No Reservations: The Shwarma and Shrapnel Episode

Anthony Bourdain’s comments regarding the whole being stuck in Lebanon thing. Sounds like he can chalk up being on a Navy warship in his long list of experiences.

-shogunmoon

Bravo will be replacing Billy Joel’s wife Katie Lee with the Indian born Padma Lakshmi as host for the second season of Top Chef. I had never heard of Lakshmi before hearing this news, but according to Wikipedia she has written an award winning Indian cookbook and is married to Salman Rushdie, so I am assuming she can at least carry a conversation and not just take up space on the set like the insipid Lee. Also, she is quite the looker, which I realize is beside the point but the 15-year-old boy in me just wanted to point that out. Oh, and also, as Jessica observed, why are all of Bravo’s female reality show hosts married to really ugly guys way older then them?

Straying from the cullinary world, but while on the subject of Bravo Reality TV, I still can’t believe that Malan was eliminated from Project Runway. I know his dress was a horrific failure, but at least it was an insanely ambitious horrific failure. I was really starting to like him; he was like a cross between Simon Doonan and Austin Powers. I know that they probably wanted to keep that Angela chick around for a while because of her love-to-hate qualities, but she didn’t even do a sketch. Shouldn’t that be an automatic disqualification? Man, I am watching way to much TV.

I’ve thrown a link to The Mastcator up on the blogroll. This is a friend of mine who relocated to Brooklyn within the last year to make his way as a writer in the big city. Although The Masticator would be an awesome title for a food publication, the meaning here is abstact; the masticating of life, art, culture, and whatever else a midwesterner might might find intriguing in the Big Apple. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some great food/booze related posts like this bit on the health benefits of Kimchi, and Soba Shochu, a Japanese liquor distilled from buckwheat.

Anthony Bourdain was stuck in Beirut. Man, what a fucked up situation.

Looks like he got out:

Broken-hearted celebrity chef evacuated from Lebanon.

When talking about sustainable/organic/ethical ect ect, one thing we forget about is how annoying it is to tell people what not to do. This is something that vegetarians are notorious for, but us folks on the meat-eating-but-free-range-loving side of things can be guilty of as well.

No one likes a zealot.

Instead, I prefer telling people what they CAN do. (As any regular reader of this blog knows, this is actually kinda hard for a preachy bastard like me… What can I say? I’m working on it!)

Jeremy Iggers, the venerable Strib restaurant reviewer, summed things up real nice in the following passages of todays Strib:

Excerpt: Not-so-simple choices
Jeremy Iggers,

…Red-light ethics and green-light ethics

Much of the talk about ethical eating focuses on what you shouldn’t eat or shouldn’t buy. Many consumers avoid buying veal because of the methods by which this meat is produced. Some shoppers avoid factory eggs for the same reason. And some boycott retailers that don’t pay their employees a decent wage.

That’s the red-light approach to ethics.

But it may be more productive to take a green-light approach: to look for positive choices that make the world a better place. For example, by buying locally grown foods, you support local businesses and contribute to the vitality of your community. The impact is greater when you choose sustainably produced foods, when you shop at farmers’ markets, or sign up for a weekly delivery of seasonal produce from a community supported agriculture farm. Sustainable farming methods actually help restore the vitality of soils damaged by conventional agriculture….

This makes the most sense to me. The key is to accentuate the positive. I have found that people are a lot more receptive to buying ethically raised food once you point out that the proof is in the pudding. And, of course, the best way to demonstrate is the make that pudding.

As anyone that buys meat from the Wedge’s deli, the farmer’s market, or straight off the farm in the form of a quarter cow or half a hog knows, fresh local meats taste fantastic. What more do you need to know?

As an aside, I have joined Slow Food. They are an organaziton dedicated to sustainable farming for all the right reasons. And what are the right reasons? Better TASTE! Better PLEASURE! Good food should not be a guilty pleasure. Indeed, it should the second most of all the innocent pleasures, second to you-know-what! I will try to get in the habit of posting cool events in the future.

Anyhow, here are the links:

Not-so-simple choices

and good companion articles:
More about ethical choices at the grocery store

Agendas for Eating Out

Just wanted to give props to my favorite coffee house. Ok, the only coffee house I am willing to set foot in, period. You see, as a general rule, I have open contempt for the idea of a place ostensibly meant to hang out in that does not have booze for sale. It is just how i am. I don’t expect anyone to understand.

