Category Archives: Food & Beverage

New Product Monday

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The rains lately have been tropical-like, without the high heat. The days start warm or warmish, and then the rains come in short, intense downpours. Enough to water the plants and dampen the deckchairs. Afterward, it’s clear and warm again.

I don’t follow the snack-food industry as anything but a consumer, so I didn’t know that Nabisco, as well as Ritz, are brands of Mondelēz International. Mondelēz, eh? A Brazilian behemoth come to North America to buy our brands? A Taiwanese confectioner who picked that name to throw us off? A massive Turkish purveyor of sweets that got its big break when Atatürk expressed admiration for its tulumba and walnut sujuk?

No, Mondelēz company HQ is in Deerfield, Ill., and according to some sources, operates the world’s largest bakery, a whopping 1.8 million-square-foot Nabisco facility in Chicago. Recently we’ve been buying Ritz Toasted Chips because damn, they’re good. They bear the Nabisco logo, complete with the oval and the crux gemina (or antennae?). Everyone likes them, which is no small thing in this house. They’re small, crisp crackers, and exceptionally tasty.

I spent some time with the ingredient panel, trying to figure out what is it that makes them so good. My guess: sugar. And yet, they aren’t sweet. Still, sugar is the fourth ingredient, following flour, soybean oil, and cornstarch. Salt is three more places down the list, though the taste seems more salty than sweet, though not that salty. Must be the balance of sugar, salt and some of the other substances that whip the taste into being. Anyway, it’s a home run for the Mondelēz food technologists, test-kitchen managers, tasters, and so on.

Sorry to say that Santa Cruz ORGANIC lemonade – the label practically screams that at you – is only fair. Coming in a convenient quart-bottle, it’s neither very sweet nor tart, and I think lemonade should tend toward one or the other. I prefer a tart mix myself. It isn’t bad, but it’s more watery than it should be.

The bottle does assure us, however, that Santa Cruz National, which is based in Chico, Calif., is a Green-e certified company that buys enough renewable energy each year to cover its production needs, and “we recycle more than 95% of our waste.” Well, dandy. Now make better lemonade.

Corsicana

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Everything about this picture says Texas: the Collin Street Bakery sign, marking a famed Texas bakery; the Texas flags; the HEB grocery store; the pickup truck driving by; the onion domes off in the distance. Onion domes?

Texas4.25.14 001First a little background. On April 24, 2014, Jay and I drove south on I-45, the main road from Dallas to Houston. About 50 miles south of Dallas is Corsicana, seat of Navarro County, and home of the Collin Street Bakery. I’ve been eating its fruitcakes on and off for years, mostly by mail order, but in 1996 (I think) I passed through town and visited the bakery store.

As the web site notes: “The DeLuxe Texas Fruitcake or Pecan Cake you order today is still baked true to the old-world recipe brought to Corsicana, Texas from Wiesbaden, Germany in 1896 by master baker Gus Weidmann. He and his partner, Tom McElwee, built a lively business in turn-of-the-century Corsicana which included an elegant hotel on the top floor of the bakery.”

The hotel is gone, but you can still buy baked goods at the bakery store, including the signature fruitcake. We bought one to take to our mother, plus some smaller items for more immediate snacking. From the parking lot, we noticed those nearby onion domes, and being curious about onion domes in small-town Texas, we went over for a look. After all, how often do you see Moorish Revival buildings in small-town Texas? Probably more often than I’d think, but anywhere there one was.

It’s the Temple Beth-El, a former synagogue on 15th St. in Corsicana.  A shot from across the street is here; it’s a handsome building.

Like the Collin Street Bakery, Temple Beth-El too dates from the late 19th century. The Jewish community of Corsicana isn’t what it used to be – they probably went to Dallas, like everyone else – so in more recent years, the building’s been a community center overseen by the Navarro County Historical Society.

Now fully in a look-see mood, Jay and I went over to the Navarro County Courthouse grounds. Navarro himself was there. A statue of Jose Antonio Navarro, that is.

The Smithsonian tells us that “the sculpture was commissioned by the Texas Centennial Commission to honor Jose Antonio Navarro (1795-1871), a native Texan lawyer, merchant, and rancher who founded Navarro County and co-created the Republic of Texas. Navarro named the County seat Corsicana after his father’s birthplace, Corsica. While on an expedition to Sante Fe, Navarro was captured by Mexican soldiers and given a life sentence for treason. He escaped in 1845 and upon his return to Texas was elected as a delegate to the Convention which approved the annexation of Texas and drafted the Constitution.”

Nearby Navarro stands “The Call to Arms,” a Confederate memorial. It’s a little unusual, not being a soldier standing at attention or the like.

