Broward Palm Beach Food Blog

Candyblog.com

​

One of my favorite Japanese candies is Morinaga HiChew, a sort of white, milky version of Starburst that's got the consistency of recycled plastic. That doesn't sound so great at first, but the creamy, fruity chews just sort of melt away deliciously as you gum them - they're highly addictive, and extremely fun to eat. I'm also partial to EveryBurger, little sesame seed topped cookies that sandwich a chocolate "pattie"; they look exactly like miniature sliders, but they taste almost like unsalted, chocolate-covered pretzels.

candyaddict.com

​The Japanese are crazy creative when it comes to their snack food. And you can get a taste of some of those strange and exciting treats during Saturday's Japanese Snack Tasting at Tate's Comics. Starting at 2 p.m., the comic, art, and pop culture shop will invite in people with adventurous taste buds to sample a litany of odd Japanese sundries for absolutely free. All you need to bring is a willingness to taste something like Spicy Mentaiko Toast, crusty baked bites topped with spicy cod roe. For something less adventurous, but equally intriguing, try Walky Walky, little candy-coated confections from the makers of Pocky that come in a coffee cop. Kawaii!

Tate's Comics
4566 N. University Dr., Lauderhill
954-748-0181
www.tatescomics.com

There's a killer on the loose.

​
It's a quiet Monday morning, and you're in your kitchen, making yourself a cup of fresh ground coffee with your Starbucks Barista coffee grinder. You pop some beans into the hopper and press the grind button. Ah, smell that fresh coffee smell. After a few seconds, you remove the cap and move to pour that fragrant powder into your coffee maker. Then it happens: the Barista springs to life, blades churning and hungering like a gaping maw. It lunges for your jugular. You try to duck out of the way, but you're just too slow. Looks like you'll be drinking your coffee out of a tube from now on. In the morgue. (Because you're dead.)

OK, so that scenario will definitely not happen. But Starbucks is recalling its Barista model coffee grinders, which, according to the company, can "fail to turn off or turn on unexpectedly, resulting in injury." Starbucks announced the recall of 530,000 grinders in June following nearly 200 reports of error (none of which were death related). You can see here that the company is still displaying this literature in its stores. The recall also applies to Seattle's Best coffee grinders as well. If you have one, best call 866-276-2950, or visit www.starbucks.com. But act fast, lest the killer strike your happy home too. 

My recent trip to New Orleans was largely predicated on two things: 1) that I had never before been to the Crescent City, and it was high time I got there, and 2) it's known as one of the best food cities in the country. Sure, you could argue that New York, Chicago, and San Francisco each have more cutting-edge dining scenes. But food in New Orleans is not just a hobby, nor is it something to do on a Friday night. It genuinely seems to be a way of life -- a pursuit of happiness predicated upon ingestion. There's also the fact that Louisiana is home to arguably America's most native and homegrown cuisines, Creole and Cajun cooking, each of which grew from the accidental intermingling of cultures, like diamonds formed by pressure and time. The influence of French, British, African, Caribbean, and southern-American cooking styles literally define the term melting pot.

Of course, there are a multitude of other reasons that New Orleans has become the dining mecca that it is today. Tourism is obviously a huge boon for the food and hospitality industry in the city, which, in 2007, had nearly reached pre-Katrina levels according to New Orleans Online. And while the bad economy has led to high job losses all across America, New Orleans has suffered far less than the rest of the country, according to a January report in the Times-Picayune. The reason: The post-Katrina rebuilding process has "insulated" the local economy -- at least for the short term. Of course, New Orleans' position along the Mississippi and proximity to the fresh seafood of the Gulf of Mexico has also afforded its chefs the finest available ingredients with which to play.

All these things got me wondering, however. Doesn't the South Florida food scene share a lot of common traits with New Orleans?

If only all menus were so honest.

Ever notice how restaurant menus are beginning to resemble a politician's campaign speeches? Lots of buzzwords, catch phrases, empty platitudes -- a steaming pile of verbal roughage signifying very little.

"Insipid Farms baby greens, picked by virgins at the first breath of springtime, lovingly dressed with balsamic vinegar drawn from ancient casks hidden in Guido's basement and kissed with cheese made from the milk of magical goats that live in the clouds above Siena."

Yeah. Whatever.

So since in the restaurant biz, as in politics, nothing means quite what it seems, Clean Plate Charlie has compiled this modest dictionary of currently trendy menu buzzwords. Eat 'em and weep.

Artisanal: Made by former real estate agent going through midlife crisis

Biodynamic: Grown in shit

Who's Yurmami?

