Whether or not you eat meat, do yourself a favor and visit Green Hills Market at 5933 South Salina Street in Syracuse. That’s just a few blocks south of Route 173 and so worth the trip. It’s local grocery shopping at its best, for at least these two reasons: (more…)
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. (more…)
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.
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.
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.
It’s a lazy Sunday (yeah, right! Just before Christmas!) and I’m not going to write today because Kathrine Gustafson has written what we all need to read: Coke is killing us. Not just Coke, but everything containing high fructose corn syrup. Read the labels, folks, and at least stop killing your kids. I’ll let Katherine take over from here. Her entire post on this is well worth a read.
Well, I must say, we’ve really managed to screw ourselves over in this country food-wise. Left and right there’s tainted meat and salmonella-laced lettuce, BPA-lined cans and chemically enhanced food-like products that will give you “anal oil leakage.”
Now there’s evidence that the reason for our obesity epidemic is that something we consume a lot of — at least 60 pounds a year — is actively damaging our ability to stay healthy. Yes, my friends, apparently high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) alters our body chemistry, causing it to grow more fat cells around vital organs and to spark early stages of diabetes and heart disease.
The problem isn’t just that we consume too much of the corny sweetener — though surely we do — it’s that HFCS actually damages human metabolisms in ways that promote the specific problems we’ve got.
You can read the rest of this, plus some really good comments, at Katherine’s Sustainable Food blog at change.org.
Lonnie and I were very disappointed to find that the Melt Shop suddenly closed. Jennifer was extremely friendly, we enjoyed the food, and best of all, we could walk there. Even the decor was original and fun. It wasn’t entirely clear to us why they closed. I think it may have had something to do with the rent being increased, and if that’s true, I suspect that their profit margin may have been too tight to afford it.
Already, another sandwich shop has moved into that spot. (At least I think that’s what it is – it has looked mostly empty each time I’ve gone by) That location is like a revolving door, I’m afraid – many small restaurants right in a row. You have to wonder why they have the notion that they will succeed where so many others have failed, something I’ve written about elsewhere. For instance, no matter how many pizza joints there are all over, and how many have failed, we’ll always see more – it’s a nearly scientific fact. Apart from most people’s unwillingness to do any market research at all, I imagine that having kitchen equipment there is the deciding factor. Maybe the landlord has no choice but to try to find other aspiring sandwich shop owners – other businesses may find the location to be a bad fit.
“Everybody knows” that this is possibly the best pizza shop in Syracuse. We don’t need to tell you that. Check out the reviews on TripAdvisor or any other food-rating site.
What I never knew, despite years of eating at Cosmo’s, is that, unlike at every other pizza shop I’ve ever called, you are not allowed to call in your pizza ahead of time if you plan to eat it there. I’m guessing a few decades of ill treatment by the local studenti may have something to do with that. But when I’m really, really hungry, the last thing I want to do is drive 15 minutes and then have to wait an additional 20 for a pizza. We eat pizza all over town, and we have never been told that we are “not allowed” to phone in the order ahead of time.
Some years ago, I wandered into the coffee forum at e-gullet and asked for help making the best possible coffee at home without an espresso machine. The answer: get a vacuum coffee pot (otherwise known as a “siphon pot“). This method of making coffee was created by a French woman in the 1840′s for the same reason I’d gone looking: she wanted to make a great cup of coffee for her husband. The pot itself looks like something out of a science lab, as it is basically all glass, even one version of the filter. No plastic to taint your coffee, no paper to filter out any of the flavorful oils. Coffee is infused, not boiled, at just the right temperature. And it’s just a heck of a lot of fun to watch.
The moderator for that coffee forum was Owen O’Neill, and as it turned out, he was living right here in Syracuse! Of course we’ve become friends since that first online conversation, and when I discovered that Origins Cafe in Homer, NY, was actually making siphon coffee, I had to invite him and hubby Dave to go try it out. The only other cafe serving siphon coffee in the northeast, that I’m aware of, is Ray’s Cafe and Tea House in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. We had checked it out last winter and it was everything we’d hoped for. But to find it being made this close to home? Bonanza! (photos on next page)
…to Feature Wine, Food and Beer Tastings at the State Fairgrounds
Event to be held in Syracuse for the first time
SYRACUSE, N.Y. –The 2009 Pride of New York Harvest Fest will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 14, and from noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 15 at the New York State Fairgrounds in Syracuse. More than 100 growers and producers from across the State will offer the public the opportunity to taste and purchase the State’s award-winning wines and beers, as well as a wide variety of food products including sauces and marinades, meats, cheese and ice cream, baked goods, honey and maple products, organic offerings and more.
Dear neighbor,
I must confess, it was I who stole your leaves. Shirley, I came after dusk with a rake and blanket, and a wheelbarrow, the tools of the trade. I checked to see if you were around, but no, you left me to my silent task.
Just as was taking one of the last loads, Mike peered down the street from his front yard and thought to himself, “Hmm! That looks like Lonnie… and she’s stealing Shirley’s leaves!” He came by to assure me that he’d already called the cops. But I guess they had more important things to do. Mike stayed, still in his sock feet, to entertain me with stories of some recent food marvel he’s created, while I kept stealing leaves right underneath his nose.
Sue, Dave and I stole your leaves today. The city crews were out rounding up all the leaves from the sides of the streets. They gathered them in huge piles using large, carbon-spewing earth-moving equipment. I wonder how many of my tax dollars went to pay people to collect leaves that could have been mowed into lawns as mulch.
Recently we were on vacation in the Thousand Islands region in northern New York state. The weather was great, and our base was in Clayton, NY. One sunny day we went on a jaunt to look at antiques and neighboring towns. As we drove along, the car seemed to be buffeted by the wind, which was high that day. But as drove further, it seemed to get worse, and much as we hated to admit it, the car started to hesitate, indicating that the wind wasn’t the problem at all.
We were between towns, not at all in the middle of somewhere, and we began to make agitated calls to information to see if there were any repair shops anywhere near us. We managed to get a couple numbers from the operator. Of course, when dialing information, accuracy suffers somewhat, and though we did scare up some actual people that answered, a look at our map revealed that they weren’t particularly close to us at all.
I just love this story from The Atlantic. We could learn a thing or two from scrappy Vermonters when dealing with big corporations:
In Beer Battle, Internet Beats Goliath
Reminds me of the ridiculous fight our local cafe, Freedom of Espresso, had to fight to keep going when attacked by Federal Express. The cafe started out as Federal Espresso. As if you would go there to actually send a package?! Too bad they didn’t have Facebook and Twitter on their side back then. Still, they did a pretty good job of keeping the essence of their name, and the battle with one more national corporation.
Our son left some of his belongings with a friend from the CIA when he went west. These things finally found their way to our house, via friends whose son is attending the same school, and now we have to send it all to California. His textbooks are full of the stuff we love (including our garlic harvest):
But we’ll send it all out there. All, that is, except for one book:
I’ve been reading this book with its very clear explanations of the techniques and exciting recipes. And sorry, Scott, we just can’t part with it. Winter is coming, it’s the season for braising, and you’re living the good life in Santa Barbara. Nope, we’re not parting with it, not yet. We need to make good use of Grandma Chu’s Belgian Dutch oven (even our cookware is diverse):
What could be easier or make the whole house smell better than a slow-braised chuck roast? The aromatics we used were local onions and our own dragon carrots, parsnips, garlic, rosemary, oregano and parsley.
It doesn’t matter that I started this whole thing “too late” and it finished at 9:30. It takes a total of four hours from start to finish, but the vast majority of that is some very slow oven cooking. The book says it will taste even better after a night in the ‘fridge. We’ll be eating well tomorrow.
My garden progress:
