Cooking

How about a little pasta carbonara?

My co-worker who’s in Rome this week sent me a message today that he went out to Chinese food for supper. Chinese food? In Rome? The home of the world’s greatest cuisine?

Yeah. He said he’s tired of pasta.

He’s been in Rome for half a week so far! How can he be tired of pasta already? And there’s a whole universe of Italian food beyond pasta.

Such an opportunity, wasted! Oh, my breaking heart.

Can you copyright a recipe?

Can one copyright a recipe? You might be surprised to learn that you cannot. Then again, since recipes have been freely traded for ages, you might not be surprised.

The key is to look at the components of a recipe. In the 1996 decision Publications Intl. v. Meredith, the Supreme Court ruled that the a listing of ingredients and their quantity is a statement of facts and one of the most basic principles of copyright is that you can’t copyright a fact. If I write that the sky is blue, I can’t copyright that fact such that everyone else would have to get my permission to say that the sky is blue. Likewise, even though there are many variations on the recipe, you can’t copyright the fact that a particular recipe for, say, enchiladas, contains 1 pound of cooked, diced chicken.

As for the directions, that’s even more clearly not copyrightable. Because the recipe directions are either a “procedure, process, [or] system,” they can’t be copyright either, although unique systems can be patented. Of course, the patent process is long and expensive and it’s unlikely anyone will bother to file a patent for the instructions on how to make Grandma’s Chicken Soup.

What that leaves are the chef’s notes, illustrative description, photos and illustrations, and the layout of the cookbook. For example, you could take every recipe in Mario Batali’s latest cookbook and copy them onto a web site, leaving behind the introduction, the photos, and his notes on the preparation of the dish. That may not be ethical, but it’s probably legal.

But rather than steal someone else’s hard work, the spirit of the recipe exchange is that we all share good food. There is something about food and cooking and eating together that is essential to man’s communal nature. It’s why one of the symbolic meanings of the Mass is that of a ritual meal. So, yes, apart from all the legal and technical reasons why we don’t copyright recipes, there’s also the ineffable reason as well, the one that tells us that sharing good food made with love is essential to the human experience.

Welcome back farmer’s market, we missed you so

Click the thumbnails to see all the photos and click on “notes” to see the captions.

We went to our first farmer’s market of the season this morning, although it’s their second week. June in New England doesn’t see a whole lot available from the fields just yet and the market reflected that. There were lots of flowering plants as well as vegetable plants and herbs. Of course, there were also lots of strawberries as well as leafy greens like Swiss chard.

One reason we love this market is because some of the vendors have become so familiar to us. The lady from Crystal Brook Farms in Sterling, Mass., which produces wonderful goat cheeses, always remembers Isabella and dotes on her. This year she cooed over Sophia too. Next to her booth is always the lady from West River Creamery of Vermont, makers of delicious English-style cow’s milk cheeses.

The market also has food vendors, local restaurateurs who bring food down to sell to the crowds. The Thai restaurant, Sticky Rice, is a perennial and the owner is a friendly and popular family man who is always surrounded by his kids. New this year was Zaika, a new Indian restaurant in Marblehead. We got a combo platter from them of chicken tikka masala, chana masala (chick peas), a samosa, rice, and nan. My goodness, they must put crack in the food, it was so good. We were fighting over the right to mop up the last of the sauce with the nan.

The patrons are an interesting melange of stodgy WASPs and crunchy hippies, which is sometimes reflected in the eclectic mix of vendors. There’s always musical entertainment. Unfortunately, this week it consisted of some hippies who happened to be singing an anti-Catholic/anti-organized religion song while we passed by. I wonder if anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic sentiments would have been tolerated in this oh-so-liberal town. I think not.

Apart from that off-note, it was nice to have the farmer’s market back again, which has quickly become a sign of summer’s return. We’re going to miss it very much when we move.

Brain freeze is not the worst part of this ice cream drink

What is “America’s Unhealthiest Drink”, according to Men’s Health magazine?

At the top of their list of one dozen dastardly libations is Baskin Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake (32 oz) with 2,310 calories, 266 grams of sugar, and 108 grams of fat (64 of them saturated). That’s more calories than an adult woman is supposed to consume per day. That’s nearly twice as much fat and more than three times as much saturated fats. In one drink!

