Apocalypse Now Dinner

It was the Ride of the Valkyrie earlier this week, you know, the music they played when Col. Kilgore destroyed the village in "Apocalypse Now."

I had 30 minutes to prepare dinner and nothing defrosted. I did have chicken breasts that I'd poached the day before. I've made a recipe with poached chicken breasts, but didn't have most of the ingredients.

It was time to innovate. I felt like a contestant on Food Network's "Chopped."

I put on some rice (21 minutes) and cut broccoli crowns. I set the broccoli to steam for four minutes, about half our usual cooking time (my wife and daughter like broccoli very soft). I then julienned carrots and a red pepper. As I did so, I heated about two tablespoons of canola oil in my big, all-purpose pan.

As the pan heated, I measured about about a quarter cup of chicken broth, a tablespoon of Chinese cooking wine (dry sherry works as well) and a tablespoon of oyster sauce. I then sliced the chicken breasts into thin, approximate one inch squares.

When the pan was very hot, I dumped in all the vegetables. I stir-fried for about four minutes. The broccoli soften too much and started shedding its tops, so I couldn't stir-fry long enough to get a deep char on the vegies.

Once the vegies were soft and a little blackened, I dumped in the liquids, brought to a boil and added the chicken. I stir-fried about a minute, added salt and pepper and served.

Not the best or worst dish I've ever made. All in all, pretty good.

If I did it again, I'd steam the broccoli for a shorter period, maybe two minutes, so I could get vegetables blacker and perhaps add some sliced or minced garlic to the vegetables.

Requiem for a Friend

I found out about a week ago that Rick Lewis, the man who taught me more about wine than anyone I've known, died in March.

Rick was an amiable South African chemist who ran the Madison Wine Shop in Madison, Ct. Every Saturday, he held court at the back of his store, a huge grin across his face and as many as a dozen bottles of wine open before him ready for tasting. His one rule, an indeed a good one, was that you had to try everything.

What I loved about Rick was his lack of pretension. He firmly believed that a good wine could be had for $15 or less. He wasn't your stereotypical wine snob, looking down his nose at those who lacked his knowledge and expertise. He was the opposite, always eager to educate, always joyful to mint a new oenophile.

My wife and I loved his Rick's Picks newsletter, which was chock-o-blocked with unusual and interesting varieties. He introduced us to Argentine Malbecs, New Zealand whites, French Roses and Austrian dessert wines.

Here is one of the first wines we sampled at a Rick's tasting and still love:



And it's only $7.99, a steal. A little fizzy, it goes great with spicy food. I recall Rick recounting how he drank it for the first time with a spicy meal in Portuguese East Africa, today Mozambique, in about 1946. The label had not changed since, he said.

I will miss Rick tremendously. Here's to you Rick. If there's an afterlife, I hope you get to spend it tasting wine.

Upton Sinclair, Eco-Terrorist

I'll never forget the putrid filth portrayed in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." Even 30-plus years after reading the book, I recall the description of a digit (or was it a limb?) going into the meat grinder and coming out as sausage.

Thank God this is all in the past, I thought when I read the book in high school in the 1970s.

Or not. The Jungle is making a comeback. Eggs that make you sick, hamburger made of pink slime, chicken unfit for human consumption, we read about it every day. If some state legislators have their way, we won't read about it any more. And anyone who exposes those conditions will be arrested and branded a criminal.

The New York Times today reports in an editorial that lawmakers in several agricultural states want to outlaw undercover video of abusive and unsanitary farm practices. Some have even gone so far as to call those who make such videos "eco-terrorists."

So if we know the truth about factory farming, the terrorists win.

I mean really. Is this what we've come to? Do we want to eviscerate the First Amendment to protect agribusinesses' right to poison us? As the editorial rightly points out, the only purpose of these bills is hide production of putrid and unwholesome food.

I guess Upton Sinclair had it all wrong. He was really just an eco-terrorist. Creation of FDA, laws prohibiting adulterated food, government inspections of meat packing plants, all bad ideas.

