Cooking With Ideas

Blog Day 2006

Today is Blog Day 2006. According to the official blog for this event:

Blog Day was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On this day every blogger will post a recommendation of five new blogs. In this way, all Blog surfers will find themselevs leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

Please Get Political: Impeach Bush Coalition: As its name suggests this is a "united coalition of bloggers for the impeachment of George W. Bush." This and others on impeachment are worth reading, especially since the recent ruling that the NSA domestic wiretap activities are unconstitutional. (We knew that, but now a court says so too.) For the Finger Lakes Progressives' impeachment resolution, click here.

Orchids and Blogging: Ok, I am not at all a gardener but I live graced by orchids. So, it seemed a good idea to put an orchid-related blog here as part of my contribution to Blog Day 2006. Several of those I could find are really not posting any more, but I liked these two: (1) Orchid is, as it should be, aesthetically pleasing and also informative (with web sourses and pictures and. . . ); and (2) West Coast Orchid Enthusiasts whose blog has the wonderful name Orchidelerium . The latter come to you from the west coast of Canada. I can't read italian, but if you can, check out Orchids.it

Oh Canada: Readers of this site know I am in Canada on occasion. So, I thought I ought to look at some canadian sites, of which there are many. Although a bit unfair, given that this is a food blog, I particularly like the newish site, Canada Eats. They raise the delightful question: what is Canadian food? They have a feature I like a lot -- a round up of food sections from around the country. In case you want to find more Canadian blogs, check out this site. And check out the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards; it lists things like Rick Mercer's blog

Just Say Anything: I came across this site when looking for blogs on Alberta politics. Here's why. But the site really is a pretty good read and claims to be North Dakota's most popular poltical blog.

Gender Politics: Ok, feminism, gender, lgbt and related blogs is what I mean. I am not sure what to make of Redneck Feminist as politics. The site focuses on feminist, free market, libertarianism. I know my taste in music definitely does not work with her Friday Rock Music days. But she's got some politics. Feminism, libertarianism, etc. And in cruising, I found a great article responding to recent media coverage of AIDS in black america at the blog blackfeminism.org. I love the look of Turnpike Feminist's site;and I need a bit of the younger perspective. Check it out.

Finally, one more foodie site, just because you can read it in a variety of languages: Cooking Diva. I am a terrifically uncosmopolitan person, but cooking helps me expand my horizons (though how one does that without appropriationism and a sort of yucky tourism factor is always a challenge). Check out Panama -- and expand your horizons too.

BlogDay2006
Canada
Feminist
Blog
North Dakota
Current Affairs
antiwar
Impeach
Impeach Bush
Orchids

Taste of the Region

On a recent blog crawl, I came across "York Staters" -- a collective blog site focusing on Upstate New York, broadly understood. For foodies, see especially the part of their site called "Tastes of the Region." What are uniquely Upstate tastes? Spiedies, salt potatoes, wings, grape pie and more!

Not All Links are Sausage Links

COMING SOON TO THIS SITE AND MANY, MANY MORE!

Blog Day is August 31. For more information, CLICK HERE. And watch this site for a Blog Day entry with links to . . . . well, who knows!

Everything is Political

Who knew that George Bush actually read (or at least took on vacation) Mark Kurlansky's book Salt? I liked the book -- thought it was a pretty good read, learned from it, and recommend it. It is one of those books on a single topic that opens out to the world. Meanwhile, though, if you want to know about Bush and the book, check out Book of the Day -- and move from there. It'll satisfy your need to procrastinate. Or, your need to link everything to the Evil Man -- Bush.

Bread Bread Bread

Dustin Cutler's bread bakery, Normal Bread, has opened in Geneva. Hurrah! We had samples of various breads earlier, but can now attest to wonderful bread available in the mornings at his Washington Street store. (You can get a cup of coffee too, I think.) Most recently, we tried sour dough olive bread. Let's just say it is gone and we bought it Saturday. This is a truly great bread. Lovely kalamata flavor. Organic flour. Nice balance of flavors. Nice texture. Cuts well. Works well with no butter, no olive oil, no nothing. Just eat it. Wow. We also tried cranberry rye bread. The tartness of the cranberries illumines the rye, which avoids the sweetness of many rye breads. Little explosions of redness in your mouth. I liked it a lot when I tried it in the bakery. I admit it: I bought some and brought it to my office where I am not so subtle in my efforts to ensure this bakery is highly successful. The other option was a 7 grain bread, warm from the oven. Each one priced reasonably -- and substantially more weighty than Wegman's pseudo-bakery breads. (and, okay, I admit it, I like Wegman's breads.) My point is: Dustin's bread is a very good value for your money and buying it means you can support local business at the same time. Rumor has it Madderlake will be serving Normal Bread. And, rumor also has it that on Saturdays Dustin will make something sweet. More danger even than all this bread?

Not only is the bread tasty, but the venue is wonderful. The light woods. The ovens. The people. Those oh so lovely smells. Go there. Buy bread. Eat it in slices. Make it into sandwiches. Try a bread pudding. Go back for another variety. And, let others know what you think right here, including whatever punning you are driven to my the very notion of normal bread, any fears of widespread normalcy that keep you up at night, your favorite day to eat normal bread, and/or . . . . . more.

Click here for an interview with Dustin from this summer.

Blog Watch -- Late August

Here are a few blogs to watch out for. Foodie and not, these are filled with things to spice up your day. And remember: Blog Day 2006 is August 31. Click here for information on Blog Day, 2006.

Gay News Blog -- updated daily -- brings news that the Archbishop of Canterbury has asked for a meeting with 6 bishops to discus global disagreements around homosexuality. And lots of other news! In case you want to choose amongst what some say are the top10 blogs devoted to LGBT issues, click here.

But wait, isn't this a food blog? What food blogs should I check out?

I love the food museum blog, partly because once in a while they have an entry on religion. I mean, who wouldn't giggle at Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich or learn from some of their other entries. Just the right mix of silly and serious. (For religion, click here.)

And get religion has a piece once in a while worth reading -- including one on a church that advocates marijuana.

Who could resist an article entitled "How I immanentized the culinary eschaton?" Go for it. Click here. Not really worth the read, was it? Alas. One of those cases where the title is better than the article (or the trailer is better than the film or the menu is better than the meal.)

Blogs. What are you gonna do? Read 'em and weep. Or laugh. Or go back to the kitchen and make . . . .

Obsessing on Single Topics. . . .

I like books with single topics -- though they always turn out to be about more than one thing. Some of my favorites (surprise, surprise) are about food, at least ostensibly.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kulansky is, not surprisingly, about, yes, salt. For those of us from upstate, we know salt is important --hence the salt city (it is Syracuse's nickname), salt potatoes, and there are major salt deposits near both Seneca and Cayuga lakes (hence the Watkins Glen refinery of US Salt and Cargill Inc.). On my shelf, I have sea salt from France, black and red salt (both coarse and fine) from Hawaii, Himalayan pink salt, and Hibiscus salt (which is a lovely purple-ish color). Not to mention my usual Morton's and some kosher salt in the pantry. Salt -- not just one thing -- from mines, from desalination plants, skimmed from the surface of brackish water. (I have only seem this in the Caribbean, but hey, it is a time honored way of getting salt.)

Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham is another like offering. Of course, we all know that curry is more than one thing -- despite its marketing in little bottles and big bags as "hot curry powder" or "curry powder" or. . . . red (or green or yellow) curry paste. This is a great book that reveals loads about the complex history of India (and its environs) -- across centuries -- and miles and miles of a huge geography. How did we end up with "curry" and its many meanings? (Who do we mean by we?) Read the book. I particularly like the chapter on the introduction of tea drinking to India. And, I learned an immense amount from the ways various cultures have influenced India, including the arrival of hot peppers of various degrees of heat via various circuitous routes (originating, of course, in the Western hemisphere). If you need more persuading, check out this review ages ago in the NY Times.

