Fresh Air with Julia Child

Heads' up: NPR's Fresh Air is more interesting than usual this week, as it continues its food-related installments with a special Thursday rebroadcast of an interview Terri Gross did with the late, great Julia Child.  It's today, people - on WYPR and WAMU it's 3:00 - 4:00.  Or if you miss it, you can always listen to it whenever you feel like it at the Fresh Air website (audio available around 5:00PM on Thursday, September 1).

Flying Green Tomatoes

Yesterday's installment of NPR's Fresh Air featured Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland, which investigates just why our plump and beautiful supermarket tomatoes also taste like soggy styrofoam. In short, they are bred for weight and aesthetics, not for taste, because the farmers get paid by the pound, not by the "Mmmm":

"For the last 50 or more years, tomato breeders have concentrated essentially on one thing and that is yield — they want plants that yield as many or as much as possible," writer Barry Estabrook tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "They also want those fruits to be able to stand up to being harvested, packed, artificially turned orange [with ethylene gas] and then shipped away and still be holding together in the supermarket a week or 10 days later." [NPR 2011]

His opening vignette with Gross discusses how a few of these mutant Florida green tomatoes flew off a truck near his car while he was driving down the road. They almost broke his window. But what he later saw was not damaged tomatoes, but still perfectly formed and firm green tomatoes on their way to have whatever it is Big Ag does with that ethylene gas to them to turn them red extra fast.

Click on the link at the beginning to go to the podcast page.

Tidbits: Early June Edition

A few items that have been waiting:

* While I wrote the other week about my food truck experience in LA, I never got around to my experience the week before in DC with their food trucks (I did send out Twitter posts about them though). I was specifically seeking the fabled Red Hook Lobster Truck (Twitter: @lobstertruckdc), parked that Wednesday at L'Enfant Plaza metro along with several other food trucks. It sells - what else - lobster rolls. Okay, it also has shrimp rolls, but they're known for the lobster. $15 for a lobster roll but this is absolutely worth it. They have two kinds: the Maine-style lobster roll, which is mayo-based, and the Connecticut-style roll, which is butter-based. I went with the Connecticut-style, and it was just wonderful. I could not stop little pieces of lobster from falling out of the roll, so I just ate those with my fingers - forgetting the obligatory fork, of course. They also have whoopie pies and New England lines of craft soft drinks.

Of course, I had to try the others, but how to do so with only $5 left? Get some small bites! The Fojol Bros (of Merlindia) (Twitter: @fojolbros) serve Indian plates, usually $7 or $8. Don't have that? Get one of their $2 "dingo bites" - sort of like a shot of one dish with rice. I got their silky butter chicken. After a free sample of jerk chicken from Goode's Mobile Kitchen (Twitter: @mobilekitchen), I got a massive side order of chickpeas for only $2 at the Tasty Kabob truck (Twitter: @tastykabob). I'm not kidding about the "massive" part either. This was easily as big as two lobster rolls, and as filling as two dozen of those dingo bites. If you have just two bucks, go to the Tasty Kabob truck, and you will get filled up.

* Heads up: both Baltimore and Washingtonian Magazines have similar themes this month: where to get the cool groceries, find the best butchers, peruse the nicest cheeses and sample the hoppiest beers. Read them for yourself to find out where to get the foods and shopping experiences you've been craving in the Baltimore-Washington area.

* Watching a soccer game at Sláinte Pub soon? Like, maybe, during the CONCACAF Gold Cup 2011 matches this month? (USA 2 - 0 Canada, yippee!) But you want to save some of that food money for beer or dessert? Why not sample the Sloppy Jim? For $10 (on special - it might be more at its regular price), you get a Sloppy Joe-style sandwich on an onion brioche bun, with cheese. And the Sloppy Jim isn't ground beef - it's bison sausage. Mmmm.

* Did you catch the Midday with Dan Rodricks show last week, with the big fried chicken smackdown between Gertrude's John Shields and the Baltimore City Paper's Henry Hong? No??? Check it out on the WYPR website here.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of food on the radio: today's Kojo Nnamdi Show featured a large segment on military food. Watch below as Kojo samples a delicious MRE:

* The last of my bacon-pancetta wot that I made for last year's Great Grapes bacon cook-off (info about this year's Great Grapes festival is here) has been sitting in my freezer - in a freezer ziploc bag - for almost exactly a year. Now? Still good.

