A couple months ago, UC Berkley hosted an interesting event with the very subtle title of “The Past, Present, and Future of Food”. It involved a presentation and conversation between Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and noted sustainable foods author and journalism professor Michael Pollan*. The most interesting part is a discussion about the direction of food production today. Not surprising, given the speakers’ background, the focus was on organic and local foods. I’m personally not a big supporter of organic – though am much more sympathetic to the eat-local movement** – but still found the content really interesting.

Click here for a presentation on the topic (note – this break about every rule of good PPT design I’ve ever learned, which says more about me being in business school too long than it does about John Mackey.)

Click here for a streaming video of the event, lasting about 45minutes

* Pollan wrote “The Omnivore’s Dilemma“, a New York Times best seller named one of the “10 Best Books of 2006″ by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. The book is a meticulous account of four meals: One from McDonald’s, a second from “Industrial Organic,” a.k.a. Whole Foods Market, a third from an organic farm in Virginia, and a fourth one in which Pollen hunted, gathered, and prepared himself. It’s structured from “worst” to “best”. I’ve heard it is an interesting, though it defintely seems a bit Luddite-leaning.

** The challange with organic food is that it is just not a solution for a resource contrained (i.e. land, water, etc…) world with 8+ billion people. Pumping endless steriods into cattle and fertilizer into the ground isn’t good either, but reverting to hunter-gatherer won’t cut it. Eating local, on the other hand, lowers the embedded energy cost of your consumption.

(via thesuperficial)

Jeremy Piven, famous for playing a slime-ball agent, seems to have been doing some method acting recently in Aspen. Piven has been banned from Nobu Matsuhisa’s Aspen restaurant, Matsuhisa because he recently left a DVD of his show Entourage as a tip at the 100-200 dollar a person restaurant.

“He came in with a large group of 12 or more without reservations and asked for a table. It was a very busy night, but a table, although cramped, was provided. On his way out, he made a nasty comment to the manager: ‘Thanks for nothing.’”
…
“He left a DVD of the first year of ‘Entourage’ to one of the waiters. [An employee] ran up the stairs and hurled it at him as he was leaving.”

Now we don’t know if the waiter did something horrible or the food had mice in it, so we can’t jump to conclusions just yet. I’ve certainly had service where I felt like leaving a DVD of my HBO series as a tip, but I’ve always restrained myself.

Regardless, this makes me dislike Entourage even more, which I’ll never forgive for leveraging Carnivale and Deadwood off the air and heralding the end of any HBO series not set in the present (not that Big Love isn’t great) because period pieces are twice as expensive to film. For Entourage you just need to pay Carrot Top to make a cameo.

Anyhow, if you’re ever in NY and feel like dropping some cash, Nobu is pretty fantastic, especially their miso-soaked Black Cod dish, which is melt in your mouth delicious. You can actually get out of Nobu with a tasting for not a horrible amount of money if you go during lunch, which is what I did.

If you live in Boston, as I do, you can get a really good twist on the dish at The Elephant Walk, which has a “Wild Alaskan black cod filet, lightly glazed with mushroom soy; served with wild lime rice, a ginger-coconut sauce and sweet pepper relish…” It’s really good.

(via b3ta)

I am not a morning person. Never have been, never will be. I’m quite fortunate that my job allows me to make my own hours and work in my pajamas from home as needed. People like me need serious help getting up in the morning.

Remember those commercials from the 80s where someone is in the process of breaking and entering a family’s house (we are lead to believe it is their own) in the early morning, then they open some Folger’s Crystals and everyone in the house wakes up to the joyous morning and it’s suddenly Christmas? Well I dislike coffee in most all forms (except when I add burbon and cook with it) and the Folger’s wake-up technique would cause me to turn over in my covers and pinch my nose.

There is hope for me, however. Two designers have come up with WAKE n’ BACON, a clock with a bacon-based alarm system.

From the site:

A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n’ Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes. (read more)

Brilliant! Yes, WAKE n’ BACON would make even me wake up with a smile. Plus, you have some breakfast when you wake up. Just eat the bacon from the secret bacon compartment, and you’re golden. The only problem is that you have to remember to stock it with frozen bacon the night before. So ideally they’d have this attached to a chilled magazine of frozen bacon–something like the beer-launching fridge.

Incidentally I found this vintage Folger’s commercial online, which teaches you not only about the great taste of Folger’s, but gives instructions on how to cruelly chastise your 1950s housewife. Thanks Folger’s!

I will NOT throw up on Barbara Lynch

I will NOT throw up on Barbara Lynch

It’s 3pm and I am lying shivering on my bathroom floor as I repeat this mantra over and over in my head. Only three hours to go until Taste of the South End.

I had been looking forward to going to the AIDS Action Committee-sponsored “Taste of the South End” all week. Lots of amazing food from lots of amazing chefs. Lots to write about. Pure bliss.

The day of the event, I woke up to greet the dawn of a wonderful day of eating, when I was hit HARD with a horrible case of irony. Within 30 minutes of waking up it was very clear that I had contracted some sort of virus that appeared to have picked up a Little Red Book somewhere and had decided to put on a Cultural Revolution of its own in my stomach.

Time passed and things got worse. This towering paragon of masculinity (that you know and love) was reduced to a shuttering, freezing heap on the bathroom floor–writhing in gastrointestinal agony.

