Michelle Obama’s agenda in the new administration includes a focus on healthy food and healthy living, according to this article in the New York Times. The first lady praises Miriam’s Kitchen, a non-profit drop-in center, for serving meals made with fresh produce to Washington DC’s homeless population. Michelle also discusses strategies for getting her own kids to eat healthy meals instead of processed and fast foods. (Still, Sasha rejected the White House chef’s creamless creamed spinach because “it’s green.” ) Michelle also cheerfully admits she’s not above eating the occasional fast food burger at Five Guys Burgers and Fries, where she took her staff to lunch last month.
March 11th, 2009 | No Comments »
Baby, it’s cold outside, but vegetable gardening is hot! Though the recession is hurting most businesses, “seed companies have a bumper crop of customers,” according to this article in the Seattle Times. Seems like everyone wants to get out and dig in the dirt (if it would only stop snowing, hailing, and freezing), but what if you don’t have a yard, or what if you do have a yard but no time or skills? Amy Pennington of Go Go Green Garden (and a Tom Douglas Restaurants alumna) has just launched a brand new website called Urban Garden Share where city folks with yard space but no garden experience can match themselves up with experienced gardeners who need a patch of dirt to work in. This is an ingenious way to revive the Victory Garden for modern times. Also, Fine Cooking (Taunton Press) just sent me an email about their newly launched Vegetable Gardener. New as it is, the site already has several fascinating and useful articles. Two that I particularly liked, “How to Grow Radishes” and “Radishes are Multi Purpose Vegetables” which explains how to eat everything from sprout to leaf to root to seedpod, are from the archives of Taunton’s very wonderful, but now defunct Kitchen Gardener magazine.
March 10th, 2009 | No Comments »
Here’s a photo (left) of Pastry Sous Chef Randi Johansen wearing her prize winning hat! The hat contest took place at the annual Managers’ Christmas Party at Tom and Jackie’s house. (This gala event had to be rescheduled to early March from its usual holiday season date, due to December snow.) Randi’s hat, which won the top prize of a deluxe weekend in Chicago, depicted Wrigley Field and the Chicago El as well as a crab and a cake ( “crab cake”), all cleverly fashioned from pipe cleaners, baubles, and beads.
What did we eat at this spectacular event? Tom Douglas and Steven Steinbock grilled hunks of prime rib to perfection, and we also feasted on melt-in-your-mouth potato gnocchi in tomato sauce (the recipe is in this book
.) Here’s a photo of the gnocchi production line set up in Tom and Jackie’s kitchen with Shelley Lance (Tom’s co-author and blog editor), Jackie Cross, and Gigi Steinbock (Etta’s server and longtime friend of Tom and Jackie) who have all been working together at Tom Douglas Restaurants for more than 20 years.
(Stay tuned for Dahlia’s upcoming 20th Anniversary Celebration next November with more hands-on cooking by the original staff.)
March 9th, 2009 | No Comments »
It’s always a joy to eat “the real deal” Mexican food while visiting Mexico, but it’s better yet to eat it on a blistering hot lava rock. The molcajete, used primarily for making fragrant condiments and sauces, roars to life as an elemental vessel for holding dinner.
Eddie, one of Etta’s cooks and a native of Nayarit, says there are no hard and fast rules about what goes into a hot molcajete. Often a sauce is made of chicken stock, onions, tomatoes, ancho chiles, chile powder, and ground, dried tortillas for thickening. Next, the sauce is poured into the waiting molcajete, kept white hot in the oven. The final product (see photo left), from El Brujo Restaurante
in Puerto Vallarta, features beef, nopales (cactus), gooey panela cheese, fresh tomatoes, and sweet, charred green onions. Everything continues simmering and bubbling in front of you for at least twenty minutes. It’s like eating out of the fiery mouth of an ancient god.
El brujo means “the sorcerer” in Spanish and that’s appropriate in this case. Dinner served in a molcajete is some kind of powerful culinary magic.
March 9th, 2009 | No Comments »
An article called “Food Safety Problems Elude Private Inspectors,” is a good piece of investigative journalism that was published in last Friday’s New York Times. How did the Peanut Corporation of America in southwest Georgia get a food safety rating of “superior” from a private inspector in March, 2008, given that federal investigators later discovered that “the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for nine months”? The peanut plant’s condition resulted in “one of the nation’s worst outbreaks of food-bourne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened.”
The NYT article, by journalists, Michael Moss and Andrew Martin, questions the usefulness of private auditors (ie. inspectors) whose function in the current system is to reassure food industry giants like Kellogg (as in the case of the Peanut Corporation of America) that “American consumers are being protected from contaminated products.” Also, the private auditors are usually paid (as in the peanut plant case), by the food plants they inspect. Read the rest of this entry »
March 7th, 2009 | No Comments »
In late November, my mother and I were trying desperately to think of a Christmas gift to get my impossible-to-shop-for father. I was planning on coming home to New Jersey for a week in early January, and she wanted to nail down plans for our traditional “The Gibbons Take Manhattan” weekend, consisting of a Broadway show, dinner, and spending the night in a hotel. She said that if I could, I should try to get a reservation at Mario Batali’s downtown restaurant, Del Posto. I wasn’t comfortable asking my boss to call for us, but luckily, the concierge at our hotel was able to get a table.
