A sweet, soft Southern thrill

Ok, so it wasn't exactly a "Dixieland Delight" but I did make a pretty damn tasty TN summer supper last night. Sadly I did not take pics because we were too busy eating it all!

I was nursing a pretty serious hangover all day Saturday so my 4th of July plans turned out to be me on the couch watching Margaret Cho and falling asleep by midnight. I know, I know, you can barely contain your jealously. Between napping, whining about my headache, drinking water and watching many hours of news coverage of Steve McNair's murder I didn't even drag myself out to buy groceries and my fridge and pantry were looking pretty sad. Finally I scrounged together the ingredients for a pretty dang tasty mac n cheese with smoked sausage I found in my freezer. I've realized that the trick to homemade mac n cheese is mastering the bechamel sauce which I feel pretty confident about these days thanks to my lasagna making adventures. I need to experiment with some more cheeses but the Tillamook cheddar and goat cheese version I made this weekend was great.

I've had a friend in town this weekend and wanted to send him off with a tasty homemade meal full of Tennessee goodness so I took a trip to the farmer's market yesterday and put together the following:

A bright, juicy, fresh local tomato simply sliced with salt, olive oil, balsamic and fresh basil from my herb garden

Roasted beets with local goat cheese (ok, the cheese came from the Turnip Truck not the farmer's market)

Sweet potato cornbread

Sweet corn and fresh herb risotto

For a cocktail I pureed a couple of my first batch of TN peaches for the year and mixed with a little lemonade and Corsair Artisan vanilla bean vodka. Perfect.

I love summer and coming up with new and different ways to use all that's fresh and available in this area. I'm finally starting to appreciate what's available here locally without always pining for my faves from back home....well ok, there's still some pining.

The day after tomorrow I'm heading down to Mobile, AL to take my first cruise. We are taking a quick cruise to Cozumel, Mexico. I'm really looking forward to a few days away from work, stress, responsibility, and life in general to lounge, catch up on some reading, get a little sun, and relax. Awwwww, I can't wait. Look for updates on the cruise food (should I expect it to suck and not get my hopes up?) and interesting things I may eat and drink on vacation after I get back. I know that we're stopping in at the Dew Drop Inn in Mobile to eat the cheeseburger that inspired Jimmy Buffet to write "Cheeseburger in Paradise" so that should be a good time.

The obligatory food blogger post about Food, Inc.

I've been told recently that people are actually reading this so I guess I need to be better about updating it!

I've just returned from the Nashville premiere of Food, Inc. at the Belcourt Theater with a terrific panel discussion afterwards of food producers and activists. I feel like there probably isn't much for me to say about the film that someone else hasn't already said a lot better than I could - except to beg anyone reading to go see it, convince others to go see it, and spread the message of what's happening to our food supply.

I think a few of the things that really struck me given what I do for a living is how powerless the government really has become in terms of food safety and regulation in this country. I work every day with government regulations on products being imported from other countries (I don't currently deal in any food products), and we are inundated with regulations on everything from where the materials come from that make up the product to where it is manufactured, how it is labeled, etc. I can't import a Christmas ornament without supplying a ream of documents showing who made it in which country and that it is labeled correctly so the end consumer knows what they are purchasing - yet the meat packers in this country can sell a hamburger in the supermarket containing beef from hundreds of cows (in ONE burger) that could have come from several countries and they don't have to label that product in any way that the consumer can trace it back to where it came from. Take the toy recalls of last year for lead paint and other dangers - within days products are removed from the shelves, the company selling them identifies the factory in China where they came from, notices go out to consumers, etc. And this is on a product that causes developmental damage in children - not mitigating the danger there, but it's a long term effect of repeated exposure that is the problem with lead poisoning. E coli poisoning can kill a child within a matter of days and it can take WEEKS to trace back to the source of the problem and for the manufacturer to track and pull product off the shelves once a sample tests positive for food born illness. It makes no sense to me. Since 9/11 we've heard so much hype about the danger of terrorists infiltrating the food supply in America and how devastating that would be. The food supply has already been infiltrated and it's not only accepted by our government, most of the folks in a position to make laws to regulate the food safety in this country are former lobbyists or executives of the companies they are supposed to regulate.

Food safety is just one issue presented, but I think it's an incredibly important one to get out there because I think selling people on the idea that food grown responsibly and sustainably is also food that is healthy and safe is key. No one wants to feed their family something dangerous, no parent wants to feed their kid burgers that have been washed with ammonia because the beef is so diseased and contaminated that it is the only way to make it edible (true), but they don't know it's happening because the system is set up to keep them in the dark. The system is set up to grow food cheaper, faster, and bigger - at the expense of pretty much everyone except the few large corporations that profit from it. There's so much that I could write about it's almost making my head spin right now. I can't think of any other issues that fire me up more than food and the importance of a safe, responsible, healthy food supply system.

