Last first: why do people think that giving a bottle of wine that is 8 years old is a Great Gift? I was the recipient of a bottle of Pinot Noir this week that was from a lame-ass label and the vintage was 2006. Who is going to want that? Who is going to think that is going to taste good? Not me. Hey, folks, it's not a french burgundy. Yes, I said the appropriate "thank you" to the giver but I spit out the first taste and dumped the entire bottle. Yuck. A gift such as that should not be given at all. I am not being cynical here, I am simply being honest. If you buy $10 wines, they will not last for 8 years, trust me. And it is so easy to buy a really good bottle of wine for the same $10 that would make any gift giver and gift getter happy.
Butter: remember when we were in kindergarten and we were given a jar of cream and told to shake, shake, shake it until it turned into butter? And if we were lucky, it did? Well, the hotel I work for gets really thick cream and I borrowed some but, alas, I borrowed too much. I thought I would re-create that golden moment of making cream so I poured some into a jar and shook it. And shook it. And shook it. It got thick and then thicker and finally! It was sort of like soft-spread butter! Without salt, just plain, and it was actually quite nice. Sweet and creamy.
Cooking: Have you noticed the trends in cooking lately? There is no more Roasted Chicken, no more Beef Chili, no more simple Pork Tenderloin. There is nothing that is worth cooking (if you read blogs, articles, Internet food porn sites) unless it has the really hip, current, totally NOW ingredients which are impossible to find in a normal supermarket, not to mention impossible to afford on a $14 per hour wage. Things like pork belly, last year's cutting edge protein, are being replaced by things like everything fermented, bone broth, weird grains like Teff (what the F is that?) and some things I saw today at Whole Foods, kalettes, some cross-dressing kale/brussel sprout combo. Is that what we have to look forward to, hybrid vegetables? It's sad enough that black beans are so, so 1990's, now we have new kinds of beans that you are supposed to soak and then drink the soaking liquid before you cook the beans. O.M.G. Think of the bloating and the gas! Talk about ruining the ozone layer. Yuck.
Bee pollen, spirulina, dhutan rice, oddly milled flours, fiji berries, hemp seed, couscous made out of cauliflower, handpicked roots from things that grow in streams….. it goes on and on. Imagining a nice, simple piece of roasted meat seems heresy when held up against this new regime of food products.
My really nice chicken thighs cooked on a bed of leeks with a smattering of chopped bacon on the top are definitely not socially acceptable any more. My Italian pork cooked in milk might as well be spawn of the devil. It has milk and cream! It has pork but no bacon! Wait, even bacon is getting the cold shoulder, according to food blogs and food magazines. And a simple, delicious roasted chicken? HA! Who would eat such a thing? It must have some rub of natural seeds blended with seaweed and the juice from a cactus that only grows in a five acre plot in central New Mexico. Or the Himalayas. Or in some lab dish.
I know, I am exaggerating, but not by much. Chefs are moving to the country so they can do that silly farm-to-table thing easier. And farm-to-table? Really? What's the alternative? Farm-to-grocery-store? That's how all of us shop, we don't forage for our food. We don't shoot it, we don't clean it, why should we pretend that all this "back to the earth" stuff is something new and somehow better. How pretentious and unreasonable to think that we can all pay $20 a pound for some free-range fat-ass turkey at Thanksgiving.
OK, that's enough. I am going to toss together my simple salad of arugula and toasted walnuts and a diced pear. Wish I had some chickpea flour croutons to go along with it, but that will have to wait for another day. Or a different new year.
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