More sauce, less pasta

I've been thinking recently about Mark Bittman's suggestion that we might want to eat "more sauce and less pasta" as a way of reducing refined flour intake, but basically found the idea  unappetizing (I am a strong proponent of the theory that pasta is about eating noodles, while the sauce is just "condiment") until I realized that replacing normal pasta with a strip of lasagna basically gets you a pretty plausible "unstructured" ravioli while cutting actually pasta consumption in half (the lasagna solves the problem of eating a tomato-y stew with a few lonesome pasta strewn therein, and while I would  normally eat 3 oz. of dried pasta, I can get away with a .9 oz. lasagna). 

So last night I made a sauce of swordfish (farmed, cut into cubes and seared before adding back to the sugo) with wonderful canned san marzano D.O.P tomatoes, onions, capers, red chili flakes and garlic, and layered it between two halves of a lasagna. Delicious.

Stimulus

So someone finally asks the question that I think is at the heart of my unease about the proposed stimulus. How is it possible that the solution to deep seated problems caused by years of profligacy is for the government to stimulate profligacy?

* yes, yes, I know. Supposedly the answer to this is that we'll fix the structural problems later, etc, etc, but right now we need to be jolted out of Depression. Maybe so.

UPDATE: A previous post from me on this. Short and unsubstantive, but I link to remind myself I have been thinking about this for a while. This, by the way, is a serious problem even in (or maybe especially in, since we have the ability to save truly disposable income) the upper middle class stratosphere of big law firm practice. People (especially people who got through law school romantically unattached) typically start spending like drunken sailors as soon as the first paycheck clears, and then wonder years later why their debt isn't gone.

UPDATE 2: I note that Paul Krugman has the following to say on exactly this topic:

"Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving — a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now."

School Lunch

Copied below is a month's worth of menus from an elementary school, recently passed along to me by a reader. I count pizza or a manifestation of pizza 5 times out of 13 school days (I include Pizza Dippers and Mozzarella sticks), burgers twice, and fried chicken (popcorn chicken and nuggets) twice. The only food on this list that could even plausibly be made fresh and healthy are the tacos (and I am certain that they are neither) and the bagels (the jury's out).

[UPDATE: For a comparison, here is a random public school menu from France I dug up. It reads like a restaurant. The point to note here is that even though the French menu is incredible, it also doesn't require the full bore Edible Schoolyard approach, however laudable that is. This is a menu that can be assembled in a reasonable form for a reasonable expense anywhere in America, and if the parents don't like it, they can pack the kids' own lunch with crap if they prefer. Here's another menu, equally good and healthful, from a different public school. I suspect that if I searched for a week, I wouldn't find a single french menu, even in the poorest most depressed banlieu, that would have food nearly as terrible as that at my reader's school.]

Each meal costs $1.85. Kids can double their portion of these terrible foods for a mere $.75, with a quarter surcharge for Popcorn Chicken (apparently some sort of premium product). Note that this is a wealthy district.

The point to me made here are obvious, and the comments retreaded so many times I wonder whether it is worth my effort on this little kazoo of a blog.

First, this food is terrible.

Second, I don't know that it's (all) the school system's fault - the wonks tell me that this wretchedness has something to do with federal funding levels.

Third, of course there's room for kids to enjoy burgers and fries and all that. But once a week, twice a week at most, is reasonable. Not every single day, not every single option. I understand the impulse not to be paternalistic, and I am as libertarian as anyone on matters of personal choice. But there is room to be paternalistic with little kids - they are the people for whom paternalism was made, because they don't know better, and will almost always reach for the fast and efficient shot of fat and calories and sugar. Even if there are also sandwiches, as I am assured they are, most kids will simply not order them when presented with the option of hot, fat laden, food.

* On this I have special experience. As a child I became addicted to these shots of fat, through the vehicle of doughnuts. I am getting married to someone who was never given such things, or only afforded them once in a blue moon at a friend's house. The difference in the quantity and types of food urges we have when things go off the rails makes me think that there is some basis to what I'm saying.

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Grilled Cheese or Rib Patty (i.e., a McRib?)

Pizza Dippers (i.e., bread sticks with tomato sauce)

Hamburger, Hot Dog or Chicken Pattie (with fries)

Cheese Pizza

Popcorn Chicken

Soft or Hard Tacos

Bagel Day

Burgers

Mini Pizzas

Nuggets

Mozzarella Sticks

Cheese Pizza

Super Bowl Dinner

The Super Bowl was good, and our dinner was just as delightful.

