A vending machine, called Let’s Pizza, that not only sells pizza, but actually makes the pizza- whipping up “flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients to produce a piping hot pizza in about three minutes”- has been developed in the northern Italian city of Roverto, according to this article in the New York Times. Four varieties of pizza are available from the machine: margherita, bacon, ham, or fresh greens.
Hmmm….. the next step for Serious Pie?
The pizza vending machine is only the tip of the iceberg. In Milan, Brekky, a franchise chain, has opened the first of what is planned to be a large chain of restaurants similar to the historic American automat restaurant chain, Horn & Hardart. Unlike those older restaurants, where workers filled and refilled the machines as fast as customers pulled dishes like baked beans and creamed spinach out of them, these new-age Italian automats will have fully automatic vending machines stocked with cold dishes like salad and warm dishes like pasta.
European entrepeneurs believe that vending machines have a big future in these recessionary times where customers are looking for cheaper ways to eat out.
March 21st, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Here’s a delightful video, obviously made before Michelle Obama and school kids did plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn, but still well worth watching for step by step instructions on digging up your lawn for a vegetable garden and a marvelous Woody Guthrie song. Watch it here.
Here’s a striking fact: At the peak of the Victory Garden movement, 40% of the nation’s produce was grown by American families in their gardens. 
March 21st, 2009 | No Comments »
As many foodies and food activists have been hoping, a vegetable garden will soon be planted on the White House lawn, according to this article in the New York Times. Michelle Obama herself will begin digging up a patch of the lawn on Friday to create the first vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden during World War II. Though some of the food from the garden will be used for the first family’s meals (no beets! The President doesn’t like ‘em) and for formal White House functions, it’s main purpose is to educate children in the importance of fresh, locally-grown foods– a major part of the First Lady’s agenda. Children from Bancroft Elementary school will be helping Michelle dig the garden on Friday. Most of the daily work will be done by the White House grounds crew and kitchen staff, but assistant chef Sam Kass (editor’s note: MY COUSIN!!!!), who used to cook healthy meals for the Obama family when they lived in Chicago, will have the job of overseeing the vegetable garden.
March 19th, 2009 | No Comments »
A stellar article on food politics in the brand new April issue of Gourmet magazine, “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch” by Sam Hurst, relates the story of the Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota. For more than a century, Jesuit “Black Robes,” originally invited by the Lakota chief, Red Cloud, ran a boarding school for American Indian children as a self sustaining community. The students learned to grow vegetables, raise chickens and cattle, and cook and preserve the harvest on a school farm located on grassland plains that supported small migratory herds of buffalo. Cecilia Fire Thunder, who enrolled at Red Cloud in 1952, remembers “the main thing was three square meals a day. No junk food. And nobody went hungry.” Another former student remembers, “Nobody ever got sick.”
Like most real-life stories, this one is complicated, full of good intentions gone wrong and unintended consequences. “The history of American Indian boarding schools is extremely conflicted and horror stories about the abuse of children are legendary. Schools like Red Cloud that have survived into the 21st century have been forced to undergo painful soul searching and reconciliation.” Long story short, the Jesuit farmer-priests retired or died and were not replaced. Fast forward to the present where the school has no farm, no chickens, no home-cooking, and instead a school lunch program that runs under the guidelines of the National School Lunch program.
Today, the Indian Health Service reports that nearly a quarter of the adults on the Lakota Nation reservation are diabetic. A great number of the children are obese and/or diabetic. When teachers asked students to track their daily eating habits they found that students mostly ate unhealthy fast food or convenience foods both at school and at home, and many ate only what they were served at school (ie. ate nothing at home). Read the rest of this entry »
March 19th, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Senior Executive Sous Chef Warren Peterson planned the menu of ten beers matched to ten tastes for last night’s Palace Ballroom event. Warren’s favorite taste of the evening? Beef mole matched with Hale’s Porter. Warren made a deliciously complex mole sauce with 3 kinds of dried chiles, beer, prunes, sesame seeds, and dark chocolate. He smoked and braised beef brisket for 4 hours, then pulled the meat, mixed it with the mole sauce, and served it on corn chips with a sprinkle of queso fresco. Here’s a simpler recipe for a sweet-hot mustard which you can easily make at home: mix 4 parts of stone ground mustard with 3 parts of barley malt syrup (such as this brand) and serve with Bavarian Meat‘s white wurst. Warren paired this combo with Boundary Bay IPA.
The Seattle Firefighters Pipes and Drums (pictured in photo posing with our 6-ft cardboard Obama) put this event right over the top. Twelve firemen marched straight through the ballroom, and they were hot! They played Amazing Grace, sang Danny Boy (tears were shed), and then drank Guinness with us. A few kisses were exchanged with the firefighters for a truly rousing St. Patrick’s Day event.
