Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

File this one under “never say never”.

All day I’ve had a craving for Squeeze Cheese. On Ritz crackers. Two foods I was pretty sure I’d never ever eat again.

As far as I can tell, they don’t even make Squeeze Cheese anymore, at least not in the same packaging. The product I remember was shaped like a fat little sausage, encased in plastic and sealed at both ends, with a hard plastic sphincter-like opening from which you squeezed the cheese into a pretty flower-like shape. Which probably gives you a fairly decent time frame for the last time I ate the stuff (ie. 1987).

Nowadays, if it’s even the same thing, Squeeze Cheese appears to come in squeeze bottles. Which is probably more practical when you think about it, but I’m pretty sure I don’t need a whole bottle’s worth. One of those little processed-cheese sausage sphincter things would have suited my needs just fine. I mean, I can always use the Ritz crackers to make mock apple pie. (Oh, I crack myself up sometimes!) But a whole bottle of fake cheese?

I may need to think about this some more. And of course, it all depends on the availability of pimiento for the garnish.

Or maybe some of you good folks could give me a heads up. Is the stuff in the bottles the same as the stuff we used to get in the plastic sausage thingie? Anyone? Bueller?

First, a disclaimer. The content of this post is not intended to sound pretentious or condescending. It is not my intention to look down on the home cook (I am one myself), or to sneer at people who have not gone through a culinary arts programme. I’ve always hated when people with university degrees look down on tradespeople, and it’s very easy for people with professional training to look down on home cooks.

Which is why I’m not recommending Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef to anyone.

Oh, it’s not that it isn’t a great book - it is. But it would be like me trying to sit down and real a programmer’s handbook. Or a book of Latin. Most of what Ruhlman discusses in this book about his time at the Culinary Institute of America would appear to anyone who hasn’t trained professionally or worked in a professional kitchen to be in a completely different language.

Ruhlman went through the programme not to become a chef himself, but to write about the experience and the CIA. What he learned, most importantly, was how to think like a chef…

Efficiency: no wasted movement. This idea, this will, bore not only on one’s actions in the kitchen; it extended to one’s life outside the kitchen. It changed how I packed for a trip - I tried to diminish the number of times I moved from closet to bureau to suitcase just as I learned to minimize my trips to the pot room or dry storage.

He discovers the importance of sauce and spent an inordinate amount of time on the issue of blonde versus brown roux for a brown sauce. These are, apparently, issues that keep CIA staff and students awake at night, after a typo in a textbook mentions brown roux for a brown sauce while the CIA standard is blonde:

[...]Chefs Pardus, Smith and Reilly, all of them CIA gradulates, all of them relatively young, and Chef Almquist, a senior chef-instructor, sat discussing brown sauce. Chefs at the Culinary Institute of America did not talk foie gras and truffles at dinner, I was happy to know; instead, they talked brown sauce, specifically what kind of roux one used. Chef Amlquist, the ranking chef at the table whose girth suggested he had known many a brown sauce in his time, said, according to Pardus, “No one has ever made a brown sauce with brown roux since Escoffier died!” This sort of definitive comment was common at the Culinary. Passions ran high on such matters.

Takes ya back, doesn’t it? Okay, well, it takes me back. So much so that I had dreams of cooking school while reading this book, flashbacks to the days of making sausages, scrubbing pots and yes, making roux. Mother sauces, derivative sauces, knife cuts, monte au beurre - I still remember all of it!

And like most chefs and culinary students, Ruhlman got hot for sauces, and early on, figured out the difference between the home cook and a professional cook:

I was never one to get all goosey about recipes. Recipes were a dime a dozen. You could follow them for a hundred years and never learn to cook.[emphasis mine] I was after method; I wanted the physical experience of doing it, knowing what the food should look like, sound like, smell like feel like while it cooked. I had made my own stocks and had talked to various chefs about their stocks, but at the Culinary Institute of America I would learn the classical preparation of stock, the foundation, the bedrock of classical cookery. If you didn’t know how to make a great stock, if you didn’t even know what a great stock tasted like, you were doomed to mediocrity in the kitchen, at best, and at worst, ignorant foolishness.

