There is also food in New Orleans...

...it is not only alligators, swamps, giant enormous black grasshoppers, and tangly Spanish moss... Louisiana is also the home to absolutely fantastic food from the Cajun and Creole traditions.  Seafood abounds, of course, with New Orleans being situated near the mouth of the Mississippi River.  Eating in New Orleans is kind of like bird-watching at Cape May - you just can't miss good food (or the migrating birds).  It is just everywhere as long as you stay away from the very few chain restaurants and hotels downtown.  We were mostly in the French Quarter and the Arts and Warehouse district and ate really well.  What we ate?  This!

Mmm, this was fantastic.  Here you have all the goodness of New Orleans food nearly on one plate from Mulate's, a Cajun restaurant.  (= Go there! Eat!) Crawfish tails, stuffed crab, blackened fish, shrimp on a skewer, potato salad, deep-fried octopus, deep-fried oysters, baked potato with cheese, oh and some vegetables in a corner as an afterthought.  This is not veggie heaven, this is seafood heaven, as you can see.  In New Orleans, even the botanists don't care about food plants. I probably ate more oysters in 4 days than I have eaten in the last 4 years during this trip...

This is the sign outside Grand Isle Restaurant and oyster bar.  What is Hog's Head Cheese?  Wikipedia will tell you, and I think I will pass on it after reading about it.  But the oysters were fresh like cauhgt an hour ago at this place! :

"Head cheese is not a cheese but a terrine or meat jelly made with flesh from the head of a calf or pig (sometimes a sheep or cow), and often set in aspic. The parts of the head used varies, but the brain, eyes, and ears are usually removed." (link)

 The late snack oysters we had at Grand Isle. Moist and fresh! So raw that you nearly could feel them wiggle in your mouth. People that don't eat oysters are wimps (I think) and don't realize what amazing thing they are missing. 

At Ernst Cafe we sat outside in 30-degree (Celsius) / 90-degree humid heat and drank cold beer until after midnight.  The whole place was just run by one bartender...

Louisiana has a million hot sauces.  Well, maybe not, but at least a million bottles.  Tabasco is made here. As is Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce, Hog's Breath Hot Sauce, and many other hot sauces with names that can't be written on a family blog. If you ever wondered about the original Tabasco hot sauce - yes, it is kosher and an unopened bottle lasts at least 5 years. More hot sauce information here.

Fried alligator - we just had to order this.  It was good, very moist and tender, white like chicken, doesn't taste like fish, and less stringy than chicken.  But I don't think I would like to live on it for years. On the other hand, I rather eat than be eaten. Each year over 75 000 alligators are captured in Louisiana (90% of them being male) from a population of over 2 million alligator.  Some alligators are called 'Elvis' when they are small, at least if they are kept on boats as pets for tourists. So, we had an Elvis sighting in the form of an alligator - maybe a reincarnation of the real Elvis?

You realize you are in the South (of USA) when you see this magazine at the airport, Garden & Guns.  I have never seen it in the northern parts of the US, but sure, gardening is truly a kind of micro-warfare against deer (8 feet of plastic deerfence and no deer in the garden), Japanese beetles (feromone traps), diseases (water and nutrients, and then whatever dies off is just life), blister beetles (handpick and drown), hawkmoth caterpillars (which I let live, so they can get parasitized and release more larvae-killers), slugs (sigh - get to handpick and drown them), rabbits and groundhogs (keep them out with fencing)... ok, turns out I don't need a gun for my gardening.  The magazine has a strange (for me) mix of shotgun reviews, pie recipes, and anecdotal stories from southern gardens. I understand hunting magazines, but not gardening with guns.

Bacon bits and pieces on the internet

Do you need a new wallet?  Check this one out.

If you just want the flavor, pop a tablet. 

Just want the smell, hang this, or the taste, lick this.

And, if you need to cut some bacon, this would be perfect, right? I want one of these.

Swedish food: Blood pudding

black pudding, originally uploaded by lnairks.

Blood pudding actually have pig blood in it. It is not one of those foods that get a name after how it looks only.  If you grow up with it, then it is not too bad tasting, just unusual.

We had this a lot as children, and it was served in school too - at least once a month for 10 years. And school lunches in Sweden when I grew up had only one dish served, there were no options at all. Blood pudding or nothing. Boiled cod or nothing. Liver patties or nothing. Split pea soup or nothing.  Kids today have no clue how lucky they are! :) {At least the American ones that have cafeterias with options, I don't know how it is in Swedish schools anymore.)

You buy it in big chunks, round or half-round cylindershaped pieces encased in plastic. Cut off the plastic, slice it up about 1/4 inches thin (1 cm), and then fry it in a pan with butter. Quick and then it is done. Serve with lingonberry jam, and a glass of milk, and sometimes with sliced raw cabbage too. Black, red and white food.

I don't miss blood pudding, it is not one of those flavors that you think of as something you absolutely need from Sweden. I could still eat it though (unless it is the brand that puts soggy raisins into the pudding). I don't think many kids have salivated over the thought of blood pudding for lunch, quite the opposite. But it was a good way to take care of all parts of the animal in the old times and I bet it is very nutritious.

Photo: copyright Lars Niklasson on Flickr (he has also many other Swedish things on his Flickr stream)

Swedish food: Falukorv

Inbäddad Falukorv, originally uploaded by Cayene.

In Sweden there is a long, light pink sausage called Falukorv encased in red plastic, and it is commonly used as a major dinner ingredient. It tastes kind of like bologna, and should be cooked before eaten (but I know several weekend campers who gave up trying to light a fire or camping stove and ate it raw without dying from it).

When I grew up we had this sausage made in three versions.
1) you slice it into 1/4 inch slices and panfry it, and serve with mashed potatoes and ketchup.
2) you cut it into 1/4 inch thick sticks and make something called 'sausage stroganoff' with it, including lots of ketchup and cream.
3) you keep it whole, but slice it 2/3rds through and put slices of apples, onions and cheese into the cuts, and then bake in the oven. Ketchup and more cheese is good on top!

Both 1 and 2 were served as lunch food in the public schools.

I don't really miss falukorv here in the US, and for me this is real childhood food. And yes, there was lots of ketchup when I grew up. Next week we will go on to another Swedish childhood food - blood pudding.


Photo 'Inbäddad Falukorv' =Embedded Falu Sausage (copyright Cayene on Flickr).

OK snapshot: Östermalmsmeny

För lilla Fido, hundmeny på Östermalmshallen.
For the little dogs, a menu at the posh Östermalmshallen market in central Stockholm.

Menu translation:
Mager falukorv med mammas köttbullar = lean Falu sausage with Mom's meat balls
Strimlad flaskfile å kycklingfile = Cut up pork tenderloin and chicken tenderloin
Ungnötslever = Calf liver
Mix - MEZA tallrik = mixed plate

Correction and update - this was actually at Djurgården, not Östermalmshalle.  I stand corrected. Still posh, at least parts of it.  And more appropriate,  Djurgården means the Animal Farm.  Really.

The real thing in St Louis

So, I went to a conference in St Louis and while there, apart from being a scientist at a national conference, I also wanted to 1) see the Saint Louis Art Museum, and 2) eat some good barbecue.

For 1, that was easy.  The Sunday morning before things started, me and a friend walked 2 miles (3 km) through their central park in 90-degree heat and high humidity (that is about 30 degrees Celsius for Europeans) to the Art Museum, which is chilled like an icebox.  Rarely has air conditioning felt that good.  But more about the art museum later.  But where to find the best bbq?  My tactic was to ask cab drivers.  They really should now where the best things are.

We took a cab back to the hotel from the art museum, and when asked, the cab driver said "Pappy's is the best, but you have to be there early, they sell out".  So we looked it up, planned out a Pappy's Smokehouse attack, and decided that Wednesday at 5.30 PM was the time to go.  We got everything ready, mainly cameras and appetites, and got a cab from our hotel on Wednesday.  When the cab driver heard our address, she said "Did you call first to make sure they are not sold out of bbq?".  And yes, we had.





We arrived at Pappy's Smokehouse, which you can find based on smell or smoke, your pick.  It looks like any regular place, but when you get inside (through the back door, please), you are met with many tables and one single counter where you order.  It turns out their BBQ is not St Louis style but Memphis (Tennessee)-style, a difference I didn't know about earlier.


So, the first question, what to order?  Nothing was sold out yet (lucky us!). The menu is scribbled with chalk over the ordering counter. Generally speaking there are five choices of barbecued meat (beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and sausage). Then there are the traditional side dishes, baked beans, deep fried corn on the cob, green beans (overcooked as they always are in the South), sweet potato fries, potato salad (lots of mayonnaise), cole slaw, and apple sauce.  Don't ask me about the last one, it makes no sense to me, but must be a traditional thing.

So, I ordered. I got food. I ate.  I shared with my friends. I ate some more.  It was amazing.


Deep fried corn on the cob.  It was a lot better than it sounds.


Baked beans.

Half slab of pork ribs with side dishes.  Mmmm, melting meat in your mouth, and with three different barbecue sauces to add onto them.  Original was best, as it should be.


If you need to prove you have been there, you can buy a Hog Whisperer T-shirt.  That phrase doesn't translate well to Swedish - who would want to be a 'grisviskare' in Sweden?  Nobody. But in America, it is the best thing ever. If you get to St Louis, try to get to this restaurant, it is worth the effort!

If you need a laugh

"the cat ate it", hehehe! (found by PP)

Things that are different from home: cows

cattle in evening light, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

The cattle of Central America have ears like sheep and goats, long hanging things flopping around in the wind. They love to graze in the wetlands, for example in Palo Verde National Park where they are used as cheap grazers to keep weeds at bay.

Food and radioactivity, a good read

There is a very good and clear blogpost on Daily Kos about radioactivity in food, and I recommend reading it if you want to know more.  It also reprinted this excellent description of the difference between being 'exposed' to 'contaminated', from a Vermont brochure:

If you have a manure pile and you are close enough to smell it, you are exposed. If you go across the road to your neighbor’s house you will not expose or contaminate them. If, on the other hand, you also step in the manure, you are now contaminated. If you go across the road to your neighbors’ house without decontaminating your shoe or boot, you will expose your neighbors and probably contaminate their house. It you do contaminate your neighbor’s house, they may also contaminate themselves. 

Radiation is similar. An exposed but uncontaminated person or animal does not pose a risk to other people or animals. Contamination can be detected with radiation meters. External contamination can be removed by vigorous washing with soap and water.

This catastrophe in Japan brings back memories of the Chernobyl accident ('Tjernobyl' in Swedish) in 1986, during my last year of high school in Sweden.  The day or two after it happened me and friends were scheduled to leave for a birding trip to Hungary during spring break, but since we didn't know where the radioactive cloud would land we aimed for southern France and the Camargue delta instead. We had no books, plans, or maps for southern France, but we couldn't risk going to a place that might mean we got radioactive dust on us.  

When we came back to Sweden all cars wheels were checked with Geiger counters at the border, and we found out that the cloud had changed direction and hit the Baltic countries and Scandinavia.  For many years thereafter you could (=should) not each wild mushrooms, berries, and reindeer meat from northern Sweden, due to Cesium 137 contamination.  The reindeers eat the lichens which has accumulated the radioactive particles. 

Once a long while ago...

breakfast, originally uploaded by istolethetv.

...I was in Hilo in Hawaii, and I had to try the local breakfast favorite, loco moco. It is served at every diner and fast food place as THE Hawaiian thing, and it is THE Hawaiian thing, based on American food culture mixed with Japanese. There has been a large historical immigration from Japan to Hawaii.

So, the loco moco - you take some cooked rice and dump it on a plate or in a bowl. Add some kind of rather unhealthy grilled meat on top (SPAM is what I had, you can have sausage or hamburger meat too). Dump some brown gravy on that (for Swedes, that is 'brun sås'). And then one or two fried eggs on top of that. Healthy? Not. Good? Depends. I am not such a spam freak but it was OK.

(This is not my photo, istoletheTV took it, thanks for letting us borrow it from your Flickr account.)

OK snapshot: Julmat (Christmas food)

Homemade sausage is a tradition in our Swedish family, and here are
chorizo and lamb sausage made by OK and EH and friends this past
weekend. Yummmmmmmy! I wish I could be in Sweden and eat it too.

Skrovmål (Nut-fed meat)

 

This is what I discovered outside my work building last Friday - a hawk showing off its rank in the food chain. We are still not sure what hawk species it is, but the prey was a grey squirrel. The secretaries walking out for lunch were aghast, the scientists were amazed, and the students took photos with their cell phones. 

Photo copyright Ilya Raskin, used with permission (with a real good camera, my photos are not this good).

Book review: The dirty life by Kristin Kimball

Another name for this memoir, The Dirty Life by Kristen Kimball, could have been The inconvenient life or The unexpected happiness in a ditch or under a cow belly.  Kristin Kimball is a New York City journalist when she shows up at an organic farm in Pennsylvania to interview the youngish farmer, Mark.  He was too busy running the farm so he put her to work, weeding, to begin with. During the second day she finally managed to get some answers to her questions, and by then she also had her old interest in farming come alive again (she was always interested in food).  

This book describes the development of her passion for farming, and first her relationship and then marriage with Mark, who is a somewhat crazy hippie-like man.  She is brutally honest, funny, and writes eloquently about everything from her mom's appalled face when Mark shows up with a newly slaughtered turkey in a plastic bag (with the neck hanging out) at their first Thanksgiving, to the feeling of warm, good soil that is just waiting for the spade and shovels and plows.

They move away from New York, trying to find some land to farm organically and 'completely', in the sense that they want to be a self-sustained farm that produces everything a family might need year round: grain, sugar (maple syrup and honey), vegetables, milk (and cheese and yogurt), pork, chicken and eggs, beef, sheep for lamb, and so on. That is a lot complex than to farm just one thing (milk cows or corn for example), but also much more rewarding.

They find some land they are allowed to lease in upper New York State and start Essex Farm.  Mark is a true back-to-old-times person, hating any kind of plastic and waste of resources.  They decide to try to do as little as possible with tractors and instead they buy two draft horses, which will help them to plow and weed and transport manure and maple syrup buckets around, you name it. There is a great interview with Kimball here.

The first year they work all the time, live on nearly nothing except on what they can grow and are worried because they are not sure that the neighbors are willing to become members and get everything they need from the farm instead of from the regular grocery store.  But, if you build it they will come. The neighbors, many of them retired farmers from farms that now are abandoned, help them out with sage advice, ancient rusty but important draft horse equipment from old barns, and a hand here and there when needed.  And they start to sign up as members to get part of what is produced at the farm.

Today, 7 years later, the farm has over 100 members and is thriving.  Kristin Kimball wrote her book on early mornings between 4 and 7 in the fire station, before her daughter woke up and the work at the farm started.  I really loved this book, and read it faster than most because it captures you.  Not only is the story both compelling (and sometimes disgusting) and interesting, Kimball's way with words is beautiful, often poetic.  But mixed with a great sense of humor - she never takes herself too seriously, but she also can be very serious at times.

I am not ready to become a farmer with draft horses after this book, but I sure would love to have a farm like this close-by to get great, real, local, handmade food from.  I am so glad Kimball wrote this book because I hope it will inspire both young people to become farmers and conscious eaters and 'cookers', as well as all of us to think about what it is that we really need in our lives.  Flat screen TVs and the latest world news don't seem that important after you have read this book.  A bunch of hay and a sunset and a well-cooked meal is more real.  So, read it.  It is one of the top ten books I have read in 5 years, and I mean it.  So, grade A+, 5, or *****.

[Disclosure: I did not get paid to say anything of this. :)  Better put this in here so I am not like those corrupt and greedy economy professors in the movie Inside Job, which I recommend the whole world to see, but more on that later.]

Some excerpts:

"A farm is a manipulative creature.  There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die.  It's blackmail, really."

About preparing bull testicles for dinner after a slaughter:

"I peeled off a layer of membrane only to find another layer. Maybe a testicle is like an onion, I thought, and if I keep peeling I will end up with nothing.  So I left some of the white and squiggly purple stuff on until I got to slicing them into rounds and discovered that the true interior of a testicle is light brown in color, with a fine granular texture - more prairie uni than prairie oyster, if you ask me.  I tossed the slices in seasoned flour and pan-fried them in butter, and served them for breakfast along with scrambled eggs and toast.  The taste was interesting, not too far from a very fresh sea scallop, which the slices resembled in shape and size."

"My existence, from daybreak to dark, became focused on the assassination of weeds. Before that first year, I'd filed "agriculture," in the card catalog of my head, in the same general place as "nature." As in many things, I was so wrong. Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war."

"It was September, deep harvest season, days of pulling carrots, pulling beets, stacking hundred-pound bags int he root cellars.  Mark scythed the rows of black beans and kidney beans, dry and hard in their brittle pods, and I forked them, stems and all, onto the wagon, which the horses drew slowly down the row."

"The food at harvest season is so right the less is done to it, the better.  Sunday dinners were exercises in simplicity. Green salad, practically naked. Steamed green beans with butter. Beets roasted in a hot oven, sliced and tossed with a whisper of oil, a suggestion of vinegar, a bit of dill on top."

Recent stops on my internet wanderings...

Now you can find out how it is to have a ball: LINK
...or 'knorr': LINK  (the name of that pig appendage is 'knorr' in Swedish, just like the food company). 

New York Times thinks we should all draw. Great article in a new series.  It made me doodle much more coherently than usual today, resulting in little sketches of a gutter, leaves, tree, the end of a lemon, and dragonfly eyes.

Some amazing photos are here. 

And this is for dinner tonight:

(I know, I know, I have posted this photo before, but I love it so much...)

Book review: The United States of Arugula

The book The United States of Arugula: The Sun-dried, cold-pressed, dark-roasted, extra virgin story of the American Food Revolution by David Kamp, is not a book that is easily categorized despite its title, which is longer than the ingredient list to many recipes. It is a documentary story, supposedly very factual, about the chefs, TV kitchen celebrities, cookbook writers, and food journalists of the last ca 100 years in the US. I say supposedly factual, but as we know, the truth is sometimes a very fleeting and subjective thing.

David Kamp writes about James Beard, Julia Child, Alice Waters, MFK Fisher, and all the other famous food people, and spice it up with stories, rumors, and a-friend-of-a-friend-said... He clearly admires many of them, but sometimes he goes for the sensational. Do we really care what somebody did lewdly to a farm animal as a little boy, and who is crazy and who slept with everybody in their kitchen? That part reads more like a gossip magazine and really has nothing to do with the actual food history of America.

The book does describe the food revolution very well , from the frozen TV dinners in the 1950s and 60s to our current fascination and desire for local, pesticide-free, and naturally grown and produced food. I enjoyed the book, but it is a bit too long and could have used some editing to cut out some slow and repetitive parts. Parts of it are based on interviews and the book therefore includes many quotes. He describes the origin of the supermarkets, the celebrity chef phenomenom, free-range meat, microwaves, and the loss of the corner groceries and farmer's markets (now on their way back).

You learn a lot in this book - that the first people to sell Chemex glass coffeemakers (we have one in our kitchen), were the two guys who later started Starbucks. That before Dean and DeLuca opened a little food store in New York City, you could not get balsamic vinegar and sundried tomatoes here. This is how trends and tastes started. Now we take it for granted, but I remember the 1970s in Sweden - there simply was no international food in the supermarkets except for spaghetti. Food has changed so fast, and with the increased international travel and immigration/emigration in the last 20-30 years we are now much more global.

I recently was asked about typical Swedish food, and after thinking about it for a second I said: boiled cod, white sauce with eggs, and boiled peeled potatoes, all flavored with salt and white pepper, maybe if you are lucky also some peas and parsley ('kokt torsk i äggsås' in Swedish). That is what we were served in school sometimes when I grew up, but I don't think many people in Sweden eat that anymore. Then I added meatballs ('köttbullar'), with gravy and lingonberries ('lingonsylt'), more potatoes, meat stews ('kalops', for example), potatoes, meat loaf ('köttfarslimpa'), cabbage, and onions. Really, quite boring even if good, but this is not Swedish food today. I have heard that the two most popular dinners in Sweden are now spaghetti and meat- or tomato sauce (like this!) and pizza, which is similar to common family dinners here in the US. It is the Italian take-over! :) (Those of you that live in Sweden can correct me if you like).

