Brighter Flames Arrayed

I live about five miles away from a Local Farm. It is literally halfway between me and the large Fancy Supermarket and a third of the way between me and the large Generic Grocery-co.

It costs more for me to buy in-season vegetable grown at Local Farm at Local Farm itself sold by its own workers than to buy the same in-season vegetable grown halfway across the state at Fancy Supermarket. In turn, it costs even less for me to buy the same thing grown halfway across the country at Generic Grocery-co. This includes the amount of extra gas I would need to use to get to the large markets.

The same thing applies to out of season vegetables. The Local Co-op stocks, say, lettuce from greenhouses an hour or so away during the winter. But that is much more expensive than lettuce grown in California and shipped across the entire continent to Generic Grocery-co.

Now, of course, I haven’t been to Generic Grocery-co in years. I do 98% of my shopping at the Local Farm, the Local Co-op and the Co-op That Is Slightly Further Away (but still not as far away as Generic Grocery-co). But even though I live in rural Vermont and am literally surrounded by farms I am still paying significantly more for the food grown down the road than food grown in California; that’s a little silly. Considering that I’m really living in one of the best possible places to eat local and this is a best case scenario, that’s a little sad. And the price margin—especially on meat—is significant enough that if I wasn’t living alone and had to shop for a family of 4.2 or whatever the average is while paying a mortgage I wouldn’t be able to do this on a teacher’s salary.

What’s even sadder and more baffling is that Generic Grocery-co has a ton of business because it’s situated nicely next to the Industrial Area and the Sub-par Housing and the Poor People. So basically we’ve got a bunch of people who literally cannot afford to buy food grown ten miles away and so they have to import cheaper food grown across the country. They have to call up some dude in a suit in the Midwest and ask him to torture some cows and feed them hormones because they can’t afford to buy the happy healthy cow standing right next to them.

That’s more than a little crazy.

Wing :: Jun.13.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

Last Thursday I discovered another link between Southern American and Southern Chinese cuisine: chicken fried pork, which is also called tonkatsu given the right sauces poured on top. This is exceptionally significant because Southern Chinese style tonkatsu (served on rice and without the standard Japanese tonkatsu sauce) is one of my favorite things in the entire world and discovering my favorite piece of Oriental food in a diner in rural Vermont is yet another proof that pork is awesome and transcends global political (but not religional) boundaries.

Not the pork I had because I was too busy eating to photograph my plate of awesome.

The basic idea of chicken fried steak/pork is that you take a steak or pork chop, bread it and fry it like fried chicken. That’s… tonkatsu. Except the local diner (and Southern tradition) puts homemade gravy on it instead of the sweet Japanese tonkatsu sauce. That actually makes it taste so much better. I am used to having tonkatsu on rice with no sauce but I actually prefer homemade gravy much more. Sadly there were no collards—the Southern obsession with dark leafy greens with salt in wet brothy goodness is something else I agree with—with my order like in the picture.

In order to understand why I love fried pork so much I’d have to go back to a story about my father like presidential memoirs do. When he was in Hong Kong he was a mechanic and repaired large looms in textile mills. He had his own machine shop in an industrial building that is now basically almost all offices and art studios since light industry has moved out of the city much like they moved out of New England mills decades ago. I spent a lot of time next to the machine lathes and not next to the arc welders doing basic office work and small prep work. Protip: If your kid has OCD having him organize your business receipts while preparing for a tax audit may not be a bad idea.

Now, pretty much every single industrial building has a cafe formed by knocking down several walls between adjoining shops/spaces and hooking up some basic kitchen equipment where heavy machinery would normally be. The one in my father’s building happened to be next to the rooftop of the garage/loading docks and so it was a swanky outdoor cafe with blue tarps haphazardly propped up with two by fours over folding tables and folding chairs set up on the rooftop. Places like these served large platefuls of meats and carbs for less than a US dollar a pop; located in a tower full of machine shops and small factories means that it gets mobbed everyday during lunch time.

Being six, there really weren’t many things I could eat there. Everything on the menu either contained lots of cheap vegetables stewed in (note: being six I have not developed a taste of vegetables yet) or had a sour or bitter sauce over it. Also, most things on the menu were meant for men who do heavy labor all day and the portions were intense. The solution: tonkatsu over rice with my father taking half the rice so the calorie count was once again something that mere mortals can consume.

As you can imagine a cafe in an industrial building with minimal kitchen equipment (basically a pile of natural gas tanks, some huge woks, several industrial sized gas-operated rice cookers, a pot of hot oil and no fear of exceedingly intense flames because everything is concrete and the chefs are as tough as the guys who carry 100kg parts up and down the stairs) is amazing at deep frying things. Places like this are also great at stir frying things or basically doing anything where being delicate is not necessary and intensity counts for a whole lot. Furthermore I’m pretty sure that they didn’t really follow all that many health codes so they could have put lead shavings into the food to make them more additive; who knows? This is where I developed a taste for breaded and deep fried pork.

And now thanks to rural Southern American traditions I can have fried pork with homemade mystery gravy (the best kind) poured all over it. Om nom nom.

Wing :: Jan.24.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Last Saturday I carved my first turkey. I suppose that it’s some form of an American rite of passage into the dominate male provider of the family; a coming of age food-related ceremony much like eating your first chicken fried steak and surviving to tell the tale. Since I ate my first chicken fried steak on Monday. I suppose that this is American food ritual week or something.

Oh wait, it is.

Talking to the basil queen about Thanksgiving plans reinforced my belief that I don’t really like turkey much. I much prefer chicken and, if the Lord may see fit to bestow upon us this most magnificent of bounties, goose. Granted, the turkey I had last Saturday was really good—but that was made by a great chef using a quarter-million dollar brick oven and I’m sure that I’d like chickens or geese cooked in the same manner even better. In fact, all carving a whole turkey did for me was to remind me how long it’s been since I roasted a chicken. So I went, got a chicken, wrapped it in herbs, garlic and bacon, roasted it and will be having chicken for the next three days or so.

The whole idea of traveling during Thanksgiving weekend is, frankly, dreadful. Just like I try not to drive through Boston during rush hour I tend to avoid getting on the roads when everyone else is doing the same thing. Making a fourteen (or more) hour round trip (usually twelve, but the interstates are quite clogged currently) to see my parents is probably not the best use of my time considering that I’ve been working nearly non-stop for the last two weeks and am completely exhausted even without the traveling. The extended family never gets together for both mobility and drama reasons—I expect that the next time the entire extended family will get together is for a funeral—and that’s fine. I’m not really interested in spending a day with people asking when I’ll be expected to reach the next stage of the socially acceptable lifestyle and me telling them something non-committal instead of providing the possibly heart-attack-inducing truth.

You see, rituals are great. But when they cause more grief than joy it’s time to reevaluate the necessity of the ritual. Besides, I’m more of an efficacy kind of person anyway. So my Thanksgiving plans involve doing all the things that I need to do but didn’t have a chance to do in the last month. For example, cleaning my bathroom and updating my blog. Really, for this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all the people in the country who are busy struggling to get together with their families and overeating inferior fowls (more on that next time) so I can be left alone to relearn vector calculus and watch all those movies from Netflix that I have piled up.

Wing :: Nov.25.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »