Food Network Kitchens: What's going on in food

A Hare Krishna group in West Virginia (who knew?), faced with what appear to be mounting cases of dissatisfied cows, has launched the nation’s first adopt-a-cow program, allowing you to provide care for a retired cow for $108 a month — or, should that prove too pricey for you, you can feed a workaday cow for $51 a month instead.  And you should definitely click through to the WSJ article on it; the cow-profile woodcut is worth the price of admission.

Charlie, meanwhile, has been doing his part. He’s already adopted three. [via]

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

The kids are home for the summer and the rain shows no signs of ever stopping, so I have two words for all of you cooped-up parents out there: Boudin Noir. For many the dark, almost black sausage conjures up feelings of warm, comfy, home-cooked goodness. For others deep, dark, pure disgust. And for others still, utter confusion. “What is it? Blood?! I don’t understand.”

To those of you in this last category, I’m no Harold McGee, but let me explain briefly. You fill a sausage casing with blood, gently poach it in water; the blood coagulates, becomes solid, and voila, blood sausage. Couldn’t be simpler.

So what will we need? Ingredients: A couple yards of natural hog casings, some ground mace and cloves, salt and pepper, an egg, a little cream, diced pork back fat, and about two quarts of pig’s blood. Equipment: A large pot to poach the sausage, a mixing bowl, a whisk, a funnel and someone (who isn’t squeamish or afraid to get a little messy) to hold the funnel.

Once this is all gathered, the process is easy and fun for all — as long as you don’t make the mistake I made on my first attempt.

Mix the raw ingredients in the bowl, tie off one end of the casing, stick the funnel in the other end and pour the ingredients into the casing. All pretty easy; that is, assuming the mouth on your funnel is wide enough for all the ingredients to pass through. (When it isn’t, you end up spending 45 minutes using your finger to stuff chunks of fat and blood through a hole they were never meant to get through, inevitably losing your grip on the casing and spraying you and your happy little helpers with blood.) In any case, the mission is eventually accomplished.

Then, the sausage is poached gently until all the blood has coagulated, and the sausage is sautéed with butter, apples and thyme and comes out of the pan just in time for your spouse to return home out of the rain to find their happy little family looking like the offspring of the barber of Seville, with a delightful hearty meal ready on the table.

I can’t think of a better rainy day activity. Enjoy!

Charlie Granquist, Culinary Producer

How an extremely misanthropic resident of the bovine digestive system such as E. coli travels through four stomachs, 150 feet of intestines large and small, across thousands of miles, from farm to processor(s) to retailers to — at the end of a journey that makes a Yukon river salmon run look like a 5-minute commute — ultimately find new accommodations in some unlucky human gut is one of the most pressing mysteries investigators of food contamination have attempted to solve since the first major E. coli scare back in 1992.

This week that mystery got a new twist with the emergence of a new and wholly unlikely disease vector: chocolate chip cookie dough. Now, a rare hamburger (or even spinach grown downstream from a feedlot) is one thing. But how E. coli 0157 found its way into a package of Nestlé Toll House Cookie Dough, let alone enough packages to sicken at least 65 people in 29 states, is the kind of mystery that adds a whole new layer of fear and distrust to an already worrisome situation. Nothing in Nestlé’s product would seem to pose an E. coli risk. The risk usually associated with cookie dough is salmonella from raw eggs-even Nestlé’s eggs are pasteurized.

One can only hope that the food safety reform bill just passed by a House panel, while far from perfect, will make such mysteries easier to solve in the future. In the meantime 300,000 cases of recalled cookie dough should have landfills nationwide smelling a little sweeter for the next few weeks.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Yes, it is. Photo, and garbage can over which we’re eating said mango, courtesy of Ashley.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

As a recent New York transplant, I have been wanting to resurrect my green thumb for some time, but I find myself slightly overwhelmed by the difficulty of finding a community garden with open plots.  I’ve heard stories of people waiting for more than five years for a plot to open–with wait times like that, it would probably be easier to get a kidney.

Using the most recent database I could find, my husband and I located some gardens in our neighborhood and the surrounding areas.  We set out to scout, filled with hope and excitement. The first garden was right down our block. It’s called the RING (The Riverside-Inwood Neighborhood Garden) and while it’s a wonderful community effort, we discovered it was strictly a flower garden, so we had to move on.  Much to our disappointment, garden after garden was either boarded up or abandoned. Six gardens in all were closed or had vanished.

I could only assume that my research had been poor, but after digging a little deeper I discovered that many of New York’s community gardens are at risk of either encroaching commercial development or simple neglect due to a lack of community support.

We came home defeated, stopping for a quart of strawberries to lift our spirits.  Washing away the dirt from our fruit, I began to question my idea of finding a plot.  Sure, it would be great to find an already established and flourishing garden where I could plant tomatoes and kale to share with family and friends, but how many people would benefit from that? Could I possibly do more?  I thought of the boarded-up gardens again and their depressed neighborhoods.