I guess it is more than a little elitist. But the instinct is what makes a good chef, and the instinct is what drives Ruhlman through the programme after an instructor disses him for his intention to not attend class during a rather ferocious snowstorm. Chef Pardus makes it clear - a real chef would find a way to get there. In the real world hotels stay open during storms (and tend to do their best business) - staff are expected to get to work. No matter what. Ruhlman fights his way through the storm and earns his Chef’s respect, as well as an understanding of what it takes to be part of the industry.

While The Making of a Chef made me want to run into the kitchen and brunoise things and make concasse and cook up a brown roux just for the hell of it, the book might be a bit dry and technical for the average reader. It’s not a cookbook, and it’s not food theory, it’s more like a look into some secret society that requires a lifetime of dedication, the ability to do fifteen things at once, the necessity of being hyper-organized, and a willingness to do demanding physical work; Ruhlman realizes late in the book why so many of his instructors look ten or twenty years older than they actually are - after decades in front of hot ovens and blazing stovetops, the heat had cooked their skin and aged them exactly as if they had spent hours on the beach tanning every day.

If you want to be a chef, if you aspire to attend the CIA or any other professional cooking school, Ruhlman’s book is a must-read. With a few variations in terms of scheduling and details, it reflects my own experieince to an eerie degree.

I don’t know (or care) if it was actually his own decision or if the pressure from animal rights activists finally got to him, but today, chef Wolfgang Puck announced that his entire operation would become cruelty-free. No more fois-gras, no more penned veal, no more chicken from battery cages.

He has directed his three companies, which together fed more than 10 million people in 2006, to buy eggs only from chickens not confined to small cages. Veal and pork will come from farms where animals are not confined in crates, and poultry meat will be bought from farmers using animal welfare standards higher than those put forth by the nation’s largest chicken and turkey producers. Mr. Puck has also vowed to use only seafood whose harvest does not endanger the environment or deplete stocks. - New York Times

Check that number at the top of the quote again. 10 million people. That includes his restaurants, express restaurants (in airports mostly) and his line of soups, pizzas and entrées. Such progress has been taking place in independent restaurants on a smaller scale for some time, but for such a major player in the international food service industry to make such huge changes all at once is astounding and ground-breaking.

The meat-processing industry is not at all happy about this turn of events, especially as it’s likely to lead to more chain restaurants following suit.

I say good for him (because really, how can you *lose* customers over an issue like this?), and let’s hope he really does start a positive trend where humanely-raised meat is the *only* option.

I’m going to screw with your heads and do something completely out of character. I’m going to recommend a cooking magazine and give praise to a Food Network show. Well… Food Network Canada.

It’s not that I’m charmed by the pretty hair or the Osmond-like smile, although the Quebecois accent melts my knees a little, but ever since the first episode of his show last fall, I’ve been really liking Ricardo and Friends.

Ricardo Larrivée is a food journalist and cook from Quebec where he’s had a show on Radio-Canada (the French version of CBC) for some time. Last fall he decided it was time to take on the rest of the country and signed a deal for 26 episodes of his weekly show (shot in English) for Food Network Canada.

Around the same time, his team (because I don’t assume he’s superman and is doing everything alone) rolled out a magazine to be published five times a year (seasonal, plus a holiday issue). It’s the first magazine in Canada to be published concurrently in both French and English.

I got the premiere issue as a freebie at the Gourmet Food and Wine show and was suitably impressed. The winter and spring issues soon followed and impressed doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

The magazine is almost intellectual in its approach to food and cooking with a regular section called Food Chemistry that explores the hows and whys of the way food cooks. In one issue microwaves are discussed, while in another, the science of cooking eggs. There’s plenty of seasonal recipes, and a section of a week’s worth of menus and related recipes. These are a bit heavy on the meat, but there’s always a couple of vegetarian options that actually look worth making.

