This article in yesterday’s Boston Globe is an interesting case study in why some restaurant locations never seem to work out. The place is about to reopen as yet another restaurant after a parade of places that came and went with so much regularity you couldn’t be sure what would be there any time you drove by. The article doesn’t seem to address what I think is the central reason nothing lasts: it’s too far removed from the rest of Davis Square’s assortment of dining choices to attract a walk-in crowd. While the spot worked out well for the bakery cafe that was there for a long time, people walking around looking for lunch or dinner aren’t too likely to wander that far away from the action in the middle of the square. Until it becomes a destination in its own right, which the new chef-owner clearly believes it will, it’s likely to stay a revolving door.
Location doesn’t explain a couple of other similar revolving-door places I can think of in Arlington. Right in the center of the town, along with a cluster of very successful places, there are a couple of spots right on Massachusetts Ave that are as regular as clockwork with the changing of the management. In one particular case, it was actually successful for a while as an Indian place called Punjab; so successful that they moved to a bigger space a couple of doors down and sent their original space back into Cursed Cafe territory. So even a doomed spot can be turned into a success if the right thing happens — in the case of Punjab, there were too many Asian restaurants and no Indians ones, plus they benefitted from the coincidence of a regular program of Bollywood movies at the theater a block away, which brought lots of Indian visitors to the district.
I also find myself wondering what sort of inertia keeps lackluster places going year after year when better ones come and go. I suppose some places develop that vibe of being an institution in their particular geography, but usually those places have SOMETHING to recommend them. In the very same locations where the revolvers I’m talking about live, there are restaurants that seem to exist in some Bizarro world where no traffic equals longevity. Funny thing, the restaurant business.
Yesterday I mentioned that the maple sugar producers would be hoping that ol’ Punxsutawney Phil would not see his shadow this morning, but, as usual, he did (although, that linked NatGeo article says that Phil is only right about 40% of the time). So it might not be a great year for maple syrup.
However, the cold weather that has dipped all the way down into the southern states this winter has had a beneficial effect on the carrot crop, according to this Atlantic food blogger, who lives in Texas. Apparently colder weather results in sweeter carrots. In fact, January is National Carrot Month, and tomorrow, February 3, is National Carrot Day, so obviously the dead of winter is WabbitDuck Carrot Season!. There’s even a cute little song:
Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, which marks the half-way point of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are already noticeably longer, but the cold weather has been hanging on with unusual tenacity this year, and so all eyes turn to Punxsutawney Phil to tell us if the weather will cut us a break or if we are destined to grind on with the bitter winds and biting temperatures. Because it’s still so cold, the maple syrup producers in New England are undoubtedly hoping Phil will not see his shadow — they are usually getting geared up in February for their production season in March, but when the weather stays cold, the sap doesn’t flow much.
I guess conditions are a bit milder in the New York City area, because here’s a first-hand account in the NYT from a woman who got to help out with a small sugaring operation right in the heart of Brooklyn. And by “small operation” I mean one sugar maple in some guy’s backyard, but they still do the whole thing with the taps and plastic tubing and buckets just like the farmers in Maine and Vermont. She got two gallons of sap for her efforts and then set up her own evaporator station in her kitchen to boil it down into Grade A syrup. You need 10 gallons of sap for 1 quart of syrup, so she didn’t get much finished product, but the very idea of boiling your own maple syrup on your stove seems like it would be a kick.
Here’s a clip from my favorite TV show, Dirty Jobs, where Mike Rowe, the host, helps a maple syrup farmer tap his trees, to help you get a sense of what the job is like. You can do it in your own backyard, too, if you have a sugar maple tree. This webpage has a video that tells you how to distinguish a sugar maple from other maple trees (which do not produce edible sap), since sugar maples are not as common in settled urban areas as Norway maples.
Hey kids, your old pal Mr. Greenjeans says if you want to be healthy, you’ve gotta eat your leafy green veggies. Spinach was always Popeye’s favorite, but there are all sorts of greens to choose from, and most of them actually taste pretty good once you know how to cook ‘em and season ‘em. This post at Epicurious is a great guide to all the different types of greens you can find in the supermarket and even has links to recipes for each kind. Here in the Northeast, we get fresh local greens in the late part of the growing season, but they’re grown as winter crops in the South, so they’re available in supermarkets even now.
