Sheryl Kirby

Food, Life and the World at Large

Archive for January, 2007

Let There Be Pie

January 26th 2007 - Posted in Food, health and nutrition, in the news, pie
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About a year ago, I wrote a post bemoaning the transfats in shortening and a bunch of people suggested that I try a butter crust for making pies. I was generally pleased with a butter crust – it handles great and tastes delicious, but I was never totally happy with the fact that it seemed to get soggy. There’s just two people in our household and lest we make pigs of ourselves, we’re not really able to eat a whole pie between us (nor should we ever aspire to) before the crust got downright nasty.

Wednesday, Crisco announced that they have removed the transfats from ALL of their products. Not just that one, hard-to-find, green can of non-hydrogenated shortening, but the whole shebang.

Now that still doesn’t make Crisco a perfect product – as I’ve pointed out before, it’s made of t-shirts doused in pesticides. But butter has its failings as well, and while I’m not adverse to butter for specific, small-scale uses, I don’t always want the scary pile of cholesterol that a slice of butter-crust pie carries with it. (And yes, I’m a vegetarian, and yes, despite the fact that I’m a big gal, you’d kill your mother to have my cholesterol levels, but still – it all helps.)

So I think I might just have to switch back to shortening for my pie-making needs. With the health concerns pretty much evenly balanced now, it really does come down to taste and texture.

A Casualty in the Battle of Ethiopia

January 17th 2007 - Posted in Food, kitchen cursing, tools and appliances
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This post started out as your basic coffee comparison. I somehow ended up with three different types of green Ethiopian coffee beans and thought it would be really interesting to roast some of each and compare the three. In the process, though, I lost an old friend.

The little black Braun coffee grinder, aka “Grindy”, has been with us for over twelve years. With the exception of a couple of vacations where Greg and I went away together (circumstances and dogs tend to make this a rare event), and a brief period where I tried to pretend that I could live without the precious black elixir, old Grindy served us daily, sometimes twice a day, turning shiny black coffee beans into a magical “just add water” kind of powder that we revered. He came into our lives at a time when even the idea of grinding coffee at home was unheard of. At dinner parties, I’d step into the kitchen and fire him up and guests would come running to see what the noise was.

We gummed up his blades with nasty flavoured coffees, dented his plastic exterior with many taps of a teaspoon to get all of the coffee out, sometimes went weeks without cleaning him properly. Yet he still soldiered on, grinding our morning brew like the trooper that he was.

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Wish You Were Here

January 15th 2007 - Posted in baking, Food
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You would if you could smell this bread.

Since back in November when every single person on the intarwebs went crazy for the no-knead bread, I’ve been playing a little bit. Reducing quantities, changing flours, adjusting baking times, and most recently, tossing in some lovely dried olives and some olive oil to make what is probably one of the best olive breads I’ve ever eaten. And I loves me some olive bread. This is easily better than the $5-a-loaf stuff I get from WholeFoods.

It would appear that you really can’t screw up the recipe. Everything works, everything tastes great. I was a little worried about the crumb, I initially found it a bit too soft and spongy for my tastes, but adjustments aren’t making a difference in that area. It is what it is. And last week when Greg and I had a loaf of the beer sour dough bread at Beer Bistro, we realized that the crumb is very similar to mine. So now I’m ready to accept that the crumb is supposed to be moist, that bread really is supposed to be eaten the same day its made, and my preconceptions were obviously based on loaves of generic store-bought bread meant to last for days.

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The End of Food

January 12th 2007 - Posted in books, eating locally, Food, seasonal food
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I first heard about Thomas F. Pawlick’s The End of Food, when my editor at Gremolata interviewed him last year. I had forgotten that interview when I finally got around to reading the book, and ended up not liking the book very much, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with Pawlick’s message and more with his writing style. Having just re-read the interview again, Pawlick’s message is more on point.

Offering a Canadian take on the current dire food production issues we’re facing in North America, Pawlick has a unique perspective in that he is both a scientist and a farmer and has worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Association. If anyone knows exactly where their food comes from, it’s him.

Starting with a tough rubbery tomato that Pawlick tosses at the fence in his yard only to have it bounce back like a tennis ball, he beings to research exactly why our food doesn’t seem like food anymore. The results are downright terrifying, particularly the statistics he gives indicating how nutritionally deficient our fruits and vegetables are compared to the same product grown twenty or fifty years ago. Modern agriculture is focussed on marketability, not taste or nutrition, and the process of growing just about any food is now highly mechanized and chemically-intensive.

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Chefs!

January 4th 2007 - Posted in books, Food
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I’m working my way through a stack of books received as Christmas presents, and while different both topically and stylistically, all seem to have one underlying theme; They’re all about chefs.

The United States of Arugula – How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp is less the history of gourmet food as it relates to the home cook, and more the evolution of fine dining in the US. Kamp traces the progression of the modern restaurant from the first Escoffier-trained French chefs brought to the US to the current trend towards Food Network “celebrity” chefs and the debate over their validity in the kitchen. Touching on every 20th century food icon from Julia Child to Alice Waters (about whom Kamp seems to have little good to say), he intertwines the history with the development of the careers of two major food writers, James Beard and Craig Claiborne. The book gets more than a little dishy at times (oh, those crazy kids at Chez Panisse!), but that’s part of its charm.

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