Roasted

Robin mentioned I should include recipes but I think of this blog as being about the experience of food in my life and how it changes what I do and how I think about other things. Also a lot of my recipes aren't so great and are totally ripped off other people's fantastic cooking ideas.

Still, I'd like to mention cooking food when it relates to an experience, like the first time I roasted an entire chicken which conveniently was just last week.

I've mentioned before that I gave up factory-farmed meat which means I don't eat meat not bought and prepared by myself much. Where are all the restaurants advertising their cage free quails? I'll patronize them! (I've never eaten a quail but I saw some at the New Amsterdam Market and am intrigued...they look like dolls if raw chickens played with little dolls of themselves. Ew. Never mind.)

One of the things I missed the most was roasted chicken. There's a Cuban restaurant in my neighborhood that makes amazing rotisserie chicken and I mourn it.

I'm pretty lazy and when the taste for flesh comes on too strong I usually just broil a chicken breast or cook it on the stove top. As I trolled the poultry isle at the Park Slope Food Coop, in my fit of carnivorous lust, there was a cornucopia of animals that had been grass fed, hormone free blah di blah. Most of them still had their bones, or feet, most were probably stuffed with graphic little baggies of organs. Why haven't I ever had duck or rabbit (not technically a bird, but still)? Was it more than laziness but rather squeamishness, a reluctance to acknowledge that what I was eating was once a living thing that died to feed me?

Hunger and curiosity drove me to pick up a whole chicken and take on preparing the meal I always pictured in my mind as an event, something for a special occasion. When I got it home and unwrapped it I was surprised not by the blood or expected organ baggie, but by the heft and texture of the thing outside its packaging. It felt kind of like a baby (Note: If your baby feels like a raw chicken consult a pediatrician immediately).

So this is how I made it:

Wash it out then dry with paper towels. Cover the whole thing with black pepper and salt and stick some garlic into slits you cut in the skin (another weird 'this was alive' moment. The skin moves across the flesh so you can see your garlic chunks lost beneath the surface.) Put it in a high sided tray breast down then in the oven at 450 until that side is browned, flip it over and brown the other side. Then I took it out turning the oven to 325 and added onions and potatoes around the chicken with a little bit of water, probably more than I need to, then put the whole thing back in for about an hour, checking on it and basting it occasionally.


It was remarkably easy and tasty. Though the process of preparing it had moments where I was just plan grossed out I think this was a testament to how disconnected we become with the source of our food rather than a sign from God that eating animals is wrong. Perhaps on the farm as I lead a Billy-Goat to the slaughter house I'll reconsider that position, but for now I just want to use this experience to establish a personal ground rule for eating-If you can't bring yourself to handle the materials you shouldn't eat the product.

For info on where my chicken came from (It's Amish!) check out these chicken people:

dartagnan.com

Going to Market

Today I checked out that New Amsterdam Market shortly before the monsoon came. The market is full of locally grown food and the people who process it and sell it. Their goal is to eventually move the market into the Tin Building and the New Market Building, previous home of the Fulton Fish Market. Right now they're under the FDR drive.

Writing that made me think of another market I used to visit when I was living in Paris that set itself up under the Metro. Walking through it sometimes felt like you could pick your feet up off the ground and be carried onward by the swell of people. The food was very very cheap and I have no idea where it came from. The placement of the New Amsterdam Market is only similar in that it's under a large bridge-like structure meant for transport. It's also a stone's throw from the South Street Sea Port which means lots of tourists which is great for sales (sometimes-tourists probably aren't so interested in fresh veggies and meat they can't cook) but maybe not the place to attract real New Yorkers in a residential neighborhood. On Sundays in Paris everybody and their Maman was at that market. Here, there was a crowd but I wondered who was representin'.

