Is the fix in?

If you are even remotely connected to anybody in Durham, chances are you've been asked to head over to the Food Network's Food Truck site and vote for Only Burger.

So far it's working.

But what does the fine print mean?

*Leader Board rankings and related Food Truck Grand Prize award subject to change based on independent judging organization final tallies at conclusion of Promotion Period.

So if they think the Portland or LA trucks will do better in the ratings, they'll push 'em to the top?

Hmmm.

I have my own thoughts about these kinds of scams, in particular the one Pepsi is running right now where you get to vote on worthy charity projects, but i'll share those at another time. Just remember that your name, email address, and web surfing habits have intrinsic value to many people out there.

Continue reading Is the fix in?

Asheville 'cue?

I'm looking for a barbecue joint in/around the Asheville area capable of catering an event of 100-120 people. I've got a list of 15 or so options that i'll be checking out in the few weeks. Any readers have a personal favorite up that way?

Continue reading Asheville 'cue?

Priceless

Venison carpaccio - $8

Signature cocktail - $10
All being served up by Durham Mayor Bill Bell at Revolution - priceless

Continue reading Priceless

Be you

Just wanted to take a moment to thank Dorian over at the Beyú Caffe for the tour the other night. If he's even 50% successful in realizing his vision for this new coffeehouse, this will be a great addition to downtown culture.

And very nice of him to conduct his renovations without papering over the windows. Don't see that every day.

Continue reading Be you

Let's eat!

Great article on my favorite Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver, in this week's NY Times magazine.

Maybe a trip to West Virginia is in my future.

Continue reading Let's eat!

Spotted what?

6:17pm UK, Tuesday September 08, 2009
"Childish" remarks about top British pudding Spotted Dick has forced a council in Wales to change the name on its menu.

They will now call it "Spotted Richard" or "Sultana Sponge".

The decision was made by canteen staff at Flintshire County Council after they became fed up with immature comments from customers choosing the pudding.

A spokesperson from the council says staff just wanted to put an end to the childish comments they received every time they served Spotted Dick.

But John Midgley, the co-founder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, told Sky News he thinks the council "will be made a laughing-stock of" and that the move will be "completely and utterly counter-productive".

And when Sky News asked food critic Michael Winner about the decision he said he found it "absolutely ridiculous beyond belief".

He added: "Spotted Dick is a classic and lovely name for a traditional British dish."

I'm already on it, chief.

Continue reading Spotted what?

Man v Food

So i go to dinner in Raleigh (sue me), and i come back, and my inbox is full of notes telling me i have to watch Man v Food on the Travel Channel tonight at 10.

Just so long as they don't call Ninth Street "Raleigh-Durham," i'll be happy.

UPDATE: Backyard BBQ and Wimpy's! Good job.

Continue reading Man v Food

Toast

I just wanted to take a minute to note the lovely meal Mrs. D and i had at Toast last night. Kelly and Bill really know what they're doing over there.

Continue reading Toast

Honeydew

Buying melons is always a crap shoot. My techniques, the thump and the sniff, are trustworthy but not completely reliable.

That said, i've picked up three near perfect honeydews in a row the past week that are among the best i've ever eaten. One of my favorite flavors ever, and one of my grandmother's few indulgences when i would spend a summer week or so with her in her Bronx walkup as a small boy. Hot streets, transistor radio playing the WMCA Good Guys, and cool chunks of pale green melon.

Even better than Mr. Softee.

Continue reading Honeydew

Tonic Water Update

So, belated thanks for the tonic water suggestions form a couple of weeks ago.

Here's how things shook out.

I tried the Whole Foods cane sugar sweetened tonic water. Definitely better than Canada Dry or Schweppes. Not as good as the boutique stuff, and certainly not what i'd call "dry," but better than the torpedoes on the supermarket shelf. And $2.50 or so a six pack, which made it pretty attractive.

Obviously, i'm not the only one who thinks so, since it's out of stock at every Whole Foods in the Triangle. No joke. Talked to someone at the Chapel Hill WF yesterday, and he say's it's been two weeks since they got any in, and they have no idea when it will be back in stock.

Southern Season? All they carry is Stirrings. It was discounted down to %5.49 for a 4 pack of 6 oz bottles. That's a bit more than half of what Parker & Otis was getting for the Q Tonic. P&O also selss Stirrings at $6.99 a 4 pack. Oh, yeah, maybe it's because they're closed for inventory, but SS didn't have any on the shelf, anyway. And the stirrings was not much better than the WF; certainly not worth 5 times the price.

I did follow up on the links to powdered cinchona bark (quinine) for making my own tonic water. And guess what? All sources of powdered quinine on line are back ordered. This is definitely getting a bit weird. Could we truly be running out of quinine? I mean, it's not even the first choice for anti-malarial any more.

Any clues?

Continue reading Tonic Water Update

Glad that's settled

I've been hearing almost since i first moved back east in 1993 all of the conflicting claims as to who made the first Brunswick stew.

Take that, Virginia.

Continue reading Glad that's settled

Priorities

North Carolina's pork lobby swings into action, following reports that poor management practices on hog farms in Mexico may have been a contributing factor in the spread of swine flu this spring:

The N.C. Pork Council would prefer you not call it "swine flu."

The industry association for pork producers thinks the colloquial name for the virus being closely monitored by global health officials is inaccurate.

Following the lead of their national organization, they have suggested "North American influenza" — a variant on the other alternative name, "Mexican flu," which has upset some officials from that country.

Officially, the virus is known as H1N1, after two of its proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase.