Presentation is huge in Ricardo’s repertoire and some of the dishes are gorgeous. In the holiday issue, he makes a celery soup with celeriac and then regular celery, pouring the green onto the white and then blending the two to look like a Christmas tree. In the winter issue he painstakingly punches holes in carrots to make “button soup”. And white chocolate made to look like cabbage leaves is the perfect garnish for a baby shower cake.

The magazines are beautifully laid out and intelligently written. There’s a nationalism obvious within the pages, minus the rah-rah cheerleading so prevalent in similar magazines from south of the border. And you never feel condescended to - there’s nothing twee or cutesy in these pages, only food that is elegant and pretty and charming.

Even the “done in 30 minutes” section doesn’t rankle me like it does coming from some other Food Network personalities. The recipes all seem lovely, nutritious and well-thought out, and there’s no one ranting about how we know you’re busy and don’t have time and who wants to spend all that time in the kitchen anyway, blah, blah, blah… That’s not to say Ricardo isn’t enthusiastic - you can tell he loves what he does in every issue of the magazine and every episode of the show, but it feels a lot more genuine than it does from say, Martha Stewart or Rachael Ray.

If you’re a cooking magazine fan/collector, I highly suggest you seek out Ricardo magazine. It’s a beautiful collection of recipes and food articles that will inspire and refresh you.

I’ve fallen off the wagon. I blame Greg - he fell first and dragged me down with him.

I did make a resolution that I would “sample” things when I had the chance, just for the sake of expanding my palate and increasing my knowledge about food. I’ve been doing that when the opportunity arose, but with little enthusiasm; the proscuitto and salami I had at the Green Link event didn’t wow me, the burger Greg ate last week grossed me out (I spit out the tiny bite I tried), and the massive brontosaurus-sized ribs he ate for lunch on Saturday made me think that I had maybe just lost the taste for meat. I got them down and it wasn’t gross, but it wasn’t a pleasant taste - just kind of… dank. Maybe that’s why ribs need so much sauce - to cover up the yukky grey taste.

Then we wandered into St. Lawrence Market and a nice man handed me free proscuitto.

I always had this running joke that I’d like to be a proscuittotarian. Pescetarians are folks who eat fish, but are otherwise vegetarian, pollo-vegetarians eat chicken. I wanted to be able to eat proscuitto. And somehow I always knew that proscuitto would be my downfall.

I tried to convince myself that the piece I had a couple of weeks ago was typical, and that I just found the stuff far too salty now. But then I had good proscuitto, and it was what I remembered it to be, and it was the one thing that I can honestly say I missed (other than the roast chicken I’ve been craving for the past few months which might also have to be rectified while I’m down and out and mercilessly having animals killed for my own hedonistic pleasure).

Something overcame me and I dragged Greg back and we bought the proscuitto.

I felt guilty about it almost immediately. I felt gulity bringing it home, I felt guilty today as I made sandwiches on ciabatto buns with buffalo mozzarella, sundried tomatoes and pesto, I felt guilty while I ate the thing. But I did eat it. And moaned with more guilt about it later.

Karma works in strange and humourous ways, though. Because it was only about an hour or so after I ate the sandwich made from a poor little pig, when my sinuses got all congested and my throat swelled up slightly and I remembered… I’m allergic to pork.

All of my other allergies have mostly disappeared in the past year since we moved from the house o’ black mold. Cheese is my friend again, even the blue stinky stuff, and ice cream and I are tentatively getting cozy. I sort of assumed the pork allergy was gone too. Not so much.

So that was my first and last dip into the pool of meat-eaters, at least in terms of eating a large amount of meat at once. Small samples don’t seem to set off my sniffer, but a whole serving certainly does.

In a way, it’s good. I almost think that every vegetarian should go off the wagon at least once to really appreciate where they are. I learned that I don’t really miss meat all that much, and that I don’t really like it that much anymore. I enjoyed the lovely ham sandwich as far as taste goes - it was definitely delicious, but I can likely go another seven years or more before I need proscuitto again, and between the guilt and the not breathing thing, it really wasn’t a worthwhile trade-off.

I might still need that roast chicken before I swear off the land animals completely, though. I can only hope I’ve developed an allergy to that too.

I have a great deal of respect for Anthony Bourdain. Not for his ex-junkie, drinking, smoking, vegetarian-hating, pig-killing, squeasel-eating antics, but because he tells it like it is. He’s one of those folks who talk first and think later, someone who regularly gets pegged as being the guy who says what everyone else is thinking but are too afraid to say out loud. And most importantly, someone who puts his honest opinion out there and is willing to take the heat when it doesn’t go over favourably.

I also respect Bourdain for being a real guy who’d rather eat pho on a streetcorner in Vietnam than put on a suit and tie and go to an upscale hot new restaurant just because it’s the thing to do.

The Nasty Bits is a collection of Bourdain’s writing from the past few years since he left his gig at Les Halles in NYC to become the punk rock version of a food celebrity, with shows first on The Food Network and then with the Travel Channel. Published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, The Nasty Bits touches on anything and everything that touches Bourdain - from being seated on a plane next to an obese woman on his way home from a conference where he took on the heads of McDonald’s, to the interview with molecular gastronomy chef Adria Ferran of El Bulli which ultimately led to the decision to leave The Food Network (they were against spending the money to send him to Spain and instead were trying to force him to into the more traditional celebrity chef niche).

He writes about everthing from his favourite places to eat in New York to his favourite places to eat in Singapore. He cooks in a suite on The World, the condo-cruise ship, describes a food tour of Las Vegas while emulating Hunter S. Thompson, and rags on both Emeril and Rocco DeSpirito, and then apologizes to both in the end notes, which lend some very interesting insights into the rantings of the articles themselves.

The most intriguing piece for me is the article “Are You a Crip or a Blood?” in which Bourdain groups chefs into two categories. Crips are the chefs who insist on the finest of everything, while Bloods are the everyday folks running Mom and Pop joints, especially in poorer countries, who cook for flavour and love. The end notes explaining the piece hit a nerve with me:

As much as I admired and appreciated the slow-food movement, and the increased interest in better, more seasonal ingredients, there was a whiff of orthodoxy about it all that I felt contradicted the chef’s basic mission: to give pleasure. I’d met a lot of hungry people in recent years and I doubted very much whether they cared if their next meal came from the next village over or a greenhouse in Tacoma. The notion of “terroir” and “organic” started to seem like the kind of thinking you’d expect of the priviledged - or isolationist. The very discussion of “organic” vs “nonorganic”, I knew, was a luxury. I’ve since come to believe that any overriding philosophy or worldview is the enemy of good eating.

I don’t know that I agree with Bourdain completely on this, as he sort of falls into the definition of the narcissist Wayne Robert’s describes in a recent NOW magazine article on the local vs organic debate, but having been to a number of events where a lot of priviledged white folks sit around and try to figure out how to bring organic/local/slow food to the masses, it does make one wonder how the issue plays out to the folks who have no choice but to resort to food banks each month.

If you’re a Bourdain fan, or if you just have a hedonistic streak when it comes to food, The Nasty Bits will be a fun and intriguing read. It’s a look into the man’s darker (and lighter) side, and his sharp wit and biting sarcasm are sure to amuse.

Have you ever rejected something from your childhood based on a memory that was either partially or wholly incorrect? As adults, our palates expand as we try new and different types of food. For some people the food of their childhood becomes the comfort food they return to when the cornucopia of choices just doesn’t satisfy. For others, especially those of us for whom food created very mixed emotions, the stuff we ate as kids can be the fodder for terrible memories.

I thought of this last night as I watched a documentary on CBC called XXL about a “fat camp” for overweight teens in Nova Scotia. One of the families was eating a traditional boiled dinner; corned beef, cabbage, carrots, potatoes and turnips, all boiled together in one pot until it all tasted the same and was pretty much mush. I gagged a bit and had to cover my eyes until it was done, something I never have to do even when there are surgery shots on TV.

My reaction to lassy mogs was almost as bad. I remember them as being soggy; sweating to a mush where they all stuck together in the cookie jar where they would remain until they were eaten, regardless of how long that took. This idealogy of not wasting food, even if it was going bad or stale, or had lost its appeal, remains with me to this day, and Greg regularly remarks on stir-fry nights that I must have cleaned out the fridge.

