Archive for January, 2010
The Last Laugh
Friday, January 29th, 2010 | daily | 12 Comments
Sometimes, and especially lately–what with meat buyers dismissing me as a nut and certain commenters to this blog calling me deluded–I get a little discouraged about my plans to take down the food system as we know it. But not so today when I met Laura who totally gets it. And I should say right off that, while Laura is a sorority gal with a mission to makeover the food plan of her house, this is not the blog post where I announce my new job at Alpha Alpha Alpha. Laura just came back from an intensive food study program in Italy where she gained a kind of knowlege and inspiration that you only get from changing your environment. It happened to me when I spent some time on a remote farm in Eastern Washington (http://quillisascut.com ) last summer and witnessed a goat move from life to death to my cutting board to my plate and felt something we’ve lost…connection to food. While in Italy, she discovered my blog and I’m so happy she did because I was starting to feel lonely in my delusion. “I want to suck up everything you know,” she told me when I met her today. I’ve witnessed the cynicism and hostility of industry insiders and I’ve been told to watch my mouth, and I don’t know where this new partnership is going, but after today I think Laura and I are going to have the last laugh.
The Good Guys
Thursday, January 28th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
One hour before dinner had to go out, about 6 guys decided this would be a good time to hang out in my tiny kitchen. Daniel was permitted to make real orange juice on my limited counter space because he’s not the kind of guy who would look at me like I just asked him to trim my toenails when all I asked him to do was bring out some fresh soup from the kitchen while I was in a meeting. I don’t pick my favorites; they pick me. By being funny and helpful and by finding more good things than bad to say. And by just going to get the goddamn soup without a major production. Because it is not like I was knocking back vodka shots on the job. No, that meeting turned out to be a significant one, where Rod from US Foodservice was able to report progress on sourcing local chicken from Draper Farms, to offer local ice cream and to push forward with a larger selection of meat from sources that don’t force their cows to stand knee deep in their own shit all day. And then, too, which I so appreciate, to convey an understanding that I am not a raving nut for thinking we should all know as much about how our food is made as we do about how our new couches and cars are.
Dumbing Down
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 | daily | 4 Comments
“So, where’s this meat from?” Blair inquired as I served him a burger from Morasch Meats in Oregon. And I’m not sure if the question was prompted by reading yesterday’s post or if he just witnessed the scene of me telling my supplier “I’ll just keep it, John, the cow is dead, if I send it back to you, you’ll just throw it away, which would be like torturing it all over again.” I don’t know if Blair heard that exchange, but he went on to ask brightly, “do you make your suppliers give you what you want?” I find this so charmingly naiive. Like I could make the second-largest distributor in the country, for whom 99% of their customers are not like me, bend to my will. “No,” I said after some thought, “but I am wearing them down.” For anyone who wonders why I am so increasingly troubled, you just need to look at today’s post on Fed Up With School Lunch http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/, the one about pre-fab Peanut Butter Sandwiches. When the food industry has convinced us that we are too unskilled to make a PB&J–about the simplest cheap form of protein to slap together from scratch–, well, we are just too stupid for pity.
Know the Source
Monday, January 25th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
Well into my grueling Monday and minutes before the cut-off time to place an order for tomorrow, Mike from Full Circle Farms called to see if I still wanted anything because he hadn’t heard from me. “Shit,” I said, “I totally forgot…can I just give you my order over the phone?” He was able to talk to me about what’s available because he actually sees it growing. “Do you have anything at all remotely green?” I pleaded and he was able to offer up 7 heads of cabbage. He had some beautiful potatoes like the ones pictured and baby carrots, too. “Know where your food comes from,” is the mantra now, and it’s a worthy one. This whole conversation was so not like my experience earlier in the day when I discovered that the sirloin in my order was processed at IBP, now actually owned by Tyson, a company that doesn’t have warm conversations about what’s good and fresh today. And when I dared to ask the simple question, “what farm is this meat from? Who raised it?” I was met with a response from the meat buyer that can best be summed up as, “We don’t know. Who cares. Get over it.” I wish in situations like this that I could call upon my rational mind and my knowlege and respond in a contructive manner. Instead of like a crazy wild bitch on meth.
Lurkers and Food Bandits
Friday, January 22nd, 2010 | daily | 1 Comment
I don’t know who left this note from last February, but I’m starting to think it isn’t any of my guys who pen these missives. When I came in this morning, there was another one from Dagney and Taylor: We think you’re the BEST. Dagney and Taylor are sorority girls who sometimes choose to sign their messages but have never actually made my aquaintance. They do, however, eat here, secretly apparently, because no one claims to have actually witnessed their dining pleasure. “Who?” one of the guys responded when I asked who Dagney and Taylor are. I’d think they weren’t students at all, but just brazen home intruders except that today as I was setting out lunch Julien asked the question, “did you see your love note this morning?” and went on to tell me that the authors are devoted fans of my blog. And when I pointed out that they’ve never commented or introduced themselves, he told me with such gravity, “Oh, no. They’re Annonymous.” “Lurkers,” I said. “Lurkers and food bandits. Someone ought to do something about that.”
