Sunday Scraps

Having spent the last couple of days contemplating my first BBQ experience since childhood and my first ever pulled pork recipe I feel it my obligation to point you over to Huffington Post where there are several interesting pieces, the first one on how humans are basically vegetarians.

The other is their over view of 7 bloggers review of Food Inc., which opened this Friday in NYC at the Film Forum, I'm going to see it on Monday. You may remember I posted the link to the trailer here a while back.

It's also worth the time to check out the review of Food Inc in the New York Times, which calls it the scariest movie of the year.

This is great a story about so many of my favorite things: Canada, the environment and plastic. You know I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how we have all backed ourselves into a plastic corner and how plastic isn't biodegradable? Well at least that's what I always thought, turns out it does biodegrade it just takes 1000 years.

A very brilliant young man has won the Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada by showing how it can be done in, oh 6 weeks.

My crazy concern is how to we get to all that plastic that is already buried, or the stuff floating in the ocean. Mostly though I just think we need to figure out a way to make naturally biodegradable non-fossil fuel plastic, we should get this 16 year old working on it!

Spicy Pulled Pork with Potato Buns - The verdict!

Final update: Monday June 15th.

Pulled pork takes a long time to cook so if you're looking for something to make in a hurry, this isn't it!

This is a fairly large amount of sauce so you have some leeway with the size of roast you use, but I'd say between 1-4 pounds would be optimal.

It occurred to me today that this is the first time I have ever published a meat recipe. The meat in this case was purchased at the Union Square green market from a farmer who assures me he sells the best, tastiest and most humanely raised pigs in the market, I of course after an hour of searching have lost his card, so I'll come to back and give you his link when I find it.

This spicy, sweet, tomato based pulled pork goes great on these Potato Buns
- try using sweet potatoes or whole wheat flour.

Rinse a 2 -5 lb. pork butt or pork shoulder under running water then dry completely. Generously season with salt and pepper and set aside in a large bowl, covered, while you make the marinade.

and smashed, In the bowl of a large food processor add: 1 cup roughly chopped onions, 6 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed, 4 Serrano chilies, stemmed and seeded (you can substitute Jalapeno), 4 T tomato paste, ½ cup raw organic cane sugar (like turbinado, or you can substitute brown sugar), 2 tsp. ground allspice, 2 T fresh thyme (just the leaves) 3 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper, 1 tsp. cayenne pepper, 2 T dried Ancho pepper (ground into a powder: if you find a whole dried Ancho, de-seeded and grind in a coffee grinder or food processor), 2 T Dijon mustard, 2/3 cup apple cider vinegar.

Puree.

Pour puree over prepared pork butt and marinate overnight.

I'm off now to my friends Pam and George's place to make this using their grill. Here's how I see it going.

Make sure your meat is room tempterature (so take it out of the fridge 2-3 hours before).

Take the marinated roast out of the marinade and wipe the meat as clean as you can (n need to be too crazy about it)

Once the cools are hot and the embers glowing place the roast on the grill. Don't place it directly over a flame, cover and keep it slightly ventilated, after about 15 minutes, turn it over and cook for another 15 minutes.

I idea here is to infuse the pork butt with smoke and char it a little before finishing it in tin foil either in the oven or on the grill.

Prepare a cooking sheet by lining it with tin foil, double layer it, unless you are using the heavy industrial stuff, place some of the reserved marinade on it. Place the roast on the marinade, cover it with the remaining marinade and pull together the tin foil to create a sealed package.

At this point you can put it back on the grill, we cooked our 3 and a half pound roast another two hours, a total of 2 1/2 hours, it reached an internal temperature of 190 when we finally took it off the heat.

It was well cooked but did not shred, we chopped it.

At this point the grill was also losing heat and would have needed another batch of hot coals. The meat was steaming in it's own fat and juices and marinade, yummy, but it wasn't falling apart by any means, I'd say it could have cooked for another 2 hours, but was perfectly delicious as it was.

Mix the pork with the sauce the cooking marinade), place on a bun, serve with cole slaw. We ate it just on buns last night with lovely sauteed chard and an delicious asparagus vinaigrette George made.

