Wendy's Explained

The shock in their voice is always completely genuine. Inevitably, we'll have just finished talking about the merits of fleur de sel or why I prefer Malbec to Merlot. Then, "Hey, do you want to pick up some Wendy's?"

For me, grabbing a Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Wendy's is as natural as logging into Facebook or shaving in the morning. It's not even something I think about anymore...just something I do. And yet, what is the source? Of all the foods and all the restaurants to be obsessed over--why this?

I've actually never really known. As other sandwiches and restaurants come and go, I can still remember riding my bike for 45 minutes across Peachtree City at the age of 15 (A DECADE AGO) with part of the $20 I got from mowing the lawn...all to get this unusually delicious sandwich. 10 years of this obsession and it has shown no signs of abating (even though I worked at Wendy's for about six months in high school, partially with the hope that I would tire of the food).

It seems David Kessler has stumbled onto something.

His resulting theory, described in his new book, "The End of Overeating," is startling. Foods high in fat, salt and sugar alter the brain's chemistry in ways that compel people to overeat. "Much of the scientific research around overeating has been physiology -- what's going on in our body," he said. "The real question is what's going on in our brain."

...

The labels showed the foods were bathed in salt, fat and sugars, beyond what a diner might expect by reading the menu, Kessler said. The ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different times; sugars showed up five times. The "egg rolls," which are deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like meatloaf to give it a "melt in the mouth" quality that also makes it faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.

Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will stimulate that diner's brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the come-on offered by Lay's Potato Chips -- "Betcha can't eat just one" -- is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should or even want, Kessler found.

This shouldn't actually be much of a surprise. After all, foods that taste good can release endorphins (especially sugary foods), and the body is just about always interested in the euphoria they create. But it's at least interesting to see that perhaps science can explain 10 years of Wendy's cravings.

Some time off

You ever get so hungry that you order/make a ton of food/desserts and scarf the whole thing down without breathing?  The kind of scarfing where you don't realize you've eaten so quickly you've outpaced your "full" feeling by quite a bit, leaving your stomach to continue to expand for a half hour after you've finished loading the dishwasher in a misery that can only be relieved in a way that makes me feel like I have an eating disorder?

Anyway, that was all a metaphor for how I feel about my last run of cooking.  It was great, don't get me wrong...but after all that food for weeks on end, I had to get back to my roots (Wendy's and Chick-fil-A...don't hate).  And while there's been plenty to write about in politics, I didn't really feel like anything warranted a full post of my personal commentary.  So just a few notes to get me back into this cooking (and blogging) thing.

• It hasn't JUST been Wendy's and Chick-fil-A.  It's also been chocolate chip cookies!  The New York Times ran an article a while back about the perfect chocolate chip cookie...including recipe.  It calls for chocolate "discs" rather than chips and letting the dough rest for an unreal 18 hours.  Aside from a pretty obvious typo in the amount of chocolate (1.25 POUNDS???) this recipe was just about perfect.  In my second batch I added the sea salt after baking and could find absolutely nothing wrong with these warm, moist, chewy, droooool.

• Speaking of Chick-fil-A. Oh. My. Goodness.
• I'm finally doing this twitter thing.  To pre-empt your arguments, I refuse to update about bathroom habits or what color pen I'm writing with--I'm only going to update things of substance or hilarity.  Tune in if you'd like!
• Watching lots of NBA playoffs and sending tons of love to my hometown Hawks!  By the way, why does Doc Rivers sound like he has emphysema?
• Wolverine was downright RE-DONK-ULOUS.  The critics are haters.  Seriously.
• Arlen Specter switched parties, and promptly voted against everything the Democrats have put to a vote in the last few weeks, went on national TV to claim he wouldn't be loyal, and rooted for the Republican lost cause in the Senate in Minnesota.  Can we send this one back?  I think it's defective.  (Even better, maybe we can upgrade to the Sestak model.)
• Are you reading 2birds1blog?  Start.
• Look what I discovered at The Gibson.  New favorite EVER.

What y'all been up to?

Right now

FML:

Restaurant Weekend Returns

For those of you in the South/other places that don't do Restaurant Week (anywhere except NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC?), perhaps a clarification is in order.  Twice a year, restaurants around DC for a week offer three coures from their menu (or a smaller version thereof) for $35.  Some of these places typically charge upwards of $30 for a single course.  So on the bright side, you can find great deals if you get to some of the pricier restaurants before they're totally booked.  But on the downside, restaurants often offer limited menus, chefs use cheaper ingredients, the service and food preparation is more rushed and less careful, and you'll be packed like sardine in a can with tons of other diners.

Last year, Alyse and I decided that, with an equivalent monetary contribution from our friends, we could create a better dining experience than the vast majority of places that do Restaurant Week.  Restaurant Weekend was born, and we were right. But this year's Restaurant Week was different.  Dinners I enjoyed at Farrah Olivia and Rasika turned my impression of Restaurant Week upside down.  In one weekend, both restaurants vaulted into my top four restaurants of all time, along with Perilla in NYC and Corduroy here in DC.

But we were up for the challenge again.  That is, at least, until I lost Alyse to a bit of personnel shifting at Granville Moore's.  I managed to pick up the indispensable Jazmin as a sous chef for Sunday's seating, but I was totally on my own for Saturday.  This was going to be interesting....

By starting on Thursday, I managed to take a lot of pressure off the weekend.  That night I finished up the garlic aioli, basil oil, bleu cheese butter, shrimp marinade, and maple chili glaze. Friday I knocked out the tomato jam, asparagus puree, red pepper sauce, 15 spice blend, and cilantro oil.  So by Saturday, I felt pretty good about what I had left to do.

But this was nothing like last year.  Way more moving parts=way more things to go wrong.  Fortunately, a few of the dishes were replications of  the previous weekend's 7 course extravaganza.  Making second appearances were the amuse bouche of torched escolar, the shrimp and grits, the bleu cheese butter and pear stuffed pork tenderloin, and the apple fritters with cinnamon, caramel, and white bordeaux ice cream...with some notable changes in portion size and, in some cases, garnish and whatnot.

After the amuse bouche, we had two options for course 1.  First was a slight variation of the shrimp and grits Alyse and I served the previous week.  But instead of pancetta as a base of the red pepper sauce, we used it as a garnish (Jazmin doesn't eat pork).  The flavor of the sauce was definitely a bit off from last week, but the presence of the crispy pancetta was an awesome addition.

The other option was a trio of scallop sandwiches, each with their own fillings.  In the first was a simple puree of blanched asparagus, chicken stock, and a little ground ginger.  The asparagus puree was topped with diced mushrooms (day 1 got Oysters, day 2 got Shiitakes...I preferred the Shiitakes) that had been marinated and cooked in white wine, sherry, and worcestershire sauce until all the liquid had evaporated.  The second scallop was a spicy and sweet tomato jam of peppercorns, allspice, clove, mustard seeds, sugar, and crushed tomatoes cooked down until thickened and then hit with a little basil oil.  The final scallop was delicious delicious bacon topped with a double garlic aioli.  I dusted the scallops themselves in salt and paprika before searing them in bacon fat and slicing them in half.

I got the idea for these while driving to Richmond and daydreaming about dishes (it's also when I thought of the torched escolar amuse bouche) and I was incredibly happy about how it turned out.  The asparagus and ginger was a wonderfully fresh start to the dish, the classic tomato and basil really stood out in an unusual presentation, and garlic, bacon, and scallops should definitely get together and make delicious babies.

The first option for the main courses was the same pork tenderloin as last time around, except now I was much much better at butterflying the pork tenderloin.  Look!  Pretty!  And say hi to Jazmin in the background.

I roasted the pears a bit longer in the vinaigrette this week, and boy did it pay off.  A little bit of extra time left me with a vinaigrette that was much richer and developed in flavor.  On the other hand, my better butterflying skills actually left me with a piece of meat that was even less apt to stay together than last time.  Nonetheless, this is still a wonderfully well balanced, complex dish.

I made the same 15-spice ribeye this week, except paired it with a fianciere sauce.  A fianciere is a brown sauce derivative (just as was the chevreuil sauce) that employs mirepoix, madeira wine and truffle essence (instead of the chevreuil's bacon, white wine, red wine, mirepoix, and beef trim).  The fianciere sauce was a major hit...especially on Saturday, where there was licking of plates.  And we got some cheddar potato brioches that actually brioched!  The second day's plating, which is what this picture is of, is actually a bit comical because I ended up with too much meat.  This, the sort of mountain o' meat that is below.  Leftovers!

