The Omnivore's 100

From the Boston Globe via Very Good Taste, a food meme.

I know everyone did this forever ago, but I dropped off the face of the blog-earth, and still think this is interesting enough to post. Here are the instructions:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears, or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Cooking a really freakin' big chicken, Day 1

Step 1. Get your hands on a really freakin' big chicken. This is where I got mine, at my friendly neighborhood farm. Check this baby out. It's over 7.5 pounds!

That's...that's huge, people. Don't believe me? Well, let's move on to step two.

Step 2. Find a pot big enough to hold said chicken. The one I have is a 20 quart I had to borrow from my brother since my largest pot was no where near large enough. Behold, the chicken next to the pot.

See? I wasn't lying. This is serious poultry!

Step 3. Make a brine (I used one cup of salt) and soak the chicken inside.

Step 4. Place pot and chicken inside fridge to thaw. Now, I'm not planning on cooking this chicken until Sunday, and for those of you paying attention at home, it's Wednesday. Really freakin' big chickens take a loong time to thaw.

I have two concerns about this chicken in my fridge. First, it's taking up a significant fraction of my available space:

And second, I'm worried that I'll open up my fridge tomorrow morning and chicken-y salt water will come pouring out because that poor shelf can't bear the weight of the pot. How much does 20 quarts of water and a really freakin' big chicken weigh? A bit over 49 pounds, people. Trust me, I'm a chemist. I did the volume-to-weight conversion. So, do we think this shelf can hold it? Should I move the pot over to the other side where the drawer is? Send in your suggestions.

BAD PIE

A while ago I spoke to you all about Good Pie, instructed you in how to recognize it and divulged to you the secrets to eating it properly. I hope you have taken this advice to heart.

I write you today with a heavy heart for I have to discuss Bad Pie. Now you and I both know that in an ideal world there would be no Bad Pie (world peace, an end to poverty, fine, but seriously -- can you imagine a world with only Good Pie? It sends chills down my spine). But this is no ideal world and there are people out there putting themselves in Positions of Power as Pie Distributors who are letting you all down.

You see, there's a new Pie Bakery (this is the actual name of the shop) in town that my family tried out last night. When I got to the shop to buy a few pieces to take to dinner with me, my options were key lime pie (fine) and three choices of cream pie. That's all. Cream pie is...well, it's OK if there are other options as well, but honestly, I'm wary of a pie shop that seems to only be offering slices of cream pie. What are they trying to hide under all of that custard and whipped cream? (I am obligated to mention that this bakery did make their own whipped cream. At least some things are sacred.) I'll tell you what they were hiding: their crust.

Good pie crust is delicate and flaky, it almost dissolves in your mouth. Good Crust is difficult to work with. Apparently these pastry chefs couldn't be bothered and added BAKING POWDER to their dough to give it the appearance of flakiness, but really, it just ended up tasting like a stale cracker. Whywhywhywhywhy would they do that?! Remember, people, a stale cracker won't form that luxurious layer of slightly under-done filling-flavored goo that you're supposed to scrape off in Step 5 of your pie eating.

I do have to say there is one high point with this new bakery: the "History of Pie" blurb on the back of their takeout menu. And I quote:

"Pie has been around since the ancient Egyptians. The first pies were made by early Romans who may have learned about it through the Greeks. ."

Yes, there really is two-thirds of an ellipses on the printed document. I appreciate the proprietors covering their butts with the ancient civilizations, but why stop with the Egyptians, Romans and Greeks? How about the Akkadians or Babylonians? We could also -- gasp! -- venture onto other continental land masses! I wonder if any Ancient South American civilizations had pie. Better mention them too, just to be sure.

Thanksgivnukkah Extravaganz[nukk]a[h] 2007

I'm sitting here in my warm apartment listening to the wintry mix pelting my windows, and I'm thinking that sometime in the next couple of hours I'm going to have to go outside and shovel just to get the snow up before the freezing rain really starts up in earnest. This is the only thing keeping me from curling up on my couch under a blanket with a nice, big mug of tea steaming next to me; I don't want to get too comfortable too soon or I won't be able to drag myself outside in a little while. It is beautiful outside, though, white and stormy and there's no one out there and wouldn't today be perfect if I didn't have to shovel?

A car just drove by my house with an engine that sounded like horses hooves clopping on a cobblestone street. Weird.

But I didn't begin this post to write about the glorious winter weather we've been missing for the past few years here in New England. No, I wanted to post about the birth of what I hope to be a new Holiday Season tradition: Thanksgivnukkah. You see, for the past several years my family has had Thanksgiving with this one particular other family, very close friends of ours, but since my family went elsewhere this year and part of their family went elsewhere this year, we decided that we needed to hold an after-the-fact Thanksgiving feast, and while we were at it why not celebrate Hanukkah after the fact as well? The Thanksginukkah Extravaganza of 2007 was born.

