You are eating horsemeat: or there are 450 places where something could go wrong with your food

Horse meat.

Pig bung.

Rockfish.

What do these three things have in common?

Or maybe your first question is "what the eff is pig bung?" Let me explain. This week, three stories came to my attention. Two because they're making headlines, and one because it was on "This American Life" two weeks ago and I only just listened to it this morning.

Horse meat: Europe is horrified to discover that its beef supply has some horse meat in it. In some cases traces, in some cases up to 80%. Of what was supposed to be beef burger meat. Salon does a great job of covering the issue and it implications.  Now the fact that horse is being eaten is not what should horrify in my opinion, though I suspect for many people that is the case. What should horrify is stuff like this, from Salon:

"While the explanation of where some of the horse meat could have come from is straightforward, how it got to dinner plates is not. As Lichfield explains, “It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.”

Leading to: "There are 450 places where something could go wrong before your food gets into your hands."

Torino, Piemonte

I have spent a fair amount of time in Torino at this point but to suggest I know the city is a laughably incorrect statement. To suggest that I have eaten what it has to offer is also quite off the mark. In my two times there I have mostly been marooned in a southern corridor of the city, mostly behind a desk, on my feet, slowly dehydrating myself into laryngitis.

There were short forays out, both in 2008 and now in 2010--which is a wonderful thing because Piemonte is a wonderful place to eat and an even more wonderful place to drink delicious, affordable red wine (Nebbiolo, Barbera d'Asti, Barbera d'Alba). They are my absolute favorite wines in the world.

We had our staff meal the first night at Tre Galli. The carne crudo, a specialty of the region, was a revelation. Yep, that's raw meat; this rendition had shaved truffles and sea salt on top and it was sitting in an egg-based sauce of some kind. It was terrific, as was the braised tongue. As was the vegetable tart. And basically everything else we had.

Its sister restaurant Tre Galline is also good--especially their pasta. The chestnut gnocchi was so so very good. It's a little fancier and required slightly softer voices (sotto voce).

I could not for the life of me find the neighborhood pizza place (near Corso Sebastopoli and Corso IV Novembre) that I fell in love with in 2008. That is what I get for having a bad sense of direction. But we did get farinate again from the lowkey place on our corner and it always makes me happy. Farinate = chickpea flour pancake. And we were directed to a very good Napolitano pizza place called Cammafa.

On the final morning, voiceless and exhausted, I headed to the rightfully famous Bicherin and alongside Jenny and Suzanne and Taylor (who has just launched Good Food Jobs) we sugar-bombed it with insanely light but rich zabaglione, the local specialty "bicherin" (a coffee and chocolate drink) and several other things but I am embarrassed to continue listing them. Pics of the bicherin and the zabaglione are up above.

Bits & Pieces

1. My friend John is famous! John is a great cook and a great guy. I just randomly found this piece about him on Apartment Therapy. He's too modest to have sung it from the rooftops, natch.

2. I sing from the rooftops. I wrote this piece on Gristle, a book edited by Moby, all about the negative impacts of industrial meat production.

3. Well and Good NYC covers what to bring for lunch. I bring my lunch almost every day--as do most people at my office. I love that I work in a place where that's the norm.

4. Just ate my first ramps of the season, at the end of a long, hard day. Thanks, Deena, for bringing them to me, and for 4 years of friendship & laughs (& for getting all of my "Friends" and "Seinfeld" references).

Biscuits, 2 ways

Every few months I have the ladies over for dinner. I know lots of ladies, but for whatever reason, this group--mes soeurs--are called "the ladies." Making a nice home cooked meal is how I lure them to my apartment. "Bring wine," I say, and they do. Sometimes they bring their boyfriend/fiance/husband type person, and this is also nice. We have had these gatherings all over this city: in the East Village, in Cobble Hill, and here in UPS depot land (I have also supped with them in Los Angeles, Paris, Santa Fe, North Captiva and beyond but my dinner parties have remained in NYC).

Last weekend we gathered for chicken pot pie, something I hadn't made since an avant garde restaurant menu a couple of years back. After much hunting I found the red ribbon bookmark in The New Joy of Cooking right where I had left it--can you tell I don't use that cookbook much?

I topped it with buttermilk biscuits, a recipe torn out from an old Food and Wine magazine. I did the recipe wrong but liked what I came up with. They're insanely buttery and if you manage not to overwork them, they are flaky and light.

A few days later I made use of the remaining buttermilk and some Mountainview Farms bacon, plucked from the freezer, and made bacon shallot buttermilk biscuits for the 4th annual meat lovers an

d chocolate lovers potluck at my office.