The Great Food Truck Thing

In case you missed it, Dan Rodricks had a whole episode last week on his Midday Show on WYPR on the whole food truck phenomenon. Among others, he talked to Heather Shouse, author of Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels. Shouse goes all over the country to examine local food trucks and the local adaptations to them. For example, Portland, Oregon, has a whole section of town devoted just to food trucks! Rodricks also interviewed several local food truck entrepreneurs, including the good people who bring us the food trucks from Gypsy Queen Café, Iced Gems Baking, Creperie Breizh, and Kooper's Chowhound, as well as the former owner of Juana Burrito who now runs the food truck consulting business Mobile Food Products. The food truck trend is starting to really rocket here, as it has in DC too - surprisingly since DC has such arcane laws that regulate food trucks in such a way that they may not park unless they have a queue of people waiting for them (I found this out a few weeks ago on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU). It's a trend I hope we see continue to flourish in Baltimore in the future.

Sampling Ethnic DC, One Cuisine at a Time

I often go back and forth between Dan Rodricks on our own WYPR (88.1 FM) and his noon-to-two counterpart Kojo Nnamdi on WAMU (88.5 FM), partly due to subject matter, partly due to reception. Today was a Kojo day, and I was lucky to hear Corinna Shen, owner of Rockville's Seven Seas Restaurant, and Todd Kliman, food critic for Washingtonian Magazine. Shen is a big proponent of mixing the Americanized "Chinese" menu with the "real" menu, so that non-Chinese patrons will be more willing to see what Chinese patrons are actually eating - dishes made with loofah and duck blood and frog, that non-Chinese patrons might be reluctant to order, and Chinese restaurant owners may be even more reluctant to give to non-Chinese diners. Kliman gives some tips on how to get those "real" Chinese menu items - show that you respect the cuisine, that you have heard of some of these not-so-Western ingredients, and that you really are willing to eat anything. It still will not always work, but when it does, be prepared for dishes that look nothing like General Tso's chicken.

This is just the latest in a string of shows that Nnamdi has done about the varied ethnic food landscape of Washington, DC and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. This Local Restaurant World Tour, as he dubs it, is by all means a go-to source for ethnic eating in Montgomery & PG Counties, Northern Virginia and the District. Just one look at the map on the Kojo Nnamdi Show website shows a map of the DC metro area splattered with maps of China, Greece, Thailand, Korea, Trinidad, Italy, Ethiopia and several other countries, some as far away from DC as Frederick and - yes - Baltimore (Da Mimmo's is currently the only Baltimore restaurant on the map). If you are in or around the DC region, and you know you will be eating, you must check out this map.

If I Were Trader Joe's...

I didn't even know this strange homage to Trader Joe's even existed... until this morning while listening to NPR's Morning Edition. Trader Joe's is amazing. Its popularity is really due to word of mouth. I was first introduced to it not when it came to Towson a decade ago. Instead, it was just after I moved to Riverside, California in '97, and my fellow grad students mentioned it and just about had an... well let's just say they were in love with it. One of them had a friend in St. Louis which did not, at the time, have a Trader Joe's, and she begged her West Coast friends to bring some out to her. In the late 90's, almost all of the nation's Trader Joe's stores were in the Pacific Time Zone. Now they're everywhere.

The cars that won't fit in the parking lot. Y'all can say that again.

Kitchen Science: "Two Minute" Spaghetti (well not really)

I was going through my typical early Sunday afternoon ritual - listening to Splendid Table on the radio while driving up and down 83 from Wegman's to Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, and maybe Giant. Somewhere around Padonia Road, my jaw dropped into my lap. Lynne Rosetto-Kasper's guest, Kate Heyhoe, author of Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen, was helping Lynne and listeners with some tips on how to cook in an environmentally-friendly way. A big part of this involves how much energy you use in your kitchen.

