Meat Envy

 

I’m a part-time vegetarian. I leaked this information to a friend recently and she was a bit taken aback. I guess I can understand. Since the catalog and website I lead are full of pig parts and a bacon club is our best seller it’s probably easy to imagine I'm powered by pork 24/7. (Please don’t tell bacon that I don't eat it every day, it might get jealous.) If you ask around in the food industry, though, you’ll find I’m not even close to unique. There are many closeted part-time vegetarians among us. My streak of vegetarianism tends to run during daylight hours. It’s rare I eat meat before dinner—virtually every lunch I have is all vegetables. I’m also a huge fan of restaurants that do vegetable dishes well (when restaurants start to figure this out I predict it'll be a powerful trend).

I still love a good debate with vegetarians about their life choice. There are many reasons why but mainly it comes down to the fact that vegetarians, on the whole, think about what they’re eating more than most of us. Since a large part of my job is thinking about eating they’re usually engaging folks for me to discuss food with.

All this is a long walk to get to my point: meat envy. The foods pictured were at two markets in my neighborhood but you could find something like them anywhere. I knew about tofurkey but I'd never heard of beefless sliders or vegetarian chicken. Prepared packaged food sold as vegetarian has a horrible tendency to market itself with meat envy. "So good it tastes like meat!" Why do these companies insist on selling to vegetarians like they’re losing out, that they can be happier if they just ate vegetables that looked or tasted more like animals? No vegetarian I know thinks like this, it feels foolish to sell this way.

Most promiment company, state by state

Debateable but totally interesting. Source: mapsontheweb.

Chilled Salad

 

If you regularly buy too much at the farmer's market and the results crowd out your fridge all week here's one way to cut the clutter and help ensure you don't end up throwing a lot out. Spend half an hour blanching your haul in a single pot of heavily salted water, dropping each batch of cooked vegetables into a fresh bowl of ice water. Seal 'em up and use throughout the week. Then make something like this.

My whatever-works kind of farmer's market salad. The one pictured has blanched asparagus, peas, favas; boiled potatoes, chickpeas and egg;  ricotta, anchovies, capers and basil ripped from an indestructable plant that's been surviving on my sill for five months. I doused it in good olive oil, salt, pepper. (Sometimes I dress it in a vinaigrette of torn basil leaves pounded with a clove of garlic, Txakoli vinegar, salt, pepper and olive oil.) Serve it cool.

It also works great with green beans, tinned tuna, shreds of cured ham, chunks of salami, flakes of Comté, a squeeze of lemon, and probably a hundred other things.

Drank No. 17: His beard may be lying, there are false distillers among us.

During microwbrewing's first wave in the 1990s large brewers like Budweiser and Miller made a quick move to get in on the act. They started new macro-batch beers and made them look like microbrews with new names and quirky labels. They charged a little less than microbrews but a little more than standard beer, then filled their coffers with gold.

The same thing is happening in micro-distilling, except this time it's sort of the other way around. Micro-distillers are using macro-distilled product and selling it as small batch. How's that? Well, it turns out after you put the alcohol percentage, the category of spirit and some warnings to pregnant women on the label, you can pretty much say anything you want. You don't even have to say you didn't distill it but you can still call yourself a distiller. Buy a vat of clear distillate from Smirnoff, run it through your filter, put it in your apothecary bottle: voila, instant artisan.

There's no law against it and frankly, I don't think there should be. You've got to expect a certain amount of these shenanigans when people have essentially been given a license to sell drugs. The better distillers will come forward because they explain what they do and you can taste the difference. It's just important to keep your eyes clear and ask questions. One question might be what's the benefit of small batch distillation in the first place?

This news comes on the heels of learning about Bruichladdich, the resurrected Islay scotch maker (Islay being the Scottish island famous for its peaty, smokey scotches). From the New Yorker:

 “all its barley is sent to a huge malting plant in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands, which returns malt with a specified amount of peat smoke.”

Pretty much sounds like the liquid smoke version of Scotch to me. Drinkers, keep vigilant.

New calendar technology

A follow-up to yesterday's post about calendars. We've started testing a project timeline calendar that looks like a bit like a Gantt chart, which is a newfangled calendar technology (meaning it's a hundred years old, not several thousand—there's not a lot "new" in calendars this century). It has a special jagged red line "right now" feature you'll see below. They key thing is that, like a calendar, time starts on the left and moves to the right. Whenever you need to visually represent time progression that's the best way to go.

Here's an example of it (hat tip to J Atlee). It was used to plan and report on our progress as we performed a multi-day rearrangement of our warehouse floor. The red line, where we're currently at, moved every few hours. Here it shows where we were Day 1 at 1pm (ahead of schedule on the part of the red line that angles a "V" to the right, the rest on schedule):

At 4pm (behind schedule on the part that angles to the left, ahead on the angle to the right, the rest on schedule—also the line is drawn at the chart's 5pm, not 4pm, because they stopped an hour early):

Ancient calendar technology

I don't know when seven day week calendars began — they predate the Romans — but I don't think it's a stretch to call them ancient. Or maybe I should say heirloom. Whatever the word, calendars work crazy well. Everyone knows how to use them, the structure is the same worldwide so you don't need to understand a local language to read one, and they're super fast to scan and pick out the exact info you're looking for. When you want to tell people something specific to a day of the week there's nothing better. So I'm always surprised how many times people choose to ignore them and force customers to wander their word maze to find the information they're looking for. Like this restaurant:

Here's the same information written as a calendar:

C.S. Lewis writing before cable TV

"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act — that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

- C.S. Lewis 

 For me, magazine food photography, mostly the same feeling.