The marinade is nicely spicy. George was saying he'd read a recipe where the pork was served with sauerkraut, sounds good! George also made a kick ass almond creme englaise over fresh strawberries with de stropple cookies.

At the end of the day I feel this is a recipe that is best started in the early morning, sear the meat, then wrap it in tin foil and cook for another hour or 2 on the grill until the heat starts to wane then finish it off in an oven at approximately 375 for another 2-3 hours or even longer.

Conversely you could do the whole thing in a crock pot and cook it for the 8 hours you are away at work.

BBQ season is here! Enjoy.

Crop to Cup

The CSA we signed up for this year Paisley Farms have co-partnered with croptocup a beyond fair trade coffee company that deals directly with family farmers and pays significant;y above the average per pound to help support these coffee farmers and their families. By joining our CSA we now are given a special rate of $6.99 a pound which is awesome cheap for coffee of such pedigree.

If you check out their site and go to the home page you too can order coffee from them directly.
The page I have linked to is the information "about us" page. On which they talk about their mandate:

How does Crop to Cup compare with "Fairtrade"? A. While we support the Fairtrade movement, and seek to source certified beans when we must go outside of our relationships, we require neither Fairtrade nor organic certifications. Rather, we believe that respectful and credible relationships with the farmers are the best way to make an enduring difference through coffee. Our goal is not to compare ourselves with FT, but if you are looking for a point of reference, it would look like this:

Fair Trade FT set minimum payment to farmers: ? There is no published data on this FT set minimum payment to cooperatives: $1.25 / lb of green coffee* This is a flat-rate applied across regions; this is paid to a farmer's cooperative. Includes farmer pay and other costs such as those for marketing, transport, processing, etc. FT support for community projects: $.10 / lb of green coffee* Ten cents per pound is set aside to support community project Crop To Cup C2C market-driven minimum payment to farmers: $1.11/ lb of green coffee We ensure that farmers receive 20% above market-rates; this allows farmers to experience the upsides of selling specialty coffee. C2C payment to cooperatives/export partners: $1.48 / lb of green coffee Includes farmer pay of $1.11 and cost of purchasing, transport, processing, administration and export (i.e. costs separate from farmer pay). C2C support for community projects: avg. of $.37/lb of green coffee (5% of C2C’s coffee sales) + 10% of profits. Support for community projects is connected to selling price of farmers’ roasted coffee in specialty coffee consuming markets.

The chief difference between FT and C2C is that FT works at the cooperative level, meaning that the costs of purchasing, transport, processing, administration, certification and export are taken out of the $1.25 paid to the cooperative before this amount reaches the farmer. C2C’s payment practices, on the other hand, are based on market prices and actual payment to individual farmers. We ensure that individual farmers receive a 20% premium over market prices. For the most recent crop, this equates to $.88 / lb of parchment or $1.11 / lb of green coffee. We outsource the other in-country services (processing, transport, export, etc) on behalf of the farmer, then reinvest 5% of our roasted coffee sales and 10% of overall profits to give them a stake in the business. While we do have a nonprofit organization associated with us (www.dnetiganga.org), this is no charity. Our coffee is specialty washed Arabica, and our relationships are packaged into value-adding marketing materials and customer loyalty functionalities so that you can get much more out of your coffee. *According to Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International “Pricing and Premium: VALID FROM 1 JUNE 2008”

To my way of thinking it is like supporting a farmer at the market who you know and trust and who doesn't have the money to become certified organic nor the desire since the Bush administration has so degraded the standard and since Obama seems less then interested in changing it any time soon. In part because big Agri business - Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta to name are so wealthy and influential anything they don't want or like they can de facto obstruct or stop or so bastardize that unless you are prepared for a battle it may be best to leaves things as they are. A sad state of affairs if you ask me, but there it is, the bottom line rules.

Anyway, I digress, check out these crop to cup people and see what you think, meanwhile I'm going to sign up and get some beans and do a taste test. I'll get back to you.

Summer Camp

Hey kids! I'm going to Berlin to BBQ for the opening of Summer Camp part 1 at my friend Christian's gallery This Is Exile July 18th. I'm going to be making my original recipe for spicy pork butt and homemade potato buns.

