Category: Food and Drink

News about eating and drinking

Sampling Sazeracs

Seth Anderson0 comment

Absinthe Sazerac
Absinthe Sazerac – America’s First Cocktail

I had a first attempt at making a Sazerac at home the other day, but wasn’t quite satisfied: perhaps I used too much Absinthe. Will try again as soon as I am able…

This variant ran in the NYT in 2009

Sazerac

  • 1/4 ounce (1 1/2 teaspoons) Herbsaint, absinthe or pastis
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 2 dashes Angostura bitters
  • 3 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
  • 2 ounces (1/4 cup) good rye whiskey
  • 1 lemon, unwaxed and scrubbed.

1. Place a short rocks glass in the freezer to chill.

2. Add the Herbsaint to the chilled glass, swirl it around to give the inside of the glass a thin coating, then discard the excess.

3. Place the sugar in the bottom of a mixing glass with a few drops of water. With a wooden spoon or cocktail muddler, muddle down the sugar, add the bitters and keep muddling. Add the whiskey and stir well, until the sugar is dissolved. Add enough ice to fill the mixing glass three-quarters full and stir for about 20 seconds.

4. Strain into the coated glass and, using a vegetable peeler or sharp knife, slice off a piece of lemon peel. Squeeze the peel’s oils over the drink and either discard the peel or drop it in the drink.

Adapted from “Artisanal Cocktails” by Scott Beattie.

(click here to continue reading Tales of a Cocktail | Sampling Sazeracs in New Orleans – NYTimes.com.)

 

Alabama Crops Rotting in the field

Seth Anderson0 comment

Indian Cucumber
Indian Cucumber

Oh, Alabama. Didn’t you learn anything from the Arizona fiasco?

Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law, the nation’s harshest, went into effect last month (a few provisions have been temporarily blocked in federal court), and it is already reaping a bitter harvest of dislocation and fear. Hispanic homes are emptying, businesses are closing, employers are wondering where their workers have gone. Parents who have not yet figured out where to go are lying low and keeping children home from school.

To the law’s architects and supporters, this is excellent news. “You’re encouraging people to comply with the law on their own,” said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who has a side career of drafting extremist immigration legislation for states and cities, notoriously in Arizona and now in Alabama.

Alabama’s law is the biggest test yet for “attrition through enforcement,” a strategy espoused by Mr. Kobach and others to drive away large numbers of illegal immigrants without the hassle and expense of a police-state roundup. All you have to do, they say, is make life hard enough and immigrants will leave on their own. In such a scheme, panic and fear are a plus; suffering is the point.

…The problems do not stop there. Farmers are already worrying that with the exodus, crops will go unpicked. Like much of the rest of the country, Alabama needs immigrant labor, because too many native-born citizens lack the skill, the stamina and the willingness to work in the fields — even in a time of steep unemployment.

(click here to continue reading It’s What They Asked For – NYTimes.com.)

Tomato Mountain Organic
Tomato Mountain Organic

Surprising to nobody who has ever lived on a farm1 or who reads this blog- Alabama agricultural businesses are having extreme difficulty finding people to pick crops once their intolerant anti-immigration bill passed, and farm laborers fled the state.

ONEONTA, Alabama (AP) — Potato farmer Keith Smith saw most of his immigrant workers leave after Alabama’s tough immigration law took effect, so he hired Americans. It hasn’t worked out: They show up late, work slower than seasoned farm hands and are ready to call it a day after lunch or by midafternoon. Some quit after a single day.In Alabama and other parts of the U.S., farmers must look beyond the nation’s borders for labor because many Americans simply don’t want the backbreaking, low-paying jobs immigrants are willing to take. Politicians who support the law say over time more unemployed Americans will fill these jobs2

…

Tomato farmer Wayne Smith said he has never been able to keep a staff of American workers in his 25 years of farming. “People in Alabama are not going to do this,” said Smith, who grows about 75 acres (30 hectares) of tomatoes in the northeast part of the state. “They’d work one day and then just wouldn’t show up again.” At his farm, field workers get $2 for every 25-pound (11.3-kilogram) box of tomatoes they fill. Skilled pickers can make anywhere from $200 to $300 a day, he said. Unskilled workers make much less. A crew of four Hispanics can earn about $150 each by picking 250-300 boxes of tomatoes in a day, said Jerry Spencer, of Grow Alabama, which purchases and sells locally owned produce.

