Friday, May 30, 2008

We’ll always have Paris…or again, someday

I was going to write about some of my favorite restaurants to dine alfresco this week, but then the weather turned gray, chilly and gloomy on Tuesday. We’re back to sunny skies, but I think I’ll say that post for another day.

So as a preview to a travel story of mine that’s running on Sunday about my cooking and market adventure in Paris, I thought I’d give you my last post about Paris, a short list of some of my food picks: stores, restaurants and the like. Paule Caillat, the woman with whom I took my cooking class, showed me some of these spots. Others I scouted out before we left. And others we just ran across.

I know the exchange rate is terrible, but if any of you are headed to Paris in the next few months, you might find this list useful. I’ll get back to France someday, but seriously, who am I kidding? Short term travel plans will probably aim for somewhere closer to home, say, Asheville, or Chicago, or Honduras, where my funds may go farther. But I do believe in the mantra “we’ll always have Paris.” Here’s hoping that someday the almightily dollar will rise again.

G. Detou
58, rue Tiquetonne
01 42 36 54 67
Once a Paris insider’s secret, G. Detou is now widely revered by food-loving tourists. Its rather Spartan shelves are clock-a-block with confectionary, baking supplies, pickles and mustard. Here we stocked up on salted butter caramels from Brittany and Valhrona chocolate at (relatively) reasonable prices. And here, a stern-looking saleslady gave me dirty looks because I, the ugly American, took the last four bags of caramels from one shelf. There were more in the back. But that kind of customer service is the true French paradox. Forgot about thin ladies smoking and eating lots of cheese and living forever.

Breizh Cafe
109, rue Vleille du Temple
01 42 72 13 77
I am still craving the nutty crepes from this modern take on a Britton creperie. Along with those delicious salty caramels, Brittany is the home of galettes, savory crepes made with buckwheat flour and filled with a variety of caramelized onions, mushrooms, spinach, Emmental, ham, sunnyside up eggs, and more. One is large enough for a light supper, but you’ll want to try a sweet crepe for dessert. I can’t recall specifics, but I know I got very emotional over a dessert crepe made with caramel and salted caramel ice cream. Perhaps there’s a theme here.

Cafe Breizh also has a long hard cider list, another Breton staple. Breizh, by the way, is the Breton word for Brittany.

Bistrot Paul Bert
18, rue Paul-Bert
01 43 72 24 01
You must make reservations here - the traditional French fare at this mid-priced bistro is that good. The best steak frites, with a large hunk of beouf in a creamy peppercorn sauce. Marron glace ice cream, a cold terrine of leeks and foie gras...oh, yes.

Goumanyat et Son Royaume
3, rue Charles-Francois Depuis
01 44 78 96 74
An elegantly-organized little spice shop, with bags and bottles of sea salts, peppercorns of all shades and more. This is where I bought some forbidden tonka bean and espelette pepper.

Le Petit Bofinger
6, rue de la Bastille
01 42 72 87 82
My first few bites in Paris almost made me cry - a so-so sandwich, and a positively flaccid Nutella-filled crepe. I felt so much better after I had gone here. Well, and also had a nap and a shower. French classics - meltingly soft duck confit, oysters on the half shell, and steak tartare with the hottest, crispiest pomme frites in a nostalgic 1950’s brasserie.

La Vaissellerie
Several branches around Paris, but we went to 92, rue Saint-Antoine
01 42 72 76 66
A closet-sized shop so packed with breakables you’ll be afraid to turn around. Wine glasses, escargot dishes, tea pots, soup bowls, coffee cups, water carafes, cheese knives - it’s like Aladdin’s Cave for cooks.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Sugar-Coated Health Benefits

You’ve heard about functional food, food that has a specific health benefit? Well, I had to laugh when I read a May 25 report on brandweek.com about functional candy.

The report says that Hershey’s, Wrigley’s and Cadbury are all working on sweet products with a good-for-you claim. It turns out that it isn’t so much candy they are developing, but gum, and in one case, mints.

Functional candy is of course nothing new. Just about every over-the-counter oral child’s medicine is some mix of sugar or syrup mixed with medicine.

And even adults soothe a sore throat or mediate a cough with sweet throat drops. The report also mentioned BestSweet, based in Mooresville, and its Bee M.D. honey throat lozenges.

And many candy manufacturers have marketed dark chocolate in recent years as a quasi-preventative for aging, because of its natural antioxidant content.

Don’t be surprised, though, to see more candy touting health claims, with all kinds of vitamins and other nutrients mixed in to give it a double appeal, to the health-conscious consumer with a sweet tooth.

Chocolate-covered dinner mints with echinacea to fight off a cold? Gummy bears with Vitamin C to keep kids happy and healthy? Or chewy caramels that may rot your teeth but have loads of calcium to ward off osteoporosis?

