UPDATE: Just saw at Grist that the USDA National Organic Program has responded to the Post story by publishing a PDF with comments about the possibility of cloned food being certified organic. Summary: it’s not going to happen.
From yesterday’s Washington Post: “Can Food From Cloned Animals Be Called Organic?” You can read the arguments for this absurdity or you can just read this.
A year or so after opening the first organic dairy research farm at a land-grant school, the University of New Hampshire recently started shipping milk through the Organic Valley cooperative.
No organic clones here. With 48 Jerseys to start, the farm saw its first-born heifer in December. The naming rights to the heifer were auctioned off on eBay for $1,275. The winning bidder, the President of Stonyfield Farm and his family, named her “Charley.” In exchange for Stonyfield’s support, UNH has agreed to name its second calf “Gurt” so that, according to the Stonyfield customer who picked the name, you can call it by yelling “Yo! Gurt!”
Question: if you are born on a non-organic farm to a non-organically raised cow but you’ve been assimilated into an organic dairy farm, does that make you less organic than a heifer of the same quality and breed who’s born on an organic dairy farm to a cow who’s lived most of her life on an organic dairy farm?
For more about the UNH dairy farm, visit its website. In addition to the dairy farm, UNH also has an Office of Sustainability. Interesting article about it here.
I just heard the sad news that Sharon Tyler Herbst, the author of the popular Food Lover’s Companion, has died. According to her husband Ron, she had been fighting ovarian cancer for a few years.
When the third edition of the FLC came out in 2001, I was assigned to write a profile of Sharon for the San Francisco Examiner. My editor at the time had some strange fixation with the FLC and was tired of all the praise that had been thrown at it over the years. She wanted me to take some shots at it, focus on its sporadic errors and find some unimpressed people to comment on it.
Happy just to have a consistent writing gig and young enough to effortlessly try on smugness for a while, I went to meet Sharon one afternoon at a coffee shop in Corte Madera. She breezed in, brightly dressed and all smiles, and whatever plans I had for cheek immediately fizzled.
She was just so damn charming and gracious and frank and enthusiastic. Every now and then, more often for me (one of the many reasons I’d really never cut it as an investigative reporter), a journalistic interview turns into something resembling a real conversation. That’s how it went with Sharon. Instead of answering my stock questions — How’d you get started with cooking? What kind of sources do you use for the FLC? — with the who-what-when details of her bio, she responded with long and whimsical meditations on the oddness of life. In a way that came across as humble and refreshing, she marveled on the record about all her good fortune. She seemed constitutionally incapable of just going through the motions of an interview.
I didn’t know Sharon at all outside that one meeting and a few other conversations, but I left that day feeling so much better about things I didn’t even know I was concerned about. At one point, we talked about pluots and I mentioned that somebody should write a book about them. She said, “Oh my gosh, you should!” A couple of years later, when I emailed to tell her I was doing just that, she emailed me back with more exclamation points.
The AP obituary mentions that she included pronunciations in the FLC because she’d never been able to forget her own mortification after mispronouncing a word. The word was “crudités” and because of her indispensable book, countless others have been spared the embarrassment of commenting on the delicious “kroo-deets.”
Like beets and Brussels sprouts, cauliflower has often been written off as stodgy, bland and boring. While cauliflower is just as easy to make delicious as any other vegetable, it does need to be paired with aggressive flavors to shine. Think chiles, spices, mustard, ginger, garlic, capers and anchovies.
Here’s an easy, hands-on way to prepare a head of cauliflower. It requires just a few big cuts. Though broccoli’s a little softer, you can prep it in much the same way.
First, pull the leaves away from the head and toss them. Chop off the bottom of the core to just under the head of florets. Cut the core in half without cutting into the florets. Do the same with each half. Cut through the core and pull the two halves apart with your hands if you need to.
Next, slice the thickest part of the core away from each quarter. You can either discard the core and thicker stems, or slice them thin and cook them along with the florets. Like broccoli stems, cauliflower stems have a beautiful tender texture when cooked.
Now just pull the florets (of any size you like) apart with your hands. You may need to trim away some of the thicker stems with a pairing knife.
I pile the florets into a colander and rinse them well with cold water. You can wrap them in a kitchen towel and keep them in the refrigerator until you’re ready to cook them, up to a few days depending on how fresh the cauliflower is.
I was down in North Carolina over the weekend and had a long talk with my mom and sister about unfashionable vegetables. They had seen TV chefs braising radishes and making delicious-looking cauliflower, and were curious to cook with them.
So for my brother-in-law’s birthday on Friday night, we braised radishes and parsnips with butter and parsley, and we tossed cauliflower with a bright mustard-tarragon vinaigrette (recipe). The spicy radishes and tangy cauliflower made a great contrast for a rich, deeply browned standing rib of beef.
Bill Yosses, who logged time early in his career at The Polo alongside Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, has been named the new executive pastry chef for the White House. Yosses most recently worked at Citarella, where he developed a lemon pound cake the recipe for which is right here.
In a 2001 New York review of Citarella, Hal Rubenstein wrote that “while the proposition of risk-taking desserts is always a scary one, the nervy Yosses’s Pavlova meringue with fruit sorbets and his lemon-raspberry soufflé in verbena sauce are far more agreeable than esoteric. In fact, his warm vanilla cake, fig napoleon, and warm chocolate-chestnut brioche pudding are simply yummy.”
Not the type of guy who’s likely to recreate the chocolate intemperance (a mousse-filled brownie covered in a chocolate glaze) Bush had during his inaugural week. But he should heed two words of advice from Roland Mesnier, who retired as PaCOTUS in 2004 after 25 years on the job: never serve flambé and watch out for Barney.
The latest tally of the damages from the citrus freeze earlier this month: at least $800 million. Much of the direct losses to citrus farmers will get repaid with crop insurance. But the indirect damage will be harder to keep track of:
1. With no crop to pick and pack, thousands of farm workers will be out of work.
2. That labor shortage will put a strain on relief agencies and force the counties and state to redirect already tight funds.
3. In some citrus-heavy counties, certain tax revenue that depends on a normal, busy season will take a hit, affecting funding for things like road maintenance and fire departments.
4. During the freeze, citrus growers used a ton of water to fight the frost. That unexpected demand for water put added pressure on what’s been a very, very dry winter in the San Joaquin Valley (the fifth-driest January since 1850).
5. Summer fruit growers are already irrigating because of the drought. With this spring’s snow melt predicted to be lower than average and the lack of winter rain (the only kind in central California), a water shortage later this year looks possible.
6. Even well outside the fruit belt, people depend on citrus in unexpected ways. For example, a nursery school in Pasadena gets 40% of its funding every year from a massive orange sale. Parents had already collected 2000 paying customers for this season, but now have no fruit to deliver.
I just noticed an excerpt from this month’s National Geographic Traveler about doubles, the Trinidadian street food that’s basically a curried chickpea sandwich. The thought of street food in winter got me thinking about the week my friend Michael and I spent in Berlin living almost exclusively on currywurst, the ketchup-and-curry sausage dish popular on the corners of Berlin and Hamburg.
Michael and I had finagled press passes to the Berlin Film Festival but we had nowhere to stay and very little money. Before we left, our friend Kristin gave us the number of a sculptor she had once hit it off with on the phone while fact checking an article for the Los Angeles Times about the East Berlin arts scene. It had been years since she’d spoken to him and so she wasn’t sure if the number was still good or, if so, whether or not he’d even remember the conversation.
Just before getting on the train to Berlin from Prague, I called the sculptor, Roman, and introduced myself. He remembered the conversation he’d had with Kristin (or was too polite to admit that he didn’t) and he asked when we would arrive. “Tomorrow,” I said. He told he would see what he could do. Would I call him back when we got to town?
I called the next day and Roman gave me an address. We went to the address, an old warehouse where he had a studio. Roman came to the door and said that he would be unable to host us because he already had friends in town. But, he said, we could stay with his friends Anke and Klaus. He walked us over to Anke’s studio, where she was working. We sat and watched her paint and smoke. Later, she drove us to her apartment.
A huge metal scorpion sculture hung in the entrance hall. Roman had made it for them as a wedding present. She and Klaus had married, Anke told us, because their group of friends hadn’t had a really good party in a long time and they decided that a wedding would make a great party. That had been a few years before. Anke gave us a key and told us to come and go as we pleased.
Freed up from having to worry about where to stay but not wanting to bother our hosts, Michael and I woke early and returned late, watching four or five movies a day at the festival. Most of the venues were a long trip from Anke and Klaus’s place, and almost every meal we ate that week came from one street vendor near the Zoo Palast.
Was currywurst all he served? I can’t remember, but I do remember that it’s all we ate. Neither of us had ever heard of it before and I can’t remember why we decided to try it in the first place. Probably because it was sausage and it was cheap. Whatever the reason, “Zwei currywurst, bitte” became an immediate ritual.
The sausage and french fries came on a hard, rectangular paper plate. We would take our plates and huddle over them on the sidewalk, trying to stay warm. We were there so often that the proprietor, whom we got to know in that smiling, dumb way you do when you don’t share a language, grew increasingly delighted to see us. I think that we even tried to cobble together some kind of farewell speech for him, but I may be making that part up.
Michael sent me a currywurst recipe a few years ago, but I can’t find it. I’m sure there are a million recipes. Anybody have a good one?
Our friend Ed Schwarzschild wrote the fantastic novel Responsible Men (in 2005, a San Francisco Best Book of the Year, a Book Sense Notable Pick and a finalist for the Rome Prize), and his story collection The Family Diamond will be published in September 2007.
Earlier this week, Ed kicked off a new project at Jewcy. It’s a series called Letters to Ahmadinejad, and over time it will feature an assortment of responses to the open letter the Iranian leader sent to the American people in November. Eight letters up so far with lots more on the way, apparently. Check it out.
At a cooking shop in Birmingham, Elizabeth bought a small, wax-sealed bottle of “Perpetual Vanilla” that held three Madagascar vanilla beans.
To make your own vanilla extract, you break the seal, take out the vanilla beans and slice them lengthwise. You then put the beans back into the bottle and fill the bottle with either vodka or light rum.
After letting the vanilla sit for a month or so, it’s ready. Each time you use it, you’re supposed to refill the bottle with vodka or rum so that the beans are always covered. Simple enough. I started ours today (rum) and will report back in February on the results.
The bottle we bought came from Hartley’s Herbs, a bulk herb supplier in Georgia that also sells other perpetual extracts. For those interested in making your own, it holds a little more than 2/3 cup of liquid for the three vanilla beans.