Just to give you a sense of what you're dealing with, Thanksgivings with this family have always been a day-long event. Everyone gathers at about noon to begin preparing the meal and the fixings, and this is when the snacking and the drinking also begin. Five hours of eating and drinking later, we're ready to begin the actually Thanksgiving meal. Etc. Etc.

Seeing as we were celebrating Thanksgivnukkah and not Thanksgiving, the menu may appear to be missing a few things, but I assure you it was quite sufficient:

• Fresh smoked turkey (a particular specialty of this family, so glorious, so tasty; the stuff dreams are made of)
• Latkes
• Applesauce (made by yours truly)
  
• Stollen
• Salad (how did something health get in there?)
• Cranberry sauce
• Donuts
• Pumpkin pie
• Pecan pie

Everyone was especially excited about my brother's donuts, but something went tragically wrong with this little guy:

All he wanted was to be a delicious donut

For whatever reason, the dough didn't rise and as a result didn't cook through during frying. Let's take a moment to mourn.

RIP. You looked delicious, but weren't cooked through.

The food was followed by a rousing game of Dictionary (my favorite new word: krukolibidinous. I will use it every chance I get) and a showing of The Sting. Could the day have been any more perfect?

The aftermath

In the end, the journey to Buffalo was easier than I had thought. Too easy. There was no rush hour traffic going to the airport, we had no trouble finding parking, and we sailed through security. It was eerie, to say the least. See? This is what happens when you obsess about how painful something will be: it isn't painful. Gotta love it.

My trip to Buffalo also served as a last-ditch effort to get through Watership Down, by Richard Adams. My friend, T, lent me this book about three years ago as it was one of her favorites growing up, but I couldn't get past the first ten pages. Well, folks, after two days and three nights, I'm only on page 175. For a person who routinely reads several books per weekend, this is an extremely slow pace.

So why the trouble? I think maybe because the plot (or what there is of one) hasn't grabbed me. Sure, there are a group of rabbits who leave a warren they deem unsafe to start a new one elsewhere. And there's danger. And they have adventures. But what's the story? I was discussing this with a high school friend of mine over brunch today, and he said, "This sounds like one of those books that's really an allegory. I bet the book is really about evil WWII-era companies. I'm not saying that for any reason, it's just what I think." Well, according to Wikipedia, he's scarily close: Watership Down is apparently about "fascism and appeasement." I'm fairly certain I hadn't reached the F&A storyline yet, but it isn't quite enough to make me read on. It isn't often that I can't bulldoze my way through a book, even if I'm not enjoying it. But I think three years is long enough to try, especially considering the teetering stack of books I have here next to me, waiting to be loved. And anyway, my book-as-allegory muscle has atrophied.

New camera edition

How I love you, November, with your cool, crisp days and your extra hour of sleep! To celebrate, I headed out this morning to get myself a special breakfast treat at my favorite local bakery, Bread and Chocolate:

Now doesn't that look delicious? Especially since it was taken on my new camera, to be referred to hereafter as The Best Birthday Present Ever. I've been having a great time getting myself acquainted with all of TBBPE's features and exploring the limits of its 12x optical zoom.

This afternoon I'm going to see my favorite opera, La Boheme, with my family, and will finally have the opportunity to use the opera glasses I inherited from my grandmother. They were not originally hers, but as she had been the recipient of almost all of her family's things, I'm not sure who they belonged to originally. They are beautifully inlaid with mother of pearl, and from my pokings-around on the internets, it appears that they date back to sometime in the second half of the 19th century and are French.

I'll let you all know it goes! This will be my first time going to the opera State-side, so I'm excited to finally be able to read an understand the subtitles accompanying the performance (the majority of my other opera experiences were in German and Czech speaking countries).

First (and last?) peach pie of the season

This is the glory that awaits me after dinner tonight. Behold, the before:

Notice how lovingly the lattice crust has been woven together, full of tasty potential! And the after picture:

I can't wait! And now you know how it will be eaten.

Cookbooks

Just a quick post on two cookbooks that focus on making sound, ethical choices when you're standing in line to buy meat and fish wherever it is you buy them:

• One Fish, Two Fish, Crawfish, Bluefish: The Smithsonian Sustainable Seafood Cookbook
  
• The River Cottage Meat Book

Happy eating!

Food for thought

The New York Times has an eye-opening Op-Ed today about "food miles," or the distance a piece of food travels to reach your plate, be it beef, avocados or zucchini. With eating locally becoming all the rage for environmentally conscious folk, it's important to keep in mind that the energy cost of a given food is more than the sum of it's plane rides; one must consider the energy that goes into producing the food as well. How much fertilizer did that plant need to grow? Did the tomato need to be kept in a greenhouse, or did it grow outside?