We got to the restaurant at around six, and it was almost empty. We were promptly seated and ordered our drinks. I had a blood orange bellini which was so delicious I wished I could have ordered it in a size similar to a Big Gulp. The service was fantastic. Our server was knowledgeable and prompt but not obnoxious. I was facing the entire dining room, a room that had beautiful light and dark accents, and I noticed that it was not filling up as I expected. I thought: the service is amazing, the food is great, but why isn’t anyone here? We left around 9 or so, an hour at which most restaurants would be busy, but although there were many occupied tables, it still didn’t make sense to me why it was so difficult to get a reservation.
Cut to a month later in Seattle: Read the rest of this entry »
March 6th, 2009 | No Comments »
In times of economic hardship, people often look for ways to cut back, such as giving up luxuries like dining out, or buying high quality food. These options are replaced with cheaper and more comforting food. I certainly haven’t escaped feeling my wallet get a bit lighter, but eating out at restaurants is something that I simply won’t give up. I have managed to keep going out due to one simple, comforting, and inexpensive dish- Pho.
For those who have not experienced it, pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup made with a beef broth (traditionally) and includes any number of thin sliced types of beef. Most popular is the rare eye round steak, the brisket, and the fatty flank steak, and many restaurants also offer meatballs, beef tendon, and tripe. The bowl is filled with rice noodles, broth, and the meat, and garnished with cilantro as well as green and white onions. With each bowl, a plate of bean sprouts, Thai basil, limes, and jalapenos is provided, and each table has a bottle of sweet and savory Hoisin sauce, as well as vibrant, spicy Sriracha. With all of these options, each bowl of pho can be customized to meet the desires of anyone who eats it.
Often served at plastic or metal tables under vinyl tablecloths reflecting fluorescent lighting, pho is not as glamorous as other dining experiences but it is the meager ambiance and limited menu of a pho restaurant that makes it possible to keep a large bowl under $7. Read the rest of this entry »
March 5th, 2009 | No Comments »
At a lunch meeting with farmer/owner Luke Woodward of Oxbow Farm, he and I both started talking excitedly about the new administration’s plans for USDA community gardens. (”They’re actually breaking up pavement! Wow, that’s so cool”) The reason I was aware of this garden project is that I’ve started keeping an eye on the USDA website, something I’ve never bothered to do before, but I’m intensely interested in where the Obama administration will be leading the country on food and farming issues. If you haven’t heard about Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s goal of establishing community gardens at each USDA facility worldwide, here’s an article for you to read. The People’s Garden (view a concept plan of the garden), which was created to commemorate the 200th Birthday of Abraham Lincoln, will “showcase conservation practices that all Americans can implement in their own backyards and green spaces” while expressing Obama’s commitment to “responsible stewardship of our land, water, and other natural resources.” Yes, it’s symbolism, but I think it’s great symbolism.
Another amazing development, in my eyes, is Obama’s plan to stop paying our tax money as un-needed subsidies to giant agribusinesses in his newly proposed budget. The positive effect this could have on our farm economy is mind-boggling. Take a look at the USDA website now and then. You might be surprised at what you find.
March 4th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Delicious? healthy? local? not bad for the environment?
There must be a catch, yet the Vancouver BC farm raised scallops are all that. I’ve recently discovered them from Taylor Shellfish, a 100 year old company based in Shelton, Washington, which imports these scallops from our neighbors to the north.
These beauties come in the shell, if you wish, with all the delicious innards intact. I’ve been serving them sliced raw, simply dressed. They are very fresh, firm, and not at all “fishy.” That’s the beauty of locally farm raised sea foods. The catch doesn’t spend days on a boat and then more days in the supply chain. Harvested when needed, they arrive still moving. I can’t quite stop picturing their 50 little eyes watching me as I reach for my knife…..
Ninety six percent of the world’s scallops (ie. wild scallops) are dredged from the sea floor, wiping out whatever happens to be nearby. Farmed scallops, on the other hand, are cultivated in a similar fashion to mussels. Because they filter the local plankton for food, they do not have the problems associated with farmed salmon feed. Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch gives the farmed scallops its “best choice” rating. Finally, something to savor guilt free!
March 3rd, 2009 | No Comments »
What an arty shot….. this photo was not staged.
This is the actual work space of the Dahlia Lounge Private Dining coordinator, taken during one of the incredibly brief breaks I take every day just to eat enough coconut cream pie bites to keep me from fainting! If you close your eyes and put your hands on the screen, you can almost feel the industriousness, the careful attention to every detail, the mild obsessive-compulsion that make the Dahlia’s private dining experience the best in Seattle.
You may wonder how we do it. Wonder no more! Secrets of private dining success:
1. Enough neon colored post-its to create a neon square large enough to see from outer space.
2. Four different colors of dry erase markers, not five, not three, but four. We have a system here!
3. Enough pencils with good erasers to build a miniature log cabin that would fit a hamster and his water bottle.
4. A very, very hard wooden chair, creaky is good, a nail or two sticking out is better.
5. Warm mood lighting, even in the daytime.
6. A 1952 high school chemistry teacher’s desk, complete with burn-proof top. You just never know when that’s gonna be the difference between life and death, up here where the action is, where the sparks fly, where by the intoxicating fumes of the laminating machine, the unseen heroes toil…. I need to get back to work, but before I do, here’s my advice:
Book the Dahlia Lounge Private Dining Room for an amazing “Boarding House Brunch” on Saturdays and Sundays. The menu is new, it’s rockin’, and I swear my mouth waters every time I look at it.
March 3rd, 2009 | No Comments »
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