I'm not sure what to say. Is this really what where we want to go? Make ourselves sick to enrich a tiny group of agribusiness executives?

Sometimes I think we've gone insane.

Wealthy Memories

My parents came for dinner last weekend, and the discussion turned to Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma." I have blogged about this hugely important book before. I find the book especially interesting because my mother is from the part of Iowa Pollan profiles in the first section. She grew up during the 1930s and 1940s on a small, mostly subsistence farm (My grandfather was plumber who owned about 5 acres and periodically farmed another 80 or so he rented).

Pollan contrasted today's monoculture of corn and soybeans with the diversity of my mother's era when Iowa farms grew all sorts of fruits and vegetables and kept a menagerie of farm animals. After describing Pollan's book, I quizzed my mother on what the fruit our family grew when she was a child.

Four varieties of apples, she said. The only type she could remember were Wealthy, which she called a good eating apple. The Internet tells me that Wealthy apples were bred in the 19th century by the famous apple breeder Peter Gideon to survive Minnesota's harsh climate. I'm very curious if they still widely available in Iowa and Minnesota, but came up empty which leads me to suspect they rare today.

Then there were strawberries, huckleberries and currants. My mother didn't much care for the huckleberries, which I have never eaten. All this on five acres where they also grew corn, beans and had a cow, geese, chickens and pigs.

Today, it's all gone. Iowa farms are industrial operations that grow corn, soybeans and hogs for agribusiness. In the space of my mother's lifetime, our agricultural system has been transformed beyond recognition.

Champagne Puttanesca

I was making a puttanesca sauce last week when I suddenly realized I had no white wine, a key ingredient. The wine adds tang, balancing out the bite and saltiness of anchovies.

Crisis. What can I replace it with? I looked at my various vinegars (we're adding "acid" as they love to say on Food Network), but they were all too powerful.

I opened the fridge and perused. My eyes fell on a bottle of cheap Champagne that had been in there since God knows when. If it's not too sweet, it'll work, I thought. I took out the bottle, opened it and tasted: nice and dry.

I dumped it into the cooked-down onions, anchovies and garlic, brought to a boil and added the hand-crushed tomatoes. It worked brilliantly, even adding an extra tang to the sauce.

Not something I'd recommend doing with Moet, but it worked.

A Salty Tale

"Lightly Salted" said the package of Roll Gold pretzels. Great. Always a good idea to cut down on salt, even though it's not a problem for me. So I tried them, and they did indeed taste less salty.

A few weeks later, the store was out of those pretzels. I began reading labels to find a replacement and discovered that Synder's Old Tyme had almost half the salt per serving as the "Lightly Salted" Roll Golds, 5 versus 9 percent of the daily recommendation.

What's up with that?

A few weeks later, the "Lightly Salted" Roll Golds were back in the store so I compared labels. The Roll Gold "Lightly Salted" have 9 percent of the daily recommended salt intake per 28 grams and the Synder's Old Tyme 5 percent per 30 grams. So the "regular" Old Tyme pretzels have about half the sodium per serving as the "lightly salted" Roll Gold.

Once again, your federal government working hand in glove with Big Food to fool you.

From now on, I'll be reading food labels with more than a grain of salt.

23 Percent

That's how much the average American's calorie intake has increased since 1970, according to this fascinating graphic. No wonder we're blowing up like zeppelins. Let's hope we don't all end up like the Graf Zeppelin and blow up over New Jersey.

You can play with a moving bar on the graphic showing what parts of the American diet have increased and decreased over time. The biggest increases: sugar and fat. No surprise there.

I saw a photo not along ago from the early 1950s of a housewife surrounded by the groceries she purchased in a year. What a contrast if we did that today. Instead of eggs, flour, sugar, vegies and meat, she would be encased in fast food, pizzas, frozen dinners, and all manner of processed snacks, desserts, you name it.

A revolution brought to you by Big Food.