A crew of 25 Americans recently picked 200 boxes — giving them each $24 for the day. It may make sense for some to stay at home. Unemployment benefits provide up to $265 a week while a minimum wage job, at $7.25 an hour for 40 hours, brings in $290. Spencer said the Americans he has linked up with farmers are not physically fit and do not work fast enough. “It’s the harshest work you can imagine doing,” Spencer said.

(click here to continue reading The Associated Press: Few Americans take immigrants’ jobs in US state.)

Let’s see, bust your ass, break your back, squatting in the hot sun and make $24 a day, or maybe more if you persevere a year or two, long enough to become skilled; or make $290 a week in an air-conditioned minimum wage job, making copies at Kinkos. Hmm, not much of a choice.

The only way banning illegal immigrants from farm labor will ever work is if either food costs to consumers jumps astronomically higher, or if minimum wage gets overturned by government fiat. I sincerely doubt the Republicans would be bold enough to eliminate minimum wage, even though they mention it every once and a while. And would you pay $17 for a single tomato? Probably not. So what’s the solution, besides allowing borders to open up? NAFTA, I guess, and more shipping of American jobs to places where $25 a day without benefits is adequate for a worker to survive.

Great plan you’ve come up with, immigrant haters in the GOP.

Footnotes:
  1. yes, I lived on a farm, but I don’t now, thanks god [↩]
  2. despite any evidence [↩]

Why Are Restaurant websites So Often Awful

Seth Anderson0 comment

Tommy's Grill - Lomo Fuji
Tommy’s Grill – Lomo Fuji

I’ve ranted about this for a long time – for the majority of restaurants, their websites are horrible. Especially in the era of smartphones and iPads, restaurant owners that have Flash-only sites are deluded, at best.

Farhad Manjoo reports:

While lots of people have noted the general terribleness of restaurant sites, I haven’t ever seen an explanation for why this industry’s online presence is so singularly bruising. The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. The problem is getting worse in the age of the mobile Web—Flash doesn’t work on Apple’s devices, and while some of these sites do load on non-Apple smartphones, they take forever to do so, and their finicky navigation makes them impossible to use. Over the last few weeks I’ve spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell. I also spoke to several industry experts about the reasons behind all these maliciously poorly designed pages. I heard several theories for why restaurant sites are so bad—that they can’t afford to pay for good designers, that they don’t understand what people want from a site, and that they don’t really care what’s on their site.

But the best answer I found was this: Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. “In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general,” says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). “People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that’s why disco music starts, that’s why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online.”

When you visit many terrible restaurant websites in succession, it becomes obvious that they’re not bad because of neglect or lack of funds—these food purveyors appear to have spent a great deal of money and time to uglify their pages. Indeed, there seems to be an inverse relationship between a restaurant’s food and its site. The swankier the place, the worse the page. Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ Berkeley temple of simple, carefully sourced local cuisine, starts with a pointless, grainy five-second clip of what looks like a scene from a Fellini movie. Alinea, the Chicago molecular gastronomy joint, presents you with a series of menu buttons that aren’t labeled; you’ve got to mouse over each one to find out what you’re about to click on. Masa, the exclusive New York sushi bar, presents you with a pages-long, scroll-bar-free biography of its chef, but (as far as I can tell) no warning that you’ll spend $400 or more per person for dinner.

(click here to continue reading Restaurant websites: Why are they so awful? Which ones are the absolute worst? – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine.)

and brief parenthetical note: I started using Menupages about 6 months ago, and now I find myself going there first before or soon after looking up a restaurant’s URL. Menupages also has an iPhone app and an Android app which is handy when I’m hungry outside somewhere since the app has a geo-locational feature.

I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. “Say you’re a designer and you’ve got to demo a site you’ve spent two months creating,” Bohan explains. “Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What’s going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn’t know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it’s great and money well spent.”Not coincidentally, designers make more money to create a complicated, multipage Flash site than one that tells you everything you want to know on one page. Bohan, for one, isn’t complaining about the terrible state of restaurant websites. Menupages, which lists each restaurant in its database by menu, operating hours, price, and address, is one of several sites that benefits from bad restaurant pages.

