A few nights ago we hit up TASTE Restaurant at the Seattle Art Museum. Now, normally I am not a fan of restaurants attached to things...museums, hotels, stadia, etc. But I'd read an article on TASTE and knew that they focused on locally raised meats, locally grown produce, and sustainably caught fish. They cultivate relationships with farmers and regularly change their menu to reflect the season. All of this led me to give the restaurant a try, despite its slightly intimidating feel. Now we are regulars. The menu is a bit pricey (although certainly comparable to many other downtown restaurants who do not focus on local products) but we have attended the urban suppers ($12!) and had the three course, $30 menu.
But overall we are regulars at happy hour. It's tough, coming from the Eastside, to make it before 6pm, so we take any chance. They have a superb head bartender in Duncan, who insists people taste the wines and liquors and beers. A better tap list would make TASTE hour of happy even better, since 18 oz of beer can be had for $3, but now that they have Flor de Cana, I shan't complain. Bar food is $6 and so we can make a decent meal at a reasonable price. And we always, always get at least one order of rosemary frites.
The rosemary frites are delicious--crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and nice and salty and fragrant. But (coming back to the beginning of the post)on Thursday there was something just a bit...off. They weren't bad, but they weren't mouthwatering. So we mentioned this to Duncan, and he brought us a new order. Although we wanted it to be just a bad batch, it wasn't--the second order still fell flat.
So Duncan sent out Craig Hetherington, Executive Chef. At first we felt bad because, c'mon, they're just fries. But then we realized we are experts on their frites. But what I was most impressed by was not the customer service--even though it goes above and beyond each time, and this was even further beyond--but the fact that Craig was able to explain to me exactly what he believed to be wrong with the potatoes, and the fact that TASTE is a restaurant that enables him to know this.
The potatoes, you see, had not come from Washington. TASTE gets many of their specialty potatoes from Olson Farms, but the russets typically come from a produce distributor. Still they try and source them from within the state, but the distributor had run short of Washington potatoes. These ones just didn't taste the same.
Silly traveling potatoes. Eat local. Support nearby business, particularly ones that know the names of the small farms from which they obtain their produce. Encourage the connections between the rural and urban economies. Be willing to pay a bit more to know exactly where your food originated. The less it travels, the better it tastes.
(Exceptions made for Belgian beer, sriracha, and coffee)
Showing posts with label buy local. Show all posts
Showing posts with label buy local. Show all posts
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Friday, August 07, 2009
What It Is I'm Doing
Some have wondered--what exactly do you mean, traditional foods? Some have asked, what's the point, where are you going with this?
Well, with all the hustle and bustle surrounding food these days, it seems that sometimes it's difficult to come up with the best choices. It's almost as though everyone's read Michael Pollan, and everyone's seen Food Inc., and for heaven's sake every second commercial is making free use of the word "sustainable." But how many have actually changed their eating habits? It's almost as though we've been oversaturated, and rather than responding to these challenges, we're backing away.
Perhaps "traditional" foods wasn't quite the right title to give this. I don't plan on hunting my own meals, although if presented the opportunity I'd like the chance to kill a chicken. I don't wish to exclude dairy, or beer (dear goodness!) or coffee (double dear goodness!) because those are relatively recent additions to the diet. However, it does mean a conscious decision to decrease white sugar intake, as it's a fairly new phenomenon.
But what I want are meals without cellophane. Keep your plastic and your packagings, please. I don't want it from a box or from a tray. In addition, I don't want things added--none of this "calcium-fortified" or "added iron". And finally, in this age of fat-obssessiveness, I don't want things taken away. My milk is whole (and raw, more on that next week!), my yogurt is whole-milk, my cheese is not low-fat.
Finally, I want my food to be sourced as locally as possible. My garden is thriving, but it's difficult when I spend so much time going back and forth across the lake. Plus, um, it's summer right now. Those tomatoes won't last long. But what about organic? For me, it's better to be local than be organic. Besides the fact that many small, local farmers simply can't afford the cost of certification, I would rather cut down on the environmental costs inherent in trucking in a kiwi (or worse, an apple) from New Zealand.
In general, the concept of this test is to see that if, by eating foods that I cook and combine myself, that are as close to the ways nature intended as possible, if I can shed the excess weight I've carried for years, and to become a healthier person.
To do this I:
*Will eat meat only if I know how it was raised
*Will allow myself only two "quick-purchase" meals per week (I hope to cut this back to one after a few months)
*Will buy as many fruits, veggies, meats, and dairy from farmers markets as possible
*Will buy fruits and veggies in season
*Will seek out recipes that use honey, agave, or other natural sweeteners rather than cane sugar
*Will not consciously consume high fructose corn syrup or genetically modified foods
*Will find ways of using heritage grains, including spelt, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, and kamut
Exception: I will be a gracious guest. If someone cooks for me, or invites me to a party, I will eat what is given to me.
I hope that this helps to clarify what it is that I'm doing. If you have questions, feel free to ask, whether in person, through email, or in the comments. And thanks, thanks so much to all those who have offered support and encouragement, commiseration and advice.
Now I just need a catchy name...
Well, with all the hustle and bustle surrounding food these days, it seems that sometimes it's difficult to come up with the best choices. It's almost as though everyone's read Michael Pollan, and everyone's seen Food Inc., and for heaven's sake every second commercial is making free use of the word "sustainable." But how many have actually changed their eating habits? It's almost as though we've been oversaturated, and rather than responding to these challenges, we're backing away.
Perhaps "traditional" foods wasn't quite the right title to give this. I don't plan on hunting my own meals, although if presented the opportunity I'd like the chance to kill a chicken. I don't wish to exclude dairy, or beer (dear goodness!) or coffee (double dear goodness!) because those are relatively recent additions to the diet. However, it does mean a conscious decision to decrease white sugar intake, as it's a fairly new phenomenon.
But what I want are meals without cellophane. Keep your plastic and your packagings, please. I don't want it from a box or from a tray. In addition, I don't want things added--none of this "calcium-fortified" or "added iron". And finally, in this age of fat-obssessiveness, I don't want things taken away. My milk is whole (and raw, more on that next week!), my yogurt is whole-milk, my cheese is not low-fat.
Finally, I want my food to be sourced as locally as possible. My garden is thriving, but it's difficult when I spend so much time going back and forth across the lake. Plus, um, it's summer right now. Those tomatoes won't last long. But what about organic? For me, it's better to be local than be organic. Besides the fact that many small, local farmers simply can't afford the cost of certification, I would rather cut down on the environmental costs inherent in trucking in a kiwi (or worse, an apple) from New Zealand.
In general, the concept of this test is to see that if, by eating foods that I cook and combine myself, that are as close to the ways nature intended as possible, if I can shed the excess weight I've carried for years, and to become a healthier person.
To do this I:
*Will eat meat only if I know how it was raised
*Will allow myself only two "quick-purchase" meals per week (I hope to cut this back to one after a few months)
*Will buy as many fruits, veggies, meats, and dairy from farmers markets as possible
*Will buy fruits and veggies in season
*Will seek out recipes that use honey, agave, or other natural sweeteners rather than cane sugar
*Will not consciously consume high fructose corn syrup or genetically modified foods
*Will find ways of using heritage grains, including spelt, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, and kamut
Exception: I will be a gracious guest. If someone cooks for me, or invites me to a party, I will eat what is given to me.
I hope that this helps to clarify what it is that I'm doing. If you have questions, feel free to ask, whether in person, through email, or in the comments. And thanks, thanks so much to all those who have offered support and encouragement, commiseration and advice.
Now I just need a catchy name...
Saturday, May 17, 2008
You know the night life is just not for me
I'm back! I have energy! The nausea's gone! There's still pain in my abdomen/pelvis so I'm sure that I'll be seeing quite a few more specialists, but compared to how I felt last week I can handle this pain.
So once again, I've done more on Saturday morning before the city awakes than most do all weekend. First stop, always the market. Veggies! Veggies everywhere! Ok, enough with the exclamation points. Since I'm reading Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food, I decided it's time to try a summer minestrone. The only minestrone I've ever made was a Rachael Ray recipe--not the best example, I've learned, and probably why I hated it. A thirty-minute meal does not lend itself to the process of creating true minestrone, which needs a base, than the veggies that cook for a long time, then the tender veggies. Pasta and beans are cooked separately. For this minestrone I need onion, carrots, a leek, green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, beans and spinach. Save for the beans and the leek, all available at the market--and I hope to find a leek at the neighborhood market. Also from the market today--broccoli, strawberries and pork roast. A side note--Amazon.com's search engine lists How to Cook Everything Vegetarian right under The Art of Simple Food when searching, which is odd when you consider that Alice Waters is by no means a vegetarian, and does not advocate a vegetarian lifestyle, but rather a local and sustainable one.
So it was market, then post office, then home to take the car in. We needed to cross the Industrial Canal into the lower 9th to find someone to pull the door panel off. When approaching, I noticed the bridge looked something like this:
Granted, the boats going through looked a bit more modern, and there was pavement on either side, but the way the bridge rises and appears remains the same. The most interesting part though was that, once I'd fought the panic of not being able to roll down the window on this eighty-degree morning (I figured out the control still functioned while dangling from the panel), I hit the button for classic rock and House of the Rising Sun was on the radio. So here I was, Saturday morning at a well-known NOLA location, listening to lyrics about the city while barges traveled from the lake to the river.
After leaving the car in the capable hands of a man who appeared to have lost almost all of his vision, we were pretty hungry, so it was off to Bywater BBQ, where Craig was shocked that I wasn't having a Bloody Mary and that the Pope was now accepting of aliens. After receiving the royal treatment in the form of $3.95 breakfast, triple berry jam, and concerned questions about my health (probably need to know when I'll be partaking of the $2.50 Bloody Mary again) we walked a couple more blocks to the Bywater Art Market, the best in the city in my obviously un-biased opinion. There we added to our collection of cemetery art with a black and white photo taken on infrared film, which causes greens to show up as bright points of white. Unfortunately Kodak doesn't make this film anymore, since the art (and smell...mmmm) of film photography is clearly dead. But the photo is cool, even if it ignited a debate as to which room is the living room. We have a living room, an open bedroom, a real bedroom, a kitchen, bath and laundry room. How one of those other rooms could be mistaken for the living room is beyond me.
I hope to wander the neighborhood this late afternoon with the camera. I've realized it's about time I share the quirks and wonders of Bywater with my readers.
----------------
Now playing: Brand New - Geurnica
via FoxyTunes
So once again, I've done more on Saturday morning before the city awakes than most do all weekend. First stop, always the market. Veggies! Veggies everywhere! Ok, enough with the exclamation points. Since I'm reading Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food, I decided it's time to try a summer minestrone. The only minestrone I've ever made was a Rachael Ray recipe--not the best example, I've learned, and probably why I hated it. A thirty-minute meal does not lend itself to the process of creating true minestrone, which needs a base, than the veggies that cook for a long time, then the tender veggies. Pasta and beans are cooked separately. For this minestrone I need onion, carrots, a leek, green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, beans and spinach. Save for the beans and the leek, all available at the market--and I hope to find a leek at the neighborhood market. Also from the market today--broccoli, strawberries and pork roast. A side note--Amazon.com's search engine lists How to Cook Everything Vegetarian right under The Art of Simple Food when searching, which is odd when you consider that Alice Waters is by no means a vegetarian, and does not advocate a vegetarian lifestyle, but rather a local and sustainable one.
So it was market, then post office, then home to take the car in. We needed to cross the Industrial Canal into the lower 9th to find someone to pull the door panel off. When approaching, I noticed the bridge looked something like this:
Granted, the boats going through looked a bit more modern, and there was pavement on either side, but the way the bridge rises and appears remains the same. The most interesting part though was that, once I'd fought the panic of not being able to roll down the window on this eighty-degree morning (I figured out the control still functioned while dangling from the panel), I hit the button for classic rock and House of the Rising Sun was on the radio. So here I was, Saturday morning at a well-known NOLA location, listening to lyrics about the city while barges traveled from the lake to the river.
After leaving the car in the capable hands of a man who appeared to have lost almost all of his vision, we were pretty hungry, so it was off to Bywater BBQ, where Craig was shocked that I wasn't having a Bloody Mary and that the Pope was now accepting of aliens. After receiving the royal treatment in the form of $3.95 breakfast, triple berry jam, and concerned questions about my health (probably need to know when I'll be partaking of the $2.50 Bloody Mary again) we walked a couple more blocks to the Bywater Art Market, the best in the city in my obviously un-biased opinion. There we added to our collection of cemetery art with a black and white photo taken on infrared film, which causes greens to show up as bright points of white. Unfortunately Kodak doesn't make this film anymore, since the art (and smell...mmmm) of film photography is clearly dead. But the photo is cool, even if it ignited a debate as to which room is the living room. We have a living room, an open bedroom, a real bedroom, a kitchen, bath and laundry room. How one of those other rooms could be mistaken for the living room is beyond me.
I hope to wander the neighborhood this late afternoon with the camera. I've realized it's about time I share the quirks and wonders of Bywater with my readers.
----------------
Now playing: Brand New - Geurnica
via FoxyTunes
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Slow Down--Where Are You Taking Yourself Now?
I found a heroine.
Every movement needs its hero, and the local food movement has Alice Waters. She founded Chez Panisse in the 1970s and she is also the founder of the Edible Schoolyards program. She is all about local, fresh, being involved with the food. She also recognizes the necessity of atmosphere, about the way a place looks, about hominess, about having a place for people to come together.
She started CP when she was 27. 27! That's a year older than I. So what for me?
The more I read about food, about agriculture, about the environment, the more that I know that this is where my heart is. I know that I want to be part of the movement toward local food, to encourage people to buy from local producers, to realize what it is like to taste something picked a few hours ago or to have an egg that was just hatched this morning. The decrease in biodiversity worries me. The idea of agribusiness in our country shoving out small producers in other nations infuriates me.
So I have that much. I know what I love and and what makes me angry and what makes me passionate. And where do I go from there? Maybe I don't know yet. I know that I want to start a community garden. This city is has such little access to food. It also has so many empty lots. I'm sure it's tough to grow crops in this climate, but there must be something we can do. I know also I want to be involved in writing about this. I feel like I've been so focused on this vague dream of writing a novel when really, my skills lie in expositional writing. I love the research, I love the communication, I love organizing so that someone reads it and gets it.
Where will this all lead me? Again, I don't have to know yet. But I'm tired of it just being an idea in the back of my mind. Since I was little, I wanted to save the world and I wanted to write. I remember writing about the environment, in fact. When, if not now?
There are so many pieces to this. I'm going to have to really think hard about eating local...I pay attention, but sometimes I can't resist the Washington apples or California strawberries (although I'm still laughing about the sign in whole foods that told me that the watsonville strawberries might be damaged by the san diego fires). I need to learn how to keep one plant alive and see if I can do some container gardening. I want to get better at my cooking and learn to pay attention to each individual ingredient. And, of course, I feel this need to tell the world about it...probably starting here in this blog.
----------------
Now playing: Jack's Mannequin - I'm Ready
via FoxyTunes
Every movement needs its hero, and the local food movement has Alice Waters. She founded Chez Panisse in the 1970s and she is also the founder of the Edible Schoolyards program. She is all about local, fresh, being involved with the food. She also recognizes the necessity of atmosphere, about the way a place looks, about hominess, about having a place for people to come together.
She started CP when she was 27. 27! That's a year older than I. So what for me?
The more I read about food, about agriculture, about the environment, the more that I know that this is where my heart is. I know that I want to be part of the movement toward local food, to encourage people to buy from local producers, to realize what it is like to taste something picked a few hours ago or to have an egg that was just hatched this morning. The decrease in biodiversity worries me. The idea of agribusiness in our country shoving out small producers in other nations infuriates me.
So I have that much. I know what I love and and what makes me angry and what makes me passionate. And where do I go from there? Maybe I don't know yet. I know that I want to start a community garden. This city is has such little access to food. It also has so many empty lots. I'm sure it's tough to grow crops in this climate, but there must be something we can do. I know also I want to be involved in writing about this. I feel like I've been so focused on this vague dream of writing a novel when really, my skills lie in expositional writing. I love the research, I love the communication, I love organizing so that someone reads it and gets it.
Where will this all lead me? Again, I don't have to know yet. But I'm tired of it just being an idea in the back of my mind. Since I was little, I wanted to save the world and I wanted to write. I remember writing about the environment, in fact. When, if not now?
There are so many pieces to this. I'm going to have to really think hard about eating local...I pay attention, but sometimes I can't resist the Washington apples or California strawberries (although I'm still laughing about the sign in whole foods that told me that the watsonville strawberries might be damaged by the san diego fires). I need to learn how to keep one plant alive and see if I can do some container gardening. I want to get better at my cooking and learn to pay attention to each individual ingredient. And, of course, I feel this need to tell the world about it...probably starting here in this blog.
----------------
Now playing: Jack's Mannequin - I'm Ready
via FoxyTunes
Monday, October 15, 2007
Distance Rips Us Further and Further Away
So today is Blog Action Day, with the theme centered on raising awareness of issues regarding the environment. It seems appropriate then that I write about something that I'm so passionate about...although I wasn't aware that there's actually a name for it until just a few months ago.
Agroecology: an ecological approach to agriculture that views agricultural areas as ecosystems and is concerned with the ecological impact of agricultural practices (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/agroecology)
Getting closer with...
Agroecology: the science of sustainable agriculture; the methods of agroecology have as their goal achieving sustainability of agricultural systems balanced in all spheres. This includes the socio-economic and the ecological or environmental (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroecology).
And what I find most interesting...
Agroecology: ecological knowledge is used to inform human management of nature for the production of natural products for human use in ways that minimize environmental impacts (http://envs.ucsc.edu/graduate/) because it adds another lens to look through: examine the deeper social processes through which the institutions that structure our social and ecological agendas have been constructed.
Clearly this can be a series of blogs rather than just one--maybe that's the point of this blog action day. So I'll start with one question for you to ponder--from where does the majority of your food come? This is a question that is popping up more and more in the consciousness of people in the US--from articles in the New York Times to best sellers such as The Omnivore's Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Living Locally to the new Buy Local signage being displayed in Whole Foods stores.
Have you noticed? Do you pay attention? When you hit up the produce aisle, do you turn over
the apples to see if they are from Washington or New Zealand, do you refuse to buy a peach when it's from Chile rather than Georgia, does it matter to you if your lettuce travels three thousand miles?
It should. In addition to the fact that the fresher your food is, the better it tastes (don't believe me? Eat peas straight from the vine or pick blackberries on the side of the road in August...do they really compare?), we are sending our food on near-pointless journeys in many cases. Why, in Louisiana, are my peaches coming from California??? In addition to the ridiculous amounts of fuel being used to truck these items across the land, we are also using oil to keep the trucks refrigerated and the storehouses cool.
I'm not saying I'm perfect, by no means. Sometimes I need those Driscoll's strawberries. But the fact is that, for the most part, the less your food has traveled the less impact it will have on the environment. What are some ways to find local foods? Grow it yourself, obviously. Shop at local grocers--they're more likely to carry regional foods (in Louisiana, that's Rouse's). Find your farmer's market. Join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture, you get the freshest produce).
What are you doing to reduce your ecological footprint? Does your mouth know what your foot is doing?
More to come in the next few weeks...
Agroecology: an ecological approach to agriculture that views agricultural areas as ecosystems and is concerned with the ecological impact of agricultural practices (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/agroecology)
Getting closer with...
Agroecology: the science of sustainable agriculture; the methods of agroecology have as their goal achieving sustainability of agricultural systems balanced in all spheres. This includes the socio-economic and the ecological or environmental (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroecology).
And what I find most interesting...
Agroecology: ecological knowledge is used to inform human management of nature for the production of natural products for human use in ways that minimize environmental impacts (http://envs.ucsc.edu/graduate/) because it adds another lens to look through: examine the deeper social processes through which the institutions that structure our social and ecological agendas have been constructed.
Clearly this can be a series of blogs rather than just one--maybe that's the point of this blog action day. So I'll start with one question for you to ponder--from where does the majority of your food come? This is a question that is popping up more and more in the consciousness of people in the US--from articles in the New York Times to best sellers such as The Omnivore's Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Living Locally to the new Buy Local signage being displayed in Whole Foods stores.
Have you noticed? Do you pay attention? When you hit up the produce aisle, do you turn over
the apples to see if they are from Washington or New Zealand, do you refuse to buy a peach when it's from Chile rather than Georgia, does it matter to you if your lettuce travels three thousand miles?It should. In addition to the fact that the fresher your food is, the better it tastes (don't believe me? Eat peas straight from the vine or pick blackberries on the side of the road in August...do they really compare?), we are sending our food on near-pointless journeys in many cases. Why, in Louisiana, are my peaches coming from California??? In addition to the ridiculous amounts of fuel being used to truck these items across the land, we are also using oil to keep the trucks refrigerated and the storehouses cool.
I'm not saying I'm perfect, by no means. Sometimes I need those Driscoll's strawberries. But the fact is that, for the most part, the less your food has traveled the less impact it will have on the environment. What are some ways to find local foods? Grow it yourself, obviously. Shop at local grocers--they're more likely to carry regional foods (in Louisiana, that's Rouse's). Find your farmer's market. Join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture, you get the freshest produce).
What are you doing to reduce your ecological footprint? Does your mouth know what your foot is doing?
More to come in the next few weeks...
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