Author: Nick Bergus

On holiday: dream kitchen

We’re just outside Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the week, staying in a house that has been in a state renovation for a year or so (and will be for another five). The walls are naked (and not in the no-art-hanging way), the floors plywood and walking around without shoes is a bad idea. The only heat comes from fireplaces.

It’s the home of my cousin Josh (he of the Maryland crabs), the retired cook and Culinary Institute of America alum. And while living in a constantly morphing space has it’s drawbacks, it is fantastic for cooking.

Right now, Josh is installing a new counter next to the sink over the used Sub-Zero wine storer, adding a second oven just for the 36-pound turkey (more later), and hooking up a second refrigerator for all the bits and pieces.

Josh and Michelle are raising their own chickens for both meat and eggs. (They originally got the birds to save money, but quickly realized that it was costing them more to raise their own. They don’t get government subsidizes.) The meat birds are still too small to slaughter, but the eggs’ yolks are a vibrant orange instead of the pale yellow of regular supermarket eggs (including the cage-free, organic and free-range ones).

The coolest feature of the kitchen, such as it is, is the built-in wood-fired oven. Our first night we had pizza in it and last night’s roasted chicken and the skin came out a beautiful brown. I’m now planning — with or without anyone’s consent — to tear apart our 1950s ranch to enlarge our kitchen.

Reader mail

Longtime-reader, first-time typer NOYFB writes:

“How many potlucks have you been to in the past 5 years?”

Well, for the last three Super Bowls, I went to parties where admission was apparently a container of seven-layer dip. (It’s sort of like those dances in junior high where admission was a box of tissues.) So I guess three. But I’ll betcha I’d have stratospheric numbers if I was a member of a religious group.

A necessity for every Midwestern kitchen

Everyone here in the Midwest has a crock pot.

The big-box store down the road has an entire isle dedicated to slow cookers. OK, that’s not entirely true; the slow cookers actually creep around the corner to the next isle, too.

Filled with meat, canned tomatoes, more salt and pepper (inevitably pre-ground), crock pots appear at every potluck. (Power strips are often employed for larger gatherings to ensure electricity for everyone.) And no matter the crock pot’s contents, it always looks — and tastes — identical.

One exception: if, instead of ground pork, it’s holding Li’l Smokies and barbeque sauce, then it does looks different, even if it tastes about the same.

The Farm Bill, take 2 (and Michael Pollan, take 3)

OK, seriously, this is not the Michael Pollan blog. But I read (and abstracted) his Sunday New York Times op-ed on the farm bill. It’s a good, passionately written primer on the bill and worth a look from any one who eats. That, I assume, would be you.

For another look, check out Michael Grunwald’s take, ‘Down on the Farm,’ in Time. He points out how rediculous our subsidy system is when “it redistributes our taxes to millionaire farmers as well as to millionaire “farmers” like David Letterman, David Rockefeller and the owners of the Utah Jazz.”

On a related note, it speaks to the sad state of journalism — let alone food journalism — in Iowa that we’re getting scooped by a former New Yorker living in Berkley and a guy from Washington, D.C.

Two very different food pyramids

I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and came away with, I though, I good picture of how the Farm Bill works against us.

As much as I hate to cite a single author in two consecutive posts, Micheal Pollan’s bookdid a lot to spark foodie — and media — interest in the Farm Bill. (I’m too lazy to link to him or his book. Go to the previous post if you’re that in the dark.) And since the discrepence between what that legislation subsidizes and what is in the public’s best interest has been covered in detail.

But the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine makes it ever clearer with one simple visual. On the right, the USDA’s Food Pyramid. On the left, what the US government subsidizes through direct payments to farmers and programs like school lunch and food stamps.

It puts what Nadine Fisher told me (notably “I don’t know that the Food Stamp Program has adapted to anything.”) into a whole new light for me. Yes, that teeny tiny point on top is for fruits and vegetables.

Via Serious Eats

Happy high fructose corn syrup high holy day

From a piece in The New York Times comes this gem from Michael Pollan, author of The Ominvore’s Dilemma, in response to the question “What did you most want when trick-or-treating as a child?”

I well remember my disgust whenever someone offered me a homemade brownie or, worst of all, an apple. Halloween is the high holy day of high fructose corn syrup. And if we can keep it to one or two such days, why not?

Who else but the man who wrote the definitive story of corn would go straight for the high fructose corn syrup angle?

Update

A story in the Los Angeles Times calls the sugar high — or, more appropriately, the high fructose corn syrup high — a myth. This runs contrary to anecdotal evidence I could cite, but the scientists probably know what they’re talking about.

434 words

My intention to meet a pig, kill it and eat it was the reason I started and named this blog.

I decided to meet, kill and eat because of my own realization for how distant we all are from the food we eat. (That I could build this into a multimedia project that would earn me a degree, and hopefully a job, was certainly some of my motivation, too.)

The realization came when I had just wanted to make sausage. So I went to my local supermarket armed with little more than knowledge from the recipe I had.

At the meat counter, I asked for a five-pound hunk of pork shoulder butt, a cut from the

My intention to meet a pig, kill it and eat it was the reason I started and named this blog.

I decided to meet, kill and eat because of my own realization for how distant we all are from the food we eat. (That I could build this into a multimedia project that would earn me a degree, and hopefully a job, was certainly some of my motivation, too.)

The realization came when I had just wanted to make sausage. So I went to my local supermarket armed with little more than knowledge from the recipe I had.

At the meat counter, I asked for a five-pound hunk of pork shoulder butt, a cut from the top of a pig’s shoulder with a high fat content almost perfect for sausage. The request met a blank stare from the clerk. He wasn’t sure what I was talking about. He called his boss, who wasn’t any more helpful.

We have over 17 million pigs in Iowa and this man, who cut and sold their flesh for a living, could not answer simple questions about the pieces of Hormel hog he was offering me.

And now how can I justify writing thousands of words and cutting minutes of video and posting dozens of photographs when Verlyn Klinkenborg, on today’s New York Times op-ed page, writes so beautifully and so touchingly and so movingly in just four paragraphs?

Via Michael Ruhlman

Poverty’s paradox: obesity and malnutrition

Obesity and malnourishment may seem mutually exclusive, but, in America, they’re not. And, a recent study found, public assistance programs like food stamps and WIC may be contributing to obesity while trying to alleviate malnourishment.

This contradicts another study released recently, also by the USDA, this one an official government study.

Here is about 6 minutes of audio, which follows up on an earlier post, with the director of the local Women, Infants and Children clinic, Nadine Fisher.

This just strengthens what Michael Ruhlman writes in a somewhat rambling post about a Cleveland Plain Dealer story that found higher prices at farmers’ markets than at grocery stores:

Until local hand grown produce and meat are available to everyone, and not just to those who can pay boutique prices, America’s so-called food revolution will not be complete.

A bottle I’ll miss

As much as I like the flavor of scotch, I started drinking it because of the image of scotch.

Scotch — always on the rocks — is what suave, tough-guy reporters and private eyes drink.

To me, a good bottle of scotch is like a good book: the urge to consume it quickly must be fought lest you suddenly find the bottle empty. Once the bottle is gone, I’m left with an empty feeling that always comes when there is no more of that good thing.

Possible the best bottle of scotch I’ve had — especially for its price — is the 12-year Bowmore Islay single malt. It has a heady flavor of smoke, and is smooth and hints of sweetness. Well worth the $30 or so it will run you.

I got the bottle from my parents (along with the usual warnings about heavy alcohol users on one side and teetotalers on the other), on the recommendation of Eric Asimov, for my birthday six months ago.

And last night I finished it off. (It paired beautifully with the Milky Way bars and Whoppers.) And now I’ve got a little empty feeling inside.