The ONE thing I hate about farmers' markets

The ONE thing I hate about farmers' markets is the individual who moves as slowly as possible, not because others are blocking his or her path, but because he or she is soaking in the sights!

The smells!

The good vibes and karma!

The handmade cheeses and farm fresh apples, garlic and kale grown just 50 miles away by the same farmers who are handing it to you!

Sometimes stopping to chat with friends right in the middle of the thoroughfare!

Taking fliers and circulars about socialism and veganism!

All the while never realizing that they are in your fucking way!!!

That's the one and only thing I hate about farmers' markets.

Obrycki's is closing, hon*

Yes, Obrycki's is closing its doors (as reported by the Sun's Richard Gorelick):

Obrycki's will open again in March. But when the crab season concludes in November, the family's Fells Point restaurant will close for good, according to Robert M. "Rob" Cernak, who operates the business with two sisters. Cernak said the family decided to close "for quality of life" reasons. The Cernaks expect to open a smaller crab house soon at the planned slots parlor near Arundel Mills mall.

As you just read, fortunately they are opening a smaller place at the Arundel Mills slots parlor (couldn't have done that without Anne Arundel County voters). Still, 2011 is the year to enjoy a Baltimore tradition one last time. I remember people in grad school in Riverside, California, who mail-ordered Obrycki's crabs across the continent. Yes, it is a sad day. God speed to the Cernak family.

* Apologies to Café Hon

Well this is just silly, hons

Denise Whiting of Café Hon has copyrighted the word "hon" - at least on printed merchandise, as ABC 2's Cheryl Conner reports:

In fact, the word has been for about 10 years, along with “Honfest”and “Hon Bar.” We talked to restaurant owner Denise Whiting on the phone, who says she's just trying to protect the brand she created 20 years ago.

I get that she has popularized the brand. And yes, she said she would be unlikely to actually prosecute someone for using it. And yes, I know countless people have said today that people have been saying this word for generations in this city, and that it is ludicrous to copyright a word in common parlance.

That said, it is ludicrous to copyright a word in common parlance. Copyright "HonFest" if you want, but "hon"? Seriously, hons. But I got dibs on the collective noun my friend Eric came up with a few HonFests ago:

spray (noun, collective) - a gathering of two or more "hons", typically seen during the HonFest event in Baltimore, Maryland.

There's no smell like roasted chiles for the holidays...

Chiles are forgiving. I found that out yesterday when I tried to resuscitate some partially-dried chile peppers that I had grown in my garden plot at Clifton Park (note to self: check on the herbs and whatnot you still have growing there). I had tried to dry them out in the oven but got exasperated when I had to stop and come back to it another day. I never came back to it, so those half-dried chiles were sitting wilted in a covered dish in my refrigerator for a week or two. They weren't exactly dry anymore. But only one or two had to be thrown out; the rest were doing alright. So I had a go at finishing the process.

This time, like last, I spread the chiles out on a cookie sheet, no oil or anything. This time I took the rest of the chiles I had gathered since then (I also grabbed a few to freeze instead of dry), and spread them out on the same baking sheet. Yes, I knew they wouldn't all dry at the same time. This time, I correctly started drying them: I turned down the oven as low as possible, about 150°F, and placed a dish towel in the door to keep it slightly wedged open. Mr. Freak-Out here had worried at first that the towel might catch fire, but I realized that was highly unlikely. Several hours later, with the lovely smell of homegrown chile peppers permeating the house (seems like New Mexico), some of the first chiles had finally dried out altogether.

This is often a multi-day process, especially if some of your chile peppers are not super-thin. So over the next few days I will continue to dry out these chiles for use throughout the winter and spring.

Fire on Charles Street!

Best wishes for the folks whose businesses were damaged in the fire on Charles Street. Donna's, My Thai, Indigma and the Helmand were all damaged, and I have eaten at all of them. I don't know enough, based on what I've seen and read. Some restaurants may be back in a matter of days, others may take a while. Let's hope they and their staffs are able to get things back up and running soon. This is a bad time for their employees to be out of a job!

Also: does anyone know about Thairish or any of the other businesses on that side of the block?