We're all familiar with the four primary tastes we experience on our tongues: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. Food scientists and restaurant critics desperate for novel terms have also added two more semi-tastes: astringent, and spicy. But a century ago the Japanese identified a fifth primary taste -- "umami" -- which can be roughly translated as "deliciousness." Writers and scientists have had a hard time describing exactly what umami is -- not a flavor, not quite a sensation. Many people agree that when you encounter it in food, umami imparts a feeling of fullness, roundness, savoriness, or yumminess.

Umami comes from glutamate (yes, as in MSG, which is glutamate in a shaker. MSG has been mostly given a bum rap, but that's another story). Glutamate is an amino acid that is found in many foods. One of the great challenges for chefs in both the East and the West is finding ways to combine foods to get the biggest glutamate punch, because the more umami a dish has, the more likely customers and stray food critics are to fall into ecstasies of devotion. Umami is probably the main reason why spaghetti & meatballs is so universally loved.

Wanna guess which of the foods pictured below contain glutamate? PS: If you're really an umami devotee, as I am, you can join the Umami Information Center, and learn all about the fun conferences and symposia and seminars they sponsor around the world.

*the photo above is from hoosierburgerboy.com, a great blog about all things burger.

Hit the jump to identify yer umami.

File this under: "Amazing things people do for no reason at all." But I'm not sure I'd want to eat this pizza after he was done with it.

Gagnaire & friend: "Ees eet timed to explode en schedule?"

This confirms it, we are in The End of Times. French chef Pierre Gagnaire at Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental has created what he's calling the first entirely food-free restaurant dish, at least according to the PR the hotel is sending out. The recipe for "Le Note a Note", just one course in an 11-course synthetic tasting menu, is comprised of ascorbic acid, citric acid, glucose, and maltitol. Isn't that the exact recipe for chewable C tablets? Reports say the dish looks like little pearls and tastes a bit like apple and lemon. Or like a Flintstones vitamin, take your pick.

Can I just put this out there -- isn't there enough synthetic food on our grocery store shelves that we don't necessarily want a kitchen lab approximation of Cocoa Krispies or Fruity Pebbles when we book a table at some high-end restaurant? Am I being a hopeless curmudgeon? I mean, I'm sure Gagnaire and his sous chefs are having a blast back there playing mad scientist, but I can't imagine that his customers are similarly enthralled. The dish below, for example, looks like a pickled pig's testicle set alongside a souvenir model of the World's Fair, interesting....but edible?

No, please, you go first...

OMG, how did I miss this? An animated history of war, with each country represented by its most popular foods. Hilarious, in a totally gruesome, juvenile, and thoroughly un-PC way. Anybody who correctly identifies the players in each scene wins my undying admiration. Check it out.
 

"Most vegetables are something God invented to let women get even with their children. A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something brussels sprouts never do." -- P.J. O'Rourke

Bonus: Vocab word of the day, borborygmus, n. a rumbling noise caused by movement of gas through the intestines. A complaint common amongst restaurant critics. "He was woken early by borborygmus as his insides fermented and his intestines ballooned with gas beyond their capacity.'" Ruth Dudley Edwards; Book Review / Straying Into A Dark, Ugly And Sick World; The Independent (London, UK); Sep 21, 1994.

Chicks and ducks and bees better scurry: Tonight at 8 p.m. the Lake Worth City Commission is set to discuss an ordinance to allow up to seven chickens and ducks and "a limited number of bees" to be raised within city limits. The "chicken on every plot" movement has taken off around the country, as city folks are starting to get into raising a hen or two for fresh eggs (and the occasional roast chicken). Viz, this snippet from the New York Times:

City dwellers who raise chickens are springing up around the country. Groups organized on the Internet in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, Tex., are host to chicken-centric social events, and there are dozens of books -- a whole new form of chick lit -- on raising chickens, including Barbara Kilarski's "Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces," and related titles like "Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker," by Herrick Kimball.

Leave it to Lake Worth to be the South Florida city marching bravely forward into urban farming (Key West is the only other city to allow legal chickies). We already have an anarchist city commissioner and a transgendered city manager -- flocks of domestic fowl will only add to the general sense of a town gone pleasantly haywire. I've had a yen to keep guinea fowl for the past couple of years, and I've even considered trying to do it secretly: Now there'll be no reason for subterfuge. And frankly, it's not like nobody's doing it already. I have personal knowledge of at least one very pretty black hen that has made B street her home; she roams freely in my neighborhood (and she's gotten very good at dodging the pit bulls). No doubt my planned guinea hen project will go down as yet another wildly expensive agricultural hobby, right alongside the pathetic heirloom tomatoes, the citrus trees that manage to squeeze out one tangerine every other year, and the pineapples underwhelming us with their lack of fecundity. But it's nice to know that I'm part of a large movement of silly yuppies with way too much time on our hands. And this time I'll have a government body to blame for encouraging me.