Monitoring Your Condiments

How long should you keep a jar of pickles in your refrigerator before discarding it? That's a good question, and it's one that someone (with a sense of humor) is trying to help us answer.

That "someone" has created a Table of Condiments that closely resembles the Periodic Table of Elements that most of us remember from high school science or physics class. It's supposed to help us know when a condiment has exceeded its shelf life.

Rhubarb the Veggie

In the N.Y. Times, Melissa Clark notes that rhubarb is more versatile than most cooks realize. She writes:

. . . I wanted to break the always-add-lots-of-sugar mold. Rhubarb is technically a vegetable, so why not treat it as such? I had been planning to make a duck curry, based on a Madhur Jaffrey recipe that called for vinegar. With its naturally acidic flavor, rhubarb might stand in for most of the vinegar.

. . . Just as I had hoped, the rhubarb melted into the sauce, thickening it and lending a deep and delightfully piquant flavor. Made again, with chicken in place of duck, the curry was nearly as good, though the sauce was slightly less rich.

Yet, acknowledging how wonderful rhubarb is in crumbles, cobblers and the like, Clark's article is accompanied by a recipe for a raspberry-rhubarb cobbler with cornmeal biscuit topping.

Cardiac Cuisine

Introducing a restaurant where the customers are called "patients" -- and for good reason. CBS's Bill Geist takes you on a walk through Heart Attack Grill.

D.C. Is Becoming Gelato-Town

And that's very good news. First, there was the opening of Dolcezza in Georgetown a few years ago. Dolcezza offers Argentine-style gelati. Sound strange? It shouldn't -- the Argentines positively love their ice cream. They also make chocolate/hazenut-filled churros that are yummy.

Now, as of several weeks ago, there is a new place called Pitango. It's located on P Street, N.W., between 14th and 15th Streets. I tried a few flavors there a few days ago, and the experience was pretty amazing.

I will (of course) be back to try other flavors, but I thought that both the Cinnamon and Bourbon Vanilla were excellent. They also offer several flavors of sorbet.

I Cook, Therefore I Am

What can foodies or other people learn from a Harvard-based biological anthropologist? Plenty, it turns out. According to Slate's Christine Kenneally:

In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, [Richard Wrangham] proposes that the big breakthrough of almost 2 million years ago that generated another 1,000 ideas and changed who we are forever was this: Drop food in fire, eat it. We are because we cook.

. . . The assumption is that once we became modern, we worked out how to cook. Wrangham, by contrast, thinks we were cooking 1.8 million years ago—and that the activity was not an outcome of being human but that being human was an outcome of cooking. Cooking physically transformed a creature that was more ape into the earliest version of us, Homo erectus (perhaps more Conan the Barbarian than Jamie Oliver but still fundamentally human).

. . . Apparently, the idea that cooking was the crucial difference between their diet and ours came to Wrangham as he stared into the fire at home. Though there's no archeological evidence of controlled fire before 800,000 years ago, he realized that a cluster of changes in the human face, brain, and gut 1.8 million years ago could be explained by only one thing—regular cooked meals.

His argument begins with the odd spend-money-to-make-money aspect of digestion: You must burn calories in order to release calories from food (a fact deeply cherished by celery-chewing teenage girls). Because raw food is harder to digest, it takes more calories to get the calories out of it, and you get fewer calories from it anyway.

So I guess human beings looked pretty gaunt way back when.

Chased by High-Fructose Corn Syrup

That's how I feel sometimes as I'm shopping in the grocery store. It seems as though more and more products are made with high-fructose corn syrup. I have had such a hard time finding a single Kellogg's cereal without HFCS that I have stopped buying the company's cereals altogether.

What's the rub about HFCS? One of my complaints is simply a gut-level reaction -- don't screw around with my food by adding something whose real purpose is to artificially extend the life of the product (even beyond the chemical preservatives that are already in there).

Pepperidge Farm makes a good white bread with some whole wheat in it, but I was annoyed the other day to see that HFCS was one of the ingredients. What the hell is HFCS doing in a loaf of bread?

Another complaint I have is that using HFCS may allow processed food/beverage producers a back-door means of hiking the sweetness without indicating it on the nutritional label. I can't seem to confirm whether the presence of HFCS is included in the total grams of "sugar" listed on the nutritional panel. I strongly suspect it is not included. Dr. ChristopherMohr calls HFCS "one of the more popular aliases for sugar today."

My final complaint is focused squarely on health. Does HFCS contribute to health problems? I don't have the answer for that question. But this blog post on Consumer Reports' website reported that traces of mercury (which is unhealthy at any level) had been found in HFCS. The number of HFCS samples studied in this mercury analysis was small, which makes it hard to know how much of a problem this may or may not be.

There is also concern about a potential link between HFCS and obesity. The Mayo Clinic's website featured this post from a registered dietician:

. . . research has yielded conflicting results about the effects of high-fructose corn syrup. For example, various early studies showed an association between increased consumption of sweetened beverages (many of which contained high-fructose corn syrup) and obesity. But recent research — some of which is supported by the beverage industry — suggests that high-fructose corn syrup isn't intrinsically less healthy than other sweeteners . . .

Please note the phrase "some of which is supported by the beverage industry." CBS News has found strong links between pro-HFCS research and the industries that stand to gain financially from HFCS. I'm deeply suspicious of any research that is funded by the major food and beverage producers.

