Homemade Or Store Made?

I'm always amused whenever I see a restaurant window sign that says the restaurant's food is homemade. It would be safe to bet that the food sold never came out of anyone's home kitchen. Plus, I'm sure the health department wouldn't allow such food to be sold. What restaurant owners should say is that their food is store made or cooked on the premises.

Community Gardens, A Solution To Urban Food Deserts?

Community garden, Harlem, 127th Street, near Lenox Avenue.

I Am Not A Dunkin' Donuts Fan

I worked as a proofreader at the iconic New York alternative newspaper, The Village Voice, in  1982 and 1983. Back then Monday nights were special because around 7:30 or 8 o'clock the editorial staff were treated to a different national cuisine. I remember, for the first time, eating a pierogi, a sort of Polish dumpling.

At 8:30 or so, we got in a van and headed for the printing plant in Hackensack, New Jersey, working until seven the next morning, checking the page proofs for any last-minute errors that crept in before we went to press a few hours later.

Before arriving at the plant we would stop at a Dunkin' Donuts shop to pick up a couple of boxes of donuts. There might have been coffee purchased, too. Although my memory of that is kind of hazy, it seems unimaginable to eat donuts without something to wash them down.

I say all this because I recently picked up from the Little Free Library a book called Chowdaheadz: A Wicked Smaaht Guide to All Things Boston by Ryan DeLisle and Ryan Gormady, two Bostonians, with humorous illustrations by Kevin Mulkern, another Bostonian (Globe Pequot/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

In this book I learned that Dunkin' Donuts began in 1950 "as a single donut shop in Quincy, Massachusetts" that "has morphed into a Massachusetts icon." The authors further state that "[t]he endless drive-through lines at every location at any given hour prove that Boston runs on Dunkin." (The book spells Dunkin' without the apostrophe. Store signage puts it in. I chose to follow the latter.)

This might sound sacrilegious to a Bostonian, but I don't like Dunkin' Donuts. They remind me too much of those terrible donuts sold at the Winchell's donut chain stores in the Los Angeles area. My go-to donut store is Krispy Kreme, of which there are too few in New York. I like their soft, sugary, and somewhat greasy texture, especially after they are freshly made.

So if I ever get a chance to visit Boston (don't call it Beantown), I would be hunting for a Krispy Kreme shop, not a Dunkin' Donuts one. And I would make sure to carry with me a copy of Chowdaheadz* as well as a good street map.

*The authors explain what a chowdahead is. It's "someone who lives, or has lived, in Boston and maintains a wicked big sense of regional pride."

Reminder: National Donut Day is celebrated on the first Friday in June. In 2024, it will be on Friday, June 7th.

Tomorrow Is Turkey Day! Be Thankful!

Happy Thanksgiving to all the readers of this blog. Be sure not to overindulge at the dinner table tomorrow evening.

If there is a community fridge in your area, please donate any canned and/or perishable food items to help those less fortunate.

The community fridge concept, reported an article in The Christian Science Monitor Weekly (May 10, 2021), "first appeared in Germany around 2012." They have since "emerged," said the magazine, in the United States "as a grassroots response--neighbors feeding neighbors." These "community fridges let anyone give and take food freely."

A Food Fight In Court

I have a bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce in my kitchen cupboard. So when I saw an item in Harper's magazine (January 2023 issue) quoting a class-action lawsuit against the product's manufacturer, the T.W. Garner Food Company, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I became very interested in what the lawsuit was about.

The lawsuit, filed in September, stated that "A hot sauce is labeled 'Texas' if it is made in Texas, using Texas ingredients and flavor profiles. .... Texas hot sauces...must be made in Texas from ingredients sourced from Texas. ....Texas takes great pride in its hot sauce. ....The defendant trades on the reputation of Texas. There is nothing Texas about them."

Nowhere on the label does it say "Texas-style" (whatever that is). There's only a cartoon-drawing of a cowboy wearing a 10-gallon hat, with a whip in his hand, and three red peppers near the logo. The label says the company has been making Texas Pete hot sauce "Since 1929." Which leads one to ask this question, why has it taken 93 years to complain about the product's authenticity?

Frankly, I don't know what makes Texas hot sauce different from any other hot sauce. If there is such a thing as Texas-style hot sauce and the recipe is generic and in the public domain, how is its replication by others injurious to the reputation of Texas? I'm not a lawyer but based on the above quote, this lawsuit sounds frivolous. That could mean it will get thrown out of court.

Eating My Way Up Harlem's Eighth Avenue (Maybe)

I remember reading that Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, who died last year at age 57, ate in every restaurant along Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles and wrote a review of each restaurant. (Pico Boulevard is a very long street.)

I thought about doing something similar as an experiment here in New York, eating at and writing about every restaurant along Eighth Avenue (aka Frederick Douglass Boulevard) in Harlem, from 111th to 145th Streets.

If I decide to do it (and that's a big IF),it would be an enormous gastronomic feat involving details about each restaurant, the quality of the food and service, as well as some historical information about the ethnic and/or regional cuisine.

Not only would this project cause my waistline to take a hit but it would also take a big bite out of my wallet (concerning the latter, I would have to try to talk some publication into agreeing to underwrite my project, an iffy proposition because many newspapers and magazines have become cash-strapped lately.

Speaking of food, today is National Pizza Day. So pizza lovers, celebrate!

