Fraternity Kitchen

Food Security

Monday, November 30th, 2009 | daily | 2 Comments

At the precise moment that I pulled into the driveway at work today, the suspect in the hideous police shooting here was reportedly stepping off a bus a block away.  I received an email press release warning us all about his potential presence on campus and when I forwarded it to my husband, I was going to give it the subject title “there goes the neighborhood,” but thought better of it.  I’m pretty solidly anti-authoritarian, but right now we’re all in awe of our men and women in blue after five murders in a month.  I was doubtful that we had much to worry about.  After all, a crazy child-molesting, cop-killing out-of-shape creep with an ankle bracelet and a bullet wound wouldn’t exactly blend in with the UW crowd.  Still, like a mother hen, I fretted all day about my guys and was happy that my blackened wild coho (an Alex Guarnaschelli recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alexandra-guarnaschelli/blackened-salmon-recipe/index.html)  was not just great-tasting, but spectacular to behold.

A World Away

Saturday, November 28th, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

There’s been a noticeable void in the House with Newman away in Germany this quarter.  He’s bright and funny and has the rare ability to do everything that pisses me off without actually making me angry, a quality that I’m sure will serve him well with his future in politics and law.  I don’t know what he’s doing in Germany because, while I had understood he was studying abroad, all I’ve heard about from Dan and Zach is beer and women.  And I don’t know why he had to go all the way over there for that.  If he’s going to waste his parent’s money, he could at least be sending me reports on the food and the culture to dispel the tired old notion of men in lederhosen eating nothing but brats and potatoes.  I knew I had this one reader in Germany, and one in Rome, but until I installed tracking software last week, I was unaware of readership in 10 other foreign countries.  I know it’s all becoming one big mono-culture, but still I can’t imagine what the readers in Westgate, South Africa and Mandaluyong, the Phillipines make of Fraternity Kitchen.  It strikes me as so peculiarly American.  Like putting marshmallows on a vegetable and, just one day a year, dressing up like Sarah Palin to threaten the neighbors with harm if they don’t fork over the Snickers bars.

Favorite Holiday

Thursday, November 26th, 2009 | daily | 1 Comment

Giving thanks for all the guys who amuse, question, delight and challenge me every day. 

Blackberry Vodka Cocktails  (from last summer’s wild blackberry picking)

Cajun-Seasoned Roast Turkey with Cornbread Dressing and Cranberry Sauce

Sweet Potato Cake (thinly-sliced sweet potatoes and leeks layered with clarified butter and baked)

Sauteed Kale with Bacon and Sherry Vinegar

My Grandmother’s Buttery Dinner Rolls

Northstar Columbia Valley 2005 Merlot

Homemade Vanilla Bean Ice Cream and Brandied Peaches (from last summer’s glorious Seattle farmers’ markets)

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

Morning Game

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

“Well, I heard there was moose meat over here, and so I had to come,” Stephanie explained when I observed I’d not seen her all quarter.  Not, “I’m here to see Brian,” or “I’m here for the superior Alpha Sig ambiance,” but, “I’m here for the moose meat.”  It was my favorite of all the comments about yesterday’s lunch, including “I thought you were kidding,” and Daniel’s inquiry into leftovers this morning.  7AM this morning, when I was barely up for a piece of toast, let alone a roasted serrano-spiced moose sloppy joe.  “Cereal just doesn’t appeal right now,” he explained, as if that was supposed to make some kind of sense.  But I have learned not to ask the obvious follow up questions here, after one too many TMI responses from guys who forget that I could be their mother.

Favorite Teacher

Monday, November 23rd, 2009 | daily | 2 Comments

“We decided you’re our favorite teacher,” Richard (pictured in the center) said to me in the chaotic moments of placing the final items for Chapter Dinner.   So I snapped this terrible picture to capture the tremendous joy I felt at the sentiment.  I love this comment on so many levels, and not so much the “favorite” part as the “teacher” part.  I had put out a Brie en Croute a little earlier and a surprising number of the guys had never heard of this totally cliche appetizer.  And I had been thinking all day about my last blog post, about how much is being hidden from us about our food choices, and about Cookie’s wish for us all to be thankful, and about all the people who contribute their energy to this blog, and just as I was feeling so richly blessed, one of the guys (not pictured) told me he thought the brie had a texture ”like snot.”  And it was just at that moment that precious Richard uttered his words about me being his favorite teacher, saving them all from a cruel fate.

