James and the Giant-Priced Peach

James McWilliams discusses the notion of expensive farmers' market, organic food and whether junk food is actually cheaper than non-junk food - in a sense, "fair-price" (for the growers, anyway) in the food section today's Atlantic Magazine website. Michael Pollan and Alice Waters have spoken passionately about expensive food that you just don't buy as much of, like a $3.90 peach or an $8 dozen of eggs. Famous and not-so-famous food writers (Can I still call them foodies? Ooooh please let me call them foodies!) have taken them to the woodshed. I mean, really called for their heads. From McWilliams' article:

Anthony Bourdain, who dedicates a full chapter of his latest book, Medium Raw, to attacking Waters's airy idealism, scoffs at the idea that people should be willing to spend more on food: "She annoys the living shit out of me. We're all in the middle of a recession, like we're all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market." Jason Sheehan, author of Cooking Dirty, is even less restrained in his assessment of Pollan. Admitting that Pollan is "damnably right about a lot of things," he can't quite stomach that pricy peach. "When you've been too broke to buy soup," he writes, "some iconoclastic dickhead trying to tell you that paying $4 for a peach is a good idea because it is a really good peach can be the kind of thing that makes you want to buy a rifle and a map to the homes of famous food writers." (Dude, it's just a peach ...)

So, yeah, folks are angry.

That rifle thing is just disturbing.

Granted, a Bourdain rant is a lot more common than that $4 peach, just as juicy, and a bit more tiring. But McWilliams actually speaks up for Pollan and Waters. Mind you, he disagrees with much of what they say. But here he suggests they have a point: namely that cheap crap food is lamentable and yet seen all too often. But McWilliams points out something even more surprising: it isn't just crap food that has gotten cheaper over the past 30 years - it's also the healthy stuff. But people are still choosing the Tastykakes over the apples. Hmmm...

Check out the comments. Those are particularly interesting.

Haute Dog Carte

I have to hand it to the folks running the Haute Dog Carte, conveniently located near the corner of Lake and Falls next to Bonjour Bakery. They have a good business going. How so? Let me note the ways:

• Their onion and tomato jam (it's better than ketchup) may make you swear off eating mustard on your hot dogs ever again - unless you taste their Dijon mustard.
• Their different-each-week Binkert's Dog ($4), and their different-each-week Chef's Dog ($5) - today was a Filipino frank called the Maharlika. I got their Dijon in my bun but they were right: I didn't need it.
  
• Oh, these buns are soft and hollowed out, not open-faced at all like a typical hot dog bun.
• And the way they warm those buns - which leads to some, ahem, startling comments from some otherwise unassuming blue haired little old ladies...
  
• Their Signature Dog ($4.50) is a 1/2 pound Angus dog. I haven't had it but it sounds good.
• Even if you just get the regular $2 dog, you have a variety of toppings to put on it. I'd still recommend the Dijon or (even better) the onion-tomato jam. But there are a few toppings.

Since Dara's story on them, the Haute Dog Carte seems to have gone to seven days a week. This is lucky for the hot dog-lovin' public. Lake and Falls, right across from the Royal Farms. You can't miss it.

Green v Black Iced Tea

Just a brief note: I've been making a lot of iced tea lately. I have been making iced green tea and iced black tea. I am finding the black tea to just produce a richer, tastier tea. That's all.

Life After People: the McDonald's Edition

Hat tip to the GOOD Blog via the Daily Dish (neither is a food site), another reason to heed Morgan Spurlock and Super Size Me: a McDonald's Happy Meal looks (though perhaps doesn't taste) pretty much the same after 4 1/2 months. Manitoba-born New York City artist Sally Davies found out as much and the Refinery 29 website chronicles a sample of her work.

This is a typical Happy Meal after 137 days:


My guess is the ice, at least, would have melted.

Back to Mango Grove

I was in Columbia the other day, and decided to stop by one of my favorite vegetarian restaurants, Mango Grove. I've been here before, and in general I liked it (one semi-famous commenter did not, though she was later called out on it). I liked it enough to return for their $10 lunch buffet. At about noon, it was only moderately busy, unlike the dozens upon dozens of unlucky bastards waiting half an hour or more to go through the drive-thrus at McDonald's, Wendy's and Chick-Fil-A. Efficient, indeed.

Just a reminder: this restaurant, which specifically offers many Southern Indian dishes (dosas, idli, etc), will fill you up. Also, it will easily remind you (pace PETA) that eating vegetarian does not necessarily keep you from gaining weight. You could easily gain weight off this wonderful food. Just a few excellent things that popped out for me:

• the idli is tangy, but unlike other idlis I've had at area buffets, this black lentil and rice cake didn't have the funky taste I've found with others. It was a great complement to the channa dishes on the buffet, which came with their own oily fried puffed breads.
• I don't remember if aloo gobhi was on the buffet, but I ate something like it. Filling and delicious.
• Don't knock their various chutneys. My favorite was the tamarind chutney, which tasted almost like a very tangy barbecue sauce - in a good way. Close behind was a coconut milk chutney that was wonderful on the various breads I had on my plate.
• They had two types of basmati rice on the buffet: plain and lemon. Go with the lemon. It's light enough to not overpower, but strong enough that you will taste it.
  