I'm loving how much people have started thinking about their food, but clearly there's more work to be done. Is there some way to label fruits, vegetables and meats to give an indication of the amount of energy required to produce the food, taking all of these factors into account? Some mass database that will spit the number out for each food item at a given grocery store? Such a database would certainly require the cooperation of the farmers, but maybe these farmers will be more and more willing to participate as people's awareness continues to grow.

In a name

Many of you already know where I got the name for my blog, but for the rest of you...

This past winter I finally took E's suggestion and read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. This book is one of a small number of (non-fiction) books to change the way I think about the world. Pollan traces the food we eat back to the industrial farms it comes from and opens our eyes to what it is we're really consuming. He discusses the history of agribusiness, explains how corn has come to be in almost every processed food we buy in the grocery store, describes the life of a cow that is being raised to provide meat, and tells the disturbing tale of where our eggs come from. He isn't promoting stores like Whole Foods, rather, he is encouraging us to reaquaint ourselves with the food we put in our bodies and, if at all possible, to develop a relationship with the farmer who grows our fruits and vegetables.

Pollan's thesis made so much sense to me, but what could I do about it? I don't live in California or in another state or country with a long growing season. I live in a heavily populated state where one city flows into another. Where was I supposed to find these farmers? Where was I supposed to find grass fed beef? Or chickens that were free to roam and peck and eat grubs and grass?

It took a lot of work, but I did finally find a local farm to provide me with these things, and this past Saturday I drove the hour and a half to pick up my broilers. The farmer had offered to get them to me a different way, but I was interested in visiting the farm; I wanted to see the chickens and the cows for myself. Well, here is one of my future meals:

And another:

I'm thrilled that I've been able to track down a farmer who raises my food humanely. I know my chickens aren't packed a dozen into a tiny cage, I know the hens who lay my eggs aren't tortured to do so, I know my cows aren't standing knee deep in excrement. I know they don't need to be shot up with antibiotics.

I'm sorry this post has been a bit preachy, but please, read The Omnivore's Dilemma when you have the chance, or another book like it, and educate yourselves so you can make informed decisions at the grocery store.

How to eat pie

You all may *think* you know how to eat pie. "Bibliophile," you'll say, "there's really nothing to it. You just take one bite, and then another, and then another, until there's nothing left on your plate!" "Ha!" I'll say. "This show's you really know nothing about how to eat pie."

No worries, I'm here to educate you.

Step 1: Get your hands on some really good pie. This is not as easy as you may think. I would have to say that 99.9% of the pie out there is what I would classify as Bad Pie. Bad Pie has many guises. The filling may be too sweet, the crust not delicate and flaky enough...Let's face it: Good Pie is not easy to make. I suggest you stay away from the store bought stuff (there's rarely anything good there), and either find a friend or family member who has real Pie Making Talent or practice yourself. I'm lucky enough to have a family member who falls into the former category, and several times a year makes pie. Last night, for my sister-in-law's birthday, he made her favorite (and my third favorite): sour cherry pie. Behold:

Step 2: Gaze lovingly at your pie. Please, don't rush past this important step. Remember, Good Pie is exceedingly hard to find, so cherish it while it's on the plate in front of you!

Step 3: If the slice in front of you has a lattice-top crust (as my slice does), delicately remove those pieces of the crust and set them aside.

Step 4: Eat the pie filling, reserving ALL PIE CRUST. I know how difficult this is to do, especially if you happen to know that the pie crust in front of you is top rate. If you find saving the crust for later to be too difficult for you, feel free to snack on the lattice crust as necessary, but reserve the bottom and edge crusts at all costs.

Step 5: Once all of the filling has been eaten, scrape the remaining filling goo from the remainder of the crust.

Step 6: Eat the crust, starting with the remaining lattice pieces, moving on to the bottom crust, and finishing, finally, with the best part: the edge crust.

Class dismissed.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, here is the order in which I like different pie flavors:
1. Pumpkin
1. Peach
3. Sour cherry
4. Everything else

Fun with food

As expensive as Williams-Sonoma is, I have to say they sell the absolute coolest stuff. Where else could you buy a cake pan that does this:

This is way cooler than their train or snowman cake pans. Fun!!

Another cute item that they (apparently) sell is this cheese pantry.

What do we think, people, useful or useless? I'm leaning towards the latter due to its status in the 50% off bin alone, but it sure is a cute idea. How nice would it be to have a few cheeses stored out of the fridge where I can happily view them at any time? Where they're free from the prying mouths of insects and (hopefully) mice. Where I can gaze lovingly at them, nibble almost constantly. Slowly gaining weight until I can't fit through the doorway out of the kitchen...Ok, so maybe this wouldn't be such a good idea for me.

