Holidays

The holidays are upon us, and I've already scorched my goose for the year. So next stop is gift giving. Chez Pim gave a tour of the things every cook wants for Christmas. Topping her list was a $10000 vacuum-distiller-of-absolute-essence -- a device that sucks the absolute flavors and smells out of anything from lemon zest to kitty litter to sand. Which begs the question: What would YOU SUCK?

And of all things I can't help but wonder what it would do to my penis.

On Veganism

In my first post I might have raised a few waves, so I want to just patch things up. Though veganism isn't my chosen life path, I never meant to imply that there was something negative about veganism. My problem was not with the choice to preserve or protect animal life, but instead with the choice to name wholly vegan foods after well known animal products and by-products. Frothy, emulsified soy protein, canola oil, and rice wine vinegar, flavored heavily with nutritional yeast isn't friggin' bleu cheese dressing. And that soya protein isn't cheese.

As a course to live by, I think veganism is very admirable. None of the vegans I've known have been in any way proselytizing or outwardly judgmental. None have ever told me that it was a life style that I needed to acquire, nor did they seem to doubt I had what it took to become one. None ever told me that I was a murderer for drinking coke or wearing leather, that my wool sweater came from terribly mistreated animals. Most of these opinions I developed on my own about myself in college, and have since accepted.

Which is to say I guess that I have nothing--not a drop of any animosity--against vegans -- accept about the names they give their food.

Milk

I picked up a copy of Harold Mcgee's On Food and Cooking, and have spent the last couple of days reading about the science of milk. In fact, milk has been on my mind a lot lately. Why just the other day I drank some really good milk. And the day before that I drank some milk that was thoroughly bland ... Oh, and the day before that accidentally drank some really bad milk. And of course the world of milk is full of these ups and downs. The whole concept of big, fat, grain-and-bone-fed, hormone-pumped, and severely-ill, kept-alive-on-various-cyclines-and-other-antibiotics, half-past-dead cows being the main source of milk in the United States is just plain old sad. I remember how much I liked that stuff in my early days, that thin, pearly-white glass of homogeneity. But milk just ain't milk if it is heated to frying temperatures for 20 minutes and centrifugally beaten into uniformity. Drinking that stuff I can't help but ask "where is the good stuff?"
I don't mean to slander uncle Louis P., but do we really still need to pasteurize our milk? Do we need to pulverize the cream into individual molecules, spread so thin that we can no longer feel it or see it? Even heavy cream it looks pretty thin and utterly un-udderly -- perfectly smooth to a fault.

Fuck The Bees

I remember a story my dad used to tell about an old friend of his--was it Skip? Skeeter? Scooby? his name had a "Sk"/"Sc" to it somewhere. Maybe a Ricky or a Dicky, but that's unlikely. Let's stick with Skip.

After a long day R. came home to a phone call from a deeply depressed Skip--Skeeter, I prefer Skeeter, and so sorry if Skeeter was/is someone else, but I'm using your name--a depressed Skeeter.
"I'm gonna do it tonight, R." Skeet said. To which R. replied something unusually tense and terse; not qualities I know him for. Let's say it was something like this: "I can't bail you out for ever Skeeter. If you are gonna do it just fucking do it." And instead of running to save his friend's life, R. hung up the phone and felt guilty. He felt guilty for an awfully long time, until a day came 10 or so years later when he got a phone call from a very much alive Skeeter/Skip/Scooby asking R. to be best man at his wedding.
"I thought you were dead!" R. said.
"Well, there's an interesting story about that. I was gonna do it. I had a razor in hand. I drank a glass of Jim Beam and ... I was ready, you know, but I noticed that the TV was on. There was an interview going on, an apiarist was showing a field journalist a hive. He pulled out a wood box that held a colony. 'Now, how many are in there?' she asked. 'A couple thousand in this hive' he said. Shocked that so many bees were being kept in such a small space, the journalist asked 'isn't it uncomfortable for them in there?' Then the apiarist said 'for who, the bees?' and his face went stern and hard. 'Fuck the bees.'"

The story always ended there. Skeeter gave no explanation as to why "fuck the bees" changed his mind about dying.

SO, why do I mention it ....
a.) has a strange way of cheering me up
b.) seems like the bees might really be fucked
c.) relevant, food/agriculture-related topic

I've been thinking about our nation's honeybee pandemic a lot. I've been trying wrap my head around a world without soy, cotton, cherries, peaches, apples, avocados, almonds, nectarines, pears, alfalfa, cashews ... I mean we're talking about 30,000,000,000 dollars in crops. How many farms would that put out of business? All the nation's almond farms for example (est. $3,000,000,000) in california between Sacremento and San Juaquin (and thats most of the nation's almond farms) add up to 6400ish farms.

Not to mention that whole cotton thing. Cotton would be an awful thing to lose!

better food for thought

Hi, I'm Dan. I'm a part-time cook, part-time ghost writer, full-time lost in the cosmos kind of guy. I like food. I love food. I love cooking. I cook during my spare time. I spent the last 72 hours making a traditional demi-glace from scratch. It's good, rich, velvet--it's a celebration of omnivorous gluttony, made to be loved.

Maybe it could have done without the cloves.

I live with my girlfriend and 2 cats. The cats are in full support of my staying up late over a pot of bones and pinot noir. My girlfriend ... well she got her own business and competing hours, but she loves the food, and loves me for making it, but her feelings of my sometimes bizarre, obsessive behavior, standing with a spoon and yelling "try it again! it's down to a demi!" can range from aloofness to frustration.

I'm in the middle of a mid-cook/life/food-crisis. I revel in roast pork with chicharones, the nasty bits, crab and lobster boils--the jaws snapping carnivore, tearing through cow to pig to duck and its force-fed liver, down through the bellies and bowels-turned-pate .... and then I see that pig on the discovery channel, watch his relief to hear that pork bellies are down this quarter, handsome Wilbur. I think about life, pain, rights and wrongs and things that really just seem wrong.

Vegetarian? Fuck .... no thanks. I ate brunch at a vegan restaurant, proudly pawning off its buffalo wings and blue cheese dressing. What IS THAT? And where do they get off calling it blue cheese?

It feels like a clear fact that things gotta die if we want to live, and who are we to judge the value of a life? So what if kelp doesn't feel pain. Oysters don't feel pain either.

And yet there is something important about what we eat. Meeting a vegan, the omnivore's face wilts into disdain, pride for the beef in there bellies bubbles. Why is it important? what is so significant about what we eat? And is there a way to make what we eat make us better?