The toothy ones
Is it just me, or is “Patagonian Toothfish” a way cooler name for a fish than “Chilean Sea Bass”?
Is it just me, or is “Dr. Jekyll” a way creepier name than “Mr. Hyde”?
Is it just me, or am I supposed to be working on something else?
Jungle fever
Last week on Gourmet.com there was an interview with the author of a book called The Jungle Effect, which is about the value of traditional diets and how we can accrue some of that value without having to actually live in the jungle. The author, Daphne Miller, wisely pitches her book as a companion volume to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: he tells you why to eat a traditional diet, she tells you specifically what to eat.
I haven’t read the book and am agnostic on its thesis, but I liked this part a lot:
At a conference last week I was asked to help people determine what’s a healthy oil and what isn’t, because it’s so confusing. So I sat down and looked at traditional oils, which are oils that have been used for cooking for thousands of years, versus the oils that we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution (essentially for the past 100 years or so, or a little less). The way that you can make the distinction easily is to take a mortar and pestle and see if you can make that oil—if you even have a fighting chance of making that oil. Take a kernel of corn, for example, and stick it in your mortar and pestle and go at it. And you call me when you get that corn oil, okay? Versus take something like a palm fruit or an olive or a piece of coconut or something like that—you’re not going to make gallons of oil [when you grind it yourself], but you’re going to get something greasy.
As I said, I don’t know if the oils she’s talking about are the healthiest (thought if I had to bet, I would bet that they are), but they are definitely the most delicious. Especially if you add duck fat, butter, and lard to the list.
Using better cooking fats is one of the easiest ways for a cook to make a better dinner. Olive oil, peanut oil, lard, and butter are four of my best friends in the kitchen. And they can be your friends too!
NOTE: I am on a hardcore deadline for the next month and you will probably see little of me, online or in person, between now and June 15.
I did not cut down that cherry tree
But I did eat the cherries. Today on Gourmet.com:
So around the Fourth of July, my family rolled up to the generous reader’s front yard, armed with buckets. I was worried this would be some kind of scrawny, homegrown cherry tree with inferior fruit, and we’d have to politely pick cherries and then toss them in a Dumpster on the way home (the fresh-fruit version of “your home-brewed beer is delicious!”). Instead, I found a towering, mature tree, bearing bushels of the same bright-red Montmorency cherries I was paying $7.50 a pound for at the farmers market.
Thanks to Dana Cree and Lara Ferroni for making this story possible; I was just the cherry pitter and scribe.
Keeping house
Sorry for the off-topic post, but I wanted to point out a couple of recent changes to Roots and Grubs.
First, you should be able to edit your own comments for a short time after you post them, in case you write “Thomas Killer” or something. I’ve found that the feature works but it’s a little finicky; let me know if you have any trouble with it.
Second, people (such as my mom) have asked if I would make it easier to see when someone has posted a new comment. I played around with having recent comments in the sidebar but couldn’t find a design I liked (this is also why I don’t have links to my favorite blogs). But I did add a sidebar link to the Comments RSS feed, which you can add to Google Reader, Bloglines, or, if you really love me, an RSS-to-email gateway.
If you just want to know if someone has replied to your comment on a particular post, individual posts have always had links to their own comment RSS feeds at the bottom of the post, just above the comment box.
If nothing in this post is helpful to you at all, don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll be back to complaining about how Michael Pollan won’t let me eat at Momofuku Ko, or something.
Herb in a box
I noticed something cool and possibly new (or maybe just new to me) in the fresh herb section at QFC. You know those expensive herbs in plastic boxes? They’re now selling blends. Like the poultry blend, the pasta blend, etc. It’s not the idea of using all the herbs at once that excites me; it’s that you can get up to four different herbs in the same box for $2, instead of a fairly large amount of rosemary that you won’t actually use up.