Veerasway to Change to a Burger Joint

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Urban Archeology
Urban Archeology, 846 W Randolph.

I did eat at Veerasway once, and I thought it ok, not great.  Nothing had much flavor, and I never returned. I’m not adverse to a good hamburger now and again, but how many new “organic” hamburger joints can the West Loop support anyway?

Last weekend at Lollapalooza, Veerasway owners Chris and Angela Lee set up shop as Juhu Beach. Little did anyone know that the tent setup would be the modern Indian restaurant’s new form as the Lees shuttered the Michelin Bib Gourmand-stamped Veerasway on Sunday and now will begin transforming it into Grange Hall Farm Burger.

Despite getting recognized by Michelin, Veerasway just wasn’t pulling in the business. “Not enough people gave Indian a chance,” said Chris Lee. “In other words, everyone who had the food thinks it’s great, but not enough people were willing to try the food.”

The new approximately 55-seat free-range burger joint will open sometime this fall to, as the Lees feel, fill a quality burger void in the West Loop. They were inspired to open Grange Hall after seeing the popularity of DMK Burger Bar. “There are many restaurants with good burgers, but the point is that there are no dedicated burger places in the West Loop,” he said. “We want to do it to Angela’s style.” Lee does recognize that Epic Burger recently opened not too far from their location, but considers that more in the Loop.

The restaurant will grind all the hormone-, drug- and antibiotic-free beef in house. They will source all the products—meats, vegetables, fruit—from family farms as close to Chicago as possible and plan to use only in-season ingredients. The menu, which is still being worked out, will also feature turkey and veggie burgers, as well as just-baked pies and hand-churned ice cream. And on weekend mornings, they’ll hold farm breakfasts.

(click here to continue reading Veerasway Closing, Grange Hall Farm Burger Will Replace; Juhu Beach to Carry on Legacy – New Beginnings – Eater Chicago.)

Three Hearts Better than None
Three Hearts Better than None, 844 W. Randolph.

—

update, walked by here this evening:

Future Home of Grange Hall Farm Burger

 

Farmers Oppose GOP Bill on Immigration

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Lets Make a Deal
Lets Make a Deal

Hmm, another crack in the GOP coalition? I don’t think Wall Street is very happy with the Tea Baggers right now, and now agribusiness is concerned too? Hmm, the election of 2012 will be interesting, won’t it?

Farmers across the country are rallying to fight a Republican-sponsored bill that would force them and all other employers to verify the legal immigration status of their workers, a move some say could imperil not only future harvests but also the agricultural community’s traditional support for conservative candidates. Blogs

The bill was proposed by Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It would require farmers — who have long relied on a labor force of immigrants, a majority here without legal documents — to check all new hires through E-Verify, a federal database run by the Department of Homeland Security devised to ferret out illegal immigrants.

Farm laborers, required like other workers to show that they are authorized to take jobs in the United States, often present Social Security numbers and some form of picture ID. Employers, many of them labor contractors providing crews to farms, have not been required to check the information and are discouraged by antidiscrimination laws from looking at it too closely. But it is an open secret that many farmworkers’ documents are false.

…

“Most of our folks are Republicans,” said Paul Wenger, the president of the California Farm Bureau. “But if the Republicans do this to them without a workable worker program, it will change their voting patterns or at very least their involvement in politics.”

(click here to continue reading Farmers Oppose G.O.P. Bill on Immigration – NYTimes.com.)

Purple and White Onions

Purple and White Onions

and we’ve mentioned how difficult it is to find Americans willing to crouch in the dirt for 12 hours a day, agriculture work is not for the soft of belly and back:

…But farmers and their advocates scoff at that notion, saying that regardless of high unemployment, few American workers are willing to sign up for what are often hard, hot and long hours in the fields.

“People just don’t want to do farm work,” Mr. Wenger said. “They don’t want to pick berries. They don’t want to pick lettuce. And the pay is just as good as working at the hamburger shop or making up hotel rooms, but they just don’t want to do the work.”