Haute Dog Carte for a frigid day

The Haute Dog Carte is still out daily, folks. It hasn't stopped operations yet, though I think they are scaling back during the snowy months. So make sure you get a knockwurst in beer butter sauerkraut or their tasty Filipino Maharlika dog - unless you just want the classic 1/2 pound all-beef Angus (none more than $5). Just do it. You will be happy you did.

Snacking State-by-State: Alaska II - Salmon on Wood!

As Chef Glenn Denkler suggests in a prologue to Severson's book, you do not have to feel bad about not following the letter of the recipe. He insists

A recipe should be considered a starting point. A cook must learn to taste and not be a slave to a recipe... [T]reat these recipes with respect; respect the talent of the cooks who came up with the ideas, but have fun. If you don't like an ingredient or amount, be bold and experiment. If you can't get wild Alaska salmon or Kodiak scallops, find the best seafood you can, given the state of your local fish market... Let your heart and your taste buds rule. [Denkler, in Severson, xxiii]

I was already experimenting with the wood, so why not?

Snacking State-by-State: Alaska

Official Name: State of Alaska
State Nickname: The Last Frontier
Admission to the US: January 3, 1959 (#49)
Capital: Juneau (3rd largest city)
Other Important Cities: Anchorage (largest), Fairbanks (2nd largest), Sitka (4th largest)
Region: West (Northwest, Pacific); Pacific (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Salmon
Bordered by: Arctic Ocean (north); Yukon Territory & British Columbia (Canada) (east); Gulf of Alaska (south); Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea & Chukchi Peninsula (Siberia, Russia) (west)
Official State Foods: King Salmon (fish)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: salmon, halibut, herring, Alaska king crab, moose, caribou, pemmican, northern Alaskan berries - and not Baked Alaska

I did play around with some of the ingredients, but only a little: parsley instead of dill, leaving out the dried berries (alas, none in the pantry), an addition of a little bit of sea salt. But I did want to at least find Alaskan salmon, even if it couldn't be wild. Trader Joe's is probably the best place to find it without bankrupting yourself, and the fresh stuff was $16 a pound! Thankfully I was there when they were out, and it dawned on me to check amongst the frozen fish section.


There it was, wild Alaska sockeye salmon fillets, frozen, for only $8 per pound. Jackpot!

The recipe: Oven Roasted Cedar Plank Salmon

With the most important ingredients now in my possession (the salmon and the plank), I just had to look around the kitchen for the rest:

* butter (a pound to 1.5 pounds of fish - since I only had a pound of fish, I didn't need so much butter. I didn't have the good stuff, but the chef recommends you do)
* fresh parsley (instead of the dill - hey, I had it from the farmers' market for $2)
* lemon juice (from an actual lemon, or just use the bottled stuff)
* chopped berries (unfortunately I had none on me, so I omitted them)
* crushed pepper mélange (again, I only had black peppercorns)
* vegetable or olive oil for seasoning (check)


You can do the prep while the cedar plank is soaking. Note: you will need to anchor it down for that whole hour, otherwise it'll float right up to the top. It must be submerged, with at least a quarter inch of water completely covering the surface. This is to keep it from catching on fire in the oven. Also note that you must sterilize the plank in the oven for about 10 minutes at the cooking temperature, in this case 400°F.

First seared...

When you get close to when you need to use the salmon, scale it and make slits in the skin, then sear it in "shimmering" oil for 30 seconds on the skin side. Cut it into portion sizes, place it skin-side down on the plank, and smear it with the butter, whipped together with the remaining ingredients. Bake it for 8 minutes, and serve it off the plank.

...then smeared.

I have not eaten anything roasted on a plank before, so I was not sure what to expect. The cedar flavor ended up being especially subtle, delicately lingering in the background while the salmon was quite robust, more so than I am used to eating, since most of the salmon I eat is the cheaper Atlantic variety. I ate this with some cranberry sauce I had just made, and it was damn amazing.

Amazing what big plank o' wood can do for your food.

For my next post, I trade the Northwest for the Southwest, and head for the flavors of Arizona, a combination of flavors from Sonora, Spain, Navajo, Pueblo and the cowboys - ingredients and cooking styles that by and large don't involve a whole lot of sockeye salmon, or muktuk.

Sources:

Severson, Kim, with Glenn Denkler. The New Alaska Cookbook: Recipes from the Last Frontier's Best Chefs. 2001 : Sasquatch Books, Seattle.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Alaska" page and the Food Timeline State Foods webpage link to "Alaska". It's a lot of info for the enterprising Lower 48'er to process.

