Today, Mark Bittman put up a recipe for lamb burgers, which was funny, because I’d just finished making lamb burgers…and loving the hell out of them.
One of the benefits to living in Southeast Michigan is that ground lamb is ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive. It’s also, as Bittman points out, more flavorful than beef. So, here’s my lamb burgers (take that, Bittman!):
1 lb ground lamb
1/2 cup plain, fat-free yogurt
2 t crushed/cracked rosemary
1 T red curry powder (alternately: 1.5 t cumin, 1 t coriander, 1 t cayenne)
Pinch of salt and pepper
Goat cheese
Take everything but the goat cheese and mix. Fashion into patties, about a fourth of the mix per patty (I prefer flatter, broader patties, myself, as they cook more evenly and don’t get that home-cooked burnt crust). Grill or pan-cook over medium heat until done. Place onto bun, and sprinkle goat cheese over the top. Also works without the goat cheese, but the creaminess is awesome (and it’s doubly great if you find some on clearance at an ethnic grocer, hint hint).
“When you consider the healthy option, you say, well, I could have that option,” said Keith Wilcox, a doctoral candidate at Baruch College who is one of the paper’s four authors. “That lowers your guard, leading to self-indulgent behavior.”
This research is going into consumer marketing publications, which should alarm anyone, since obviously the takeaway message for fast food places is to put more salads on their menu, with the realization they don’t have to pony that much for the lettuce because they’ll be moving that many more fries. This study found that students who saw the salad on the menu were three times as likely to order fries, a number which should make anyone from McDonald’s or Burger King perk right up. Of course, a lot of these places already knew this. I was reading blogs and books last night while idly looking over at the basketball game on TV, and I noticed that most of the fast food ads showed a lot more healthy food on the screen than you could get in the restaurant. The idea is clearly to make people think of their restaurants as a place where you get balanced meals instead of just junk food. And you may go in intending to get some fresh vegetables, but by the time you order, most people will cave and get the fries. And perhaps they’ll be more likely to with a salad on the menu.
This perked up my interest, because the standard diet (not dieting, which is a temporary restriction that people take on to lose weight at a rapid pace, and rarely works to keep the weight off, because they just return to old eating habits when they go back) advice from the nutritional experts has been simple in theory, if difficult in practice: complex carbohydrates, lots of vegetables and fruit, some protein (but less than most people think), restrict your exposure to HCF and refined sugar to “only on rare occasions, like when it’s a wedding and there’s cake”, and don’t drink your calories. Diabetics obviously have a different diet, but this is standard for most everyone else. But the calorie-drinking thing is, probably because the cola industry is so invested in it, a bit contentious. While most research shows that calories you drink don’t register against your hunger and are therefore empty in every sense of the word, there was also a study that came out that was widely publicized (because it was a combination of being counter intuitive and what people want to hear—-a surefire media sensation) that said that people who switch to diet sodas often gain weight.
William Saletan—-who has no problem understanding that pleasure is basically seedy and needs to be punished when it comes to shaming women who have abortion for being irresponsible sluts, and (hat tip Daily Texan writer who told me about this) encouraging a moral panic about anal sex—-has decided to change his tune when it comes to the sweet, sugary pleasures of drinking soda. (Hat tip.) I guess drinking soda isn’t an illicit sex act associated with gay men, and it’s not indisputable proof that some lady had Teh Sex, so what could be wrong with it? But what’s hilarious about Saletan’s approach is that he’s misreading the mainstream opinion on these issues. Look, even James Dobson admits his life’s work of pushing women into the kitchen and gays in the closet was a failure, and the culture is trending in the other direction (with lots of pushing from feminists—-and yes, despite the patriarchal implications, we do accept flowers as thank you gifts).
Imagine if Saletan treated female and gay sexual pleasure the same way he treats the sacred joys of inhaling high-fructose corn syrup. He’d say things like:
The sex police are closing in on their next target: women filling out birth control prescriptions.
Or:
Persuading Americans to fight contraception and abortion the way we condemn cigarettes won’t be easy. Isn’t contraception part of sex? Isn’t sex a good thing? And isn’t it a matter of personal choice? Doesn’t obstructing access to control people’s sexual behavior cross a fundamental line of liberty?
But no. People who are up in arms about the moral dangers about sexual behavior that is practiced in a healthy manner and adds a net good to society are sympathetic characters in Saletan’s world. People who are casting around for ways to lower the diabetes epidemic through high (and admittedly regressive) taxation are the food police. But what’s funniest to me is that he’s reading the winds on these issues and he’s got it wrong.
Tucker Carlson is on the teevee telling me that the government can’t tell me what to eat.
Which I would have heard if I wasn’t eating a big-ass hamburger and drinking corn-syrup laden soda. Thanks, government subsidies - you taste like delicious!
I just had to write and tell you this after reading the letter you posted about feeding hungry workers in the Fargo floods. I live in a neighborhood (I’ll keep the city anonymous so the subject of my story doesn’t get in trouble with the local nannies) that has a lot of construction going on. A wonderfully nice woman drives through during lunch hour selling these great tamales out of the back of her van. It’s obvious to me she needs the income, and the workers (and many of us who live here) love her product. She’s doing a booming little tamale business.
I know what she’s doing is probably running completely afoul of the local health-department regulations. But so what? The first time I bought one of her tamales I figured if I got “the revenge” I’d simply stop buying them. I certainly didn’t need some bureaucrat to tell me she wasn’t operating a clean kitchen. She also knows that if her product gave people the trots she wouldn’t sell any more tamales to anyone, so it’s in her economic interest to cook her tamales in a clean kitchen. Free market, free minds!
Nordlinger calls this “sweet Hayekian music”, because Hayek apparently liked banging an empty box with a stick and shouting the lyrics to Crazy Train at top volume.
Suppose the letter writer’s unicorn-laden fantasy about the functioning of the free market actually worked. It’s the height of begging the question - she’s only selling the tamales because her service is clean, and if it wasn’t clean, she wouldn’t be selling them!
By this logic, inspectors running yearly inspections on restaurants should never find violations - the restaurant would immediately hear about problems and, if they didn’t want to lose every customer they had, they would fix whatever the problem was. Gordon Ramsay would be out of one of his seven jobs, and I could eat at Joe’s House Of Mystery Meat without fear. Finally!
Unfortunately, since human interactions and the market at no point in history have ever worked this way, the more likely outcome is that, without inspectors, the next nice lady selling tamales out of the back of her van will have made her food in her cousin’s kitchen (you know, the one with the huge stove that hasn’t been cleaned since 1994 and all the mice), but it’ll be okay, because at some point in the next few days, the person that she gave food poisoning will stumble out and tell her that they got sick a few days ago. Then she’ll deny it, saying that she makes her food in a clean place, and then she’ll hand her next tamale to someone with her bare, unwashed hands.
And thus will the market work, and your plunger get an awesome workout. Charmin shall be pleased.
Via Courtney, I found this post by Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden to be thought-provoking and heartening. Of course, all this was undermined by reading a ton of coverage on the way the Obama administration is going to drop the ball when it comes to tackling the toxic assets problem. Growing a garden to set a trend in economic hard times works better as a symbolic gesture if you believe the administration is going to bat for you instead of rich bankers. Juxtaposing Michelle Obama’s gesture towards environmentalism and economic self-reliance with the knowledge that increasing numbers of people won’t be starting a vegetable garden because the foreclosure on their house doesn’t permit that gives me a bitter, cynical taste in my mouth.
Still, I find myself attracted to the project, because I do think vegetable gardening is both fun and a stand against larger trends that have helped get us into this situation. Last night, while walking to go get some dinner, I walked through an older neighborhood with a number of big houses in it, but charming houses all the same with big yards suitable for (and being used for, in many cases) large gardens and even greenhouses. Then I walked by a lot where they were building a new house, and because it’s so fucking important to have the biggest house imaginable, the frame extended to the end of the lot on the sides, and dominated the backyard, though it did leave room in the front for a no-doubt colorless standard well-manicured lawn. The sheer wastefulness of it annoyed me, but the trend’s so common now that even ranting about it seems pointless.
What impressed me about Harris-Lacewell’s post (besides the thought-provoking analysis of the racial politics of gardening) is that she addressed gardening as a way to lay claim to and promote values that can push back against the soulless materialism that got us into this mess in the first place.* I have to quote this at length, because it’s just so neat.
Is this what it has come to? Is there some sort of taste difference here, or is it all about a bit of religious bigotry married to plain old ignorance?
Retired barber Joe Godlewski says he was inspired by television chefs who repeatedly recommended kosher salt in recipes.
“I said, ‘What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?’” Godlewski said, sipping a beer in the living room of his home in unincorporated Cresaptown, a western Maryland mountain community.
By next week, his trademarked Blessed Christians Salt will be available at http://www.memphi.net the W,eb site of Memphis, Tenn.-based seasonings manufacturer Ingredients Corporation of America.
It’s sea salt that’s been blessed by an Episcopal priest, ICA President Damon S. Arney said Wednesday. He said the company also hopes to market the salt through Christian bookstores and as a fundraising tool for religious groups. Arney and Godlewski, 73, said a share of the proceeds will be donated to Christian charities, but neither would specify a percentage.
Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, kosher administrator for the Chicago Rabbinical Council, said marketing Christian salt as an alternative to kosher salt reflects, at best, ignorance about Jewish dietary laws. He said all salt is inherently kosher because it occurs naturally and requires little or no processing.
The salt comes in packages with bright red crosses on it. He appears to be so into “Christian” alternatives to all things Jewish that he is contemplating a line of Christian-branded rye bread, bagels and pickles. I’m not kidding.
What is wrong with people!? Someone’s life could have been in danger because a 911 operator was stuck dealing with this ass on the line. This incident took place in Fort Pierce, FL.
Told McDonalds was out of Chicken McNuggets after paying for a 10-piece meal, a local woman called 911.
Three times.
This is an emergency, If I would have known they didnt have McNuggets, I wouldnt have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I dont want one, Latreasa L. Goodman told police. This is an emergency.
Goodman told investigators she tried to get a refund for the 10-piece McNuggets, but the cashier told her all sales are final.
“I called 911 because I couldn’t get a refund, and I wanted my McNuggets,” Goodman told police.
...On Tuesday, Goodman said she agreed to get a McDouble in lieu of the McNuggets as long as she also got the difference in price back. Goodman said the only menu items she cares for are McNuggets and McDoubles.
In related boggles-the-mind news (also in Florida!), a man called 911 because the Boynton Beach Burger King ran out of lemonade.
I kind of love the Hoover Institution. It has all the trappings of being an academic think tank, but none of the actual academics, rigor, intelligence, relevance or inquiry that would normally follow something academic in nature.
George Will references Mary Eberstadt’s new Hoover Review piece, Is Food The New Sex?. Will also calls Eberstadt “intimidatingly intelligent”, which should pretty much be a warning sign for what’s to come.
If food has become what sex was a generation ago—the intimidatingly intelligent Mary Eberstadt says it has—then a cheeseburger is akin to adultery, or worse. As eating has become highly charged with moral judgments, sex has become notably less so, and Eberstadt, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, thinks these trends involving two primal appetites are related.
[...]
In a Policy Review essay, “Is Food the New Sex?”—it has a section titled “Broccoli, pornography, and Kant”—she notes that for the first time ever, most people in advanced nations “are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want.” One might think, she says, either that food and sex would both be pursued with an ardor heedless of consequences, or that both would be subjected to analogous codes constraining consumption. The opposite has happened—mindful eating and mindless sex.
It mentions Kant - it must be smart! For instance, that classic treatise from the University of Florida, “Kant Loves Tig Ol’ Biddies”. That awakened a spirit of intellectual curiosity in me that’s satisfied almost every shower I take, yet somehow…never satisfied at all.
As someone with a modicum of social skills (and a mother), I frequently have dinner with members of the opposite sex, be they girlfriend, friend, or, you know, mother. Sometimes I pay, sometimes they pay, sometimes we both pay for our own meals. But for some reason, the idea that one person is paying for two people’s meals sets off some retrograde bomb in a server’s head that always make me the magnet for anything financial, presumably with a mop and knitting needles soon to come thereafter for my dining companion.
When two people are having dinner, there is usually a straight line between them. By “usually”, I mean “always”, because basic geometry dictates that there’s a straight line between any two points. Some restaurants understand that this not being Mad Men, either one of the apparently functioning adults at the table is equally likely to have the ability to pay for basic necessities like food. Now, given two adults, either one of which could pay for a meal, what would make the most sense to do when handing a request for compensation for the food you just ate to said people?
If you said, “Put it as close to the man as possible, and then when returning the bank card with the name ‘Girly Von Girlerson, Professional Female’, again placing it as close to the man as possible,” then you could have a job as a server waiting for you at any number of fine chain restaurants. Double bonus if the female diner actually hands you the payment, and you still return it to the male, like it was some sort of patronizing social experiment designed to make the woman feel like she could actually pay for things - next, she’s going to go home and wonder what it would be like if she could pay Social Security taxes, that ambitious little scamp.
The correct answer, by the way, is putting the goddamn check about halfway between the two people in a neutral spot.
I’ve stopped going to restaurants where this is a recurring theme, in no small part because it serves as an awkward and offputting end to any meal (to be fair, a much larger rationale is that the correlation of this behavior to mediocre or overpriced food is also very high). I’ve tried complaining about this before, usually to the sort of reaction you’d get if you complained that your napkin was improperly creased and it gave you cancer. The major problem is that the behavior is so subtle, it’s often not even realized until after you’ve paid or even left the restaurant, at which point it just becomes another kick in the ass in a life full of kicks in our collective asses.
Only a few years after McDonald’s became public enemy number one for serving up almost cartoonish amounts of food to American consumers, it’s back on top, becoming the recession’s shining star of cheap food.
I can’t help but feel this is the Walmartization of dining, the biggest bulk buyer of its particular foodstuffs in the world moving ever onward, creeping in as dining options wane in the recession. There’s a reason that the poor are among the most obese sectors of society - bad food is cheaper than good food, and bad food, thanks to the creep of fast food, is far easier to get than good food. It goes back to my beef with Sandra Lee - she takes an ethic that should result in affordable, fast meals for people with less means and less time, and makes it the same sort of middle to upper-middle class “gourmet-but-not” ethic that dominates cooking at home.
There’s an obvious market niche that’s being underserved here, or at least being served solely by the proliferation of fast-food restaurants. Few people like cooking at home every single night, particularly when home doesn’t look like a Food Network kitchen set. Little’s being done to make home cooking accessible; sure, there are the odd books on how to eat cheaply but they’re fairly sparse and largely focused on college students.
Plus, with McDonald’s taking over the world, I’m just sad that Demolition Man chose the wrong fast food chain. I thought that movie was the future.
My tips to eating cheaply at home:
1.) Build up a stock of dried spices. You don’t need anything fancy, but a basic set of spices like oregano, thyme, paprika, rosemary, cumin, etc. will stretch the same ingredients a lot further. They’re also an investment. Four dollars for a spice may seem expensive, but that spice will probably last you a few months. Olive oil is much the same - spending seven to fifteen dollars for something that isn’t even the actual food part of the meal seems expensive, but it lasts forever and improves the quality of your food.
2.) Use aromatics. Onions, celery and garlic are still relatively cheap. And they make things taste good. Really good.
3.) Think about how much a meal actually costs to make. McDonald’s is cheap, and very cheap at that. But think about what you get for a five-dollar value meal - you get a soda, fries and a sandwich of some sort. Stretch that over four people, and you’ve spent twenty dollars for sandwiches, fries and drinks. You can feed yourself for less than five dollars, and you can certainly feed four people for less than twenty dollars.