It’s a philosophy that goes well with lassy mogs, a molasses cookie with roots in all of the Atlantic provinces from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. Historically, before wider food distribution systems were put in place in the early 20th century, molasses was the main sweetener for baked goods, with white sugar a pricier option that was available only to the wealthy, or saved for special occasions or tea. With a touch of spice and some dried currants or raisins, lassy mogs were often as good as it got, at least for an everyday cookie.

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I know, I know, I know. There’s no excuse for the negligence. Not even that I was busy, because I wasn’t (not that “busy” is a real excuse for anything anyway - no one is too busy to attend to their priorities), I was sitting on my butt in front of the tube, watching People’s Court. Yes, for the past four days.

See, I got a new desk chair. The old one is a ten-year old piece of crap from IKEA and it was time for it to go. Except the new chair is aligned much differently, and while in the long run it might actually be a lot better for my back, in the short term, my back and neck were not appreciative, and responded by mostly seizing up and not really allowing me to move without pain from the waist up.

Thus, I stepped away from the computer for a few days, and armed myself with pain killers, a heating pad and a tube of Rub A535 and hung out with my gals, Judges Judy and Marilyn. Others get sucked into soaps and talk shows when forced to watch daytime TV, but for me it’s all about the small claims court.

What has this got to do with beer and/or chocolate? Not a damn thing, I’m just explainin’ why I’ve been gone.

See, one of the things I was supposed to have done last week was drink a bottle of stout and post about it to the beer geek round-up my hubbie and his friends were doing. Except I forgot until the day after, at which point I decided I would drink a bottle of stout and write about it anyway.

And not just any stout, but a 750ml bottle of Great Divide Yeti Oak-Aged Stout. Known to those of us able to drink a whole bottle by ourselves as “Yeti Bo Betty” (banana fanna fo fetti, YEHHHTEE!). The name was coined one night on Yonge Street as Greg and I were flagging down a cab. I had finished a whole bottle on my own and at 9.5% alcohol, it’s quite a bit of beer, even for a festively plump gal like myself. Thus, a little bit of singing. Which earned me the nickname “Drunkie”, I believe, but also earned the beer a nickname of its own as well.

I cracked the Yeti with dinner, which was a cheese sandwich, some potato chips and a pickle. And my beloved Yeti tasted off. So very very off. And that 9.5% alcohol really tasted like alcohol - of the rubbing variety.

Now I had always known that beer had to be paired with certain foods to bring out the best qualities, but I don’t drink enough different types of beer to really notice the difference. So when I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a couple of pieces of chocolate, I was really bowled over by how much better the beer tasted.

There was the smooth warm roasty flavour I was familiar with. Ahh! Even more interesting was that the beer tasted noticeably different with the different chocolates. Paired with the milk-chocolate and caramel-centre bar from Green & Black’s, the beer was still hot and a bit burny. However, when I switched to the 75% cacao single-origin Pralus bar from Indonesia, my Yeti Bo Betty was back and ready to take prisoners. The woody flavour of the chocolate melded with the oak tones of the beer, and became a gorgeous blend of wood, coffee, chocolate and a delightful bitterness. It was like I was drinking two completely different beers.

Greg and I have been talking about setting up a stout and chocolate tasting for some friends for a while now, and now that I’ve really seen how the pairing of food makes a difference in the flavour of the beer, I can’t wait to try it.

So back at the end of December I came up with a list of “foodie resolutions” for 2007. While I have been fairly slack about trying to do everything on my list - I have yet to find the time to make a souffle, for instance - I did have the opportunity on Monday to cross one thing off.

Greg and I attended a conference put together by the Toronto Slow Food chapter and part of the event included a free buffet lunch. One of my foodie resolutions was to break my vegetarianism and try small samples of meat at events like this in an effort to expand/retain my palate.

