Black Marks on Heat Eat Review

January 12, 2009


My TSO.A few months ago, I ate a Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers General Tso’s Spicy Chicken meal.

As I often do when I walk by the Healthy Choice section, I thought immediately of one of my favorite sites: Heat Eat Review.

I sent a tweet to Abi Jones and asked, “Can I write a review?” And she said, “Hell Yes, Dawg.” And I took a artfully moody-looking picture and dug in.

The result is here:

“The sauce was the selling point and, ultimately, the downfall of the dish. Put a classy sauce over awful chicken and you can possibly get away with a saved meal. But this sauce, while proper in consistency, was lacking in taste. It was like homemade sweet and sour sauce that was made with an unequal amount of ingredients – as if the sugar was running low, so they used silica gel instead.”

I love reading works of food criticism. So, it should come as no surprise when I say I’m pretty excited about my first Heat Eat Review post.

So go check it out, already.

Tags: Blogging, Food |

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The Food Lover’s Companion

December 16, 2008


The Food Lover's CompanionThe Food Lover’s Companion proclaims to include comprehensive definitions of over 4,000 food, wine and culinary terms. At over 700 pages long, it’s a compact reference book that spans the entire spectrum of taste, from plain water to the complex makeup of rare cheese.

For our home, the Food Lover’s Companion is a pre-children experiment in chance. Kerrie and I, buoyed by a love of food-based television programming and encouraged by several food magazine subscriptions, developed a game to accompany the Food Lover’s Companion – a game that ultimately gave us an excuse to read the reference book, as our normal cooking habits did not often require the definition or use of rare ingredients.

The game was played like this.

Kerrie would begin by naming a food. Any food. It could be general, like “beans” or “pasta” – responses that naturally gave a much wider chance of continuation – or very specific, like “Gorgonzola” or “pinto.” I would read the description aloud – an act that could try my patience with the epicurean language, especially in those cases of long, general descriptions – and Kerrie would choose one of the cross-referenced words within. In the rare case another term wasn’t cross-referenced, we would start again.

This little ritual began during a time of sleeplessness and continued for a year or so. I was working late nights – the relay center closed at 1 AM, and I often didn’t make it home until 2 AM – and on my nights off I would typically stay up much later than Kerrie.

Every few weeks, when Kerrie needed to fall asleep, we’d pull out the Food Lover’s Companion and start sifting through the descriptions. We’d slowly learn a little more about food, developing a keen sense of which terms would profit in terms of available cross-references, thus keeping the game afloat. Eventually, Kerrie would get tired and I would continue on with my night.

The act has since been abandoned. The Food Lover’s Companion now sits in the kitchen, where it probably – no, definitely – belongs. I no longer work late, te go to bed at about the same time each night, and a 16-month old toddler (not to mention a blossoming pregnancy) has rendered us a tired mess by about 9:30 PM.

In other words, getting to sleep is no longer a problem.

Still, the allure of that little white book still captures my attention. I still open it up now and then at work (I have a copy that was handed down to me from a co-worker for use with a handful of restaurant accounts) and marvel at the complexity of food – the miles of descriptions and backgrounds and cultural ties, the thousands of preparations, the amazing array of choice that forces havoc on the eternal question, “What should I eat?”

It’s no bigger than a travel bible; no thicker than a pocket dictionary. Yet, it holds the entire history of food. Term by term. Each linking to the next. Until finally, you arrive at a dead end, and you can sit back with awe at the path you took to get there and wonder, of all things, how anyone could have discovered this rare food, this odd cheese, this strain of wine, and marvel at the chance that led to some random person tasting it and proclaiming it to be good.

The chance of discovery that, ultimately, leads to the choices in taste we are allowed to make each day.

Tags: Books, Food |

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The CSA: Weeks 16-18

September 29, 2008


And just like that, we’re done.

This week, our vegetables came with a note. “Thanks for everything, sign up for the Fall CSA.” Or something like that. It wasn’t a sad, misty-eyed moment or anything, but it felt like a grand experiment had come to an end.

It hadn’t, though. Instead, a new habit formed. Over the past 18 weeks, we’ve been lucky enough to have fresh, locally grown produce for half of what it would cost at the grocery store. We received a constant supply of whatever was in season. Carrots. Onions. Radishes. Whatever was ready for harvest, we were ready to receive.

And we learned a lot about vegetables. Naturally.

We are thankful that some of our veggies lasted longer than a few weeks. Some are still lasting right now. We have stocked up on potatoes and onions and other root vegetables. Like, for a month. Or more. They’re just sitting there, staring at us with all of those eyes.

Looking back, I discovered a love for raw carrots – garden carrots, naturally – that I had always suspected but was enforced by constant availability. I never knew there could be so many different types of potatoes and onions. I came to the realization that you can have too many tomatoes. That you can have too many of anything, really.

We changed our cooking habits. We were used to the typical vegetarian style of generic, quick cooking, which throws several different types of produce together in one stir-fry/stew type dish. Over the summer, unknowing as we were, we sought out recipes for beets and kohlrabi and pumpkin and found ourselves creating nearly single-vegetable dedicated meals.

