Chus On Chow

Hydrofracking threatens everything we value: our land, our food, our water, our air, our natural environment, our animals and birds, our home values, our communities. Seems unbelievable, which is why people just can’t seem to compute how close it is to destroying New York State.

The following post is not written by me. It’s too well written for that. It’s a complete copy of a post at Ithaca’s Food Web blog.  Read it and weep.

Then DO SOMETHING:

Join the FaceBook group: No Fracking Way!

Sign the petition, write the governor

Copy this link and send this article to everyone you know

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Saturday, November 21, 2009

Farmers speak out about natural gas drilling via hydrofracking

With just a few weeks left for public comment on the NYS environmental impact statement for “horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing,” some farmers are speaking out against the method.  The public comment period ends December 31.

Please click here to read the rest of the article.

Hungry and grumpy and way past my suppertime, I didn’t even check with Dave before going online to see what the new Domino’s pizza was all about. He gets pizza cravings like I get chocolate cravings, so I knew that whatever I ordered would be fine with him.

The website is a great use of Ajax programming, according to Dave. It is bright, colorful and fun to use. I chose the “build your own pizza” option and had a blast. The writing is even funny at times, such as that which appears in the pop-up when you choose shredded Parmesan cheese and it doesn’t actually show up on the image of the pizza:

TRUST US. Sometimes believing is seeing. This is one of those times. Although you can’t see it on your pizza now, we’ll get it right.

I ordered two large pizzas, given that I had a coupon code for a free one (found it by googling it). There are four crust options, and I chose the Hand Tossed and the Crunchy Thin Crust. The others are a deep dish style and a “Brooklyn Style” – thin and foldable. I then created the toppings. Each time I chose a meat or “unmeat” option, it would show up on the image of the pizza. I also chose to put completely different toppings on the two halves of one of the pizzas.

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Just recently I was relaxing and watching the boob tube, when I saw the new Domino’s Pizza ad.  At first I wasn’t sure what was going on.  As I recall, a fellow standing in a professional kitchen (possibly the CEO) was saying that customers had told the Domino’s management that their pizza wasn’t good.  The language he quoted was pretty blunt.  Wow.  He went on to say that they had taken this to heart and changed their recipes (and possibly the ingredients?).  Finally, he asked the viewer to please come in and try the new pizza.  It was hard to believe that this was an ad, with simple candor.  What a concept – no slick sales pitch, and even more amazing, an admission of error by a corporate boss.  Unbelievable!  And refreshing.  Finally somebody who gets it.  Now that I think about it, I wonder if it’s cheaper to make this type of ad than some dazzling, slick, completely phony production.

In the Internet age, with everyone blogging and commenting everywhere, and with news organizations publishing online countless times per day, it’s very hard for a huge business to hide.  If your stuff sucks, people will find out very quickly, whether or not you admit it.  As such, corporate heads can no longer count on preventing negative press from being seen, which they were able to do when distribution of news and information was very tightly controlled.  But it’s still the rare CEO who seems to grasp this.  I suppose that if upper management has been there a long time, and no longer is in touch with rapid changes that make up our modern reality, then you’ll still see the tired, outmoded ad techniques trickling down from their remote ivory tower.  Fortunately, this seems to be changing.

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We just got back from a couple days’ visit to New York City during which our nearly sole focus was to try new places to eat.  Staying with family in SoHo, we found it delightfully easy to fall out of bed and into a restaurant, chocolate shop, specialty grocery store or patisserie.

Our first stop after a long trip with too little caffeine was a Vietnamese restaurant called Bún Soho. With family members, we ordered a couple of bún, a beef salad and duck confit, all really tasty. The coffee showed up slowly (we expect this with Vietnamese coffee) and in a startlingly large quantity, without the little Vietnamese coffee maker sitting on the top. It was very satisfying, but just not the knock-out coffee we get at New Century in Syracuse. I suspect it was not made in the traditional way.  The service, too, was lacking. Seemed it was her first day on the job. All in all, though, the experience was quite nice, and I later experienced a longing for that cup of coffee that was not sated  by the Italian coffee nearby.

Later in the evening, looking for a hot drink to balance out the bitterly cold weather, we wandered into Maribelle chocolate shop and cacao bar. Yes, it’s pricey, but so is most of New York. And yes, it is an experience worth having at least once in your life. We went to the charming cacao bar in the back and ordered one Aztec spicy chocolate and one dark chocolate. I judge all hot chocolate by the chocolate I drank in Bar Odeón in the north of Spain some thirty years ago. It must be thick, very dark, and so rich you have to eat it with a spoon. Maribelle provided exactly that. I’m just sorry we didn’t have time to do it again.

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A couple days ago I sent this email to a friend of ours, Mike Sweetman, the meat manager at Green Hills Farms, “the best little grocery store in America“, according to Inc. Magazine.

Hey, Mike!  Here’s a question for Mr. Meat Manager: Does Green Hills serve up ground beef with ammonia in it?  Read this New York Times article and send me a pithy comment that I can blog.

He was aghast. Actually, his response was unprintable. So I asked him to explain why we can trust the meat at Green Hills. Here’s what he said:

This is the first place I have seen that does NOT use tube beef to grind burger out of. I order cases of Certified Black Angus, Choice grade shoulder clods to grind our 81% burger. We also use… get this… whole top rounds for our 90% and we use prime sirloin tips for our 93%. This is one reason our ground beef cost a little more. As I get along here I realize our prices are a bit more, but for good reason.

I was at the store on the boulevard (I won’t say the name) and it was a mess. The case looked awful, the chicken breast was in the fresh case, but it was frozen. At Green Hills we hand inspect every cut in the morning for date; if they don’t look good we pull ‘em anyway regardless of date. Our beef is all CAB (Certified Angus Beef). We do not sell it as that because our Erie Boulevard competition has a CAB program. They bring you in under the thinking that all of their beef is CAB when only a few cuts are.

So we have good reason to charge a little more for our meat. Not to mention our attention to customer service is second to none. And then you have me, with cooking instruction and my witty sarcastic humor to make your shopping fun. I’m also going to be getting in some all-natural angus beef soon.

Michael Sweetman-Meat Department

That was enough to convince me. As it turns out, unless your grocer is grinding your beef for you, you are likely buying beef parts and scraps that may come together in that “tube beef” from over a dozen different places, even different countries. That means that E. coli has many different pathways into your hamburger.

If you stop in at Green Hills and have a chat with Mike, be sure to mention how you heard of him. Then leave a comment here to tell us about your experience.

Buy local, eat well.