But what am I reading now? A much slower read, alas. Nathaniel's Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed History (also known as Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History) by Giles Milton is a semi-swashbuckling recounting of Dutch and British colonialism -- efforts to get to the "spiceries" via the Arctic, accounts of boats which set off and most died before arriving in the Banta Islands -- from scurvy and dysentery and. . . . of men killing each other. Accounts of small islands with monopolies on nutmeg -- selling for a penny what sold in London for 50 shillings. Stories of the Dutch and the Portuguese and the British -- and, less directly, the people who lived on these islands. Nutmeg, mace, cloves. Plague treatments, high class spices. I don't use nutmeg much -- though I love it on eggnog and of course in some baked goods. This book, unlike Salt and Curry isn't really about the food item in the title -- nutmeg. Though it does remind us (as do both the other books in somewhat more appetizing ways, which may not actually be for the better) of the entanglement of food and spices with the less desireable traits of humanity like colonialism and imperialism, capitalism through invasion and genocide, environmental destruction and war. Certainly, the book reminds us of the downside of certain forms of historically valued masculinity in the west. Not to mention, the global reach of history. I won't reveal the punchline of Milton's book -- but even nutmeg (and the spiceries) relates to the Finger Lakes (or at least New York).

So: single topics worthy of obsession. Food for thought?

Cucumber Kimchee

Rumor has it the only Kimchee at Wegmans in Geneva is labeled "mild." Kimchee, to my mind, is not supposed to be mild.

Enough already.

I made the Cucumber Kimchee from Simply Ming. Think bread and butter pickle fused with hot kimchee-ness. Tasty. Lovely smell. Warming taste. Think big bowl of cucumbers, onions, ginger, garlic, fish sauce, sugar, rice vinegar sitting somewhere in your house for 24 hours turning into kimchee. Think Mason jars.

I made 7 jars of the kimchee and have given two away so far. Here's my version of what Ming said to do:

1.At the farmer's market, buy 6 cucumbers, two cloves of garlic and 3 beautiful red onions. Buy organic. Buy local! (Remember later you need carrots and get them from elsewhere.)
2. Buy organic sugar and several big bottle of (unseasoned) rice vinegar (to augment what you have), some ginger.
3. Have on hand crushed red pepper and fish sauce, salt, etc.
4. Cut cukes in half lengthwise, seed them, and salt with lots of coarse salt. Let sit in collander for about 2 hours, and drain the water that comes out of them. Then cut them into 1/4 inch half moons. Dump into a bowl with about 1 cup or more of shredded carrot (which I did on the food processor).
5. While cukes are sitting for their two hours, hang out and make about 1/4 cup of ginger into matchsticks, slice thinly 10 cloves of garlic and halve the red onions and slice into thin half moons. (Ok, this recipe has lots of half moons.)
6. Towards endish of the two hours, put 2 cups sugar into 6 cups of rice vinegar in pot and bring to boil to dissolve sugar. Add items from #5 (ginger, garlic, onions) and bring back to simmer.
7. Dump the vinegar mixture into the cucumber/carrot mixture. Let cool to room temperature in your big bowl. Then cover the bowl in cling wrap (who invented that stuff. Pain in the neck, but effective.) and make a few small holes in the top. Ming says store for 24 hours in a cool dark place. I left it out overnight, then moved it around the house a few times, until maybe 36 hours later I finally put the contents into mason jars.

Ming also says it'll last two weeks or so refrigerated. We'll see!

Smells great. Tastes great. Easy. And impresses those you give it to!

Home Again, Home Again

There's nothing like cooking smells to make you feel like you have returned home. Or, as Laura Rebecca has it, to sell your home. Somehow cooking smells, for me, are part of what turns a house into a home, as sentimental as that sounds.

So, I bought a cookbook (for a mere $9.99 CDN) while in Medicine Hat. Not a Canadian one, not a fancy one, but a book called Simply Ming, by the chef who also did Blue Ginger and whose restaurant of the same name in Wellesley Massachusetts I finally visitied in 2006 while attending the HERS Management Institute. In fact, I went to the restaurant Blue Ginger with a group of women that included someone from Cornell's hotel school -- and thus met Ming Tsai himself. The foie gras shumai were great. And we read aloud a funny tale called Clueless George Goes to War by Pat Bagley (author, also, of a more recent Clueless George book called Clueless George is Watching You which also involves our favorite unelected buffoon and . . . the man.) Read both.

In any case, I bought Simply Ming --which has a very nice approach to East-West cooking that involves making some background basics that can be used to make cooking easier. I have tried one of the basics twice: Curry Ginger Oil and am about to make Cucumber Kimchee.

