Coffee deal

After reading my post about Doma Coffee, he became overwhelmed by a fit of chutzpah I suspect is not at all atypical of people who spend half their lives on ocean going ships and asked if my name could get him a deal on coffee. I blew the comment off, but Terry Patano, Doma Coffee Roasting Company’s owner and principal rotisseur des cafes, read and took the comment to heart and offered TyroneBcookin (and anyone else who wants to sample Terry’s work) the following deal:

Between now and August 6th, 2009, order one pound of Doma coffee and Terry will add in a half pound of another coffee of his choosing. Just make sure to fill in the line on the order form that asks for your company’s name with the words “A Hunger Artist.”

Also please keep in mind that I have no financial interest in any of this. I’m only trying to promote the work of a fellow artisan and expect no financial or material gain from any transaction that anyone makes with Doma Coffee Roasting Company.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

‘Tis the season….

by Mike Pardus

All winter, I watch the weather for skiing, by the end of March most of the snow is gone and it’s time to think about my favorite spring sport- Mushroom Hunting! I start to watch ground moisture and temperature, air temperature, and precipitation. When it’s moist and the ground temp climbs above 55F degrees it’s time to start looking for Morels. This spring has been good in the Hudson Valley and more than morels have been popping up in abundance. My first find happened as I got out of my car at work – in the grass at the edge of the parking lot were three large Meadow Mushrooms (portablello relatives). Sauteed with olive oil and garlic they topped off linguine well for that evening’s dinner.

A few days later, cycling through the woods outside of New Paltz , I found a few shelves ( they grow on trees in layers, like shelves) of polyporus squamos growing on trail side trees- appropriately, they are also known as “bicycle seats” because of their shape and size. Although they become too tough to eat when large and mature, these were young, tender and buttery. Again, sauteed with oil and shallots, they made a fine addition to a warm salad tossed with bacon lardons and topped with a poached egg.

But it’s Morel Season and, although I’d been hearing tales of successful forages by some of my students, I’d yet to find any of my own. On Tuesday I made a date with my GF to ditch out of work as early as possible and go wandering through the woods near the banks of the Hudson river – my perennial favorite and most fruitful source of morels each spring, this year did not disappoint.

It was a beautiful, warm and sunny afternoon and the forest was clean and relatively free of underbrush. We walked and chatted, keeping our eyes on the ground, but also watching the tree tops for dead elms (morels are reputed to favor growing under dead or dying elm trees). Just when it looked like we might have to be satisfied with a simple walk in the woods we went to check out an elm and found not morels, but several shelves of fresh, young, oyster mushrooms. Favored by beetles and slugs as well as humans, it’s important to catch these soon after they emerge, we felt lucky to have beaten the bugs.

But it was morels we’d come for and after another hour of wandering we decided to give up the quest and be thankful for the half full sack of oysters. On the way back to the car, ambling up a hill, I glanced to my left and was astonished to see a doublet of morels – each the size of a pint beer bottle! Since morels most often grow “gregariously”, where there’s one there are usually many more, we forgot about the car and started scrutinizing the forest floor. Within 30 minutes we discovered three productive colonies, harvesting a total of 78 gems ranging in size from huge to tiny; our sack full and we fulfilled.

Returning home, we took turns prepping dinner and showering off the ticks. Soon we had dinner on the table – Roasted chicken and asparagus, large, crunchy croutons tossed in the rendered chicken fat, and sauteed mushrooms. With a bottle of cava, it was a rare and delicious meal.

So, now for the disclaimers:

Never – NEVER – eat wild mushrooms without first studying with a professional and having your harvest inspected for safety.

Join your local mycological society and go on organized forages to learn the basics (almost every county has one – google to find one near you)

Buy and use a good Mushroom field guide. My favorite is Mushrooms of North America by Roger Philips.

Never eat or serve anything you aren’t absolutely sure of.

Remember the old adage:

” There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no OLD, BOLD mushroom hunters”

Don’t be bold – or foolish – mushrooms are fun to hunt and wonderful to eat, but acute liver failure is a slow and painful way to die. You want to be an OLD mushroom hunter.

Happy hunting

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Cool Lard Blog

I love lard, in measure. I love the color and aroma of it, and I love to make it. But for purely personal reasons, I don’t share the die hard lipophile’s passion for eating it. See, my paternal ancestors, who were all of an Italian demographic that used lard as its primary cooking fat, all “died young” from diet related diseases. That said, I still have to recommend this lard fan blog for it’s ebullient endosement of a remarkable, if slightly dangerous, food stuff.