If you're in Berlin please come by!

How To Cook Your Life

My friend Malka turned me onto this, Netflix here I come!

Bacon Flavored Vodka

Yep. That's right. Really just wanted to make sure you were all kept up to date on the latest bacon news. No need to say anything else now is there? Of course if you're curious check out their site.

Operation Wildfire

If you aren't a member of Food Democracy Now I heartily encourage you to join. Otherwise you can always count on me to pass along their latest action.

After the letter is a link so you can send a fax to Secretary Vilsack.

Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has dropped over 50 percent -- the largest single drop since the Great Depression -- to a point far below the cost of production. This unprecedented collapse in prices has occurred in large part due to market manipulations and increased foreign imports by milk industry giants.

Increasingly, dairy farmers are at the mercy of these giants, such as the Dairy Farmers of America, the country's largest dairy "cooperative" which controls 40% of US milk production. Last year DFA was fined $12 million for price fixing by the US government and has also been implicated in the recent massive increase in imported milk products.

Already banks across the country are cutting off farmers' access to credit and at least two dairy farmers have committed suicide in California. The latest estimates are that the crash in domestic prices might lead to the loss of up to 30 percent of the remaining dairy farmers by the end of this year -- as many as 20,000 family dairy farmers could be off the land by the end of this year.

The loss of this many family farmers across the country will have a devastating economic impact on rural America, erasing over $52.7 billion of economic development in less than one year. Even worse, the loss of domestic supply will also create a serious gap in U.S. food safety as the DFA and others dramatically increase foreign milk protein concentrate (MPC) imports from countries such as Mexico, India and China -- countries which have much lower food safety standards than we do.

Today we're asking that Secretary Tom Vilsack, head of the United States Department of Agriculture, halt this injustice and adjust the price of milk paid to farmers to "reflect the price of production” by invoking his authority under Section 608c (18) of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. This legally mandated "floor price" should be at least $17.50 per cwt (a cwt is the standard measure for milk producers).

Because of the importance of this matter and the fact that we want every voice to be heard, we have partnered with Credo who has agreed to send a fax in your name to Secretary Vilsack's office.

We must stand by them so they can continue to produce a safe product that not only nourishes our children, but also our rural communities. Without a fair price for their milk, they can do neither. Now is the time to embark on meaningful reforms in dairy pricing to ensure that a disaster like this never happens again.

If you'd like Secretary Vilsack to hear your concerns in person, please call his office at (202) 720-3631 after you send your fax and tell him that you stand with America's dairy farmers during this crisis.

Oh Canada!

As most of you know I am Canadian even though I've lived in Manhattan for 23 years and hold an American passport I still consider myself a Canadian. It makes me proud when the neighbors to the north do the right thing. I am a bit embarrassed to say I had never heard of Nahanni national park, it is after all a very big country!

Still, it's nice to see them giving the land over to the grizzly bears and caribou than to some large corporation to exploit.

I give the link to the article in reuters, but then have include it in it's brief entirey below.

This just in from reuters:

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada plans to expand one of its most prized parks to more than six times its current size in a move to help protect the habitats of grizzly bears, caribou and other species, the government said on Tuesday.

Ottawa unveiled legislation to increase the size of the Nahanni National Park in the Northwest Territories to more than 30,000 square km (11,600 square miles) -- an area two-thirds the size of Switzerland -- from the current 4,800 square km.

The South Nahanni River, which runs through the center of the park, is considered to be one of the top paddling rivers in the world. The original reserve was created in 1972 to protect the river from possible hydro-electric development.

The new park will be home to around 500 grizzly bears, two herds of woodland caribou as well as alpine species of sheep and goats. The new boundary includes the highest mountains and largest ice fields in the Northwest Territories.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Frank McGurty)

Strawberry Frozen Dessert

This is probably a little premature, but I am in the midst of making this easy no ice cream maker required strawberry frozen dessert. I call it dessert because it has cream and yogurt in it so it doesn't seem to qualify as frozen yogurt but isn't strictly an ice cream either. Right now I just whisked the mixture that had been in the freezer for several hours and could have drunk the entire bowl down, so if you loose patience remember you can always just call it a milk shake!

