Food I Can Live Without

I have to admit that, since I’m from the New York metropolitan area, I can be a bit of a snob about certain foods. Pizza, for instance, is manna sent from the gods when bought in the tri-state region. Anywhere else, it’s just tomato sauce and cheesy bread. Bagels, likewise, should not be consumed outside of a 100 mile radius of Manhattan. The term “bagel” should be appellation controlled for this vicinity. Outside of this locale, bagels never seem to have the glossy hard shell or the meaty, tightly formed matrix of bread inside that I would expect from a real bagel. They don’t even seem to taste like a bagel should. Bagels sold in bags at the supermarket are even worse, they are merely bagels in shape only. A true bagel connoisseur would avoid them like a sommelier shuns boxed wine.

At least in the area of bagels, I’d hoped that some of my foodie elitism had worn off on my boyfriend. Last night, though, I found something despicable sitting next to our milk and eggs. I don’t know what prompted Ryan to buy it, but “Thomas’s Squares Bagelbread” is definitely one of the more ludicrous foods I’ve seen in a long time.

The Thomas’s website has this to say about their product:
“THE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD IS A REPLACEMENT FOR SLICED BREAD”
“Make the most of any sandwich, burger or snack with Thomas’ Squares Bagelbread. With the versatility of a sandwich bread, you can now add the traditional taste of Thomas’ bagels to any meal you desire.”
“Part Bagel. Part Bread. Totally Delicious.”

First of all, aren’t bagels already completely bread?
Secondly, what self-respecting executive gave the go-ahead for this product?

I imagine the product pitch for bagelbread squares went something like this:
Exec 1: Ok, so you know how bagels are totally boring and you can never seem to put anything on them?
Exec 2: Oh my god, I know! Seriously, why aren’t they more like regular bread? I mean, a circle of bread? How on earth do you hold it?!?!
Exec 1: Exactly! Well I think you’ll be excited by this new product. It takes all the excitement of a square piece of bread and then puts a hole in the middle of it!
Exec 2: You’re not talking about its some sort square-shaped bagelbread are you?
Exec 1: I am.
Exec 2: I can’t believe we haven’t thought of this before. I’m fast-tracking this product and giving you a bonus, you brilliant bagel revolutionary you!

Obviously, the idea is just plain stupid. The product, though, isn’t even executed well either. In no way does it approximate the texture or flavor I’d expect from a bagel. I toasted a piece last night and found it to be a slice of thick, gummy (square) bread with a small hole in the center. Even as bagged bread it would be barely palatable since it manages to be both very dry and chewy.

So lets review:
Bagels should be from New York, round, and tasty.
Thomas’s Squares Bagelbread is from a bag, square, and godawful.

What is it?

One night at Safeway, I found this peculiar looking fruit sitting with some mangoes. It looked like the unholy product of a one-night stand between a lonely prickly pear and a drunk kohlrabi. Since there was only one, and no one at the store could figure out what it was, the checkout guy let me take it home for free.

Back at home, I cut into the red skin and was surprised to find a white flesh speckled with hundreds of black seeds. Because of all the seeds, it ate with a texture just like that of a kiwi. It tasted like a very green melon- almost more like a vegetable than a fruit (a little onion-y?). I figured it must not have been completely ripe.

Still not knowing what I had bought, I typed “red skinned white flesh black seeds fruit” into yahoo and got back a bunch of sites for the “pitaya” or “dragon fruit.” Apparently, I wasn’t too far off with the prickly pear since practicallyedible.com told me that dragon fruit comes from a cactus vine. I’d heard of dragon fruit before –I think in some Vitamin Water or Sobe energy drink- but I had absolutely no idea it looked or tasted like the strange thing sitting half eaten in my kitchen.

Wikipedia told me that the pitaya/dragon fruit/strawberry pear/pitahaya/huǒ lóng guǒ/nanettikafruit/thanh long was a native to Central and South America that has become fairly popular in southern China and many Southeast Asian countries (apparently, this fruit-of-many-names is now one of Vietnam’s biggest agricultural exports). The mildly sweet flesh is most often appreciated eaten out of hand though it may be turned into wine or juice (e.g. Sobe and Vitamin Water). Evidently, I should have chilled the fruit before eating in order to bring out its flavor.

