Happy Thanksgiving to all!!!!!!

I won't be posting this week. I have stuff with the family to do, pumpkin pies to bake, lots of food to eat way too much of, and school work to knock out with three and a half weeks left in the semester. It's crunch time in more ways than one. Until next time, have a great holiday!

Make It Local: Episode 1, Pimp My Apiary

I have a laundry list of things I want to do and try with this blog. My mind doesn't focus on any single thing for very long. (those of you who remember my banana bread making escapades may beg to differ, but I digress) One of my goals in writing here is to promote the eating and production of sustainable local foodstuffs. I believe very strongly in the idea that local, sustainable food production goes a long way to promoting a healthy lifestyle, plus a healthy and vibrant community. In my mind, being able to produce and distribute quality local food at a decent price and make a buck or two in the process is a win/win for all! So, without further adieu, allow me to 'pimp' my first local producer, or in this case, potential local producer: Mad Urban Bees LLC.

Mad Urban Bees LLC is the brainchild of a good friend of mine, Nathan Clarke. For the purposes of full disclosure, no, Nathan is not paying me to write about this. He wouldn't need to even if he wanted to. Nathan is an all around great guy. I have known Nathan and his wife, Beth, for a number of years now. They are what you could most certainly call 'self-sufficient' and 'sustainable'. A high percent of the food they and their two daughters eat throughout the year they grow themselves. They buy local whenever they can, including meats, cheeses, and veggies. Nathan brews his own beer, mead, wine, and other goodies that he loves to share with friends and loved ones. (I have partaken in eating and drinking in his humble abode more than a few times. My memory has been a bit 'fuzzy' regarding these events, but a good time was always had by all!) Nathan has also been beekeeping for the last five years. He owns two hives in his back yard and has helped others start their own. His commitment to all things local and sustainable has lead him to start Mad Urban Bees. He wants to expand his two hives to forty or fifty hosted by local businesses and residents throughout the city of Madison. This would be one of the first apiaries in an urban setting in the United States. He has a page on Kickstarter.com where people can donate to the start-up of his business. As of this writing, forty seven people have contributed $2,275. His goal is $7000 by January 3rd, 2012. He has some awesome gifts awaiting those who contribute, ranging from a personal thank you and updates on the project's progress for a $10 donation, all the way up to a honey themed four-course meal for two, a case of honey, t-shirts(gotta have the swag!) and a beehive donated in your name to Heifer International for a $1000 donation.

I think it's an awesome idea and I want to support Nathan in any way I can. One more local, sustainable business in Madison is good for our economy, our health, and our community as a whole. Donate today. Do it!!!!!

A short rant about mediocrity and Madison.

There are those days where I get mad at the city I currently live in. I'm not from here, but I do take some pride in my adopted home. I was far beyond proud when my fellow Wisconsinites took to the streets this past February to protest the heavy-handed, short-sighted, and downright mean policies of an incoming governor. I'm proud to live in a state that loves its cheese heritage and craft beers. I love that I live in a city of 230,000-plus, yet I can drive 20 minutes to the west and fish for brown trout in a fast-moving stream in the middle of nowhere. I love not living amongst a sea of strip malls and used car lots like I did down in suburban Illinois. I do like it here.

What I get angry about is the fact that, while Madison, Wisconsin is said to have the highest number of restaurants per capita of any American city over 200,000 people, it has A LOT of mediocre food. There is an abundance of chain stores here, but there are plenty of locally owned establishments as well, and some of them are quite good. But, the food culture here seems stunted, as if there is no real sense of identity. Again, please don't get me wrong, there is good food to be had, but for every L'Etoile and Shinji Muramoto, there's twenty or thirty Samba's or Parthenon Gyros.

What has set me off was a trip to Chicago this past weekend. Some friends and I celebrated a birthday at Fogo de Chao in the Loop. It's part of a Brazilian steak house chain that opened in Brazil in the late seventies and now has sixteen restaurants around the U.S., mostly in major cities. The experience was amazing! The meat never stopped! It was quality food, tasty drinks, excellent service, a wine list that wins awards, and an upbeat atmosphere. It wasn't cheap, mind you, (a date night could easily set you back $200+,) but it was well worth it.

