Eat at Joe's!

Another Day, Another Social Media Platform

"Life is short, but the days are long."  Somehow, that seems to mean that we should get our mittens into every possible crevice, in case we miss anything while we're in a hurry, sticking our mittens in other crevices.

Ahem.  Anyway, I have a presence on Google+ as Joseph D. Eater.  You will find me there on occasion.  You may find me there more than you find me here, or maybe not.  I certainly prefer G+ to FB.  It's certainly easy to drop items of interest there.  

I stuck a link in the top section of the sidebar.  

Bad Doughnut!

Ladies and gentlemen:  From Rebel Donut in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Breaking Bad doughnut!

"This 'Breaking Bad' Blue Meth Doughnut From New Mexico Is Perfect And Everything Is Wonderful" at BuzzFeed

This Is A Real Thing: Fifty Shades of Chicken

I read a little bit of it today and it's... um... saucy.  :)  The recipes looked fine, but I didn't look closely.  

The link above is to Random House, but the book itself has its own WWW site: 

Fifty Shades of Chicken

"Fowler"?  Really?  :)  Also, how come this has been out for 10 months and I'm just now finding out?  

Turkey

I think fall has come early this year.  It smelled like it to me a few weeks ago, and it smelled like it again today.  Not much in the way of tomatoes this year, but at least there was rain, and relief from the punishing heat.

But fall means Thanksgiving — and Thanksgiving is an entire 84 days away — but I've already started thinking about turkey.  Thus prompted, I pulled out a grilling book to look up a turkey recipe, and found the following amusement:

 

WILD TURKEY I

If it hasn't already been broken, crack the government seal and lay the bottle over a moderate fire.  When just warm, sit on the back porch and serve with cool branch water, sardines, and saltine crackers.  Leave some in the bottom of the bottle for tomorrow and stay off the telephone.  

(From The Grilling Encyclopedia by A. Cort Sinnes, used w/o permission.)

 

Fall also makes me think about brown liquor.  :)

Ugh

I just put away over 1000 unread pieces of e-mail.  If I missed you, I apologize.   I should go back to just letting people leave me comments.  

Lost And Found

Long-time readers of this blog will remember when I occasionally used to post a comic or three, often from Chris Onstad's Achewood.  Chris's output has fallen off, unfortunately, but I still check by occasionally to see what's going on.  Still no Achewood, but further searching revealed a couple things:  Chris and his wife have apparently split up, which is enough to screw up anyone's creative juices.  But Chris's have oozed out in another direction, as he's now the resident food critic for the Portland Mercury.  This is good: those of you who keep up with the guy know of his increasing interest in food, and of course understand that he writes well and is funny.  This all collides pleasingly in his reviews.  Even though I'm probably not going to be going to Portland any time soon, I still enjoy the reviews, and see the humor and agile mind behind the words.  Thanks, Chris.  Good to hear from you.  :)

Mystery Meat, Vegetables, And Fruit Juice?

I realize this article has a hysterical edge to it, but still:

"Food Fraud: Labels on What We Eat Often Mislead" at National Geographic

Rat meat and mountain zebra?  I guess that's fine if you want it; if you think you're getting goat or beef, it's not.

Bob Fowler, R.I.P.

I was really sorry to read today in the N&O that Bob Fowler, the last family proprietor of Fowler's, died earlier this month:  

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/10/3020680/robert-l-fowler-jr.html

I liked Bob, and liked talking to him when I went in Fowler's.  He told me once there was never any telling what he might be doing in the store at any particular time — helping customers, writing up an ad, or "swabbing out the john."  

There was a long time in Durham where there was not much in the way of resources for food geeks.  The big exception was Fowler's.  Bob was the one who successfully took a small family grocery store through the transition to a gourmet resource, with (at one time) the best wine selection between DC and Atlanta, and maybe beyond.  

Bob, I still miss your store, and we'll miss you.  

De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

When I was a kid, I had a problem with being easily sucked into magazine polls: the type article where you answer 17 questions, then find out that you'll turn into a serial killer, have tooth cancer, Socialist tendencies, a liking for cheap frozen pizza or maybe just cheap beer....  

That tropism crops back up occasionally, and I think this Deadspin ranking triggered it:

36 Cheap American Beers, Ranked

It's not a poll, per se — actually I don't know how they came up with it — but it caught my eye because regular Coors is ranked 3rd out of 36 "cheap American" beers.  I've never had #1 or 2, or really a lot of them.  But I've had a lot of cheap Coors in cans, especially when I could get 18 or 24 cans for, say, $12.  Michael Jackson — no, not that dead one, this dead one — kind of agreed with me, giving the lowly beer two stars in one of his beer books, which was better than most any other widely available American "premium" lager I could find listed in there.  

But almost everyone I know hates Coors, even when they prefer, say, PBR or Bud or whatever.  I don't get that, but it's ok.  De gustibus non est disputandum.  If you like something, good.  If you like it and it's cheap, or good for you, or easy to make, great.  If all of the previous are true, you should find a way to live off whatever that substance is.  ;)  

Hope you all had a great 4th of July, and had plenty of cheap beer.  :-D

My Newest, Hottest Kitchen Appliance

... isn't an appliance at all.  It's a woodworking bench:

I'd really gotten tired of trying to find the right sideboard/work table for the kitchen.  So I gave up and bought the wrong one.  http://www.harborfreight.com/60-inch-workbench-93454.html was about $160.  It's mostly oak, 60"x20", and counter height, which fits well where it needs to go.  The drawers are small — they're really meant for small tools — but they'll still be useful.  

Now if I can figure out what, if anything, I want to do about the bench dog holes, I'll be set.  I figure I can use the tail vise to crack walnuts.  ;)

No, It's "Containment Area for Relocated Yankees"

"... Now it's time to turn my attention to developing Rise #2.  If you or someone you know is a developer in the Cary area..."

God bless Tom Ferguson.  He knows Cary needs something, and he's going to try to give it to them good and hard help them out.  Maybe some culture will be just what they needed [for my extensive out-of-town readership, the following might help explain the situation in North Carolina's Research Triangle: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cary, and I'm not bitter.  ;-) ].

Alcohol: It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

Pretty much everyone and their mom has posted this article by Eric Asimov, featuring Michael Maller's smiling face behind the bar at Mateo (behind the NYT semi-paywall again).  It's not so much about NC wine, which isn't even mentioned.  It's about our food and wine culture here in Durham and the Triangle, one that has taken off like a rocket in the past 30 years.  I love it.  

But I did feel a little sad that our own beer and winemaking areas aren't given more notice (that's not going to be Asimov's focus for this article in the NYT, so no criticism to him).  All legal wine and beer production in the country had to start from scratch after Prohibition was over in 1933, but the Great Depression and WWII kept the industry down until the 40s.  When it did, it was largely the industrial producers—the ones who could serve an entire country—who took off.  A lot of smaller rivals were left behind in the dirt.  They stayed behind.  Not too long ago, Weeping Radish had a brewery off the corner of Duke and Morgan Street.  They didn't make it (which may have had more to do with their not-so good restaurant than anything).  Wineries like Duplin Wines have been going since the 70s, but with their focus on inexpensive wines appealing to what they feel are local tastes, they're not likely to see much more than local recognition.

But it's better now.  Durham itself has three breweries, and seems to have no problem supporting them all; North Carolina has over 60 breweries and brewpubs.  Wineries are doing well too, with three American Viticultural Areas currently recognized by (and I can't believe I'm saying this this way) the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.  The AVAs are all west of us, near the Yadkin River valley, but wine and beer are made all over the state.  So, just in case you can't find a North Carolina producer of beer or wine:

NC Brewers Guild brewery map

NC Winegrowers Association wine region map

The beer map has a list of breweries on it.  For lists of North Carolina wineries, you'll need to pull down a menu or two from near the top of the page.  But for both beer and wine, find someone in the state, try them, and see if you like them.  When you find a match, tell us about it, will you?  :)

Maintenance

I haven't been paying much attention to the sidebar recently, so it had gotten a little stale.  No longer: pretty much anything obviously dead or not recehtly updated has been removed, along with Twitter feeds to places I'd already linked to.  I've also added a couple things.  

Speaking of Twitter, my twitter feed is at https://twitter.com/eatjoe.

Enjoy.  

Preventing Celiac: You Might Be Doing It Wrong

There seems to be an epidemic of celiac disease going on.  I keep running into more and more people with the disease, and more and more products are proclaiming themselves gluten-free, as if gluten were some kind of plutonium.  It's not: it's a complex of proteins found in wheat, and possibly in other foods based on wheat-like grains.  But to some celiac sufferers, it might as well be plutonium, because that's how strongly they need to stay away from it.  Others not as much: it might be worth it to them to eat an occasional slice of pizza or a doughnut.  But the disease does seem to be on the rise.