Hopefully another pitaya will pop up at Safeway again. Or better yet, more mystery fruit that I get to bring home for free.

Meat Fab

The class stuff, I can handle. I’ve been handling it for sixteen years. Lectures, reading, study, and tests are all second nature to me. I’ve always been that nerdy girl who determines her self worth by how good her grades are. Now, after six weeks of sitting in a classroom, we’re finally moving into the kitchen, and it’s very likely that I’m going suck- A LOT.

On my first day of Meat Identification and Fabrication, I’m standing in front of a ridiculously yellow chicken, swimming in whites that are a size too big, holding a dull knife, and having a mini freak-out. I’m not butchering this chicken, I’m destroying it. Chef Briwa broke his down in about two minutes and didn’t even appear to be rushing. It’s taking me at least ten and somehow half the chicken’s skin disappeared once I’d finally cut it up. It’s not been a promising first day.

The next day, I’m in better spirits. Though I’m still butchering chickens only in the Slasher-pic sense of the word, I can’t help but have fun. Chef Briwa seems to project a rather stress-free air about the whole thing. I can't help but laugh as he repeatedly peppers his conversation with out- of-place mid-nineties hip hop slang: “Now what do you with all this trim, girl- friend? Wasting all of that wouldn’t be good bidness. We couldn't get down with that.”

Towards the end of the week, and about twenty broken-down chickens later, I’m feeling a lot more comfortable about the class and the kitchen in general. Chef Wong is teaching the last three days of Meat Fab. An ex-military man, he emphasizes that our uniforms be perfect (hair off the collar, just one roll of your sleeves, please), but also acknowledges that we’re here to learn and make a lot of mistakes. Aaron and I ask him for a knife sharpening demonstration and (lucky me!) he shows the class how to properly use our stones with my knife.

After five days of meat fabrication, I’m not even feeling too nervous about our practical. In addition to our written test, we’re supposed to truss and break down three chickens – something we’ve now done dozens of times. This isn’t to say I anticipate getting an A; I just don’t expect to bomb it.

The day after our final, we get to fool around with sausage. There’s something about taking apart dead animals for six hours a day that brings out the inner sixth grader in every one. Almost every sentence warrants a “That’s what she said.” Now we’re expected to make sausage by stuffing ground meat into pigs’ intestinal casings using a machine that has the word “DICK” emblazoned across the front of it. A lot of goofiness ensues.

Once Meat Identification and Fabrication is over, we’ll spend another seven days on Seafood Identification and Fabrication. Knives now sharpened and somewhat used to cutting animals up, I’m not nervous about class anymore. I can handle the kitchen stuff, after all.

Ubuntu

As a one-time vegan (I tried for a summer), I know how difficult it can be to find any good vegetarian food outside of the local Indian restaurant. Fine-dining and vegetarianism rarely meet so when I heard about the new vegetarian restaurant/yoga studio, Ubuntu, I couldn’t wait to try it out.

Ubuntu’s airy, minimalist interior echoes the simplicity that a yoga practitioner strives for but the photo-collages on the walls of Tibetan monks with pseudo inspirational phrases like “Be Extraordinary” or “Open Your Eyes to the Ideal” are a bit much. So is the chanting music. Still, Ubuntu more than makes up for these mistakes with fun touches like bread served to the table in cute burlap bags and an impressive wine bar.

On the Ubuntu website, the restaurant claims its food is “less about a philosophy of no meat and instead a celebration of our own biodynamic gardens.” Unfortunately, I found myself wishing it was the other way around. I might be uninitiated to haute-vegetarian cuisine but I felt that some of our dishes could have been a little more accessible.

