Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Eating on the cheap(ish)

I was just checking out Chowhound, one of my favorite food-related message boards, when I noticed some people on the South board were talking about the Triangle’s first ever restaurant week.

This is great news. Basically a bunch of restaurants, many of them pricy and decidedly upscale, offer three-course, prix fixe menus for relative bargins. Big cities such as New York and Baltimore have long had restaurant weeks. Nice to see it happen in North Carolina, too, and especially in such a bustling and growing restaurant community as the Triangle. The list of restaurants doesn’t include the Triangle’s poshest places, but if you’re in Raleigh this week, you could make a reservation for a $25 dinner at Vivace, an Italian trattoria or - yeegads - a $15 three-course lunch at South, a Cotton Mill-like New Southern place (I’m reading the menu and sweet potato and Vidalia onion raviolis, or smoked chicken and egg noodles are making me hungry - though they not be an option on the prix fixe). When you think about how much an appetizer, an entree and a dessert add up, it can be a good value. It’s also a great way to try a new restaurant that you might have considered too rich for your blood. You won’t save money or be wowed by exotic ingredients at every participating restaurant (some of them just don’t have upscale or even particularly remarkable menus), but you can.

Triangle Restaurant Week runs through Sunday.

One thing I don’t get: it’s called “Triangle Restaurant Week,” yet the list of participating restaurants is limited to Raleigh. A post on Chowhound from one of the organizers indicated they wanted to start things small, but some of the Triangle’s best restaurants are in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Durham and even little Hillsbourgh. And while I’m on my soap box, I think Triad Restaurant Week has a nice ring to it.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Drink Up!

Beer and wine lovers have a lot of choices coming up in the next week or two.

It’s festival season in Yadkin Valley wine country this month. Salute! The North Carolina Wine Celebration (http://www.salutencwine.com) will be Saturday, May 10 in downtown Winston-Salem.

Elkin will hold the Yadkin Valley Wine Festival (http://www.yvwf.com) on May 17.

And the North Carolina Wine Festival (http://www.ncwinefestival.com) is coming up May 31 at Tanglewood Park in Clemmons.

Salute! will include a workshop and reception the evening of May 9, followed by wine dinners that night at a bunch of downtown Winston-Salem restaurants.

Wine Merchants Gourmet, a wine shop at 1901-B Mooney St. in Winston-Salem, has a couple of special tastings planned.
The Icon of the Andes seminar at 7 p.m. May 8 will give an overview on the wines of Chile, including tastings from Vina Montes winery.
Zinfandel lovers might want to check out the shop’s annual Zinposium — The Ultimate Zinfandel Tasting at 6:30 May 13. Co-owner Jamie Bronk said that this tasting of 25 zins will be the largest zin tasting in the state.
Each of the Wine Merchants events costs $10 each, which includes tastings and hors d’oeuvres — that’s good value for anyone who likes to taste before they buy.
Reservations are required for the Icon of the Andes seminar. People can just show up for Zinposium.
For more information, visit http://www.winemerchantsgourmet.com or call 765-8175.

Last but not least is the Brats and Hops tasting at City Beverage, 915 Burke St. in Winston-Salem.
City Beverage will be giving away bratwurst and samples of 15 to 20 craft brews from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday, May 17.
Also during that time, City Beverage will have homebrewing demonstrations by the Wort Hawgs, a local homebrewing club.
For more information, call 722-2774.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

France vs. North Carolina, Round 2 - Lyon is France’s Lexington, with lots of pig, but better

During my trip to France last month, a cooking instructor and culinary tour guide in Paris warned me about bouchons.

“It’s just that they are a little...too much,” she said, scribbling down the names of other restaurants she liked in Lyon, a city about two hours (via high-speed train) southeast of Paris that is considered the culinary heart of France.

I respect her opinion enormously. I hemmed and hawed about where we were going to eat in Lyon when we were still in Paris. And then I ignored this dear lady’s advice.

And I’m glad we did.

I love bouchons. Slightly kitschy, time-worn and definitely a bit of a tourist attraction, they are small, casual restaurants unique to the Lyon region. With red and white-checked napkins, paper-covered tables and carafes of local young wines with a rubber wrapped around the neck to catch the drips, their dining rooms are simple and homey. Their menus are predictable and hearty and heavy on pig. It’s like Lexington, but with more porky choices, and often better ones.

