And, just because

I watched the last half of "The Price is Right" this morning. This is what happens when you get up at 4am--by 11:30 you're ready for a beer and some baseball. Instead, I had seltzer and "The Price is Right". But I digress. In the showcase showdown, Scott made off with some drab Armani, the most pedestrian-looking Gucci luggage available, and a trip to Milan with personal-shopper tour of the fashion houses (and $500 to spend--maybe he can get some shoelaces). There was a semester in college when my schedule was arranged perfectly to allow me to watch TPR every day. I was there for the 5,000th episode, where every prize was a car.

In any event, watching television at 11:45am (and, really, television at all) often exposes a fellow to some bizarre things. I assume the network figures its demographic at this time to be elderly and/or infirm or generally insane/desperate, because nearly every advertisement was for some sort of medicine/medical product/hoodoo claptrap that Will Make Your Life Better. During one commercial break, there was an ad for Singulair, powered chair-scooter things (Medicare May Cover The Cost!!), and yogurt with "clinically-proven" poop-makin' mojo (don't even get me started). But, at the end of the break, there was an ad for Manwich. It featured a variety of people, shot in closeup, eating Manwiches and generally boogying to some cheesy music. At no time did this ad suggest that Manwich would Make Your Life Better. Manwich: It's Just Meat in a Can. It made me smile. What does it mean when this is a breath of fresh air?

And, just because, here's a sloppy joe on a Krispy Kreme.

Springtime brings ominous sounds from the KitchenAid mixer

Today I'm prepping the dough for five different loaves of bread. Tomorrow I'm going to bake and take those loaves to some potential buyers. It seems sensible to start the bread business small: selling a few loaves per week to people I know. I need to find commercial kitchen space before I can sell to the general public, but hope to make that happen soon--there's a farmers' market in the neighborhood that would be a great place to sell bread and make dough. Pun heartily intended.

Perhaps fittingly, just as I am starting to get serious about the bread-making business, our 4.5-quart KitchenAid mixer may be headed for the grave. It's been wobbly for months now, but kneading dough for six loaves today it began making some truly dreadful grinding sounds. It didn't smoke, but the motor casing got pretty hot. Ah well. It had a good run. We should probably replace it with a 60-quart Hobart HL662 (a steal at $14,000!). It can live in the bathroom.

I've spent the ten-to-thirty minute intervals between breadmaking activities today by strolling across the street to the garden plot, which has been showing signs of life. The snow peas are going gangbusters, but so are the weeds. I've been weeding in a somewhat lackadaisical manner, figuring that the weeds will be easier to pull when they're not tiny. Maybe that's a bad idea. In any event, there are definitely peas on the way, and my scallions are sending up tiny shoots as well. The volunteer strawberries take up more space every time I see them, and I can't wait for them to bear fruit so I can A)eat the fruit and B)cut back the plants. I put in the pole beans today, and hope they work out. No sign of any squash or okra plants yet, though. However, given the early success of the peas, I am feeling confident that I will meet my New Year's resolution to grow something and eat it. Yum!

This weekend I participated in a neighborhood-wide cleanup organized by the West Broadway Neighborhood Association. About eighty of us met in the local park where there were dozens of shovels, brooms and rakes. After a brief visit from the mayor (who rolled up in a shiny black hybrid SUV), we broke into teams and set to work cleaning up the streets. Myself and three neighbors started on our own block, sweeping up and bagging leaves and trash, and raking out the planters in the streets. It was surprisingly time-consuming work; one block took the four of us an hour and a half. Some of the planters were layered with heavy piles of decaying matter. In one particularly unfortunate box I uncovered a plaque that said "Award for Keeping Providence Beautiful 1988", which seemed to confirm our estimate for the last time these planters had been cleaned out. I had some leftover watermelon and cantaloupe seeds from my melon patch at the farm, and surreptitiously added a few to each planter. Guerrilla gardening. Aw yeeah.

The Scali Has Landed

My friends, I have been remiss in my posts. But I assure you my absence was productive. You see, I encountered a challenge--a nemesis even--that demanded my full attention. What started as an innocuous-seeming request from a potential customer--develop a recipe for whole wheat scali bread--quickly morphed into a nearly uncontrollable monster. An obsession. A bitter quest. There will be blood. And there was. Blood.

For those of you considering franchising the Chow Rhode Island column for a Boston version, you'll have to put scali bread on your list. Scali bread is a soft, crusty braided white Italian bread heavily encumbered with sesame seeds. Hugely popular in the Boston area, it is particularly good sandwich bread (especially with some Boah's Head cold cuts, motto "It's Gotta Be Boah's Head!"). It seemed easy enough to test a few recipes using whole wheat flour, make a few tweaks, and bada boom.

Er, and, technically, that's what happened. But that doesn't make for good blogging. Blood! I bled for this bread! Back to the melodrama!

I started out with King Arthur Flour's recipe, which uses a weird proto-starter. Something between a biga and pate fermentee (remember your lessons?), this starter didn't seem to add much to the flavor and made mixing the dough a pain. This dough was fairly soft, but rose nicely and was happy to be rolled into the three logs for braiding. At this point, I encountered my first serious problem: I don't know how to braid. I consulted my phalanx of bread books, none of which had any helpful information. The closest thing I could get was from "The Bread Bible", where Rose Berenbaum instructs the reader to start at the center of the braid. Gee, thanks. I eventually arranged the logs into a braid, but couldn't say how. The loaf rose nicely, went into the oven... and quickly flattened out like the nation's GDP. While the flavor was okay, the form was a complete failure.

Working off the assumption that the stiffness of the dough contributes to its eventual holding-togetherness, I tried a different recipe that had similar methods but a much lower hydration percentage. This dough was so stiff our poor Kitchen Aid took a few jabs at it, looked at me, and said "Yeah, um, I'm on my break." Heaving away at the dough by hand, I could see the machine's point. This dough, though containing a huge amount of yeast, barely rose at all. Things were not looking good when I divided it and began shaping the logs. It was stiffer than Al Gore on Pants-Off Dance-Off. By the time I'd gotten the logs into loglike shapes, I was fully prepared to throw the whole thing away, but decided that I could at least use the braiding practice. This time it went much better, since I stopped thinking about the actual convolutions and simply let my lizard brain take over. Lovely braid. Baked: terrible bread. I was cranky. And, bitterly going in to hack off the first slice, the knife slid off the surface of the bread and bit deeply into my index finger. As I stood and bled all over the white bathroom sink, I wondered if I should photograph this macabre nadir of my nascent baking career. I did not.

Instead, I made a real biga. This morning I woke up, found my biga had grown to a perfectly gelatinous state, and mixed a combination of whole wheat and bread flour to the point of tackiness but not actual stickiness. Rose it, shaped it, baked it in a hot oven, and voila.

And it tastes great too.

Broccoli Rabe Pizza

Also known as rapini, broccoli rabe (pronounced, seemingly interchangeably, "rob" or "robbie"), is one of my new obsessions. It's like broccoli, only much more assertive and bitter, and has many dark leaves like kale or spinach or collards. It's great boiled, steamed, sauteed or roasted. Today I made rabe pizza with goat cheese and caramelized onions.

Laura and I make pizza every few weeks, but we almost never apply tomato sauce. Fresh tomatoes, yes, but never red sauce. I generally prefer to infuse a few tablespoons of olive oil with some crushed garlic, red pepper, and herbs, and brush that onto the pizza dough prior to topping and baking. I find it makes for a more crispy and dough-actualized pizza.

Broccoli Rabe Pizza
serves 2

1/3 lb Broccoli Rabe, ends trimmed
1 Medium/large onion, sliced thinly
3 Cloves garlic, put through press
4 Tbsp Olive oil
1/4 Tsp Crushed red pepper
2 Tbsp Chopped oregano, basil, rosemary, cilantro or whatever you have on hand
2oz Crumbled goat cheese (optional)

Preheat oven with stone on middle rack to 550F. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Add rabe and cook for three-five minutes until mostly tender. Remove and place in bowl of ice water to cool. When cool, strain, squeeze gently to dry, and roughly chop.

Meanwhile, heat a splash of oil in large skillet over high heat until shimmering and add the onions along with a healthy pinch of salt. Cook over high heat, turning regularly, until generally wilted, about 90 seconds. Turn heat down to medium-low, add one tablespoon of sugar (your choice) and stir frequently until dark brown, adding a splash of wine or beer if it gets dry, about 20 minutes.

Mix the oil, garlic, crushed pepper, herbs, and a teaspoon of kosher salt in a small bowl. Roll or pat out your pizza dough and place on a sheet pan (or peel) covered with cornmeal. Brush the dough all over with the oil, spread out the onions, then add the rabe and optional goat cheese chunks.

Place or peel into oven and cook for 20 minutes, turning halfway through cooking, until the crust is dark brown and mottled. Remove, slice, eat, clean up, go to bed.

The Rhode Island Accent

The week I moved to Boston there appeared in the soon-to-be dearly departed Boston Globe an article on the Boston accent. The author described the various forms this accent takes, the metro-regional variations. Those wandering R's, fleeing their native words, only to awkwardly attach themselves to foreign bodies, like rebound sex: "lawyer" becomes "lawyah" while "Pedroia" turns to "Pedroier". Like many people, when faced with this bizarre and homely creature, I fell in love.

But the Boston Accent is a slippery thing. Easy to broadly imitate, it's hard to pin down. Even people from the town of Medford can't agree on how it's properly pronounced. Is it "Medfud" or "Mehfud" or even "Medfid"? I needed a Rosetta stone. And that classic catchphrase, "Park the car in Harvard Yard" (which, BTW, you would never be able to do--there is exactly zero parking at, in, or around Harvard) even this old chestnut is riddled with incongruity. While most non-Bostonians would probably give all those A's looong "ah" sounds ("paaaak the caaaaah") it would overlook the fact that most Bostonians would more likely say "aa" as in "cat" for "park", "car", and "yard" but a long "ah" for "Harvard". Getting all this? Or, really, the A's end up being something in between an "ah" and an "aa". My old vocal coach called this vowel migration, and there's a cubic ass-ton of it going around the Hub. I spent eight years in Boston working on that accent, but never was able to nail it down. It was sort of like living in a foreign country, after a few months in the city I started thinking in the accent. I could hear how to pronounce something even if I couldn't quite wrap my mouth around it. I think if I'd stayed for eight more years I'd have it.

So you can imagine the eagerness with which I have approached learning about the Rhode Island accent. Although it's only an hour away from Boston (less than the distance from one end of Memphis to the other), the accents are cousins at best. Maybe even second cousins. There are similarities, sure, the basic structure is the same, but in the RI accent there lies a strong vein of what can only be described as Long Island. Those liminal A's from Boston are often replaced with a harsher, more nasal sound. And the R's are often rendered as I's. It is still very much a work in process, and I plan to report to you, gentle readers, as I uncover more. For one thing, I've learned the best place in Providence to hear the Rhode Island accent in its natural habitat: Ocean State Job Lot (an entire blog post in itself). I overheard some amazing specimens there.

I had a moment of clarity the other day while riding up Reservoir Ave and passed a restaurant called Scramblers. Instantly I heard two voices in my head say that word. The Boston voice said "Scrambluhs". And another voice, a voice I'd never heard before, whispered... "Scramblizz".

I smiled. Oh I've got you now.

Cyclical nature

Spring continues its joyful unfurling. The first sprouts from my hot pepper plants appeared yesterday in their little pots by the window. It was a thrill to see these tiny shoots, the beginning of life. Seeds are amazing.

I planted some of my urban garden last week. I built a little walled bed for my mess-o-mesclun and nasturtium, and put in a few rows of scallion, peas and okra, and a few hills of summer squash and butternut. Later in the season I'll put in tomato seedlings (sungolds, I hope) and kale. Laura has her eye on an unoccupied section of one of the beds for some more flowers and maybe carrots. It was fun to make little furrows with my fingers and lay the seeds in their new homes. I loved seeing all the crazy different shapes and sizes of the seeds. Some were obvious: squash seeds look like the seeds you take out of squash (my lord!), but others were foreign to me. The nasturtium seeds were huge, craggy hailstones, while the scallion seeds were tiny half moons, inky-black. They got stuck in the spaces between my fingers. Soon, hopefully, I'll start to see more little shoots popping up in my garden beds.

We began composting last week. I took an unused municipal trash barrel, hosed it out, and drilled holes all over it. We started it with a few scoops of soil, and a bucket of horse compost, and then started collecting and adding kitchen scraps. I put the barrel in the driveway, on a little patch of gravelly dirt (about as good as we can do at our apartment). We were adding scraps to it on Friday when our neighbor poked his head out the window and asked what we were doing. When we said we were composting, he disappeared, and returned with a bowlful of kitchen scraps. Now all of the neighbors in our and the next building are participating. We're going to need another barrel. It's incredible how much waste we've saved from the landfill after just one week of composting.

Now that I have some little seedlings to care for, I've started a batch of fertilizer tea. My working recipe is this: Take half-full bucket of compost, fill it to the top with water. Let sit for a few days, stirring occasionally. Voila: fertilizer tea. This is my first time using it, but I keep reading and talking to people who swear by the stuff. I'm going to put some in a spray bottle and use it to water my seedlings. It's amazing to think that my kitchen scraps can feed my vegetable garden. Instead of going into a landfill, those onion peels, coffee grounds and eggshells are going to become okra and kale and tomatoes. Life is cool.

Marketing!

The Providence Public Library's edgy new nickname (no doubt to appeal to the young and hip):


Word.

Book Review: Mark Bittman's "Food Matters"

Last year a friend of mine in DC mentioned that he'd been invited to a vegan potluck dinner. Sounded simple enough, but there were a number of stipulations: Aside from bringing a vegan dish to share (naturally), guests were additionally forbidden from wearing any leather or even, bizarrely, carrying cigarettes into the house. It sounded to me like the least fun dinner party ever. I'm not saying that I require dead animal to enjoy myself, but that degree of prohibition almost for its own sake just seems silly--and potentially self-defeating. Nothing makes folks want to do something more than strictly forbidding it. This is one of the reasons that I have generally found veganism to be obnoxious. In my experience, people for whom the choice to eat vegan is less a lifestyle or diet and more an identity, tend to be people who simply don't like food much--but really do like being uppity. Let's call this Veganism. A common argument made by Vegans (and vegetarians) for not eating animal products usually is some version of "But they're so cute with their big brown eyes!" I call this the Big Brown Eyes Fallacy, and it's a stupid argument. Things eating each other is how life works.

So the irony of the fact that I've recently been moving toward largely vegan diet is not lost on me. Why the change of heart? I still love meat, and will still eat meat--specifically the sublime steak-wrapped oysters at Loie Fuller's--but lately I'm thinking about what I eat differently. About the impact of all the animal products, processed carbohydrates, and sugar (specifically: the typical American diet) has been having not only on my body but also my planet. I've been a fan of eating locally for a few years now, blessed as I am with friends who are involved with food and farm issues, but what provided the nudge that has sent me down a road of significant diet change was Mark Bittman's new book, "Food Matters".

One of the great things about having your own blog is that you can make dramatic statements: Everyone in America should read this book. Go to the library, go to Amazon, steal it, I don't care. There have already been many good books about food and the food system by luminaries such as Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, but what really hooked me about "Food Matters" is that it's written by a serious chef and gourmand--a diet book by a man who really loves to eat. I've been a Bittman fan for years; my copy of "How to Cook Everything" is well-thumbed and stained. I read his blog and love his column. So when I first hear him talking on NPR a few months ago about this book, it really spoke to me. I finally picked up a copy a few weeks ago.

"Food Matters" is roughly broken into two sections: A thorough and unflinching description of the American food system and how we got here along with some simple and clear recommendations for what you can do to help yourself and the environment, followed by a set of recipes. Most of the information Bittman covers in the first section I was already familiar with: The gross failure of regulation due to overwhelming influence of industry in policy making. The USDA's perversion of its stated goals. The pernicious effect of marketing. The suppression of real science. Sadly, the story of how we got here in the world of agriculture reads pretty much like the story of America: Public Policy Manipulated to Benefit Private Industry, to the General Detriment of the Population and Environment. Yuck.

Bittman follows this with more specific data about what is happening today. In essence: we're producing too many calories, and way too many empty calories. Factory farming--particularly meat production--contributes hugely to environmental denigration. It takes a massive amount of energy to produce factory farmed meat. A few stats from the book: A steak dinner for four has the same environmental impact as driving an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home. It takes 40 calories of energy to produce one calorie of meat. It's not enough to call our current food system unsustainable, it's unendurable.

That's not even going into the fact that Americans get over seven percent of our total calories from soda (or the fact that it takes 2,200 calories to produce one 12oz can of soda). The things we eat are often packed with sugar and useless calories even when they're supposedly "healthy". Yogurt, for instance, has had more and more sugar in it recently, until it is now basically nutritionally indistinguishable from ice cream. I had a bit of a crisis of faith myself when reading his explanation of simple starches and he pointed out that white flour is nutritionally identical to white sugar. Mind you--I'm trying to become a bread baker.

So we're eating shit, and it's making us sick (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer). It's killing the environment. We can't hope for change from the government, and certainly not from the same industry trying to sell us all that high fructose corn syrup (aside: Bittman makes a lovely rebuttal to those stupid "corn syrup's just the same as sugar!" ads. It's not. It's much worse). We have to make change ourselves. As Pollan says, vote with your fork.

This is where "Food Matters" gets into the good stuff. Bittman lays out a system of eating that, basically, is just "eat less meat, eat more plants". That's pretty much it. But, unlike "diets", the kind of eating that Bittman describes is not based upon strict prohibition. Eat meat, he says, meat is delicious (Bittman is a butter man), but don't eat it every meal, every day, in huge quantities. Cutting out one meal of meat per week makes a difference. Do what works for you. What works for him is: vegan from dawn until dusk, then anything goes. By allowing yourself to continue to eat the things you're used to eating, you put yourself in a much better position for making real and gradual change to the way you look at all food. His recipes are all well-written and clear. And he makes the reader re-think preconceptions about what we eat when. Does breakfast have to involve sugary things? Does dinner require steak? His recipe for wheat berries "cereal" was my gateway drug to this book, and this way of eating.

I've been following a version of this plan for about a week now, and I've already seen changes. I feel different. I'm thinking about food differently. I made wraps the other night, and where just a few weeks ago I would have put chicken in them, instead I roasted some broccoli, sweet potato, and red onion and it was delicious and satisfying. I've even (finally) started buying and cooking dried beans.

There's a great deal more to the book, and once again let me encourage every one of you to read it. "Food Matters" is a book about saving the world, but saving the world through deliciousness.

Faith in your work

The other day I was riding my 1983 Trek 400 singlespeed conversion over to the East Side of Providence. The East Side is the fancy-pants side of town. That's where you'll find RISD and Brown and fancy-pants shopping and folks who have been to Federal Hill "maybe once or twice". It's basically the Cambridge of Providence. Unlike Cambridge, however, the East Side of Providence has a hill. A big, steep, nasty F-ing hill. If you take the wrong approach, as I did, the effect will be less of biking up a hill and more akin to slamming into the side of a hill.

I dragged myself up the street, past throngs of pink-haired art students, cursing my existence. Never cross the river onto Waterman Street on a bicycle. Coming back down the hill I made a similar mistake by taking College Street, which is probably even steeper than Waterman. And, like all good steep streets, it has a stop light at a busy intersection right at the bottom (marking the first time I've ever considered getting off my bike to walk it down a hill). The light was red, and as I shifted my weight as far back as possible, and carefully yet firmly grasped the brakes, I couldn't help but think about how I'd just installed new levers, realigned and adjusted these very brakes upon which my life now depended. It was, if not the only moment, certainly the most stark occasion in which I've placed my life directly into the hands of my work. After a brief moment of panic, I took the zen approach; I know how to adjust brakes, these brakes will stop me. They did.

I've been thinking about that moment of zen recently, as I hunch over my seed pots, willing the pepper seeds to germinate. Am I doing something wrong? There are so many variables. When you're working at a desk, clicking a mouse, there is rarely life in the balance. But I'm trying to help make life in the garden, in these little seed pots. It's easy to overthink things when you don't know what you're doing.

Perhaps I'll stop fretting over the pepper seeds when I sow the outdoor garden later this week. On Sunday I picked up a truck full of composted horse manure from the farm, and it now is lying in a thick layer on top of my plot across the street. I'm going to go rake it in today before it starts raining again, and after a little more landscaping I'll sow my lettuces, peas, and squash. What will happen? I have no clue. But maybe it's best I try and be mindful of that zen moment on College Street--what will happen will happen, I've done my best.



Next up: I review "Food Matters" by Mark Bittman (early returns point to: delicious!)

Barbary

I was riding through the Knightsville neighborhood of Cranston the other day, which naturally got me to thinking about the history of the barber's pole. The history of the barbering profession, which you can find much better explained elsewhere, is fascinating. In a nutshell, barbers were originally tribal healers; evil spirits were thought to enter the body through the hair, and so the practice of cutting the hair was venerated along with its practitioner. Later, neatly-trimmed beards were crucial to success in Athenian society. Fashion trends came and went. In the early centuries of Christianity, the clergy began enlisting barbers to assist in curative bloodletting. In 1163, Pope Alexander decreed that the clergy may no longer practice medicine, thus opening the door for the barbers of the community to assume the central role in caring for the ill. These barber-surgeons not only cut hair, but also bled patients and (bizarrely) practiced dentistry. This seemed to work out great for a few hundred years, until it became apparent that maybe these guys were spreading themselves a little thin. In the mid-1400's there started to be separate schools of surgery, though barbers remained in a position of medical authority until pretty recently.

To the pole. As you've probably guessed, the red-and-white (and sometimes blue) stripes have something to do with blood. The white stripe represents the bandage used to wrap the arm or leg (or whatever) first, and then to dress the wound after the bleeding (that's the red part). So, the next time you pass by a barber's shop, take a second look at that pole. And, if your thoughts turn to the macabre, you're welcome.

Chow Rhode Island Update

I think I turned a corner in my development as a Rhode Islander this weekend. My parents were visiting so I took my father to the Olneyville NY System. We sat at the counter and I ordered us each a hot weenie all the way. They were delicious. It was a beautiful day. Everyone at the joint was in a good mood. With two sodas, the tab came to $6.58. I could get to like this.

As I've been pursuing my Chow Rhode Island mission, I've encountered expected trouble deciding what counts as a Rhode Island-specific foodstuff. Some things, like hot weenies and coffee milk, are pretty obvious. But other things, often pastries of Italian origin, seem harder to categorize. And then there is the issue of local branded food, such as Del's frozen lemonade. Does Del's per se count as a RI food, or frozen lemonade in general? In the course of wrestling with such issues I realized that it's time to make a Chow Rhode Island Master List. I expect this list will change from time to time, but it's a start. Feel free to suggest additions.

Chow Rhode Island

Standards
Hot Wieners
Coffee Milk
Jonnycakes

Clam Group
Stuffies
Clams Casino
RI Clam Chowder (the third kind of clam chowder)
Clam Cakes

Baked Goods
Pizza Strips
Spinach Pies

Branded Foods
Frozen Lemonade - Del's vs. Mr. Lemon
Cabinets - The Awful Awful

Shrouded in Mystery
Dynamites

That last one has me most curious because it seems from my research that the Dynamite is the one delicacy most likely to be made at home. A very unusual local treat in that regard. And, best of all, the recipes I've found look terrifying. So I'm going to attempt to eat all of this stuff. The possible wrench in this plan (aside from heart disease) is that, at one point in my life, I was allergic to clams. It's been well over a decade since I've eaten a single clam. But for you, dear readers, I will face down this nightmare from my past. I will eat quahogs, and I may vomit all night from it. And then, when the dry heaves have left me, I will crawl to my computer and write all about it... on the next installment of Chow Rhode Island.