Snacking State-by-State: Alaska I - From Home Depot to Your Table

When we think of Alaska, we usually think of salmon. True, it is much more than that: it's moose, it's king crab, it's halibut, it's herring, it's pemmican. But salmon really is one of the most important foods - if not the most important. Even the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has created a resource for teachers to instruct students on just how important salmon is to the culture and cuisine of the state. It is so quintessentially Alaskan that for this state's dish, I really had little choice.

Snacking State-by-State: Alaska

Official Name: State of Alaska
State Nickname: The Last Frontier
Admission to the US: January 3, 1959 (#49)
Capital: Juneau (3rd largest city)
Other Important Cities: Anchorage (largest), Fairbanks (2nd largest), Sitka (4th largest)
Region: West (Northwest, Pacific); Pacific (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Salmon
Bordered by: Arctic Ocean (north); Yukon Territory & British Columbia (Canada) (east); Gulf of Alaska (south); Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea & Chukchi Peninsula (Siberia, Russia) (west)
Official State Foods: King Salmon (fish)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: salmon, halibut, herring, Alaska king crab, moose, caribou, pemmican, northern Alaskan berries - and not Baked Alaska

Perhaps the biggest misconception - that I may unintentionally be helping to spread - is that Alaska is all salmon, all the time. Granted, salmon is important, but it is more than that. This isn't the only misconception. Journalist and author Kin Severson writes in her The New Alaska Cookbook about the reaction she got from her fellow San Franciscans when she talked about her many years reporting from Alaska:

Here in San Francisco, a place many argue is the epicenter of the American food scene, people find that funny. "Lots of whale blubber recipes?" they ask. [Severson, p. xi]

Whale blubber - that is, the Inuit dish muktuk - is, actually, something I used to think they ate a lot in Alaska. Of course, not many people eat it there anymore - no more than do many Californians eat things made out of acorns. As to Alaska's many culinary riches, Severson notes:

Nearly round-the-clock daylight in the summer produces an abundance of herbs, greens, and other vegetables, including cabbages so big a single one might easily keep a restaurant in cole slaw for weeks. In the state's interior, morel mushrooms can grow as big as your hand. Unusual game meats, such as caribou and moose, present themselves in the fall and winter... Any serious eater who has visited Alaska leaves pleasantly surprised by the quality of the cuisine served in both city restaurants and remote fishing lodges. [Severson, p. xii]

Long story short: it ain't all muktuk.

What Severson offers in her tome is what, to me, seems like a haute Alaskan cuisine, since the various contributors to The New Alaska Cookbook have many innovative takes on Alaska's native ingredients. They often prepare and plate their unique mixture of Northwestern and international ingredients and flavors in various ways that we in the Lower 48 would find familiar: Southwestern, Southern, New England, Tex-Mex, Creole, California-style, and so on. They even have mini-Baked Alaskas in there. By the way, just to get it out there: no, Baked Alaska is not from Alaska; it was made by chefs at Manhattan's Delmonico in the 1870's to celebrate the acquisition of Alaska from Russia. And yet, despite the innovations of many of Alaska's top chefs (now that is a show I'd like to see: Top Chef: Anchorage), I still wanted less haute Alaska and more traditional Alaska.

One recipe that seemed simple and easy (enough) comes to us from Chef Jens Hansen of Jens' Restaurant and Bodega in Anchorage. His recipe for alder plank-roasted salmon is similar to what Native Alaskans have been doing with either alder or cedar for thousands of years to prepare their salmon. As you probably know, grilling salmon, halibut or other seafood on the wood imparts a mid taste of the wood. And not only can you grill it, you can also bake it in the oven. This is Hansen's preferred method, and it was mine too. There were just three problems for me. One, I could only find cedar, not alder. Two, The cedar planks at the grocery stores were pretty damn pricey. And three, most people recommended that I not use it in my oven. The first was easily solved by buying cedar. The second was almost as easy: with some research I was able to find out how to make my own, much, much cheaper cedar roasting plank. The last one just took a little prep and some careful watching.