Mike Carlton, director of labor relations for the Florida Fruit and Vegetables Association, agreed. He said his group monitored hiring by citrus growers, who are required to offer jobs to Americans before they can turn to the H-2A program for temporary foreign laborers.

In one sample, Mr. Carlton said, 344 Americans came forward to fill 1,800 pickers’ jobs; only eight were still working at the end of the two-month season.
Mr. Carlton said Florida growers had flocked to Washington, telling lawmakers they had glimpsed the possible impact of Mr. Smith’s proposal after a verification mandate narrowly failed in the Florida Legislature this spring. “Just the prospect of it, and some of our workers left the state,” Mr. Carlton said.

Labor shortages were also reported by Georgia growers, said Charles Hall, the executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, after lawmakers there imposed a state mandate to use E-Verify this spring.

Some of the most forceful feedback has come from Mr. Smith’s home state, where farmers have the backing of the larger Texas Business Association. The group used its clout recently to kill an immigration crackdown law in the State Legislature, even though it was supported by Gov. Rick Perry, a possible Republican presidential contender.

Can You Win Friends With Salad?

Seth Anderson0 comment

Crust - Shaved Fennel Salad
Crust – Shaved Fennel Salad

Really? People don’t like salads? I try to eat a salad a day, sometimes during both lunch and dinner1, not for any particular metaphysical reason, but because I love the taste of a good salad. Apparently I’m in a minority:

Can packaged produce get America out of its salad rut?

Despite decades of nagging to eat more leafy greens and colorful vegetables, the average American eats a salad at mealtime only about 36 times a year. That’s 20% less often than in 1985, when the average annual frequency was 45, according to market research firm NPD Group. Fewer than half of Americans—49%—ate at least one “leaf salad” at home in two weeks, compared with 75% who ate a potato dish and 81% who ate beef.

(click here to continue reading The Salad Is in the Bag: Marketers Hope Adding Veggies Will Get Americans to Eat More Packaged Greens – WSJ.com.)

Many salads I create are served accompanied with the Simpsons “You Don’t Win Friends With Salad” cha-cha (YouTube clip, or when this is taken down, someone else will upload a different version)

Green City Organic Farmers Market bounty
Green City Organic Farmers Market bounty

Tossed Salad - Maroush
Tossed Salad – Maroush

Salad Stuffed Tomato
Salad Stuffed Tomato

Kai Sushi Cucumber Salad
Kai Sushi Cucumber Salad

Microgreen Salad
Microgreen Salad

Marche May 2010 House Salad
Marche May 2010 House Salad

Arugula Salad
Arugula Salad

Sabana de Jitomates
Sabana de Jitomates

Tomato cucumber salad
Tomato cucumber salad

Steak, Salad and a splash of wine
Steak, Salad and a splash of wine

Endive Salad - Vivo
Endive Salad – Vivo

Press Here

Press Here

Spinach Salad
Spinach Salad

Pumpkin Curry Halibut
Pumpkin Curry Halibut

Suron Salad
Suron Salad

Dolmas -Cafe Suron
Dolmas -Cafe Suron

Beet Salad
Beet Salad


Footnotes:
  1. though of course, this doesn’t always happen [↩]

Cuba’s International Brand Havana Club Rum Co-Produces Film

Seth Anderson0 comment

Papa Dobles
Papa Dobles

One of these days, I’d like to visit Cuba.

As one of Cuba’s very, very few international brands, Pernod Ricard-owned Havana Club rum uses Cuba itself as a marketing tool. Capitalizing on Havana’s lively, sultry cultural scene, the company is co-financing a feature film called “Seven Days in Havana”1 to be screened in cinemas around the world next summer.

The film, created with M&C Saatchi, Paris, is a contemporary portrait of Cuba’s capital city, with a different director for each of the seven days. One director, for instance, is Oscar-winning actor Benicio del Toro.

There is contractually no product placement in “Seven Days in Havana,” although because the film was shot in Cuba, and Havana Club is one of the few alcoholic drinks brands in the country, the rum features in the finished product.

Daniel Fohr, founder and creative director at M&C Saatchi, Paris, said, “Everyone who goes to Havana is in contact with Havana Club. It is everywhere in Havana — people drink it in every bar and carry it on every street.”