Based on discussion on eGullet.com and other recommendations I’ve found hunting around on the web, we made reservations at Cafe des Federations for 8 p.m. on a Monday. When we showed up, the restaurant was nearly empty and we worried that perhaps we had made a mistake (echoing restaurants are never much fun).

We were so wrong.

By the end of the night (maybe 11 pm? a meal takes that long here, and I didn’t see a single table turn), Cafe des Federations’ two narrow dining rooms were happy and loud, crowded with families, friends and businessmen each on their third bottle of Beaujolais and trying to make a dent in the enormous platter of five cheeses that were on each table.

Meals are prix fixe here with a choice of typical Lyonnais fare for entrees - tablier de sapeur (breaded and fried tripe), chicken cooked in vinegar, sausage in wine. Sorry, vegetarians.

We choose pike quenelles, an oval-shaped dumpling beloved in Lyon, with creamy crayfish sauce, and my favorite, boudin aux pommes (blood sausage with apples - the sausage was crackly on the outside, almost creamy within, and a delicious foil to the fruit). They came served with a side of friendly attitude. At one point, a quiet teenage girl at a table across from ours timidly asked a waitress what was in the little pot set before her. The waitress sighed elaborately. Then she pushed her way onto the girl’s chair, sitting down and calling “carrot, potato, potato, carrot” as she pointed at each vegetable in turn. Each and every one. It’s the kind of behavior that would have had my eyes rolling in back of my head at a restaurant in America. Here, it was just part of the bouchon fun and the feistiness.

And oh, boy, did my middle and high school French miraculously come back here. No way was I not going to try to speak French with that waitress. I didn’t want a tongue-lashing. I also wanted that cheese. Thank you, Mlle. Stumpf of Carrington Middle School, circa 1992!

Entrees and desserts aside, the rest of the dinner prix fixe at Cafe des Federations is about the same for everyone, a parade of oeufs en meurette (poached eggs in beef broth and red wine), a salad of frisee, lardons (basically, thick bacon), soft-cooked eggs and craggy croutons; tiny green lentils spiked with Dijon mustard and shallots; cornichons, rosette (a local cured pork sausage), that cheese platter. It began with grattons (pork cracklings) and ended with chocolate mousse. We were groaning. We were in pain. In retrospective, I got too greedy with the lentils. I should have paced myself.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

The land of frozen custard

Two things have me thinking of Indiana this week. One is of course the impending Democratic primary on May 6. News reports have North Carolina and Indiana (both of which have primaries next week) linked in a way that almost makes them sound like a engaged couple ready to show up at the altar Tuesday.

The second is today’s review in relish of Kernel Kustard, a modern, shiny version of vintage walk-up frozen custard stands. Their neon signs are vivid in my memory.

Obama in Indiana:

Clinton in Indiana:

Frozen custard in Winston-Salem:

My mom is from northwestern Indiana, an unbroken swath of openness so big and wide it almost made me hurt as a kid. On visits to my grandparents’ farm, I was always astonished by how flat everything was (until I spent one summer during college in Iowa). You could stand among the blackberry bushes there and see two or three thunderstorms going on at the same time miles away, miles from each other. The same thing happened with firework displays on the Fourth of July, except the lightning was man-made.

Those summer visits tasted of raspberries and blackberries, tomatoes, and corn-on-the-cob picked from a nearby field seconds before it was dropped in a pot of roiling water.

And it was Lindy Freeze, a tiny little frozen custard shack in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Linden, population 700, not far from my grandparents’ farm. There were other stands in nearby Lafayette and its twin city, West Lafayette, but Lindy Freeze is the one I remember going to the most. We licked our cones as we sat on picnic tables outside or in the neighboring park.

It’s hard to find frozen custard outside of the Midwest. It’s similar to ice cream (but don’t you dare call it that, or you might incite violence among normally mild-mannered Midwesterners) but usually denser, creamier and served at a higher temperature, frozen custard has the texture of a meltier gelato. You have to eat it fast, especially if you are outside (which I think of course tastes better than eating it in some chilly air-conditioned dining room).