Here’s a recipe I like for kale:
Braised Kale with Onions and Pine Nuts
Ingredients
• 1 cup pine nuts
• 1 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 cup minced onions
• 1 bunch kale, stemmed and sliced thin
• 1/2 cup vegetable broth
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cracked black pepper
Directions
In a large saute pan over low heat, toast pine nuts for 3 to 4 minutes until lightly browned. Add butter and allow to brown. Add garlic and onions. Cook for 3 minutes until slightly caramelized. Add kale and toss lightly. Add broth, cook kale for 5 to 6 minutes until tender and liquid has evaporated. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
I think most people have at least some dim awareness of the existence of food stylists — the people who make all the food in ads look so damn appetizing — but probably don’t grasp quite how extensively they tweak the appearance of things. This video features a real food stylist giving away the secrets about how they make the burgers in fast food commercials look like something you would actually want to eat, as opposed to what you get when you hit the drive-thru:
At least these tricks involve using (mostly) edible items. Some food stylist techniques include using Elmer’s glue in place of milk in cereal ads, painting food with glycerin to make it look shiny and juicy, and spraying food items with spray paint to enhance color. Granted, nobody’s ever going to eat the food used in commercials and photo shoots, but it’s the sort of unrealistic expectation that food ads create that results in situations like Domino’s Pizza having to “reboot” their product because the reality was so unappetizing. (I wonder if they’re going to fix the pasta bowls, too)
I have to admit that I do not follow Harold McGee’s posts in the New York Times Food section, even though he is probably the most important food writer going. For those of you who aren’t clued in, McGee wrote the ne plus ultra book on food science, On Food And Cooking, dispelling generations-worth of handed-down cooking lore and legend in favor of actual scientific explanation of how cooking works in terms of chemistry and physics. You can think of him as sort of the Ultimate Mythbuster of Food. So, I completely missed this post from all the way back in February ‘09, wherein McGee explains that the traditional method of cooking pasta in vast amounts of water is completely unnecessary. McGee determined that you could cook an entire pound of spaghetti in as little as 1 1/2 quarts of water (as opposed to the traditional 4-6 quarts). And he didn’t wait for the water to come to a rolling boil either; he put the pasta directly in the cold water. The total cooking time was about 18-20 minutes, but that is directly comparable to the amount of time it takes to bring water to a boil AND cook the pasta in boiling water. Because the pasta needs more stirring in this method to prevent sticking, it may not be as useful to the multitasking chef, but for someone cooking a pot of spaghetti at home it is a perfectly reasonable way to work, and he says the resulting cooking water is even better for using in pasta dishes than the more diluted traditional version. Thanks a ton to Lifehacker for bringing this to everyone’s attention.
Raye’s Mustard is a product made in Eastport, Maine that probably most people outside of Maine have never heard of. In fact, I’d wager most people inside of Maine haven’t heard of it either, even though it has been around for a long time. Apparently Martha Stewart “discovered” it not too long ago (Martha owns an island off the coast of Maine and spends a lot of time there…it probably reminds her of her days in the pokey), and she still has enough juice with the foodie crowd to bump a product. This morning there’s a post on The Atlantic’s food blog by Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig, also singing its praises, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to get in on the bandwagon. Weinzweig writes about how the Rayes produce the mustard using an actual stone mill, the last of its kind in the U.S. You might remember this post I wrote back at the end of 2008 reporting the end of traditional mustard making in Dijon, which helps underscore what marvelous things traditional handmade food products like Raye’s Mustard really are. (Unsurprisingly, Zingerman’s does indeed sell Raye’s, in case you were wondering)
Among the glut of “Best Of The Decade” articles that have inundated us all these last several weeks, Fast Company (of all places) had a post summing up what it called the “Eight Biggest Kitchen Innovations of the 2000s”. Now, usually Fast Company is more interested in social networking, green technology, and other buzzword-of-the-minute flimflammery, but that drew my attention. Sadly, the piece is one of those annoying “slideshows” that makes you reload the page every time you advance forward (all the better to collect ad revenue, my dear), and the resulting text is a little slim but here is my neat little summary list for you and some personal opinionating to go with:
The turbo-oven — Yes, that thing Starbucks uses to overcook your breakfast sandwich. I’m not sure you’ll find too many $8000 turbo-ovens in home kitchens yet, but the professional models are showing up in all sorts of smaller restaurant situations that would never have sprung for the big convection ovens heavy-duty kitchens have.