For some reason I've never realized that honey was not allowed by vegans, which I only mention because since my experimenting to come up with a maple syrup cake it's gotten me into a maple syrup phase. In truth I've been in a maple syrup phase since I first tasted the stuff. Right now with strawberries in season I just really enjoy how the mellow, rich sweetness of dark maple syrup sets off the tart sweet sourness of the strawberries.

Macerating a quart of strawberries in a few tablespoons of maple syrup is just such a wonderful thing, simple and after an hour or so in the fridge gives you a wonderful strawberry maple "juice" perfect for soaking into a biscuit or some nice sponge cake along with the berries and some whipped cream, ice cream or something luscious, cold and non dairy.

Here's what I've got so far.

Clean, stem, cut in half 31/2-4 cups of strawberries. Place them in the bowl of a large food processor with 5 tablespoons of maple syrup (I like grade B but use what ever you have or prefer), 1/3 cup red wine and 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. Puree.

Pass the puree through a fine seize to remove the seeds.

In another bowl whisk together 1 cup heavy Cream and 1/2 cup yogurt until peaks form. It should be fairly stiff.

Add the strained puree, mix well and place in a metal bowl and place in the freezer. After about an hour the edges should have frozen, but the middle will still be liquid, whisk it all together again to spread out the ice crystals to make it an even consistency and place back in the fridge.

It should be done and ready to serve in 4 hours.

Before serving take it out of the fridge and let warm up a bit.

I'll up date this later when I see how it works out. Update: I whisked it again at hour 5 and it was creamy deliciousness and could be served, it held it's shape but was still creamy and soft, but had a n ice crystal quality to it that I found refreshing. It's cold sweet sour strawberry hit just the right note for me and with the addition of sweetened whipped cream and strawberries macerated in maple syrup I think it would make a dynamic combination, but if you want to you could certainly add a tablespoon or 2 more of the maple syrup.

All in all my conclusion is that if you were to make this in a larger flat baking tin (say 10 x10) instead of using a bowl like I did it would freeze quicker and you could have yourself a cool summer treat in a few hours. I also think you don't need to take it out and whisk it, you could just let it be and I believe the result would be creamier and more ice cream like - damn , guess I 'll have to make it again.

Oh and lastly, if you do end of leaving it in the freezer longer and it becomes too granita-like, just let it sit out for 10 - 15 minutes it should soften up and be luscious once again.

Today is World Oceans Day

The United Nations has named this the first ever World Oceans Day or maybe it should be called a day without seafood?

Reading the reviews of the new documentary The End Of The Line makes it sound more like a horror flick you have to keep looking away from.

Looks like Sushi needs to be taken off the options list. Also Fish and Chips are rarely made with a fish one can feel comfortable with, Natural Resource Defense Funds seafood chart now includes not only Cod, but Atlantic Halibut as must avoids. In general it seems like most Atlantic fish are in danger, with the exception of Lobster which seems to be making a come back.
It seems to me like eating fish out has become a very treacherous affair and that really at this point the only fish you should eat should be bought from a local fish monger at the green market. Unions square green market has two or three fish mongers and I believe one is there every day the market is open. Of course I also have noticed that one of the fish mongers sells Cod so...

As always grist.org has a bevy of informative and interesting articles and have knocked themselves out today with ocean day coverage.

One way to do something productive on this World Oceans Day is to click here and take action. They offer several ways to do things from calling the White House to emailing them (which I did) and some other social networking stuff. Here is the text they are suggesting:

President Obama, in honor of the first annual World Oceans Day I'm asking you to take the lead on getting the Convention on the Law of the Sea ratified before Congress goes home for the summer. Though the votes are there, it is unlikely that the Senate will adopt any major treaty without Presidential leadership. This treaty has broad bipartisan support and will help protect marine life, keep our ships safe in international waters, and boost our economy.
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Mr. President, please steer the Law of the Sea towards ratification and show your commitment to working cooperatively with the international community by speaking out about this important treaty today. Thank you.