One of Heyhoe's suggestions caught both Lynne and myself off-guard: when boiling spaghetti, don't boil it until al dente. Instead, boil it for 2 minutes, and then do the following: turn off the heat but don't remove the pot from the burner, and cover the pot for the remainder of the time that the pasta would have to boil. It will turn out al dente. Needless to say, Lynne was skeptical, but willing to try it. I was almost as skeptical, but curious, so tonight I made up a nice basil-mint pesto* and did the two minute pasta thing.

It worked. The damn procedure worked! The reason it works is because the residual heat in the pot continues to cook the pasta while the lid is covered. Were I to take the pot off the burner or leave the lid off, it would not work. Heyhoe makes similar suggestions for baking things in the oven. You save 7 minutes of heating the kitchen by just, in essence, steaming the pasta until it's al dente. It's interesting enough that I will probably do this again.

* Hey, basil is in the mint family. Why not?

Pickled Grapes

I was listening to Lynn Rosetto-Kasper of Splendid Table gushing over Matt & Tedd, the Lee Brothers, and their new cookbook Simple Fresh Southern. I was nodding at many of the Southern style party recipes they discussed with Rosetto-Kasper. One caught me totally off-guard: pickled grapes.

Again, stop wretching.

Yes, pickled grapes. The Lees said these Thompson seedless green grapes take on an almost olive-like quality. And all you need is equal parts water and vinegar, plus some chili pepper, rosemary and garlic. The sour grape takes on a pleasantly pickled flavor.

Of course I had to try this, but without their cookbook in front of me I had to improvise instead (of course, dumbass didn't bother to actually check the Splendid Table website, where the recipe is clearly posted). So I put about a cup of seedless green grapes in a container, added one cup each water and vinegar, plus three chopped cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of rosemary and a few generous pinches of roasted red pepper flakes. After marinating it all in the fridge overnight, I was pleasantly surprised.


However, I cannot say this was sour at all (maybe I didn't buy Thompson seedless). Instead, the grapes tasted a little sweet. This sweetness was actually magnified by the vinegar and garlic. So it wasn't the same thing that the Lees were promising, but it was good anyway. In fact, it instantly reminded me of the Cambodian style pickles where you just throw some fresh veggies into a water-vinegar-fish sauce-garlic solution and let it quickly marinate. So I wonder how these pickled grapes would taste with a little bit of fish sauce thrown into the pickling brine. I shall have to try this later on.

Since I didn't add the salt that the Lee Brothers so clearly put in their recipe, it's no wonder they come out sweet. I still like the flavor, but some salt or fish sauce still needs to go in. In retrospect, I did things very differently than they did. So next time, I will follow the actual recipe, to see how the Lee Brothers pickle their grapes.

Right now on Mid-Day w/ Dan Rodricks

Henry Hong is talking about local summer food traditions. Listen live here. Listen after the fact here (or ask for a CD of the broadcast if it's been a month since broadcast).

Young & Hungry in the D of C

I was half-listening to WAMU's Metro Connection today, until this segment came on showcasing Washington City Paper's 50 Best Restaurants feature this week. As the WCP's Tim Carman noted, this list is a little different than others because they dispense with the usual suspects - the Citronelles and what not - because everybody already knows that they're worth eating at. This list focuses on the less well-known ones. Present, a Falls Church Vietnamese place (one of five Vietnamese places on the list, and not all of them are phở houses) sounds like it is particularly worth going to. Apparently, they make up nine different types of fish sauce. Nine.

Farmers' Markets and CSA's on Mid Day

If you are able to listen (and interested), Mid Day with Dan Rodricks on 88.1 WYPR is discussing farmers' markets and CSA's from 1 to 2. If you miss it, don't worry: you have a whole month to download the MP3 from the Mid Day website (after that you hae to email them and ask for a CD with the show you want). In that case, it's the Thursday, June 11, 1 to 2PM show.

Farmers' Markets of America, Unite!

I just heard on NPR this morning a new series they're doing for their Morning Edition program. They are exploring the farmers' markets of America. Of course, they can't hit all of them. They're just doing a representative sample. The first installment of this series looks at a farmers' market in northeastern Vermont (How much more Yankee-fied can you get?). Here, they're focusing on my old nemesis, the tasty fiddlehead fern which, when prepared incorrectly, could make you very ill.

Getting to the Great Cilantro Divide

Josh Kurz despises cilantro. To him, it smells like soap and tastes horrible. He's not alone - many people he knows are exactly like him. As he reports for NPR, people seem to fall into either one of two cilantro-defined groups, those (like him) who hate it, and those (like me and most of the people I know) who love it.

I read the report on the NPR website, but if you want you can listen to it instead, just by clicking on the "Listen" link on the page.

Splendid Table Gifts: Give Food!!!

Y'all may know I am planning to go cheap for Christmas and give some variation of food gift (sorry to give it away, but the family and friends know this). But as I listen to Splendid Table on NPR right now, I heard another good food gift idea from host Lynne Rosetto Kasper (I don't know why I thought she looked like Ina Garten).

Rosetto Kasper

Garten

Actually, they look a little alike - emphasis on the "little" part. Maybe not like sisters, but I'd believe it if they told me they were cousins.

Anywho, Kasper suggested buying foods for foodies that they may not have eaten before. Troll the ethnic markets and the gourmet shops. Buy what looks interesting and is cheap. Or make gourmet chocolate bars (Sally Schneider tells us how to make our own chocolate bars with cayenne pepper, bacon bits or curry powder).

Cookies and fudge are also a good gift, especially if you put them in cheap and attractive containers.

Splendid Table: Turkey Confidential

WYPR is broadcasting the Splendid Table's two-hour "Turkey Confidential" episode from 11 to 1. If you have any problems, or just want to hear some helpful solutions to other people's problems, now's the time!

Click here for WYPR's main page, and then click on the "Listen Live" link to get to Turkey Confidential. It will probably be much more useful than the Alton Brownathon playing on the Food Network as I type.

Kojo on Obama: First Eater (?)

Todd Kliman, of Washingtonian Magazine, was on WAMU (88.5)'s Kojo Nnamdi Show today. The topic? President-Elect Barack Obama as "Foodie-in-Chief":

Grits, hushpuppies, greens, and other southern food went decidedly upscale when President Clinton's arrival in DC coincided with the debut of Georgia Browns. But for all the excitement in 2000 about a President Bush reviving local BBQ battles, this hasn't really happened. We project the impact an Obama Administration have on DC's Food Scene.

Had I known this was coming I'd have let people know. Fortunately for us, WAMU archives all episodes of Kojo Nnamdi, so you can listen to it in streaming audio here.

A few loose ends on YouTube and elsewhere

1. I finally got back to Salty Dog's for their $1 heavy crab night, while doing recon for Exit 42 (I had never been to Edgemere so I never realized how pretty it is). I bought $5 worth and ate 'em last night during Project Runway. Gooooooood crabs!

Mmmm. Cheap crabs.

2. It is almost impossible to find pre-made mole poblano in the grocery store. No Latino grocery is conveniently close to me so that will be my next stop. Plus, it's a pain in the ass to make it because of all the different ingredients. I did find two jars at the Hampden Super Fresh of La Costeña brand mole. I got it home and tried to stick the spoon in - and it was as hard as a piedra de chocolate. Que será será, I guess.

3. Off topic, and not at all food-related, but you don't usually think of NPR personalities in terms of their good looks. But damn - Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace is a hottie! See him in the pool filming a clip from a waterproof camera with Kevin Pereira, host of G4TV's Attack of the Show. Kev is telling Kai on yesterday's show about all the latest waterproof gadgets that an NPR-head would ever want to buy.



Sorry. I love Marketplace, the only show that makes economics remotely interesting. I've been trying to figure out a way to mention it for months.

Listen to this post as an MP3

I LOVE laughing about food!

Now that Justice Talking is off the air, WYPR had to find something to replace it with. Now they join WAMU by finally airing Lynne Kasper's Splendid Table. I first listened to it on the way back from a trip to Ocean City last year, and I occasionally catch it on WAMU. Like many of us food bloggers, writers and aficionados, Kasper seems to enjoy food. So much, in fact, that she often laughs on her show. A lot. Apparently about the food stories of her callers. Since this show is followed up by the nuttiness of Car Talk, which used to have the Sunday-at-noon time slot, it's just two non-stop hours of laughing about food and cars.