My first course was an intensely algae-colored mushroom and nettle soup which was poured over a locally (and ethically!) produced slow-poached egg. I found myself wishing that there was more of the egg and that the too-subtle flavor of the soup would match its radioactive color. Even so, it was pleasant, and it would certainly make a good winter comfort food. My aunt Jennifer ordered a zucchini “carpaccio” which, though artfully presented, was doused in a strangely sour and bitter soy “marinade.” She did not finish it.

I did finish, and enjoy, my main course of pumpkin flavored risotto-- though I couldn’t really distinguish much pumpkin flavor. It was dressed, however, with fried sage leaves (oh so trendy right now) which I’m a pig for. Jen ordered a cauliflower “crock pot” composed simply of roasted, pureed, and raw cauliflower mixed with Vaduvan curry. I liked the idea of the raw pieces as the “meat” of the dish but I’m not really sure if cauliflower alone can carry an entrée.

We continued to be more perplexed than pleased by our food as we ate dessert. My aunt had the medjool date cake with coconut ice cream and teeccino caramel. The date cake itself was warm, sweet, gooey goodness but it was covered with acrid lime foam which ruined the entire plate. Not to mention, since when does coffee-flavored teecino pair with lime? Yck. My “Green Apple and Goat’s Milk Parfait” was an equally confusing mélange of apple slices and sorbet, goat’s milk whipped cream, quince consommé, and cider gellies.

Maybe I’m too prescriptive of a culinarian to appreciate Ubuntu’s unique “philosophy” but, overall, I found the meal to be more unusual than remarkable. Jen and I spent more time trying to understand our food than we did enjoying it and I think we both left unsatisfied. Nevertheless, Ubuntu provided an out of the ordinary and, at an average ten dollars a plate, relatively cheap diversion from the Napa Valley norm.

A Tomato Tale (for Product Knowledge)

These days, it is hard to imagine a tomato causing much of a stir. Despite its current ubiquitousness, however, the tomato inspired controversy for centuries. The fruit (or vegetable…) that we might now think of as mundane, in previous centuries, stimulated fear, myth, religious zealotry, and even legal dispute.

The tomato can most likely be traced back to a wild, berry-sized ancestor that grew in the Andean area that is now present day Peru. The plant migrated up to Central America and the pre-Colombian peoples of Mexico adopted it sometime afterwards. Soon after their arrival in the new world, the Spanish brought tomato seeds back to Europe. By the early 17th century the tomato had infiltrated Spanish and Italian cuisine. The French and Northern Europeans were, however, much more reticent in adopting the fruit for anything outside of ornamental use.

Even though their neighbors to the south adopted the tomato, Northern Europeans believed the plant to be poisonous and potentially deadly if ingested. The botanical cousins of the tomato plant might explain this erroneous assumption. The tomato is a member of the Solanacae family along with many plants that actually are poisonous such as nightshade and belladonna. Also, though the fruit is edible, the leaves, stems, and roots may contain toxic glycoloids and solanine – perhaps dangerous to those Europeans who first encountered the plant.

In many languages, the word for “tomato” still reflects the once perceived perils of the plant. Though the English word is simply a derivation of the Nahuatl (Aztec language) word “tomatl,” other languages adopted more ominous sounding names. The scientific name for tomatoes, “Lycoperisicum,” translates to “Wolf Peach” – a moniker based on the assumption that tomatoes could serve as a poisonous bait for wolves. The Hungarians baptized the fruit the “paradice appfel,” believing the Garden of Eden to have been located somewhere in the New World and the tomato (rather than actual apples) to be the dreaded fruit that caused Eve to sin. The Italian and French translations may have also followed this line of the thought. The Italian “pomodoro” can be interpreted as “golden apple” (a possible reference to the apples in the garden of Hersperides) or “love apple.” Using these interpretations, linguists and food historians assume that the first tomatoes were actually golden in color or that the Italians, like the Hungarians, also associated the fruit with original sin. The French “pomme d’amour” or “Apple of Love” would also support this hypothesis. This word, though, could also have been a bastardization of the French word for eggplant (a close relative of the tomato): “pomme des mours.”