I realize that I come at this from a position of privledge (OMG y'all I swear as I typed that sentence MJ's "Man in the Mirror" just came on my iTunes - Michael is telling me from the grave to make some changes!). I'm single, I made decent money and perhaps most importantly I have the luxury of access to information and time to educate myself on where my food comes from. I'm not feeding a family, I don't have to make a lot of hard choices about where my next meal comes from. I can spend a saturday afternoon browsing the farmer's market to pick out fresh produce, local meat and eggs, etc. and then spend hours cooking all kinds of tasty things. A large part of my free time is spent around food, reading about food, making food, eating food, etc. It's a passion for me and something that I'm very invested in learning about, I know this isn't the case for most people. But the thing that gets me most fired up I think is that it shouldn't be like this. It shouldn't be considered a luxury or some sort of elitism to have access to fresh, non-processed food. Arugula shouldn't be something that Republicans use to paint Obama as elite and out of touch with "hometown USA", it should be growing in every backyard in America and something that anyone can throw with a little oil and vinegar as part of their meal for much less than they can buy a cheeseburger at McDonald's. When we can buy a burger that has been processed from so many sources, trucked all over the country, frozen, reheated, etc. cheaper than we can buy a bunch of carrots that came out of the farm less than 20 miles away - something is very wrong with our food system.

So yeah, as I suspected this film just solidifies my desire to get out there and do more work, more direct activism, and more education. I can feel a fundamental shift happening in the way I look at the world and my place in it and unplugging from "the system" a little more each day.

Go see this film if you're even the slightest bit interested in what you put in your body - but especially if you're not interested. Don't continue to think that meat comes in a nice wrapped package in the supermarket and there is not an animal life attached to it and several human lives affected by the process of killing it and getting it to you. Don't think that all food is equal and that the FDA/USDA will protect you and your family from contracting a food born illness or put human safety above corporate profit. And most of all, don't forget that corporations do not care about feeding you and nourishing you and your family. Any time we take responsibility for the act of feeding ourselves and those we care about, we are doing a part to create change in the system. Cooking your own food, learning where it comes from and making informed choices, these are becoming subversive acts in our society. Don't wait until all the good choices are gone and these small farmers trying to do good are pushed out by big agriculture before you speak out. Vote with your meals and your food budget, if enough people demand good food the companies who supply it will have no choice but to make it happen.

Good lord y'all, when did I become such a hippie?

Lasagna Bolognese

My grandfather went off to Italy in WWII and brought back more than a love for Italian food - he brought back a wife and they had 6 children, the second oldest of which is my mother. My mother and her siblings all had multiple children, I am the second oldest of 18 grandchildren. We all spent many years growing up in and around my grandparent's huge Victorian home, and many of my favorite memories involve what we ate. Way before I knew that it was anything special I was eating fine, hand crafted Italian food and drinking amazing espresso. It's funny how most people develop a taste for finer food as they age, I think I've spent most of my adulthood coming back to the food of my childhood that I never fully appreciated when I was young. What's that joke about what do Chinese call Chinese food? Food. I never realized how spoiled I was, food-wise, as a child. I grew up with a heavy Italian influence in the way upper northwest corner of Washington State, right on the Canadian border. Holidays and family birthdays were huge feasts of all you can eat salmon (grilled and home smoked), crab just hauled from the bay across the street, oysters, clams, salads right out of the garden, salami, fresh bread, biscotti, and the family favorite - my grandmother's lasagna bolognese. We had lasagna all the time - some families have an Easter ham, a Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas goose, etc. - the Bennett clan ate those normal holiday foods too but there were always huge pans of lasagna on the table as well. It was a staple, layers of fresh handmade spinach noodles, meat sauce, bechamel sauce, and cheese. It was what they call in foodie circles, rustic. Simple. Beautiful. Delicious.

Later I found out that "grandma's lasagna" was a collaboration between my grandmother and one of her good friends, Bruna - who my family affectionately nicknamed "grandma's kitchen slave". When my grandmother moved over here from Italy she did not speak English (almost 60 years later, some days it's debatable whether she does even now!), she knew no one other than her husband, but she got hooked in with the Italian community in nearby Vancouver, Canada (about 45 min. north) and we had many "honorary relatives" from Canada who would come down for weekends and parties. I could write a whole blog post about Bruna, she's in her 80's now and has lived in the same apartment in East Vancouver for decades. Never married, loves to drink and gamble, picture the stereotype of an old Italian spinster who loves a good brandy and to argue about politics and you've got Bruna. My mom remembers Bruna coming and staying at their house when she was young, Bruna would be doing laundry, cooking, ironing, whatever needed to be done. I like to joke that Bruna was paying off some secret mafia related debt to my grandparents for years and years by doing domestic work but she was probably just a lonely older lady with no family of her own so she was happy to help out in exchange for companionship. Who knows. Anyways, her and my grandmother would get together several times a year for an all-out lasagna making marathon.