We learned to cook more simply. With the vegetables we received, we had to enforce a more simple approach. We had little need to go to the grocery store. Instead, we pulled from our large stockpile of pantry staples, finally finding a use for things we had purchased long ago and never used. Our grocery bills went down – not just because we weren’t purchasing produce, but because we were simply using what we had. It was the beginnings of a pantry raid. And it has served to change our outlook on cooking meals.

Still, we have a lot of work ahead of us. Planning meals is hit and miss. The uncertainty of knowing exactly what we got left us to plan on Sunday, which often just left us not planning at all. To take full advantage of a bag full of potatoes, knowing full well that another bag will be coming in just seven days, has the feeling of a work deadline.

Above all, it just felt good to reap the CSA harvest. To me, it was always more than just food. It was more than an extended garden, a supplement to the mess we have growing in the backyard. Instead, I saw this as giving back, to supporting someone who is tethered to the ever-changing roller coaster cycle of farming, who depends on weather that has no need to cooperate and factors that live off of a farm’s suffering.

Even if it was just a couple hundred dollars, only about $10 a week for nearly 20 weeks, it was our way of supporting a small farm. And in return for that support, we received the fruits (vegetables?) of their harvest, the lifeblood of the independent farmer: produce, fresh from the ground, plucked from the vine, ripened naturally, stored on site and treated to only water, fertilizer and love.

It was worth it. On so many levels. And now the only thing I wonder is what next year will bring.

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Weeks 14 and 15

September 9, 2008


What do you do with 30 tomatoes?

50 potatoes? Five full-sized cucumbers? Two large bundles of carrots and 15 onions?

When you’re a family of three, with one of those three being just 13 months, how do you eat five squashes?

My fear is, you don’t. You let them go bad. You give them away. You forget about them quickly, lest your inner waste-not conscience smacks you upside the head.

Herein lies our problem. We’re waste-notters. And we have too many vegetables.

The week before we left on vacation, we were a total whirlwind of busyness, flitting around the house and town and all over the place like the proverbial chicken with no head, organizing the last week of daycare and preparing for a full-on onslaught of travel.

So we had little time to make real meals.

Which means our CSA sat dormant. Piling up. Spreading out and taking over the kitchen. And with a garden full of tomato plants, thriving even without a consistent water supply, we left town to a kitchen that looked like a cornucopia murder scene, vegetables spilled everywhere, covering the counter and threatening to climb up the walls.

While we were gone, we missed a Saturday, in turn, missing a week of the CSA. Thankfully. Otherwise, we’d be in even worse shape.

Instead, we returned to yet another half-share, lovingly deposited by my mother, and realized we had a problem. We had over 30 tomatoes total, now. Our potatoes had expanded, with at least 50 small tubers in several piles throughout the kitchen. Squash was on special, apparently, and cucumbers the size of overgrown zucchini threatened to take over our fridge.

(And yes, the aforementioned zucchini were available as well, in addition to more carrots and more onions, a green pepper and two jalapeños.)

So here’s our plan.

Eat them. All of them.

Tomatoes? Half went into an easy gazpacho recipe, as did one of the cucumbers and the green pepper. More cukes will be used in a cucumber melon sesame salad. Onions? Let’s have a redux of the incredible English Onion Soup with Cheddar recipe from Jamie Oliver. Potatoes and zucchini? Kerrie’s been waiting to make tiella for ages, and this is her chance.

I don’t think it will all be gone in one week. In fact, I fully suspect that our stash will grow again on Saturday, maybe to the point that we don’t make up any ground. Or (gasp!) we actually fall further behind.

But hey – with the price of produce and the freshness of what we’re getting, I can’t imagine I should be complaining about getting too much of a good thing.

(Of course, if you need a potato or two, you know where to come calling.)

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Weeks 12 and 13

August 25, 2008


Tomato soup. BLTs. Salad garnish. Toasted tomato and basil with mozzarella. Sandwich toppings. Straight tomatoes with salt.

Last week’s CSA and this weeks are nearly identical – corn, potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, carrots. Each bag shows up with a wide display of colors, each week a promise of more freshness. Oh, and tomatoes. So many tomatoes.

Raw. Broiled. Sliced. Whole. Tomatoes are coming out of our ears. With our garden exploding in a fireworks display of green, orange and red, and with the ol’ CSA ramping up its collection of actual usable vegetables, including, of course, tomatoes, we’re nearly drowning in the Fruit that Would Be Called Veggie.

They’re the crown jewel of the growing season, in most cases – a perfect combination of ease, versatility and taste. We have several different kinds throughout our garden – Roma, full, three different types of heirloom – and we have a cornucopia of tomatoes spilling out on our counter; red, orange, yellow, green, like a terror alert scale gone wrong. Unfortunately, one that’s nearly always peaking on red.

And here’s the paradox. I’m greedy. I want them all. I don’t want to give any away.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m forcing myself to part with some of them. I know I couldn’t possibly eat them all, and our family is only so big. We could have tomatoes for every meal and still make an unidentifiable dent.

So we’ve been handing them to our family, offering them to friends, always with my hands over my eyes, my fingers crossed behind my back, unable to believe the words coming out of my mouth. “What am I doing,” I find myself saying afterwards. “These are royalty, these tomatoes, the most valuable vegetables in the stash!”

I get over it. Eventually. I only hoard because I understand that, when we’re out of town, the garden will be picked clean. Family will arrive like vultures to snatch away the forgotten fruits. We welcome this, but I can’t help but think that everyone would be a lot happier if we’d just go away on vacation for a month or so, leaving the garden wide open, free for the taking, simply lousy with tomatoes and the people who love them.

Don’t ask. We have too many tomatoes. Yet, it never seems like we have enough.

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Week 11

August 13, 2008


CornAt one point in my life, I had gotten over corn.

It was like the dark ages, a corn-free zone. It wasn’t that I didn’t eat it – I would, if given no other option, but sometime during my senior year of high school I just kind of seeing it as a viable choice. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I don’t think – it was just an organic result of a decade’s worth of cafeteria corn. Loose kernels, floating in corn-juice, with little yellow specks clinging to the spoon as you pulled it out of the serving line. Ugh.

And on the cob, things weren’t better. I never made an effort to purchase corn on the cob, would pass it up in buffet line, would forgo it’s messiness for something safer, like potato salad or another hamburger bun.

What makes this corn absence even more surprising is that I was a vegetarian, making corn even more important during any sort of already meat-infested meal. But aside from having corn used in a recipe, I was never crazy about it. I was non-plussed. Corn was not a part of my life.

So why am I so excited about it now?

Maybe weeks of beets and cabbage and kohlrabi have left me shell-shocked, longing for something familiar. But when I grabbed our green bag of farm-fresh groceries and I saw those tufts of corn silk peeking out the top of the bag, nestled in between a sole green pepper and bunch of carrots, I got excited. Like, really excited. So excited that I felt the need to send a text message to Kerrie, that moment, proclaiming the good news.

“Corn!”

Now, three ears of corn sit in our fridge, preparing themselves for a Friday night grilled salmon feast. I spent ages not caring about corn, and though it might seem silly to say, I’m glad it’s back in my life.

Welcome back, corn. Welcome back.

(The weekly haul, of course)
Corn
Onions
Tomatoes
Potatoes
Carrots
Various peppers
Cucumbers
Zucchini
Kohlrabi
Green beans

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Week 10

August 4, 2008


Sometimes, your schedule is thrown off so wildly that you don’t even remember what happened. This happens a lot more frequently when you’ve raised a child for a year – things are forgotten at such wildly quickening speed that you find yourself looking around for the time, as if you simply dropped it somewhere between the car and the front door.

I went to the Farmer’s Market twice this week. Within three hours. And I can barely remember it.

Oh, sure – I had my reasons. I was in the middle of a runaway wild hurricane, a twister caused by an impending First Birthday Party. And I was shuttling back and forth all day on Saturday, unaware of where I was from one moment to the next, working three errands at once, sweating profusely as the heat pressed harder on my skull.

The first time I went to the Market I was simply looking around. My father had never made it down to the booths, so I offered to take him down, knowing full well that I’d be back later to make any actual purchases. We wandered, we gawked, and we discussed the seemingly high price of organically grown vegetables and why the amount is generally worth it.

Later that morning my mother and I took our regularly scheduled trip to pick up our CSA, and it was like a new experience. Everything seemed new, as if I hadn’t been there since last week. And our share sent me further into the past. Back was the kohlrabi. Back was a too-big batch of beets. Beets. You’ve got to be kidding me. Our pepper stock had shrunk, and our cucumbers had as well. It seemed as though we had hit a rough patch in the weekly harvest, leaving us with nothing but the usual.

We’re getting tired of the usual.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy the weekly harvest. But at some point, you have to say “NO MORE!” to cabbage and kohlrabi and beets. Give us double carrots. Or, I don’t know, more tomatoes. Even onions – hell, it will give me an excuse to make French onion soup again.

(Which reminds me. Last week’s urge was for the onion soup. This week’s urge comes right off the top of the “now that I’m an omnivore again I can eat this” stack: the BLT. The real BLT. With real bacon. And with that urge in mind, I purchased my first package of non-grilling meat. Beef bacon. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.)

Most of our veggies from last week still sit in the fridge, aside from a handful of cucumbers and other sandwich- or pizza-friendly items. It was rough, to say the least. So we’re on catch-up this week.

Of course, that’s just the thing. I can’t remember what we ate last week. Just like I barely remember going to the Farmer’s Market. Just like I can’t remember anything else from that day. So maybe we’re okay – maybe we’ve forgotten what we ate, and we’re only a few beets from a successful week of vegetable nutrition.

For our own sake, I hope that’s true.

The haul:
Onions
Tomatoes
Beets
Potatoes
Carrots
Various peppers
Cucumbers
Cabbage
Green beans
Kohlrabi

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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