Arugula is ruccola in Swedish (Eruca sativa in Latin), and has become the symbol of elitist food snobbery in the US, at least the Republican Party thinks so. I love another species also called arugula, the Italian 'Rustica' kind (the species is Diplotaxis tenuifolia). We have Rustica growing in our garden as a perennial, self-seeding weed. It is so good, especially with beets. After reading this book I am grateful we have all the food options we have - dinner tonight will be locally raised herb-marinated poissons (young chickens), served maybe with green chili and cilantro polenta produced in Pennsylvania and fresh artichokes from California. Mmmm...

Very good food and very good food things...

Yesterday a very smelly package arrived in the mail - a Tennessee Smoked Ham from Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams, a small company that is recreating the old-fashioned smoked hams without any modern additives. Our ham was 14 months old and weighed about 15 pounds (that is about 7 kilo for us Swedes, so like a 1-year old or so). Heavy! But the smell. Close your eyes (oh well, you are reading, but imagining that you are closing your eyes and open your nostrils). Breath in - suddenly you are in a old smoky log cabin with bacon cooking on the stove, and the smoky smell is not that kind of annoying smoky flavor when you put wet spruce branches on a little fire in the winter and the smoke burns your eyes, but long-slow good smoke from a burning wood that has penetrated everylittle pore in the log walls of the house. You can't buy anything even remotely similar to this in any store around here. We haven't tasted our ham yet, since it is for Christmas Eve dinner ('julskinka' for 'julbordet'), but I am sure it will be heavenly. Thank you Benton's!

The day before Lucia (Dec 13) I made saffron buns ('lussekatter'), typical for Lucia in Sweden. They turned out great!

The beginning of a braised beef dinner from oxtail and short rib pieces, from our local supplier down the street. We bought a quarter of a calf that had fattening himself up over the summer here in the Sourlands, so now we have about 120 lbs (55 kilo) of grassfed, organic lean beef in our freezer for the rest of the year. And it is cheap to buy it this way. And yummy. Tomorrow we are making Cajun-style meatloaf from some of the ground meat.




I have tried to make Tarte Tatin (an upside down French apple cake) three times now, and everytime the apples stick to the pan at the very end. But it tastes great. Here is the beginning, when you slow-cook apples with butter and sugar for hours so they caramelized. Later you put dough on top, cook it in the oven, and then turn it upside down after it has cooled a bit.




One of my most favorite things in our kitchen is the superduper out-foldable pantry PP custom-built. It looks like two doors, but when you open you have shelves on the doors and inside, and the inside shelves fold out too. You can see every little can, pasta box and pepper jar, and all the spices are accessible and just right there when you need them. It is amazing how much food you can store at a little space with this. It is mouse proof too.

"most perfect processed forcemeat stuffed inside of an animal intestine"

For those of you with little or no experience with the Swedish cuisine, I would like to explain the classic 'Falukorv', the main ingredient of a recent post here on the blog. Falukorv is like bologna sausage, but smaller and one of the least expensive meat products (at least when I grew up). It comes as a long straight sausage or tied into a ring, and always in plastic red casing (no intestines here!).

Swedish parents have come up with many ways to enliven this rather-unknown-content meat product. We often cut slits in the ring so the pieces held together at the bottom or sides and then in each slit we stuffed apples or cheese, squirted it all with ketchup and mustard, put it into the oven, baked it, and then ate it. At desperate times when camping I am pretty sure I have seen people eat it raw, but usually it is fried and served with cramy macaroni or mashed potatoes. It is even used in 'korv Stroganoff' - a dish that has nothing to do with the original Stroganoff since this version has tomato sauce, onions, and lots of ketchup in it. Yes, Sweden is a ketchupy nation, but no more than the USA.

The reputation of Falukorv is mixed, to say the least. When I grew up, we had a lot of falukorv, and I remember it fondly, even if the origin of the extremely finely ground meat (etc.) is a bit suspicious at times. You can't buy Falukorv here in the US, not even at IKEA. Falukorv has "Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG)" status in EU, but I am not sure what that really means. That Falukorv can't be made by a German butcher in the US?

Hat tip to Mr. Lebo for the title of this post.

Go a posts below below to see OK's innovative use of Falukorv as a bedding for mozzarella and basil (how was it?).