W10: But is it a SANDWICH?

Panini Happy, one of the food blogs I follow posed an interesting semantic question a few months ago: How do you define a sandwich? Is a hamburger a sandwich? What about a hot dog? A quesadilla? A crepe?

For your final post, try to define a sandwich. Decide whether the items above are in or out and explain your rationale. (And if you have some questionable sandwich-like items you'd like to add to the mix, then go ahead).

W9: Field Trips

For this week, craft a post that considers your field trip to either Whole Foods or Snowville Creamery.

due 11/8

W8: Time for Some Synthesis

For this week's post, begin by choosing either the Myers reading from the coursepack ("The Moral Crusade Against Foodies") or the Fedoroff reading from the day we worked on editorials ("Genetically Engineered Food for All"). Your blog post should be a response to either Myers or Fedoroff and it should utilize the ideas/perspectives of at least two other composers that we've encountered this quarter. Everything is fair game for the other perspectives--films, assigned readings, and readings from the coursepack. You're also welcome to include additional perspectives (i.e. other outside sources) but you need to work with at least 2 people that the whole class has read.

W7: The Secret Family Recipe

So much of food is about sharing, so why the mystique of the "secret recipe"? Why is it so important to people to keep recipes secret? We can understand that Coke is trying to make a buck, but what about my Aunt Jean, who would never give away her Peach Cream Pie recipe? Would KFC really be so compromised if we knew just which 11 herbs and spices we're dealing with?

Do you have a secret recipe to share (or just write about)?

Food INJustice

Think back through the movie Food, Inc. What did you find most compelling, either in a good way or in a bad way? Use that as a jumping off point to respond to the film.

As an example, to me, all of the sad animal pictures only go so far in persuading me. I'm not an animal person, so that strategy has limited impact on me. (Just to be clear, it's not like I cheer to watch the poor chickens keeling over in the windowless pit of ammonia. But it's not necessarily enough to completely persuade me). What really did piss me off though, was the injustice these companies were perpetrating against "regular people". The old man who was being sued by Monsanto for engaging in completely legal business made me so sad that I was ready to write him a check for his legal bills by the end.

So: what particular aspects of the film were really persuasive to you (or really unpersuasive)?

due October 13 as a comment to this post

W6: Food Histories

For this week's Personal Blog post, give us a blogged version of your Food Histories presentation. Be sure to hyperlink to your sources and includes graphics as appropriate.

W5: Our Fast Food Nation

For this week's post I'm interested in your own "fast food story" but then I really want you to move beyond that and do some thinking about why America is such a fast food nation. I've traveled quite a bit and I know that many of you have too. Nowhere else in the world does fast food like America does fast food. In developing countries, places like McDonald's are luxury items. When you walk inside you'll see a pretty wealthy clientele. In other developed countries (say, in Europe) fast food tends to be relegated to freeway rest stops and a few locations "downtown".


What is it that makes fast food so American? (And, what have you seen fulfilling this role in other countries if you've traveled? How are those foods different from fast foods?)

W4: "American Food"

Here's your task for this week's post: You get to design the menu for a new "quintessential American restaurant" in, let's say, Russia. What foods best represent "America" and why? At a minimum, your post should list the menu items and the rationale. But no burgers, fries, or pizza. Those are a given--let's dig deeper. (And I think we can all agree to leave SPAM off our lists as well.

A Predictable Adventure

My kitchen reeks of fried SPAM. Yes, I said SPAM. I’d found a clever article on the reappearance of SPAM here in our recessioned American lives—she claimed it wasn’t so bad, really.

She lied.



I assigned the article to my class as we were discussing “American foods” (I feel sorry that we Americans are forced to claim SPAM, but some truths cannot be fudged, unfortunately). As I was preparing for class I thought, “If we’re going to read about it, we really ought to do a taste test. How bad can it be? Perhaps I am misremembering its cloying, gelatinous texture and overpowering, processed taste.” And so I found myself standing over the stove, browning a can of diced SPAM at 9:00 last night.

***

I’d searched the SPAM website for recipes and clicked on “Blue Ribbon State Fair” recipes. I figure at least one person has decided these recipes are good, thus giving me better odds than simply searching the ‘net at large. I check out an instructional video on making “SPAMaroni and Cheese Swaddlers” with a Toddlers and Tiaras-esque headshot of, I presume, the pre-teen creator of “Swaddlers”. Given my present repulsive associations with the term “swaddlers” (i.e. eating my newborn son and/or his diapers of the same name), I decide to pass on this recipe and move on to “SPAMkins Breakfast Muffins.” The SPAMkins’ chief virtues are that I already have the ingredients, the SPAM will actually be cooked, and the SPAMkins seem more likely to be palatable at room temperature than some of the other options.

Perhaps they were more palatable, but that is more a statement about the palatability of SPAM-based foods at large than about these particular muffins.

The SPAMkins were conceptually something of a McGriddle, but in muffin form. The recipe called for making a strange, yeasty batter for the bottom and then layering cinnamon-sugar, a spoon full of browned SPAM, a glob of beaten egg, and a drizzle of maple syrup. Yes, I said “a drizzle of maple syrup.” On top of beaten eggs. As I assembled the SPAMkins my husband kept telling me not to sweat it—that nothing I did was really going to make these things taste worse.

I popped them in the oven (a cold oven, mind you, per the recipe’s instructions), set the timer, and hoped for the best. I then dumped the remaining fried SPAM in the trash can and gave thanks that tomorrow was garbage day. And then I turned on all of the fans in the house in a vain attempt to suck out the stench of browned SPAM. Vain, vain, vain.

The SPAMkins emerged glistening from the oven, the task of tasting saved until the next morning’s class.

***

There were looks of horror when I announced that I’d brought SPAM to class. One of the looks was mine. I popped open the lid of the Tupperware, slid out a SPAMkin, and passed them around. I unenthusiastically began peeling the cupcake liner from the SPAMkin. Except that the liner was stuck to the SPAMkin as though concrete had been a key ingredient of the recipe. It took several minutes to peel off enough paper for a bite-able portion of SPAMkin to emerge. I stared, summoning my courage, stifling my gorge. Closing my eyes, I took a small bite.

The assault came in waves. First, the cinnamon-sugar and cold lump-ness of the muffin batter. “It’s not so bad it’s not so bad it’s not so bad” I chanted to myself. Next, the salty-smoke explosions across my mouth as my incisors met with chunks of SPAM. “Yuck. YUUUUCK. But I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.” Then, just as the taste settled into unpleasant but bearable: the slime—the everlasting slime of cold eggs and maple syrup. “Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. EW!!!.” I can still feel that cold, stickiness coating my mouth, my whole body, my very soul. Can I ever be made clean again?

***

The aforementioned SPAMaroni Swaddlers video concludes with a challenge to “break the monotony!” by cooking with SPAM. The website features poor, sad looking eggs that are transformed into smiling, happy eggs once one hovers the mouse (a can of SPAM) over the eggs. “Break what monotony?” I ask myself. “The monotony of eating actual food??”

[image credit: spam.com]

W3: Teachers

As we're transitioning into the next section of the class, we'll be talking about cookbook authors, bloggers, and television hosts--people who, in part--are trying to teach us about food and cooking. Who have been the "teachers" in your life? Who has taught you about cooking and food (and what did they teach you)?

If you don't like or know how to cook, feel free to get creative with this prompt. What do you know (even if you don't feel like it's a lot)? For example, I'm remembering the friend who taught me to make grilled cheese without the stove, enabling a new after-school snack. She would put the bread in the toaster and then butter it, add the cheese, and microwave it to make the cheese melt. My best friend Jenifer taught me that peanut butter and jelly was even better if you grilled it (butter = better). She would make her sandwich, butter it, and then grill it just like grilled cheese. And now that I think about it, on that same visit she introduced me to the fried hot dog--a hot dog pan fried in butter with a little worcestershire.

Now none of these is haute cuisine. None is going to win a prize. But both of these people did teach me something about food. So if you need to expand your definition of "teach" for this post, then have at it.

And in honor of one of America's best known food teachers, I give you: The Chicken Sisters!

W2: The Enigmatic Pawpaw

Your assignment for this week:  What does the pawpaw taste like?  Write whatever you'd like about the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, but make sure to include your best description of the flavor of pawpaw.


