Weekend Update

What were you thinking, America?

What were you thinking when you outsourced food--and pet food--ingredients to the Chinese? Perhaps you didn't figure the Chinese were spiking the nitrogen content of food ingredients with a chemical that's otherwise used to make resins for laminated floorboards, fire retardents for foam cushions and plastic dinner ware?

The product in question is, of course, melamine, which every dog and cat owner now knows is the likely culprit behind hundreds, perhaps thousands of pet deaths that began to come to light in March and resulted in the recall of some 5,300 pet food products.

Melamine actually is a rather old chemical compound. Along with a related chemical, cyanuric acid, it is known to cause renal failure after prolonged injestion. Cyanuric acid is used to stabilize chlorine in swimming pools.

It appears the Chinese were using melamine and cyanuric acid to artificially boost the nitrogen content of foods. Once it was detected in pet food, authorities started to find it in wheat gluten, corn gluten and rice gluten, which turned up in hog feed, chicken feed and fish feed.

You may have heard of putting nitrogen fertilizer on your lawn to make it greener. In the food world, nitrogen translates as "protein." But it's really a scam. There's nothing nutritious about melamine or cyanuric acid. The nitrogen molecules pass through the intestines and into the blood stream before they can be digested. That's how they end up in the kidneys.

The New York Times quoted one Chinese chemical producer as saying that companies there for years have been putting cyanuric acid in animal feed as a cheap way to jack up the nitrogen content and fetch higher prices.

As the melamine scandal worsened day by day, outraged Americans woke up to the fact that our chief enforcer of food quality, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has no authority to ban or recall tainted foods. That's right, the government we pay for with tax dollars has arranged it so that manufacturers need remove dangerous foods only when they are good and ready.

Isn't it nice to know that the same people who profit from potentially deadly food products, and who now look to the nitrogen-boosting Chinese to supply cheap ingredients, get to decide which foods are suitable for public consumption?

The dire absurdity of this paradox apparently struck even the business-boosting Bush administration as unacceptable. They quickly appointed a "food safety czar" for the Food and Drug Administration. Which makes you wonder why the agency responsible for food safety suddenly needs a person to be responsible for food safety.

But we were all comforted to hear the feds announce that the melamine in question really poses no danger to humans.

*****

On the subject of animal feed, and as another example of the mind-boggling twists and turns in the global food web, authorities in Iowa are looking at the residues left over from turning corn into ethanol as a way to generate electricity and feed cattle.

You'll remember that the ramping up of ethanol production from corn to fuel automobiles has helped double the price of corn and made tortillas too expensive for many Mexicans. Well, Iowans apparently have now developed a way to turn the ethanol leavings into pellets that could potentially substitute for the use of coal to generate electricity and stand in as a feed for fattening beef cattle.

Question: has anyone discussed this with the cattle, or have they completely lost their taste for regular old grass?

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Monsanto, in its quest to corner the world market on food seed, suffered another setback. The European Patent Office revoked the food giant's patent on genetically modified soybeans.

The patent was due to expire soon anywhere. But observers see the European rebuke of Monsanto as setting a potentially important precedent.

Last week, it was a federal judge in California who ordered a halt to Monsanto's sale of gene-mutant alfalfa, pending a federal study of the affects on organic and conventional crops.

*****

Apparently the melamine scare has not put Americans off food products from China.

It isn't enough that we've exported our manufacturing jobs and put our trade balance in hock to the Chinese. Now our own federal government is considering allowing chickens raised, butchered and cooked in China to be sold here in the United States.

This falls under the rubric of fair international trade. And the best part is, there are no regulations that require poultry to be labeled as to country of origin.

As much as we like Chinese food--even when we can't read the menu--we consider this a possible source of indegestion.

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On the seafood watch, a landmark agreement between 21 countries would potentially ban bottom trawling for fish in the South Pacific beginning in September.

Bottom trawling lays waste to the ocean floor, destroying coral reefs and sealife habitat. The agreement concerns about 25 percent of the world's oceans.