Toss in a Wendy’s Classic Triple Cheeseburger— notoriously America’s worst fast food sandwich at 940 calories with 56 grams of fat, 25 of them saturated—and you have a heart attack happy meal in one greasy sack.

Okay, of course, no one would eat both in one sitting and I’m skeptical that many of either are sold in general, but what about the sneakier foods and drinks. Vitaminwater is advertised all over, using svelte and powerful athletes as pitchmen. Yet if they lived on Vitaminwater (“It’s got vitamins right in the water!”), they would not be so svelte anymore. One 20-ounce bottle has 130 calories and 33 grams of sugar. They should just drink Coke instead.

So, while the extreme examples on lists of this type are fun to gawk at but are probably rarely consumed, they do serve the helpful task of drawing our attention to the more mundane products which don’t pack the same wallop to our health, but can be cause for concern if consumed to readily. In the end, I think we’d all be well served if we paid closer attention to the nutritional labeling.

You might want to lay off some of those Starbucks Frappuccinos when you see how much fat and calories are in them, even if they’re not in the blow-out-your-aorta category.

Photo credit: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

We must be protected from the “dangerous” white gold: Raw Milk

Apparently there is a movement afoot of milk connoisseurs, people who like to live on the edge and who believe that pasteurization—the heating process that destroys all those nasty bacteria and germs—also destroys the flavor of milk. And so, despite the fact that it’s illegal in half the US states, there is still a brisk underground trade in the lactic hootch.

Harper’s Magazine looks at the trade in raw milk as well the over-the-top enforcement of laws against it.

In October 2006, Michigan officials destroyed a truckload of Richard Hebron’s unpasteurized dairy. The previous month, the Ohio Department of Agriculture shut down Carol Schmitmeyer’s farm for selling raw milk. Cincinnati cops also swooped in to stop Gary Oaks in March 2006 as he unloaded raw milk in the parking lot of a local church. When bewildered residents gathered around, an officer told them to step away from “the white liquid substance.”

I don’t feel strongly about the “right” to have and consume raw milk, but does law enforcement have to deploy the same tactics they use with drug smugglers and terrorists? It’s an effect of the militarization of police, I think.

One interesting aspect of the argument of the milk purists is that people who live on farms develop fewer autoimmune disorders than those who don’t and they believe this is because they are being exposed to bacteria that their bodies learn to fight off from an early age. Many microbiologists and immunologists have made similar arguments about First World urbanites living in super-clean, antiseptic environments weakening themselves in preparation for being laid low by diseases our ancestors would have shrugged off without notice.

For our part, Melanie and I have never been the type of parent who freaks out about our kids touching “unclean” surfaces. If food falls to the floor, we pick it up, wipe it off, and pop it in her mouth. (Obviously not in places like hospitals or high-traffic areas such as malls or restaurants.) And I will point out that Isabella has hardly been sick at all her entire life, perhaps a few days total of sniffles and raised temperatures, which is a far cry from the horror stories I hear from other parents. Is it because we aren’t afraid to expose her to the bacteria found in the wild? Maybe, maybe not.

So maybe there is something to this unpasteurization movement. For the moment, I’ll stick to the organic, BGH-free milk we drink now, mainly because the taste is so good. But if it’s better for us too, that’s even better.

Lidia cooks for the Pope

Famed Italian chef, grandmother, cookbook author, restaurateur, and PBS cooking show host Lidia Bastianich was enlisted to cook not one, but three meals for Pope Benedict when he was in New York last week. When Lidia and her parents emigrated to the US forty years ago, they received a special Vatican stamp on their visas to allow them to come to America. And now she got to repay the favor with three amazing meals. Prior to the papal visit, she was not allowed to reveal the menu (lest terrorists spike every example of the ingredient in NYC?), but now it can be told.

Lunch on Saturday was apparently a light meal whipped up by Lidia and her assistants from what the nuns who serve the household of the Vatican’s observer to the UN had already gathered:

 
• “Italian cherry tomatoes with celery and grana Padana alongside some fresh mache
 
• “Asparagus soup thickened with boiled potato and sautéed asparagus
 
• “Baked monkfish Sicilian-style with seasoned breadcrumbs
 
• “Peach fruit tart that, according to Lidia, almost went directly from the oven to the table”

Dinner, meanwhile, was a more formal affair for 52 guests.