Priority One
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | daily | 2 Comments
Pledge Richard’s dad introduced himself to me today and added with a laugh, “I sure am enjoying the hell out of your blog!” Besides feeling nauseous when a parent tells me that, I feel at a distinct disadvantage because I know nothing about them while they have learned that I’m a narcissistic, foul-mouthed obsessive compulsive. It’s not fair! I learned later in the day that he’s a lawyer, which could come in handy when I get sued for my posts like the one I’m mulling over called, “Now Cadbury Sucks, Too,” a companion piece to my previous work, “Kraft is Crap.” A while back when Rod was looking at me like someone who hates his job more with each word coming out of my mouth, I shut up for a second and then explained in very simple terms why I’m such a difficult customer. I want a choice, and when 3 massive companies gobble up all the other players, choice gets devoured. But there’s hope we’ve reached a tipping point when the topic of conversation on the dinner line of a frat house is the movie Food, Inc. http://www.foodincmovie.com/ “You all need to see that,” I butted in. “And then you will totally understand me.” Which I know is Priority One for these guys.
Sweet Thing
Monday, January 18th, 2010 | daily | 2 Comments
Okay, so here is the picture of last week’s Chicken Cacciatore which I didn’t want to post because I thought it looked less appetizing in the photo than it should given that it was actually very delicious. I know this because Joey said so and I’m posting it because, while it’s clearly not art, it is clearly actual chicken, peppers, onions, garlic and tomato. And those readers who’ve discovered Mrs. Q.,–a teacher blogger who’s decided to eat school lunch every day to expose the nasty truth at http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/,– will appreciate that the food I’m dishing out is at least, well, how can I put this…food. I’m worried about Mrs. Q. losing her job by speaking truth to power and I’m worried about all those kids eating plastic slime. And while I’d like to save the whole world one real chicken dinner at a time, the problem is much greater than putting out good food. Because there are evil forces all around us who think that Hot Pockets are a hearty meal, that squares of orange stuff in plastic is cheese, and that a heavy dose of high fructose corn syrup is a very sweet thing.
Happy Kitchen
Friday, January 15th, 2010 | daily | 6 Comments
I get daily reports on the search terms people use to find my blog and this morning I learned that one person’s typing of the phrase “disturbingly happy kitchen,” had led them here. I wasn’t surprised about that because, well, Zach for example just screams “disturbingly happy” and not just because he’s off to Whistler with his Brothers and a sack of frozen burritos to sustain them at the Canadian border when they get frat boy profiled. No, what surprised me was that whoever was searching spent less than one minute reading this site and I feel oddly crushed by that. It’s so weirdly fascinating to see what terms have led to this blog that I thought about creating a whole separate page of the best of them, from the completely appropriate “dazed and confused sleep deprived,” to the slightly creepy “frat boys shirtless,” to the total head scratchers like “shaveless can openers,” ”traditional papist” and “cruel kitchen,” the latter perhaps submitted by the same seeker who found us to be insufficiently disturbed in our happiness.
Future Plans
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
I wasn’t sure if I was going to post a picture of Joey or a photo of last night’s Chicken Cacciatore, but it wasn’t that hard to decide. No matter how great Chicken Cacciatore looks in real life, it just appears to be vomit in photos not manufactured by a food stylist. And Joey doesn’t look anything like vomit, so there you go. He was excited about that dinner because he’s from a genuine Italian American family–former restauranters in fact–and came into the kitchen to talk to me about his dad’s wonderful meatballs and about the other, less important life matters like what he plans to do after graduation this summer. It’s hard for me to grasp that these guys who were fresmen when I started are almost done. “Did Badley tell you he’s going to France in the fall?” their advisor asked me when he stopped in this morning. And given that I’ve been listening to French language podcasts in endless boring repetition, you’d have thought it would have come up. ”No,” I responded chagrined, “he just gave me a song and dance about being depressed about the future.” Which no one planning a post-college fall in France is allowed to be.
