Recently in Food Category

OK, it's not evil, but I'm one of those people who doesn't much care for the stuff. I don't dislike it -- why, I ate a Halloween-sized Butterfinger and Snickers at the office today, and loved it -- but if given the opportunity, I'll have whatever dessert is not the chocolate one. Yes, this has made me a social outcast, and the object of pity among many, but I have found my soulmate: Michele Humes. Excerpt:

Now, I don't dislike chocolate, per se--at least not milk chocolate--but I never seek it out. I can't recall ever eating my way through two or three courses and thinking, "Well, wouldn't something dense, dark, and fatty just hit the spot!" I have thought, in those moments, of a brisk sorbet; of rhubarb compote on cool, thick yogurt; of shattering a burnt sugar top to get at a grapefruit tart--but of chocolate mousse, no, never.

Tell it, baby. Screw you, chocolate, you Branson, Missouri of desserts, you desperate milquetoast Kenny G. crowd-pleaser. You know what? You are so over. La Dolce Michele writes:

On menus across the country, and to my selfish glee, the chocolate dessert is fast becoming the token item--so at Seattle's Spring Hill, a scoop of chocolate-banana ice cream is the lone concession to the chocoholic, and the clear subordinate to a buttermilk panna cotta with huckleberries and a balsamic-drizzled plum crostada. More plums at Chicago's Mado, where a stone fruit and pistachio crisp is dolloped with tangy crème fraîche. And in New York City, Locanda Verde's sundae-for-two, assembled from rhubarb sorbet, lemon biscotti and fresh berries, is the very antithesis of hot fudge.

Go read more of the lovely and exceedingly intelligent Michele's culinary advice at her blog. Michele, ma belle, since you live in Brooklyn, I want to encourage you to hie thee to Sweet Melissa's on Court Street and try the chevre cheesecake.

I just got off the phone with Regina Charbonneau down at Twin Oaks Bed & Breakfast in Natchez. I'd phoned her because she wrote this great piece on the Atlantic's Food Channel about making cane syrup in the South. I wanted to find out when Judge Bramlette's syrup making Saturday was going to be this fall. Anyway, because Natchez is only an hour north of St. Francisville, my Louisiana hometown, we share a lot in common, especially the experience of shocking Yankees and other non-Southerners by showing them that the crazy, only-in-a-novel stories that we've told them really are true. As my wife will tell you, "I thought he was a pathological liar until he took me down there and I met the people he had told me about. It was all true! They really are like that."

Turns out Regina and I know a couple of the same people, but she doesn't know David and Edie Varnado of Camp Topisaw, the Mississippi folks who hand-craft superlative soaps and candles. I never recommend any products on this blog that I don't use myself and believe in, so I can tell you that you can't go wrong ordering from Camp Topisaw.

Regina has a Southern food blog on the Atlantic's Food Channel. If you get around to making her cornbread pudding stuffed with mustard greens recipe before I do, you've got to tell me how it turned out. Here she weighs in on the sweet cornbread vs. savory cornbread controversy. Excerpt:

Cornbread in the South is about as controversial as gumbo. Everyone has a recipe and everyone has an opinion. I love cornbread, so I like both savory and sweet. I also like honey butter on my savory corn bread and jalapeno corn bread, andouille and crawfish cornbread, broccoli and cheese cornbread, cracklin' cornbread, sun dried tomato and bacon cornbread, and I especially like my recipe for cornbread pudding stuffed with mustard greens. When it comes to making cornbread dressing, there is no question you have to use savory cornbread. The one thing I do that is a little different and adds a touch of sweetness and helps the texture is add creamed corn to my cornbread batter. I like the texture and taste of sweet corn in the cornbread and dressing. I add heavy cream and eggs to create a custard texture that I like in a dressing.

I am pleased to report that Regina's recipe is mostly on the side of the angels -- the savory tribe -- in this dispute.

The Double X folks put the artificial sweetener stevia to the test, and find it wanting. I'm with them. You can have my Sweet 'n Low when you pry my cold, dead fingers from around the pink packet. I don't like NutraSweet either, and have concerns about its safety (but not so great that I completely swear off diet Coke, which I drink one of a day). You?

UPDATE: A certain uppity chicken enthusiast who lives in Old East Dallas writes to say:

Dude, you have stevia growing in a pot in your backyard and a jar of dried stevia leaves in the fridge. And still you call it an artificial sweetener!?

What's on the stove today over by you? We've been down in my house with the creeping crud all week. It's not the flu, really, but it's flu-like. Julie has been especially hard hit, as I was last week. This week, for me, it's better because I'm reasonably ambulatory. But here we are at the weekend, and I want to cook, but my sous-chef (or am I her sous-chef; we haven't quite worked this out) is down for the count. I am trying to figure out what I can make that's good, and special, but not too demanding.

I'm defrosting a Windy Meadows chicken for roasting tonight. Windy Meadows is Mike and Connie Hale's family farm (you'll remember them from "Crunchy Cons") not too far from Dallas. Their chickens are nonpareil. If you buy high quality meat, such as the roasters from Windy Meadows, doing a first-rate roast chicken is very easy. Just puncture a lemon, stick it up the bird's butt, salt and pepper it, and stick it in the oven. I think I'll add a few sprigs of rosemary from the garden.

We have some Arborio rice left over from last weekend, and a little bit of Parmigiano Reggiano left on the rind, so I'll probably make a risotto to go with it. We also have some carrots in the bottom of the fridge, which I'll either steam or steam-saute' in chicken stock. I'm thinking of going by the store to buy some Savoy cabbage to make with it, or maybe some Brussels sprouts.

Autumn comfort food for the sick. It's all good.

I had hoped to make a sauerbraten this weekend, which is a German-style pot roast that's marinated for a day or two in vinegar and herbs, but the week got away from me. The weather is pleasant outside, and I'd also love to grill some German sausages, and drink some hefeweizen with some friends. But nooooooo, we've got to stay expectorated and droopy all weekend. Nothing left to do but go by the movie store on the way back from my cabbage run and lay in a supply of comfort movies as well.

How about you? What are you cooking this weekend (he says, as he takes his last swallow of Theraflu from the coffee mug).

What's causing the honeybees to die? Here's an argument from Discover saying that in the name of industrial efficiency, we've turned them into weak-chinned inbreds. Excerpt:

The problem is hardly trivial. A third of the total human diet depends on plants pollinated by insects, predominantly honeybees. In North America honeybees pollinate more than 90 crops with an annual value totaling almost $15 billion. Indeed, that importance lies at the root of what went wrong. In trying to make bees more productive, apiarists have torn the insects from their natural habitats and the routines they mastered over millions of years. As a result, today's honeybees are sickly, enslaved, and mechanized. "We've looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what," says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. "They can't be pushed and pushed."

In the beginning, honeybees and their partners, the flowers, drove an explosion of natural diversity. While most bees preferred a specific type of plant, honeybees were equal-opportunity pollinators--"pollen pigs," beekeepers called them. The most socially complex of the bees, they thrived in colonies led by the egg-laying queen, who ensured the genetic fitness of her progeny by breeding with multiple male drones from other colonies.

All that began to change in the early 20th century, when farms and orchards started enlisting honeybees to pollinate their crops. Bees that were adapted to harvesting pollen from a variety of plants suddenly spent a month or more at a time surrounded by nothing but almond or apple trees. Farmers eager to increase their crop yields turned to commercial beekeepers, who offered up massive wooden hives stocked with queen bees genetically selected to produce colonies of good pollinators. These breeding practices slashed the genetic variety that helps any species survive infections, chemicals, and other unforeseen threats.