…

The 100-minute film continues Havana Club’s focus on Cuban culture and creativity. Havana Club, produced at a distillery in San Jose, Cuba, has been promoted since 2006 with an ad campaign using the slogan “El Culto a la Vida” and regularly updates a website featuring contemporary Cuban artists and musicians at havana-cultura.com.

“Seven Days in Havana” is currently in post-production. Although it was filmed by seven different directors, the whole script was written by Cuban crime writer Leonardo Padura.

Wild Bunch International has secured distribution in more than 20 markets, including Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Canada. Havana Club is planning a program of marketing activities around the launch of the film in every country, except the U.S.

(click here to continue reading Cuba’s International Brand Havana Club Rum Co-Produces Film | Global News – Advertising Age.)

 

Footnotes:
  1. 7 días en La Habana [↩]

Local Laws Fighting Obesity Under Siege

Seth Anderson0 comment

Tommy's Grill - Lomo Fuji

Tommy’s Grill – Lomo Fuji

I am opposed to most government meddling, no matter the intent, but this tea party reactionary anti-public health wave is particularly ridiculous. Partially in reaction to the Obama National Health care initiative, partially because Tea Partiers want to eat 2000 calories for breakfast, 2500 calories for lunch, and 3000 calories for dinner, not to mention snacks, and don’t want your shame tactics interfering with their drug, damn it. And stop telling them to exercise either – that’s also a socialist plot!

Several state legislatures are passing laws that prohibit municipalities and other local governments from adopting regulations aimed at curbing rising obesity and improving public health, such as requiring restaurants to provide nutritional information on menus or to eliminate trans fats from the foods they serve.

In some cases, lawmakers are responding to complaints from business owners who are weary of playing whack-a-mole with varying regulations from one city to the next. Legislators have decided to sponsor state laws to designate authority for the rules that individual restaurants have to live by.

Florida and Alabama recently adopted such limits, while Georgia, Tennessee and Utah have older statutes on their books. Earlier this year, Arizona prohibited local governments from forbidding the marketing of fast food using “consumer incentives” like toys.

And this week, Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed the state budget, which contains sweeping limitations on local government control over restaurants.

“All of sudden we’re seeing this legislation get slipped into pending bills at the 11th hour under the radar of public health advocates, which will pre-empt local governments from adopting policies that would improve health in their communities,” said Samantha Graff, senior staff lawyer at Public Health Law & Policy, a nonprofit group that works to combat obesity, among other issues.

(click here to continue reading Local Laws Fighting Fat Under Siege – NYTimes.com.)

Cajun Campfire Breakfast
Cajun Campfire Breakfast

 

 

West Loop wine bar -Uva

Seth Anderson0 comment

Decaying Carnivale

Decaying Carnivale

Kevin Pang reports about who is going to move into the old Rushmore location:

Chef Mark Mendez, who left Carnivale last September, has revealed his next move: opening a Spanish small bites/wine bar with his wife Liz in the West Loop.

They’re calling it Uva, Spanish for grape, and it’ll be located at Lake and Carpenter Streets (1023 W. Lake St.) in the West Loop. His neighbors will include Next/Aviary and Maude’s Liquor Bar.

Mendez said he and his wife are working with Charles Bieler of The Gotham Project, who’s been working on a proprietary system of kegged wines on tap in New York City. Mendez will also be sourcing what he calls “oddball, small batch varieties.”

(click here to continue reading Former Carnivale chef Mark Mendez to open West Loop wine bar – chicagotribune.com.)

Wine Jug
Wine Jug

Not All $12 an hour Jobs Are The Same

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Wisconsin countryside

To wit: working in a hot, dusty field on your knees is not as much fun as making copies at Kinko’s…

Cynthia Tucker reports:

I’m going to let you in on a big secret, a closely-held and dirty truth about Georgia’s farmers: They depend on immigrants, some of whom are here illegally.

What’s that? You knew that already? Not such a secret?

Well, Georgia’s agri-business leaders are posing and posturing as if it is. They dare not admit that they need the sweat and toil of migrant laborers so much that they are not always fastidious about searching for legal documents.