To start, I fried some calimari and made a sauce out of chipotle peppers and Mexican crema.

I followed with Bittman's intriguing wine marinated rib-eye with onion marmalade (onions cooked for about an hour with balsamic vinegar for the last 40 minutes). I love the combination of orange peel and clove with beef, and the marinade does wonders for what is not necessarily the most tender cut.

Favorite thread anywhere

Even with all the food related boards and blogs I read, my favorite long-time comment thread anywhere on the internet is this - Balmoral Boot P&rn. I offer it up this morning as some friday morning light-heartedness.

In a better world, this would be the only type of dress shoe a man would wear.

Take it light

I've been pretty confused by a New York subway sign encouraging you to take your trash with you for a while now. It goes as follows:

"Take care. Take it light. Take the subway. Take responsibility. Please take your trash with you when you leave the train or station."

I had never seen the phrase "take it light" before, nor ever heard it said, nor could I really figure out what it meant in the context of the rest of the sentence. Apparently, though, according to the Urban Dictionary, "take it light" means something like "take it easy".

Why did MTA use this phrase? Is whatever group that unironically says "take it light" (assuming there is such a group) somehow responsible for trash on the subway? I am puzzled.

Plus, second prize for bad language goes to this Will Wilkinson bloggingheads, for grotesque overuse of the word "epistemic".

Bar Breton

We visited Bar Breton the other night to try their galettes - crepes, but with a toothsome, somewhat acid buckwheat. I'll say that I enjoyed mine - the first ham and cheese with egg, and the second nutella - but will note that I found it unnecessarily expensive ($16 for a crepe?). My fiancee had a salmon dish on the menu, as she didn't want crepes. It was competent, but entirely a throwaway. My pear cider was excellent.

What do I recommend? Get a savory crepe at Bar Breton, and then visit the amazing Crepes Lady in midtown for your sweets. She makes an amazing crepe, crunchy and tender and blistered with butter, and you get to talk to a treasure of a woman while you're at it.

EDIT: My last visit to the crepes lady, Madeleine messed up the first crepe she tried for me, made another, and folded the first into the second before applying the nutella, saying that when she was a child, this is how it was done in Brittany anyway. I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I don't care, as it was doubly delicious.

LLC

What is this supposed to mean? Are normal people understanding LLC as some sort of special protection for them as investors?


"The offices were beautiful, and I was told it was a limited liability corporation,” said Reggie Roseme, a deliveryman in Wellington, Fla., who lost his entire savings of $35,000 and now faces foreclosure on his home."

(This is from an article on Madoff-like ponzis in the New York Times).

Squid with Feta

Bittman's recipe for squid stew caught my eye recently, but my influences here in Astoria are more greek than anything else, so I converted the idea into a tomato stew with olives, feta and herbs. For textural interest, I added fried calamari - there's nothing like mixing the rustic (homey) with the rustic (junky).

The rising costs of food

I have a long running entirely one sided (in the sense that he is unaware of it) argument with Ezra Klein about his "locavorist" policy prescriptions (which, in short, amount to changing government policy to raise the cost of meat). His theory is that if you raise the cost of meat, people will eat less of it, and the environment will be better off. The issue has come back again because of Anthony Bourdain's recent tart comments about Alice Waters, the high priestess of American market driven cuisine. Waters's occasional high-handedness reminds me a lot of Klein's, and it is equally annoying. But in any case, we are in the middle of a great natural experiment in seeing what happens when the price of meat rises in relation to the average person's income (through the unfortunate mechanism of dropping incomes). I am confident that no less meat is being consumed. I realize I don't have the empirics to back me up, but I can at least start my analysis with the observation that the reaction of burger chains (some of the keenest observers of food trends anywhere) has been to provide cheaper rather than less meat. Mcdonald's has surveyed the landscape, and the McDouble is their inimitable answer.