As the popular song from Mary Poppins says, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

Thursday, May 22, 2008

A review that wasn’t, but a restaurant and a chef to watch out for

You can find my review of Firebirds in today’s relish. But originally I had planned to write about the Kitchen at Elkin Creek. I was rubbing my hands about this review, yes indeed. I love sharing truly wonderful restaurants with you all, even more than I enjoy warning you about terrible ones (contrary to popular belief, I take no pleasure in that - but someone has to do it).

A trip to France got in the way. Then, I came back. For some reason I was poking around on Elkin Creek’s website - probably looking for their phone number, or directions to the little winery (down a gravel road, and through a rusty farm gate. There’s a teepee near the winery and restaurant proper, and some signs welcoming you in Spanish, and maybe Chinese? - it’s truly a charming place). In any case, the chef’s profile was noticeably missing. It turns out Jesse Williams and Elkin Creek parted ways sometime in April (that’s according to Jesse). So, Susan Gilmor, my wise relish editor, put the kibosh on an Elkin Creek review, at least for the time being. It wouldn’t have been fair to the restaurant. It wouldn’t have been fair to you.

I just got out my notes from my last meal at Elkin Creek. It was sometime in late March. I remember a salad of pear, Gorgonzola, charred croutons and red leaf and romaine lettuces infused with the smoky taste of the kitchen’s wood oven. I remember the best rendition of oysters Rockefeller that I have ever had. Spaghetti with chorizo, fennel, tomato and clams. These weren’t wild dishes, but oh, did they taste good.

To be fair, I also remember some weird touches, such as the fake votive candles flickering their orange light, and bread served with a shallow dish of olive oil so light it was nearly yellow. “If anything, would like to see something more extraordinary, more innovative. Push boundaries more. Have seen this place do better,” the last lines of my scrawl read.

I read about saffron macaroni and cheese gratin, and crab and coddled egg salad with fennel when I was scouting out Elkin Creek. I saw the menus for the beer dinners the restaurant once held with Spencer Davis of City Beverage, and squealed in my seat about a shucked oyster shooter with lemon sorbet; braised pork belly with apple strudel; and clever twists on sandwiches such as duck pastrami and cherry chutney, and a club made with foie gras, apple chutney and bacon. Nice, but too tame, is what I thought as I drove home after that dinner in March.

All of this is why you should keep an eye on Sanders Ridge Vineyards and Winery in Boonville, where Jesse has landed next. He’s a chef to watch out for. Sometime later this year, Williams will open Homeplace 1847. The winery and restaurant have been thrown off by off-again, on-again construction but Williams wants to open in September. He has ambitious plans to make the restaurant a homage to local food (in season, he’ll get a lot of his produce from Sanders Ridge’s organic farm), and a trendsetter across the state. He’s working on the menu right now, and when I talked to him earlier this week, he called it “nostalgic comfort food.”

What does this mean? Williams has got his eye on a grilled watermelon salad, for example, and shredded barbecued rabbit on sourdough. This past weekend, Williams says he made mint lemonade with watermelon foam for the non-drinkers at the Yadkin Valley Wine Festival. It’s comfort food, but probably like nothing you had in your momma’s kitchen.

Williams also wants to set up a farm stand at the restaurant, so after your barbecued rabbit sandwich and bottle of wine, you’ll drift through the fresh produce. You will become powerless as you reach for a tomato to take home. And remember what kind of economy he is doing this in. “People love good food,” he says.

I can’t wait to see if he’s right.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Emeril’s Revenge

A lot of people were shocked in December when the Food Network ended production of new episodes of Emeril Lagasse’s Emeril Live!

The network didn’t dump Emeril altogether. It is happy to show reruns, and it is keeping his other show, The Essence of Emeril, in its afternoon lineup

Still, it was a surprising move to scrap new episodes to what had amounted to Food Network’s prime-time cash cow.

Sure, Lagasse owed the network for helping to make him a star. But Emeril was the centerpiece of a pool of talent that helped make the Food Network what it is today.

Looking at the network today, though, it’s clear how much it has changed. It has moved further away from cooking shows to those that present food as entertainment. Viewers who don’t like it have flocked to the “pure” cooking shows on PBS.

Of course, Emeril was always a hybrid — half cooking, half entertainment show. Remember his band?

I always felt a bit sorry for Emeril. On the one hand, his cooking on the show was sometimes sloppy — a fact often pointed out by other, more precise and less showy, chefs. On the other hand, I felt that he knew more than he sometimes appeared to know; in other words, the show was dumbed down, whether by design or chance.

If you like Emeril, you’ll be happy to know that Emeril Live! is coming back — but to the Fine Living Network. Beginning July 7, FLN will show Emeril Live! every night at 7. From July 7 to 11, the network will show all new episodes. Then beginning July 14, it will show a new episode on Mondays, and reruns the rest of the week.

So Emeril gets his revenge. Or as he might say to the Food Network execs, “Bam!”

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.