On Food and Culture

I developed a passion for food and cooking at a young age when I realized that food is the center of life.  Food is everything.   Food can induce any emotion, bring people together or divide them apart.  There’s food in your yard, the gas you put in your tank is ancient, geologically fermented food, not to mention we are all participating in one grand food chain that binds us all together under one universal consciousness, or something.  That was my teenage idealism, which I still believe in, but it’s developed with age.   This food passion is what drove me to become a Biology major and I have a sort of constant meditation churning away inside my brain contemplating all things food.  I had an experience earlier this year that shook my beliefs on food and I realized on my bike-ride to work today that I need to address this, so here it is.

I generally pride myself in being simultaneously conscious of the things I eat, while respecting and partaking in the food of others.  “You are what you eat” is a common saying that I take seriously, in two ways. First, the molecules that make up what you consume will be used to create and re-build your own flesh.  Secondly, we all have an emotional relationship with our food and I believe that we all take pride in or at least enjoy food to some extent.  Therefore, what we eat is also an outward expression of who we are and by sharing food, we are sharing ourselves.  This is why I don’t push my own food beliefs on other people.

Whenever I hear someone reject food that is offered to them, I am instinctively offended.  I feel like the person rejecting is somehow culturally disrespecting the person who is offering food, even if that’s not the intension.  I’m generally talking about vegetarians, vegans, raw-foodists, etc. - people who have chosen a diet for reasons other than an allergy or diagnosed medical condition.  However, this raises the question of what is the difference between food and medicine, and then how do we culturally deal with the difference, if there is a difference?  I eat the way that I do because it makes me feel good and healthy.  When I went to visit family earlier this year I spent the week generally eating the way that they eat and I ended up getting incredibly sick.   Asian cultures (Chinese, Indian, Japanese…) tend to blur the lines much more between food and medicine than we do here in the US.  National Geographic recently reported on a new archeological find from some ancient European civilization (Rome?): medicinal pills made out of onions, celery, and other common vegetables that we would probably consider as food and not medicine now.

So how do we develop and share a vibrant culture of food, if everyone has their own individual eating habits?  I think what I’m beginning to realize is that it is about communication.  Communicating with yourself to gain an intimate understanding of your body’s needs so that you can communicate with others to let them know what you do or do not need.  I think the key is going about it respectfully, though, and discussing any foody disagreements with the understanding that everyone’s body chemistry and culture is fairly different, and that’s okay.

                 

Lobster Mushroom #4 - Tempura

To recap, I've used lobster mushrooms in Fish & Chips, Risotto, and Etouffee. Last night, I made tempura lobster mushrooms. I can't remember the last time I made tempura, so I had to look up a recipe. I fairly quickly settled on the recipe on the Food Network website, partially because I had all the ingredients lying around, anyway, long story short, I'm not totally happy with the tempura batter, and it's something I want to play with in the future. That being said, tempura is super easy and it did turn out to be quite tasty!

To make a dinner out of tempura I cooked up some udon noodles and stir fried some onions, carrots, garlic, sweet peppers, broccoli, and finished it with cilantro, green onions, liquid aminos, fish sauce, salt, and sriracha.

Blue Cheese Cheesecake Bacon Maple Donuts

For Alex's birthday I constructed something ridiculously delicious - blue cheese cheesecake bacon maple donuts. Essentially it was a yeast donut, filled with blue cheese cheesecake and topped with maple icing and bacon bits. Here's the process:

After letting the dough rise a few times, sit over night and rise some more I rolled it out to about a 1/8-1/4 inch thick and used a circle cookie cutter to cut out circles of dough.

Every circle got brushed with egg whites and half the circles got a dollup of the blue cheese cheesecake filling which was just equal parts Humbolt Fog, Cream Cheese, and Sour Cream, plus a dash of vanilla and a sprinkle of sugar.

Then I made a sandwich with two doughy circles and the filling in between. I thoroughly pinched the edges together and then placed them on a tray to rise one last time for about 30 min.

Once they were all puffy and risen, I heated up a pan of canola oil for vegetarian doughnuts, and a separate pan of bacon grease for meaty doughnuts.

I let them fry until they were golden brown all over and then let the oil drip off on some paper towels.