 
• “String bean salad with sheep’s milk ricotta and pickled shallots and toasted almonds
 
• “Ravioli with fresh pecorino and pears
 
• “Risotto with nettles, fava beans, and ramps
 
• “Whole roasted striped bass with boiled fingerling potatoes and a frisée salad
 
• “Apple strudel with honey vanilla ice cream (with honeycomb intact)”

She notes that while it seems like a lot of food, each course was presented separately. In the article this comes from there’s a lot of nonsense about not making the Pope appear gluttonous or that he’s supposed to be too focused on spiritual matters to be concerned about whether the food tastes good. Bunk! Catholics are not Manicheans who reject the material world as if we’re all spirits. The Pope enjoys a good meal as much as the next guy and he’s quite able to voice that opinion. It is as much a virtue to enjoy the fruits of God’s good earth and the labor of man or woman as it is to fast from such bounty, each at its appropriate time.

Anyway, the third meal was Sunday dinner for the smaller papal entourage of 24:

 
• “White and green asparagus salad with fresh 30-day pecorino, fava beans, and green chickpeas with lemon and olive oil
 
• “Agnolini (little flying-saucer-shaped pasta filled with roast meat that Lidia served because they look like hosts) in free-range chicken soup with grana Padana on the bottom of the bowl
 
• “Beef goulash made from Wagyu-style flat iron beef with a side of patate in tecia (pan-fried potatoes with bacon and onions that Lidia says remind her of hash browns) served with sauerkraut and sour cream
 
• “Chocolate-hazelnut cake with “Tu Es” inscribed on it, topped by a two-foot-high marzipan mitre made by Bruno Bakery owner Bruno Settepani
 
• “Apricot and ricotta crostata”

My favorite is probably the cake with “Tu es” and the mitre to form the image of “Tu es Pietro,” i.e. Christ’s message to St. Peter, “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church.”

In the end, Lidia received the finest compliment possible from Pope Benedict after that last meal.

After the goulash, the pope said to Lidia, “These are my mother’s flavors.” Lidia said she almost cried when she heard this. All the wines, Lidia said, were selected by her son, Joe Bastianich, and came from the Bastianich vineyards in Italy.

One last tidbit: Joe Bastianich is Mario Batali’s partner in many of his New York restaurants and his wine shop.

Her Marthaness buys the Bam!

The Queen of Domesticity has purchased the Sultan of Bam! Martha Stewart has purchased the rights to all of chef Emeril Lagasse’s media empire for $50 million, meaning that she gets everything—TV shows, syndication, cookbooks, web sites, licensed kitchen gear, etc—except his mega-restaurants.

Ed Levine at Serious Eats provides the insider analysis. Seems to me that with Emeril’s flagship show on the Food Network “Emeril Live” ending/getting canceled, the man wants to return to his first love, feeding the folks, and spend time with his family. Can’t blame him for that. I will admire him for the perspicacity to know when to sell and to whom for maximum return.

Sounds like he’s got plenty of capital to open more restaurants without having to bring in too many partners or leverage his current properties. Maybe he’ll open one in or near his hometown of New Bedford, Mass….

Meanwhile, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia exhibits the omnivore’s appetite to grow ever larger. Who will be the most powerful woman in media: Oprah or Martha? Hmm.

Balancing organic against affordable

Since we’ve only one salary to live on, Melanie and I have made a resolution to get our budget into shape. A major part of that budget, of course, is food and because we love cooking and good food, we’re learning to be creative. It’s not like beef tenderloin was a regular entree (like never!), but we often pay more for every day items that are higher quality.

For example, we buy organic milk mainly because it is certified free of bovine growth hormones (BGH) and other additives that some say are harmful to developing children. I feel better knowing that Isabella and Melanie, who’s carrying Sophie now, aren’t ingesting it, however safe the government and the dairy industry say it is. Not to mention that it tastes better: 2 percent milk tastes like whole milk and even skim tastes like 1 percent.

