Category: Food & Drink

Some how I signed up to test recipes for America’s Test Kitchen, the publishers of Cook’s Illustrated, perhaps the best recipe magazine in existence. While I never actually manage to get around to testing the recipes, I would if I could. Really, I keep meaning to. Really.

Now they’re looking for people to form a “grilling panel” which might means grilling in the middle of winter. Never a bad thing to have an excuse to do. I’ll probably sign up for that, too, and, again, never get around to actually grilling.

The e-mail:

We’re starting a special grilling panel, and we need your help!  Because we test recipes six months before they are printed in the magazines, we sometimes ask our recipe testers to buy produce off-season or grill outdoors when it’s the middle of winter.  We want to create a new panel to which recipes that require grilling will be sent.

If you live in a climate that is conducive to grilling year ‘round and would like to join this panel, please fill out this survey.  You’ll still receive recipes from the magazine that you currently test for, along with the additional grilling recipes.

Might as well give it a try. Nothing to lose besides buying expensive out-of-season ingredients and using possibly incomplete and faulty recipes.

Update
Apparently you’ll have to lie if you live in Iowa and want the recipes.

The problem with using Casey’s General Store as a landmark is that every small town in Iowa has one. So when I was told I needed to turn right, down one of the many straight side roads running between corn and soy fields, when Casey’s was on my left, I wasn’t sure if this one or another.

I probably shouldn’t have been driving. It was dark and I was distracted by the sparse lights from the fields and houses. And the half bottle of wine I’d had with dinner. And the belly full of food.

Oh, yes, the food. Lincoln Cafe‘s food. Lincoln Cafe, a Mount Vernon spot offering a few locally focused dishes every evening, doesn’t count as a hidden gem anymore. At night, when the kitchen rolls out the small menu of features — usually three plus an appetizer — that extends the menu past burgers and fries, it’s still hard to decide what to eat.

Matt Steigerwald, the cafe’s chef and proprietor, is adamant about the local focus of his menu, preferring to pay a premium for locally produced ingredients. He’s part of the foundation Iowa needs to cultivate if we’re to move towards becoming a destination for foodies. (Matt graciously gave me a plate of house-cured meats, including a smoked duck breast, prosciutto and a particularly delicious coppa.)

As more locally focused restaurants and producers and markets pop up around Iowa, we’ll see fewer Casey’s and more unique spots worth traveling for.

I suspect Matt would love the competition.

In The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof writes about the practice of giving pigs antibiotics to prevent diseases even when they are not sick

More antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.

And if that’s true of North Carolina’s hogs, it’s true of Iowa’s hogs, simply because we have more. Overuse of antibiotics can lead to pathogens that are immune to our antibiotics; more diseases we can’t fight or cure. So-called superbugs.

Really, it’s the problem of cheap meat. It’s cheaper to pack pigs (and cows and chickens and …) into small spaces, load them up with drugs and feed them the waste products of our industrial food system than it is to care for them in some sort of humane way.

The production of (and demand for) cheap meat creates more problems than it solves. We consume more meat, causing rising cholesterol and obesity in the human population. We end up with a food system — a system so big that it can’t be properly overseen — that fosters the sale of diseased animals as food. It creates environmental pollution. It encourages the overuse of fossil fuels for farm chemicals (to feed the animals) and for transportation (to later ship them, living and dead).

The creation of superbugs is just another reason to reform our meat industry.

(Thanks to Sam for the quote)

Yesterday, Jim Duncan posted a brilliant essay that I linked in the Daily Slop, a section in the sidebar to your right. But reading his piece again, I wanted to talk about it here so that more people would see it.

He argues that we Iowans spend a lot of time and money trying to both attract people to our state and convince those from elsewhere that we’re just as with with it as, say, New York or Seattle or San Francisco.

We aren’t, and so we do it at the expense of something we do very well.

His suggestion:

Mainly, Iowa needs a new attitude, one that chauvinistically acclaims the quality of our best foods rather than resuscitating tired rhetoric about record-breaking harvests and largest-in-the-nation hog populations. More than ever, travel is food oriented. Yet Iowans seem ashamed of their agriculture roots and do little to promote some of the best tasting things in the world.

I’ve always thought of Iowa the way of thought of my little brother: I’m allowed to make fun of it, but you better not.

But no matter what credit Jim gives me at the end of the piece, I’m partially at fault here; when ploting a foodie weekend, I think of going four hours east to Chicago instead of two hours west to Des Moines.