Buttery Biscuits

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter (that's 10 tbsp. yup, you read correctly), chilled and cut into thick slices

1 cup buttermilk, chilled

Preheat oven to 425

whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt

cut the butter into the flour using two knives or this cool implement I have that I don't even know the name for

stir in buttermilk until dough is just moistened

dust a work surface with flour; make sure it's cat hair free

turn the dough out onto the surface and knead 2-3 times

pat it into a disk, about 1/2 inch thick

use a biscuit cutter, or the rim of a glass and cut out circles

put the biscuits on a baking sheet and sprinkle with Maldon sea salt

bake for 20 minutes, until golden

[to make the bacon ones, cut your bacon into small pieces, then fry it up, not too much since it will go in the oven later; saute minced shallot in the bacon fat; let both bacon and shallot cool; when you stir in buttermilk to the dough, also toss in bacon and shallots]

September Diary

I was so busy being where I was, I forgot to blog.

What I've been up to:

• Managing Slow Food USA's Time for Lunch campaign, thrilled by the success of our national day of action--300+ potlucks in all 50 states this past Labor Day!
• Seeing movies, writing about them
• Eating beef heart and oysters at Marlow and Sons
• Stuffing zucchini blossoms with goat cheese and frying them
• Attending New Amsterdam Market, already excited for the next one on October 25th
• Supporting Just Food at their Let us Eat Local benefit, eating pork sliders, gazpacho and grilled cheese and Blue Marble's strawberry ice cream and anything else I could cram in my yapper
• despairing occasionally at the state of the world (read: politics, yo)
• Preserving 70 lbs of heirloom tomatoes

Whatchoo been up to?

Go Meat- and Dairyless One Day a Week

From an article in the latest Mother Jones:

"According to a 2008 report from Carnegie Mellon University, going meat- and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day."

Chocolate, chocolate, meat

I have a dream job, and what you do in a dream office is have potlucks, ones where everyone who brings stuff in are really, really good cooks.  Cool, right?

This week we had our 3rd Annual Meat Lovers and Chocolate Lovers lunch (in honor of Valentine's Day), for which Jenny and I made Sausage/Broccoli Rabe panini.  It's a good thing, too, because everyone else practically brought chocolate (remember the old Sesame Street episode where they have a potluck picnic and neglect to plan who will bring what?  Everyone brings watermelon.  This wouldn't happen at our office because, hey, watermelon is NOT in season.  But chocolate, chocolate is always in season).

Sausage/Broccoli Rabe Panini

Sweet Italian Fennel Sausage  (OR John's homemade spicy italian sausage)

a little white wine (or red wine, whatever you have)

olive oil

broccoli rabe

garlic, minced

red pepper flakes

salt/pepper

thinly sliced fontina cheese

sliced sourdough

panini press

begin by blanching broccoli rabe in boiling water for about 2-3 minutes

drain

saute chopped garlic in olive oil

add cooked broocoli rabe, pinch salt, and one shake of red pepper flakes

toss to coat, cook 1 minute

at the same time (because multi tasking is fun) in a separate pan, heat a little more oil

add sausage links, letting them brown on all sides

add 1/2 cup white or red

cover, turn down heat and let cook fro about 12 minutes

assemble sandwiches: one layer cheese, one layer of sliced sausage, one layer of broccoli rabe

put on a lightly oiled, heated panini press and cook until cheese melts and bread crisps and browns.

cut into thirds and eat with 2 kinds of chocolate mousse, 2 kinds of chocolate cake, chocolate chip cookies, and a strong antacid.

Heritage Bird

For a few years now, as part of my job, I have been preaching to others about eater-based conservation and the joys of keeping biodiversity alive by eating heirloom varieties, and heritage breeds. Conventional turkeys are not bred for flavor, don'tcha know; they're bred for big boobs and fast maturation, and ability to freeze well; and blah blah blah and yup sure, I hear ya.

Finally this year I myself cooked not just a free range bird but a heritage one--an American Bronze from Frank Reese's Good Shepherd Ranch in Kansas. Which for me is a bit like a football fan saying he ordered a football and it came from Brett Favre's backyard where Brett Favre himself stitched the pigskin together with his own two (giant) hands.

I proudly served the beautiful 9 pound bird at the Thanksgiving feast called by one enthusiastic guest "the most delicious, least emotionally complicated Thanksgiving I've ever had!" And I found that I was suddenly my own target audience; this bird was weird. There was no light fluffy, watery breast. It didn't taste like any turkey I have ever eaten before, and of course that was unnerving.

But by bite three I was won over by this flavorful, tenacious, lean meat, and finally understanding this idea of "real turkey flavor," that heritage bird proponents talk about. My initial dislike helped me understand how deeply ingrained our food preferences are--we like what we know, and what we know is a Butterball. If I am to be any kind of spokesperson at all for the importance of re-shaping our palates, I must begin with myself, no?

Me and Meat

I am a city girl born and bred, with city needs and city habits. I have a strong memory of being six or so years old and wearing a puffy winter coat with a hood on a hot summer day in the backyard of our weekend house, so the bugs wouldn’t fly in my ears. There is a picture of me at camp riding a horse in jazz shoes. You get the picture.

