Eat All About It

I have an article in Pacific Northwest magazine in The Seattle Times this week on veal — specifially, a look at the calves raised on Vashon Island’s Sea Breeze Farm. I became interested in the topic after seeing veal on the Sea Breeze tables at the farmers markets — a meat that’s been so closely associated with animal cruelty campaigns that it was hard to find a companion willing to order a piccata or parmigiana in my food critic days.

You can read the full story here. And, just to drum in the reality of farm life, Sea Breeze noted on Twitter that the calf featured in the story is currently being served up on the dinner menu at La Boucherie.

The Canning Across America weekend is finally here, and I’m not. The celebration weekend, as I knew from the start, fell when I would be out of town.

But you can still participate in this nationwide revival of “the lost art of putting up food,” if you’re in Seattle or any other town hosting events. (Don’t miss seeing the amazing Renee Erickson of Boat Street Cafe and Boat Street Pickles do a free demo at the University District Farmers Market.)

And, if you can’t attend a formal class or event, think about getting together with friends anyway and making a little Canvolution of your own. Because — sorry to always be finding the heartwarming moral in the story, but it’s true, it’s true — I’m starting to think this is all about learning what you can really do when you try. (more…)

Autumn Martin, beloved for her Hot Cakes and her work at Theo Chocolate, has resigned as Theo’s head chocolatier. Her last Theo hurrah was last night at the Incredible Feast (”what a great event!”), she wrote, and her next culinary career move is “to live the life of a farmer in Spain for three months.”

She’ll be farming in the town of Sella, near Alicante, from mid-September until just before Christmas. The bulk of Hot Cakes will be on hold when she’s gone, but she’s stocking the freezer at Picnic so there will be some available there. She’s working on a Hot Cakes website, and plans to grow that business when she returns. (And she does plan to return, so this shouldn’t be another lose-’em-to-Europe goodbye like when the Bruschettina lady boarded a plane.)

Martin won fame and fans at Theo, with David Lebovitz (who literally wrote the book
on chocolate) writing that she was “crafting some of the finest chocolate confections I’ve ever tasted in my life.”

My review of outgoing New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni’s memoir, Born Round, is in today’s Christian Science Monitor. You can read it here, and you can see Bruni when he’s in town next month at a Words and Wine event, at Elliott Bay Books, and at a Cooks & Books dinner.

I’ll be talking with Bruni when he visits Seattle — probably over a meal (I was glad when I learned we shared a favorite), although I did suggest to his people that, given the memoir’s focus, a walk around Green Lake would also be nice. If you have questions for him, feel free to either write them in the comments or e-mail me at rebekahdenn at gmail.com.

The new season of Top Chef starts tonight, with — finally! — not one, but two Seattle chefs on board. Due to the hyper-secrecy of reality TV, Robin Leventhal and Ashley Merriman didn’t know until they arrived in Las Vegas that there would be any other chefs from home. (They already knew each other; Leventhal had offered Merriman a job at Crave “on the spot” when Merriman moved to Seattle, though she ultimately ended up at Tilth and  Branzino.)

I talked with both chefs, separately, by phone this morning in advance of the first show. Merriman, currently driving across country to help mentor Alex Guarneschelli open a New York restaurant (she’ll return to Branzino), will watch from Minneapolis. Leventhal will watch from Seattle with friends and family. “I even got DVR.”

Here’s an peek at what each one had to say about the Top Chef life. I’ll be rooting for both:

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My traditional end-of-August vacation means I miss some of the wonderful events scheduled that week — the Incredible Feast, Skagit River Ranch Farm Day, and so on. This year, I’m most crestfallen to be missing this, an Aug. 30 canning class at Kirkland’s  Starry Nights Catering by Marisa McClellan of Food In Jars, who is normally based in Philadelphia. I’ve been asking Marisa for months to teach a Seattle class, as I’ve followed her through the seasons of preserving from cabbage to rhubarb to strawberries to peaches. She was finally inspired to hop on a plane and teach here as part of the Canning Across America project. My first response? “AAUUUGH! THAT’S WHEN I’M OUT OF TOWN!” But you, if you’re around, can take advantage of the opportunity. Here’s the class description:

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Photo courtesy Lou Manna Photography

Food photography is a specialty in itself. That may seem self-evident, but even at the P-I, where we had brilliant photojournalists but no one trained in food styling, we agonized over how hard it was to make our dishes look as dazzling in the paper as they did on the plate. At the International Food Bloggers Conference this year, it was clear that attendees were itching to learn more specifics about how to properly light and photograph food; and photography dominates the agenda of one upcoming food conference. 

Save the date for Sept. 18, if you’re among those wanting to learn more, because Keren Brown and Foodista are putting together “Foodsnap,” a full-day event with Lou Manna, author of Digital Food Photography, a former New York Times photographer who boasts a raft of national clients in his New York-based business. (more…)

If you’re wondering about all the people breaking their Whole Foods habit and searching out other markets, the answer is here. The boycott was spurred by an op-ed piece on health care reform in the Wall Street Journal, written by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. The main eyebrow-raisers in the article came here:

“While all of us can empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have any more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have an intrinsic right to food, clothing, owning their own homes, a car or a personal computer? Health care is a service which we all need at some point in our lives, but just like food, clothing, and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually-beneficial market exchanges rather than through government mandates.”

and then, here:

“Most of the diseases which are both killing us and making health care so expensive-heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and obesity, which account for about 70% of all health care spending, are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal or no alcohol consumption, and other healthy lifestyle choices.”

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It’s almost impossible to go online this week without reading something about either Julia Child or Julie Powell, but Jon Rowley’s wistful remembrance, in an unexpected place, touched me in a different way. It’s a photo, here on Flickr, of the picture Rowley snapped after hearing of Child’s death, and the story behind the peaches that went in her final birthday cake. Read down in the comments to see Toni Allegra’s memories of the same day.

I have written in the past about the Northwest’s rising stardom in the world of artisan cheese, about the best way to assemble a cheese plate, about one of my favorite local cheeses. But it is safe to say the subject has never made me laugh so much as when I saw this video, previewing the American Cheese Society’s annual conference, a big-deal event coming to Seattle next year. It’s serious business, of course. Co-chair Kurt Dammeier tells me that the public will be in on the final awards ceremony at Benaroya Hall, with tickets sold for an extravaganza including “over 1300 cheeses to taste, food from Seattle’s best restaurants and an array of local wine and beer.” Tami Parr has the scoop here on Northwest winners at the 2009 conference, which was just held in Austin, and Sheri LaVigne of The Calf and Kid has an insider’s look here, but if you’re in a (have to say it) cheesy mood, check out the video to whet your appetite for 2010.