First of all it was blazing hot. So I went over to the People's Popsicle where I was 'greeted' by an array of beautiful fresh-faced young lads and lasses with charming British accents who seemed to be selling popsicles pretty much on a lark. All four of them served every customer, taking out the individually frozen pop, dipping it's plastic case into a mason jar of warmish water, then working it in their hand until it could be eased out of its molding. I asked if this was their first time ever selling popsicles and they admitted that yes, this was the dry run-through.

An hour later when I got my Blue Velvet pop (blueberries, yogurt and honey) I hoped it would be worth the wait and $4. I know, $4. Kind of outrageous but I would never have described a popsicle as filling before. Seriously, it was practically a meal.

Refreshed, I continued on and got a big score-the last head of purple cauliflower!!!:

If you eat something purple made of synthetic chemicals it's probably bad for you. But any opportunity to eat colorful vegetables should be taken. It pleases the eye and the body! Here's the picture of the last purple cauliflower I ate that a friend bought and cooked for me in October:

Hauntingly beautiful, isn't it? I like taking pictures of myself with vegetables.

I also bought some fancy Gruyere cheese which was actually, it turned out, from Pennsylvania, being distributed by White Dog Community Enterprises which is a non-profit that tries to help farmers hook up with local wholesalers. Had I read the fine print I may have on principal tried to find the New York State equivalent but the cheese lady had already started hacking away and seemed a bit flustered. I didn't want her to stab me and ruin all her lovely cheese with blood. Anyway, I spend a fair amount of time in the Poconos. Pennsylvania cannot support its economy with scented candles alone! (The candle store in our hamlet burned down)

It would have been pretty easy to fill up for free, since as one excited shopper exclaimed when I asked if she knew of an ATM around, "Free samples! FREE SAMPLES!". Yes, lots of those, cheese and bread in particular. The bread isles were a little lonely looking, with the heat and colorful competition all around no one wanted a slice. Atkins, what hast thou wrought??

But speaking of eating for free one of the most popular stands was Wild Foods, headed by Nova Kim and Les Hook, two foragers from Vermont. They go into the forest and come out both full and not horribly dead. Verrrry curious, I bobbed along the perimeter of the crowd to see what they might have-air? Grubs? Actually, lots of little bags fulled of funny roots and furry leaves with photocopied recipes stapled to them. They also had several photocopied DIY books with all the ways you can eat from the side of a road and not kill yourself. There were even little laminated spore grids that look like Sudoku puzzles that you somehow use to not eat poison mushrooms...I don't know, I'm not a doctor.

Anyway as soon as I picked one up Nova Kim herself leaped on me. She and her fam live off the grid which I would guess gets lonely. She told me several interesting facts:

There are about 2,600 identified mushrooms in the U.S. and only 13 or 14 will kill you or make you wish you was dead. I like those odds!

If you eat a poison mushroom, consider yourself lucky it's not Hemlock. Hemlock runs through your circulatory system, so as you struggle to walk for first aid you're basically helping it kill you, whereas with a mushroom you'll make it to a hospital most of the time.

Hemlock and Wild Chervil, an edible plant, look much alike.

She and few others are trying to set up a Wild Food Gatherers Guild and get more and more people gathering food and certified to teach what's edible and what definitely isn't. Talk about taking personal responsibility for what you eat- according to Nova the most important thing is knowing your own environment and trusting your own expertise. Um, I know what crab grass looks like...

Here's a place to learn about that (it's pretty much as cool as martial arts):

wildgourmetfood.com

And I must say a much nicer looking website than I would have ever anticipated.

So eventually I came home and made a great meal of steamed cauliflower with pecans, honey, garlic, and grated Gruyere. Jealous?

You're jealous.

For more info on the New Amsterdam Market go to:

newamsterdammarket.org

Get That Delicious Meaty Monkey Off Your Back

Last night I received this text message:

"What the fuck kind of vegan bullshit are you getting yourself into?"

I responded with a disparaging comment about the sender's meat consumption, to which she replied:

"Red meat makes me happy. Blood red."

End of conversation. Now, I'm not a vegan. I'm not even a vegetarian. Shortly before last Christmas I made a vow to stop eating factory raised meat. I've maintained that vow except for two occasions. Once at my company's annual benefit at Tavern on the Green. No filling baskets of bread laid helpfully across the table to soak up all the alcohol from the open bar. No, you get one roll the size of a chihuahua's head (I like to measure things in chihuahua units) and you have to make the best of it. When the main coarse arrived the green beans were already soaked in the juice of their chicken breast counterpart. It was eat or drink more, and I ate. In retrospect that sounds like a stupid choice but it seemed like the right thing then.

The second time I broke my new rule was also at a benefit, for a public elementary school at a Chinese restaurant downtown. This wasn't intentional, I thought the little cube of something I popped into my mouth would be tofu. It wasn't. I'm not sure how it could be classified but it tasted like something suffered to make it.

Meat is a touchy subject for a lot of people. It has been fairly easy for me to stay away from factory farmed animal products mainly because I wasn't raised eating one of the most seductive and destructive-red meat. Blood red. I say destructive because CAFOs, the places where thousands of heads of steer are crammed shoulder to shoulder in their own filth, eating by-products of their predecessors (Helloooo mad cow disease), have changed the face of agriculture in America. No more small family owned farms growing a diversity of plants in a delicate ecosystem of crop rotation and animal grazing. Now it's acre after acre after acre of corn owned by large agribusinesses. To feed cattle, who aren't really built for eating corn anyway and have to be injected with all sorts of antibiotics to be kept from keeling over dead from ulcerated stomachs before they get to the slaughterhouse.

And I say seductive because red meat is tasty. I have eaten it and it tastes like blood and to carnivorous animals like humans, blood taste is the taste of protein and life and macho chest beating. All fun things. I could probably list a lot more reasons why steak is awesome if I were a connoisseur of that particular dish and had eaten more than a few experimental bites from a friend's plate. What I can say is that steak if heavy. If you don't eat it much a few bites will knock you out. So, is beef like crack and my friend craves it because she constantly eats it? Probably more like nicotine since I hear crack is instantly lovely that very first time while my memories of my first smoke all involved severe nausea and regret. Until it gets into your system.

There are options. There are free range chickens and grass-grazed beef. There's also this really interesting article I read a few weeks ago in the New York Times about how to start eating less meat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/dining/11mini.html

Not NO meat, just less. I think it puts a few things in perspective about how much meat we really need to eat. No one likes to be told what to put in their body but I do think its important to experiment and consider why we eat how we do. If nothing else you may find a recipe you really like.

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

Hey Y'alls,

I'm just putting this up there in case anyone wants to check it out:

http://www.newamsterdammarket.org/calendar.htm

The New Amsterdam Market is off pier 17 near the South Street Seaport. Whoa, South Street Seaport. Scary territory.

Anyway the Market has growers and purveyors of delicious native New York food. A fun and yummy way to learn a bit about what's locally available. I assume it's fun since I've never been, but I'll report back my findings. Wearing a plastic Statue of Liberty hat.

CSA!

Tonight I had dinner with my friend Robin for which we cooked from some of her CSA vegetables. That was the intention anyway but a CSA provides you with whatever's in season and this time of year that pretty much amounts to greens greens greens. Robin claims there were strawberries too but I didn't see any of them.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Basically, you buy a share in a local farmer's crops and receive a basket of produce weekly or bi-weekly. Some CSAs include fruit, eggs, herbs, flowers, even milk. These ones are generally pricier. One of the benefits to this arrangement is lots of healthy produce that's grown organically from someplace nearby. What you eat isn't giving a brutal beating to the face of the planet with the fist of fossil fuel. No refrigerated trucks covering thousands of miles so you can eat pre-washed salad!

In fact if you want something pre-washed you're not going to get it at a CSA. Root vegetables seem to be strait up ripped from the ground. I once stir-fried a caterpillar in a bunch of fresh kale. Yeah, I ate the kale anyway. Caterpillars are probably protein.