My junior year of college, in the suburbs of Philadelphia (practically the country!) as part of my Religion studies, I took a course called “Religion and Ecology,” in which we read everything from the Jewish laws of kashruth to Heidegger’s “Technology;” from Buddhist texts about the distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings, to the eco-terrorist tract “The Monkey-Wrench Gang.” At the end of the course I vowed to spend time on a farm, to look a chicken in the eye as it died, to bear witness to the slaughter of a cow, something that would earn me the right to eat one of these creatures, one of these sentient beings-- a creature of this earth, like me.

When I graduated from college I moved back to NYC and hit the pavement running, my farm dreams something quaint and faraway (like my desire to have cats of my own someday). I became a vegetarian, thinking that if I could not come to terms with animal slaughter, if I could not find the time to go to the farm, between auditions and acting classes and the like, then I would refrain, altogether, from eating meat.

But what a terrible vegetarian I was, making exceptions for street food in Mexico, and sausage bites in Barcelona. Not to mention the annual NYC burger. This lasted for five years, on and off, until I gave up, gasping for meat like a drowning woman for water. And hadn’t my vegetarianism been the coward’s choice?, I asked myself. I had found a way out of my vow since it was, in a sense, a helluva lot easier than finding my way to a farm. I did not know any farmers. I barely ever saw a tree, let alone something edible growing out of the ground.

So imagine my sense of wonder, when four years after giving up on vegetarianism, and twelve years after graduating from college, I found myself on the farm, present for the slaughter of two sheep. I had traveled to Lopez Island, off the coast of Washington State, in order to visit the community of farmers who make up the Island Grown Farmers Cooperative. This collaborative is in possession of the first ever USDA certified mobile slaughter facility. The reasons for building a mobile unit on Lopez were very particular to their island status: farmers had to go off island to slaughter and then bring the meat back to the island. This wasn’t cost-effective, so most people just brought their meat to the mainland and then sold it there. The ironic result was that the island was having a food access issue; the meat was being raised there but not eaten there.

There is a need for mobile slaughter facilities all over this country because everything is being geared more and more towards the large-scale producers—this is both with grains and livestock of course—so that there are very few processing facilities for small farmers, making the market increasingly favorable to large industrial operations and less and less favorable to the little guy. All the little ones are gone, and in their wake? Large facilities that are geared for huge numbers of animals. Also, similarly to all the neighborhood Mom and Pop shops giving way to big box stores, this means you have to travel farther to get to them, sometimes prohibitively so.

In the wake of health scares and disturbing meat recalls, we are seeing an increasing demand for sustainably raised, grass fed meat, but if there isn’t an infrastructure to support these small farmers—i.e. if there aren’t processing facilities for them to use—then how will the demand ever be met? How will people, on a large scale, ever have a viable alternative to industrially-produced meat? In order to get product to the people, you have to have infrastructure to scale, and the mobile unit does just that.

Before I headed out to Lopez, I spoke to Holly Freishtat, who was hired early on to do a needs assessment of the island. I asked her what she learned as a result of this assessment and she said that “the issues this island community is facing, of farmers not having access to local infrastructure, and consumers not having access to the local foods they demand, is no different from what rural and urban communities are facing around the country. I thought they were unique because they were surrounded by water and now I have realized that it is a result of a centralized global food system. We have to build the capacity and infrastructure for our farmers and consumers to have local foods.”

Back to the farm: most people I know don’t want to hear exactly what I saw that morning, so I’ll keep it simple. I approached the farm (not the first farm I’ve been on in the past two years at my job, by the way, not by a long shot) with the jitters, and in the first moments I had to suppress tears. But those tears, those were the tears of a city girl who is so soft-hearted she cannot even train her cats to stay off the kitchen counter. Those were not the tears of a woman who tore into a burger the night before; I would not let them be.

Watching the farmer next to me, I was humbled by the fluid grace with which she understands the cycle of life. She raised these sheep, with tenderness, and she watched them die with tenderness. The parts of the animal that are cut away (the head, the hooves, the skin, the innards) are composted on the farm, eventually enriching the very soil that grows next year’s crop of vegetables. To see this is to learn more in 30 minutes than I could have hoped to learn in my semester-long “Religion and Ecology” class.

To see the IGFC mobile slaughter facility in action is to understand, in the deepest sense, what a successful venture this has been–for business, yes, in the ways that I described above–but even more, for the health and well being of the animals. The animals live quietly and well in the fields, then enter the barn they’ve known all their lives. They are processed humanely and the work is slow, careful, and meticulously clean. I watched it from inches away, and though it was challenging, especially at first, I watched it eyes open.

I left the island utterly convinced of mobile facilities as the next wave–to step in where small/mid-size infrastructure has crumbled away. It works for the farmers, and it works for the residents of the islands, who are able to eat meat that their neighbors have raised. It’s an amazing sensation to drive around the island and see the animals, and then to know–not just because someone told you, but because you’ve seen it with your own eyes–exactly where your food has come from.