Lard Lovers – A network to help you find organic lard in America

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Salt this

A few weeks ago a guy stopped by the kitchen while I was making sausage to ask me if there was any salt in one of the dishes I prepared. I told him that, yes, I used a type of sea salt that was pure sodium chloride and occasionally, Kosher salt. The sea salt I used was the same stuff that was used for making brine for cheese. It contained nothing other that sodium chloride.
Ironically, the Kosher salt, which by my limited understanding of the Kosher laws is supposed to be pure and unadulterated, contains an anticaking agent to keep it from clumping up when it becomes humid. I wasn’t sure which one I used, but either way I was very sure that both salts were mostly pure sodium chloride and had no iodine or any other adulterants.

“Oh,” he said “ I can only sea salt. I’m allergic to regular salt .”

I then explained that regular salt or table salt is sea salt that has been mined from areas formerly covered by saltwater. When the sea water evaporated, the salt -and everything else in the water- precipitated, crystallized and formed what are called evaporite deposits. After the salt is mined, the impurities are removed and what’s left is pure sodium chloride. Then I said that since one can only be truly allergic to proteins and that, unlike many of the salts that are made by people who evaporate sea water in cave or tidal flats, there are no proteins in table salt, it is pure sodium chloride, so he should feel safe.

By now the man’s eyes were glazed over as he said “But sea salt is more natural than sodium chloride, right? I mean, sodium chloride is a chemical, isn’t it?”

Obviously, there was nothing more I could or should say other than Yup, I reckin, or what I actually said which was “Yes.”

Afterwards, when he had gone, and I was alone with my sausage, I realized that while he may have been more allergic to one conception of salt than salt itself, he was not at all unusual in one key measure: he was suspicious of ingredients that are described by their chemical names.

I think that a lot of people assume that if an ingredient is described by it’s chemical name that it must be man made and therefore dangerous to consume. So, for many folks sea salt is good because it comes from the sea, but sodium chloride or table salt is bad because they think it is produced by pinheads in lab coats working side-by-side with dweebs who are cooking up dioxin.

There are some larger points to be made here and some big conclusions to be drawn. If you’re up for it, do it. Me, I’m going to cook dinner.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Meat Delivery

We sent two sows out to be slaughtered on Tuesday and they returned on Friday as meat. We had been planning to slaughter and butcher at least one of them ourselves, but the timing was all wrong. I was more than game to get it done, but I could not slaughter and dress a 300 + pound pig by myself and Trent (who absolutely could do it himself) was not going to be available to help because he was too busy cutting and baling hay. Frankly, I was pretty disappointed that we had to send them out.

A big part of the reason why I have chosen to work on a farm is that I want to try to fully confront the implications of my craft and my appetite. So far, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of moving towards an apprehension of what happens along the chain of cause, effect and affect when I choose to cook or eat something. But I don’t yet know what it is like to a) raise a large animal, b) kill it at close range, c) butcher it, d) cook it and e) eat it.

With the slaughter and return -in the form of meat- of our two Berkshire sows , I’ve experienced everything except b and partially c. I’ve broken down large animals into primal cuts but I have never bled out and gutted anything larger than a rabbit.

Apart from being slightly disappointed over not having had the opportunity to kill and butcher at least one of the sows, my feelings about what happened are characteristically complicated. The meat is superb and I’m very pleased at having had a hand in producing it. And while I would not describe myself as feeling sad that the sows are gone, I definitely feel their absence. If nothing else, they were two very big animals who made a lot of noise and now that noise is gone. And as Trent noted yesterday when I half-jokingly asked him if the piglets were upset that we sent away their mother(s), they are definitely less rambunctious now that they don’t have two mammoth adults to stand between them us.

The quiet that replaces the sows has made me more aware than ever that the business of cooking and eating is very serious business.

I’m sure it’s going to be even harder for me to look at one of those asinine food ads that encourage people to “think” about eating or overeating as entertainment without smelling those sows. And I’m even more sure that the people who run those idiotic “cooking” shows that treat cooking like a spectator-sport are either denial-artists or cynical liars. Cooking is not a sport, eating is not entertainment.

I suppose it is okay to occasionally pretend that these essential activities are something other than unique and sacred (as in “set apart”) practices, but I am also convinced that when if you ignore what is really happening when you cook and eat something, you lose.