Now all through the seven years that I’ve been vegetarian, I’ve still eaten fish. I try and go off it every couple of years or so, more because of the issue of overfishing than of eating an animal (I’m sorry, I know animal rights activists would call me a hypocrite, but I just can’t look at an oyster or a lobster and equate it with a deer or a cow), but I inevitably come back to it. I like to joke that you can take the girl our of Nova Scotia, but you can’t take Nova Scotia out of the girl, but jokes aside, pescetarianism was always as far as I was willing to go. However, even though I still eat fish, I was still under the impression that meat would make me quite ill.

The only other time I “fell off the wagon” was about a year after Greg and I had both gone veg. We were at a party where the host had quite obviously planned the menu and prepared the food and only at the last minute realized there was nothing on the buffet we could eat. I mean nothing, not even some veggies and dip. He whipped up some bean dip at the last minute and continued to point it out to us throughout the evening. Unfortunately, this being a cocktail party held during the dinner hour, we were starving, and it was only after I had eaten three devilled eggs that the host said, “I did mention those had bacon in them, didn’t I?” At that point I threw in the towel and ate a handful of pre-fab turkey nugget things that were passed around with some dip.

In all the advice that is offered to new vegetarians, one thing that is often repeated is how “going back to meat can make you sick”. This is a vague generalization, and if you don’t think about it too hard, you figure you’ll end up with a stomach-ache or some indigestion. No, my friends, when you give up meat, your body quits producing enough of a particular enzyme that helps you to digest that meat. This enzyme is not produced in the stomach, which is, afterall, really just a bag full of acid. If something gives you a stomach ache, it’s probably too acidic and you’ve got a little chemistry experiment happening down there.

No, the meat digestion issue happens a little further down. Way further down, pretty much at the other end. It will sneak up on you the next day, and all of a sudden you’ll be doubled over on the bathroom floor, cramps so bad you’ll think you’re dying. For me this lasted about four hours, during which I sweated, cried and finally emitted other bodily fluids that eventually took the bad turkey nuggets down to the porcelain god.

So let’s just say that when the nice chef at the Slow Food conference handed me a piece of proscuitto wrapped around a breadstick, a flash of pain blasted across my abdomen in warning before I took a big bite. I pushed the fake pain aside as I took a piece of locally-made salami. And the weird stomach thing I had all the way home was most definitely my brain playing tricks on me.

Because the next day, I was fine. Granted, it was a wee little bit of salami and one slice of proscuitto, and I did fortify myself with a massive quantity of bran both on Monday morning and Tuesday to help that proscuitto along. But there was nothing. It was fine.

Which is great because as much as I missed proscuitto, as often as I joked about becoming a “proscuitto-tarian”, the ham, I’m sorry to say, really wasn’t very good. Even after a plate of pasta and a bottle of water, the salt from that proscuitto was crusted to my tongue for hours. I’m not sure if my palate is off from not having eaten meat for so long, or if the proscuitto was just not very good, but hot damn, if I had spent four hours on the bathroom floor because of that tiny little piece of overly-salted meat that left me crusty-throated and begging for water, I’d have been one really cranky gal.

As a sidenote, Greg went to the Brooklyn Brewery dinner the next night at Beer Bistro and ate duck confit, a handmade mini frankfurter, stuffed chicken wings and a braised bison cheek. The next day - nothing. I suspect that all of his recent talk about wanting to fall off the vegetarian wagon is the guilt talking, and that he’s secretly eating burgers for lunch every day.

So why did I suffer so badly the first time I feel off the wagon when neither I nor Greg (who ate a lot more meat than I did in this recent 48-hour period), suffered any problems this time? I don’t know for sure, but I’d like to think quality was a big player. Those nuggets are made with glue and fillers and additives and anti-biotics and come from animals treated so inhumanely I can’t even describe it. The meat we both ate this week was all organic, grass-fed, and humanely slaughtered, and locally produced (except for Greg’s bison).

That’s not an excuse to go back to eating meat, and I have no intention of doing so, although my hubby is no longer with me 100% on the issue. But it is an interesting theory in terms of how the body reacts to meat and the quality thereof. Unfortunately, to really prove it, I’d have to eat a turkey nugget, and that’s definitely not going to happen.