Enemy of Good

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | daily | 11 Comments

My husband and I watched Food, Inc. last night. No matter where you stand, if the scene of the tiny chicks getting smashed up against the scanner doesn’t hit you just a little, you’re a jerk.  And if the news that you can go to prison for talking trash about Big Food doesn’t strike you as a little Big Brother-ish, well, just how American are you?  Being a major trash-talker, I can tell you I’m not sleeping easy.  It’s not that these issues were new to me, but I found myself waking up several times last night fretting about it.  I’m not subversive.  I’m not an activist.  I’m just  a food lover who cares about where my raw material comes from, but I also live in the real world of trying to provide a cost-effective product in an instituitonal setting.  I’ve been approached about speaking to students at the UW about what I’m trying to do here–the radical notion of providing meals that aren’t total crap to a frat house–and I can imagine how smacked around I will feel when their youthful idealism meets my counterpoints.  Well, first, you have customers who would just as soon eat prefab cordon bleu as your fresh herb-roasted  birds, and then there’s the question of whether your distributor even carries the product you want, and just forget about skipping the distributor and going straight to the local farmer.  Unless you can convince your guys to eat beans and rice the other 4 days of the week.  But in the spirit of not letting perfect be the enemy of good, I’ll be adding another page to this blog, listing affordable products I have found.  The kinds of products that made me stand back and say, “holy shit, I’d eat this myself!”

The Day in Pictures

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | daily | 7 Comments

John sent me an email today with photos of lettuces.  “Real Photos!” the message advised, after I’d mocked previous produce emails with obvious cartoon clip art.  “Wow, who knew iceberg lettuce could be so HOT!” I replied, resisting the temptation to send my first choice of replies, ”Wow, iceberg lettuces make me hot!”  I was feeling especially superior because I had just captured this shot of  Real Green Beans Wrapped in Bacon.  If you’re finding vegetables to be a challenge, I say just tart them up with a slab of pork fat and watch those babies fly.  This photograph beat out today’s challengers of “Darlene about to quit on the spot,” and “Darlene holding a bottle of wine and roses from Badley and Daniel in damage control.”  Badley really wanted me to know that he gets what I’m doing, really gets how hard it is to put out good food for large groups, and so he had me pull up this picture on Facebook, a picture he knew would make me laugh, and which he had titled “What Alpha Alphas consistently eat for dinner.  No joke.”  .  “But it’s not funny,” I told him. ” It’s true.  And it’s not me you need to share this with.”  It’s the handful of whiners who wipe out all the positive energy from all the Badleys and the Daniels, the Mitch’s, the Brandons, the Patricks, Brians, Richards, Alexs, the Nicks, the Dans, oh, the Joey’s, the Newmans, the Bobs, the, uh, the…okay, lots of the guys are not ungrateful little shits.

Dinner Guests

Sunday, November 15th, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

On Friday, I emailed Rod to check on the availability of more of those Alabama shrimp.  “We’re having the UW police to dinner next week!”  He temporarily ignored my food question and replied back, “were they invited?”  My husband had a similar reaction when I was working on the menu.  “We’re having the UW police for dinner on Wednesday,” I shared and he asked me how I planned to cook them.  It’s illustrative of how hard it is to be taken seriously in this job.  But we have had other VIP guests, including Mark Emmert, who just loves to be subtitled The Third Highest Paid University President in the Country during the Great Recession.  And I’m sure he was surprised to be served something other than frozen chicken a la king and tater tots from a fraternity kitchen.  I consulted Badley on the entree for next Wednesday’s dinner, not that I intended to follow his suggestions but because it was fun to shoot down everything he proposed.  Beef?  Red meat avoiders.  Pork?  Religious restrictions.  Veal?  Controversial.  Fish?  Allergies.  “Well chicken then,” he offered.  “Oh that’s good, Badley, let’s give the little woman cop a condescending piece of feminine chicken.”  And I think it was at that point that he gave  the look of someone mentally transporting himself to a tropical island.

In Defense of “Dirty”

Thursday, November 12th, 2009 | daily | 4 Comments

I wasn’t about to hand the camera over to John to take a picture of me looking like a marshmallow having a shower, not after I’d gone to all the trouble of dressing like someone who doesn’t spend her days sweating over spattering marinara sauce.  It was my day off, the first I’ve had since I went back to work in September, and being the food nerd that I am, I chose this day to schedule a tour of Seattle’s Darigold plant, where the local, farmer-owned company bottles it’s milk.  It made me grumpy to hear about the majority of customers demanding super-safe product, devoid of anything resembling a living product,  but I brightened up when I learned that they do sell non-ultra-pasteurized heavy cream, that “dirty”, stuff I need to make the luscious creme fraiche that makes the Best Potato Gratin Ever.  It’s a slippery slope, this drive to sanitize our food supply and pretty soon we’ll all be protected from the threat of raw milk cheeses, street food, sushi and other dangerous deliciousness.

Great Expectations

Saturday, November 7th, 2009 | daily | 2 Comments

As a former English major, the first thought I had when I saw this is that I bet Shakespeare never thought of that one.  I love you like a lamb and barley stuffed pepper topped with sharp cheddar.  And then I wondered why only two people signed on to this.  Do the others not love me?  Or is their fondness more akin to a slice of Korean-marinated skirt steak?  Is their affection more like a spoonful of homemade Ranch dressing?  I marvel that these guys routinely overlook my faults and failures and choose instead to show gratitude for the effort.  And I should probably pass some of that along to John, who, after suffering the whiplash of my acid tongue, spent a good part of Friday procuring and delivering shrimp from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, the setting of Forrest Gump and a place devastated by Hurricane Katrina.  He was grinning like Santa Claus when he presented the box to me, and I’m not sure what great expectations we had, but we both wanted to open it and look inside.  “Did they have American flags on them?” Rod asked when I called to tell him his direct report had come through for me.  Not exactly, you know, but wild beauties all the same.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

Thursday, November 5th, 2009 | daily | 5 Comments

“I take it you don’t want the shrimp?” my driver inquired superfluously as he lifted the box of  product from Thailand .  I’m not sure what tipped him off, but it might have been the sight of me pulling out my camera, cell phone and computer all at once.  Regular readers will know that I’m on something of a crusade against cheap, low-quality shellfish from Asia and will understand that I had words to say that made even frat boys blanch this morning as my delivery arrived.  I couldn’t reach John for ages because he was at a seminar.  And I didn’t know what sort of seminar, but by the time I did talk to him during a break, I bet he was wishing it was one called, How to Respond When the Customer Vomits the Toxic Contents of Her Brain Into Your Ear.  It’s just that I had been promised my longed-for domestic shrimp.  You know, the ones not swimming in sea-polluted waste laced with antibiotics.  Those shrimp.  John got the message and promised me the world would be made right tomorrow and shortly afterward, I received an email from his boss letting me know that they were both at the Gitomer seminar.  As in Jeffrey Gitomer, the “Yes! Attitude” man.  The “how to win your customers over” man.  “Oh, God, that is too perfect,” I replied as I thought about the blog and realized there are some things you just can’t make up.

Thought and Will

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | daily | 8 Comments

The prep time on trimming the sirloin for 175 kebabs was over 2 hours, so it made me smile to see Alex L. positively giddy over them as they sizzled on the flat top.  I had stumbled on some old notes, just lists of ingredients really, one for a Middle Eastern meat marinade.  Cooking good food like this–the kind that makes the Alex’s “so psyched”– is not hard, it just takes thought and will, so it made me crazy tonight to see a commercial for an Ore Ida product to “simplify” the task of making mashed potatoes.  There on the screen was a woman in total mental meltdown over the complications of peeling a potato and putting into a pot of water.  I grew up in the seventies and it was clear to me even as a child that advertisers thought women were idiots, but you’d think we’d have progressed a little.  And it’s not just harried moms who are the victims of this “you’re too stupid to boil an egg” processed food industry brain washing.  “That’s so involved,” John marvelled yesterday as he watched me chop some herbs to add to a bowl of ricotta, mozzarella and Parmesan for lasagna.  “I know it’s a lot of steps,” Nick countered today when he told me what a hit it had been, “but there is nothing quite like scratch lasagna.”