Here in Madison, we have Samba. It's owned by a couple who also own several other restaurants and a couple of liquor stores and are taking turns serving time in prison for tax evasion! The last time I was there, (also for a friend's birthday,) the lamb was game-y, some of the other meats weren't very well cooked or spiced, the salad bar was pretty good, the drinks were ok, and the service absolutely sucked. All of this and I only paid $10 less for the meal than I did for Fogo de Chao.

I'm not sure I have anything constructive to say about Madison's food scene at the moment. There are quality restaurants here and places I love, but some folks here have an attitude that the scene here is on par with Chicago, and I'm here to tell you...it's not. I'm going to sleep on this one and we'll see if I have anything more to say about this issue. /rant

I *heart* chili!

I *heart* it so much, I'm going to share a recipe with you.

It's November and in Wisconsin that means 40 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and below freezing at night. By February, we'll be lucky to have seen the sun for more than three hours in a week and Ice Road Truckers will be starting their runs across Lake Mendota's three feet of ice. Wisconsinites take this all in stride; we are a hardy bunch, and fourteen below zero weather doesn't stop us from carrying on about our day. One of the ways we in the north get through our winters is consuming a fair amount of soups, stews, and anything we can cook in a slow-cooker for hours on end. Both East and West coasters love to make fun of us chubby, pasty-white Midwesterners. But unlike coasties, we can survive arctic temperatures with minimal discomfort and can maintain a relative amount of sanity after five months of frigid weather. (Though I will admit to the fact that this is made easier by fostering a certain level of lunacy to begin with.)

One of the ways I survive winter is making chili in my slow-cooker. As I write this, my first batch of chili of the season is simmering in my kitchen and it will be doing so for the next ten hours, (for a total of twelve hours.) I was given the recipe almost twenty years ago by a guy who lived on the same floor as I did when I was stationed at Castle Air Force Base in California. For the life of me, I can't remember his name, only that his nickname was "Tex". He was from somewhere just outside of Houston and one day, after I made some chili in the first slow-cooker I ever owned, (my mom's old slow-cooker from the early 80's,) he decided that it was his civic duty as a Texan teach a "yankee" how to make chili properly. I have used this recipe, tweaking it every now and again, ever since.

It is now MY civic duty to share this recipe with you. Feel free to tweak as you wish:

Jay's Texas chili recipe

3 tbsp Bacon grease
2 lbs. beef stew meat or tri-tip, cut into cubes
1 medium white onion, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
1 Jalapeno pepper, diced
3 cloves of garlic, diced finely
1 14.5 oz can of chopped tomatoes
1 29 oz  can of tomato puree
2 16 oz cans of beans, (red, black, kidney, whatever you like)
3 tbsp chili powder
1 tbsp of cumin
1 tbsp white flour
1 tbsp of vegetable oil

In your slow-cooker, mix in tomatoes, puree, beans, chili powder, and cumin and set the temperature to Low. Cook two or three strips of bacon in a frying pan to draw out grease. Eat bacon when done. (Mmmmm...bacon.) Saute onions, peppers, and garlic in bacon grease on medium heat until onions are translucent. Pour contents of pan into you slow-cooker and mix.  Lightly coat stew meat in flour. Pour oil into pan and cook meat on medium-high heat until lightly browned. Pour contents of pan into slow-cooker and mix. Cook chili on low heat for a minimum of 8 hours, stirring every 2 hours or so.  I cook mine for at least 10 hours. Feel free to thin out chili with water or beef stock if it becomes too thick during the cooking process.  After cooking is finished, you may eat right away, but chili, much like good stews and soups, is better after it has cooled for at least 12 hours, allowing the flavors to "marry" further. If you choose to do so, simply reheat, serve with your favorite toppings and enjoy!

The critic within us all.