Unfortunately, we pay about twice as much or even more per gallon for the privilege of being free of these additives. And it seems we’ll soon be forced to pay even more.

The forces that have driven grocery prices up sharply over the past year - growing demand for food in China and a global biofuels boom - have had an impact on the organic food market as well. Meanwhile, US farmers haven’t kept pace with demand for organic food, sales of which shot up 21 percent in 2006, and that has also sent prices soaring. And supplies of organic soybeans and grains are squeezed - not only are they needed for human consumption, they serve as feed for the animals that will be sent to market as certified organic beef, chicken, and pork.

In addition to those aforementioned reasons, the process for going organic is extremely costly and time-consuming. For one thing it takes three years of no pesticides or any of the other materials before the organic label can be applied and all your resources have to be organic too, such as water and animal feed. The farmers just can’t go organic faster than the consumers do it and so demand outstrips supply and prices rise.

I don’t know if we’ll go without our organic milk or if we’ll just have more bean-and-rice dinners to compensate, but it’s not easy or cheap to do the right thing nutritionally for your family.

What the world eats: a family by family comparison

My uncle sent me this link to a Time magazine photo essay, “What the World Eats.” In a series of 16 photographs, they show families from around the world of varying sizes, what that family consumes in a typical week, and how much they spend.

The essay was timely because Melanie and I were reviewing our financial budget and discussing how much we spend on groceries and whether we might be able to cut back. Frankly what we spend sounded high and we’re going to see if we can cut it back some.

On the other hand, apart from the families in the Third World nations, we’re spending less per person than almost every family in the developed nations. The German family spends about $2,000 per month for food for two adults and two teens!

Check out the American families (two are included): I suppose they’re fairly representative, but see how much of their food is pre-packaged and how little fruits and vegetables they eat. I just wish Time had included a list of the food because I would have found it fascinating.

Anyway, maybe Melanie and I aren’t doing so bad after all since we buy few pre-packaged foods; we eat more fruits, veggies and grains than meat; and we make as much as we can from scratch. Still, I’m sure we could cut back even more if we need to. We’ll see.

Making it from scratch

There are some foodstuffs that are so easy to make from scratch that I wonder why anyone buys pre-mixed packaged versions. I suppose one reason might be that these people don’t know how easy the “from scratch” version is. Or maybe they just lack confidence in themselves.

Pancake mix is one example. I know people who buy a box of dry ingredients and then add in milk and an egg and mix it up and cook it. Apparently they don’t realize that they just paid twice as much as it would to make it from scratch and they still do more than 50 percent of the work. The only thing in the dry mix is flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, plus all those good chemical stabilizers and preservatives to keep it on the shelf. Really, the version in “Joy of Cooking” is very simple and takes very little more time than the box stuff.

Hot chocolate is another example. Folks rave about the various hot chocolate mixes out there, from Swiss Miss to Ghirardelli. (The Serious Eats foodblog does a review of hot chocolate mixes.) It’s just not that difficult to start from scratch. I used to Hershey’s powdered chocolate, but now I use Dutch-processed chocolate I get from a mail-order spice house. It’s a much richer flavor than any mix and it’s so easy to use: Combine milk, chocolate, sugar, dash of salt, a little vanilla and heat it up.

I use this Back to Basics CM300BR Cocoa-Latte Hot Drink Maker I got for Christmas a few years ago for the recipe. It’s nothing special: It mixes the ingredients; heats them up to a predetermined temperature; and then dispenses them through a spigot. But it’s a lot easier than riding herd on a saucepan to make sure the milk doesn’t scorch.

We’ve become a “ready-to-use” prepackaged society, but I think the tide’s starting to shift toward a resurgence of the old, do-it-yourself, make-it-from-scratch ways of the past and I think that can only be a good thing. It means less preservatives and chemicals on the one hand and a lot better taste on the other.

The hottest bread dough on the block

I totally want these flame decals for my KitchenAid mixer, but Melanie won’t go for it, I’m sure. How else can I emulate my cooking idol Alton Brown?