Underlying all this, though, is that the fact that the good food lobby is riven with contradictory and competing interest groups. While they all think they're allied, in reality they are not, and tensions caused by people like Waters are a sympton of the fact that there are many things one may mean by "good food". Consider the below preliminary taxonomy - if pushed, I would put myself in between the taste and localist groups, but with an intense historical sympathy for the advocates of the poor. In terms of practicality, though, the only answer is a humble, incrementalist approach, somewhat akin to Mark Bittman's "less meat-ism". The food situation in so many places in our country is so bad that almost any improvement, whether providing vegetables to those who don't have them, or providing somewhat dubious "naturally raised" meat, is a measurable, valuable improvement to the lives of real people. I disdain the zealots who refuse to consider these modest steps.

1. The environmentalist crowd - The focus here is to limit the harm caused by food production on the global environment. This means less meat and less fishing. To be clear, this doesn't mean "better/natural practices in raising livestock". Indeed, raising chickens or pigs or cows in a humane manner would only exacerbate the environmental impact of meat, because organic, healthy, animals need land and resources. What these people want, ideally, is vat grown, artificial meat.

2. The taste crowd - Their goal is to bring back flavors that have been lost due to the growth of the food industry, from vegetables to meat to fish. They might care about organics because they taste better, but they do not necessarily care about environmentalism. Indeed, if one thinks about it, better tasting meat might mean that more meat is consumed, eventually.

3. The localist crowd - Local food might or might not taste better, but the point is to live within your area, to experience New York, or Virginia, or Lyon, as New York or Virginia or Lyon. Of course, while this is all well and good, true localism condemns millions to wretched food for much of the year (unless, I suppose, one really loves tubers) and rolls back gains made over centuries of economic development (forsooth, our medieval ancestors stabbed localism in the back when they started importing sugar). As such, localism is highly susceptible to hypocrisy (e.g., a "localist" food event staffed by chefs and food flown in from around the country). Local for thee, but not for me.

4. The cruelty crowd - The puritanical allies of the localist and taste groups, the anti-cruelty advocates care not so much about how the meat tastes or where it comes from, but whether it was raised in a way that respects the animal's life. They may think it a nice side effect that humanely raised meat tastes better, but the point is emphatically not flavor. The fissure between these lobbies is illustrated by foie gras, which scandalizes the cruelty crowd, but is positively encouraged by the taste/localist groups.

5. The improving the food of the lower middle class and poor crowd - Another interest group with less glamor under the broad umbrella of the good food movement are those advocates interesting in raising the eating standard of the poor and lower middle class, of persuading people whose food is so often based in restaurant junk food (bad) or on very bad food made at home (a little better) to try something new. The problems here are the lack of availability of decent food in many of the places these people live, and money. Of course, these problems would be made much, much worse by the success of any of the lobbies above. While we, the affluent, might do well to put aside our industrially raised vegetables, the problem for these people is the lack of exactly those things which we're so happy to sneer at.

No knead pizza bianca this morning

2666, again

I finally finished 2666.  The last book is masterful, as Archimboldi floats back and forth before the reader, slipping out of our vision while offering no satisfaction.  The first three books are mostly masterful.   Book 4 is, simply, a pornographic nightmare of death and terror, and I would never read a word of it again.    How would I react were a beautiful meal to include one course of rotten meat? Of course, I would be disgusted by everything.  Should not the same be true here?

Gout

I too am surprised that people still get gout. I hope that Mr. Ozersky isn't serious about the below:

I just want you, Feedbag readers, to know that I won’t be altering my lifestyle at all, and that you can continue to expect the up-to-the-minute coverage of the city’s dining scene that only total bodily dedication can bring.

EDIT: I should note that one of my heroes, Pitt the Elder/Lord Chatham, was afflicted with gout, and I was always touched reading about his efforts to govern despite it. 

Swirling thoughts

Best wishes to Obama. Wow.  But the press coverage is so irritatingly fawning.  He's got a lot of problems to fix - hope he does that.  But a lot of them are problems he has nothing to do with. Well, he can regulate, can't he? But some of the problems were the government's fault.  Not the worst things, surely, those were business's fault.  But stimulus is really not going to work.  Krugman is mocking economists who think stimulus isn't going to work - it's simple math.  But it'll end in tears.  Yeah, probably.

Thought I never tire of working around in my head until I start grinding my teeth

I could take all our wedding guests to some place like Corton and drown them in tasting menus and wine until the cows came home for the same price as some of the "estimates" I'm getting from caterers. 

More to the point, for half of these "estimates" I could drown all those guests plus all sorts of other people in kebabs and falafels, if only there were proper arabic caterers around.

