"What if I baked a plum into cornbread?"
I don't know why, I just wanted to. But I didn't have any cornmeal, and a friend had suggested spice cake instead. I'm not sure what this is, but I went into the kitchen last night and something happened: I baked.
I hate measuring and reading recipes for more than inspiration, which is why baking is a blind act to me—completely unlike the spontaneous, add-as-you-go process I take to cooking that usually sends me into a trance, whirling back and forth from the spice rack till something is ready to serve, not waiting curiously beside the oven.
But I pulled out an old Betty Crocker Cookbook, glanced at the list for spice cake and then listened to every odd idea that came into my head.
1 plum
1 cup spelt flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup olive oil
1 egg
about 1 teaspoon each: salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, vanilla extract
a little vanilla soy milk
a couple drops of orange seltzer water (again, I don't know why)
Cut plum in half—hold one half and chop up the other into a medium-heated cast iron pan with cinnamon and butter till mushy. Mix all other ingredients into a batter, mix the mushy plums in too, and pour back into the cast iron pan to send into a preheated oven at 350ºF for 15 minutes.
Place other half of plum into center of cake as it's starting to set, then put back into oven for another 20 minutes or until a fork can poke through and come out clean.
Glaze top with maple syrup, bake for another 5 minutes, then remove, let cool and powder with sugar. Frosted plum brownie spice cake.
If there was dissection going on in 6th grade science class, I knew not to go in with a weak partner. I knew to pick someone giddy to take a knife to a frog—the same kid who probably made worm mud pie during pre-school recess, who'd grow up with no sweat separating a shoulder from a cow. I need this person, because I more than sweat.
Though I wish I could, I can't even chop a sardine's head without feeling a little clammy. And thanks to a profession like butchery, I don't have to, for the same reason I don't have to perform root canal on a friend. Doing it yourself is great, and certainly a great lesson in something we no longer need to know how to do. And, really, I'm working on it. But above all, we got to give it to those who do it every day, and with such care and precision, without a flinch.
I wonder, often, how, in fact, they got over the sound of animal bone cracking or seeing a skinned head. Is it, I wonder, like getting used to the necessary crackle of killing a bug? Or is it, for them, as common as taking a drumstick from a chicken, something we easily associate with food not flesh?
However they do it, I say thank you, and, is it over yet?
Tomatoland
In what started as a James Beard Award-winning Gourmet article, food politics journalist Barry Estabrook traces the modern supermarket tomato from the deserts of Peru through paltry paid farmworkers in Florida hoping on at least a one cent per pound wholesale raise for the fruits of their labor. "What can you say when you find twelve farm workers, covered in pesticides living in a trailer and paying $2,000 a month," asked Estabrook at this year's Cooking For Solutions conference at Monterey Bay Aquarium, home of the much-adopted Seafood Watch guide. Now there's a look at just how unsustainable and unfair the trade is for tomatoes, and in Estabrook's always vivid words.
Tart & Sweet
Before this summer's crops bloom into unmanageable quantities, here's a plan of action: a whole cookbook devoted to canning and pickling, but one both pie-baking, chutney-packing moms and beer mustard-curious guys can use. Learn to make what all the cool picklers make—candied kumquats, citrus-ginger-pear butter, habañero hot sauce, daikon pickles, fermented kimchi, and recipes to go with, like nachos with pickled okra, braised short ribs with pickled onions, and a Martini with pickled ramps. Read more about the catering co. responsible for these renditions, Sweet Deliverance, at Edible Manhattan.
Beer Craft
Given all the small-scale breweries popping up all over the country, a pair of NYC apartment-bound recreational beermakers (a journalist for the WSJ, GQ, Fast Company; a web-savvy designer/editor) figured there should be simpler, more up-to-date literature on homebrewing for more would-be entrepreneurs. Complete with illustrations and one-gallon recipes, they've created such a guide. Check them in this Edible Manhattan news spot.
Goat: Meat, Milk, Cheese
Goat's cheese is well-eaten in the U.S. but not yet its meat (save for street-side rarities), despite the worldwide attention it gets for its lean, low-cholesterol cuts that cook like lamb. With recipes like saag paneer curry, goat empanadas with chimichurri, jerk-rubbed leg with blood orange and chops roasted with blackberries and sage, this cookbook might send you begging your butcher. There's also lessons in cheese-making, dairy-milking and goat-raising; cultural context; and new adaptations for milk and cheese, like chocolate-dipped goat cheese balls.
Edible
Those Edibles—you may have heard of them way too many times here but in case you wanted to check out the work of Edible magazines outside your region, the community has published a compilation of best-of articles and recipes. It's a good way to get to know all those small-scale American food businesses, farmers and lesser-known chefs that are doing right by food in an industry that became so confusing and far-removed from the days of family farms and neighborhood butchers.
They're so talked about, by mid-spring, you're tired of hearing about them, unless you've had them. Don't you wish you engineered a garlicky onion before we found out they grow naturally? A cast-iron grilled batch dipped in spicy tomato sauce and slung back à la that No Reservations episode from Spain I keep going back to. (See: This video at the 3-minute mark.)
Food's confusing these days. Every Friday, I'll recap the biggest news of the week.
Here goes May 21-27.
Pink Pork is Safe
Tuesday, the USDA dropped the recommended "done" temperature for pork from 160ºF to 145ºF, the read for all safe-to-serve cuts of meat, except poultry, which remains at 165ºF. To this chefs say, yeah we know. We're also reminded to let meat stand for three minutes to kill pathogens. Or as we more often hear, prevent juices from bleeding out onto the board.
No GMO Sugar Beets, yet.
Not so easy, says the courts to Monsanto. Organic supporters got a glimmer of that "friendly co-existence" we'd been hearing about from Sec. of Ag Tom Vilsack when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that genetically modified sugar beets would not be approved without a final Environmental Impact Statement, something the USDA has often overlooked or ignored when approving GMO product in the past.
Quit With The Antibiotics, Okay?
"Approximately 80% of all antibiotics used in the United States today are used in livestock." That's the battle call for groups suing the FDA over antibiotic overuse, particularly penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed. Overuse (how's 29 million pounds?) only allows for drug resistance and a need for ever-stronger doses—something the FDA concluded years ago.
Also: The new food pyramid icon comes out June 2; lackey regulations on food marketing to kids continue; the "ag-gag" bill dies in Florida and Minnesota but remains in Iowa and reaches New York; major mislabeling in seafood; and Mark Zuckerberg will only eat what he kills.
(cartoon via Nerdy Science Blog)
Few kitchenwares get passed down—some get lost in nooks, some trashed from forgotten (burnt) rice or rust. Some, no one wants. Then there's the few stragglers that remain from a set and become go-tos—a random fork with a funky engraving you know nothing about; an old kettle with a crazy-hot handle that you love anyway.
I have a stout, stemless wine glass like that with a horseshoe on its base. And a wood-handled knife. It sort of looks like this, courtesy the 1911-born Brazilian company whose name I found on the blade. But Dad can't remember where he got it before he settled down and the American site is down, too. Any old kitchen draw stragglers you wish you had twelvefold?
Maybe just the one is okay.
