Freetaly
My mechanic has great taste. His name is Steve and he runs the show at Larry’s Foreign Auto. And he and his team are fantastic. I’m not the first to buy another Mazda just so I could keep bringing it into his shop. But since I know nothing about cars and little about tennis, we often talk about food when I’m in there.
Big shock, huh.
He’s a food lover, and he has current issues of food magazines in the waiting area. On Friday, we were talking about the upcoming Saratoga Wine and Food & Fall Ferrari Festival. Steve went last year and made a bee-line for one of his favorite wines, Pininfarina. Given that it bears the name of the family that has been designing Ferrari automobiles for decades (or so I’ve been told), it is a very appropriate wine for the event.
For some reason I was unable to attend the event last year. Luckily my schedule is a bit more open this time around. And thanks to the generosity of the Italian Trade Commission, I and a handful of other local bloggers will be reporting to you about the event on their dime.
My hope is to come away from this with a better understanding of Italian wine.
Bitter Sweet
As much as I love a well-made classic cocktail, I am not a cocktail geek.
I say this not as a matter of pride, because I admire and respect the cocktail geeks out there. It also doesn’t mean that I’ve given up the valiant fight for justice for crimes against cocktails. Rather, it’s a self-realization about where I am on the cocktail continuum.
The geeks will try to seek out rare bottles of spirits and liqueurs in order to faithfully recreate drinks made a century ago. And if they cannot find them, they will make the closest approximation possible, given the tools at their disposal.
These people make great friends and bartenders.
But I am not one of them. I am happy to take certain short cuts, or use things that are close enough. Especially when the original ingredients are no longer available. Like, for example, the pre-1970s formulation of Amer Picon, which is arguably the Holy Grail of cocktail geeks.
The Fox in Charge of the Henhouse
One day I’ll escape from these posts on trivial food matters and write about something important. Still about food, mind you, but important nevertheless. But that day isn’t today.
Today is a story about finding one of my favorite foods, unearthing a recipe built on that food, and the inherent danger of putting me in charge of other people’s food.
Last night I found myself at a lectern with a microphone, standing in front of a room full of adults, and I was proclaiming my love of challah. This is a deep love that goes far back to grade school. But looking back I’m convinced the challot of my youth were for the most part nothing to get very excited about.
I undertook this speaking engagement because apparently I’m now in charge of something called the Challah Committee. I have no idea exactly how many challot I’ll be ordering every week, but it’s a lot of them. And I’ll be working with a local bakery that hands down makes the best challah I’ve had in the area.
This could be dangerous.
Beans and Beans
Little Miss Fussy has a pet name. It’s bean. We love beans over at the fussy house. String beans, black beans, chickpeas, baked beans, and lentils to name a few. I’ll spend hours shelling mounds of fresh fava beans to get a cup of them in the end.
And we eat them in all kinds of ways. Black fermented soybeans that add their depth and funk to Chinese stirfry. Garbanzo beans tossed in oil and roasted for a crunchy snack. White beans get pureed with garlic and oil for a silky spread.
When thinking of bean recipes we look to cultures from around the world for influences. From the U.S. South we make both red beans and rice and black-eyed peas. There’s also an Italian dish of Tuscan white bean and beef stew I love to simmer for hours in winter. But my favorite bean dishes come from South Asia. And what makes things even more fun is that they have so many different kinds of beans to play with.
Today, I’ll tell you more about one of those dishes, and what it has in common with coffee. You know, besides that being a bean too.
Loss
It seems like many people have already moved on from what became tropical storm Irene. She did not annihilate Washington D.C. (so God must not be that angry). She did not obliterate Manhattan or Boston. So what was all the fuss about? Man, I can’t believe how much they over-hyped that thing.
Hey, did you see that Lady Gaga wore pants at the VMAs?
Except here the flooding continues. And yesterday news of the destruction kept on piling up. Now I know my priorities are out of whack. There are people out there who have lost their homes and all of their possessions. But I’ve never really cared too much about material things.
Even in times like this, my focus is on the food. And there is bad news coming in from all around the region.
After the Storm
While the hurricane cum tropical storm did not quite arrive with the full fury some might have been expecting, it has done its fair share of damage, taken a few lives, and there is more to come.
In Miami the dangers after a hurricane were in the downed electrical lines, overtired people and amateurs wielding chain saws, and people putting themselves in other precarious positions while making repairs. But in Albany, we are in a river valley. Make that two river valleys, the Hudson and the Mohawk. And all of that rain that Irene dumped throughout the region is all coming back to us, and it’s no laughing matter. Evacuations were called for last night, and until I check the news later this morning, I’ll have no idea how bad it is.
We got off easy. While Little Miss Fussy was nonplussed that she couldn’t watch her regular morning dose of Word World without electricity, we only had to suffer without power for less than four hours. And fortunately coffee was made before the lights went out.
Still, there’s nothing quite like losing power to realize how much we take it for granted.
Beer Me
Today is a beautiful day for a hurricane, or tropical storm, or whatever. Nobody can predict the weather. Weather happens. But you can be prepared.
My neighbors are clearly unprepared.
Yesterday I went around taking things inside and making sure there weren’t large pieces of debris around the yard. I even took out the window screens and put them in the garage because I really didn’t want to lose them to the storm. But my neighbors still have bird feeders, grills, Adirondack chairs, hoses, baskets, buckets, tires, planks of wood, and all kinds of detritus still out and about.
I suppose if it doesn’t get that windy later today, the joke will be on me. However I’ve seen what wind can do, and I know how to prepare for intense winds. I know a bunch of things, but I also know what I don’t know.
Beer is a blind spot for me. But I’m hatching a plan to fix that. Maybe you can help.
Eating Hurricane Andrew
When a hurricane rolls around, you want a Floridian nearby. I still remember a unit on hurricane preparedness from my seventh grade civics class. But also every year Publix would print hurricane-tracking maps on all of its paper grocery bags. Hurricanes were just something else you had to deal with as a resident of South Florida.
While I don’t watch the TV news, I do imagine they are making great hay of the approaching storm. And it pays to be careful. But there is also no reason to panic.
For the most part, people don’t die in hurricanes. Okay, smart people don’t die in hurricanes. If you walk out into the storm, you are likely to get seriously injured. Most hurricane deaths occur after the storm. People get electrocuted from downed power lines and fall off roofs and ladders while making repairs.
Your property can suffer. But at the end of the day, it’s just stuff.
The good news is that Albany isn’t Miami. And as someone who was living on the edge of the evacuation zone for hurricane Andrew in 1992 (and chose not to evacuate) I should be able to provide a unique insight into preparations for and life after a significant hurricane. And don’t worry, there’s food in here too.
Strange Bedfellows
Let’s play a game.
This has either been the week of really great reader feedback, or the week that I haven’t sufficiently made my point the first time around. Maybe it’s a little of both. On Tuesday I got some flack about buying honey from the grocery store. Then just yesterday, both in the comments and on Facebook I got some guff for this statement:
If you think the food system is broken, shopping at farmers markets and buying direct from local producers isn’t going to fix it. By voting with your wallet and supporting the larger businesses that are making a positive change, you encourage more positive change.
Some people would rather go off the grid. And I can totally understand that. Places like Walmart are despised by many who think the answer to solving our problems is embracing the small. Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot about small that I love, and I think that small is important. But I also think both things can coexist in the same universe.
Thinking about this yesterday, I came up with what I thought was an interesting question. So here’s the game. Read the below question and mull it over. Take your time. Once you have an answer in your head, then click through, and read my thoughts. Then let’s discuss. Okay? Here we go.
Question of the day: How do you realistically get GMOs out of the food supply?
Of Markets Large and Small
Well that was unexpected. Of all the things that are going wrong with our food supply and the regulatory system, the loudest outrage was pointed right back at me for buying my honey at Price Chopper.
That’s fine. I can take it.
I’ve got some strong feelings on this too. But it’s now clearly apparent that I haven’t adequately presented my thoughts on this matter. Or if I have, I haven’t done it recently. So today I’ll first answer all of your questions about honey. And I hope you stick around until the end, because I’m equally concerned about those of you who shun large grocery stores and mass-market retailers.
First, the good news.
FUSSYlittleBLOG 