But the gut-busting pressures of a harsh new Georgia law targeting illegal immigrants — modeled after a controversial law in Arizona — may force farmers to speak the truth out loud. At the very least, it may force them to campaign openly for a broad immigration reform proposal that grants legal status to illegal laborers.

It’s not looking like a good year for many of Georgia’s farmers, who were already struggling with a warming earth. As drought conditions worsen in some portions of the state — upgraded from moderate to severe — searing heat and stingy rainfall are yellowing leaves and stunting crops.

Now, some of those lucky enough to reap bountiful harvests may be forced to leave fruits and vegetables in the fields for want of enough hands to pick the onions and tomatoes, beans and watermelons. Farmers have complained that some of their seasonal workers from Mexico, Guatemala and other points south have failed to show up, frightened away by the new law, which takes effect July 1, and its promise of increased scrutiny of those with Spanish surnames.

Dick Minor, president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable

Growers Association, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that some migrant workers are skipping Georgia because they fear harassment. “People are just saying, ‘I am not going to Georgia. The law is terrible. We are going to get in trouble there. Let’s just go on.’ They have options. And what they are saying is, ‘Georgia is not the place to go,’ “ he told reporter Jeremy Redmon.

For what it’s worth, the labor shortage casts doubt on the old canard that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from hardworking American citizens, a reliable set-piece in arguments from nativist diehards. Even at an average wage of $12.50 or so an hour, native-born Georgians aren’t eager to take the work the fields offer — dirty, joint-maiming, miserably hot and impermanent. Once you’ve picked one crop, you must move to another state for a different harvest.)

(click here to continue reading Georgia’s big secret: State needs illegal workers | Cynthia Tucker.)

Mango, Orange, Plantains, Oh My!

Bottom line, expect fruit and vegetable costs to rise dramatically as the cost to pick them rises

Vienna Beef Sues Grandson of Founder

Seth Anderson0 comment

Vienna Pure Beef Hot Dogs Polish Sausage

Scott Ladany must have really been causing Vienna Beef trouble behind the scenes for a long time, or else they wouldn’t have reacted this way.

Chicago hot dog maker Vienna Beef has a beef with a grandson of one of the 118-year-old company’s founders.

Vienna says the grandson, Scott Ladany, is trying to make consumers think hot dogs made by his newer, separate company are the same as theirs.

In a suit filed Monday in federal court in Chicago, Vienna Beef says that Ladany “has embarked upon a deliberate, multi-faceted campaign to promote [his] products” by trying to convince hot hog vendors to sell his hot dogs by misrepresenting them as Vienna hot dogs — or by telling vendors that his company’s hot dogs are made with Vienna’s original recipes.

The suit claims Ladany and his company, Red Hot Chicago, are guilty of trademark infringement, false advertising and unfair competition.

Ladany was a Vienna Beef employee and shareholder, the suit notes, until 1983. At that point he sold his entire 10 percent interest in Vienna, resigned his position as a salesman and left the company. He signed employment and severance agreements that acknowledged, among other things, that Vienna’s recipes were trade secrets that he would never use or divulge.

In 1986, after his non-competition agreement with Vienna ended, Ladany opened Red Hot Chicago (RHC), headquartered at 4649 W. Armitage, to sell hot dogs and other products.

Vienna Beef says “for more than 25 years, Ladany and RHC made few inroads into Vienna’s position of dominance of the hot dog stand market. Vienna’s reputation among consumers was simply too strong. … Accordingly, Ladany and RHC recently decided to take a different tack: they decided they would avoid the enormous long-term expense associated with building their own brand. Instead they would lay claim to Vienna’s recipes, pretend to be Vienna, and sell their products by misappropriating the enormous power of the Vienna name and reputation among consumers and vendors.”

Vienna says Ladany, of Highland Park, and RHC have “made numerous false and misleading statements in their print and Internet advertisements and marketing materials” that intend to mislead the public into thinking that RHC and its products are affiliated with Vienna and its products, the suit states.

“Among other things, Defendants state in these advertisements that RHC’s products are made with Vienna’s family recipes. If these statements in their advertisements are true, then Defendants are admitting that they have stolen and are using Vienna’s trade secrets. If RHC is not in fact using the Vienna family recipes, as stated in their advertisements, then Defendants’ advertisements are false.”