Even the Mayo Clinic dietician recommends "moderation" in consuming products with HFCS. And Carol Porter, who is director of nutrition at UC-San Francisco, says this:

One of the issues is the ease with which you can consume this stuff. It's not that fructose itself is so bad, but they put it in so much food that you consume so much of it without knowing it.

If our government didn't artificially hike the cost of sugar through price supports, HFCS probably wouldn't be used as much as it is in our foods and beverages. (Here is a good article from the San Francisco Chronicle -- definitely worth reading.)

Worst of the Mega-Calorie Meals

Fast-food restaurants are usually the main eating establishments that dieters try to avoid. Unfortunately, as the N.Y. Daily News reports, the worst of the mega-calorie meals are found at the "family restaurant" level:

A new report finds you'll really pack on the pounds if you're a regular at popular chains like T.G.I. Friday's, Chili's, Applebee's and The Cheesecake Factory. Heaping portions, deep-fried dishes and appetizers the size of entrées are the culprits, say the folks in Washington who put out the Nutrition Action Healthletter. You're essentially looking at 2,000-calorie meals, which is what most people should have in an entire day," said registered dietitian Jayne Hurley, who wrote the belt-loosening report.

The Cheesecake Factory's fried macaroni and cheese is a particularly hefty example. At 1,570 calories and 69 grams of saturated fat, "you'd be better off eating an entire stick of butter," she said.

And that's hardly the worst. Consider this dessert at the pizza-centered chain known as Uno Chicago Grill -- Mega-Sized Deep Dish Sundae: 2,800 calories. That's more calories than the average adult is supposed to consume in an entire day.

Depression-Era Foodies

Slate's Laura Shapiro has reviewed a new book by Mark Kurlansky called The Food of a Younger Land. I learned something new from her review:

Among the fortunate Americans who managed to find employment during the Great Depression was a Florida woman named Rose Shepherd — or, as she often signed her work, "Rose Shepherd, Writer."

We don't know much else about Rose Shepherd, Writer, but we do know how she paid the rent in those years: She applied to the Federal Writers Project, an economic-recovery program that actually included writing under the rubric of useful work and paid people to do it . . .

. . . late in the 1930s, she started to get a different sort of assignment. Suddenly they wanted her to write about food. The project was called America Eats, and it was going to be a collection of essays on community food events from coast to coast — the first book of American food writing, in other words, though nobody used that term, because there was no such genre.

It sounds like Kurlansky has written an interesting book.

Review: Enology Wine Bar

I had dinner this weekend at Enology, a wine bar at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Macomb in Washington, D.C. And, all in all, I was quite impressed.

The decor is sleek and post-modern. The wood floors add to the noise level, but it's not too excessive. There is outdoor seating in good weather (on a first come, first served basis).

The food we had was excellent. The flatbread with mache and proscuitto was amazing. And, if you go, do try the crab deviled eggs. Their French fries are also quite good. Service was fine, not great, but the wines were reasonably priced, and they offer some interesting flights.

I wish they had a few wines from Italy, France, Argentina and other non-U.S. countries. I think it's great that they try to get their food from local or regional sources, but there isn't much difference (in terms of a "carbon footprint") between shipping wine across the country from California and shipping it across the ocean from France, Spain or Italy.

Anyway, the food and wine was excellent. I'm definitely going to return.

A Knife? Nyet!

In the year 1717, during Peter the Great's reign, an etiquette manual was published in Russia with the following instructions:

Do not eat like pigs and do not blow into the bowl so it splashes everywhere.

. . . drink and eat only as much as you need; be the last one to finish eating . . . Do not lick your fingers and do not gnaw bones but rather take the meat off with a knife. Do not pick your teeth with a knife but use a toothpick . . .

Do not pick your teeth with a knife!? I'm willing to bet that a lot of people cut their gums up trying to do that.

Conan's Sudden Interest in Cupcakes

In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, "Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien provides the 10 items on his "Must List." This is how he explains Item No. 1:

MARTHA STEWART'S CUPCAKES — This book comes out June 2. I'm putting it on my list because I'm afraid if I don't, Martha Stewart will rip my face off and sauté it with butter and chives. Have you met Martha Stewart? I have, and trust me . . . she would.

Makes You Wanna Grab a Fork

. . . doesn't it? I have no particular reason for posting that photo above. But it looked so good and it reminded me that a slice of black forest cake that I had many years ago still ranks as one of the best desserts I have ever eaten.

Cherry and chocolate are two flavors that marry quite well.

What Schnitzel Is . . . . And Is Not

Having enjoyed several fantastic schnitzels in Vienna this past December, this N.Y. Times article immediately caught my eyes today.

The NYT's Melissa Clark writes that the secret to marvelous schnitzel is

to trap air in the crust when you cook the meat by moving and shaking the pan. After dipping the veal in flour, egg and bread crumbs, he put a cutlet in the skillet, swirling it so the hot oil undulated over the cutlet in waves. This motion creates steam that lifts the crust away from the meat, allowing the bread crumbs to crisp without sticking to the veal in a gummy mass.

BTW, I must mention that as much as I enjoy eating hot dogs, I was appalled to see that some hot dog-focused restaurant franchise actually named itself Wienerschnitzel. How dare they? That would be enough to keep me from going there.