I wish I had paid more attention to this when I was a kid. I wish I had watched them make the sauce, roll out the fresh pasta dough, assemble the huge hotel pans of delicious lasagna goodness. But I didn't, I ate that stuff, along with the rest of my cousins, like there was a never-ending supply. In 2001, my grandmother was making a batch of lasagna when she got the phonecall that her oldest son, my uncle Benny had died from a sudden and very unexpected heart attack. She has not made lasagna since that day, that is how powerful the memory is. She says the smell would make her sick now. I was 26 then and had not yet grasped that things and people from my childhood would not be around forever. I grew up in a small town that never seemed to change fast enough when I was growing up and all of a sudden things were starting to disappear that I assumed would always be around. A lot of these things I associate with food - as I lose people in my life, move to new places, etc. I have taught myself to cook things as a way to hold onto memories of people and places I love. I can make my mother's beef stroganoff from memory now, one of my favorite foods growing up. I spent years trying to make my grandmother's very basic chicken soup but pretty much have it down, I can make a mean tater-tot casserole just like my aunt Linda, tollhouse cookie bars just like my mom's and this past winter I spent a few weekends trying to make a cookie bar like I used to beg for every time we went to Nordstrom as a kid.

A couple of weeks before Easter, my grandfather passed away. He was my hero in so many ways and a man who taught me so much about life, family, business, food, and hockey - among other things. He would have turned 80 on April 14th, I always associate his birthday with Easter because we would frequently have a big family get together to celebrate both holidays at once. For Easter this year, thousands of miles away from my family - I wanted my grandmother's lasagna for dinner. I wanted to remember what I consider to be my family's signature dish, feel connected to those memories of big family dinners, and celebrate the life of my grandpa with one of his favorite foods.

So after researching various recipes I chose a recipe for a Bolognese sauce from Chow.com, I bought some semolina flour which had a simple pasta recipe on the package and I set out Easter Sunday to make a lasagne.

First up, sauce. I started cooking the meat sauce early in the day to let it simmer for several hours. It started like this:


and then ended up like this:


It smelled exactly like I remember my grandma's sauce, meaty and rich. I was feeling good that maybe I was actually going to do this.

Then it was time to make the pasta - I was nervous but it ended up being so easy and since I was making a lasagna that would be layered with sauce and cheese, I didn't have to worry about cutting the noodles so they looked perfect and pretty!

Eggs, water, olive oil, flour and salt





Now, my pasta did have more of a "rustic" look than more experienced pasta chefs would make! But it worked and I chose to immediately make the lasagna and let the noodles cook in the dish rather than boil first because they were fresh and wouldn't take long at all to cook. A layer of sauce, pasta, a little Parmigiano-Reggiano, bechamel sauce, repeat.




Waiting for it to bake and then cool a little before eating was torture - the whole house smelled amazing. The first bite took me right back to my childhood and my family and it turned out to be the perfect way to feel connected to my family when I'm far away.

I'm heading out to Colorado in a few days, meeting up with family at my sister's house for a few days. I'm looking forward to making the lasagna for everyone and enjoying some some great times with great food.

Kopi Luwak

I just returned from a trip to Jakarta, Indonesia for work where I ate and drank many delicious and interesting things but perhaps the most blog-worthy was the Kopi Luwak. According to wikipedia, kopi is the Indonesian word for coffee and luwak is the local word for the Asian Palm Civet which is a small rodent (pictured above)

The civet eats the raw coffee berries which contain the coffee beans inside, then the beans travel undigested through the animal's digestive system and the coffee beans are extracted from the civet's, well for lack of a more civilized word, poop, and they are thoroughly cleaned then roasted. Kopi Luwak is supposedly the most expensive beverage in the world - there is a limited supply annually and only a few places where is it made. The Indonesian island of Sumatra, which is home to many delicious coffees is one of them, this is the variety I tried.