Vacuum sealers — Those crappy things you see on infomercials have been upgraded quite a bit in recent times. The one in the FC post is a deluxe model (natch), but a basic one can be had for about $100 according to this site. I have to say I might actually buy one of these.
FreshDirect.com — A-ha! FC shows its true colors by naming a website as a “kitchen innovation”. This is a New York City-only service that lets insufferable New York foodies feel superior and sanctimonious about buying “fresh and local” produce. What bullshit!
Home Molecular Gastronomy — Oh, please.
Vorwerk Thermomix — a German-made überappliance that blends, steams, boils, grates, whisks, kneads, chops and has a built-in food scale all for only $1400! And you have to buy it from a Canadian website! Could it get any more trendy?!?!?! Foodies will LOVE it! WARNING: If you actually buy one of these, Alton Brown will personally come to your house and bitch-slap you.
Microplane Grater — At last, an actual kitchen tool worth talking about! The fine-rasp grater was a HUGE sensation when it came out, and rightly so. This guy is the ultimate grater for Parmesan cheese, nutmeg, lemon zest, or anything else you want finely grated. I have a couple of larger-grate Microplanes as well, but this one is truly indispensible. Good call!
Epicurious iPhone App — More electronica, but this one is actually pretty handy because it builds shopping lists and has a metric buttload of recipes to choose from. I don’t know if the recent demise of Gourmet magazine will doom this or not. Also, not really an “innovation”, as recipe software has let you make shopping lists for eons, but a very good portable app for the gadget-loving cook (ahem!).
Tabletop Sous Vide — Professional kitchens ADORE sous-vide (but only in places where local food ordinances haven’t banned it), and if this came down a few notches in price it might catch on with home cooks, too.
There are plenty of gross things that you probably wouldn’t eat in the first place, but this website has a list of seven things that you probably eat all the time that some scientists would never consider putting in their mouths for one reason or another: additives, unsanitary production methods, chemical leaching from packaging, etc. You probably won’t be too surprised at the things that made the list, although one of them took me a little by surprise. Also, a couple of them are so ubiquitous in our commoditized food supply that there’s no real alternative except to stop eating those things altogether.
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with:
Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the hole
GateCrashGate
Meredith [...]
Nowhere near enough responses to fill in all the blanks on the Mad-Lib Post game, so I guess we’ll chalk it up as a loss and try it again some other time. Maybe I’ll try it on Facebook instead.
More additions to the list:
Levi Johnston
Carrie Prejean
Blue Dog Democrats
The Entire Lohan Family
The 2012 Apocalypse
The Republican “Comeback”
“ordinary heroes”
More effluvia:
Those Northwest Airlines pilots
Zombie Michael Jackson
Sexy ____________ Halloween Costumes (in fact, anything to do with adults and Halloween)
Celebrity Twitters
Balloon Boy and His Crazy Dad (thankfully, this one has already faded quite a bit)
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
Update to yesterday’s post about boiled eggs:
The picture at the top is what I got by boiling two eggs in 180-degree-ish water for 6 minutes. Sorry for the so-so photo, I only had my cell phone handy.
The eggs were indeed nicely done. The cooked ring of egg white was consistent in its thickness [...]
Bridget’s mother called yesterday to say that she’d taken Barkley to be put down. When we saw him over Columbus Day weekend, he was noticeably thinner and having trouble breathing. It was a bit of a spot decision by my mother-in-law, but she felt the time had come. I’m glad she came [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
Update to yesterday’s post about boiled eggs:
The picture at the top is what I got by boiling two eggs in 180-degree-ish water for 6 minutes. Sorry for the so-so photo, I only had my cell phone handy.
The eggs were indeed nicely done. The cooked ring of egg white was consistent in its thickness [...]