Here is a brief sideshow with a few pictures of some of the belly we took from the sows. There are also a few shots of some of the eggs that Trent chickens are cranking out. I think has has more than 300 hundred laying hens now. I’m not sure but I think we are harvesting about 12-15 dozen eggs/day now.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Meat Delivery

We sent two sows out to be slaughtered on Tuesday and they returned on Friday as meat. We had been planning to slaughter and butcher at least one of them ourselves, but the timing was all wrong. I was more than game to get it done, but I could not slaughter and dress a 300 + pound pig by myself and Trent (who absolutely could do it himself) was not going to be available to help because he was too busy cutting and baling hay. Frankly, I was pretty disappointed that we had to send them out.

A big part of the reason why I have chosen to work on a farm is that I want to try to fully confront the implications of my craft and my appetite. So far, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of moving towards an apprehension of what happens along the chain of cause, effect and affect when I choose to cook or eat something. But I don’t yet know what it is like to a) raise a large animal, b) kill it at close range, c) butcher it, d) cook it and e) eat it.

With the slaughter and return -in the form of meat- of our two Berkshire sows , I’ve experienced everything except b and partially c. I’ve broken down large animals into primal cuts but I have never bled out and gutted anything larger than a rabbit.

Apart from being slightly disappointed over not having had the opportunity to kill and butcher at least one of the sows, my feelings about what happened are characteristically complicated. The meat is superb and I’m very pleased at having had a hand in producing it. And while I would not describe myself as feeling sad that the sows are gone, I definitely feel their absence. If nothing else, they were two very big animals who made a lot of noise and now that noise is gone. And as Trent noted yesterday when I half-jokingly asked him if the piglets were upset that we sent away their mother(s), they are definitely less rambunctious now that they don’t have two mammoth adults to stand between them us.

The quiet that replaces the sows has made me more aware than ever that the business of cooking and eating is very serious business.

I’m sure it’s going to be even harder for me to look at one of those asinine food ads that encourage people to “think” about eating or overeating as entertainment without smelling those sows. And I’m even more sure that the people who run those idiotic “cooking” shows that treat cooking like a spectator-sport are either denial-artists or cynical liars. Cooking is not a sport, eating is not entertainment.

I suppose it is okay to occasionally pretend that these essential activities are something other than unique and sacred (as in “set apart”) practices, but I am also convinced that when if you ignore what is really happening when you cook and eat something, you lose.

Here is a brief sideshow with a few pictures of some of the belly we took from the sows. There are also a few shots of some of the eggs that Trent chickens are cranking out. I think has has more than 300 hundred laying hens now. I’m not sure but I think we are harvesting about 12-15 dozen eggs/day now.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Jamie Oliver, Chick Killer

Former boy-toy chef Jamie Oliver is walking a righteous path these days (Hey, everybody has to grow up sometime.) by teaching his TV audience about how food is produced at every node in the process. Watch, as he demonstrates to a group of clueless swells how the egg industry manages to maintain an almost exclusively female population of chickens .

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Jamie Oliver, Chick Killer

Former boy-toy chef Jamie Oliver is walking a righteous path these days (Hey, everybody has to grow up sometime.) by teaching his TV audience about how food is produced at every node in the process. Watch, as he demonstrates to a group of clueless swells how the egg industry manages to maintain an almost exclusively female population of chickens .

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Raw Deal on Raw Milk

This is not a joke

Vermont law makers recently passed a bill doubling the limit on the sale of raw milk from 25 quarts to 50 quarts per day; and lifted the groundless ban on advertising. At $5 to $7 a gallon, 50 quarts per day is still just a small step in significantly affecting the viability of Vermont farms however, it is a leg-up. [Source]

But it sure sounds like one to me. Fifty quarts a day is next to nothing. Why doesn’t Vermont simply make it legal for dairies that pass inspection to sell raw milk and let the public decide how much milk it wants to buy?

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Raw Deal on Raw Milk

This is not a joke

Vermont law makers recently passed a bill doubling the limit on the sale of raw milk from 25 quarts to 50 quarts per day; and lifted the groundless ban on advertising. At $5 to $7 a gallon, 50 quarts per day is still just a small step in significantly affecting the viability of Vermont farms however, it is a leg-up. [Source]

But it sure sounds like one to me. Fifty quarts a day is next to nothing. Why doesn’t Vermont simply make it legal for dairies that pass inspection to sell raw milk and let the public decide how much milk it wants to buy?

The best sauce in the world is hunger.