Want to help prevent future flu pandemics? It’s easy. You don’t have to lobby congress for billions of funding for pandemic research. You don’t have to wear a surgical mask 24×7. No, the best thing you can do is to vote with your dollars. Buy pasture-raised pork and other meats. Really, it’s that easy? Indeed it is. Read this fantastic article from Wired.com.
So next time you go the grocery store to pick up a cellophane wrapped package of meat (how convenient!), or you order that steak or the pork chops off the menu at the restaurant, just realize that you are contributing to system that is killing us. Sounds harsh? Well, it’s time we faced the cold hard facts. So what’s the answer? Find local producers in your area that raise their animals on pasture. They care about the welfare of their animals, their workers, the environment, and their customers.
EatWild.com is a great resource to find local producers. Go to the farmer’s markets, or better yet go to the farms, and know where your food comes from. It could prevent the next flu pandemic.
Chipotle is the only fast food restaurant where Lisa and I can actually eat meat. She and I have been trying to follow a pasture/natural-raised meat diet. Unfortunately, that means we end up eating vegetarian most of the time when we eat outside of the home. However, Chipotle brings some hope that pasture-raised meat can become more prevalent in restaurants.
I’m sad to report that the Woodstock Water Buffalo company has expired. I tried to call them this morning to find out which retailers in NYC sell their mozzarella cheese and was greeted with a recording saying the company is closed and to press extension 17 if I was interested in purchasing their remaining assets. I have only had their yogurt before, but it was really wonderful and I’m sad that we won’t get to eat it anymore. I wonder why they closed? They had been doing very well in the press and their products had been receiving rave reviews.
And what about the water buffalo, what happens to them?
My mom and dad left this morning after an enjoyable five day stay. Well… I enjoyed it; I hope they did too! We managed to do a few tourist-type things as well as just hang out and visit with each other and relax. We toured the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Central Park, the NYC Transit Museum, and the Greenpoint neighborhood (for Polish food). Here are some photos from their stay, as well as a video of a bag piper practicing in Central Park –
When Lisa and I were traveling in Vietnam, we the pleasure of dining on rat. We were in Can Tho in the Mekong Delta and had stopped for dinner at a riverside restaurant. Rat was on the menu and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try it. Lisa admonished me, “If that thing comes to the table with a head and a tail, I’m leaving!” I had two choices of preparation method: steamed or grilled. I think I made the right choice in grilled because, let me tell you, the Vietnamese know how to grill meat! The rat was served on a plate with some rice and a couple vegetables. It had been halved and grilled with some kind of sweet sauce that made the skin crispy, caramelized and so delicious! Lisa and our traveling partner, Carol, both tried it and loved it. And yes, the rat was without head or tail.
I’m having an “I Hate New York” day. You would think that a city of 8 million people would have everything under the sun. You would think that there would be so many people with such broad interests that it would create enough demand, even in niche areas, so you could easily find whatever your heart desires. You would think. I’m here to tell you that it just isn’t true. As diverse as NYC seems, most people here are really the same. New Yorkers are much more “middle America” than they would ever admit.
Why is there not a butcher in all of NYC that carries locally-produced, pasture-raised meat? I have done some extensive searching and I found one, and all they carry is pork chops and pork spare ribs that are priced twice as much as what I can buy at the farmer’s market. And don’t tell me it is economically sustainable, that there isn’t enough demand. See here for proof that it can work.
So instead of heading off to the butcher shop any day of the week, I have to wait for Wednesday or Saturday to go to the farmer’s market to buy from the two producers who bring their product into the city (Flying Pigs Farm and Hawethorne Valley Farm). Thank God for the farmer’s market. Of course, if I really want to plan ahead, I can always order online, but that’s not the point.
P.S. If you want more info on pasture-raised meat, check out this great website. And if you want to read a great book that talks about pasture-raised meat and other meat-eating issues, then read The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
When Lisa and I moved to NYC a year and a half ago, we had a hell of a time finding a good cup of coffee. I mean, we could find decent coffee and, believe me, there was plenty of crap coffee we suffered through as well. To get a really good cup of coffee, we have to travel well out of our neighborhood, unfortunately.
Here’s another one that is, again, not easily accessible for us. Though I may have to make the trek up to Williamsburg just so I can check out the Clover.
If you remember from a month or so ago, I left Jean-Georges and decided to pursue stagiaire positions at several restaurants before Lisa and I head back to Seattle. I started my first stage last week at Del Posto with their very talented pastry chef, Nicole Kaplan. I feel like this kitchen is good fit for me and I’m looking forward to spending six weeks with them. As for my next stage… I’m not sure yet. I need to go out and trail at some more restaurants to figure out where I might want to spend some more time.
Speaking of time, I have had a bit more of that on my hands this past month. Some of that extra time has been funneled into cooking at home more often. One dinner in particular was a very big success. Lisa just couldn’t stop talking about it (and I’m pretty pleased with the results as well). I stopped by the butcher shop, one of the few left in the city, and picked up a mixture of ground beef and pork to use for hamburgers. This is something I’ve discovered recently and I really never plan to go back to just plain beef burgers. The addition of the pork really makes a difference.
Since Lisa will only eat burgers on actual buns (not sliced bread), I either had to go to the grocery store and buy the buns or make them myself. Since I had the time, I decided to make my own buttermilk buns. The buns turned out a little smaller than I anticipated, not quite full-size but not quite “slider” size either. This is why I decided to call them Burgerlets instead of burgers or sliders.
The toppings for the burgers were goat cheese, carmalized onions, tomato “jam”, fig jam, mayo, and lettuce. I slowly carmelized the onions and then finished them off with some red wine. We didn’t have any slicing tomatoes, just little assorted cherry tomatoes. I decided to make a jam out of them, however I didn’t want to have to cook the tomatoes down and lose that fresh tomato taste. So instead I chopped up the tomatoes, put them in a strainer, salted them, and let the juices drain off. I then thickened the tomato juice using xanthan gum and added it back to the tomato solids. This created a tomato “jam” that was thick enough to stay put in the burger but still had the fresh tomato flavor. The fig jam I had made a few days earlier as a way to save some black mission figs that were almost expired. Actually, they had just started to mold but the great part about making a jam is that you boil it and kill off the little bit of mold that started to grow. I learned that trick at JG where we would save all the mushy and slightly moldy berries to be boiled down and made into sorbet. Here’s a picture of the final product.
And a shot of the sweet potato fries as they cooled after the initial blanching.
After our wedding last year Lisa and I had a lot of leftover barbecue. Really good barbecue. The kind that takes a lot of time, a lot of skill, and more than a little bit of love. Lisa’s cousin’s husband (or should I just say cousin-in-law?) has a bbq catering business in Kansas City. Craig, the cousin-in-law cum barbecue king, smoked many pounds of various meats for the event and brought it with him on the plane from KC. You can check out his company, Belly Up BBQ.
One of the various types of meat was a delicious smoked salmon. The morning after the wedding I was trying to figure out what to make Lisa and I for breakfast. We didn’t have too much in the fridge besides a lot of leftover barbecue. I wanted to do something a little nicer than cereal or toast. That’s when my eyes fell upon the foil packet of smoked salmon and my mind was alight with thoughts of softly scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, and cream cheese. And that is just exactly what I did. It was such a big hit with Lisa that it became one of her new favorite dishes. Unfortunately, we don’t get smoked salmon very often and so I have only made it a few times since.
Over this past Labor Day weekend we went up to Cape Cod and stayed at a friend’s vacation house. It was a relaxing weekend and we had a good time. Well… I did. Lisa, unfortunately, came down with a cold and it was at it’s worst that weekend. She soldiered through though and we even managed to spend a little bit of time on the beach on Sunday. As far as food goes, we were a little disappointed with the Cape. The food we experienced there was rather mediocre. We tried to go out to dinner on Saturday night to what was supposed to be one of the nicest restaurants on the Cape, but were sorely disappointed (and much lighter in the wallet unfortunately). Thankfully for Lisa she had almost completely lost her sense of taste because of the cold. She wasn’t able to tell just how bad the food was. Oh, I almost forgot, we did stumble upon a bakery making fresh, hot malasadas, which was a nice treat. On Sunday we managed to find a fish monger where we picked up some halibut to make for dinner that evening and some wonderful smoked bluefish to take back home.
Fast-forward one week. Lisa has finally regained most of her sense of taste after it being wholly absent for more than a week. We’re trying to decide what to make for dinner when she remembers the smoked bluefish. Smoked fish – check. Eggs – check. Cream cheese – check. Add a little green chives and sliced shallots and we’ve got ourselves a meal! To accompany the scramble we sliced a local tomato and sprinkled it with sea salt and extra-virgin olive oil. A couple pieces of toasted multi-grain bread with our favorite butter, Plugra. Breakfast for dinner! It was fantastic.
