Of Apples and Pineapples
You want to eat clean food? You want to eat seasonal food? You want to eat local food? Well, these three things often go together to make produce more delicious.
Fruits and vegetables taste better at the peak of their season. Local producers who can carefully bring their goods to market, don’t have to pick fruits underripe so they can be survive commercial freight. Those farmers who care enough to work with nature rather than against it tend to optimize for flavor and not tons per acre.
I believe in all of this. This is why I belong to a CSA. This is why I shop at farmers markets. This is why I love restaurants like All Good Bakers.
But now I’m going to turn it on its head.
Food Writers Have To Eat
One day I’ll take some time and figure out how to make money from this blog. In the meantime, I’m happy to trade my time and talents for food and fame.
It’s a pretty good deal. Last week I met up again with chef Noah Sheetz of the Chefs Consortium, and he handed me another box of delicious treats. In that box were eggs from unusual birds, notably wild turkeys and pheasants. There were also smoked sausages from unusual animals, like pheasants and deer.
So naturally I put the pheasant sausage on a garlicky white bean puree and topped the whole thing with a fried pheasant egg. You can read all about it, and my new found love for these smaller eggs here. There are even pictures.
I feel great about this partnership and the work I do for All Over Albany (for which I actually do get paid). But there is something else on the horizon that makes me a little uneasy.
The Supermarket Wars: Cheap Meat
Before we begin, I need to tell you something. I’m rooting for Price Chopper.
It’s not because I think they are the best of the supermarkets in the region. Right now they have a few good stores. I really like the one down in Slingerlands, and if the bagels from the Kosher Chopper out in Colonie went away, I would truly miss them.
However, the hard but obvious truth is that right now they are not the best supermarket in the region, regardless of what the Times Union Reader’s Choice Poll will say when it comes out in June. But there is no reason why they couldn’t be. I hope that in the face of tremendous competition our hometown market can rise up to the challenge and reinvent itself. But it will take a lot of work, focus and difficult decisions.
That said, I got a flyer in the mail recently that reflects their new deep savings. This is what was promised after rolling back their popular gas promotion (which I’ve only taken advantage of twice – I always found it too much of a hassle).
True to their word, the prices are low. Maybe a little too low.
The Great Shrinking Bean
Beans grow. We’ve got examples of it in our folklore, like Jack and the Beanstalk. Plus if you’ve ever cooked with dried beans, you are keenly aware of how much their volume increases after sitting overnight in water.
But just last week, as I was begrudging the lack of fresh spring produce, I found something special at ShopRite: fava beans.
Fresh fava beans, still in their large soft pods look like string beans on steroids. Maybe they’ve been around every spring. Perhaps they are in Price Chopper and Hannaford, and I’ve just never seen them. But I was excited to get my hands on these. I’ve prepared fresh fava beans before, so I knew what I was up against, but I had plenty of time to kill.
This time, I thought I’d conduct a little experiment, and see just how much they shrunk in preparation.
A Mothers Day Without Moms
Some people are wanderers. They are born one place, grow up somewhere else, go to college, and then head off to find their place in the world.
Others stay put. Maybe they’ll travel for school or spend a year abroad, but they will eventually come back home to the city, town or hamlet where their family has lived for generations.
Albany seems to have a higher than average population of the latter. Mrs. Fussy and I firmly fall into the former. And as a direct result are nowhere near our respective mothers on this Mothers Day. I’m not even entirely sure where my mom is today. She may be in Florida, but perhaps she’s on a plane, or maybe she’s recently returned to Providence.
It’s difficult to keep track of other people’s schedules when I can barely keep up with my own. So in lieu of gifts or flowers, once again I’m dedicating today’s post to my mom.
There’s just one problem. Well, really there are two.
Doctor Stock
There is one very last thing I have to say about stock before moving on. Unless you write Burnt My Fingers, you too are probably sick of the debate about the preferred method for making this flavor base.
Probably my favorite part of this conversation was Chef Tanner’s comment. One of the things he spelled out is the difference between stock and broth. Broth, he says, is made from meat, while stock is made from bones.
So what one buys at the grocery store, which is liquid and not gelatinous when cool, is technically broth and not stock. That fact actually makes the title of this post problematic. But I couldn’t resist the nod to Star Trek. Now what I need to tell you about is a little trick I picked up from Julia Child (if I recall correctly) about what to do should you find yourself in a cooking emergency surrounded by little more than store bought chicken broth.