Kojo on Food: The Ethics of Kashrut, and the History of Chinese Food

Long before Dan Rodricks took over from Mark Steiner, I was tuning into the Kojo Nnamdi Show on DC's NPR station (WAMU-FM, 88.5). I don't know - to me, it was always just more interesting than Steiner. Nothing against the man, I'm just not among the masses of people in the "Bring Back Mark Steiner" movement. The show always put me to sleep.

Today as I was driving around the Beltway, practicing the new hypermiling thing and doing research for my latest Beltway Snackin' installment, I had the good fortune to hear an all-foodie hour of Kojo Nnamdi (which you can listen to in streaming audio here)

• In the first half hour, I got to hear about an issue that I'm surprised has not risen much before - the ethics of workplace conditions - of workers, that is - at kosher slaughterhouses. Apparently, conditions for workers have largely been ignored at kosher slaughterhouses in the past, one common justification being that the rabbinical concern was with dietary laws, not workers' rights. One woman among others is fighting to change that: Devora Kimelman-Block, the founder of KOL Foods (Kosher-Organic Raised-Local Foods), who was interviewed by Kojo today along with Rabbi Morris Allen, the director of Hekhsher Tzedek. Hekhsher Tzedek's goal is to get kosher companies to hold themselves to high workplace standards, shown by "[displaying] a seal on already designated kosher foods that reflects production benchmarks consistent with Jewish ethical standards, including how companies treat their employees". This is meant as a complement, not a replacement, for the traditional certification of kosher products. Most callers thought this was a very cool idea. (Listen to this standalone segment with Real Audio or Windows Media)
  
• In the second half hour, we heard from New York Times food reporter Jennifer 8 Lee (yes, 8 as in Eight). Lee is also the author of the fascinating book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food from Twelve Publishing. Lee breaks down many, many misconceptions and preconceptions about Chinese food in the US, and the breakdowns came fast and fun. Among them:
• The goopy, sanitized, boneless stuff we call "Chinese food" in the US is not known or found anywhere in China. Case in point: General Tso's (pron. Tsao's) chicken, the crispy, fatty, boneless chicken bits covered in sweet goop, paired with the occasional stalk of broccoli (an Italian veggie so it isn't even eaten in China). The villagers in Gen. Tso's hometown thought Ms. Lee was coming to research him, the man who helped end the Taiping Rebellion - the largest, bloodiest civil war in world history. But General Tso's chicken? They didn't even know he had a chicken.
• Fortune cookies come from Japan, not China.
• They actually eat something in New England called a "chop suey sandwich": chop suey fixings, including the crispy noodles, between two slices of bread. Ick.
  
• As Lee notes, Chinese food really adapts well to the local products and tastes of the areas it comes into contact with. Chinese food in India, Italy or Ivory Coast is very different from Chinese food in Argentina, Australia, or even Antarctica (where it's eaten weekly at McMurdo Station)!
• The best Chinese restaurant in the world? On the second floor of a strip mall in Vancouver. I forget the name, so if you want to find out what it is, either read the book or listen to the standalone segment with Real Audio or Windows Media.

How the heck do I miss these things!?

I thought I was being so on top of things by reminding people about Henry Hong on the Dan Rodricks show last week. Then I log on to WYPR's website at work to see if there is anything interesting on this afternoon.

I find out what they had on this morning:

Rhubarb… by Coconut and Lime

Baltimore-based food blogger Rachel Rappaport talks to Tom about exactly what to do with rhubarb --- that red, tart vegetable that causes epicures to either salivate or grimace at the thought. Rachel also shares a memory of smearcase, and growing up in the Highlandtown area of Baltimore --- and what food blogging is like, in the Mid-Atlantic region.

External Links:

Coconut & Lime
Taste of the Bay

I guess I'm not so on-the-ball after all. Not that I could've listened at the time; at least I can listen to it after the fact. But a belated congrats to Rachel for getting on the radio!