Curry Ginger Oil: Basically this involves mincing ginger (circa 1/2 cup) and cooking it in a substantial quantity of grapeseed oil (about a quart) for 10 minutes. Then you add the grapeseed oil with ginger to some curry powder (a cup) that you have toasted until smoking in a heavy saute pan (say 10 minutes). Once settled, you have curry ginger oil that will last a month or so in the refrigerator. I halved Ming's recipe when I made it since grapeseed oil seems to come in half quarts where I shop-- circa 500 ml. The recipe turns out to be pretty good (though it stains everything it touches yellow because of the turmeric, so be careful) and is very easy to make. Next time, I will try to make something, though, that does not depend on curry powder but uses my own combination of cumin, coriander, pepper, fennugreek seeds, etcetera.

So far, I have used the oil to make a variation on a zucchini/ chicken stir fry in Simply Ming. What I did was heat a few tablespoons of the oil, saute and set to the side cubes of organic turkey that I had seasoned with salt and pepper (about a pound), add a bit more oil and saute 1 1/2 white onions until soft, add 2 lovely organic zucchini that I had sliced sort of thinly (not large ones -- ones that actually taste like something) and then return the turkey to the pan, add a bit of chicken stock and voila. I served it with turmeric rice and some stir fried broccoli with thin strips of yellow pepper and lots of ginger. (The leftovers were great cold.)

Cucumber Kimchee here I come.

Meanwhile, the restaurant and cookbook are both great. Go Ming Tsai.

What do you make ahead to make cooking easier? Are there "condiments" that always grace your kitchen (even if you are someone who usually hates condiments, a la Because You Have to Eat? What are the smells of comfort and home for you?

Thus Ate Zarathustra

An airport gift which I finally got to and which lifted my spirit: the July 3rd New Yorker, complete with a story by Woody Allen entitled “Thus Ate Zarathustra.” Turns out Nietzche lives on in pop culture in more than the short stories of Jenny (my least favorite L word character). (Would the New Yorker refuse the “pop culture” label or have they recognized the shift in academic and cultural discourse?) Anyway, I have a vague memory of Jenny’s story title. Wasn’t it “Thus Spake Sarah Shuster” that she thought meant she was destined for literary greatness? More seriously, of course, in a recent book I reviewed entitled Theory for Religious Studies by William Deal and Timothy Beal, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Saussure appear as key “predecessors” influencing contemporary theorists in religious studies. And we all know that without Nietzsche, no postmodernism.

More importantly, the funny man, Woody Allen, reminds us that without food – well, where would we be? What would Nietzsche have eaten, he asks? His answers are pretty funny. And discussed already on various blogs. Read the article. Contemplate the Nietzsche Diet Book.

What about all those other theorists? Freud had his cookbook, complete with Bananas O, and such. And, our other favorites?

Too many years ago to recognize, I took a class with Charles Long in which we spent a semester on Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion. My paper was on vegetable symbolism. I am not a vegetarian, but maybe he’d order the Portobello mushroom sandwich with a side of soma?

Durkheim – would perhaps eat out at the Outback Steakhouse (given the Australian focus of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life)

Weber -- well, he was Lutheran. Does that mean he ate like one? Or, was his focus comparative? Or his search for the ideal typical sausage? (Book title: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sausage?)

Marx -- would he resist potato chips as the material equivalent of the opiate of the masses? What would the food of the revolution be? Would it be the fish caught by those of us who wish to fish? (See The German Ideology; and his views on commodity fetishism as well as the very influential Theses on Feuerbach's Menu).

Geertz -- would he always order wings, given his famous piece on the cockfight, or would he avoid chicken all together?

Jung – would he dream of a pizza with anchovies arranged in the form of a mandala? Or the archetypal meal? (See the apendix to Memories, Dreams and Reflections where Jung debats the ongoing significance of dreams of recipes and menus)

James – would his emphasis on varieties push him to frequent the smorgasboard? Or, as a restaurant reviewer, would he emphasize the “fruits not the roots?" Would he avoid parsnips, carrots, turnips and potatoes in favor of . . . . ?

If Zarathustra (and Nietzsche) ate thus, how about your favorites? What do you imagine your favorite theorists, authors, cultural figures ate/eat? What food books might they have written? restaurant might they pitch? snack might they obsess about?