The statue’s plaque says that it was erected in 1907 by the Navarro Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy “to commemorate the valor and heroism of our Confederate soldiers. It is not in the power of mortals to command success. The Confederate soldier did more – he deserved it.”

History’s written by the victors, indeed.

Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles

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Until recently, I was only dimly aware of chicken & waffles. As a combined meal, that is, apparently known to the Pennsylvania Dutch and as a soul-food specialty in the 20th century. (More about it here.) Not long ago, Lilly started mentioning the combo. Not sure why. Maybe she picked it up from a let’s-go-there-and-eat-something show (e.g., Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.)

Anyway, the notion had lodged in my mind just in time for me to see a listing for Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles, which is at 132 N. East St., right at the eastern edge of downtown Indy. The area’s still mostly small commercial uses and parking lots, though I spotted a couple of apartment complexes being developed nearby.

Once I saw the listing in one of those publications left in hotel rooms, and did a little reading about the place – this is the age of Yelp, after all – I suggested it for Saturday lunch, after we’d finished with the Eiteljorg Museum. I didn’t want to end up at some restaurant that could be anywhere, just because we couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and everyone wanted to eat right now.

Maxine’s is about a 20-minute walk eastward from the museum, across the heart of downtown Indianapolis. Along the way we spotted the statue of Vice President Hendricks, but also another memorial that goes to show the veneration we still have for President Lincoln.

Indy, April 2014It marks the spot where Lincoln stopped to speak, on February 11, 1861, on his way to Washington City to become president. (We should still call it Washington City. Maybe that usage will return if DC wins statehood.)

We arrived at Maxine’s for a late lunch. Good thing, too, because I’ll bet the place gets really crowded on Saturday morning and into the early afternoon. As it was, it was mostly full. According to a sign on the wall, and its web site as well, the place only dates from 2007, founded by the children and grandchildren of Ollie and Maxine Bunnell, whose large family had a knack for cooking (Maxine’s regular job was cooking at St. Francis Hospital).

I’m glad that the restaurant survived the recession. Not every venture started in 2007 would be so lucky. But I don’t think luck was the main factor. We all had a variation of chicken & waffles – plain, blueberry and strawberry waffles – and they were terrific. So seemingly simple, so artfully made.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAs you can see, it’s your basic waffle, adorned by three fried chicken wings, with a bit of honey-butter on the side, along with syrup. The combo works. They complement each other. After you’ve eaten some of the sweet waffles, you switch to the mildly spicy chicken, and then back. From beginning to end, not a bad bite in sight. Not even a mediocre one. Whatever soul-food recipes the heirs of Ollie and Maxine have come up with, they’re winners.

Eat Potatoes With Potatoes

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File this under “Learn Something Every Day.” As I was reading a press release today about an environmentally friendly hotel – a green hotel, in commercial real estate parlance – I came across the following: “[It’s the] most environmentally aware hotel that I have ever stayed at – breakfast plates and cutlery made from potatoes…”

Wait, what? Immediately I imagined knives and forks carved out of potatoes. No matter how artfully you did that, I don’t think they would work very well as eating utensils. Of course that’s not what the release meant. PR writers should avoid that kind of unexplained references in passing.

Still, help is only a Googling away, and pretty soon you’re reading about bioplastic cutlery made from potato starch (Spudwear is or was one brand) and other plant-based materials. Been around for the better part of a decade. I had no idea.

A Thousand Words About Pho

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Found a new place for pho not long ago, not far from where we live. Once upon a time, the only place we knew for pho, besides Vietnam itself, was Argyle Street on the North Side of Chicago. But good food tends to spread.

Why go on about it in words when this image will speak for me?

March 2014 phoAh, muy delicioso.

The Day of the Trivet

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More snow last night. Getting a little tiresome, eh? Most of the nation is probably getting tired of the Winter of ’14 and its polar vortices and cancelled flights and icy Southland.

But spring is nigh. I know that because in the mail today I got the first circular of the season advertising better lawns through chemistry. Maxi-Green Lawn Service, or something, promising a lawn as green and monocultured and uninteresting as the surface of a billiard table. It’s a little hard to imagine any kind of lawn under those feet of snow, but I know it’s down there. As usual this year, I’m going to promote biodiversity in my lawn and survival of the fittest for the flora.

Here’s a word you don’t see all that much: trivet. I’m thinking of it because I also got a MoMA catalog in the mail today, as always full of artful bric-a-brac that I don’t order. In includes the Bakus Trivet, by Brazilian designer Tati Guimarães.

“An ideal way to collect and repurpose corks from special occasions,” the catalog says. “This stainless-steel frame becomes a trivet when you add bottle corks atop the 36 bent spikes. (Corks not included.) Made in Spain… $48  MEMBERS  $43.20”

Some cork-collecting friends of mine in college could have used one of these trivets, provided it wasn’t that expensive. They collected corks for some years, and wrote on each cork who was with them when the bottle was opened, and when. As I participated in wine drinking with these lads, my name too ended up on some of the corks, which were kept in a wooden box.

