Southern Comforts

I usually have lame excuses for not posting in a long time, but this time I have a good one: I've been out of town for the past week and will continue to be on the move for another week! 

As friends and family know, I'm pursuing a personal project which has taken me to Texas and now New Mexico.  California is to follow.  Having made sure that the Internet would always be accessible, I was expecting to write almost daily about my dining adventures, especially since there's very little home cooking involved when on the road.

Well, while the eats in Texas were very good, they were almost all deep-fried, grilled or Tex-Mex.  It made for a repetitive and generally unhealthy menu.  Furthermore, the dining venues weren't exactly conducive towards photo-taking.  I felt alien enough being a very visible minority; it might have been too freaky for the locals if I started taking pictures of my food.

At last, today I was in Santa Fe and had my first taste of light food since leaving home.  At a modest little place called the Palacio Cafe, I had a refreshing half-sandwich and salad.  The sandwich was a BLT with whole wheat bread accompanied by a simple salad with balsamic vinaigrette.  My beverage was a delicious prickly pear iced tea.  In other words, cactus tea.  One thing I am loving about the southwest is that all iced tea here is unsweetened which is the only way any iced tea should be served, IMO.  And refills are always free.  The prickly pear tea was oddly familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place the taste until I remembered that my brother had given me a pouch of cactus tea upon returning from Tucson.  Unfortunately, I always made it hot and didn't like it much.  Served cold, I can't get enough of it.  A squirt of lemon perfects it.

For dinner, I found myself at the Atomic Grill -- aptly named considering Santa Fe's close link to the Manhattan Project.  I would have walked away from their menu which offered standard pub fare, but I was immediately attracted to their Fried Avocado Salad.  They took two fleshy halves of a whole avocado, rolled them in some breading then fried them to a light crisp.  The indentations where the pit used to be are filled with a creamy, tangy crab salad.  Leafy greens and yellow peppers are on the side, drizzled with a honey mustard dressing.  It was satisfying without bloating and seasoned just right.  I'd love to emulate this at home!

Shortbread Redux

I have no new recipes up my sleeve today. What can I say... excuses always sound lame, but it's been busy. More about that later.

Recently, I revisited one of my older recipes from March: Orange Coriander Shortbread. For Mother's Day, it seemed appropriate to send Mom something home-made from my own repertoire. To give it a personalized twist, I tried three flavor variations. Going clockwise from bottom left: (1) Lavender Orange, (2) Kaffir Lime Leaf and Lemongrass, and (3) Vanilla Poppy.

Not mentioned in the names is the grated lime rind that went into (2) -- Kaffir Lime Leaf Lime Rind Lemongrass sounded a little excessive. For (3), I scraped seeds from a vanilla pod rather than use vanilla extract. I like how the specks of vanilla blend right in with the poppy seeds.

The only thing I would do differently is to omit the lemongrass... as much as I adore its aromas, even finely ground lemongrass is too fibrous and clashes with the delicate texture of shortbread.

Happy belated Mother's Day to all you fabulous Moms out there!

Free as a Bird

I consider myself to be relatively food conscious, but it was still a very rude awakening to watch Jamie Oliver's Fowl Dinners -- a brutally honest examination of the poultry industry. I mean, I try to do my part by buying only free-range or free-run eggs if available, or at least organic eggs. Likewise with chicken meat. I know there are cynical counter-arguments that "free range" isn't what it's cracked up to be, but my choice is driven less by concerns about my own nutrition and more by the quality of life we owe to these creatures who nourish and sustain us.

But Jamie's show rattled me when I learned that egg farmers routinely euthanize large batches of male chicks after selecting female chicks most suitable for egg-laying. (Why the male chicks can't be sold or given to poultry farmers is beyond me.) A container full of fuzzy, adorable male chicks were gassed live on the show as audience members looked on in horror.

Less emotional but equally unsettling was the realization that we consume many third party commercial products that are made from eggs, almost none of which are organic, never mind free range. Cookies, cakes, ice cream and salad dressings are some of the less obvious examples. Sure, it's obvious when you think about how these things are made, but are you thinking about the quality or origin of the egg when you pick up a bag of chocolate chip cookies?

Hellmann's mayonnaise is my Achilles' heel. Their half-fat mayo is especially killer -- for someone like me who is perpetually watching her weight, it's a blessing to have something that tastes so creamy and rich at half the fat. Yet I had to give it up after seeing Fowl Dinners. {sniff}

For a while, I've been making do by making my own version of mayonnaise with half the effort: I posted a recipe last summer which I call Almost Mayo Sauce. By using soft/hard-boiled eggs instead of raw ones, it skips the hassle of ensuring that the emulsion stays stabilized. (You can all too easily screw up home-made mayo by over-whisking past the point of emulsion and causing it to separate itself again. It's salvageable by adding more egg yolk, but it's still annoying.)



Well, now some great news! Hellmann's has announced that they are using only locally sourced "100% Canadian free-run eggs". I'm usually very leery of big corporations that make these kinds of feel-good claims but this change makes me ecstatic. It shows me that there is enough push and demand out there among my peers for what Hellmann's calls "real food". By shaping the market, we make it possible for local farmers to succeed and create financial incentive for ethical farming practices. Maybe we're not doomed... it's nice to have hope.