FoodNerd!

An interesting article on the Walmartization of organics:

“But Michael Pollan, a writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of a book on organic agribusiness, notes in a June 4 article that Wal-Mart’s entry into this new market will almost certainly perpetuate practices that are at odds with the original vision of organic farmers. For example, demand for organic milk has already caused agribusiness companies to apply the tactics of factory farming to organic milk production. Cows are herded into organic feedlots where they never eat grass — just organic grain. Thus their milk satisfies federal standards for the organic label, even though it lacks essential nutritional ingredients, to say nothing of the misery caused the animals.”

Food for thought, as it were. [via our friend Jul at her new blog Veggie Chic]

So last night a bunch of dancers and I went out for Chicago deep-dish pizza, and since I had not yet been to Gino’s (home of the insanely long lines) I went along with the plan, just to see if ALL Chicago deep-dish pizza sucks or just the stuff I’d been having.
Pretty much it all sucks.
But Gino’s is much better than the others. The crust is butterier and drier in texture, almost crumbly — it’s nice not to have it be all doughy, but there’s still way the hell too much of it, and it’s not that tasty. Way too much cheese, pretty decent sauce, and the spinach mushroom pizza has a very nice lightly-creamed spinach topping, if almost zero mushrooms.
It’s fine, it’s not horrible, but I can’t imagine voluntarily going there, forking out absurd amounts of money, waiting in line, and then waiting another hour after ordering to get food ever again. What is the point?

I have been absurdly busy lately, AND i left my digicam cable in Boston, so i have yet to write up all the good stuff from my trip to CA and beyond. So sorry for the lack of posts, y’all. But tonight I had dinner with C for the first time since July, since by some miracle we are both in chicago at the same time. I’ve been reading all kinds of buzz on Schwa, which is just up the street from my place, so because we both needed to watch the season premiere of Lost at 8pm (mildly disappointing, but i suspect only b/c they need to set up a whole season’s worth of mindfuck in 45mins or less), we decided to get a late dinner at Schwa. Yum.
They do fixed menus of either three or nine courses. The 3 course meals appear to be standard sized portions (american style), while the 9 course is a standard haute cuisine parade of tiny plates. We went for the nine, of course, despite the appetizer course of fancy cheeses and Ur-Weisse that went along with Lost.
The entire staff is 4 guys, doing everything from booking reservations to cooking to dishwashing to waiting tables to marinating the enormous tub of beef shortribs we were eyeing from the dining room. It’s a little odd when you walk in off a seedy stretch of Ashland Avenue into what looks like a shuttered storefront, and find yourself in the middle of a tiny dining room, elegantly decorated and half full of diners. It feels like having a fancy dinner in your living room, but once you get past that, I’d say that Schwa can compete with any dining room in the city.
A few of the dishes were a little over-elaborate in my opinion, with an element or two that didn’t work or could just have been left out entirely (the butter-poached lobster with passion fruit puree and potatoes didn’t in any way need a lavender foam, no matter how groovy a lavender foam may be — and no matter how well the lobster and passion fruit work together, which you’d never guess, but they totally do), but as i said to C, that’s pretty much picking nits that in a lesser restaurant i would totally let slide. Everything was well cooked, delicious, and inventive, and we had a fantastic meal. The service was attentive without being formal, and I definitely had the sense of being in a craftsman’s workshop — it reminded me of my brother’s glassblowing studio, if you swapped out the furnace for a cooktop and ever so slightly lowered the volume on the hip hop.
I am a little goofy on wine, since we had a bottle of champagne and a bottle of burgundy, and i have to get up in 7 hours, so i am not going to go into detail about all 9 courses right this second, but let me just mention a few highlights:
turmeric ice cream with date puree
fleur de sel over all the icecreams (i am SO doing this at home)
beef tartare with asian flavors and a quail egg
yuzu syrup on the plate with the trio of beef – tartare, pickled tongue and shortrib
a tiny spoon filled with confit eggplant and pickled trimmings
quail egg ravioli with ricotta and brown butter, at once insanely rich and somehow light
perfect sweetbreads with a melted pool of humboldt fog and a bit of wine-poached rhubarb, apparently local from the market even in october
strawberry foam with berries and salty olive oil ice cream
I think probably i could live without having absolutely everything reduced to a paste or puree smeared on my plate, which is pretty much the way it is at Schwa, but since i have no shame at all i just ate everything with my hands or at the least scooped up all the smears of whatnot with a finger so as to truly appreciate every bit of them. And not one paste or smear was anything less than exquisitely delicious, so i think i forgive them their youthful extravagances. We had a lovely time, and we’ll go back. Stay the course through the annoyance of having to leave voicemail to get a reservation — it’ll be worth it.

I have written on this site before about the goodness to be had at the Caribbean Baking Company on Howard Street between Sheridan and the El. But today I was reminded anew of the tastiest thing yet that i have had there: the jerk chicken patties.
The beef patties are excellent, canonical renditions of spicy ground meat in bright yellow pastry. The curry chicken patties are even better, sweet indian-style curry in a paler yellow pastry, flaky and wonderful. But the jerk chicken, sweet jesus, these things are perfect. Surprisingly spicy, faintly sweet, deeply savory, and in a shatteringly flaky, pale, almost-sweet-but-not-quite pasty shell.that perfectly complements the filling.
If you haven’t already, get yourself there. Yum.

I managed to connect with Cindy from FoodMigration this time out, and we dragged ourselves through rush hour to Milpitas to check out the Chinese Muslim cuisine at Darda Seafood.
Yum.
As you might imagine, Muslim Chinese hail largely from the northern and western parts of China, and the food leans strongly to lamb and wheat. We ordered the thick sesame-scallion bread and the cold ox-tendon terrine, both recommended by the magic article from Gourmet, along with a dish of pan-fried hand cut noodles with lamb that we saw on the table next to us. (Cindy took one for the team and leaned over to ask our neighbors what they were eating — just one of many reasons why she is such a delightful dining companion.) After some consultation with the waitress, who by this time in our ordering had figured out that we were not just a couple of amateurs wanting General Gao’s Chicken, we chose a black cod steamed with salted vegetables and a plate of sauteed pea tendrils with cloves of roasted garlic to round out the dinner.
Everything was delicious. The gamy lambiness made the noodles more interesting than usual, and the noodles themselves were thick and chewy, sparked with bean sprouts, shreds of cabbage & bits of cilantro. The pea tendrils, well, not much need be said about pea tendrils other than yum. The tendon terrine was beautiful, all marbled shades of brown, savory with a bit of five-spice, and just slightly chewy, becoming more yielding as it warmed. The cod was perfectly cooked and tasty, and the bread, oh my god — the smell alone, all yeasty and oniony, is just dreamy.
There’s a ton of other places in this same mall, which as described in the magic article is indeed huge and almost entirely Asian, so if you are in the area, stop by and explore. (The mall itself is tucked into the corner of the junction of the 237 and the 880 freeways, so it’s conveniently accessible to many locations, assuming it’s not rush hour.)

I really wish I lived near a Porridge Place, because the one that I’ve been eating at here in Cupertino is so awesome. Good Chinese food, fast and cheap, and intensely satisfying. You walk in, pick from the steam trays and platters behind the glass counter, and the waitresses bring you your tasty bits along with hot tea and a big tub of steaming rice porridge with cubes of sweet potato floating in it. I will post pictures once I am back home, because I think I managed to forget my download cable. Duh.
I ate there last night, because I’d been in bed all day with a head cold (three cheers for exhaustion!) and really wanted hot comfort food. I got some ground pork in a thin juicy sauce with slivers of mushroom, tasting faintly of ginger & soy, and a pile of mildly garlicky greens, and an extremely savory tea egg. This turned out to be particularly excellent because the liquid from the pork thinned out the rather thick congee and made it just the way I like it, and the greens gave the right note of bright freshness.
I still feel sort of crappy, so I went back again tonight. This time I spied some 1000-year-old eggs with tofu, so I got that, along with some napa cabbage braised with shiitakes & dried shrimp, and a plate of chewy-crunchy salted turnip with spicy red pepper. Then they asked me if I wanted pork sung with my egg-and-tofu, and when I said yes they drowned the bowl with fluffy pork goodness, which made me happy, happy, happy. I just love rice porridge with sweet-salty pork threads dissolved in it, and the spicy turnip & fermented eggs were awesome with it. Delicious. I ate not even half of what I ordered, and I am stuffed to the ears, and the whole works set me back $11 and change. Three people could easily eat on what I ordered, and two would be stuffed, so this is cheap eats for sure.
I am toying with bringing my two coworkers here one night after meetings — there are some scary looking foods (which I am sure are delish) like tiny whole squids or soybeans mixed with tiny silver dried anchovies, but the vast majority of dishes are highly approachable: tofu, sausage, cabbage, green beans, cucumber, ground pork, fish, shrimp.
It looks to me like at least half the patrons get takeaway, to be used as a quickie dinner. Geeky bachelors and young families walk out with a few cardboard cartons of savory prepared dishes and a tub of congee, which beats the hell out of Domino’s Pizza any day. It reminds me of the prepared foods counter at Whole Foods, only better. And if you choose to eat in, it feels more like a Chinese version of tapas, comfort-food style. It’s just awesome, and I will be sad not to have it near me when my work at Apple is done.

I went to dinner last night with coworkers from the San Mateo office of my company, to some unnamed restaurant in San Mateo, and amusingly I found myself walking in the door of Joy Luck Place, the exact same restaurant I ate in the night before only in a different town. On my recommendation we ordered the shrimps in mayo, which were devoured before I got any, which was fine since I was macking down the very excellent sauteed pea pod stems, which were the tenderest I’ve ever had, and some nice tofu/seafood/roasted garlic clay pot, and a smoked glazed sea bass (also with mayo), and some tasty scallops in hot bean sauce with broccoli, among other things. The seafood and vegetable dishes are better than the meat dishes (which are respectable enough), so I would recommend you focus your order toward the fruits of the sea. Again I forgot my camera; I suck.

I am in Cupertino, California, which is a horrifying wasteland of strip malls and concrete, and frankly the circumstances of my arriving here were more than a little frantic, with multiple cell phone calls at the same time and rental car counters without any cars and general mayhem. So it was most gratifying to finally meet up with MissLudmilla for dinner and chow down on some high-quality west coast chinese food.
Which is in and of itself a saga of some magnitude — I’d read an article some years back in one of the food rags about a constellation of fantastically great Chinese restaurants tucked away in the strip malls of Silicon Valley, and at the time I’d thought, damn, I’d really love to eat in some of those restaurants, but when the heck will i ever be in Silicon Valley? Lo and behold, I finally get sent to a client site out here, but I can’t dig up the damn article ANYWHERE. I enlisted my Bay Area food minions, and the power librarians at the Chicago Public Library, and some searches of Google and Epicurious, all to no avail. Finally I went nuclear on the situation and called up the editorial offices of Gourmet Magazine and left a message on their generic voicemail box. Within an hour, the article was on my fax machine. Hot damn.
We chose a strip mall here in Cupertino, since it had a wide selection of options and happened to be right around the corner, a bonus since we were both ravenous and it was already 8pm. After casing the place — and deciding that I need to go to Porridge Place for lunch one of the days I am here for congee, yum — we settled on Joy Luck Place, for two reasons. 1) it was full of chinese people who seemed happy, and 2) it served shrimps with mayonnaise and walnuts, a dish that has fascinated me with its transcendent unlikeliness since I first heard of it, though I’ve never had a chance to try it. (The place also serves Buddha Jumps Over The Wall, but you have to order in advance for that.)
The shrimps were awesome. Big sweet fresh shrimps, coated with mayonnaise, dusted with cornstarch and deep fried. Yum. The walnuts were only lightly sweetened, with a dusty nutty taste to them that was very pleasant, and nice with the shrimps or alone. A completely insane set of ingredients to combine, and yet it totally works. MissLudmilla said it was one of the nicest versions of the dish she’d had, more subtle and less goopily sweet than many, so bonus for us.
We also got some beef in XO sauce with enoki & button mushrooms, which was fine, some mustard green with a bland sauce and some shreds of delicious Yunnan ham, and an appetizer plate of lusciously fatty roast duck with perfectly crisped skin and a pile of slightly sweetened beans of some sort, maybe adzuki. There are all sorts of classic luxury foods on the menu, including a whole section of shark fin dishes, not least of them a $50 soup of shark fin and abalone, and the place did seem to be full of people in the market for celebratory and/or showy dishes — we were totally out of place with our elbows on the table and casual conversation, but it was late enough in the evening that we didn’t cause any trouble, and the staff pretty much started cleaning up around us as we finished up.
The shrimps are fantastic and worth the trip. The boiled spiced peanuts that arrive as amuse bouche are also pretty addictive, so watch out. The rest of the dishes were merely good, but after the wastelands of Chicago’s chinese cuisine, merely good is fine eating indeed.
10893 N Wolfe Road, Cupertino