While the doughnuts cooled, I made a basic milk icing with added maple syrup and then iced the doughnuts when they were cool. Vegetarian doughnuts were topped with sprinkles and the meaty doughnuts were topped with the famous Skagit River Valley Ranch Bacon. I was worried they were going to be too intense, but they turned out to be a big crowd-pleaser and there were only two left at the end of the party - perfect for breakfast the next morning!

Three great tastes that taste great together!

Basil

Goat Cheese

Strawberries

In my hand on the beach. Perfect.

Fish & Chips

The best fish and chips you will ever have is not made with fish at all, but rather a fungus-infected mushroom. The plain white mushroom, Russula brevipes, gets consumed by Hypomyces lactifluorum, which contorts the mushroom and covers it with a hard bright red-orange coating. This appearance has won it the name of Lobster Mushroom. Russulas (and close relatives) have a unique cell structure that makes them "brittle like chalk". That's not to say they are delicate, Lobster Mushrooms in particular are quite sturdy, but if you try to bend the flesh, it snaps cleanly. This also gives it a wonderful "al dente" mouth feel. Here is what a Lobster Mushroom looks like in the wild:

To make this into fish and chips just follow the standard breading procedure, which is as follows:

1) Cut item to be breaded into pieces roughly 1/4 inch thick

2) Dunk a piece into flour, pat off the excess flour.

3) Dunk the floured piece into lightly beaten eggs, allow excess egg to drip off.

4) Plop the eggy piece into some seasoned bread crumbs. Cover the piece thoroughly with bread crumbs. (Season with salt at least, feel free to have fun with herbs or spices though)

5) Immediately fry the breaded piece in bacon fat or any other oil. Cook until golden brown!

Here's the logic behind the standard breading procedure if you're curious - The flour absorbs any natural moisture (this is incredibly helpful for breading meats that are naturally quite moist). Egg is essentially edible glue that can be used to stick dry things together, in this case, the egg is holding together the flour and bread crumbs while the flour is stuck to your food item. Then as you cook the breaded item, the egg works to cement everything together.

Now for the Chips part of Fish & Chips. Olsen Farm sells some amazing potatoes, in particular, the Bintje variety makes amazing fries! We just slice them up and fry them in bacon fat. Minimal turning/stirring helps to give them a nice crisp texture.

Grilled Cheese and Tomato Salad

Few things are better than the simple pleasure of grilled cheese and tomatoes. For lunch today I made myself grilled cheese with Tall Grass Bakery's sourdough bread and Golden Glen Creamery's medium cheddar cheese. Then I grabbed a few cherry tomatoes and basil leaves from the garden, supplemented with extra basil and tomatoes from the farmer's market and whipped up a simple and delicious little salad. Oh and salt is an important ingredient for tomatoes, it really makes that delicious tomatoey flavor sing.

Mead

My buddy, Mark, has a friend who has a father in Aberdeen that makes honey. His bees pollinate the flowers of Cascara trees, which is an incredibly important tree for the native peoples of this land. Way back in the day, before semis and international shipping, people here in Cascadia lived largely off of berries, nuts, roots, and wild game. Just before winter they built a long house, stocked it with food, and everyone "hibernated" in the long house for the winter eating only what they could preserve from the summer. Then in late spring, the salmon start running. Salmon are packed with calories and nutrients and it's tradition for all omnivorous/carnivorous creatures of this region to gorge themselves on salmon when the opportunity presents itself. Now, as you can imagine, eating nothing but ridiculous amounts of salmon after fasting on berries and nuts all winter can get a little digestively complicated. This is where Cascara comes in - the bark of Cascara is a laxative. According to Mark's friend, it's in quite high demand year-round, and growing up in Aberdeen kids used to make money by harvesting and selling Cascara bark. They would also play pranks on each other by saying the bark was natures candy... you know the jokes on you when you end up running for bathroom.

Anyway, the important part is that the medicinal compounds are only found in the bark. Which means honey made from bees that gather Cascara flower nectar is totally safe, and Mark and I made mead out it. We split a gallon of honey - diluted it was water, brought it to a boil, then cooled it with cold water, moved it to carboys and added Champagne yeast. Mark also added cardamom and white pepper to his carboy. Here are our babies, and in 9 months we will drink them!