Cooking With Ideas

Chit Chatting at the Chit Chat Cafe

Along 96, nearish to Rochester (well, ok, it is in Victor) there is a very cute little place called the Chit Chat Cafe. I have meant to stop there for years -- and finally was there for a work-related reason. It is as cute inside as it is outside, complete with tschotchkes everywhere. And the menu is swell -- breakfast in many versions. There is homemade bread -- and omelettes and pancakes of various sorts and french toast and really pretty much everything you can imagine. I had potao pancakes, which were light and lovely, with applesauce. And I had bacon, which I admit was odd because it was round. No, it was not canadian bacon, just some odd shape perhaps to make some sort of bacon bun. The coffee was only adequate and I drank way way too much. But, I woudl go there again. It's friendly, tasty, and who can resist its exterior?

Location: 164 West Main St. Victor, NY 14564
Phone: 585-742

Mcgee in Geneva!?!

On Sunday, October 14, the Finger Lakes Times made me happy -- briefly. Here's why -- and why that happiness lasted only a little bit. Alas, the FLT told me some good news -- but not soon enough and. . . If only. . . .

What's the news? Good news for foodie fans: Harold McGee -- yes, THE Harold Mcgee -- was, the FLT announced, coming to Geneva to "visit the [New York State Agricultural] station's apple breeding program, taste some pasteurized cider and tour the apple collection at the USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Resources Unit." (P.4A) McGee is even quoted as saying that his visit is, in part, to help "create a stronger demand among apple varieties." (p. 4A) Yep, he came on October 15. I never did find out if he did any public event at all. Alas. I'd have gone.

Who is Harold McGee? According to the FLT, he's also known as the "Curious Cook" and writes a monthly column for the NY Times on "science in cooking." That's not, though, why the name rang my bell. Rather, it was his amazing book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Best discussion of meat ever (even when I cannot remember what it said).

To visit him virtually, check out his site, here.

Or try NPR's interview (and related stories) at the time of the second edition of On Food and Cooking. Or more interviews.

College Cooking OR Duke Cooks

To quote the NY Times article "Too Cool for School," published on September 30, 2007,

College is a time of discovery for most students, but perhaps not of the culinary kind. There’s a reason that pizza joints flank campuses and that the Cereality restaurant chain — all cereal, all the time — now has four university locations.

To check out the Cereality chain, click here.

The article then features a current Duke student (Brian Zupon) who opened a restaurant in his dorm room. (Here in Geneva, we'd call it a residence hall, but hey, does language matter that much?) That the article comes complete with the phrase "molecular gastronomy" and a recipe for snapper with braised fennel and candied olives makes it clear, this is no pizza joint. In fact, it does not strike me as a joint at all. For the article itself, click here.

Is this a very different phenomenon from a cookbook which I pulled out of my pile of growing possibilities to read for this blog? The book is called On Campus Cookbook: For the Non-Kitchen Cook by Mollie Fitzgerald. Yep, a 1984 version of those cookbooks aimed at the new cook at college stuck without anyone else but food service or their own devices. First apartment, first cookbook kind of thing. In this case, it really is for those without kitchen, focusing on hot pots, blenders, and toaster ovens. (When was the microwave invented?) This book, of course, is most definitely not for anyone interested in molecular gastronomy. (When was that phrase invented? Who had heard of it in 1984?)

Yet, oddly, the article and book have much in common, despite technological and culinary changes. Here's the description of Mollie Fitzgerald from the back of the book

an undergraduate at Duke University with her own cable TV dorm-room cooking show. During the summer, she runs Tres Bonne, a catering business.

Duke and food. Of course, I would have known all this if I had bothered to read the alum magazine with an article on Zupn a while ago. Oh well. Duke is also well known for a "fat farm" -- not-so-politically-correct lingo for a set of practices bringing people together to diet. For information, click here. In fact, many years ago I lived in a residence hall (aka dorm) which also served Duke diet food to celebrities of various sorts. And that first summer after college when we are all traumatized by the move tothe "real world" (adroitly avoided by heading for graduate school) I made some money being a jane-of-all-trades at one of Duke's diet camp competitors in Durham. But then again, I ate pepperoni lasagna when I was in college.