The apple fritters and ice cream were just as tasty as before, and even inspired Roommate Nirmal to make a little jim beam+coke+cinnamon ice cream float.  But especially exciting was the Spiced Chocolate Souffle:  just a traditional chocolate souffle with cumin, cayenne, and cinnamon.  On Day 2 I added a bit of the ice cream to the side.

And there we had it.  Huge huge thanks to Jazmin, who helped Day 2 go 1000 times more smoothly than Day 1.  And many thanks to all of my guests:  Coworkers Laura, Nora, and Maggie, Intern Monica, Roommates Nirmal and Shala, Friend Randall, Dancer Carena, and Soccer Hannah.  You are truly the cream of the crop and made this an even better experience than last year.

Maybe I won't wait a year to do this again.

Updated Blogroll and New Look

Perhaps you care, perhaps you do not.

Kathleen and I go back years and years and, even though she has now changed her last name so I can never find her on facebook anymore, she has started up a delightful food blog filled with tasty treats.  Check her at Grits and Glory.

I stumbled across a local blog called the arugula files that's both politically conscious and interested in food.  Right up my alley!

Read them.  Love them.

Also, I went and found a template that wasn't quiiiiite so blah.  This is a bit more me, so I'm gonna stick with it for a little while.

7 Course Extravaganza

For months and months, Alyse and I have talked about having over some of our favorite food lovers:  Boss Dave and his wife Jen, Chefs Tom and Christy.  Each has blessed us with delicious food and wine, and it only seemed right to return the favor.  And I have to admit...this was going to be an intimidating meal.

After all, Chefs Tom and Christy are ACTUAL Chefs (not my pretend "wannabe" variety) that have an awesome restaurant (Food Matters) and have cooked at other awesome restaurants (Cafe Atlantico).  And Dave and Jen, also awesome in the kitchen, have rather refined palates themselves (their last meal was at Alinea).  Finally, Alyse and I settled on a 7-course (7!!!) tasting menu that would give us the chance to showcase a wide variety of preparations and flavors.

The preparation for this meal actually began weeks ago with the veal stock, which was the base for the espagnole sauce, which was the base for a cheuvreil sauce that was served during the second to last course.  This has indeed been a many-weeks-long process.  But the outcome was well worth the hours and hours of preparation.

We started with an amuse bouche that had been inspired by a trip to Farrah Olivia for restaurant week.  Chef Morou serves a "shocked escolar"....a small cut of fish that has been poached very quickly, and then set in a chilled mixture of soy and wine.  It's a dish that totally stole my heart and made me crave escolar for weeks and weeks.  To get some, I had to special order it from Balducci's (did you know you can do this?  if you want a cut of meat or fish or poultry, or even produce, and you're not sure where to get it...just call and ask!  a lot of times they'll order it JUST FOR YOU.  Pretty sweet).

In any case, that is too long an explanation to tell you that I fell in love with escolar and wanted to serve it almost-raw.  I diced the raw escolar, which basically has the texture of butter, dusted it with some freshly ground cumin, placed it over some cilantro oil and topped with some fleur de sel before going at it with my blow torch and finishing with lemon zest.  I absolutely adored this amuse.

The first course was a chilled corn soup topped with a tarragon oil that was done from start to finish by Alyse.  There are few words to describe how perfect this dish turned out.  Sweet, with just the perfect toothy texture and a surprisingly mild yet well-balanced contrast with the tarragon oil.  The presentation was beautiful, with the bright green oil sitting atop the creamy yellow soup.  This was probably my favorite dish, overall, of the whole night.

And I forgot to get a picture of it.  AGH!

The second course was also all Alyse:  she wrapped some beautiful raw tuna in basil, let it sit marinate in the fridge, and then lightly steamed it right in the leaves to infuse the basil into the tuna.  She served it on top of a light, acidic slaw with a little basil chiffonade.  Another beautiful presentation, and another great starter dish.  At this point, we had hit three extra-base hits and I was feeling great about the night.