Another benefit to this arrangement is you can usually visit the farm where your food comes from and meet the people who grow it. They have things like garlic harvesting parties and cider drinking festivals. Some CSAs even require their members to come work on the farm for an afternoon during the growing season. Wait, is that a benefit? Guess I must think so, what with the wanting to farm crap, but it may be a turn-off for people flirting with the idea of joining their first CSA. Don't be scared! It would be totally cool to shake the hand of the person responsible for your caloric intake and not in a creepy weighing-your-slice-of-cheesecake nutritionist kind of way.

The next benefit didn't really occur to me until my CSA began (this was last summer, this year we didn't sign up due to logistics) which is that whatever they give you, you have to find a way to eat it.

Crazy! I've alway been a picky eater and have pretty much rejected salad from birth. Guys, it's eating leaves. WTF? Why not eat a delicious, meaty squash or zucchini or tomato or anything else at all that isn't poisonous.

The answer is because those things do not grow in April or May or June, at least not in this part of the world. If you're eating one right now, a big mouthful of butternut squash falling from your lips to your lap as you scream, "WHAAaaaat??" it ain't from around these parts.

It wasn't that I ever read the from Mexico/California/Chile labels and thought they meant Mexico, NY. But seeing what rolled in every week from our CSA was kind of a wake-up call about what my immediate environment (the definition of which has to encompass about 300 mi these days) could sustain through out the growing season. It also forced me to eat a lot of things I would never pick up in the grocery isle, because dammit I was getting my money's worth! (On that note, the CSA we signed up for came to about $10-$15 a person a week, and we had enough food in each load to feed 3 people all week long. For the quality and quantity I'd say it was totally worth it)

My cooking has improved in both the scope of its ingredients and general flavor. Kale is pretty bitter whether there are bugs in it or not, you need to be inventive. Inventiveness is a good word to describe what taking part in a CSA makes you do. Most of us are not comfortable with eating so many fresh vegetables. We've been repelled by them as children, by their boring preparation and purported health benefits. Gross! The CSA made my taste buds grow up a little and that was awesome.

So tonight what Robin had was lettuce and mustard greens. I still don't reach for the lettuce first so she sautéed me up some mustard greens and I made an omelette. The omelette could be considered organic if not local though really by that point I was too hungry to care. Afterwards we tried to include one more of Robin's CSA finds into a recipe-lavender. She'd gotten a "Secret Lavender Chocolate Chip Cookies" recipe. We tried it out and the secret is they taste like ass. Sorry to spoil it for you.

For more info on CSAs near you check out:

http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

Um...Facts?

A friend passed along this article from Travel & Leisure magazine about WWOOF:

http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/farm-stand

It has got some of the basic information about WWOOF, how it started, with whom and a few details of the author's, Patricia Marx, experience. This article has been pretty thoroughly fact-checked because that's how they roll at T&L-I know because I worked there last year for about four months.

Fact-checking is a strange gig. Reading this article I had a flash back to the looping hallways, long paper trails and quietly ringing phones of the Hippodrome. I never fit in there because I never really tried which isn't exactly something to be proud of. A lot of people would want the opportunity to work as an editorial assistant at a publication like T&L, I saw them waiting in the lobby clutching resumes, and the FACT that I didn't make much of the situation is a testimony more to my failures than T&L's.

That being said....

There were times when the fact-checker's job was more about justifying inaccuracies than correcting them. Sometimes the letter of what was being written could be considered "fact" but the spirit of what was being conveyed was skewed for the sake of T&L's prospective readership. Very wealthy and, probably, white city people. If you challenged the perspective of an article you were an enemy of the writer, the editor, everyone. You were gumming up the works! Just say that it's true so we can go to lunch! What could I expect from a popular magazine that focuses on life's luxuries for the elite ? Travel and Leisure... it's right there in the title, moron. That's what you get!

