Lusciousity

Long before I was a vegetarian, I was the member of my family who could be counted upon to order the reddest, bleedingest thing on the the menu. In my teen years this usually meant the prime rib, but my days as a meat eater began with the hamburger. Wherever we went, the hamburger is what I ordered. Then boarding school cafeteria food and youthful idealism happened to me, and I went veggie for about six years. Then, due to either blood chemistry or pure gluttony, I came back over to the meat eating side during my senior year at Kenyon. I think I’m now pretty balanced, eating meat usually once or twice a week.

This morning’s “The Minimalist Column” in the NY Times threatens to undo all of this balance. Why? Well, just go read it: it’s about how to make a juicy, sumptuous burger in your very own kitchen in the same amount of time it takes to make a crappy one. Reading Mr. Bittman’s descriptions of his own family’s burger recipes took me back to summer afternoons in the kitchen, standing next to my mother while she chopped onions and garlic and whipped out the bottle of Worcestershire sauce for the final, crucial dash of flavor. Then came the part where she put her hands into the pink goo and rolled little balls, but I usually ducked out for that. As the piece points out, for not much extra effort you can lift an average burger to the realms of the luscious, and that is pretty much the essence of lusciousity if you ask me.

Mr. Bittman has a several concrete recommendations for making sure your burgers are rave quality every time. The most drastic is that you must grind your own meat. He admits that this sounds scary, but he contends that you can do it quite quickly with a food processor and that the pay-off will have you converted for good once you try it. Choose a high quality and higher fat cut, cube, dump into the processor and pulse away. Next, have a field day with the seasonings–don’t throw in an overwhelming amount, but feel free to experiment. The lamb with smoked mozzarella burgers looked particularly delicious to me. Finally, when you cook, don’t over cook and never (he repeats, never) squash your little burger ball into submission with a spatula. That makes you look like a short order cook and it mashes all the juice out, so just let the roundness be and work on toasting your bun.

If it wasn’t 9am, I think I’d be headed to the Whole Foods for my chuck roast right now.

But local food is catching on in a big way, and to that Lusciousity says yum and it’s about time. Just today Salon ran an article about Georgetown Law’s attempt to integrate local food into their cafeteria cuisine and I ran across a south Florida blog that is spreading the word about community supported agriculture down here in the third world*… oh I mean tri-county area. Local food is something that I have wanted to support with my very own dollars ever since a presentation an Ohio farmer gave to our history of food class senior year. He was a farmer’s farmer with a four year degree in economics. He connected a lot of dots that I was only just beginning to see. Firstly, the percentage of budget that Americans spend on food has gone down twelve percent in the past century. And that twelve percent saved has not been evenly distributed among other costs or pumped into luxury goods. The segment of our budget that has gone up is health care. 2) The amount that farmers are able to sell staple foods for hasn’t gone up either. The price of a bushel of this or that has not fluctuated all that much since the subsidies went. So while everything it takes to grow the stuff has gone up, its market value has not. 3) The most profitable thing for farms to grow these days are houses. We are giving up our farmland to McMansions and unlike soybeans and corn, they don’t give the land back.

In my mind, all of this adds up to s-c-a-r-y, but there are glimpses of hope and sanity returning in small ways, like the willingness of people to become farmers and find a way to make growing high quality local food work as a livelihood. Daniel talked about doing that when we graduated, and I laughed at him, but seeing as there is a waiting list for every local community supported agriculture collective that I have found, maybe I shouldn’t have. The will and apparently the dollars are out there (even though really it’s not an exorbitant cost by any means, no more than what I’d spend a week on fruit at Publix if I didn’t restrain myself), so this is one luscious trend I’d like to see grow and grow.

*I kid because I love–if this part of the US resembles the third world any more than any other part of the country, it certainly isn’t because of the melange of languages and cultures, it’s because of the income inequality and structurally corrupt government IMHO. I should shut up before I have to start sounding intelligent to gain credibility.

My mouth is already watering reading this NYT write-up on Starbucks’s most recent attempt to bring it’s breakfast A-game to a store near you. As you may have noticed, their breakfast food is currently limited to pastries of variable qualities. I’ve had cinnamon scones that made me want to marry them and cinnamon scones that tasted like quick dry cement. This is in striking contrast to their coffee, which is uniformly what it is, and I like it what it is so I feel safe going into any store for my cuppa. Attempting to grab some of McDonald’s ginormous market share, they are engineering their own egg-cheese-and-bread combo and investing in gizmos to heat them up really fast and really hot so that they don’t have to have actual kitchens in their stores. Now, reheated food is generally not on my luscious list, but when Starbucks does reheating, you know it’s going to add what it refers to as the “thoughtful” twist. So, rather than a plain old bacon and eggs biscuit, they are offering, for instance a “chilled egg sandwich garnished with spinach and ricotta-herb spread for lunch. After the barista stuck it in the speed oven for 60 seconds, the English muffin was brown and crisp, the cheese had melted and the egg was steaming hot.” Seeing as I live in South Florida, I’m not holding my breath, but when I start smelling the warm goodness of eggy breakfast sandwiches, I’m going to first in line.

My Global Voices RSS feed brought me some luscious riches this morning: a link to Peruvian gourmand Alejandro’s blog called Peru Food and in particular this post about Amazonian street food, mostly fruit-based concoctions, complete with photos. Although I’ve never tasted camu camu or aguaje, looking at these pictures made me want to, and it took me right back to my days in Brazil, where all sorts of fruit were cheap and plentiful and mixed up in ways I had never dreamed of before. For the final month of our stay there, D and I pretty much lived on açai smoothies, in part because we knew we wouldn’t be finding any once we got back to the States. That turns out to be only partially true, as açai looks poised to come into healthy vogue any day now, but I have yet to find a place that mixes up açai na tigela on demand. Probably the best thing to do is just go back and be even more adventurous with my fruit choices. Still, when you can’t fly to South America on a whim, cruising Peru Food has to be one of the next best things.