Next up was our version of "Shrimp and Grits."  We marinated the shrimp in an oil that had been infused with red pepper flakes, orange juice, copious amounts of garlic, and parsley and then sauteed them over really high heat.  At the top of the picture is my 15-spice blend (for the ribeye later) and the cilantro oil from the earlier amuse bouche

The grits were polenta and gruyere, chilled to room temperature, cut into rounds, and then deep fried until they were crispy-on-the-outside, gooey-on-the-inside goodness.  They were served over a red pepper sauce that had sweet and salty notes of polenta.  4 for 4.

So we were due for a mistake somewhere along the way, and finally we hit ours.  We thought a nice, simple, chicken consomme would be a great palette cleanser.  A little dash of it into a bowl with a sauteed mushroom and some scallions would do well to transition from the lighter first courses into the heavier main courses.

But the execution ended up all wrong.  When reheating the consomme, I must have left it on the burner too long, because while a consomme should have the clarity of this (which it did, before I reheated it):

mine had the clarity of this:

Yes, that's miso soup.  And that's what it looked like.  The flavor of the consomme itself was ok, but the mushroom was a little bitter and my idea for using toasted rosemary as a garnish that would impart a nice, herbal scent failed when all the rosemary fell into the soup.  Just, massive fail.  Although, if there were any dish to miss on, it was this one, and if there was any way in which to fail, it would have been that (and not overcooking/undercooking a main protein, for instance)

The pork tenderloin got us back on track.  I started by butterflying a tenderloin--something that requires a bit of practice to get right.

We then added layers of bleu cheese butter and red bartlett pears that had gone through a mandoline before rolling the entire thing up, tying it, sprinkling with salt, pepper, and paprika, pan-searing, and then oven roasting while glazing with maple syrup that had been infused with thai bird chiles.  We served over some wilted dandelion greens that had been tossed in a roasted pear vinaigrette.  This was a wonderfully balanced dish.  The mild, salty bleu cheese worked together with the sweet and spicy glaze over the bitter and acidic greens to achieve a balance of the entire palette that is often hard to come by.

Carla from Top Chef actually inspired the last of our main courses.  I loved how she was perfectly content to put a perfectly cooked piece of meat, a slam-banging sauce, and some well prepared potatoes in front of a panel of food experts.  So I picked up a huge dry-aged, bone-in ribeye and crusted it with my 15-spice blend before basting it with clarified butter and finally roasting it in the oven.  The preparation was relatively simple, something I had done dozens of times before, and felt good about.

The most complicated part of this dish was unquestionably the sauce.  The veal stock--->espagnole sauce---> chevreuil sauce.  We started with another basic mirepoix.

From there, I added bacon and some trim from the ribeye that I didn't feel like using and let all the fat render out.

My thinking here, since I wasn't working from a recipe:  "Well, I love bacon.  So I should just use tons of it.  I mean, what could be better than bacon?"

Oops.  Because after I added the sauce espagnole and began to reduce, something became very quickly apparent.  The balanced, superb sauce I was looking for was just....a bacon sauce.  Forget chevreuil and all that.  This was bacon sauce.  Sounds great in theory, but in reality....not as good as it should be.  But this was my favorite moment of this dinner for me--I didn't panic.

I added more veal stock and another dose of white and red wine.  I added a sachet d'epices.

I reduced and reduced and reduced and finally (about 3 hours after I started, and about 15 minutes before the ribeye was ready) it hit the sweet spot of both the consistency I wanted and the rich flavor with just hints (HINTS) of bacon and herbs that I wanted).

Our other part of the plate, a potato brioche, didn't quite brioche the way we had hoped, so we substituted with some (less than perfect, but still quite edible) potato chips with alderwood smoked sea salt.

Finally, we wrapped up with an ice cream that I had based off one of Christy's white bordeaux dessert wines she had introduced me to a couple of weeks earlier.  With just a touch of cinnamon and caramel, it paired wonderfully with some apple fritters and a reduction of another Food Matters special offering--the Alcyone dessert wine (also know as "the most delicious thing I have ever put in my mouth")

And there we had it.  7 courses and an amuse bouche.  All the food got out, and with generally only 10-15 minute waits between courses.  And while there were a couple of missteps, Alyse and I both agreed that this was by far the most challenging, impressive, (and, at least for me, rewarding) meal we had ever put together.  Special thanks to Dave, Jen, Tom, and Christy for joining us and letting us try this out on you!  A great night with great friends, great food, and great wine.  Can't complain about that!