BONUS: Phrases I am tired of repeating to said wedding caterers after looking at yet another inappropriate menu they can't possibly execute:

"You know, if I really wanted to take everyone to Per Se, I'd, like, do that".

A couple of quick notes

Some quick notes while I work on some longer writing projects: 

Candle 79: We visited this vegan restaurant (recipient of 1 star from Bruni) last week.  I very much enjoyed my seitan with butternut squash and pomegranate seeds, while our shared dessert of key lime pie was quite good (the crust held together without butter somehow grew on us, as did the various incarnations of cashew milk/cream).  Above all, it is an extremely comfortable restaurant, and I would return. 

Sweet Leaf Coffee: I visited this new coffee shop on a tip that they brew the apparently iconic Stumptown Coffee.   The coffee was good, the people friendly, and my apple pie comforting (though I do not believe they make it themselves, despite what the signage in the store says about baking on premises.  I could be wrong).  I brought home some ethiopian wondo at the same price as on Stumptown's website, which is quite generous of Sweet Leaf.   They're clearly still working out kinks, though, because I overheard someone who seemed to be in charge explaining things to people who weren't in charge, and also I got the last dregs of drip coffee from the pot (which I should have said something about).   The main downside?  The store is *very* small.  Not really the kind of place people can snuggle up for a while.

Roquefort-wars

The United States has placed a punitive tariff on Roquefort (english article here) in retaliation for French refusal to eat American hormone laced beef.

My understanding from people who know about these matters is that we're right on the law (i.e., we are permitted under WTO rules to impose these sanctions). But on the substance? I'm with France.* In fact, I think France is right substantively on most of these matters (GMO, the marketing of geographically protected wines in the US, etc, etc), but we keep winning the legal wars.

*(though would French people eat hormone-d beef if labelled correctly? Probably not, so the government is likely overreacting by forbidding the beef when it would simply die anyway).

** enthusiasts of American cheese will simply say, "Good riddance, as we make perfectly good blue cheese here". Yes, we do, but they don't taste like Roquefort.

New York, the center of the world (well, America) Part 1

I've been in a number of arguments recently involving the proper ranking of cities for food in the United States.  I suppose one might have some trouble with the idea of ranking cities at all, but I think that once one accepts the idea that it is preferable to dine in New York than to dine in Wilmington, more granular determinations necessarily follow.   What the use of ranking cities might be when most people have a limited range of experience and can't or wouldn't move to the higher ranked city for any number of non-food related reasons in any case probably remains unclear, but that is the nature of most ranking parlor games. 

Having determined to rank cities, the conversation in my experience tends to revolve around three endlessly repeated arguments.  In any group of food people discussing this matter, for example, there is invariably one who plays the great New Orleans gambit, which, for the uninitiated,  holds that the Big Easy is the best dining destination in the country, both before and after Katrina, and those who disagree are doing nothing better than sniffing down their foie gras infected noses at real cuisine.   Much outraged banter about Alan Richman ensues, with eventual agreement from everyone other than the gambiteer that New Orleans is, at best, Number 4. 

This resolution leaves the door open for everyone else to proceed with the two remaining set pieces, which look approximately like the following: 

1) Everyone agrees that New York is Number 1, but there is mortal combat between Chicago and San Francisco for a strong second fiddle, and the discussion collapses into a weighing of how important precisely Alinea is, whether The French Laundry is in San Francisco, and the excellence of this or that hot dog/deep dish pizza. 

2) Someone from Chicago or San Francisco says, frustration bubbling over, that New York is an overrated cesspool and that in fact their city is Number 1.  Usually this is supported by some reference to the fact that New York smells (bad) most of the time. 

For the record, I believe that set piece #1 is the correct discussion to be having, and further that the correct ranking of the top 5 is as follows, with the caveat that I rank New Orleans by reputation only. 

1. New York City

2. Chicago

2. San Francisco

4. New Orleans

5. Washington D.C.(?)

Why? The answers for me have to do with this weekend's juxtaposition of Per Se and Sripraphai.  But that post will have to wait for the morning. 

  

Air Blade

Not that it has anything to do with food, though it does have to do with the menu I posted below, but the Dyson AirBlade hand dryer is a miraculous invention. Paper towels begone!

More on this later