(If you want to be sure you don’t miss the announcements of our events, sign up here.)
March 18th, 2009 | No Comments »
The USDA program COOL, or Country of Origin Labeling for foods, started yesterday, May 16. Read about it here.
March 17th, 2009 | No Comments »
Last Wednesday, Etta’s chef, Ron Anderson, donated his evening to prepare a specially designed five-course dinner, paired with wines, for a table of twelve at the American Liver Foundation dinner. Ron and eighteen other top Seattle and Eastside chefs shared the professional hotel kitchen of the Grand Hyatt to prepare dinner for over two hundred attendees.
Ron’s menu started with roasted Deep Bay oysters with smoked steelhead roe. In the photo, left, Ron and Brian Cunningham are shown plating the oysters. (Ron is to the right in the photo, with a blue towel on his shoulder ). The photo (top) shows Ron and Brian plating up the third course of steamed Penn Cove mussels with fennel sausage, roasted apples, and Pernod broth. After a gorgeous main course of Alaskan black cod with caramelized parsnips and ham hock, this incredible meal ended with pastry chef Garrett Melkonian’s jasmine bubble tea and butter toffee dessert. Thanks to all who worked on or attended this event in order to raise money for a good cause!
March 16th, 2009 | No Comments »
Here’s a photo of my tiny but potentially mighty vegetable garden with 4 cubic feet of compost added. Spring forward.
March 14th, 2009 | No Comments »
The city council of Lucca has stirred up controversy and even elicited charges of racism for banning kebabs within the walls of the historical city center according to this article in the New York Times. Lucca, a very conservative city, and the only city in Tuscany with a right wing government, is fiercely proud of its Etruscan heritage and traditional foods. In a city “where even Sicilian food is considered ethnic”, kebab houses are at the center of this political food fight. (A member of the city council claims the council only let kebab shops into the city in the first place because they didn’t know what kebabs were!) Italian youth, in particular, enjoy non-Italian food like kebabs, and in these harsh economic times, the $5 price tag is a bargain, so kebabs are popular in Lucca. The four kebab houses that already exist will be allowed to stay, but the law bans any new ethnic or fast food restaurants in the city center. Some residents of Lucca are angry about the ban and others support it. Is the ban a good way to preserve traditonal foods in an ancient city? Is it a racist (or at least xenophobic) attack on Italy’s growing immigrant population? Is it ridiculous, crazy, or just too late as some Lucca residents have charged? Would it be a different story if a McDonalds were at issue rather than a kebab house? Read the article and decide for yourself.
March 13th, 2009 | No Comments »
This is the time of year I get impatient for Spring. I’m ready with bags of compost for the vegetable garden bed and fat brown envelopes of mail order seeds from Cook’s Garden and John Scheepers, but the weather isn’t ready for me. Since I haven’t had the chance to plant my arugula, mache, peas, and mesclun mix, I’m yearning for something fresh and green to eat instead- something really vibrant, maybe even a little bitter. A real spring tonic full of vitamins! Two recipes caught my eye in the food sections yesterday. Mark Bittman’s recipe for mashed potatoes with greens in the New York Times calls for equal parts potatoes and dandelion greens, mashed together with olive oil then topped with bread crumbs and baked. Sounds fabulous! Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times has a recipe for a spring greens soup where the greens are cooked with onions, garlic, and stock, then the mixture is pureed, cooked pasta shapes are added, and Parmesan is grated over the top. Again, sounds like perfect spring deliciousness! Russ also uses dandelion greens in his recipe, but he warns against too many dandelions because they’re bitter. Plus, he has a funny story about how he almost ruined the soup he was making for a dinner party since it turned out both too salty and too bitter, and he shares the thought processes he went through figuring out how to save the soup (and the party). This is nicely instructive, since we all have our kitchen disasters and it’s good to have some fixes up our sleeves. (By the way, Mark Bittman’s tip to tame the bitterness of dandelion greens– he blanches them and throws out the blanching water.) Two recipes with dandelions that sound really good to me, hmmmm…. maybe it’s not too late to put in another quick order to the seed companies. Some people think it’s crazy to plant dandelions- don’t they come up by themselves in the lawn? But the seed varieties you can buy are tastier (here’s an example) plus it’s much handier to have a crop of same-sized leaves to cut than forage all around for them. There’s no big danger in planting dandelions, just be sure to pull up the whole row or bed well before they flower and go to seed.
March 12th, 2009 | No Comments »
RSS Subscribe