It turns out to be complicated.  There's a genetic marker, but most people with the genetic marker don't have the disease.  The current, easier test is to look for certain related auto-antibodies.  (Grabbing a villi sample out of someone's gut and seeing if the villi are impaired, along with other characteristic gut problems, will also tell you if there's a problem.)  But there seems to be an environmental factor.

Lately, some people have been avoiding gluten due to a non-specific feeling that eating too much gluten might be a problem.  This disregards the fact that folks have been eating wheat and related grains for thousands of years.  But who knows: some folks have similar sounding problems with lactose and milk, except that's a totally separate type problem (some folks lose the ability to generate lactase, some don't, but it's also partially dependent on how much lactose you have to deal with).

Now, guess what?  Someone says that withdrawing gluten, especially to children, might be exactly the wrong thing to do: 

"Who Has the Guts for Gluten?" at the NYT (semi-paywall: sorry)

The upshot is that, well, it's complicated.  :)  But it may have to do with gut bacteria, breastfeeding, and not withdrawing gluten from kids' diets.  The good stuff in the article is down toward the bottom, where they start talking about a veritable epidemic of celiac in Sweden in the 70s, and what probably caused it: a decrease in breastfeeding coupled with a decrease in gluten fed to infants immediately post-nursing.  So less gluten caused more gluten intolerance.  

The jury is still out, but getting rid of gluten willy-nilly doesn't seem like a good idea anymore.  That's not much help for current sufferers, but more knowledge about disease is always a good thing.  

Salsa Assousa, or WWRE #3

When I started the "What We Really Eat" category, I intended it to chronicle things I really ate or thought people really ate, but was too ashamed to list as something I'd actually made.  Now I notice I've screwed that category all up.  Oh well.  

Anyway, I'm not much of a Mexican food person, and I sure as hell don't know how to cook it properly.  But I've eaten it a lot of this, er, "salsa" with bags of tortilla chips since my friend, Special Agent "Ass-O-USA," taught me how to do this.  My friend Maura says it's the only thing that makes jarred salsa tolerable.  It also makes me feel better about hauling a bag of tortilla chips to a party, and you can usually find some sort of cream cheese and salsa at whatever grocery store you stop at.  

So....  Salsa Assousa:

• 1 container salsa, pico de gallo, picante sauce, homemade salsa....  The possibilities are endless here
• 1 container cream cheese
• 1 bag tortilla chips

1. Find decent-sized clean bowl.
2. Put some or all of cream cheese into bottom of bowl.  If it's soft, that'll make it easier to grub it out amidst the salsa.  You can buy whatever kind of flavored cheese you want to try, or use some spuriously-generated fat free cheez, or screw this up however you like: you're eating a bunch of stuff out of bags and cans here, so I say go for whatever floats your boat.
3. Pour as much or as little tomato product over the cream cheese as you want.
4. Open bag of chips.
5. Dig in.

If you eat this, I'm wondering what you ran out of first — chips, salsa, or cheese?  Of course you can always make more....  :)

My First Recipe

... aaand my first post of the year.  I've also never shared a video before: its about the first thing I ever learned to cook, and something my girlfriend taught me how to do 53 years ago.  I'll never forget it.  It's particularly easy, and you probably have the stuff around to make it with, in case you're stranded at home during the current spate of bad weather:

 

Hope you enjoyed that, and enjoy your weekend.  Don't stay out too late tonight.  ;)

Merry Christmas

Only three foods, two sauces (one of which came with the ham, but wasn't horrible), one more person, and a partridge in a pear tree [click to embiggen]:

But it was special.  :)

Merry Christmas.  Hope it was great.  

De-Polled

Vizu has decided to stop offering its free web-based polls.  So everything under the link for polls, as well as the polls themselves, is no more.  

If anyone has a suggestion on a similar service I could start using as a replacement, I'd appreciate hearing it.  

How Not To Have A Happy Thanksgiving

Probably not Happy Thanksgiving fare, whether you eat their soon-to-be vanished products or not: 

Innovation long in mix for Hostess Brands at the San Francisco Chronicle

Apparently folks are running out to clean stores out of Ho-Hos, Wonder Bread, and other Hostess products.  Or perhaps the unfortunately-named Bimbo Bakeries will buy Hostess trademarks and other IP, and continue to make, um, stuff.  :)  Happens all the time, fortunately or unfortunately.

Since I'll likely be occupied tomorrow, let me take this time to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and tell you that I seriously do miss you.  I hope you don't have to work tomorrow, but whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy yourselves.  

