Bottled Pickle Juice.

Dill pickle juice. No pickles, just the juice. Bottled. 16 oz containers.

Really.

The Golden Pickle Juice web site claims that pickle juice makes a good sports drink (buh?) or as a mixer for cocktails (euh?). Their Drink of The Month: Golden Jager Blaster. Half and Half Pickle Juice and Red Bull. With a shot of Jagermeister.

Really.

And it is claimed repeatedly on the web site that Pickle Juice is not made by a troop of elves squeezing the souls out of pickles.

No Really. That’s what it says. Go look.

I got the link from Slashfood which refers to a BevNet post where Pickle Juice is described as smelling “like a bio lab during dissections.” I had this vivid mental image of big tubs of pickles bent in horrible shapes and you have to pin them down on the wax tray to get them to lie flat. I may never eat pickles again.

(I got it from Slashfood.)

As part of my ongoing experimentation with weird food, I discovered a new vegetable at the farmer’s market this weekend. It was stacked up between the broccoli and the kale and it didn’t have a label. I had to ask the hippie girls behind the table what it was, and the response was: it’s orach. Its an heirloom spinach, they said. I bought two bunches.

From googling I learn that Orach (Atriplex hortensis), is not related to spinach, but its used like spinach. Its sometimes called mountain spinach and is one of the oldest cultivated vegetables. The romans grew it and considered it an aphrodisiac. It was prized in the kitchen gardens of the American settlers and documented in John Lawson’s History of Carolina in 1714.

The plant itself is kind of bushy and weedy, with thick woody stems so you have to clean it (which is kind of pain). The leaves are thin but there are lots of them; it also has a whole lot of tiny flowers clustered at the end of the stem that are kind of bushy raw but the bushiness goes away once they’re cooked and have kind of a crunchy texture. Overall orach has a stronger taste than spinach, but not quite as bitter as chard. Its good. I like it.

For future reference, however, one’s spouse may be somewhat apprehensive if you come home from the market brandishing a pile of weeds and proclaiming excitedly “Look! I bought a strange vegetable for dinner!”

I went to Whole Foods a couple weeks ago and came home with a turkey reservation. I hadn’t planned to get a turkey this year because we were going to a potluck t’giving dinner with friends and there would be turkey there. And besides, its just me and Eric in the house, and Eric is vegetarian. The thought of having to eat a big old turkey all my myself is kind of overwhelming (turkey leftovers until JULY). They’re making little itty bitty miniturkeys now, which are easier to handle than the twenty pound frozen cannonballs you normally see at this time of year, but at any rate I was figuring on giving the whole thing a pass.

But then I saw that WF had heritage turkeys on the menu. Hmmm.

Here’s the scoop: the common market turkey, a variety imaginatively called the “Large White,” is a product of years and years of industrial breeding. Buyers prefer white meat, so turkeys have been bred with these enormous breasts (giant! turkey! gazongas! er…sorry). Those turkey breasts are so huge that common turkeys can’t fly, can barely walk, and they can’t breed on their own — they have to be artificially inseminated. And of course there’s the standard story of turkeys being so stupid they stand out in a rainstorm and look up into the rain and drown. Compare and contrast with the wild turkey I saw wandering across my lawn a couple of times last year, which was positively svelte, fast, and smart. I’ll bet that turkey has no problem getting laid (or coming in out of the rain).

The common turkey is snow white because white feathers mean white skin and paler meat, also preferred by most turkey buyers. Its a fast-maturing turkey, meaning more of them can be bred and killed in time for the holiday rush. Unfortunately, the common turkey is also pretty much tasteless. And, like most poultry breeding in the US, most turkeys are raised in huge packs in enormous industrial farms and crowded conditions and dosed with huge amounts of antibiotics to keep the poultry diseases that result from overcrowding from killing all the birds before they can be sold. Yum. Organic free-range turkeys solve many of the ethical issues, of course, but you’re still starting out with the velveeta of poultry. Bland, processed, engineered holiday food product.