My mother called to say hi, and when I responded with pained grunts, groans, and the mellifluous resonance of retching, she very kindly came over to my house, bringing along a pharmacopoeia of GI medicines as well as chicken soup. By the time she arrived I was at the point at which I truly regretted having removed Dr. Kevorkian from speed dial. Henceforth, I leave any further gory details of my condition to the vivid and enlightened imagination of the reader.

After eating my soup as best I could, and consuming about a gallon and a half of pepto, I was ready to thank my mother for her gentle kindness and crawl under the covers for and stay there forever. Instead of words of sympathy and a handful of Tylenol PM, my mother said, “No no no. You’re going to this thing! When you get going you’ll feel better. You have exactly 1 hour until it starts, so you have exactly one hour to feel better. You’ll really regret it if you miss this, and you’ll have a great time. Even if you just go for 20 minutes.”

With all the strength I could muster, I threw myself into the shower and tried to get better.

I will NOT throw up on Barbara Lynch

I will NOT throw up on Barbara Lynch

After crawling out of the tub. I was able to throw on some nice clothes and wend my way out to my mother’s car. She had offered to drive me there and get some dinner while I made the rounds. But, before I left my apartment I had to arm myself. So into my coat I stuffed a full bottle of stomach medicine and a trash bag for…um…airplane purposes.

The event itself was really wonderful. It was held in the Cyclorama, which is where I had my Keep Walkin’ Johnnie Walker Experience. I’d say there were at least 600 people there (including a group of very tall women in full majestic eveningwear, who I noticed all had adam’s apples) which created a really lively, fun atmosphere. The number of restaurants in attendance was very impressive and included many place that I had been dying to try, like Aquitaine, Mistral, The Butcher Shop, Pho Republic, and many others. There was also wine by Martignetti, an importer of fine wines.

All around the Cyclorama, there were long rows made up of tables with spreads of

Alas, I felt truly useless, akin to Moses, who traveled 40 years through the unrelenting desert only to get to the promised land and contract a stomach bug so he couldn’t eat any falafel when they arrived. I was surrounded by all this good food, good people, and good wine with a cursed and vengeful stomach.

As I was walking down the line (arsenal at the ready) someone shoved a cod cake in my hand. I looked at it and thought, “This cod cake is beautifully cooked with great presentation and I can tell it’s perfectly crunchy on the outside and moist in the middle. However, if I don’t get this out of my sight within 10 seconds I may just loose it.”

I was up to a few bites for tasting purposes, including the signature steak tartare from The Butcher Shop (owned by the aforementioned Barbara Lynch, who runs No. 9 Park, one of my favorite restaurants), which was really delicious. Also since chocolate is good for your stomach I allowed myself to try desserts, including an excellent profiterole from the Flour Bakery.

I really wanted to do a full restaurant by restaurant review of the food at this event–hell I wanted to a full restaurant by restaurant tasting of this event–but I just wasn’t physically up to it. But the event itself was really wonderful and everyone seemed to have a great time. I’m sure this event raised a lot of money for AIDS and I hope its success will encourage chefs to continue to interact with the community at large and to keep doing great benefits like this. But next time, they better damn well make sure I’m well before planning something

And no, I did not throw up on Barbara Lynch. I’m very proud of that.

Love you, mom!

You’d never think of Indian food as including ketchup, or especially worchester sauce, but food from Goa has many interesting influences dating back to it’s role as a major trade port. This recipe for Chicken Cafreal is really tasty and easy to make. No glow sticks required.

Ingredients:

Marinade Mix -

• 1 bunch coriander leaves (use powder if need be)
• 1 bunch mint leaves
• 1 teaspoon ginger paste
• 1 teaspoon garlic paste
• 1 inch cinnamon stick
• 4 cloves
• 6 peppercorns
• 4 green chilies
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds

Other Ingredients

• ~2 lb chicken (good for 4-5 people) boneless and skinless breasts work well
• 1 bottle worcester sauce
• 1 bottle ketchup
• 1 lemon
• 1 teaspoon sugar (to taste)
• 2 teaspoon salt (to taste)
• cooking oil

Instructions:

• Defrost the chicken. Cut the pieces up as desired. Stab the pieces a couple times with a knife and soak with some lemon to absorb the marinade better.
• Take the first 9 ingredients and mix them well in a blender with some water, until you get a thick and consistent greenish paste. This is the marinade mix.
• Marinade the chicken by applying the paste to the pieces and rubbing well.
• Keep the marinated chicken in the fridge for at least 4 hours or even overnight ~ 12 hours (longer the better)
• Just before cooking time, get a large vessel, add some oil to it ~ 1-2 tablespoons.
• Use a large serving spoon or ladle and fill it 3 times with ketchup, and add to vessel. This is for the gravy, so you can vary the amount. Add exactly the same amount of worcester sauce to the vessel. Stir. You should get a thick greenish/brown gravy. Heat for a couple minutes while constantly stirring.
• Remove the marinated chicken from the fridge and add to the mix. Stir occasionally. Cook for around 45 mins or until done.
• Add salt or sugar to taste as needed.

This dish and other Goan dishes in general is best eaten with bread (soft buns). Maybe add some roasted potatoes on the side. Other variations include frying tomatoes and onions before cooking the chicken.

Another option if you don’t want gravy is just to bake the marinated chicken in the oven for about 30-45 mins until cooked. This would be similar to the kebabs. This is also popular in Goa and is eaten with ketchup.