The only catch is, the restrictions are completely voluntary (like recalling food tainted with melamine). Countries who are members of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization -- including the U.S., New Zealand, China, Russia, France-- would have to be trusted to uphold the agreement.

But they would, right?

Elsewhere in the world of fish, Alice Waters, the intrepid leader of eating locally grown foods, is heading a group of 200 chefs from 33 states calling on the federal government to save native American wild salmon.

This follows last year's federal shutdown of 88% of commercial salmon fishing along 700 miles of coastline in California and Oregon, deemed necessary to allow salmon to spawn in the 260-mile Klamath River, where salmon compete for water with farmers, utility companies and Indian tribes.

Chefs are calling salmon American's last wild meat. And with salmon farming operations potentially being shut down over pollution and disease concerns, we couldn't agree more.

But some terrestrials are less enthusiastic about helping fish when it could mean dismantling dams that make hydro-electric power, which means less pollution, which means people can continue their consumptive ways without worrying so much about contributing to global warming.

Suddenly that salmon fillet on your plate is looking a little more complicated, no?

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From our Grapes of Wrath department, a cautionary tale about those pre-packaged fruit salads you like because they're so convenient.

A writer for an alternative publication in Portland, Oregon, spent a few days in a Del Monte produce plant where she found immigrant workers toiling in near-freezing temperatures, turning melons and pineapples into salads for distribution.

Fruit and vegetables originate from California, Costa Rica, Guatemala. Turns out the workers who process the produce into edibles come from equally distant locations. It's all part of the global economy (again).

"It's close to freezing cold inside this football-field-sized warehouse in North Portland. I know because I've spent three days working at the plant, and on a recent Friday at 8 am the thermometer registers 36 degrees Fahrenheit," writes Beth Slovic in the Willamette Week Online. "I'm regretting not having brought a hat to wear under my green hairnet. I can see my own breath and the respiration of the other 24 workers beginning their eight-hour shifts."

Slovic continues: "A highly unpleasant odor, which will cling to my jacket for days, hangs in the air. It's the smell of freshly diced onions tinged with chlorine, and my eyes sting from the fumes. It's so loud inside the plant that, once production is fully under way, many of the workers will resort to flinging bits of fruit and vegetable at each other to catch someone's attention. When all of the conveyor belts, washing machines and industrial-strength produce dryers are on, it sounds as if a plane were about to take off overhead...."

To read the complete article, go here.

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Finally, we are completely enchanted by the inter-connected world of food blogging and the many unexpected places it takes us. A few words from us on the subject of liver recently were enough to spark an interest on the part of Stephen at the Stephen Cooks, blog. Stephen, in turn, drew inspiration from a cook in Singapore, the result being an Asian stir fry we could not have imagined.

Go here to read Stephen's post.

Guy's Guide to Chive Vinegar

First off I have to say that I've never been big on making vinegars, mustards, soaps, potpourris and that sort of thing. I thought it fay and cloying along the lines of, say, macrame.

But now I am taking a cue from our farmer friends and trying to make use of everything useful in the garden. This time of year, that means buds and blossoms and early herbs such as chives.

Inspired by Christa over on the Calendula & Concrete blog, I determined to do something with all our chive blossoms. I would turn them into a vinegar.

I cruised around the internet and found lots of photos of chive blossoms floating in bottles of vinegar. Bingo! I ran right out into the garden, picked a bunch of chive blossoms and stuffed them into an antique-looking vinegar bottle with a very narrow, decorative neck and a tiny cork that my wife keeps in her bottle collection.

This morning, after stuffing all those chive blossoms down the narrow neck of the vinegar bottle, I proudly displayed my vinegar to my wife, who gave it one of her squinty-eyed, skeptical looks and said, "I wouldn't have done it that way."
I was immediately flooded with remorse and embarrassment because I knew where this conversation was going.

"Did you look at the recipe?" my wife asked.

"Uh, I saw a bunch of pictures," I replied sheepishly.

"So you just went ahead and did it, without even thinking about it?" said my wife, her voice rising.

"Uh..."