I first heard about heritage turkeys five or so years ago when I got a membership in Slow Food, a kind of snobby but nonetheless interesting organization dedicated to growing, preparing, and eating really great food. And I was really interested in trying a heritage turkey, but I would have had to order one, and that would had cost me upward of $140 for the bird including Fedex shipping. I like to try new foods, but there is only so far I will go, especially since its just me still working through the leftovers in July.

Heritage turkeys, in comparison to the Large White, are old-fashioned turkey breeds, turkeys closer to the original wild turkeys. They have breed names like Narragansett, Bourbon Reds, and American Bronze. They look like turkeys are supposed to look. They have normal turkey feathers and normal turkey breasts. Because only us curious rich yuppie foodies buy them, they’re raised on small farms and unpenned, and they roam and fly like wild turkeys, so they’re tougher and gamier than market turkeys. But: they have taste.

(that’s a Narragansett. Pretty, isn’t he? Picture from The New Farm website)

So there I was in Whole Foods, not planning on a turkey, when I saw they had heritage turkeys for order. All my plans for no turkey this year went right out the window. I stepped up to the table and put in my order for the smallest possible heritage, which was still going to be 14 pounds. The woman at the table was really curious. “Have you ever had one?” she asked. “I hear they have lots of dark meat.” she said, in a tone that sounded like “I hear they make you break out in sores.” I replied brightly that no, I had never had one, but I like dark meat, so that’s a good thing. “You’re the first person to order one,” she said. She had a stack of about 400 turkey orders next to her. Of course the heritage at $3.49/lb is difficult to compete with a traditional turkey that’s only a third the price or less, but still. The first one? Where is anyone’s sense of adventure?

While I was at Whole Foods I also saw they had some romanesco cauliflower, which is probably the most fascinating vegetable ever so of course I had to get some. The girl at the checkout exclaimed “Have you tried it? You’re the first person to buy some!”

I am apparently the only food experimenter in my neighborhood.

But that brings us up to today, when I picked up the heritage turkey. (like I was going to pick it up before thanksgiving with the other 400 of my neighbors? I think not). I had the meat counter at WF joint it for me (cut it up in pieces), which will make is less lovely to roast but means I can freeze most of it for cooking and eating later (leftovers. leftovers. leftovers). At home as I wrapped up the turkey pieces I noted that the heritage is definitely different from a normal turkey:

• As advertised, the turkey has smaller breasts and larger legs. It looks pretty much proportionately like a really large chicken. A really, really large chicken.
• The meat is DARK. The breast meat is much darker than normal turkey dark meat, and the leg and thigh meat is a deep, deep, red, almost beef red. Almost purple.
• It has feathers! The pin feathers on the wings are black. There are only a very few of them so its not a big deal, and I assume that there are leftover pin feathers on every bird I’ve ever bought — I’ve just never noticed because they’ve been white and they blend in.
• The meat is definitely…meatier. Its not squishy like normal turkey or chicken. This is a bird that actually moved around in its lifetime.

I wish I could end this post with a taste test, but to be honest: I had an enormous amount of turkey yesterday on turkey day, and I am sick to death of turkey right now. I have a leg and thigh of the heritage turkey in the fridge and I will roast it up in a few days and follow up then.

Gobble gobble.

Presumably you have already seen the Gallery of Regrettable Food. In that vein comes the Company Cookbook.

Amy, the author of amalah.com where the cookbook lives, explains:

I work for a financial publishing company. Which means that sometimes, I get some random swag from companies, brokers or mutual funds. Usually pens or those little squeezy stress ball things. That stuff sucks.

But one time, a company sent me their employee cookbook. It sucks, but in a completely awesome way.

Basically: its a collection of lovingly arranged and photographed company potluck dishes, with Amy’s incredibly funny mockage to go along. Cheese plays a major role.

(I got it from Slashfood.)

Have I posted about Steve Don’t Eat It! yet? (searching) No! I have not!

There’s a long tradition of eating really horrible things and then writing about it on the Internet. I would search for the good examples from the past but I am lazy. However, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it done quite so well, or horribly, and with pictures, as with the long-running sequence Steve, Don’t Eat It! over on thesneeze.com.

In past installments of Steve, Don’t Eat It! Steve has eaten and reported on potted meat food product, Beggin’ Strips, breast milk, natto, and cuitlacoche. (The last two are fermented soybeans and moldy corn, respectively. They are real food and not spoilage). In the most recent installment, he tries canned silkworm pupae. I am not certain this was actually supposed to be food, but Steve says so, so I defer.

See the Steve, Don’t Eat It! archives for previous installments.

Steve, author of Steve, Don’t Eat it! also completely fascinates me because in the same blog he can write something as perverted as this review of the Olsen Twins Toothpaste, and then turn around and do a completely excellent straight up interview with the graphic designer who did the Fedex logo. Luv him.

(I can’t remember where I got it originally, but the silkworm pupae and thus the reminder came from slashfood)

Slashfood, one of my new favourite blogs, has a fun article up about the business of mushroom marketing and how mushrooms have been renamed to make them sound exotic. Exotic means they can, of course, charge more for them.

It goes like this. You have agaricus bisporus, the common button mushroom. In these parts they run about $1.50 a pound. The more flavorful brown variety of the common button mushroom is the crimini. It is the same mushroom. It just tastes a little stronger, and, well, its brown. Criminis, however, run you about $2.50 a pound.

If you let a crimini grow too big, you get a portabella. Same mushroom. Same flavor. Just bigger. With a fancy name. $4 a pound.

And Slashfood mentions, and I’ve seen these in stores, the latest gimmick: baby bellas. Young portabellas! At $6 a pound. Except a young portabella is, of course, just a crimini.

Food marketing: a good job for ex-politicians.

(I got it from Slashfood.)

Summer is pesto season. Every year I grow a whole lot of big-leaf basil just for making loads and loads of pesto. Some for eating, some for freezing, just so we can have pesto year round.

Last week I harvested a big load of basil and was cleaning it in the sink when suddenly one of the basil leaves wiggled at me.

This very large green bug had stowed away on the basil I had harvested. The camouflage was perfect; the bug is precisely the same color as the basil.

I of course maneuvered the bug to a better location so I could take pictures and then let him go.

It’s persimmon season. Yum.

They didn’t have persimmons back east where I grew up. Or if they had them, I never saw them. When I first moved out here I saw persimmons in the store, and people told me oh, persimmons are wonderful, you should try them. So I bought a persimmon at some exorbitant supermarket price, brought it home, sliced it into quarters, and put one in my mouth.

It was like eating a handful of bitter flourescent orange dirt. The persimmon immediately sucked all the moisture out of my mouth. I would have said “Bleah! argggh!!” if I had been able to talk, which I couldn’t, because my lips had sealed themselves shut and unfortunately the bite of persimmon was still inside. I staggered around the house waving my arms and knocking over furniture looking for something with which to pry open my jaws. I was eventually able to expel the persimmon and with enough water and time eventually I regained salivary equilibrium. The remainder of the persimmon went into the trash.

I confronted the person who had recommended persimmons to me at work the next day. She laughed at me. “They’re kind of astringent if they’re not ripe,” she explained.

Kind of astringent. Right.

Suffice it to say this experience did not make me want to try persimmons again, ever. It was only later I found out that there are two kinds of persimmons: Fuyu and Hachiya. Fuyus are round like an apple and yellowish-orange. You can eat them the day you take them home from the store, even if they’re still hard and not very ripe, although they’ll taste better if they’re just a little squishy. In either case fuyus are supposed to be crisp and slightly crunchy.