I love to eat out at restaurants. The food is, of course, the main motivation for my visit, but I do enjoy the full experience of dining out. However, if the food is REALLY good, I have no qualms about overlooking the more negative aspects of my meal. I have dined within houses of ill repute with nothing but fond memories. Sketchy kitchens, war zone-like neighborhoods, bad service, and restaurants with the personality and charm of a maximum security prison will not deter me from a great meal. Food is king in my dining experiences. Everything else is just filler.


During the time I have spent so far putting this blog together, I have thought about what direction I wanted to take it and I, ultimately, asked myself this question: do I want to write as a food writer, or do I want to write as a food critic?


I have my favorite food critics. The one I turn to for restaurant reviews, first and foremost, is Raphael Kadushin. He is a regular contributor to Bon Appétit, National Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler, Epicurious.com and Concierge.com.  He also writes restaurant reviews for a local alternative newspaper here in Madison called the Isthmus. (He's based out of New York, but he's also an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.) His word is law when it comes to my choosing of restaurants to frequent. His tastes and his opinions have been spot on with my own since the very first article of his I read back in 2006. He's honest, first and foremost; sometimes to the point of brutality. There are restaurants here in Madison, (as, I'm sure, in other places,) that hate his guts. But, he will honestly try to find some good in a bad restaurant, as well as criticize individual dishes in restaurants he likes. These are the qualities I look for in a restaurant critic. There are other critics that write for the Isthmus that I don't like so much. Either they are nothing more than free advertising, not seeming too willing to criticize anything, or they exude a snobby, "too-good-to-eat-here" attitude that rubs me the wrong way. I'll stick with Raphael, thank you.


A new favorite of mine here in the blogosphere is Eating Madison A to Z. Some years ago, I was involved with a few friends of mine in a group we called Saturday Lunch Group. Almost every Saturday afternoon for more than two years, we would get together to eat lunch at a different restaurant. We had a simple rule that at least two people in the group, (there were three of us most of the time,) had to have not ever eaten at that restaurant. We complied a list of nearly one hundred restaurants. I was impressed with this number for a long time...until I ran into the Eating Madison A to Z folks here on the internet. As I'm writing this, they just posted their 734th restaurant review!!!! I feel like a slouch by comparison! They use the "Eats" list of the Isthmus as their guide to choosing restaurants to review, put them in alphabetical order, and off they go. 734...that boggles my mind!


So, then the question becomes, "Do I want to write restaurant reviews?" The short answer is: yes. But, I won't do them very often. As I have said before, I'm a student and I live on a students' salary. (Thank goodness I like ramen noodles!) I think, for our purposes here, I'll do one restaurant review per month and incorporate the format into the blog, along with the rest of it. As an amateur food writer and as an anthropology student, I think a holistic approach works best; a little bit of everything will work well with what I envision this blog to be. Food writer or food critic? The answer is...yes.


Next time, we'll talk about chili. I even have a recipe for ya! Until then...cheers!

What is "authentic"?

It's not as simple a term as one would like to think. 


Authentic conjures rustic imagery: old wooden tables, copper pots, cast-iron skillets, old women wearing aprons while stirring giant pots of bubbling stew, misshapen loaves of crusty bread, at least it does in my head. You probably have your own ideas as to what is authentic to you when it comes to food....




...and therein lies the issue with the word "authentic" as it is applied to cuisine.


Cuisine, much like language or society, is a living, breathing organism, constantly evolving; in a never-ending state of flux. Authentic is static. It is an snapshot of a time, a place, a person and/or group of people. What is currently labelled authentic may have been something new and different 20, 50, 100 years ago. As technologies, access to foodstuffs, and tastes change, so do recipes. And often those recipes are interpreted and reinterpreted within the same ethnic context time and time again. I could eat a plate of tagliatelle alla bolognese from two different restaurants in Bologna and, while they may look the same, they probably won't taste quite the same. One might decide to use tomato sauce, while the other uses puree. One might use a little more pancetta than the other. Is one of these authentic while the other isn't? Who decides this?


You do, actually.