The slow decline of the Food Network

It’s an end of an era. Emeril Lagasse, the chef who made The Food Network what it is today, is ending his long-running live show, Emeril Live. (They will still produce new episodes of Essence of Emeril.)

I didn’t watch it regularly, but Essence was one of the first Food Network shows I watched. For the first time, cooking on TV wasn’t just a couple hours on PBS here and there, but it was a dedicated channel all its own.

Even though he’s technically not leaving the network it still feels like the end of an era. Over the past few years, Food Network has been changing, becoming less about cooking and more about “food lifestyle,” whatever that is. There seems to be more attention to Giada di Laurentis sensuously tasting her recipe and less on honest cooking. It’s become more E! and less Julia Child, and that’s a shame.

At least there’s still some good shows on PBS, like Lydia’s Table and America’s Test Kitchen. And while Alton Brown can still be found on Food Network, I’ll still be watching.

Back in the kitchen with Bella

Due to popular demand, we’re blogging again at our food and cooking blog: In the Kitchen with Bella. Over the past couple of days I’ve blogged on making chicken stock as well as a really delicious leftover soup, with the latter being done as a visual recipe.

This time, we’re going to focus on food and cooking experiences rather than solely on recipes, which I hope will allow us to post more frequently. Let’s see how this goes.

Yummy cookies?

Some marketing company left a promotional-size package of a new “diet” chocolate chip cookie in a bag on our fence-gate the other day. I’m presuming we weren’t singled out, but that they were canvassing the neighborhood.

The packaging says on it—presumably as an enticement—“Tastes as good as Chips Ahoy.”

Yeah. What a way to set the bar high, guys.

They went into the trash. (I don’t eat food left hanging on my fence-gate, packaged or not, anyway.)

What’s your local fave place to eat?

New York foodie Ed Levine was just waxing poetic about local faves, those places you go for authentic local food and he highlights a candidate in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, called Oxford Creamery.

Meanwhile, last night I watched the latest episode of Alton Brown’s show “Feasting on Asphalt 2: The River Run,” in which he stopped at a local roadhouse in Illinois for some ridiculously inexpensive, high quality food.

That got me to thinking about my local faves, although I think I need to define what that is. Launching from Levine’s springboard, I will advance the completely arbitrary definition of a local fave as a local place that serves good, home-style food at a low cost and where you’ll find primarily local folks being served by a (generally) happy and welcoming staff. Even better if it’s not a place that’s ever been written up in a bestselling book about food and restaurants, featured in a magazine’s “best-of”, or lauded in a TV show.

The no-chains rule eliminates the first one that comes to mind for me: Kelly’s Roast Beef. Kelly’s is a Boston tradition, starting with a single outlet on Revere Beach, selling, well, roast beef, but ironically more famous for the fried clams. But over the past decade or so, they’ve opened up several quite slick locations around Boston, so I have to eliminate them from my list.

On the other hand, the Clam Box in Ipswich would qualify, except I’m pretty sure they’ve been featured in plenty of best-of books and magazines. Likewise for Woodman’s in Essex. No, I think I have to get even more local.

And I think I need to add another qualification and this is bound to be controversial: a local fave needs to serve more than one meal, and perhaps must serve breakfast. Arbitrary, maybe, but I think that it’s a sign that the establishment is truly a part of the local fabric because it meets a variety of needs.

So who does make the list? In Salem, I think Red’s fits the bill. Yes, yes, I know, Red’s has won “Best of Boston” and similar awards on a consistent basis, but you have to go there to see why it must be included. The place opens at an ungodly hour, like 5 am or something, to serve early rising workers or outdoorsmen. It has counter service. The menu is a slice of Americana, serving all the comfort food you can imagine and nothing exotic. While tourists come in, it’s a place that locals frequent. And it’s been there forever.

Moving outside of Salem, I would also nominate Chute’s in Windham, Maine. My mom and my sister live in Windham and whenever we’re up there, we stop at Chute’s after Sunday Mass. It’s a small, local place with friendly waitresses who call you hon’ and serve fresh-baked muffins and pies and you feel like you’ve stepped back in time. And it’s not going to be featured in any travel magazines.

So am I off-base? Should the definition of “local fave” be expanded? Am I being too picky and parochial? What’s your local fave?