And then there is the hachiya. Hachiyas are acorn-shaped, with pointy ends, and a much brighter orange than fuyus, They are sold hard in the stores. And unless you actually want to have a horrible mouth-sucking experience like I did when I tried one, you cannot eat them when they are hard. With a hachiya persimmon, you have to leave it out on the counter to blet. That is actually the correct technical term: bletting, and its actually a decaying process. No, really. The hachiya doesn’t become riper, but it does soften up and the tannins that make it, well, astringent, go away as it blets. The softer the hachiya, the better it will taste. A hachiya persimmon is not really ready to eat until it has the consistency of a water balloon. You can also quick-blet a hachiya by freezing it and thawing it, but that only makes the persimmon edible without giving you much of the flavor.

And the flavor is everything. Ripe hachiyas have a rich, honey-like flavor. They are thick and sweet and sticky and kind of messy to eat, but they taste wonderful. Because of the mess a lot of people use hachiyas for cooking but I like to eat them with a spoon and my fingers and lick off the plate. Fuyus are good and enable instant persimmon gratification, but it is the hachiyas that I really like.

I used to resist buying persimmons even after I found out how to eat them because they were so expensive in stores. $1.49 each: no. And then I found I just wasn’t talking to the right people. Persimmon trees are fairly common around here; they are a fast-growing tree that doesn’t need a lot of water or a lot of care. After the leaves fall the fruit stays on the tree, like bright orange christmas ornaments. They’re pretty to look at. The problem is that they can grow to be very large trees, they bear really heavily, and once the fruit gets ripe you have to harvest it all because otherwise the water-balloon effect works against you and whatever happens to be standing underneath the tree. It can get kind of icky. Thus, if you own a persimmon tree generally you have way more persimmons than you know what to do with. Owning a persimmon tree is kind of like planting a lot of zucchini: you begin to look around for neighbors with unlocked doors.

So around this time of year I start mentioning in casual conversations that I like persimmons. I bring it up at the gym, at jobs where I’m working. I sigh dramatically and mention the high price of persimmons at the store. And invariably someone will perk up and say “You like persimmons? Thank god. I will bring you some.” And then the next say or so I have a giant grocery bag of persimmons. Or two or three. It never fails.

I usually eat all my persimmons out of hand but one of these days I will cook with them. Persimmon pie and persimmon pudding seem to be popular. Epicurious has a whole bunch of persimmon recipes, including persimmon salsa, persimmon feta and hazelnut salad, and persimmon cardamom sherbet. Yum.

Its enough to make one want to plant a tree.

I really love stinky cheese (much to Eric’s horror). And now, thanks to the good folks at the BBC, I have a shopping list. At Cranfield University, UK they have discovered the world’s smelliest cheese. It is Vieux Boulogne, a soft washed-rind cheese from Northern France.

It comes as no surprise to me that the French were the best at making stinky cheeses. Mmmm. Camembert.

Seems like a lot of my blogging recently has been extended silences followed by me apologizing for my extended silences and explaining what I’ve been doing instead. So, here I am again doing just that. I’ve been working a lot. But I just finished up that little mini-contract so now I can get back to what’s really important, eg, reading, sleeping in, and yes, blogging.

Yesterday I was busy doing what is only right for thanksgiving, which is of course: eating and drinking until I wanted to die. I went to a potluck with a bunch of friends, and there was much feasting of turkey and stuffing and risotto and potatoes and yams and green beans and wine and wine and more wine. I brought an apple and pumpkin pie for dessert, and there was much rejoicing. I have no leftovers. I am good at pie. It is comforting to know that if this tech writing thing doesn’t work out, I can always sell pie.

I have a whole pile of links and half-written posts I need to catch up on here, so brace yourselves for an onslaught of stuff in the next few days.

It’s harvest season in the santa cruz mountains, even for the kind of gardeners who aren’t growing things like squash and heirloom tomatoes. I can tell because the dark helicopters with the funny antenna on the front have started flying low over my vegetable garden again. I’ve been meaning to make a big sign I can hold up next time they come by that says IT REALLY IS TOMATOES.

I harvested the remainder of the basil out of the garden today for pesto: one batch for dinner and another batch for the freezer. It really is the end of the summer when the basil is done. I dug out the bed, put compost and blood meal into it, and planted 48 cloves of italian hardneck garlic for next year’s pesto. So it goes.

Late summer is Crush in these parts.

Brendan Eliason, assistant winemaker at David Coffaro Winery in Sonoma County, describes the process for creating wine from harvesting grapes to bottling. If you’ve ever taken a winery tour you’ve probably learned this stuff, but Brendan writes well so its a good read.

The David Coffaro web site also has a winemaker’s blog from David Coffaro himself, and a photo gallery of the harvest (which mostly this year seems to involve kittens. I approve.)

(I got it from Metafilter)

When I posted about coffee grinders a couple weeks ago, Eric reminded me that I had neglected to mention the hand-crank coffee grinder. Actually I had discussed the hand-crank coffee grinder in an earlier draft of that post, but there was kind of a long-winded story attached to it, so I deleted it. But I can’t let a long-winded story go to waste, so here it is now instead.

As you may have gathered, I live in a kind of a rural area in the mountains outside of silicon valley. There are advantages to living here: nice view, quiet, lots of space to grow tomatoes, can walk around naked in your own back yard. Disadvantages: 20 minutes to a burrito, no broadband internet access, people sometimes run meth labs or dump bodies in your backyard. Its a tradeoff.

The biggest issue is that two or three times a year the power goes off for a while. You would think that the power would go off during the really horrific thunderstorms, or when we get eight inches of snow (yes, we get snow here.) But normally things are just fine during the storms. Usually the power will go off for no apparent reason on a lovely still day sometime in February when there isn’t a cloud in the sky. And it’ll stay off for a day or so.

We have a generator, but its kind of a pain to set up and even when its on you have a choice: you can have heat or you can run computers. And often by the time we get the generator set up the power comes back on again, so often we just say screw it and leave it off and wear a lot of sweaters.

The first year the power went off for more than a day we awakened in the morning with no power to realize that we had an entire freezer full of coffee beans…and an electric coffee grinder. How is one supposed to make coffee if there is no conceivable way to grind the beans? And the answer is: you don’t.

Well this was a horror that could not stand. And so later that morning uncaffienated and woozy I went into town in search of a non-electric coffee grinder.

This was just prior to the year 2000, and survivalist furor was in full bloom. I found I could get a non-electric wind-up DVD player, a solar powered DSL modem, a 50 year lithium battery weed whacker and a fuzzy-logic sushi rice cooker that ran on butane — but I could not find a non-electric coffee grinder. Until I went to Sur La Table, a high end cooking store that just opened up in Los Gatos that year. And there I found the hand crank coffee grinder.

I must point out again in my defense that I hadn’t had any coffee that day and I wasn’t thinking straight, and the coffee grinder was really pretty: brass and stained wood with dovetail joinery. It had a big crank on the top and a little drawer on the side to collect the coffee. It felt good in the hand. It was really pretty. And so without thinking much about it I went and plunked down $79.99 for the hand-crank coffee grinder.

On the second morning the power was still out but this time we were prepared: I had an $80 tool with dovetail joinery. I filled up the hopper with beans and set the grinder for the finest setting and then I turned the crank. And I turned. And I turned. And turned and turned and turned and turned. I opened the drawer. There was a very small bit of coffee grounds in there. A very very small bit. I re-adjusted the grinder for less fine and cranked some more. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

After 20 minutes or so I had managed to grind enough coffee for a very small cup of espresso. In this time I could have driven into town and gotten a very large cup of espresso. And minus the cost of gas driving into town would have saved me $76.49. Suffice it to say I realized I had made a really dumb mistake.

So of course the answer to the no power == no coffee problem, which should have been obvious, is to grind the coffee ahead of time for emergency use. Of course this is anathema to a coffee snob, but in a choice between stale coffee and no coffee when the power it out it is OK to have the stale coffee. It is like putting on extra sweaters and not having access to your email for a while. You can rough it if you have to.

I still have the hand-crank coffee grinder; it sits in a decorative position on top of the fireplace mantle. One of these days I will put it on Ebay. Eric noticed it just the other night as he as walking by. “Oh,” he said suddenly, pointing to a lovely engraved brass plate on the front. “The coffee grinder is made by Peugeot.”

“That explains why it cost $80,” I said ruefully.

“And also why it doesn’t work very well,” he said.

You can’t make coffee without a coffee grinder. Well, OK, you can, but then how could you live with yourself. Coffee grinder: essential to life. Electricity, running water, coffee grinder. I recently had to purchase yet another coffee grinder, and I found myself this morning thinking about coffee grinders I had known as I made a big cup of coffee this morning. Now, see, this is why weblogs are so important. Without a weblog, I would have to actually go outside and do something of value with my life rather than sit here in front of the computer and share all my knowledge about coffee grinder design with you.

Pros and cons of various coffee grinders I have known:

Various Krups/Braun cheapo coffee grinders. Cost: $15-20.

The best thing about the seemingly interchangeable Krups and Brains, er, Brauns (brains! Braiiins!! ahem) is that they are way cheap and they work well. They grind quickly and evenly, although it helps to pulse them if you grind for espresso.

There are also a bunch of problems with the cheapos, though. The most annoying one is that they cannot be easily cleaned, leading to lax behavior and buildup of yucky coffee goo on interior surfaces. More troubling: they break after a year or two, either by burning out the motor or by shredding small bits of plastic into your coffee. Mmmm. Of course they are so cheap that if they break you just throw them out and buy another one.

Gaggia Burr Grinder. Cost: $90.

Burr grinders are supposedly better for coffee because they don’t heat the beans when they grind them. I can’t taste the difference. But the price: ouch. If you can taste the difference, perhaps this will be more important to you and worth the investment. I recommend a burr grinder other than THIS one, though. What this particular grinder does very well is it charges all the grinds with static electricity, which means that when you pull the coffee ground container away from the grinder, all the coffee grounds go poof into the air and stick to your skin, the counter, your spoon, the grinder, the sides of the container etc, everywhere but stay in the pot or the filter where they belong. And you are left angry and uncaffienated and $90 poorer.

Also: Cannot be cleaned, which means there is usually a strange stale coffee smell in the hopper at all times. Also: chute leading from grinder to grounds container is poorly designed and ground coffee builds up there. Have you noticed: I really dislike this coffee grinder.

KitchenAid Blade Coffee grinder Cost: $30.

Bought this one last week when the last Krups died. Comes in fetching colors. Is kind of slow to grind compared to the Krups; it’ll take 20-30 seconds as opposed to 10-15 for the same amount of beans. Its louder, too. Will frighten pets. The cover fits loosely, which means there’s usually a bit of a mess to clean up. Buy a dark one.

But the really nice thing about this model: the metal grinder part with the blade is detachable from the motor so it can be cleaned easily — it can be tossed in the dishwasher or just run under the faucet. Its much easier to get into the habit of cleaning the thing when it can actually be easily cleaned. I like this one a lot and I have had good luck with other kitchenaid appliances (mixers, blenders, food processors), so I am hopeful that it will last. Plus: colors.

In summary: Cheap == good. Cleanable == good. Colors == good. Coffee == good. Thank you.

Clif bars are on sale at Amazon.com! I like energy bars because they keep me from ravenously cleaning out the vending machines in the middle of the day. I like Clif bars over other bars because a. they’re really dense so they’re filling, b. they’re not yucky-sweet, c. they taste good, especially the chocolate ones, and d. they do not have the mouth-feel of tile mastic.

I like the chocolate brownie.