Now I think this story would be better if I had to have some sort of adventure to find the coffee - you know one of those from Anthony Bourdain's show where he has to talk to several locals to get the scoop on some back alley coffee shop serving up the rodent shit coffee - but no. Actually I had to walk out of the lobby of my hotel, through an underground tunnel guarded by a guy with a machine gun (no joke, walking alone on the street was strongly discouraged so they had an underground tunnel to the hotel right across the street) and into the lobby of the very plush Ritz-Carlton Jakarta where I paid about $12 USD (or 120,000 Indonesia Rupiah) to savor the taste of a double espresso con panna made from coffee beans harvested out of rodent shit. I've heard this stuff sells for up to $50 a cup in the U.S. so I do still consider this a bargain although it's probably the most expensive cup of coffee I've ever had.

What does it taste like? Well it tastes like coffee, LOL. But it's very smooth, I read this is because the digestive process removes a lot of the natural acid from the coffee. It's strong and very full flavored but not bitter at all and just a really damn good cup of coffee. I sat there in this very decadent hotel enjoying something incredibly unique and delicious, it was quite the moment.

In addition I enjoyed several cups of coffee in Indonesia that had not ever touched rodent poop. It really was a coffee mecca with cups of very strongly brewed Sumatran coffee available just about everywhere I went. A coffee lover's fantasy.

More to come on the food from the trip soon.

Wild Alaskan Salmon

Living in the South there are a lot of things I miss about Pacific Northwest food - picking your own berries in the summer, Rainier cherries that aren't $9 a pound and haven't been trucked for 3 days to get to you, dungeness crab hauled out of the ocean about an hour before you eat it, and access to all the fresh salmon you could ever want - not that pale gross farmed Atlantic salmon either - red, oily, Pacific salmon. I have had real trouble finding a market here in Nashville where I can consistently find good salmon without paying an arm and a leg for it. Until yesterday when we followed a tip from some neighbors and checked out Fresh Market in Brentwood. Sure, it's a drive but it's a great store and the fresh produce and seafood were well worth it, the salmon was as reasonably priced or less than I could get in Seattle and after marinating with garlic, fresh herbs and lemon the cooking on the grill it was absolutely delicious. We sat out on the front porch last night eating fresh tasty grilled salmon with some grilled veggies and it was heaven. To be sitting here enjoying our new house and new neighborhood with a little taste from back home was exactly what I needed. I love summer.

I need to be better about updating this thing - we've been eating some good stuff lately and we've got plans to check out some highly reccomended restaurants so expect some good food posts soon.

Risotto

I've been slacking off on this blog a bit lately but it's only meant for really amazing things I eat/drink and I guess I haven't had a lot of that lately. I did have some amazing food in Seattle last week, but nothing really unique and worthy of a post here.

I had a tooth pulled this week so I've been on all soft foods since Monday, which pretty much sucks. In addition to that I've also had some killer sore throat/cold/sinus/allergy? thing going on so I haven't had much of an appetite. Today though I got a craving for risotto and since I can eat that with my tooth situation I thought I would look for a recipe and make up a big batch for the weekend. I found a great recipe for the crock pot which sounded weird but much easier than the "cook for awhile, add more chicken stock, cook more, add stock, etc." that you usually do for risotto. Turning on the crock pot and letting it go for a couple hours sounded great.

I decided to make a plain recipe with just shallots, garlic, olive oil, mushrooms, salt, and chicken stock then I added some fresh thyme and rosemary (from my herb garden on the deck!) and let everything cook down for a couple hours. It has made my house smell amazing and once it was ready I added in a little cream and parm. cheese - delicious. Simple, warm, hearty, and comforting - risotto is like mac-n-cheese for Italians I think (although I also love me some mac-n-cheese!). The herbs gave it some depth and subtle flavor, the creaminess and cheesiness was just perfect and it was exactly what I needed.

Grape Crush soda from a glass bottle

When I was a kid there was a small motel on the back of the block my grandparents lived on. Even though my grandma's fridges were always full of stuff to eat and drink, my cousins and I would beg for 50 cents so we could have the adventure of going through the back fence, though the alley and into the parking lot of the motel to the soda machine to buy our own pop. It was one of those Coke machines where you put the money in and then opened the door to pull out your glass bottle of soda. I remember there was Coke and Sprite and Orange Crush and root beer but I always got Grape Crush and to this day grape soda out of a glass bottle is one of my favorites. It is sweet almost to the point of being sickening, but the carbonation smoothes it out a little and the taste reminds me of summer and being a kid.

Today I was at the grocery store picking up some things for dinner and I saw a 6 pack of Grape Crush in the glass bottles and picked it up. After I finished mowing the lawn I was sitting out on the deck reading a book in the sun and drank one of them. It tastes just like I remember it from that old soda machine back at the Anchor Inn Motel in Blaine. And with the sun beating down on my face and the sound of the neighbor kids playing in their yard I remembered what it was like when the weather was just starting to get nice enough to play outside in shorts and my grandpa would give each of us two quarters to go get sodas and get out of his hair for a little while.