Archive for January, 2008

Gesundheit!

Paisano and I were cruising through the meat department trying to decide what to fix for dinner when Paisano cried “GwaCHETto,” to which I responded with a polite, “Gesundheit.”

“No, no, no. Oxtails! GwaCHETto!”

“Ok, so what’s that?”

Turns out it’s a pasta sauce, or soup, or maybe stew made with oxtails, or fish, or maybe beef or pork ribs. I even found a recipe for frog legs. As I later learned, guazzetto as it’s actually spelled means “splashed” and specifically splashed with wine and tomatoes.

Paisano cried “GwaCHETto,” to which I responded with a polite, “Gesundheit.”

So we bought the oxtails and returned to his friends’ house and made guazzetto, pasta, and baby artichokes. Oddly — well, maybe not so oddly, he is the Paisano after all — he served the guazzetto over browned cubes of stale bread. Pretty damned tasty.
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Colleen is a solid middle-aged mid-westerner of Anglo-Saxon stock who’s favorite comfort food is kimchi. Right, kimchi, the potent fermented Korean vegetable dish. In fact, she makes her own. So how did someone from Kansas end up loving such an exotic dish?

Read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | traditions

It’s Chowdah, Baby

If you’ve read The Once and Future King by T.H. White, a retelling of the Authurian legend, you may recall the Questing Beast. In White’s tale the beast was something quested after, not something that went on quests. But I am culinary Questing Beast and in my case I am the pursuer and not the pursued.

In 1995 I began crisscrossing the country, coast-to-coast, spending time in the Pacific Northwest, New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and central California. As a long-time fan of clam chowder I thought these serendipitous, job-related journeys to the coasts would be an exceptional opportunity to find the perfect clam chowder. Specifically, a perfect New England Clam Chowder was the dish I avidly sought.

I failed.

The fragrant aromas of clam juice and milk mingling together still evoke not only the dish itself but the whole experience…

In Serious Pig, John Thorne writes:

“That time lingers in my mind as ‘the chowder summer.’ It was the start of my life-long love affair with the dish. The fragrant aromas of clam juice and milk mingling together still evoke not only the dish itself but the whole experience: the driftwood I had carried up from the beach and sawn myself, now crackling in the fireplace; the chowder full of clams I had just dug, cleaned, and prepared, and potatoes I had carried back three miles from the store, heating in the big battered pot on the propane stove.”

I sought a “chowder summer” or fall, winter, spring. I knew what the perfect chowder would be like and I thought it could be found. Alas, no. The best chowder in Oregon was far too thick. The best in New England was far too thin. And all the others I tried failed in both flavor and consistency. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about what I sought in the quest itself.
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Let’s apply a little logic to the issue of cloning animals. First, cloning is not genetic engineering; it is not about transferring genes from an eggplant to a cow. It’s about taking the nucleus of an animal’s cell, embedding it in an unfertilized egg, and starting the natural process of embryonic growth. There is no logical reason why the meat or milk of a cloned animal should be any more dangerous than that of any other animal. And in some six years of study, that’s what the FDA has concluded. If you think about it, identical twins are simply clones that arise naturally during gestation.

You can read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | cloning

Orange and White

Back before the World Wide Web my dinner parties began with me sitting down on the living room floor, surrounded by cookbooks and back issues of magazines like Gourmet and Bon Appetit to put together a menu. At that time (the late 80′s) my favorite go-to books were the three Silver Palate cookbooks, but I also relied on the magazines as well and I think this recipe came from on of them. As I found interesting recipes I’d jot down the name of the recipe, the book or magazine I found it in, and the page number on a yellow legal pad.

In some ways that old process was more fun and satisfying than what I do now.

Now days I browse the Internet and copy links into a Word document. It’s far more efficient and I have far more recipes to choose from, but in some ways that old process was more fun and satisfying than what I do now.

I’ve long since gotten rid of those old back issues, and I doubt I ever wrote down this recipe — I certainly don’t have it now — but I was so pleased with the results and it was so simple that I’ve made it many times since then. It’s best when the first new potatoes appear in the market and you get that incredibly earthy flavor but even in the dead of winter it’s a great dish. Be sure to use small waxy potatoes.
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I happened to catch an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” the other night. He was in Singapore for the show’s season opener on the Travel Channel and, for a change, didn’t eat anything particularly outrageous – other than the bull penis. I enjoy Bourdain’s writing but I’m not tremendously fond of this show. It’s essentially a travelogue and Bourdain’s nearly inflectionless delivery is tiring. But despite all that, it’s the best food show on television because Bourdain clearly loves food. The same can’t be said of the culinary wasteland that his shows once called home, the Food Network.

You can read the complete article at Spot-on.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | food tv