Authenticity is a product of nostalgia. What is authentic is what you grew up with, what is familiar. Some ethnic cuisines have put more effort into defining authenticity, however, even to the point of creating culinary schools and societies that apply empirical methodologies in establishing authenticity, (often for legal purposes as the world becomes more globalized and producers what to protect their products from cheap imitation.) An example of this would be the Accademia Italiana della Cucina (Italian Academy of Cuisine.)


Which leads me to authenticity of cuisine in America.


As I said before, authentic is tied to the idea of nostalgia. In post-modern America, nostalgia is a powerful force to be reckoned with. As everything around us becomes commodified, one of the unfortunate side effects of this commodification is a steady loss of the meanings we apply to everything around us. Shopping for food once had meaning beyond just purchasing sustenance for yourself or your family. Shopping was a social event, allowing one to create and maintain social ties to friends, family, and food producers. Unless you regularly buy food from a farmer's market, you probably don't know where you food comes from, other than maybe a little tag on the packaging, telling you which state or country your apples were grown and shipped from. Our way of life has become so commodified, in fact, the very ideas of nostalgia and authenticity are in and of themselves commodities. "Authentic" foodstuffs are regularly packaged and sold to consumers in hopes of connecting with that sense of nostalgia, a commodity that people will pay top dollar for these days. For when the present begins to lose meaning, we quickly turn to the past.


I'm sure I'll have more to say on this subject, but for the sake of time, attention span, and space, I'll stop here. Next week, I'll talk about my curiosity about restaurant reviewing and perhaps I'll post a chili recipe. Until then, have a great weekend!

¡Yo adoro tacos!

Tacos.


I consider them to be one of the world's most perfect fast foods.
They are simple, versatile, self-contained bundles of joy. No utensils are required. They're made to be eaten on the street, purchased from a food cart, filled with parts of the cow or pig that most people nowadays have never even considered eating, victims of a modernity where eating the unsavory parts is no longer a necessity.

But wait, tacos are so much more, aren't they? 


Some have tried to tie the advent of the taco to the conquistador Cortes around 1520, noting that many a grand feast was held during his occupation of what is now Mexico, these feasts being well chronicled by several of Cortes's soldiers and members of the clergy. These chronicles included descriptions of flat corn breads, what the native Nahuatl peoples called "tlaxcalli" and the Spanish call "tortillas", filled with the meat of pigs Cortes brought over from Cuba. But, anthropologists have found evidence of indigenous people in the Valley of Mexico eating tacos filled with fish, insects, and snails well before the arrival of European explorers.


In the U.S., the first English-language taco recipes began to appear in California in the early 1900's.


Tacos have since gained a level of ubiquity in the United States that is not seen anywhere else, not even Mexico. Mexicans generally eat tacos for either breakfast or as a late night snack. Trying to find a taco between 12 and 6 in the afternoon in Mexico is a exercise in futility. In this age of instant gratification, I can grab a taco in one form or another at almost any hour of the day or night, even here in medium sized Madison, and if I look hard enough, I can find fillings such as lengua, (beef tongue) cabeza, (meat from a cow's or pig's head) and other types of offal wrapped in a soft corn tortilla. Or, I can have ground beef with lettuce, tomatoes, cheddar cheese, sour cream, guacamole, pickled red onions, etc. For all of the vitriol and anger aimed at Mexico and its people these days, Americans have come to embrace one of its greatest imports, doing so in the best way we know how; by taking the basic idea and expanding upon it, utilizing foodstuffs and techniques from many ethnic backgrounds, finding a particular recipe or recipes that appeals to the largest demographic, and then placing our stamp of approval, making it our own. This is what we've done with Mexican food, and other ethnic cuisines in general, for the past 100 years or more. 


Thinking about this has me thinking of other facets of this topic as well. In the past decade, we've come full circle on the "homogenization" of ethnic cuisines. There is a greater demand for the "authentic" experience in ethnic dishes. But what, exactly, does authentic mean? What is an authentic taco? Would someone from Oaxaca find the same taco to be authentic as someone from Mexico City? What does it mean if they do agree or they don't agree?


This will be discussed next time. It may be a bit drawn out and I'm not sure where it will lead us, but I know I'll be hungry at the end.


Until then...¡Tenga una gran semana!