point of view on this is especially enlightening.

Another interesting food trend that Fitzmorris covers is the decline of local and traditional foods; however, what makes this relatively common view more interesting is that he demonstrates that during the rebuilding of NO after the disaster, much of the local food made a comeback. He cites various reasons. For one thing Orleanean's exceptional food fascination is also reflective of their love of their city; when faced with near annihilation, they turned to the past for comfort.

As the rebuilding began and progressed, he describes how the locals recreated local restaurants in difficult circumstances; the fast-food places and national chains turned their backs and didn't necessarily reopen. His tales of heroic restaurant rebirths under terrible conditions are amazing. Within a short time after the waters receded, quite a few restauranteurs began serving free food to the clean-up crews and dedicated residents who remained in town.

Natives felt that their neighborhoods could only rebuild if they had good comfort food, and that the city as a whole also needed the fine dining establishments that gave the city its character. At times, Fitzmorris says, a small diner serving local specialties could be the only sign of life in a vast stretch of ruined homes; the people who were still there were scarcely visible.

I especially enjoyed his stories of east-coast journalists who were convinced that the small restaurants had died out, and how he convinced them that in fact, they were more numerous than before, while the chains were in eclipse. (I wonder what's happening more recently -- his book is a couple of years old, and as the city comes back the predators will surely return, I fear.)

All in all, this is a really good food memoir. I haven't tried the recipes, but maybe I will.