The prep work: How to prep a cedar plank for cooking


User "zoetical" from eHow.com gives some useful instructions for making your own cedar cooking plank. All you need is the cedar plank, a saw, sandpaper and a dab of olive or vegetable oil. And if you go to Home Depot or Lowe's, you can omit the saw because they will saw it for you! Just be persistent about finding cedar. One guy at the Home Depot I went to had no idea that they even sold cedar. In fact, he was fairly certain they did not. Thankfully his coworker led us both right to it.

One thing that is absolutely critical: the wood must be untreated. Think about it: if you're baking on grilling salmon on a piece of wood that's been coated with chemicals to help preserve it, the least of your worries is that the chemicals will get into the food. Beyond the flavor and the, um, toxicity, you also have to worry about the fumes and possibly the ensuing explosion, depending on what the wood was treating with. Please don't let this happen to you! Fortunately, the oils in the cedar act as a natural preservative, so cedar is by and large untreated anyway. The Home Depot guy was pretty certain of this. I imagine the same can be said for alder, but don't quote me on this.

Home Depot sells 8' x 1" cedar planks for about $6. Pretty sweet if you're using it for cooking, since a cedar plank in the stores will run you at least $15 to $20. That's for a whole foot of wood that you might get one use out of if you grill it, two or three if you bake it. I am able to get eight cedar planks out of mine - at $6 for 8 feet, that runs about 75¢ a foot. 1,500¢ vs 75¢. I think I know which one I'm going with.


The tough part was the sanding, which wasn't tough at all. You just need to get out all the splinters, lest you get one in your tongue (that almost happened to me with one of those cheap wooden chopsticks). So sand it, season it (one tablespoon per usable side), and soak it for an hour before using it. That's it.

Sources:

Severson, Kim, with Glenn Denkler. The New Alaska Cookbook: Recipes from the Last Frontier's Best Chefs. 2001 : Sasquatch Books, Seattle.

Zoetical (eHow user). How to Make Cedar Cooking Planks That Are Reusable. Posted date unknown.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Alaska" page and the Food Timeline State Foods webpage link to "Alaska". It's a lot of info for the enterprising Lower 48'er to process.

Milk & Honey

While in Mount Vernon running errands yesterday morning, I had the chance to finally stop into Milk & Honey, the new small storefront on Cathedral Street that bills itself as a "neighborhood grocery/café/deli". You won't find a wide variety of products here - that's not Milk & Honey's modus operandi. What you will find is a small but high-quality selection of organic groceries and higher quality goods, many from around the area. Not just local milk and honey, of course (though they do have those), but cheeses from around the world, sodas, butter (including the high-quality European butter Plugrá for a little over $6 per pound) and organic produce (very locally grown fingerling sweet potatoes for $4 per pound, for example) among other things.

They have some unique and almost impossible to find groceries that not even most health food stores carry. For example, I found a box of Lundberg gluten-free vegan brown rice couscous ($3.99). Back when I was really investigating gluten-free products, I had seen a wide variety of gluten-free flours, pastas, breads, rolls, cereals and so on, but no gluten-free couscous (yes, technically a type of pasta). No area health food stores carry it (some hadn't even heard of it), but Milk & Honey does. I bought a box, though I have yet to try it (watch for that post soon).

When you enter the big, sunny Milk & Honey, your attention will not immediately go to the groceries, though those are the first things you will encounter to either side of you. What you will first encounter is the big glass deli case in front of you, which holds a small variety of baked goods and sandwiches (looks like Milk & Honey is definitely going for quality over quantity). I was quite lucky to have gotten there when a few free samples of their ham and cheese biscuit were sitting out for the taking, as that helped me (and the two women in front of me) make my purchasing decision. Though out of that variety of biscuit, they did have an equally luscious bacon & chipotle biscuit. I don't throw around words like "luscious" very often, but underlying that crumbly outer surface is a moist, savory and I dare say luscious little biscuit. It's also a large (for me) and filling biscuit and I do recommend it. You will need something to go with that biscuit, by the way. I bought a half-chocolate-dipped sandwich cookie for $1.25, which was simple and tasty. On the beverage front, order anything from soda to coffee to hot chocolate. Sit there in their little café, or head outside. I wish I had. Hot chocolate will be a very nice choice this upcoming week.

Happy Hanukkah, Bobby Flay!

For the Jewish Festival of Lights, a most unusual brisket - with a barbecue twist!?