Winter Food Woes
Monday, January 11th, 2010 | daily | 6 Comments
“Skip it, I’ll just tell them to eat more salad,” was my response to Rod when he emailed an apology for the lack of green beans in my order and asked if a replacement would do. It wasn’t that they had neglected to put the vegetable on the truck, but just that it’s winter and the quality was bad and John, Rod’s report, was running all over town trying to meet the particular requirements of the Demanding Customer with A Blog and was finding no green beans in the whole city of Seattle. Shit happens in a kitchen and you just have to deal with it on the spot. I explained this to a couple of the guys last week when they questioned all the sudden menu changes. “Shit happens in a kitchen!” I cried, “haven’t you ever watched Top Chef!” Everyone has their opinions in this house about what I should and should not be doing and none more so than President Badley who emailed me this link from the New York Times http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/the-11-best-foods-you-arent-eating/?em with the subject heading “WE should eat more of these!.” “Sure thing,” I told him today, “and you can be the one to announce that sardines with beet coulis is on the menu next week.”
Plan B
Saturday, January 9th, 2010 | daily | 1 Comment
This is one of my favorite guys in the House. At least he was until he decided to be a bad sport just because I wanted to take a picture of him. “I don’t even want to know what that’s going to be about,” he protested as I approached. So this won’t be the blog post about how and why he didn’t get…okay, never mind. It tells you something about the physical and mental toll of this job that on Friday I couldn’t remember if it had been one or two weeks since Winter Break. When I knew on Wednesday that my Thursday dinner plan needed to be completely scrapped, I did think for a second about ordering prepared chicken breasts. But that would be Wrong. So I ordered 3 dozen whole raw chickens and used the Lebanese spice mixture I’d made for the lamb as a rub for the roasted birds. And with only two ovens, I didn’t stop moving for ten hours that day. “When you were catering, did you ever have a complete disaster?” Jake asked me at one point, and I don’t know what prompted the question, but it could have been the haggard look and the spice-colored chicken juices halfway up my sleeves as I carved the 36th victim.
Old Stories
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
I didn’t want to hear any more when pledge Blair told me I was in his dreams last night, but he just plowed on ahead. “I was reading the blog from the very beginning last night. The whole thing,” he told me. And at some point he’d fallen asleep (thanks, Blair) and dreamed that he and Badley were delivering my bonus to me in cash, in small bills, and dozens of the guys were attacking them for the money. I know I should have been flattered at someone actually wanting to go back to posts like “Official Visitors” and “Party Time,” but I just wondered what sort of easy ass classes he must be taking if he has time to waste on this trash. Late in the day I heard the unmistakable voice of Josh at the front door. He’d been VP when I started here four years ago and one of my earliest memories of those first days was finding a note some young ladies had dropped in my pantry with suggestions for activities they’d like to engage in with Josh. If you know what I mean. So when I told him that I’d started blogging after his time here, he howled at the thought of the bullet he’d dodged. “The stories you could have told…”
Hungry Boys
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 | daily | 4 Comments
Julien was back in the kitchen yesterday after a quarter spent in Italy. Unlike Newman, his European sojourn involved significant language immersion and a broad range of fabulous food experiences. I could have listened to hours of chatter about the locals cooking him real Italian fare in Perugia and Venice, but he also had up-close stories to tell about the Amanda Knox trial. Because he was there. “I saw her escorted out of the courtroom after the verdict,” he told me, and “I lived right by the apartment where it happened.” Sometimes I get so caught up in being VERY pissed off about their messes and their shocking laziness that I forget how interesting and food-curious they can be. And sweet. Later in the day, I mentioned jokingly that I’d not received so much as a Christmas card after my first winter here and Badley gave me such a look of pain. I forgot all about it until this morning when Jace presented me with flowers (and not the $5 ones from Safeway) and a card. “Thank you for all that you do!” it said and was signed by many of my “hungry boys of Alpha Sigma Phi.”
Resolution
Friday, January 1st, 2010 | daily | 1 Comment
When food writer Leslie Kelly asked me what I was preparing for New Year’s Eve, I’m sure she expected a reply more inspiring than burgers and fries. But after considering all the usual fare, what I really wanted was the lamb burgers with balsamic onions like the ones from Barking Frog restaurant. And fries. Real ones, with homemade ketchup. “It tastes so much like…potato,” my husband said at first bite and as obvious as that sounds, they were sublime because of it. This morning, there was a story in the Seattle Times about the company Beef Products, which supplies ground beef to fast food restaurants and schools across the nation. They treat the meat with ammonia, a process they’re actually proud of, and include “fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil.” I thought about this as we drove by a Mc Donalds today and wondered if people know what they’re eating. It made our hand-crafted burger and fries New Year’s Eve menu seem positively luxurious. I have a back to work resolution and it’s sadly harder than, oh, giving up crack or losing that last 200 pounds: buy nothing from questionable sources.
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