Centuries after most people forgot the etymological origins of their words for tomatoes, beliefs in the supernatural and dangerous powers of the tomato persisted. To this day, in many rural areas of North America, there are still people who remember being told not to eat them. The citizens of the United States, in fact, were some of the last in the world to incorporate tomatoes into their cuisines. Though the French-influenced people of Louisiana used tomatoes as early as 1812 and Thomas Jefferson had cultivated the plants at Monticello, the inhabitants of the northeastern United States did not start cooking the fruit/vegetable until the middle of the 19th century. Even then, widespread popularity and acceptance of tomatoes only occurred well into the 1900s.

In keeping with the tomatoes’ ability to stimulate and excite the imagination, a popular tall-tale is often told about the Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, the man supposedly credited with finally introducing tomatoes into American cuisine. According to the folk legend, one day in the fall of 1820, Johnson gathered hundreds of spectators to watch him eat a basketful of the deadly fruit on the steps of the Salem, NJ courthouse. In the story, people came from miles to hoping to see Johnson keel over. In many versions, his doctor stood nearby warning the crowd that Johnson would foam at the mouth and develop a deadly brain fever. Of course Johnson survived, and, as many tell it, he later makes a fortune running a tomato cannery.

Even after Americans were satisfied that the fruit was safe to eat, the tomato could not avoid controversy. In 1887, the debate over whether the tomato was a fruit or a vegetable traveled all the way to the Supreme Court. In Nix v. Hedden, the tomato importer John Nix, argued that, since tomatoes were botanically considered fruits, he should not have to pay a vegetable tax when importing them. The court acknowledged that, botanically speaking, tomatoes were fruits but decided that in common parlance and everyday culinary use they were considered to be vegetables. Nix did indeed have to pay and the tomato continued to straddle the vegetable/fruit divide.

Though now so often taken for granted as just another part of a salad or merely the main ingredient of ketchup, the tomato may be one of the most interesting vegetables (or fruits!) on modern tables. Few foods have sparked so much fear, debate, and deliberation. From forbidden fruit to versatile vegetable, the tomato stirred imaginations for centuries.

I Throw Up on An Indian Lady (Intro to Gastronomy Journal 3)

Cilantro smells like a rotting corpse- a rotting corpse covered in battery acid and soap that’s gone bad. I don’t know if soap can go bad, but if it could, that’s exactly what cilantro smells and tastes like to me.

When I was studying in India, I must have lost ten pounds because our cook, Lakshman, put cilantro into everything. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G: chutneys, naan, rotis, pakora, Goan stews, and I’m sure I found it in a dessert or two. Even his adorably misguided attempts at American fare (one evening we were served a somewhat recognizable “Waldrot Salad” that none of us had the heart to correct him on) were not exempt from the cilantro treatment.

I remember walking by the fish market everyday and being un-phased by vendors’ eels sitting on dirty newspaper glistening in the 100 degree sun. I remember getting used to the smell of the empty market square at late afternoon when the stalls were cleared of people but not of the grime and garbage left to bake there in the humid afternoon air. I also remember, one particular morning, walking by some stalls filled with an almost fantastical array of fruits and vegetables, being confronted by a tiny and ancient saleswoman. Her crackled face smiled as she shoved a bouquet of green at me. “Smell!” she yelled. As soon as I got a whiff of that putrid plant, I threw up right in front of that poor woman and the entire market. Of all the cultural faux pas I committed in that country, I’m sure this one was the worst.

I ran home, wondering why I was different from everyone eating Lakshman’s food and from everyone in the market. There was no way they experienced the plant the same way I did. If they smelled and tasted cilantro like I did and still ate it, they were some pretty twisted individuals indeed. I guessed that there had to be discrepancy in our tastes.

Later that day, I sat at an internet café researching my plight. God bless the internet, there, all outcastes- even culinary ones- can find kindred spirits. Typing “hate cilantro” into Google, I came up with about 300,000 hits. There was even a website, Ihatecilantro.com, which had a very active forum, a research section, and a store where I could buy an “I hate Cilantro” t-shirt or track suit. Another website told me not to fear, my future as a chef wasn’t in jeopardy: Julia Child hated the horrible herb.