Risking Attention

As far as I know, I am talking to myself. And my friend Kim. So with that said, I must say the echo in here is drowned out pretty well by the vacuous space surrounding it. So if you are out there, foodie peoples follow me and see where this leads. I cannot tell a lie. I am totally inspired by Julie Powell in Julie and Julia, though at the same time I have to agree with Julia Child's reaction: Julie is using Julia Child's hours of hard work to capitalize on her own narcissism...though it is clear it didn't start like that. What a funny world that people can easily access your work and assess your character based on what you choose to put into the world.

With that said, I would like to invite readers to comment on something of which I have just become aware, and that is a (fairly) new product call Xocai (Show-Sie). This is raw chocolate at its finest it seems. Someone decided to capitalize on the the raw cacao tip, and has patented a cold-press process that keeps the cacao berry under 110°F at all times, making sure the bio-flavinols and the anti-oxidants are not destroyed n the process. The result? A piece of chocolate, sweetened with stevia, acai and blueberry powder, that has higher antioxidant ratings than anything else. Pomegranate doesn't even come close. Oh and it helps you lose weight by curbing your appetite, helps diabetics lowers cholesterol, tastes good and its chocolate.

So, if anyone has any good reason as to why this isn't a good product, please let me know.... because otherwise, you ought to talk to me and see how you too can get a hold of something that for now seems almost too good to be true.

Broast Lamb

Well hello there. I want to start todays segment by saying that I do not support endorse, or otherwise even understand what the term Broasting means, but I felt compelled to use it in the title, just so I could have this rant. That and I think I broasted my leg of lamb, and it was delicious. To me, to braise something, you steam/boil, read: Braise it is a liquid, covered or not, until the meat is tender and well done. Roasting on the other hand, is a dry heat, in an oven, done until the internal temperature of the roast is roughly 15°F cooler than you want the final temperature to reach (this is called carry-over cooking). The significant difference, of course, is the total disolution of the cartilage tissue during braising, extracting gelatin from the meat and bones. This dissolving of the tissue holding the meat together is reason is falls apart to the touch, and the reason the resulting sauce congeals. J-E-L-L-O! or something like that. I never saw Cosby advertise lamb jello...

So I had this Leg of lamb, boned, and ready to roast, or whatever. I opened it up, spread copious salt and a little less copious amounts of ground black pepper, rolled it back up and seared the sides to get the browning of the sides and develop a fond (this is important for brasing and for gravies made after roasting). While the pan was still searing hot, I added 1# of large dice mirepoix and got some more brown, using some masa at the very end to make a rudimentary roux. I placed the lamb on top, and covered with 2 cups of eggplant marinara from end of the season, and two.5 cups of chicken stock. This I covered, and put into the oven.

Naturally, this is braising. However, when the lamb was finished, lo, the top with plenty marinara still attached and nicely browned, had much more of a roast fell than the submerged meat (though due to the high steam content, the difference was really very minimal). I removed the lamb, carefully due to its FTWD status (Fork Tender Well Done), defatted the remaining liquid, and using my hand held Cuisinart, blended the mixture to a smooth rust-orange luster. What a sauce!

The lamb disappeared much faster than the sauce, which has subsequently been used to rehydrate and thus perfect some older chicken breats from the fridge. This is Chef Zack, signing off for the first report of week one: culinary adventures of the extremely busy.

2010

I recently was able to view the What's Hot for Food Service in 2010
( http://www.restaurant.org/pdfs/research/whats_hot_2010.pdf). This .pdf document is the culmination of a large abd broad based survey among culinary professionals, speculating and creating the trends for this our new year. No surprisingly, the top of almost every list is sustainable, local foods. Local vegetables have been a hot for some time, and granted, here in Portland, where Chef resides, we are quite spoiled when it comes to the freshness of our ingredients.

But local meats? Is there enough production locally to supply the growing demand of artisan, local meats and animal products? Again, I am aware of my own spoiled nature. I grew up getting milk from our local Dari-mart, family run now for over 45 years (http://www.darimart.com/), and surrounded by farmland. Much of that land now, outside of Eugene, is being quickly developed as the allure of the Willamette valley grows, but what of the new demand for locally produced proteins. It doesn't take a genius to recognize the absolute fallacy presented in the mass slaughterhouses (killfloors) or the 100,000 head of cattle bumping and pushing up against one another in a frenzied attempt to find some kind of nutrition is the corn they are being fed (cows eat grass, by the way).

I could talk ad nauseum with reagrd to the proper handling of all of your food. The energy given to something along every part of its path is transferred, in some small way into your sells as you integrate the food and energy. Fear, antibiotics, adreniline, poison, E. coli and other bacteria, ammonia, chemicals, cow manure, etc. are all common in these feed lots. Personally, I don't have any recipes for how to make E. coli more pallatable, nor can I find an amuse bouche to make rBGH cute and attractive. The food movement is more than a movement, this is a call to return to the self-sufficiency of our great-grandparents (if you are in you 30s-ish, that is).

My partner's mother and I were discussing what we call the "great forgetting." She remembers fondly getting the bag of margarine home and how it was the kid's job to squeeze and squish the annatto coloring into the white Crisco to make the new-fangled spreadable fat look more like butter. The concept was so hi-tech, so new, that it was preferred simply due to its novelty! I grew up eating I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Butter, I can't believe its not food! Actually, I have no problem believing that it is not food. We have been duped into buying our energy from a system so sick that it requires more energy to grow corn (our mainstay crop in America) than the energy gotten out of it (see Michale Pollen: The Omnivores Dilemma). This is absurd. The whole point of food is to convert the hard to access energy of the sun into Carbohydrates that we animals can harvest and use to build our bodies and keep our hearts ticking. Is is really so difficult to envision a wolrd in which this is actaully what we are doing?

I imagine often a time-trveler from the America past coming to the future and seeing what we have made of a dream that, while perhaps misguided, was at the very least noble in it cause for growth of the humans spirit. They arrive, see the corn belt, read the financial aspects of the modern farm industry, and go home to their time, and call off the whole American revolution and go home, deflated and depressed that we could flounder in such a cesspool of ignorance and stupidity.

Of course Local is the answer: and this is no trend. Any person posed the question "Where does your food come from?" Will probably give the same disconcerted answer....slight pause, and then: "...I don't know...."

Lets change this. What the chefs see as trends for the New Year, Chef Zack sees as the inevitable movement back toward self-sustainability...