These articles -- and books -- offer much better. Well, not what I would eat today in the case of the book, but . . . . I do intend to try the snapper recipe. And Duke students are not alone in their culinary commitments. When I went to amazon.com and put "college" and "cookbook" in their search engine I came up with loads of this genre. They have dandy titles like:

The Starving Students' Cookbook by Dede Hall

The (Reluctant, Nervous, Lazy, Broke, Busy, Confused) Collkege Student's Cookbook by Joshua N.Lambert and Debby Lee

Cooking Outside the Pizza Box by Jean Patterson and Danea Campbell

and even, the very first thing that came up on my search:

The Healthy College Cook Book by Alexandra Nimetz, Jason Stanley, and Emeline Starr

College. More than mystery meat these days. Duke. More than lacrosse.

Duke

Hip Replacement?

In the envelope with Cooking with Shelburne Farms was a second book. It's title? Hip Tastes. Subtitle? The Fresh Guide to Wine Education. The tone? Chatty, young, and, I admit it, a bit irritating. Stylish? Maybe it is the young thing. The information hides behind the narrator's post-valley girl chatty pose. She's author/narrator Courtney Cochran, described on the back of the book as "a certified sommelier and founder of Your Personal Sommelier and HIP TASTES Events in San Francisco." Despite the chattiness, yes, there is useful information here, particularly if you are clueless and want to learn something. But there are tidbits even for this geezer who knows a little about wine. Like her web site, the book has a set of useful resources. In the book these are the appendices; but hey, use this link instead to get to some of them more directly. And, formore up-to-date things, check out her blog here. Here are a few:

*If you are interested in organic wines, check our www.organicconsumers.org (or see her pages 5-6)

*Or, if the levels of sweetness of German wines have always puzzled you -- she defines Kabinett; Spatlese; Auslese; Beerenauslese; eiswein; and trockenbeerenauslese. (See her page 49)

*Wine matches for pizza (her page 145)

*And for a great discussion of those obfuscatory wine ratings systems, check out page 231

Having said this, there is absolutely nothing about Finger Lakes wines in this book. So: if you're going local, this is not the place to begin. Try Finger Lakes Weekend Wino instead. And if you're hip, check out Courtney Cochran's views.

Foodie Rumors

There have been rumors about a new coffee place in Geneva. Not the Coffee Shop on Exchange Street (which is, by the way, swell. I really like the cookies -- and the Caramel De-Lite). Not that wonderful new addition. A new one. It's name is, I think, Irene's and it is in the Plaza across from Wegman's. Rumor has it there might be jazz? And I just saw on Finger Lakes 1 that it has opened. For discussion of the rumor click here. If you've tried it, leave a comment!

A New Link

The old metaphor was that things that reproduced rapidly reproduced like bunnies. Today, I think the metaphor would have to be blogs; here, there, and everywhere. We're here, we're queer, we're everywhere has become we're here, we blog, we're everywhere. Blogs seem to reproduce like bunnies.

Some of this is good. And today, I direct your attention to a newly installed link to a blog I just discovered on diners in rochester and beyond -- Dinermite. Check it out. The link appears under "Geneva-Related Blogs."

Surprises Come in the Mail OR Meeting Shelburne Farms

Writing a blog has odd results. For the most part, these are lovely ones. For instance, I have begun receiving emails addressed to "Food Mavens." Yep, mavens. And, as a result, something even better has started to happen. I have begun receiving books in the mail. (I even found one in my mail box at work from a colleague. How wonderful.) Books about food. It's heaven, especially since I live in a town with limited bookstores to trawl for books I think of as junk food, or even wholesome reads and moments of stress relief. I know, I know. Emails addressed to "Food Mavens" are actually marketing ploys. But still. One takes what one can get. And in this case, it is books.