Smug Fruits And Vegetables In A Supermarket

"Our Fruits & Vegetables Might Look Smug Because They Know They're The Freshest."--Sign in Fairway of Harlem supermarket.

Do they also know that they will be cooked and eaten? Are they happy about that? If I were a peach or a tomato or a head of lettuce I wouldn't be.

The above sounds silly but no sillier than seeing dancing and talking fruits and vegetables in a TV commercial.

Anthony Bourdain, A Man Worth Knowing

R.I.P. Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018), chef, author, journalist, TV host.

After reading articles about Anthony Bourdain online and in print, I regretted not having the opportunity to meet him. Or interviewing him about the restaurant business for a newspaper or magazine article. It would have been a thought-provoking, possibly life-altering, experience.

Now I intend to read his books as well as look on YouTube for episodes of his television programs. (I love watching food shows.)

I do recall hearing Bourdain being interviewed by talk show host Leonard Lopate on New York's WNYC-AM when his restaurant tell-all book, Kitchen Confidential, came out in 2000. Maybe that interview, and others, are also on YouTube. I hope so.

Sarah J. Jackson, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, in an article she wrote for the Sunday New York Times (June 10, 2018) stated that Bourdain "was not just curious about food and the world. He was aware that injustice and inequality are systemic issues, and he never shied away from pointing that out."

Another writer, Jonathan Gold, a restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, reported in that paper (June 8, 2018), that "Bourdain was most interested in the intersection of food and culture, and a shot of a fish on a plate would usually be preceded by an exploration of the people who had cooked it, sold it in the market or landed it on their boat."

Such a man was worth knowing and being given our full attentions.

No One Can Be Food-Deaf

Book and magazine editor Robert Gottlieb in his memoir, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), described his lack of culinary skills this way: "...I can't do more in the kitchen than boil an egg, and am generally considered food-deaf."

The term "food-deaf "is an inaccurate description. A person can be tone-deaf because that refers to sound. But a person can't be food-deaf because one doesn't listen to food as its being prepared in the kitchen. The terms that are more accurate, although imperfect, would be food klutz and cooking inept.

Recipe For A Trump Sandwich

This message was handwritten on a sidewalk sandwich board located outside Amigos, a Mexican cuisine restaurant on Broadway, near 113th Street, in Manhattan:

"Trump Sandwich--White Bread, Full of Baloney, w/ Russian Dressing and a  Small Pickle. Plus No Tax Included."

A Book For Foodies

I recently found a hardcover book entitled Holiday Book of Food and Drink (Hermitage House, 1952), a collection of articles that were originally published in Holiday magazine in the 1940s and 1950s. While browsing through the book's 22 chapters, I found articles on such food items as coffee, pasta, beer, cheeses, and ice cream. A few of the contributors to this anthology are familiar names to me--Budd Schulberg, Roger Angell, and Elizabeth Janeway.

The book contains a few recipes, food history, and food facts. Although I'm sure some of the information is outdated that shouldn't be a huge barrier to enjoying what the writers have to say or make it insignificant from an historical standpoint.

I'm looking forward to reading the book from cover to cover and writing a review of it for this blog.

Somali Food Comes To Harlem

A new Somali restaurant recently opened in Harlem. Safari, which is family-owned, is the only Somali restaurant in New York City, according to Adam, its manager.

I am looking forward to doing a feature story about it for this blog.

Putting The Right Amount Of Food In A Fast-Food Bag

At home, while eating a chili dog topped with raw diced onions that I purchased at Checkers, a fast-food chain, I noticed that on the bottom of the bag were three illustrated panels in red in the shape of a paper bag. Each panel showed the kitchen staff how many of what items would fit inside the bag. I've never seen such illustrations on take-out bags at any other fast-food restaurant. The first panel shows that four hamburgers and a container of fries will fit in the bag; the second panel shows that four hamburgers and two containers of fries will fit; and the third panel shows two hamburgers, a container of fries, and one chicken strips/fry box. I assume most customers at Checkers are too focused on their order to give much attention to these illustrations. To me these illustrations are a good idea because they are a guide for the staff to follow to prevent them from putting too many hamburgers and/or fries in a particular size bag.

Dictionary Browsing

As a leisure time activity, I often browse the dictionary, finding, to my delight, words I've never seen before. Thumbing through my beat up copy of Merriam-Webster's, I discovered this term: "open dating." It sounded at first like there was a romance or "singles's night" connection. When I read the definition, I learned there was a marketing connection instead. The dictionary defined "open dating" (which came into usage in 1971)  as "the marking of perishable food products with a clearly readable date indicating when the food was packaged or the last date on which it should be sold or used."

So now whenever I go grocery shopping and look at the "Sell By" or "Packed On" date on a container of milk or on a deli item, I know those printed dates are called "open dating" and I can make reference to that term when talking to a store manager about an item that's been on the shelf past its expiration date.

A Food Blog That Combines History And Recipes

A blog worth checking out is Frederick Douglass Opie's foodasalens.com, which combines culinary history and recipes from an African-American perspective.

Like No Other Market?

The upscale Fairway supermarket chain (which has several New York area locations) bills itself as being "Like No Other Market." (Its trucks have an additional slogan: "The World's Greatest Food Store.") In some ways it's precisely like other markets: Checkout scanners that charge the wrong price, food on shelves past the expiration date, and cashiers who don't pack groceries properly.