Perhaps there is still a need for a resurrection, and I decided to redirect my research.  I’m not exactly sure how to go about organizing a community garden, but I am open to education from anyone with experience.  In the meantime, we have joined a local community-activist group and bought a small tomato plant for our windowsill.

Leah Brickley, Recipe Tester

The Japan Times brings it with a cool list of onomatopoetic Japanese food words (from one of which, incidentally, Pacman got his name). CF also this list from the LA Times a couple years ago of French food-themed idioms, as well as an illustrated multi-language list from SeriousEats, excerpted from this book.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

So Pizza Hut plans to change its name to “The Hut,” capitalizing on what I suppose you could call its iconic architecture. That’s not entirely unremarkable, following as it does in the wake of what seems to be a trend of restaurants-that-serve-unhealthy-food-rebranding-to-remove-all-reference-to-unhealthy-food (cf Kentucky Fried Chicken). And I eat at “the Shack” and “the Wallah” so not like I can talk on that front, anyway.

Stranger news in the world of food nomenclature is that Wolfgang Puck is aiming to petition the Internet to create a top-level domain of .food, which he’d own and presumably license out, and possibly also .wine and .restaurant.

So theoretically, this site could become “foodnetwork.food” — and we could then also have food2.food, and food.food, should we want to. And I thought “Culinary Writer, Culinary Production,” which is what it says on my business card, was redundant.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer (Culinary Production)

We’re hearing a whole lot less about a global food crisis these days than we were a year ago. No longer do we read week-in-week-out of food riots in the developing world or grain shortages or skyrocketing inflation. Publishers are printing fewer books with apocalyptic titles like ‘The End of Food,’ ‘Stuffed and Starved,’ and ‘The End of the Line.’ The spectre of Malthusian collapse looms a little less large.

But lest you thought the global food crisis was over, several recent films and articles have come along to remind us that we’re not out of the woods yet. Far, very far, from it. The world is still hot, crowded, and hungry, and getting more so. Demand is growing faster than supply; agricultural productivity is flattening; and ‘the world is in desperate need of a green revolution, a greener revolution.’ A must-read National Geographic article does a nice job of walking through the debates taking place over just what shape this ‘greener revolution’ will take.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Mid-June in the garden is a thriving time, when flowering tomato, pepper and squash plants give signs of good things to come. In the meantime, I’m thankful for an early harvest that provided handfuls of radishes for summer salads — and, just this week, lots of little beans in every size and shape. English peas, sugar snaps, and haricots verts  quickly blanched in salted water and shocked in ice water make a perfect side for any lunch or dinner. I like them with (or even inside) an omelet, or tossed with some fruity olive oil, cannellini beans, radishes, and snipped herbs for a protein-packed picnic salad.

Here are a few other fast & fabulous bean recipes for your summer table:

• Green Beans & Shallots
• Snow Pea & Avocado Slaw
• Three Bean Salad
• Green Bean & Egg Salad

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer and Good Food Gardens spokesperson

(image courtesy Marlene Ramirez-Cancio)

(*That said, I have actually consumed an actual popcorn ball precisely once, about 10 years ago, at a bake sale outside a somewhat creepy concert, so for all I know they could all be like this, so grain of salt, people.)

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

(Ok, actually it’s beef.) And, though I’m grateful to El Pollo Loco (caution, sound) for digging through the 37-page ingredient document to reveal the hidden chickencow, gotta wonder what the motives were there, especially with this comment from EPL’s president and chief exec: “I can assure you that you won’t find any beef in El Pollo Loco’s fresh, natural, citrus-marinated chicken cooked over an open flame right in front of our guests.”

I mean, hey, always good to know there’s no beef in the chicken. (Or, for that matter, the fries.) And hey, it’s only been 152 years since the Sepoy Mutiny; there’s still plenty of time to learn a lesson from that.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

Canning, kitchen gardening, gourmet comfort food: There’s hardly a food trend these days that doesn’t owe something to the recession. This month’s most attention-grabbing trend, street eats, is no exception.

From Austin to San Francisco to NYC to Portland to D.C. to Seattle, across the country a new generation of food trucks and carts is emerging and expanding notions of what street eating can be in the process. The trend is drawing strength from a number of factors: cheap prices, of course; but also low start-up costs; and, not least of all, a large and growing pool of the newly jobless (many of them chefs) looking for entrepreneurial opportunity.

For these and other would-be street vendors, street food presents itself as a tradition-bound corner of the food service industry ripe for experimentation and ideally-suited to thriving in an economic downturn.

As a result, the new wave sets many of today’s prevailing food world trends-e.g. ethical eating, gourmet sophistication, cupcakes (enough already!)-on four wheels. Increasingly taco and kebab trucks find themselves competing for curbside real estate with crème brulee carts, cupcake trucks, mobile purveyors of escargot-on-a-stick and the like.

For their part, chefs and restaurateurs have seized on trucks and carts as a marketing tool for their restaurants.

Twitter has proven a major enabler of the trend. As Serious Eats points out, in mobile vendors, who use the micro-blogging service to relay info to customers, Twitter almost seems to have found its raison d’etre.