Kernel Kustard’s frozen custard stands up to the dessert of my memory, but I definitely prefer the chocolate. I think the vanilla’s too sweet and not true vanilla-y enough.

The primary will be over Tuesday (though who knows if that will decide anything). We have an entire summer of prime frozen custard weather in front of us.

Addendum: Michael Hastings just clued me into Kohl’s Frozen Custard in Wrightsville Beach. I mentioned in today’s review that I hadn’t ever seen a frozen custard stand in NC, and it’s truly not a pervasive part of our culture like it is in the Corn Belt. But CustardList.com also points to a handful of stands in Asheville, Charlotte, Cary and Raleigh. This has got to be the work of transplants...

Friday, April 25, 2008

Food Rationing in the U.S.?

An interesting report by Reuters news service this week shone a light on the global food world we live in.
The shocking news is that Sam’s Club is limiting purchases of Basmati, Jasmine and long-grain white rice to four bags a customer per visit.

The “per visit” part is a big loophole, but this still sounds kind of crazy in the cornucopia culture of America.

Costco, like Sam’s a seller of bulk food, also announced limits on rice purchases.

The cause of such a move is complicated, but, in essence, demand and prices for imported rice is going through the roof this year. Rice prices are up 68 percent since January.

The global demand for authentic Jasmine rice from Thailand or Basmati rice from India was moderate until not many years ago. But demand has grown a lot , and recent poor yields in that part of the world have caused shortages and all kinds of havoc.

Throw in an all-around spike in world food prices caused by competition with biofuels, market speculation and skyrocketing oil prices, and things get hairy. People have been rioting in the streets in such countries as Pakistan and Haiti over all this.

Also fueling the fire is that exporters in such countries as India and Vietnam are keeping more rice at home to control prices there, a move that just ratchets international demand up even more.

And all of this trickles down to the local Sam’s Club and Costco. Can you believe it?

Part of Sam’s Club’s and Costco’s moves have to do with the fact that people buy rice in bulk there, and store officials apparently have noticed people buying even greater quantities to save a few bucks before prices go up.

The sad, or funny, part of all this is that supplies of U.S. rice are plentiful — and cheaper. Some of us may be settling for “Texmati” — a Texas-grown approximation of Basmati — the next time we want to impress our friends with an “authentic” Indian meal.

(The above photo from The Associated Press shows rice that the Philippine government is preparing to distribute to the poor.)

Thursday, April 24, 2008

France vs. North Carolina, Round 1 - the Baguette Battle

I realize this going to get annoying, this starting many a sentence with “In France...” I’ve been doing it a lot lately. I know it’s obnoxious.

But truly, see if you don’t spend nearly two weeks roaming around any country and see if it doesn’t affect you in deep ways. Ideally, we would have been there longer, but, alas, my husband and I have jobs and dogs and graduate school to come back to. We stayed as long as we could.

While it is nice not living out of a suitcase, one of the many things I miss is the daily ritual of buying a baguette (along with high-speed trains and superb public transportation, three-course prix fixe dinners that start with an kir as an aperitif and end with cheese, and yes, really polite people even as they push to get on the Metro). At a certain point of the day - as people make their way home from work, perhaps - about every third person you see on the subway or the bus or the street has a baguette in hand. It’s also commonplace to spot people munching on the end of their baguette before they get home. The French don’t generally snack on the street - tearing off the end of a baguette seems to be an exception. Often, there’s no wrapping except for a thin piece of paper around the middle (that’s where you hold it). The French really don’t seem to worry about germs as much as Americans do. And they’re not throwing away another piece of trash when they get the bread home. There’s no way it lasts much beyond a day anyway. A good baguette is ephemeral. It wilts after about 24 hours.

I probably had at least a little baguette each day I was in France, and not all of them were good. Some were fantastic. But some were distinctly disappointing, with a wan crust and vaguely chemical-tasting interior. That’s a big non, non.

We don’t have high-speed trains that run through Winston-Salem (such a shame). But, we do have some good baguettes, and specifically those from Ollie’s Bakery (shown above). They have a nice chew and tug to them, and a distinct tang, and a lovely burnished, crunchy crust. I ate some with week with simple lunches of leftover roast chicken and salad greens with homemade vinaigrettes, and thin slices of Comte. Farther afield, I think the baguettes from Weaver Street Market in Carrboro are mighty fine. Whenever I am passing through, I like to buy a couple and throw them in the freezer. And baguettes from both places stand up to some of the best bread I had in France.

We do pay more for them, though. The Ollie’s baguette I bought this week came close to $2. In France, the idea of a 1 euro (= about $1.57 today) baguette seems to horrify some people, as if they are somehow entitled to them cheaply just for being French. Which I can’t argue with.

Oh, and a bit of French table etiquette: the French never - jamais - place a slice of bread on their plate as they eat. Perhaps in fine restaurants there are bread plates. But the table seems to work for the French most of the time, in an indefinite location somewhere between their wine glass and the edge of their plate. Wiping your plate squeaky clean with bread is strongly encouraged.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Multifunctionality and the Family Farm

There’s an interesting story on farming in the April issue of Gourmet. The story in general is about the federal Farm Bill and how it could support more innovation and conservation.

A sidebar titled “Analyze This” gathers a handful of telling facts, comparing Walworth County, S.D., and a five-county area in New York (Columbia, Ulster, Dutchess, Albany and Green counties), which I quote here:
-- Both regions have roughly 450,000 acres in agricultural production (just under half of Walworth County’s agricultural land is pasture).
-- Walworth County supports 322 farms. The five-county region of New York supports more than 2,500 farms.
-- In Walworth, the average size of a farm is around 1,500 acres. In the five counties, the average size is around 175 acres.
-- In 2002, Walworth generated $30,600,000 in market value for its agricultural products. The five-county area generated over $152,000,000 — five times more.
-- Between 2003 and 2005, the 2,500 farms in the five-county area received just over $5 million in government commodity payments. During the same period, the 300-odd farms in Walworth received $10.7 million, more than twice as much.

I think the main point the story’s author, Sam Hurst, is making here is that the government is paying a lot more to an area, Walworth County, that doesn’t generate as much money per acre. Another way of saying this is that Walworth isn’t giving the government a good return on its money, or, worse, is wasting taxpayer dollars.

But another point in these numbers is that it’s not the size of the farm, it’s how you use it.

The article talks about “multifunctionality” in farming, with diverse, sometimes niche crops.

I got wind of this in 2003 when I wrote about how some area farms were selling directly to such restaurants as Lucky 32 and Fabian’s.

When a farmer becomes a direct marketer to restaurants, or even consumers, his or her whole business model changes. Then the farmer is not just the farmer, but the salesman, middleman, delivery man, everything.

A curious thing happens when a farmer does this. Suddenly the farmer is able to make a living off just a few acres of carefully chosen crops instead of the hundreds of acres needed when growing a single crop and selling it wholesale to some corporation. In other words, starts looking a lot more attractive as a career choice.

This new business model is hard for many traditional farmers to get their head around. You’re telling me I can make the same money off three acres of heirloom tomatoes and specialty greens as 100 acres of soybeans? OK, that’s a hypothetical example, but the basic idea is true—most farmers are diversifying with small amounts of quite a few crops.

And I think that’s what’s happening in those five counties in New York.

Growing smaller amounts of niche crops often has great side affects, allowing the farmer to limit or eliminate use of pesticides. Best of all, it increases the amount of fresh food in the local economy.

This is already at work in North Carolina – just look at the increase in CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture programs) that sell produce directly from farms to families.

I don’t expect the federal government to give a big push to this anytime soon. But from where I sit, it’s looking more and more like the future of farming.

(Photo courtesy of Associated Press)

Friday, April 18, 2008

RIP, Rainbow News & Cafe

I’ve had this story on my to-do list for a few months - I’ve wanted to pick your brains about the shuttered local restaurants you miss.

Rainbow News & Cafe immediately comes to mind. When I was working on my first review during the summer of 2005, I reviewed Christopher’s New Global Cuisine (now simply, Christopher’s). Chef-owner Chris Fulk renovated a rambling Victorian on Brookstown Avenue for his fine-dining venture that was the former home of the Rainbow News & Cafe. It seemed like whenever I mentioned Christopher’s to someone, they began flipping through their memories of the Rainbow as if they were turning through an old album full of faded photos of friends. Oh, the vegetarian chili. Oh, the burritos.

I’ve heard similar anecdotes about Staley’s Charcoal Steak House, later the home of the short-lived, old-school glamorous, decadence-with-abandon Frankie Rowland’s (they laced their mashed potatoes with brie). Incidentally, on a local history side note, investigators looking into the doings of notorious former Davidson County sheriff Gerald Hege found that he and his cronies celebrated with at Staley’s - and paid their check with county money. I suspect some of you can still taste Staley’s steaks. In fact, I know - one reader e-mailed me in January with an entire list of their mourned restaurants. He was partial to Staley’s Chateaubriand (that inandof itself is a great throwback - Chateaubriand is a rather old-fashioned word for filet mignon).

And there are other restaurants you probably remember: Sam’s Gourmet, Leon’s, the Rose and Thistle.

So bring on the memories, please, personal and otherwise. I’m looking for people to interview (in case that wasn’t obvious). Send me an e-mail at , or call me at 727-7302. Please include a way to get back in touch with you in your note or voice mail message.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

April in Paris, and beyond

I just got back from a two-week hiatus in France, riding high-speed trains, gasping at the spring lettuces, radishes and artichokes in outdoor markets, cooking with a feisty Parisian in her apartment kitchen, and generally eating ridiculous quantities of crepes and foie gras and mini tarts, yogurt flavored with chestnut cream and yogurt flavored with rose and rhubarb, crusty little baguettes filled with Comte and rosette, goat cheese and pesto, roasted tomatoes and curried chicken. We did a lot of walking, too.

I can’t say that I still use any of the organic chemistry I took in college, but I did gain a lot of wonderful friends, including one who has split her years since graduation between North Carolina and the sweet southern French city of Montpellier. She’s there again this year, teaching English to French high school students, but she’s coming back in early May. So the Dinner Beau and I have been scheming and saving away for a trip to visit her since last fall, even as the dollar continued to fall, fall, fall against the euro.

We planned a whirlwind trip from Paris to Lyon (a city that fathered cutting edge culinary invention and my favorite, old-fashioned regional cuisine heavily based on pig) to Montpellier (smack in the largest wine-growing area in the world, the Languedoc-Roussillon region) and Marseille (spiritual home of the spicy fish stew, bouillabaisse). And while I understand that when many people visit France, and particularly, Paris, that they want to see this:

I was more interested in this:

And this:

And this:

Ooo, la, la, le fromage.

OK, the Eiffel Tower is beautiful (but caused uproar when it was built in 1889. Parisians wanted it to come down.)...so here’s another gratuitous shot from its bristly under regions at night:

In any case, I’m going to try to post a few entries on Dishing it Out over the next few weeks about my food adventures in France. I’ve returned, but I’m even more obsessed (not just with the food, but the whole French way - on the advice of a British man we met in Montpellier, I’m currently reading Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, an ethological peek into French ways and customs by two Canadian journalists. It attempts to explain among many other things why the French have such strong ties to regional food, why they view cutting in line as something of a national sport and why they don’t generally pick up after their dogs when they do number two on a busy, pedestrian-filled sidewalk. Fascinating!).

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Berry Soon

I’m about tired of apples and bananas, the two fruits I favor during the winter and early spring. Thankfully, strawberry season in the Piedmont is set to start in about two weeks. I have my fingers crossed that a late frost doesn’t damage the crops.

I’ll have a full report in the Journal in early May, but I can’t help salivating now. Freshly picked strawberries are good, but they are made better by being the first fruit of the spring — actually in our area, I think they are the only fruit that ripens before summer.

So, to me, strawberries taste good not just of themselves but because they are in fat a taste of what’s to come — months of blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, peaches, cantaloupes and more.

I, for one, can’t wait.

The wait may become shorter in future years, because N.C. State University recently reported the development of a new variety that ripens early. Called Galletta, it is said to ripen a week to 10 days earlier than the Chandler variety that the majority of Piedmont farmers plant now.

Also, Galletta is supposed to producer a better quality strawberry than the early-ripening Sweet Charlie variety that currently is the earliest-ripening variety available in North Carolina.

Actually, N.C. State said that some commercial growers have already planted Galletta, though I haven’t found any in our area yet. Galletta plants should be available to home growers for planting this fall.