Hi Y’all.
A few weeks ago I offered a reduced reservation fee that included a discount for reservees off the price of our Certified Organic No-Soy Pasture Raised Chickens to be harvested this coming year throughout the summer and fall.

As if that wasn’t good enough I am additionally offering freebie heritage breed chickens with your reserved purchase of our meat chickens.

You probably have heard about the destruction of male chicks of egg laying breeds, which are essentially all of the heritage breed chickens.

I routinely “rescue” day old chicks from the hatchery that would be thrown out otherwise and use them to follow our cows on pasture for fly control. These are not big meaty chickens but they are delicious. Young ones would be marginally tender, or chewy, but little meat and okay for grilling or frying. Older ones are tough, but awesome for stock and soup making and other such cooking methods that lend themselves handily to such birds, the same as stewing hens. Either way, tasty and nutritious.

So here’s the deal. There is still a couple of weeks before April Fool’s day, which is the cut-off to get in on the lower reservation fee with a 10% discount for your purchased chickens. For every 3 meat chickens you reserve I will give you, free of charge, a heritage breed chicken for your stock pot. I will make no guarantee as to size or weight or anything else, except that it will be prepared and packaged the same way we do our meat birds. They could be fresh or frozen/ I will give you your chicken the same time you pick up (or take delivery) of your meat birds, unless very early in the season and they are not ready yet in which case I will give them to you later in the season.

I know this will be a bit of a paperwork nightmare for me, at least until I get the system down, but I believe it will be worth it. I’m a little excited about it actually. I just love chickens!

Those of you who have already reserved chickens are automatically included in this.

Price of meat chickens this summer is expected to be $3.95 a pound. Reservations before April Fool’s Day are locked in at that price, plus get a 10% discount on their birds when they pick them up (or take delivery). It is possible that the price will go up before it’s over this year depending on what happens with feed costs, etc. Reservation price is normally $5 per bird, but is reduced to just $3 per bird until April Fool’s Day.

Need I say more?

And yes, we are still taking reservations from repeat beef customers for beef right now, newbies can reserve beef if there is any left beginning May 1st. Pork is still up in the air, I will know more in May how much of that I will have. Venison again this fall. Veal later this year only if we have a broken leg or repeat escapee or some other unexpected such thing. And of course lots of Turkeys this fall, although I recently lost 4 of my breeder turkeys to a domestic dog attack. I don’t understand why people let their dogs run loose. So not so many heritage breed turkeys, but still plenty of cross bred turkeys will be available.

And keep your fingers crossed with me that my help will work out this summer and get the vegetable enterprise under way.

Della Jastrzab
@ Happy Hooves Organic Farm
13054 Ira Station Rd
Martville, NY 13111

All our animals are raised naturally on pasture.
http://www.betterbeef4u.com

Happy Cows Make Better Beef.
Our Cows Smile All The Time.
Certified Organic by Global Organic Alliance
Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

How about that gruesome, attention-getting title? Chef memoirs are all the rage these days, with the Food Network having made chefs cool. The first one for me was Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which I read twice. Gabrielle Hamilton, a notable New York chef and owner of the restaurant Prune, has entered the fray. Just as Bourdain does in his book, Hamilton pulls no punches in describing her life and culinary path. Rather than writing a full review, I’ll just point out a few things about it that may be of interest.

Butter, widely popularized by Julia Child. It's what's for dinner.

Her writing, just as the blurbs claim, is excellent. It’s very much in her own voice, and extremely vivid – so much so that during many passages I could feel stress and exhaustion as she described some of her kitchen life and activities. Later on, her warm feelings and passion spill over as she tells tales about her experiences in Greece and Italy. It’s a roller-coaster ride of incidents and impressions. Bourdain extols her as having written the best chef memoir ever, and his opinion carries weight, as he is an exceptional writer. That said, I find Bourdain’s writing a lot funnier, and I can scarcely think of a more entertaining and incisive essayist and polemicist. But she’s great, make no mistake. Hamilton has an MFA in writing, but having read about her career, it’s hard to imagine her having any time to do that – her energy level must be spectacular.

Unappetizer

Hamilton’s early life is poignant, as she was essentially left by her parents to fend for herself at a certain point. Messed-up family life is part and parcel of many chef’s backgrounds, I gather. As a teenager, just short of legal age, she recounts a lengthy stint as a waitress at the Lone Star Cafe in New York (a place where I saw Larry Coryell play guitar once), where the extra-legal activities and antics are amusing, and even instructive for aspiring bar owners.

Tonight’s Specials

There’s a great anecdote about watching famous chef Andre Soltner make an omelette. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but if you’re a serious chef or real food geek, you’ll love it. I found the most pleasurable parts of the book to be her lyrical chapters about meeting special people and eating scrumptious food in Greece and Italy. I wonder if she recovered some of the missing family feelings in these visits.  Finally, she painted a lucid picture of her views on women in the culinary industry, framed by her appearance on a “great women in the industry” type of panel at the CIA. While some of the women were blithely touting getting into a relationship with your local organic farmers and other such ideal circumstances, Hamilton cringed, thinking that these very young women need to be told that they may be under trial by fire indefinitely, possibly never to see the lofty restaurants and luminaries at the posh top of the food chain. Oh, and as a bonus, they’ll be treated badly because they’re women, and don’t forget the massive student loans!

¡No más!

I confess that as much as I admired her writing and enjoyed parts of the book, I think this will be the last chef memoir I’ll read for awhile. Simply put, I’m burned out, after having visited the CIA (Culinary Institute, not that one) several times, having observed my stepson getting educated there, and having read too many foodie books. I’m thinking of moving on to something lighter, such as combat memoirs. Mario Batali’s blurb on the cover describes how he’ll read this book to his children. Hmmm, I wonder which parts they’ll like the best?  Family abandonment? Drug use? Tremendous hardships that come with a kitchen life? Getting married for a green card? Oh, maybe it’s the tasty omelette!

Hit Me, Beat Me, Make Me Write Bad Paychecks!

The sheer insanity that is running a fancy restaurant no longer appeals to me as a reader. Two parts of Hamilton’s book drove this home. One was where she talked about meeting someone and instantly being able to tell they’re in the business, and how gratifying that is. It reminded me that I am very much an outsider, never would have succeeded in that business, and can’t really relate to  it. Restaurant owners demand loyalty, work attendance even when sick (scary for us diners, no?), and unrelenting hard work, all for crappy pay. (Come to think of it, they’re just like bandleaders!) And as she says in the book, when someone “crosses her” by deigning to quit at a bad time, that person is “dead to me”. Then again, when’s a good time to quit a busy restaurant? Under the stress they live in, with small profit margins and nearly no time for a normal life, it’s understandable that she’d react that way. Yet from the outside, I’m thinking, I can’t believe that they stay as long as they do. It’s cuckoo land, essentially volunteering for abuse.

But anyone who does buy into that lifestyle or who loves the hardcore restaurant life will LOVE this book.

We’d never been in one, not until this morning. I mean, with great coffee in both countries, why? Because we got bored. Having decided that 2012 is the year of trying new things (dancing tango, growing cilantro, eating paleo – sometimes), we finally gave in to the urge and went over to the Tim Hortons on Thompson Road.

It’s all in the marketing, folks. You can sell anything with good marketing. The interior is a pleasant combination of Starbucks colors and Dunkin Donut fast-food display. The worker bees were bored but did their job well. We each ordered a small coffee, Dave ordered an apple fritter and I ordered a cruller.

The coffee had a decent enough aroma in that it smelled like coffee (some diner coffee does not). It was rather dark and rather strong. But without cream it tasted bitter and flat – really quite two-dimensional. With cream it completely lost its connection to anything tasting of coffee. I couldn’t drink more than a few sips.

I tried the cruller. It had that lightness one expects, but it was lacking texture, was actually on the mushy side, and worst of all, it left a strange fatty coating on the inside of my mouth. I couldn’t find the apple in Dave’s apple fritter and it had none of the crunch or dark flavor that one looks for in a fritter. I mean, if you’re going to eat fried food, for goodness’ sake, let it taste like it was fried instead of steamed!