Ironically, even as street food gains cachet in some urban settings (and increasingly shows up in the world of fine dining) taco trucks find themselves under assault across the nation, beset by increasingly restrictive ordinances designed to curb their operation. All of which serves as a worthwhile reminder of just how race- and class-specific this street food trend really is.

Fortunately here in New York, the rights and interests of the city’s 10,000+ street vendors are fiercely defended through the heroic work of the Urban Justice Center and its Street Vendor Project. And it’s probably fair to say that here in NYC, the Project, through its efforts to raise public awareness about vendors, and in particular through its wildly successful (and wildly awesome) Vendy Awards (full disclosure: our own Rupa Bhattacharya is a longtime Vendy backer, volunteer, and fiend) has been a major motivating force behind the current trend.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

As a kid, I looked forward to three things about my summer trips to my grandparents’ 160-acre Iowa farm: hiding out with my favorite book in the abandoned chicken coop, letting the calves suck my thumb, and feeding piglet runts from a baby bottle. Other than that, I thought everything about farm life was utterly uncool. The infamous swine smell, the coffee cans of rendered pork fat, and early-morning chores. Those things gave me the heebie-jeebies. I never dreamed that the habits of my grandparents, like collecting kitchen scraps for compost or putting up green beans for the winter, would be ones that I adopt, embrace, even exalt.

So I’ve grown up a little. And embraced my farm heritage. And experienced my first recession. It seems the rest of the country is right there with me—we’ve all grown up a little, and are finally seeing farming for what it really is—challenging, necessary and beautiful.

It doesn’t hurt that farmers, food journalists and chefs have laid the groundwork of making farm-to-table the chicest catch-phrase of the decade. So it won’t hurt for me to use that phrase just one more time—farm-to-table starts with you, in your own backyard (or fire escape, or windowsill). You don’t have to own overalls or piglets to embrace your inner farmer. Just a pot, some dirt, and a few seeds. And go ahead and collect your kitchen scraps while you’re at it. Ask a neighbor or a farmer at your local market if you can add them to their compost pile, or better yet, start your own.

Watch for more tips on how to get started when our second episode in our Good Food Gardens series airs this Friday.

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer and Good Food Gardens spokesperson

Here at FN, we’re all in favor of home-made popcorn, but you probably shouldn’t be trying this at home. And no, I have no idea why he’s not wearing a shirt.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M61Mvp3sZDE[/youtube]

[via]

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

I have sent this website to everyone I know. [via]

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

(image courtesy Wired magazine)

Wired magazine brings word on how to mix an exploding cocktail with their fabulously-named Manhattan Project. Genius.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

I hate to be dismal and risk ruining my Pollyanna reputation, but with a record 32.5 million Americans on food stamps, and more American families facing hunger for the first time in their lives, food insecurity is a very real part of the American fabric.

The Victory gardens of the early 1940s, inspired by wartime need and promoted by a Department of Agriculture campaign, proved that many folks are willing to dig in and become a part of the solution through growing their own food.

The government is now at it again, with a Victory garden on the White House lawn and a People’s Garden on USDA soil, soil that was blacktop just a few months ago. Yesterday, in our nation’s capital, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack lent his own green thumb to support our fourth Good Food Garden, at the SEED School, a pioneering charter school in DC. He led the students, our new Good Food Ambassadors, in planting cucumbers, squash, eggplant and artichokes, among dozens of other plants, and joined us in tasting some of the varieties of melons, tomatoes and herbs that the students will grow.

One of our Good Food Garden Ambassadors with her prized zucchini plant

While Good Food Gardens are intended to teach and inspire interest in where food comes from, give students valuable skills and growing methods, and encourage students to eat a larger variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, their larger message is that anyone, anywhere, can grow their own food, becoming part of Secretary Vilsack and President Obama’s goal to end childhood hunger by 2015. The Food Network and Share Our Strength share their mission.

He left us with these words:

“The first directive President Obama gave me when I came into office was this: Feed our children; and feed them well.”

We hear you, Mr. President.

Check out Goodfoodfun.com for more about the Good Food Gardens, and a few ideas how you can feed your children well too.

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer and Good Food Gardens Spokesperson

If you’re a fan of fish and chips, grilled swordfish, fish chowder, sole mariniere, or other traditional New England seafood dishes, the fishermen and fish need your help. Check out this petition for a chance to weigh in on the future of New England’s groundfish fishing industry.

Katherine Alford, VP, Test Kitchen

Maybe if you fly in a dinner-jacketed Italian opera singer to sing to your cows, they won’t run away.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

If the question “paper or plastic?” drives you to near-psychotic episodes of decidophobia, then do yourself a favor and stop reading now.

Because here’s another one for you: carton (paper), canned (metal), jarred (glass), or pouched (huh?)?

Fortunately, researchers at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research were brave enough to tackle that one for you.

Their resounding conclusion: based on resource requirements and ecological impact, paperboard cartons are far and away the most environmentally friendly form of food packaging, cutting carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel consumption by up to 60% compared with other forms of packaging.

How’s that for a takeaway?

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian