Follow the Farm

I was at the New Haven farmer's market today and bought potatoes for dinner tomorrow night from Stone Gardens Farm in Shelton. In season, they have great peppers, corn and other vegies. They also raise chickens and beef. I still haven't tried one of their birds (pricey), but will eventually.

The guy manning the booth mentioned that the farm now has a Facebook page and plans to post pictures throughout the growing season documenting the progress of its crops. It's pretty cool. A great way to meet your food and the people who produce it.

Stone Gardens is a CSA farm. No, not the Confederate States of America. They don't shovel manure about the Confederacy being about "freedom" and "state's rights" while leaving out that pesky little old slavery thing (Virginia and Mississippi governors please take note).

CSA is "community supported agriculture." Consumers buy shares in a farm and receive a weekly supply of produce. They get local, seasaonal food, and the farmer gets a guaranteed cash flow. The drawbacks: You share in the risk as well as the reward. If it's a bad year, you're not going to get as much. And you have to be prepared to eat seasonally. That means lots of greens early in the season and at other times perhaps more of certain things than you like or can eat.

But of course this is the way food used to be, even as recently as my childhood. Asparagus, for example, used to be in the stores a week or two instead of year round. A few things, like cherries, are still like that. The upside is that you are eating foods at the peak of their nutritional value and flavor. To really get full value, you probably need to learn to pickle and perhaps even can, which of course used to be common. My Iowa grandmother was constantly canning.

The Hartford Courant did a great piece last week about the explosion of CSAs in Connecticut.

Could everyone eat like this? Probably not. But the more they do the better. The benefits are huge, everything from a better diet to preserving agricultural land to making non-industrial, local farming profitable to reconnecting people with the process of producing food.

That said, it is a commitment and I haven't taken the plunge yet. Maybe next year.

Limeade to the Rescue

I was out of lemonade this morning. Lately, I've been breaking down and buying a Diet Coke for lunch when I run out of homemade lemonade or oolong tea (I know, Eleanor, I know).

Then I recalled that I had three limes left over from the Ruth Reichl Asian stir fry I made last weekend. Why not make limeade?

Unfortunately, two of my three limes were hard as stones and produced little juice. I still managed to coax out a quarter cup. I added about a quarter cup of syrup and a cup of water. The result was tart and refreshing.

Take that Coca-Cola.

Fight the Power, Cook at Home: On a different subject, here is a link to a great article by chef and food critic Micheal Ruhlman. His message: Cooking with crappy products, like powdered whatchamacallit, is better than not cooking at all.

I especially like his point about giant food companies discouraging people from cooking. It's too hard. You have no time. Untrue, he rightly says.

Want to hit back at corporate America? Cook your own meals. There's nothing that Big Food fears more.

Ja to Lefsa

My wife and daughter took a trip to eastern Connecticut this week (school vacation) and stopped at the Scandinavian store in Mystic where she bought one of her favorite foods: Lefsa (also spelled "Lefse").

It's simple stuff, basically a Norwegian potato and flour flat bread. She prefers the hard tack variety pictured above that you reconstitute by dampening and wrapping in a towel until it softens. You then add a filling -- butter, sugar, Cinnamon, jam, maple syrup are all good -- roll it up, cut it into rounds and it's time to eat.

I never ate -- let alone heard of -- lefsa until I met my wife. It's delicious, a simple snack or desert. My daughter also likes it.

For some, lefsa is more than just a food. It's a way of life. Below is a book, "The Last Word on Lefse," that mother-in-law lent me.


It includes recipes, pictures of specialized lefse-making equipment such as beveled rolling pins, the story of the world's largest lefse and other lefse lore. It even has songs with titles like "Oh Ya You Betcha." Sarah Palin ought to love that one. Sung to the melody of "Deep in the Heart of Texas," here's the lyrics:

The lefse's round with spots of brown
Oh yah you betcha, uff da
The lutefisk is such a risk
Oh yah you betcha, uff da
The pickled herring is so daring
Oh yah you betcha, uff da
My belly hurts from all those burps
Oh yah you betcha, uff da

How can you not love something that inspires lyrics like that?

McItalys, McArabias and Shrimp Burgers

I ran across this January Mark Bittman post on the McItaly, McDonald's lame attempt to tailor a sandwich to the Italian palate. What makes it Italian? Why the artichoke spread and Asigao cheese.

The post led me to another page featuring dozens of other McDonald's country-specific products. There's the Asian ebi (shrimp) burger:


Malaysia's "Double Prosperity Burger":


and the Saudi Arabia's McArabia:


I have confess, this one doesn' t look so bad, although that meat looks awful slimy. One hundred lashes if you don't love it.

I confess a grudging admiration for McDonald's imagination and energy in subverting and dumbing down local food traditions. I'm Lov'n it!

Huff Post Goes Foodie

The Big Bang that is the Huffington Post (It never stops expanding) has launched a food page. I browsed it yesterday and came away impressed. There are posts about KFC's new demon "chicken-wich," the Double Down, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and an interview with "The Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan. An excellent start.

It's not surprising that the Huff Post would add food to its ever expanding subject pages. Food in America is more than just sustenance. What has happened to our diets, to our food supply is one of the most shining examples of all that's gone wrong with our country. Instead of eating what we really like, instead making our own choices, we are drowning in corporate marketing and industrialized food. As in so many things, change will only come to our food system when corporate power is tamed and individual choice and will are restored.

Enough preaching for one day.

Sriracha!

I made a quasi-Thai stir fry last night from Ruth Reichl's recent memoir "Garlic and Sapphires." My wife read the book (I'm next) and suggested I make the recipe on page 70. It was excellent.

The recipe recommended adding a dash or more of Sriracha hot sauce at the end. Anyone who's been to a fair number of Asian restaurants has seen it on tables with salt, pepper and other condiments. It's the red stuff in the plastic squirt bottle with the roaster on the front, sort of an Asian hot ketchup.

I'd never tried it, although I love the bottle's design and melange of languages (Vietnamese, Chinese, English).

I'm not a huge chili head, but I decided to give it a try. It was outstanding, really bringing the somewhat vinegary dish together, a very nice balance of hot and sweet.

So if you like a little heat, the next time you see Sriracha on the table, put a squirt or two on your food. Really, really good.

Unthink

Pictured above is the Double Down, KFC's new sandwich. It consists of two deep-fried chicken breasts, cheese, two bacon strips and sauce. That's right. A breadless sandwich.

I know this sounds like a joke (I honestly thought it was when Saturday Night Live mentioned it last night), but I swear to God, it's true. Here's an article in which a Kentucky Fried Chicken marketing executive touts this bunless wonder as "legendary."

So how do you get people to eat something that's so obviously bad for them? You make a commercial that tells you to "unthink." I'm not making this up. Check out the ad. The unspoken message is pretty clear. Yea, this thing is a coronary train wreck. You know it. I know it. But you need to "unthink."

Maybe for the next commercial they could have James Brown singing from the grave only change the lyrics to "Say it loud! I'm ignorant and I'm proud!"

YEAAA!

But what to do with all those extra buns? Donate them to the homeless, according to the KFC press release. So next time you see a homeless person with matted hair and a 1970s snorkel coat chewing on a soft fast food bun, thank KFC. And thank you for choosing the Double Down.

Double down is the perfect name for this monstrosity. That's precisely what Kentucky Fried Chicken is doing, doubling down on obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Let them eat dreck.