• Also, their papadums are some of the most delicately-spiced (though deceptively sturdy) I've ever found at an Indian buffet.
• The waiter brought out a complementary dosa with a lentil filling. The texture was a little dry but it still had a lovely flavor.
  

So there's another endorsement for an inexpensive, filling and meatless (I didn't say not fattening) Indian buffet. Please, people, dispense with the 30 minute wait at Wendy's, chick-Fil-A and Micky D's. By the time you get in and out of the buffet (or the one at the attached and very much not meatless Mirchi Wok) you would've gotten through the drive-thru anyway.

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.

Gluten-Free Pancakes Wow Local Girl with Autism

My sister and I hit up Mount Washington Whole Foods and the Health Concern in Towson for gluten-free stuff. Cathy wanted me along since I had done some research on this very topic (NB: I'm still playing with the idea of some allergen-free crumb cake again). The reason? My neice has autism, and much research suggests that a person with autism can benefit from a gluten-free diet. AutismWeb.com summarizes the lowdown for parents interested in fighting autism with allergen-free food:

According to one theory, some people with autism spectrum disorders cannot properly digest gluten and casein, which form peptides, or substances that act like opiates in their bodies. The peptides then alter the person's behavior, perceptions, and responses to his environment. Some scientists now believe that peptides trigger an unusual immune system response in certain people. Research in the U.S. and Europe has found peptides in the urine of a significant number of children with autism. A doctor can order a urinary peptide test to see if proteins are being digested properly.

Studies are underway to examine the effectiveness of the GFCF diet, which has not gained widespread acceptance in the medical community. One recent study found behavioral improvements in children on a GFCF diet, while another study found no significant effects from the diet.

Changing the diet of children with autism is particularly difficult due to their often perseverative nature. This will often result in a very limited diet - for example, there are only a few key foods that my niece will eat, such as pizza, chicken nuggets and pancakes. She refuses to eat much else, no matter what my sister offers her. It's easier said than done to say "Well just make her eat it!" This sort of thing is often said by people who don't have autistic children.

So Cathy's line of attack is to make gluten-free versions of those foods that her daughter doesn't reject.

She bought all kinds of flours, including cake mixes and brownie mixes, pancake mixes and pizza crust mixes, tapioca and brown rice flours and xanthan gum. Again remember, as the helpful customer at WF reminded us, that the best brown rice flour comes from Authentic Foods, because it's ground really fine. Arrowhead Mills' on the other hand regularly makes for a gritty baked good.

Cathy left a phone message for me today: she made gluten-free pancakes for my niece. At first it looked like she wouldn't eat them, so Cathy sadly put them in the fridge. Her daughter said, "No, please," and wanted to finish them. Hopefully this trend continues, and hopefully the gluten-free diet will actually help!

So much pesto...

I accidentally let some of my basil go to flower in the garden. A little of it was bitter - as what normally happens when basil plants go to flower. I ended up harvesting about half of the basil I had in my garden plot at Clifton Park. I now have a good cup and a half of pesto, and a seemingly endless supply of basil. In fact, not just basil, but also mint (lots of uses for that), oregano (same) and rue (I used it in a recipe once). In addition, I picked a few tomatoes, including some San Marzanos that I grew from seed (I have lots of green San Marzano tomatoes). Also got some chilies, and a squash that another person just up and gave me since he was going out of town. In fact, he also let me have as many squash blossoms as I could gather, since the plant was about at the end of its rope. I hope to use them in some Mexican-style recipes soon enough.

Syracuse Salt Potatoes

I don't know how or where I stumbled upon this recipe, but when I did I found it intriguing. The thing that most intrigued me was this: in our day and age, we are trying to find ways to cut back on sodium (as my friend Eric reminded me last night at the Korean BBQ, when he was grilling me as to the nature of my inexplicable fascination with Sonic). That said, a recipe that encourages you to use as much salt as possible seems, well, odd. But that is exactly what I found recently: a recipe for salt potatoes. This comes from Syracuse, New York, America's "salt city". This is a simple and hearty recipe that grows out of three things: poverty (more so in the 19th century than today), proximity to a central area for the American salt industry, and a large Irish-American population.

As I found in this recipe from All Recipes.com the dish really is not that difficult. It is a little disturbing with all that salt you have to use, but it's rather easy. To summarize this recipe (again, it's not mine):

Take 4 pounds of potatoes (I used ones from the farmers' market) and clean (don't peel) them, then boil them in boiling water into which you have dissolved - gasp - 1 1/2 cups of salt.

That's a lotta salt

The recipe calls for fine salt but all I had was kosher. Perhaps there would be more salt penetration with fine salt. That's an exercise for another day. Boil for 15 minutes, and pour a stick of melted butter over top. To make the recipe a little less heart-unfriendly, I cut it down to 1/2 a stick of butter.


The potatoes indeed do not need salt. Even the kosher salt penetrates and makes them softer and more flavorful than merely boiling them in unsalted water. A commenter on one site said the potatoes take on a baked potato-like consistency. I don't know how often I will do this - it does use up a lot of salt, though you will still end up consuming far less than the 1 1/2 cups the recipe calls for. But it is a simple and, I might add, very filling way to use up your potatoes.

AAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!

I haven't read the Cathy comic strip for years. It got tedious. And yet, I'm a little wistful that Cathy Guisewite is shutting it down in October. No more of this...

So, when are they shutting down Garfield (yes, please)?