(click here to continue reading Vienna Beef suit: kin of a founder misrepresenting his new company – Chicago Sun-Times.)

Give the Gift of Chicago

The Caipirinha – New Favorite Summer Drink

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Caipirinha is my new favorite summer drink, replacing my old standby, a gin and tonic.

Wikipedia defines it thus:

Caipirinha (Portuguese pronunciation: [kajpiˈɾiɲɐ]) is Brazil’s national cocktail, made with cachaça (pronounced [kaˈʃasɐ]) (sugar cane rum), sugar and lime. Cachaça is Brazil’s most common distilled alcoholic beverage. While both rum and cachaça are made from sugarcane-derived products, most rum is made from molasses. Specifically with cachaça, the alcohol results from the fermentation of sugarcane juice that is afterwards distilled.

I made it for the first time for a small Rapture party, though I’ve had a caipirinha a couple of times at restaurants. A Flickr pal posted instructions on making this drink a few years ago, I loosely followed his instructions. His photos are better, so take a look if you need additional instructions.

I can see why they are such popular cocktails – fairly easy to make, very thirst quenching, and also easy to imbibe. Also easy to slurp down several before you realize it, so be careful. Luckily I have an Irish, green liver, and don’t feel any ill effects this morning.

Finally Bought a Bottle of Cachaça

The Cachaça itself: Velho Barreiro brand, which is briefly barrel aged.1 I bought it at Whole Foods of all places, but any liquor store worth visiting will have several varieties to choose from.

Limes, sliced

I took one lime, washed it, cut off the ends, and quartered it, twice. The juiciest lime will work the best of course, so don’t get those pale excuses for limes that litter produce sections.

Limes, Muddled with sugar

In a big and sturdy enough container, I added two sugar cubes to the lime bits, and muddled2 thoroughly. If I make caipirinhas on a regular basis, I might need a longer muddler, the one I own is a little too short to work well in my martini shaker. I ended up using the above pictured pyrex dish.

Crushed Ice For A Caipirinha

Threw a few ice cubes in the blender, and crushed them up.

Caipirinha

Add about 2 oz of  Cachaça to your blend, drop in the glass, stir (I guess you could do all this in your martini shaker too, I was still figuring out proper portions, so used the glass as the final arbiter)

Caipirinha is too quickly gone

Drink! And repeat until you are doing the samba, bossa nova, or even the forró…

Postscript: I tried making a drink sans the sugar cubes, and while it was drinkable, it wasn’t as good. Cachaça is pretty strong, and the limes weren’t potent enough a mixer by themselves. But two sugar cubes3 are 20 calories worth of sugar, not a whole lot.

Footnotes:
  1. I’d link to Velho Barreiro’s web site, but it seems to be only Adobe Flash files, with auto-playing music that can’t be turned off. So, no. [↩]
  2. mashed, but with a muddler. I have one made by OXO, but there are other kinds [↩]
  3. or if you get fancy, homemade powdered sugar – don’t use regular powdered sugar because it has additives like cornstarch – instead take some regular pure sugar and grind it up in  coffee grinder or similar [↩]

Novak Djokovic and His Gluten-Free Diet

Seth Anderson0 comment

Pot O Rice

Interesting, yet not definitive since this is not a controlled experiment. Would Novak Djokovic suddenly start losing if he had a cold, refreshing beer?

How did Novak Djokovic conquer the tennis world?

Maybe the answer is as simple as this: Since last year, he’s swearing off pasta, pizza, beer, French bread, Corn Flakes, pretzels, empanadas, Mallomars and Twizzlers—anything with gluten.

It’s no secret that Djokovic has had a breakout season, or that he has been, by any reasonable standard, the world’s best athlete of 2011. On Sunday, he beat Rafael Nadal in the Rome Masters, his fourth-straight win over the Spaniard. It was his second win over Nadal on clay in two weeks, and again, amazingly, he did it without losing a set. The match ran Djokovic’s 2011 record to 37-0 with seven titles.