Beaujolais Nouveau Time

Beaujolais nouveau was released about 1 hour 45 minutes ago by my watch — damn, I'm running behind.  :)  My understanding is that it's generally released worldwide at 12:01 am Thursday morning.  So tomorrow night, for those of us in the US, is time to get your drink on of the stuff, if that's your bag.  I do usually use it as an excuse to go eat at either of Durham's French-oriented restaurants: Rue Cler and Vin Rouge.  Enjoy yourselves, or not, as you choose.  After that, it's the damn holiday season thing which I will not yet mention, which will bring more opportunities for food and drink.  I hope you enjoy as many as you can.  

It's Magic

Click on the image to see the comic at a reasonable size.

Reliable Cheese Closing

The downtown food scene just got a little less bright:

Reliable Cheese closing

Dammit.

Paleo-Strangulation

At the Washington Post, Dr. George F. Will opines on the gagging of North Carolina blogger Steve Cooksey and his opinions on the "paleolithic" or paleo diet:

"Bureaucrats declare war on free advice"

More Wine

A new wine store downtown — how can that be a bad thing?  :)

 "New wine shop opening downtown" in the Herald-Sun

One of the partners in the downtown store is Nathan Vandergrift, who ran the bar at Rue Cler for a while some nights shortly after they opened, probably because his brother John made him do it.  ;)  Seriously, I really enjoyed being able to talk to Nathan during that period, and really appreciated his depth of knowledge about wine.  I'm hoping this will be good.  Downtown pretty much rocks now, doesn't it?  :-D

The store should be open around the middle of October. 

From Tybee Island, Georgia

Got out a bit this past weekend (click to embiggen):

More Buttermilk, Please

Surprised and pleased to find that buttermilk -- real buttermilk -- is making a comeback:

Buttermilk, Often Maligned, Begins to Get Its Due at the NYT 

But long-time EAJ! readers already knew what buttermilk really is, no?  :)  

It's also nice to see local author Debbie Moose getting a plug.

Mateo Bar De Tapas, or A Giant Bull Is Attacking The Southbank Building

If you get a chance to go to Mateo bar de tapas anytime soon, I suggest you do so.  The good thing about a tapas bar is that you can eat as little or as much as you want.  But at Mateo, you'll probably want to eat a lot.  :)  Mateo only has a placeholder web site up at the moment, but the N&O has a post on Mouthful by Andrea Weigl with links to a couple of PDFs for the food and wine menus.  

About those menus....  I can personally suggest the paté de hígado de pollo, the patatas bravas, and the costilla de cerdo all as being stand-out excellent, but there wasn't much on the menu that wasn't excellent.  The croqueta special we had was a delight: hot little golf ball-sized croquettes filled with a delicious melty cheese mixture.  The perro cerdito was fun on a stick: basically a small corn dog served with a light mustard sauce.  I could go on, and I did, but I'll leave some things for you to discover.  I was surprised to see no cod or olives, but there were boatloads of seafood in general, along with an olive tapenade.  We missed out on the gâteau Basque, but we made up for it on the other desserts.  Most of my examples above are warm dishes, but there are plenty of cool items to be scarfed.  

I'd also like to say what a delight it is for someone around here to be giving sherry its due.  The wine list contains at least 25 sherries: finos, amontillados, palos cortados, olorosos, and sweet sherries.  There are several straight-up Pedro Ximénezes, of which the two I had were raisiny and delicious.  

I know Matt Kelly has been busting butt for months to make this place what he wants.  It also looks like Michael Maller has worked hard to get a really good, creative, appropriate wine list, along with a nice full bar in general.  It shows.  Go eat there.  It's good.  :)

Contact information:

109 West Chapel Hill Street
Durham, NC 27701
1 919 530 8700
http://www.mateotapas.com/ 

It's The End Times

Some of these lobsters must look like Frank Gorshin did in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" on Star Trek: 

"Reports of blue, orange and other odd-colored lobsters on the rise as crustacean harvest grows"

Mobile Vending Ordinance Public Information Session Tonight At City Hall

Interest in the city's proposed additional regulation for food trucks has really skyrocketed, with some folks getting organized pretty quickly:

Durham Alliance for Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship

City Hall is the place to be tonight at 5:30 pm if you want more information about what's going on.  If you do Teh Facebook: 

http://www.facebook.com/events/390823910965591/

Yeah, It's Certified

If any of you had any doubt 10 years ago about why the "USDA Organic" national certification effort was such a big deal and how it was going to turn out, perhaps this NYT article — "Has 'Organic' Been Oversized?" — will, um, assist you in your cogitation.

Hope everyone had a grand 4th of July holiday.