These days it would take a long time for me to accumulate 36 wine-bottle corks. And we don’t need any more trivets, since we have two cast-iron objects that serve that purpose. Still, it seems like a clever little item.

The Almondmilk Carton

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Sunny day today, but that just means that a little snow melts on top of the snow mounds near the streets, then refreezes on the streets, forming hazardous ice sheets. I saw one wide sheet today at the corner of a large street and a side street. Right-turning cars onto the side street risk skidding out of control on the turn – and maybe into a car waiting to make a turn onto the large street.

We’ve gone through a half-gallon (1.89l) of almond milk in a couple of days. A little expensive, but it’s tasty stuff, and probably healthful. But it’s not enough to market it as merely healthful. The container, which is exactly like a milk carton, goes to considerable length to assure buyers of its virtues as a food. It also assures us of its ritual purity.

Or at least the modern equivalent. It is:

FREE OF [caps in the original] dairy, soy, lactose, cholesterol, peanuts, casein, gluten, eggs, saturated fat, and MSG.

All Natural with added Vitamins & Minerals [caps again – though English is not, last time I checked, German].

Made from REAL Almonds.

Vegan.

Made in a Peanut Free Facility [I really want to add a hyphen].

and

This Almondmilk [sic] is made from Almonds that were not genetically modified.

That last one piqued my interest. By golly, I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that no Frankenalmonds have crept into my diet. I checked a little further, and found that the almonds used to make my almond milk are from California.

From there, I looked up the Almond Board of California. A handy Almond Board pdf tells me that there are no fewer than 30 varieties of almonds raised in California, 10 of which account for 70 percent of production.

Always nice to learn something new. The pdf also says, “All California Almonds are developed using traditional methods; genetically modified almond varieties are not planted or available in California.”

The carton, then, was making a virtue of necessity. Strictly speaking, though, “traditional methods” must involve breeding almonds for desirable characteristics over a good many years. A kind of genetic modification, in other words, just as agriculture has done for centuries. Just not the boogeyman kind from modern labs.

Recent Februaries

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Last winter we didn’t get much snow. But it finally did snow in February, in time for me to see downtown Chicago with patches of snow, such as on the fountain in the plaza in front of the Board of Trade Building.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABet it looks exactly like that now. Further along, I snapped a picture of “Flamingo,” a 50-ton steel work by Alexander Calder, which has been standing at Federal Plaza for about 40 years now.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATwo years ago in February, we had some particularly sticky snow one time.

Feb 27 2012 007But we were warm inside and able to enjoy warm food, such as octopus on rice.

Feb 27 2012 008I don’t know that Calder ever did a 50-ft. steel octopus-like form, but it would have been a cool sculpture.

Good Eats

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Over the weekend, some of Lilly’s friends came over for a while, and she made dinner for them and her family as well.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAmong other things, a savory concoction of Italian sausage – both spicy and mild – along with onions, bell peppers, and I forget what else.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAToo bad this blog doesn’t have a smell feature. I guarantee you’d want some of this right now.

Thursday Orts

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No falling snow today, just real cold air. Of course I had to be out in it for a while, including a period spent figuring out why the garage door wasn’t closing. Once I figured it out, it was all too obvious. A chunk of snow had attached itself to the bottom of the door, and when it passed in front of the electric eye, it stopped the door.

Until I thought to visit the Coca-Cola web site itself, I couldn’t find a list of all the seven languages used in the “America the Beautiful” commercial aired during the Super Bowl. The descriptions I saw simply mentioned that most of the languages weren’t English, which seems to have fueled a short-lived tempest in a teapot. I didn’t see the commercial live, or any of the commercials during the game, or the game either.

I caught it on YouTube the next day (the commercial, not the game). A pretty piece of work, even considering that at its heart, its goal is to sell sugar water (or more likely around here, corn syrup water). Where’s that street at 0:35? Looks like a Chinatown, but I can’t tell where. I want to go there and get some noodles.

The languages are English and Spanish, naturally, but the others were impossible for me to pin down just listening: Tagalog, Hebrew, Hindi, Keres (spoken by the Keres Pueblo people), and Senegalese-French. Interesting selection. It didn’t take long before some jokesters created a parody that included the likes of Klingon and Dothraki – which I’d never heard of before, since I’ve missed Game of Thrones entirely.

Another thing I didn’t know, but just found out: as a child, Charles Nelson Reilly attended the circus in Hartford, Conn., on July 6, 1944, the day the big top caught fire and killed over 160 people. As an old man doing his one-man show, Reilly described his escape. Separately, another fellow described his escape.