As the French Open begins Sunday, Djokovic’s amazing streak—the longest to start a season since 1984—is threatening to push Roger Federer (the winner of a record 16 Grand Slam titles) and Nadal (the French Open’s five-time champion) off the front pages. But the transformation from odd man out to invincible overlord also is leaving gobsmacked tennis fans searching for answers. Clearly something has clicked for the Serb. But what?

Djokovic’s serve, sloppy as recently as last season, is now precise, fluid and, at times, devastating. His forehand used to break down in tense moments; now he hits winners that seem to subscribe to undiscovered laws of physics. His backhand, always solid, is now impenetrable, even with Nadal’s famously high-bouncing forehand. And then there’s the gluten.

Last year, Djokovic’s nutritionist discovered that Djokovic is allergic to the protein, which is found in common flours. Djokovic banished it from his diet and lost a few pounds. He says he now feels much better on court.

(click here to continue reading Novak Djokovic’s Gluten-Free Ascendancy – WSJ.com.)

Schlitz

Fear, Not Radiation, Seen As Risk to Japanese Sushi

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Open Sushi

I’ve noticed that the Japanese restaurants I frequent have been much less busy recently. I wondered if the Japanese earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster was effecting the fish, and this was a danger I should pay attention to. Apparently, not so much, instead, irrational fear of the unknown is a bigger reason why people are not eating sushi this spring.

Kai Sushi White Tuna appetizer

NPR posed the question to Masashi Kusakabe, director of the Nakaminato Laboratory for Marine Radioecology not far from Tokyo. The research center is devoted to figuring out precisely what happens to radioactive material that gets into the ocean.

Kusakabe says what’s been getting into the Pacific Ocean near Fukushima is mostly radioactive iodine. It dissolves in water, and experiments have shown that the iodine tends to concentrate in algae. Then it gets even more concentrated as it works its way up the food chain.

Kusakabe says that might sound bad, “but the iodine we’re talking about now is iodine -131, which has a very short half-life at eight days.”

Every eight days, half of the iodine goes away. So after a few weeks, there’s not much iodine-131 left in a fish. Kusakabe says radioactive cesium is a lot worse: Its half-life is measured in decades, not days. But so far, much less cesium has gotten into the ocean at Fukushima.  Also, the ocean is so vast that radioactive materials are heavily diluted by the time they travel even a few miles.

So the Japanese fish most likely to become contaminated are the ones that spend their entire lives right near the Fukushima power plant. And the government isn’t letting fishing vessels anywhere near the place.

But what about the ocean-going fish that show up on sashimi platters — fish like salmon and tuna? Might they be contaminated by radioactive material from the power plant?

“I don’t think so,” he says, “because tuna move everywhere. They travel, you know, maybe hundreds of kilometers, so they never stay there.”

A tuna might swim by the Fukushima plant. But it wouldn’t hang around long enough to become seriously contaminated.

Kusakabe says the biggest threat to the Japanese fishing industry right now isn’t radiation. It’s fear.

(click here to continue reading Sushi Science: Fear, Not Radiation, Seen As Risk : NPR.)

Fresh Copper River Sockeye Salmon

New resident at 833 West Randolph

swanksalot0 comment
doorway at 833 West Randolph
doorway at 833 West Randolph, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Former location of Marché, soon to be reopened under new management:

Nellcôte (833 W. Randolph St.; no phone yet), the previously unnamed venture by Jared Van Camp (Old Town Social). The restaurant is named for Villa Nellcôte, the mansion on the Côte d’Azur where the Rolling Stones threw a notorious house party that somehow spawned the album Exile on Main Street.

“Over-the-top luxury without pretense” is how a spokeswoman describes the look. “There will be white Italian marble, wrought-iron gates, [and] cartouche crown molding, but also irreverent accents like bohemian pop art,” she says. The menu will feature a changing-daily lineup of house-made foods using local ingredients, including pizzas and pastas made with house-milled 00 flour. The flour mill is a 9-by-11-foot leviathan that the kitchen was built around, and the finely milled flour will be available for retail sale. Van Camp is targeting November or December for opening.

via
Chicago Mag – Dish

Sounds somewhat intriguing, the proof will be if it is a place that Gram Parsons would hang out in while consuming heroic amounts of opium derivatives.