In an e-mail to Dome, N.C. Pork Council spokeswoman Deborah Johnson said the linkage between pigs and the flu "should have never been made."

Fortunately, the virus does not appear to be as contagious as creeping veganism. (FYI - i had the barbecue at Charlie's on Ninth St. for lunch today. No ill effects so far.)

Continue reading Priorities

Followup on N&O post

Just wanted to note this article in the Guardian, especially in light of yesterday's post about the N&O's execrable reporting on animal issues. The significance of the N&O's failure to actually investigate issues of animal production is heightened, i think, by all this swine flu stuff.

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers.

Emphasis added.

The N&O may have been inadvertently correct. Meat eating "as we know it" may be undergoing some profound changes in the future. But it will come about as a result of the failures of the meat production industry itself, not because a bunch of dirty fucking hippie vegans started lobbying the legislature.

Adding, this story is worth reading too. All the way to the end.

Continue reading Followup on N&O post

Second best news of the week

Old Miami Subs on Hillsborough Rd. west of 15/501. I ate their the night before i closed on my first house in Durham back in 1993.

Hopefully the food will be better than the graphic design.

Continue reading Second best news of the week

Damn

Bye, bye, Pizza Palace.

Continue reading Damn

Grocery wars

Recipe found in a Dannon yogurt container.

First, you get a layered Mexican . . .

Continue reading Grocery wars

Dinner

So Saturday night, Mrs D and i were talking about going out to dinner. We ended up at Kim Son, on Guess Rd., because it meets most of our dining out criteria: tasty food that we wouldn't make at home at a reasonable price, with decent service. With drinks, dessert, and tip we dropped well under 50 bucks.

The proximity of available parking did not figure into our decision at all. Of course, it would be great to have those kinds of dining options located in a part of town where, after dinner, you could walk to some other place for music, coffee, shopping, you know, the things that a downtown has*. Besides parking decks.

=============

*Brightleaf comes close to fitting that bill. In the summertime, at least. But Mt. Fuji doesn't compare to Kim Son.

Continue reading Dinner

Jamie Oliver

My hero.

Maybe if the prepared meals tax passes and drives people away from fast food, he can come to Durham and start an American version of the program.

The 33-year-old chef targeted the town after mothers were pictured shoving burgers and chips through school railings in protest at menus suggested in a previous series, Jamie's School Dinners.

The first episode of his new programme featured an unemployed mother-of-two who fed her children solely on fast food takeaways, and a woman who regularly eats 10 packets of crisps for dinner.

His idea is to teach "pyramid cooking", where each of the eight people he trains will teach two of their friends, and they will do the same until 250,000 have been taught to cook.

Continue reading Jamie Oliver

Calling bullshit

From an N&O article reporting today on a press conference held by opponents of Durham's proposed prepared meals tax:

Restaurant owner Gene Devine also spoke in opposition, along with N.C. Central University law student Norlan Graves, N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association president Paul M. Stone, and Dallas Woodhouse, treasurer of the Durham Citizens group.

"Everything is in a crisis now," said Devine, referring to the national economic situation. "If there's the worst time to do anything, it's now."

The presentation included a display of grocery-store merchandise the opponents said would be subject to the tax, such as a bucket of fried chicken, a sandwich and cupcakes.

"Durham will survive without the tax," said Woodhouse, who organized the Durham opposition as state director of Americans for Prosperity, a national limited-government lobbying organization.

Woodhouse and several other opponents attended the pro-tax kickoff in September. Several proponents were on hand at today's press conference.

Julie Ketner-Rigby of the Museum of Life and Science said census data demonstrate that prepared-food taxes are actually progressive, affecting affluent consumers more than those of lower incomes.

Woodhouse said that claim is "a fundamental mistake. ... Nothing can be more regressive than taxing food."

This of course explains why Mr. Dallas Woodhouse is leading the fight to remove the 2% tax that Durham currently collects when you buy that uncooked chicken at the grocery store to take home and cook it yourself, right?

Except that, you know, he isn't.

What a load of bullshit from opponents to the tax. There's lots of legitimate reasons to oppose the tax. Its regressivity isn't one of them.

Here's some irony for you. I usually partake of the Friday afternoon oyster special at Fishmonger's. When i left for my California vacation, oysters were 5 bucks a dozen on Friday afternoons. When i got back, not only was Fishmonger's sporting a couple of "No To The Meals Tax" placards around the restaurant, but they had managed to raise the price of oysters 40%, to 7 bucks a dozen. Think that will reduce sales as much as taxing me a nickel for each dozen i used to eat, money which will pay for improvements to my community? Look, Gary can charge whatever he wants to for the food he sells in his restaurant. He doesn't even have to use his revenues to "renovate" the bar upstairs, or make the bathrooms a little more sanitary. But damn if i'm going to spend my money on that hypocrite.

UPDATE: And shame on the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People for getting into bed with the reactionary "Americans for Prosperity." Dr. LaVonia Allison's reputation has dropped to a new low in my book. Americans for Prosperity is actively campaigning against Democrats, including Kay Hagan, whom the Committee has endorsed in her Senate run against do-nothing incumbent Liddy Dole. Dr. Allison, as a member of the state executive committee of the Democratic Party, should know better than to give credence to an extreme right-wing group that exalts Ronald Reagan on their website.

Continue reading Calling bullshit

Pizza!

A photo essay for my friend Kevin.













Photos taken at various locations in San Francisco, Oakland, San Carlos, and Ft. Bragg, California.

Continue reading Pizza!