"I usually sit down and think these things through," she continued. "For instance, I never would have stuck all those blossoms in the bottle. How are you going to pour the vinegar without getting that stuff all over everything?"

"Uh...."

"I would have put the finished vinegar in there and then had maybe one stem with a blossom on it for decoration..."

Gulp.

Of course she was right about everything. It wasn't until after I had stuffed the blossoms into the bottle that I actually found a recipe for making chive vinegar and it calls for bringing the vinegar almost to a boil, then pouring it over a ton of chopped chives and steeping the mixture for a week or two before bottling it.

I drained the vinegar out of the bottle. Now I was looking at a heap of soggy chive blossoms at the bottom of an otherwise empty bottle and no conceivable way of getting that plant residue out of there.

A vacuum cleaner, maybe?

So now I followed the directions, bringing two cups of white wine vinegar almost to a boil, then pouring it over two cups of chopped chives (plus some blossoms) at the bottom of a large canning jar. That's what you see in the picture above.

Those of you who can't wait two weeks to see what the vinegar looks like, and don't care to know how I get the chive blossom mess out of my vinegar bottle, can just Google "chive blossom vinegar" and see some lovely pictures of chive blossoms floating in bottles of vinegar.

Recipes For And Or Proper Manner To Prepare A Whole Human Carcass

You non-bloggers out there may have wondered what those little chicklets are near the bottom of the page in the right-hand column where it says "View My Stats" and "Sitemeter."

Those are devices down-loadable free that tell you what kind of traffic you've been getting on your blog. In other words, how many people are reading.

But more than that, thanks to the all-seeing eye of the internet, you can go behind the scenes, as it were, to see from which part of the world your readers are tuning in and even which internet sit they may have been visiting before they clicked over here.

It's pretty scary, I know. Big Brother. The heck with library records, a government agent can find out more about you just by starting a blog. I have to admit, the technology can be highly seductive and sometimes I find myself rummaging around my own "stats" to see who's watching.

Truth is, the majority of my "readers" hit on this blog as the result of a search. I notice widespread interest in things like chilaquiles, for instance, or hog butchering. For a while, I was near the top of the search lists for my coq au vin.

Last night, though, I came up short when I saw a Google search emanating from Long Beach, California, and containing the words I've used in the title of this post: "recipes for and or proper manner to prepare a whole human carcass."

I swear, I am not making this up. The first question is an obvious one: Why did Google think I would be able to answer this query? Secondly, was this a joke, or is there really someone out there with a human body in his cooler looking for ways to turn it into dinner?

A little spooky, no?

This was one of those instances where you have to look away for a moment, then look back to see if you really saw what you think you saw. You hope that while your eyes are averted the words just float off the computer screen and disappear like some kind of chimera.

Well, the words didn't go away. They were still there the second and the third time I looked.

I had to tell my wife.

"We have to call the FBI!" was her immediate reaction.

Yeah, I thought. That's what I was thinking. But even though I considered this possibly a matter for law enforcement, what I found myself advocating for was the proposition that whoever was behind this Google query did not actually have a human carcass in his fridge but was just goofing around and thought it would be funny if there really was somewhere on the world-wide internet a recipe for cooking a human.

But my wife was not moved. "We have to call the FBI," she repeated.

I handed my wife the phone book but went to bed before finding out if she actually called and what our federal crime agency's reaction might have been. I can just imagine the agent working the midnight shift who takes this call, then goes home to his wife and says, "Honey, you wouldn't believe the nuts out there working this internet shit."

Or, are there agents at this very moment dressed in full SWAT regalia, surrounding some unsuspecting bungalow in Long Beach, CA, with the sole purpose of inspecting all refrigeration units on the premises, as well as crawl spaces, attics, garages, storage units and any newly dug garden beds.

I could not resist clicking on the Google query in question (go ahead, try it!) and of course found there is no such thing even in the great big world of the internet as a site explaining how to prepare a human carcass for consumption. Oh, you do get quite a few results, but pertaining only to some of the individual words in the query line.

The Slow Cook came up because of all my posts back in March about butchering hog carcasses.

I went to bed remembering the Twilight Zone episode where aliens land on Planet Earth and proceed to carry out a number of good deeds for humanity. The aliens are represented by the same actor who played Lurch on The Adams Family, only with this hugely swollen head (all aliens have gigantic brains, right?) and these horrible dark circles under his eyes (he gets no sleep, wracking his brain for ways to help humans.) He communicates telepathically and after doing many good deeds, invites human to travel back to his planet.

He leaves behind a huge book written in an alien script that is only deciphered after earthlings begin loading onto the flying sauces. The title of the book, the first thing de-coded, is To Serve Man, which maybe explains all the good deeds?

But just as the space ships are preparing to take off, the true contents of the book become clear and a clerk comes running.

"Don't go! Don't go!" she screams to the humans waiting in line to get aboard. "To Serve Man, it's a cook book!"

Of course now that I've used the words, I will be at the top of the list of any future Google searches for how to cook a human carcass.

Ah, well. I just had to tell you.

Feeding a Hungry Frog

Our friend Bob is in town and that is always cause for celebration.

Bob is one of our favorite artists as well as being a friend. He is the creator of a series of shockingly lifelike and slimy amphibian portraits such as the one at left. We have a large example hanging in our living room.

But Bob picked up and moved to Southern France (I can't imagine why) where he's become quite a success with his landscapes and street scenes and portraits of everyday life there. We keep threatening to visit--we simply don't get to see him as often as we'd like.

Lately Bob had been e-mailing us about his wondrous adventures traveling by slow train across the Australian continent and hanging out on deserted beaches. He and his son also maintain a cabin in the Shenandoah area of Virginia where he holds huge debauched feasts for friends and relations.

When Bob comes to dinner, he usually brings a surprise or two. This time it was a bag full of morels that he'd foraged near his cabin. Some made quite an impression, as you can see here in the picture of Bob (with mustache) and his cousin Steve, our favorite photographer.

Bob also brought along a bottle of his home-brewed apple champagne. The challenge for us was how to adequately impress Bob with all the great stuff we've been cooking lately and fashion it into a menu that made sense.

By that I mean of course the homemade sausages, the sauerkraut--it just didn't seem to work with the seasonal items my wife had assembled. And how exactly would the morels fit in?

So this is what we did: Since I'd already defrosted some of the chorizo sausages we made at the "matanza" back in March, we displayed those as an hors d'oeuvres on a bed of our sauerkraut (from the bucket that's been sitting on the kitchen counter) braised with onion, apples, caraway and juniper berries. With that I poured a bottle of Trimbach Pinot Blanc. As a second hors d'oeuvres we served whole artichokes my wife had steamed, along with an aioli for dipping.

Predictably, the crowd was wild for the sauerkraut, even though it made absolutely no sense at a dinner celebrating Spring. Our friend Pete swooned over it (as I knew he would) and launched into a story about how he and his siblings growing up in West Virginia would hold their noses when grandma sent them down to the cellar to collect kraut from the big barrel she would have fermenting down there.

Somehow the story detoured into pickled green tomatoes, so I pulled a jar of those from the refrigerator, which sent Pete into paroxysms of gustatory exclamation. Pete is a wonder to behold when he is properly fed, a most appreciative guest.

The dinner itself was more straightforward. I had collected a big bowl of greens from the 30 or so different varieties we have growing in front of the house here in the District of Columbia. All different shapes and colors and not just lettuces. I threw in a few mustard greens (they're just now the perfect size) to give the salad some bite, then dressed it with a honey-mustard vinaigrette.

As for the morels, we sliced those up and sauteed them on the stove with a bit of fresh sage. In the absence of any brandy to flame them with, I added some Madeira and finished them with heavy cream. We served them with a grilled, butterflied leg of lamb, rosemary-roasted potatoes and poached asparagus that my wife garnished with chive blossoms out of the garden.

Like I said: perhaps not the menu I would have designed sitting in front of my computer. I fear we did not do Bob's morels justice. But somehow we tolerate all kinds of culinary collisions when the ingredients are first rate and when the food is prepared with love for friends.