So we did something we haven’t done since the time we ate at El Canelo (we went directly to the Dinosaur to order a second meal, the first was so bad). We dumped what we’d ordered and went to the right place to get exactly what we hoped to find. Cafe Kubal in Eastwood was happy to serve us delicious coffee and the most amazing, melt-in-your-mouth, bursting-with-flavor little macaroons we’ve ever had. These are not the coconut-laden cookies you may be thinking of, but rather the French macaron, a meringue-based sweet that comes in a variety of flavors. We had one lemon and one salted caramel and were more than satisfied.

Next time I want something Canadian, it’s going to be a new friend or a Moosehead beer. Or perhaps a trip to Montreal. It was grand, trying something so wacky. But I learned my lesson. When you know where the best is, why settle for the worst?

Explosive Growth

No, I’m no hater. I’ve always liked Greek yogurt. It’s been available for many years, and its tarter flavor and somewhat different texture make a nice alternative from the typical yogurt you find in a US grocery store. So why has it suddenly exploded? The simple answer is marketing hype. You can scarcely go anywhere without seeing ads for it. And unlike many heavily advertised products, it doesn’t suck. So once people actually become aware of it, they try it and like it.

Raising the temperature of this yogurt too much could cause explosive growth.

Bifidus Schmifidus

And now there’s a massive campaign of ads that tells you of another brand of yogurt will supposedly make you poop your way to happiness, and is even asking the public to video themselves doing exactly that! Jamie Lee, eww???

But that doesn’t fully explain the huge Greek surge. Another reason may be the constant barrage from the media about how dreadful the average US person’s health is, and if Greek yogurt is advertised and perceived as a healthy food, then that should punch up even more sales. But if that’s the case, why hasn’t non-Greek yogurt exploded, too?  (or maybe it has, and just isn’t being constantly pimped like the Greek stuff?)

Zero Sum Gamers

After reading people’s opinions online, I think I may have stumbled upon another key. It seems that many people think that zero-percent fat Greek yogurt tastes better than the non-fat non-Greek kind. Mystery possibly solved!

Unfortunately, this reminds me of when I worked in as a corporate drone in an office. There was a coterie of people who didn’t eat breakfast at home, so when their morning break came along, they’d buy some donuts or pastries and wash them down with, you guessed it, diet soda. I suppose that this way, they got their comfort from eating something fun, while still assuaging some guilt with the supposedly healthy soda. Sheer madness, and watching them do this made me think of tooth decay pain.

Leon’s Getting LARGER!

Moving ahead in time, we have people thinking that they’re doing themselves a favor by eating zero-fat food. It’s true that pounding down mounds of fat isn’t a great idea. A purely whale blubber diet may be not only nutritionally incomplete, but somewhat impractical, and even slightly gross. But zero-fat yogurt isn’t the best implementation of this idea. As Lonnie has written, some dairy fat is actually good for you. Sure, definitely cut down on trans fats. But attempting to eliminate all fats not only leaves you eating food that tastes pretty bad (and often feeling hungry), but there are also some healthy fats that your body needs, such as Omega 3 fatty acids.

Donuts, a popular food whose calories can be negated by mystery chemicals found in diet soda.

My Advice To You Is To Not Start Eating Heavily

Of course, some would take that last sentence to mean that they can now eat 8 pounds of french fries per day. It’s never as simple as all that. Getting healthy and losing weight is a holistic process – activity, diet, sleep, emotions, and many other factors are involved and should be addressed. But advertisers like to make you think that a quick fix will make you healthy – just buy our product, and the pounds magically go away! A very silly and harmful fantasy, but one that has sold products since the beginning of time.

So I say eat the yogurt with fat, whether Greek or not. It’ll taste better, and sorry, 0% fat yogurt will not turn you into a thin hottie. And those stupid Reebok unstable shoes will not make your butt instantly tight, either.

Young woman claims that she lost weight by eating Greek yogurt. In fact she simply put down her barbell while eating.