Or should you be one of those people who really just doesn’t want to bother tending a pot of simmering liquid for three hours, but still wants to cook tasty food, I’ve got the solution.
Recipes and Modifications: Carrot Salad
My CSA doesn’t start until June 12. Until then I’ll just need to hit farmers markets to get some of the local spring produce. Last weekend I tried to do just that. I was on my way to the Troy market when someone suggested I check out the Menands one instead. Having never been, and always up for an adventure, I gave it a go.
Turns out that on opening day, the Menands farmers market is more like a flea sale than anything else. It all worked out okay. Albany Jane, John, Little Miss Fussy and I went to Ted’s for fried oysters, but I never got my veggies.
So, where am I going with this?
Well, that means I’m still cooking with carrots, although I am still trying to make them spring-like. And that means carrot salad. I found this recipe for a zesty Moroccan take on this dish online. It’s delicious and easy to make (provided you have some kind of machine to grate the carrots). But more than anything else, I’d like to use this recipe as a launching point to discuss culinary creativity, and the importance of starting with a recipe.
Ask the Profussor – Pain Free
It’s amazing what a sunnier place the world is when you are not in pain. Even if it’s raining. Quite possibly the excessive grumpiness of the past few weeks has been the direct result of back and sinus pain. I also stepped on Little Miss Fussy’s ukulele and took a chunk the size of a nickel out of my foot.
The instrument was fine.
Anyway, I’m fresh off a great meeting with Chef Noah from The Chefs Consortium, and I’m really inspired by some of the local foods he’s handed over for me to write up in the coming weeks. Plus I’ve made a new friend who has backyard chickens, and enjoyed an amazing poached egg, which always brings me unimaginable joy.
But today isn’t about me. It’s about you, or rather, your questions. Because I’m committed to answering all of them provided they contain a question mark. I may even answer questions that weren’t directed at me. Occasionally I’ll tackle a rhetorical question too. Today, I’ve also chosen to address something that was never a question at all.
Ready? Let’s begin.
Tour de Hard Ice Cream
———————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Please be advised: The date of the Tour de Hard Ice Cream has changed. It’s now Saturday, May 26.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Like the Tour de Cider Donut, this might actually need to be split up over multiple rounds. But I’ve finally wrapped my head around all your nominations and have done a little bit of soul searching, and I’m proud to announce the itinerary for the Tour de Hard Ice Cream.
The soul searching involved Stewart’s. For those who live outside of the area, this is our locally based chain of convenience stores. We don’t have 7-11 out here or the Circle-K. We have Stewart’s. And they are known for a small handful of good products at a fair price, one of which is their ice cream. Some will claim they have “The World’s Best Vanilla.” But they don’t, though.
Theirs is an industrial produced product made in mega-batches and distributed through the region. It’s not going to be as good as some of the other smaller ice cream stands that make their own product by hand. But Stewart’s is also a regional benchmark. Much like how I fully expected Kurver Kreme to flame out in the Tour de Soft Serve, they had to be included, because a Tour without Kurver was no tour at all.
But ultimately this is not about hard ice cream as a commodity. It’s about the individuality expressed at each of the ice cream stands on the tour; and this can be tasted in the hard ice cream they make by themselves.
Now let me tell you what I’ve got planned.
Mad Cows, Scientists & Lawmakers
How many cows are infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (aka Mad Cow Disease or BSE for short) in America?
Well, the USDA and the beef producers would like you to believe there are none. The claim is that they have put protocols on animal feed (thankfully they’ve stopped feeding ground up cows to cows), slaughter (cows that are too sick to walk on their own into the abattoir are now unfit for human consumption) and processing (brains and spinal cords are removed from carcasses and considered high risk materials).
These steps have helped to reduce the already low risk of this disease.
Except they don’t really know for sure, because the US doesn’t require BSE testing like some other countries. And the USDA has even actively thwarted private producers from testing for BSE in the past. So lo and behold, what shows up in California last week? A cow with BSE.
Now this is no reason to panic, however it is a good reminder to be informed about the disease, its effects on people, and the shenanigans of our regulators. Read more…
FUSSYlittleBLOG 