I think Bob enjoyed it. We were lucky to see him. He's flying back to France today.

Bon voyage, Bob!

How Do You Like Your Liver?

My father-in-law has returned home from major surgery so my wife and I volunteered to cook lunch for her parents.

And what do you suppose would be at the top of their list of favorite meals?

Liver.

My wife will have none of it. She won't eat filtering organs. If the organ has been filtering, she figures there's something in it she doesn't want to put in her mouth.

("It's really the texture I can't stand," my wife tells me now. "It's gritty and weird.")

But when you think about it, liver can be pretty sublime. Where would we be, for instance, without pate de foie gras? Or what kind of world would this be without an occasional schmear of chopped liver on toast? Even a simple skillet of chicken livers with scrambled eggs lifts breakfast to another level.

At least it does for me.

So I was elated when the in-laws requested liver for the welcome-home meal. Naturally, our local Whole Foods was out of calves liver. They had some nice looking kidneys. But once again I found myself at the Customer Service desk asking the clerk to make some phone calls.

Soon enough I had about 1 1/2 pounds of fresh calves liver and three Vidalia onions. I figured this would be enough for four persons, or three as the case might be. My wife sliced the onions thinly and browned them to a silky confection before we left the house. This left only the cooking of the livers, which I proceeded to do in a heavy skillet after we arrived at the family home in Annapolis.

First, put the browned onions in a 200-degree oven to come up to temperature.

As for the liver, it should be sliced about 1/2-inch thick, or a maybe a little thicker. Season it agressively with salt and pepper on both sides. Pour a tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil into the skillet over moderately high heat. The oil should be starting to smoke.

Cook the liver on one side until it is nicely browned. Then flip and repeat on the other side. The total cooking time will be around five minutes (or maybe three minutes, I wasn't really timing it. See Stephen's comment below).

Test for doneness by poking the meat with your finger: It should still have some give to it for meat that is pinkish in the middle. Or cut a piece open and take a look. Personally, I like my liver more toward the medium-to-medium-rare side. But some people can't stand liver that isn't cooked all the way through. It's up to you.

At this point, remove the skillet from the heat and pour a tablespoon or two of good brandy into the pan with the meat. Light the brandy, tipping the pan if necessary to get the liquid to collect at one end. Shake the pan until the flames subside.

Remove the meat from the pan onto a plate to rest. Meanwhile, drop two tablespoons of butter into the skillet and deglaze on the stove, scraping any brown bits off the bottom of the pan.

Distribute the warmed onions onto dinner plates. Place the liver over the onions and drizzle the pan juices over everything. You could garnish the meat with some chopped parsley if you like. Alternately, smother the liver with the onions.

We served this with poached asparagus (thick spears--the father-in-law grew up with asparagus and insists on thick spears) and baby potatoes. I don't remember being hungry the rest of the afternoon.

Food Overload

In the last week I made meals for 30 for our Schoolyard Greening Clinic and a full-blown dinner for 50 parents at the elementary school where I teach " food appreciation."

In between were meals for personal chef clients, breakfasts and school lunches for our 7-year-old and dinners to fulfill our policy (hope) of sitting down to the table as a family in the evening.

It seems the eating never stops. And when I look back on the week, cooking without letup crowded out everything else. There is also the cleanup that goes with all the cooking. The sink holds a stack of pots and pans waiting to be put away. I still have a 5-gallon bucket of sauerkraut (almost empty) sitting on the kitchen counter.

I am reeling from the sheer diversity of what passed through my kitchen.

Here, I make a small confession. I do subscribe to several food magazines. Occasionally there is something editorially worth the price of admission. But really what I do mostly is clip recipes. And the reason I clip recipes is not so much that I am dying to sign on to the latest trend as described by Food & Wine, but because the recipes remind me what season we're in and what ingredients I should be looking for at the store.

Don't we all need a little reminding sometimes?