4.) Learn to love leftovers. I used to hate leftovers, for the simple reason that I generally made bad food and by no means wanted to save it. Better food means better leftovers, means your dollar gets stretched further. Below the fold is my staple cheap recipe, black beans and rice. And it makes great leftovers, too.
I knew going into this video (hat tip) that dishes like chop suey, General Tso’s chicken, and beef and broccoli weren’t native Chinese dishes, but Americanized dishes, but this 16 minute lecture on the history of “Chinese” food by Jennifer 8 Lee was absolutely riveting. Check it out:
It kind of made me hungry, though, even though the trends she talks about (sweetening and frying everything in sight) mostly disgust me. The trends she’s examining fall across many genres of American food, including those we call Mexican and Italian food. With Chinese food, it’s got another, more disturbing angle, which is the way the food got associated with racist attitudes towards Chinese-Americans.
Kate was surfing around on Amazon looking for an Easy Bake Oven for our niece in Alabama. I’m 45, so obviously I had one of the first iterations of the cooking-with-a-light-bulb contraption. Harvest Gold, baby. Goodness knows it was so easy to burn yourself that it would never make it to market as is today. From 1972:
Today the Oven looks more like a microwave, with none of the hair-raising prospects of scorching your digits. Kids are too soft today, there’s nothing like a good old sizzle burn while “cooking”! Actually, one of the newer models lived up to or perhaps exceeded the danger level. The 2007 Oven was recalled following partial finger amputation. Yum.
The number of people switching to the private-label foods packaged and sold by Kroger Co. at its stores has been increasing. The company runs 2,477 stores in 31 states. Some of its regional chains include Ralph’s, Fred Meyer and Food 4 Less…..
Based on its proprietary shopper-card data, Kroger found that 14% of its customers traded down to its corporate brand items for the quarter Nov. 8. It sells private-label goods in three separate price categories, competing for sales in everyday staples to pricier organic foods.
We’ve hit “peak coffee”. Look: I ride a bike and walk and take the bus. I sold my truck as part of my efforts to reduce my carbon footprint and not add to the oil depletion problem. But I need my coffee. I suspect I’m not the only blogger whose coherence as a writer is entirely dependent on the fragrant bean from heaven.
If you read the article, you’ll see that the problem is that demand is outstripping supply. Brazil uses a crop cycling method of agriculture, which means that they’re going to be less destroyed by rising oil prices’ effect on food prices, but also means some years the world is flush with coffee, and some years it’s not. Next year is one of those years. The environmental concern is that Colombia will deforest to make room to grow more to meet the demand. Hopefully, people will just reduce demand.
I have to wonder if the high demand for coffee (a lot of that demand no doubt coming from the U.S.) is a reflection of the larger worrisome trend of how Americans are ramping up productivity (without getting paid more) while spending less time at home with family or on vacation. We are a dramatically under-rested nation. Even if you manage to keep your work week at 40 hours a week, you’re also tacking on lunch hours and long commutes, and all the other hustle-bustle of the day that work eats up that isn’t officially part of your work day. People don’t sleep enough because they stay up late to carve a little time for themselves (since Americans barely take vacations) and get up early. Many don’t exercise nearly enough, and being physically unfit makes it hard to get through your day without feeling run down. In conclusion, no wonder we suck down so much coffee. It’s the perfect stimulant: legal, not especially unhealthy, and improves your mental capacity instead of degrading it.
I’ve been sitting on this link for a bit, but I’m shaking out because it’s interesting—-
William Saletan—-who has no problem understanding that pleasure is basically seedy and needs to be punished when it comes to shaming women who have abortion for being irresponsible sluts, and (hat tip Daily Texan writer who told me about this) 
Jay Nordlinger 
I kind of love the Hoover Institution. It has all the trappings of being an academic think tank, but none of the actual academics, rigor, intelligence, relevance or inquiry that would normally follow something academic in nature. 
It’s minor rant time. 
Only a few years after McDonald’s became public enemy number one for serving up almost cartoonish amounts of food to American consumers, it’s back on top, 
Actually, one of the newer models lived up to or perhaps exceeded the danger level. The 2007 Oven was 