However, in the AM hours, sometimes a guy just wants to pop in someplace to get some @#%#$@# joe in the morning, right? Though it is rare for me to stop, The Shogun Manor currently has depleted supplies of coffee. When this happens,I find that Matchbox is the best place to stop. They are cool, have great coffee, and best of all, I have yet to get stuck behind some pansy ordering a Mocha or similar drink. I mean really… if you want espresso, just get espresso! If you want milk, have a @$%##$% glass of milk. Steamed milk makes people TIRED! IT IS ACTIVELY WORKING AGAINST THE CUASE OF A MORNING WAKE UP JOLT! LATTE DRINKERS MUST BE DESTROYED. Yes. I said it. WANNA MAKE SOMETHING OF IT?!?

Needless to say, when I am i a frame of mind like this, I need coffee and fast. Thank you matchbox for being what you are, a very small and fast organic coffee house.

Oh, and a little anecdote to support my pleasure with this fine establishment:
This morning, there was a kink in my coffee swilling plans. No sooner had I ordered my cup of delicious organic joe when I realized that I had left my wallet at home! Not to worry… they just said that it is very important to have your morning coffee, and let me have it! How is that for service?

(And yes, of course I will stop in and pay them tomorrow. maybe I will even get a punch card. )

-shogunmoon
The Matchbox Coffee Shop
1306 2nd Street Northeast
Minneapolis, MN 55413

So yesterday over my lunch hour I walked over to “Let’s Cook”, a kitchen supply store on Hennepin & University, to buy a citrus press and oddly enough they have a magnetic spice rack just like the one I made that they are selling for over 100 dollars. Here’s a crappy photo I took with my phone:

It’s basically the exact same thing, although I admit this one is a little more blinged out looking.

***

As I write this, I have been informed over instant messaging that Syd Barrett has passed. He was only 60. Shogunmoon turned me on to The Madcap Laughs and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in highschool and those albums were played heavily through many lonely teenage days. He will be missed.

As requested, here is the magnetic spice rack I made recently.

I am absent minded, and although I try to follow the principals of Mise en Place in the kitchen, I often find myself scrambling around at the last minute to grate ginger or find a heat resistant spatula for something that requires immediate attention. These are the kinds of instances that make cooking stressful, and keep pizza delivery numbers on speed dial. One way to mitigate these situations is by making ingredients and kitchen tools as accessible as possible.

We have, I think, an obsession with putting things away. When you are young you are constantly being told to put your things away; “Fold your clothes and put them away”, “Put your toys away”, etc. I would try to reason that when all my stuff was scattered across the floor, it made it really easy to find things. I could stand on my bed, and get a panoramic view of my entire inventory. If all of my things were sequestered away in drawers and closets, I might not be able to find something when I needed it, or worse, forget that I owned it in the first place. This argument never got me very far, but I still stand behind it..mostly.

Not that I am advocating keeping kitchen tools and appliances scattered across the floor, but there is a happy medium between the chaotic-and-cluttered, and the hermetically-sealed, we-don’t-actually-cook-here approaches to setting up your kitchen. Check out Julia Child’s kitchen as it appears on display at the American History Museum in Washington D.C. Everything you could possibly need is in plain view. I love the measuring cups hanging to the right of the window, and the fact that she has knives stashed in two separate locations; on the butcher block cart and just to the left of the window. So cool.

So I have been slowly trying to improve my kitchen’s accessibility. I put a single wall shelf above the stove where I now store my salt cellar, olive oil, cracked pepper, and anything else that I might need easy access to while I am cooking at the stove. I installed a magnetic knife holder on the wall above the counter so I have my full array of knives and kitchen sheers available and in plain view when I am doing prep work. But my favorite addition so far is the magnetic spice rack which I “made myself.”

I first stumbled onto this idea at the Washington Post’s website, where they have a semi-regular column on home DIY projects. I really wanted to make it, but the project called for things like metal drill bits and glue guns which would require a trip to the Home Depot which meant that I probably wasn’t ever going to make it. I don’t like the big-box home improvement stores; They make me feel like I am being crushed by the weight of my own inadequacies. I put the project out of my mind until I discovered that Ikea sells large magnetic boards that can easily be screwed onto the wall, and you can order magnetic storage containers online here. This was within my margin of ability so I went ahead and put it together. It was a simple matter of screwing the magnetic board into the wall, washing and then filling the magnetic storage containers with the assorted spices I had scattered around the cupboard, and then labeling the containers. Label makers are cheap. I use this one. This system is awesome for 3 reasons:

1) Spices are easily identifiable and accessible. No more foraging around in the cupboard for spice stored in various sized containers and unlabeled plastic baggies.

2) The wide opening of the containers make it easy to access with measuring spoons. No more trying to jam a tablespoon into one of those skinny McCormik jars, or trying to pour the spice out onto the spoon without dumping the entire contents onto the counter.

3) It looks really cool. Like, expensive cool. I would like to think Julia would be impressed.

So there you have it. Go make one. On the next Swell Stuff for the Kitchen I will be rambling on about my ice cream maker which I am suddenly obsessed over. Take care till then.