One of the books which arrived on my doorstep, a direct result of the "Dear Food Mavens" email, was Cooking with Shelburne Farms: Food and Stories from Vermont. The book is by Melissa Pasanen with Rick Gencarelli. I have been reading it every night since its arrival. It has two to three page essays about topics like hunting and raising pigs and "sugaring off." It has lovely pictures (though they are unecessary and sometimes I wonder why people feel obliged to put little groupings of pictures of their dishes all done in color and special paper. Yes, I know sometimes it is great to see what something should look like, but I don't think this explains all that extra cost to the publisher. And I also know there is a genre called "food pornography." That doesn't seem to explain all of this either. Oh well.) Anyway, the book also has recipes -- arranged around major food items produced at Shelburne Farms. It's a swell book, and I will even reveal, eventually, the recipe I intend to try -- but first, some ruminations.

Let me begin by saying that until this book showed up on my doorstep, I had never heard of Shelburne Farms. I should have known of it, perhaps, but I did not. So the first thing I learned from this book -- and from various web searches in the course of working on this entry -- was that Shelburne Farms is a big deal. Yes, it is a 1400 acre farm with a conservation ethic that engages in both education and food production. It has been written about in terms of the Gilded Age in Vermont and comfort and opulence Vanderbilt-style. Landscaped by the chap whose name we most often associate with Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, started by a William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb as a model agricultural site in 1886, and transformed into an educational not-for-profit in 1972, Shelburne Farms offers classes, runs an inn, makes and sells cheese from beautiful cows, and much much more. Now they have a cookbook. And wow, does Shelburne Farms have an interesting history, reminding us that all this attention to food, to local, to stewardship and conservation, is a return rather than an innovation.

But, what about the cookbook itself? Cooking with Shelburne Farms is one of those cookbooks which is organized around various types of foods rather than various stages in a menu. So, rather than appetizers, salads, soups, entrees, desserts, for example, this book joins the trend of being ingredient oriented. This is an interesting trend which merits some reflection. I am not sure what it means, but it is not quite as odd as Cooking with Shelburne Farms implies; Starting with Ingredients is both the title of another book which does this -- and a way of organizing pantries and cookbooks that has been around for a while.

In this case, the book moves among key ingredients produced at (or near) Shelburne Farms. These are: Milk and cheese (both savory and sweet dishes), maples (again, both savory and sweet dishes), early and summer greens, wild mushrooms, game and fish, pork, root-cellar vegetables, and apples. Each section features a few stories -- and some recipes. Yes, I know that Vermont is not in the Finger Lakes. But the book is still an opportunity to cook locally. We have, for example, terrific lamb around here -- and so I intend to make the recipe from this cookbook for bolognese sauce using ground lamb and fennel. Yep, that sauce I froze will emerge not just as the swell quick fix for nights I arrive home exhausted, but also as the basis for new experimentation thanks to Cooking with Shelburne Farms. And, as Finger Lakers, we all know that apples are just right now -- seasonally and locally. Crunchy and beautiful. So, apple recipes will work too.

For lamb, I recommend Seneca Castle Lamb and Gardens, often available at the Geneva Farmer's Market and the Canandaigua Farmer's Market. Run by Steven and Deborah Dresser, they are located at 2782 Seneca Castle- Orleans Road, Clifton Springs, NY. Phone: 585-526-6549. Best lamb I have ever eaten.

Julia Child Honored

Julia Child, is, alas, gone, despite her continuing presence in our lives in the form of cookbooks, and various versions of her television shows. (For the latter, click here.) Despite even Julie and Julia -- a media spash when Julie Powell wrote about cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

This weekend, though, Julia Child will be honored by the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, NY. Seneca Falls is a great place -- good coffee, great stores like Women Made Products, a national park which honors women's rights (and this despite the fact that it is wildly out of date and needs more congressional money directed to it), and the Hall, which annually honors women leaders from various fields, living and dead. One wishes Julia had been honored before her death. But still. . . . instead, the Hall honors Julia Child this weekend. In this, Child joins a pretty darn impressive list of women --some of whose names we all know and some less familiar. Women who have changed our lives and our world.

And, for those of us looking for annual foodie holidays (can we take it off from work?) Smith College holds Julia Child Day annually.

For the press release about the honoring of Julia Child at the Hall of Fame, click here. And, if you can, head to Seneca Falls and remind yourself of women's resilience.