On Arugula

I've been kicking around this post in my head for a month now, really trying to find the right voice to get across what is, for me, a pretty challenging subject.

In late summer of 2007, well before the Iowa Caucuses and the never-ending Democratic Presidential Primary and wholesale slaughter of the Republican Party in November, the New York Times Caucus blog casually reported on a relatively innocent comment about Obama in an attempt to poke a little fun at a line that fell flat:

One line that landed a little flat, though, was when Mr. Obama sympathetically noted that farmers have not seen an increase in prices for their crops, despite a rise in prices at the supermarket.

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” the senator said. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”

The state of Iowa, for all of its vast food production, does not have a Whole Foods, a leading natural and organic foods market. The closest? Omaha, Minneapolis or Kansas City.

 

ARUGULA!!!  ELITIST!!!  The Right-Wing Noise Machine went into hyperdrive.  A Google search for "Obama arugula" now returns an unimaginable 145,000 hits.  A Google search of prominent wingnut blog Redstate.com alone returns 86 hits.  The message was clear:  Real Americans don't eat arugula.

What??

Where did this come from?  Why is it that blue blooded Americans only eat tasteless, watered-down iceberg lettuce, but enjoying the bitter peppery flavor of arugula relegates you to an Ivory Tower?  And of course, it's not just arugula.  Real Americans drink beer (specifically Bud, Miller, or Coors.  Tasty microbrews are still elitist.  And don't get me started on anything Belgian.).  Effete liberals drink wine.  Thinking about some organic iceberg lettuce?  Not so fast.  A search of that earlier mentioned conservative site for "organic elitist" returns 26 hits.  In fact, any food or drink that has been prepared for the purpose of tasting exceptionally good...all of it.  It's elitist.  And bad.

This post isn't just for me to rant about the Republican Noise Machine.  I mean, it's that too.  But it's also about the sad state of affairs the sets entire genres of food (most importantly the organic variety) into a cultural gallows.  Ezra Klein stumbled across this very concept recently as he described a fundraiser held by Alice Waters:

And that's the other problem. Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store.

I get this just as much as anyone.  When I was working two jobs to get by just after college, I knew there would be about 4 or 5 days every month where I would survive solely off of french fries and $1 double cheeseburgers at McDonald's.  That money wouldn't have been particularly well spent on organic carrots from Whole Foods (about $3 on their own).  But my point is that it shouldn't...be this way.

It's hard to escape the morbid irony of the morbid obesity omnipresent in our nation's poorest neighborhoods.  The cheapest food available to us is loaded up with trans fats, sodium, saturated fats, perservatives, chemicals...The best, freshest, safest, most healthy foods are loaded up with markups for an organic label.  The rich get healthier, and the poor get fatter and sicker.  (Oh, and they often don't have health insurance, so...)  Hey Republicans out there, this is one of many reasons why voting with your pocketbook doesn't always work.  We are quite literally staring at a market failure that is screwing over poor Americans in place that hurts even worse than their pocketbooks:  their own bodies.

Klein also notes one of my fears about writing this blog as he finishes describing Waters' meal: 

However, it wasn't clear that [politicians] would be publicly promoting the "new American table" anytime soon. It was the sort of dinner that would work well in an attack ad. A politician who spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of such dining would be served up medium-effete in his next election.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if, when I run for office one, I'm not attacked for my "Horseradish Crusted Rack of Lamb with Cherry Gastrique" or the upcoming "Torched Escolar."  But I can only hope that the mainsteaming of fine cuisine via outlets like the Food Network and Top Chef (see?  Food Network does do SOMETHING right apart from Iron Chef!) will make such a focus on good, healthy food become less the aberration of a sushi-eating (by the way, what the HECK is wrong with sushi???) latte-sipping liberal and more the usual habits of families around the country.  To do that, the price of such good, healthy food simply MUST come down.  As Klein concludes:  

But Waters' vision is almost depressingly realistic. An America in which schoolchildren are assured fresh and nutritious meals and the government doesn't spend billions subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup would be cheaper to the taxpayer and healthier for the nation. What we'd spend purchasing fresh produce we'd almost certainly save in medical bills. Our current food policy makes us fatter, sicker, and poorer. And, as Waters reminds us, it tastes bad.