Mmm, mmmm, dinner

Mr. Book and I just cooked and inhaled one of our favorite dinners, a Thai shrimp stir-fry recipe I found on the Food Network website maybe a couple of years ago. Every time we make it we're shocked by how fast it can be put together. And it's so tasty! We substitute quinoa for the jasmine rice to make the dish even healthier. Yummm!

Do you guys have any other quick, tasty and healthy recipes to recommend?

A farm, two tots and some really good Korean food

Wow, it's been a full day! We started off the morning going to a local farm with these two Tots (and their respective parents, of course):

We'll call them Tot #1 and Tot #2. Sure, they aren't standing very close together in this picture, but they were just getting reacquainted. There were lots of animals for them to meet. Goats,

and, my personal favorite, baby sheep:

But what really captured the heart of Tot #1 was the tractor. This is what happened when the tractor drove away:

You wouldn't believe how long Tot #1 chased that tractor down the road! After a nice picnic lunch it was time for Book Group. (In case anyone is wondering why there aren't more pictures of Tot #2: he wouldn't stay still long enough to get more than a colorful blur moving across the frame. He ran from the goats to the sheep to the cows to the horses to the pigs to the chickens...all before I had taken my 150 pictures of the lambs. Boy can that kid move!)

E baked a wonderful basil pound cake (yes, E, it tasted wonderful despite it's poor appearance) and we chatted until dinner, at which time we decided to rustle up the spouses/significant others for a meal at THE BEST Korean BBQ place I've found in the area.

Despite the fact that this restaurant is one of my favorites around here, we only get out to it about twice a year. But the wait staff still seem to know who we are and what we like to order! That's what I call service. The food was amazing, per usual, and E was going to take pictures and document the meal for her blog, but it was impossible *not* to eat once the food started coming off the grill, and all she managed to take were a few pictures of empty dishes stacked all over the table. Stay tuned for those pictures here.

Talk about your mixed metaphors

Here is a snippet of a conversation I had with E today. We were discussing the donuts my brother makes every year:

The Bibliophile: You're more than welcome [to the 2008 donutravaganza]
E: Yes! I didn't think it would be that easy to steal an invite.
The Bibliophile: We gave you one last year!
E: I know, but you never want to assume. Two donuts in the hand is worth three in the bush. Don't count your pastries before they're hatched.

What I want to know is, where can I get my hands on this so-called donut bush and these pastry-laying birds?!

And don't worry, come December I will dedicate an entire post to these donuts of which we were speaking. They're light, tasty and impossible to stop eating!


Just look at all that tasty perfection! Yummm.

"Avocado buds + Barry White + Moi = sustainability of a species" or, "The Ramblings of an Insane Person"

I'm quite concerned about the bee crisis. Not because I eat so much fruit or have a particular love for honey (neither of these is the case, though E loves both), but because I am obsessed with avocado. LOVE IT. Is there a better fruit? It's good with everything: shrimp and rice and meat and cheese and -- well, clearly not all of these things at the same time.

I was discussing this with my friend T and told her that I was willing to hand-pollinate the avocado trees if it became necessary. She laughed at me and said, "what are you going to do, blast some Barry White and skip through the orchard?" Yes, T, I will do whatever it takes to ensure I have all the avocado I'll need over the next few years.

So what would hand-pollinating these trees actually entail? E's challenged me to do some digging and really find out.

1. Clearly I need plane tickets to where the avocado trees live. According to Wikipedia, avocados can only be grown in the following places: Spain, Israel, South Africa, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, US (California, Florida, Hawaii), The Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico and Central America. While most of these countries are on my To Visit List, time and money are of the essence. Therefore, I will choose one place inside the US and one place overseas to visit (best not to put all one's pollen in one basket). I will choose California (accessibility) and Malaysia (because I love the food, natch).

• One round-trip ticket to CA: $362
• One round-trip ticket to Malaysia: $3,285.01

Excellent. Savings depleted. It's all for the greater good, though!

2. I must assemble a list of necessary supplies. We'll just pretend I don't need anything special for travel to South East Asia for simplicity's sake (who has time to think about inoculations? And visas? Pheh.).

• Bee Suit
• Barry White CD(s) -- any suggestions?
• Sun hat and sunscreen
• Guac ingredients (we must show the avocado trees the wonders that await its success)
• Comfortable shoes for skipping
  

3. I need to work out an SOP for pollination. My understanding is that bees fly up to a flower in order to drink its nectar, and the pollen sticks to its head, legs and little bee face in the process. The answer is clear to me: I must develop a Bee Suit that is sticky enough to trap pollen, but that is light enough and breathes enough to keep me from overheating in Southern California and Malaysia. Once this is done, I will simply climb the avocado trees, brush past as many leaves and buds as possible and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

Avocado tree flower by marjesb14

Listen, people. Let me know if I forgot anything (other than my sanity, that is). Possibly you have other music suggestions? Or are a scientist and have come up with a better way of saving the nation's agriculture? Or have I skipped a vital step?