For all their other faults, food magazine editors do a pretty good job of keeping up with the seasons, although you will occasionally find a tomato or a zucchini sneaking into a recipe in February. Secretly, I take a little devilish pleasure in counting the out-of-season vegetables that pass through the editorial screens.

I keep file folders of recipes categorized by month. Each time the postman drops off a new edition of Saveur or Martha Stewart Living, I breeze through it, tearing out the stuff that looks decent and filing it away under the appropriate month. When it comes time to planning meals for clients, I flip though the folder of the month for inspiration.

Besides strolling around my own garden, where the lettuces and mizuna and mustard greens are telling me we're well into spring salad season, this is how I know to be looking out for artichokes and asparagus and fava beans at the grocery.

Sometimes I even impress myself with the results. This week I made:

Orange marmalade duck breast with parsnip pancakes and Madeira sauce

Poached coho salmon with dill sauce

Celery root remoulade

Roast lamb and barley salad

Bulgur pilaf with spring greens

Endive salad with grainy mustard vinaigrette

Salad of greens from the garden

Just looking at the menus again is making me feel a little frisky, perhaps enough to lift me out of the food overload funk. I'm starting to have visions of artichokes.

There's a certain guilt factor involved in using artichokes trucked in all the way from California. Check that: a lot of guilt. Artichokes hardly qualify as local food. I bought a pack of artichoke seeds this year but never planted them. Maybe next year.

Still, after watching all those episodes of Mario trimming artichokes, I'm thinking this may be the year I truly get down with this strange thistle of a vegetable and see where it leads me.

Man vs. Nature

I was visiting a community garden yesterday to answer questions about dealing with pests organically. One of the gardeners wanted to know if there was anything they could do about the mosquitoes.

My immediate response was, Don't garden when the mosquitoes are out.

Somehow we've arrived at a point where we humans think nature is something to be controlled and manipulated like the potted plants on our back deck. We reject the idea of invasive plants and wage war against them. We treat threatened species like pets, putting them on display in zoos as if they were objects d'art. Having destroyed or simply overrun most of the natural world, we establish park-like reserves where the remaining species can live out their remaining days.

Yet nature is always pushing back, making itself felt in surprising ways. Like the baby sparrow that showed up on our front steps the other day.

Clearly, this little bird, unable to fly yet, would not survive on its own. We took it inside, intending to make a home for it until it was old enough to make a life for itself.

We created a nest for the bird out of a cardboard box and some straw. We gave it water in a plastic bowl and decided cream of wheat would make a fine sparrow feed.

This little bird was a fighter. It did not want to stay in the box. It would flap its wings and claw its way to the top of the box and perch there. Then, on the second day of its visit with us, the bird disappeared from the box altogether.

"The bird flew out the window," my 7-year-old daughter said.

When I was my daughter's age, I'd gone out into the forest preserve looking for Indian treasures and come home with three baby chipmunks. I set an alarm clock to feed them milk from an eye dropper every four hours. Miraculously, they survived. They grew into adult chipmunks that raced around the house, up and down the living room curtains, and would run up your leg and sit on your shoulder.

They perished one day when the door to their cage was left open and they fell into a sump pump.

I thought raising this baby sparrow would be a valuable lesson for my daughter. We knew it had not flown out the window and I figured it would make its presence known sooner or later. Sure enough, I was tapping away on my computer when I heard a loud "Cheep!" I looked to my right and saw the sparrow sitting on top of my computer router, staring me in the eye.

How, I wondered, did a baby bird that did not know how to fly make its way to a spot three feet off the ground?

But the next morning, there was no cheeping coming from the cardboard box. We'd put a metal screen over the top to keep the bird from escaping. As I told my wife, the bird had no chance of survival until it was more fully grown.

I looked into the box to check on our little sparrow. It was laying on its side, dead.

How did it die? Could we have done more?

There was no way to tell. No note left behind. No way to explain how a little sparrow could be so alive one minute--so full of our expectations for it--and so irretrievably dead the next.

I was sad that we had failed to keep this helpless creature alive. Yet she reminded us that some things in nature are simply beyond our control.

And maybe that's a good thing.