Marx's piece brought back my discomfort with this attitude. She's a little snide, a little dismissive. Presumably this trip did more than affirm her love of artificial sweetener. Yeah, she probably shouldn't pack up and move out to the country to live in a yurt. Most of us probably shouldn't, until the apocalypse comes. But, to me and many people interested in organic or locally grown food, WWOOFing is more about breaking down the crazy consumerist, industrial, micromanaging structure that makes the place our food comes from seem so distant, out of reach or impossible to change/improve. Instead of approaching it from this far more positive, truthful angle this article instead delineates the difference between those nutty new age farmers dancing their "Universal Peace" crap out in the woods and us New Yorkers who have the decency to shut ourselves into a spa during those ten days off a year from the office. Why promote the idea that only a dirty hippie or stunt journalist would attempt to WWOOF?

At the moment I'm neither a farmer nor an office worker. I haven't gotten to one place and I didn't belong in the other. But I like to imagine a third place (or several thousand such places) that isn't so concerned with cramming people to fit the labels laid out for them or the facts into the conclusions we wrote first and researched later.

So am I being a total jerk or what?

Happy Are They...Who Farm

In twelve days I'm going to live on a farm. This is not that shocking. Lots of people live on farms, they're called farmers and if you threw a dart at a map of upstate New York chances are it will obliterate the place where a farm would be indicated if we put farms on maps.

I have no idea if there will be electricity when I get there. I spoke to a few different prospective hosts and heard lots of possibilities. I could sleep in a tent (if I wanted to mow a piece of ground to stake it out on), I could stay in the unfinished barn, the hay loft, a bunk, in the cellar (if Arthur's brother isn't down there...), a room in the house. Some farms said they'd pick me up at the bus station, others encouraged hitch-hiking. They wanted to know if I smoked, if I minded smoking, if I took a lot of showers, if I could cook, if I liked children, ate meat, drank.

It may have been a good idea to press for more details but here's the deal-I'm volunteering to work there for just a few weeks. I'm a guest in their home, eating their food and sleeping on their blow up mattresses. So when they asked if I like to shower with hot water or had a problem with animals being slaughtered on the premises I tried to be as accommodating in my response as possible.

"Well, I don't eat a LOT of meat..."

"Oh no, not us either really, just you know maybe after we've slaughtered a goat we'll have meat for a few weeks, like that."

Guys...I'm probably going to eat a goat.

So when you're talking to these very down to earth (like they put their hands IN TO THE EARTH and food comes out) people and hoping they'll let you into their homes you don't want to ask some douchey question like, "Um, can I plug my Powerbook in? Because...it would be good for...illuminating the tent."

I'm not saying I wont see a light bulb all month but its definitely possible that I wont-ye gods!-check email. Still, documenting the experience is important to me, because I am the most interesting person in the world. No, seriously, I am....no, seriously, a few people wanted to know about Wwoofing-which to clarify stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (which is totally not what I've been telling people until I just double-checked now) and their website is wwoofusa.org. That's just for America, WWOOF is all over the world (Duh, world wide) and there's a different website for Canada, Europe, Australia...etc. It can get a little confusing and overwhelming. What WWOOF provides you with is a listing of their respective country's organic farms that have registered to be hosts. You go through the list contacting the farms that are in an area you find appealing to see if they need help/have space for you. If so, you get to go live with them and learn about where the food you eat back in the big city comes from and what goes into making it. Of course, most of the food being pipe-lined into the big city doesn't come from organic farms...

So I've started this blog and in the next twelve days I'm going to add to it with information (i.e. wild speculation and unfounded fears) about Wwoofing, getting ready, intentional communities, CSAs, my hacking cough, and whatever the hell else I feel like. During the actual WWOOF time upstate I may have to scratch on a piece of birch bark with a twig dipped in goat blood, but I plan to transcribe all that here upon my return along with photos.

Hopefully when the WWOOF experience is over my mental and physical scars wont be so disfiguring that I can't type. Stayed tuned to find out!