If you aren't attending the Pawpaw Festival then you can choose your own topic for this week.





I spent my Saturday morning in search of the elusive, enigmatic pawpaw fruit.  My first recollection of the pawpaw is a song sung in kindergarten: “pickin’ up pawpaws, puttin’ ‘em in the basket”.  Repeat three times, followed by some final line that I’ve never been able to remember.  Even then,  I don’t think I knew what a pawpaw was. It was just a catchy s
ong. And I don’t believe I ever thought of a pawpaw in the subsequent 20ish years.

But the pawpaw resurfaced when I moved to Athens, Ohio and began seeing bumper stickers around town:  “I’m pro pawpaw and I vote.”  Oh, really?  I had arrived in the midst of a campaign to dethrone the apple as Ohio’s State Fruit and replace it with the pawpaw.  The pro-pawpaw lobby argued that the pawpaw was native to Ohio, unlike the apple.  The power of the apple proved too great though, and the pawpaw was named Ohio’s Native Fruit instead. Somehow, I feel this must be par for the pawpaw’s course.  It can’t quite catch a break.

Living in locavore-obsessed Athens, the pawpaw and I just kept bumping into each other—in locally made jams, paired with other foods on restaurant menus, and most especially in Zoe’s pawpaw creme brulee. Yet the more I tasted the pawpaw, the less I knew just what I was tasting.  What does a pawpaw taste like? It is often described as tasting like banana or kiwi, but these are utterly different flavors in my humble opinion. I decided that this year, I would head over to the Ohio Pawpaw Festival at nearby Lake Snowden in the hopes of solving the mystery.

I set out to sample the varied pawpaw culinary offerings.  My husband and I tasted widely (one of the great benefits of marriage being that you can taste twice as many things because, as we say in our family, “Married people have to share”).  We started off by sharing some pawpaw puffs (fried funnel cake dough) with pawpaw cream cheese frosting. We moved on to the pawpaw and peanut chicken satays, then to the guacamole pawpaw burrito, followed by fried cheese curds with pawpaw pepper butter and then washed it all down with a pawpaw smoothie.  Before we left we also sampled the pawzels (pawpaw pretzels), a pawpaw cheesecake brownie, and a strawberry-pawpaw popsicle.

Having tasted so many twists on the pawpaw, you would think that we would be able to clearly identify the thing itself, right?  With my stomach full, I was no more able to answer the question “What does a pawpaw taste like” than I had been before. Before sampling the pawpaws I listened to a lecture titled “Pawpaw 101”.  I learned that the pawpaw is native to many parts of eastern North America, that it can be somewhat difficult to grow, AND that the fruit’s taste can vary widely from tree to tree. Aha!

In the puffs and pawpaw frosting, the pawpaw added just a hint of a dark, fruity note.  The pawpaw toned the cream cheese and sugar down a bit and made it more interesting. In the Burrito Buggy’s guacamole pawpaw burrito, it added a fruity tang to the guacamole, perhaps being used in place of the usual citrus.  The pawzel had a perfectly sweet cinnamoniness to complement the dense, soft, chewy pretzel. (And, if I overheard correctly, the anti-oxidant-laden pawpaw had been used to cut the amount of fat without cutting moisture, much as applesauce sometimes does.) The smoothie tasted of fruity vanilla; the brownie had dark, fruity undertones.

The real standouts, though, were the pawpaw pepper butter and the pawpaw-peanut satays.  The satays were made by the Indonesian Student Association and lest you scoff, their satays are the stuff of legend.  Their booth has the longest line each year at the International Street Fair because the delicious scent of grilling satay wafts all up and down the street. Unlike all of the other pawpaw foods on offer, I knew what the “regular” satays tasted like.  As I picked up the skewer to take a bite, I thought the sauce looked darker than usual.  As soon as the sauce hit my tongue my eyes opened wide. They had somehow managed to make the satays even better. Under all the other layers of flavor was a darkly sweet, smoky hint of fruit.

The pawpaw pepper butter was a sauce accompanying Laurel Valley Creamery’s fried cheese curds.  The curds themselves were the stuff of a cheese-lover’s dreams—soft, gooey, oozing pillows of cheesiness—none of that waxy rubberiness sometimes characteristic of cheese curds.  The light batter they’d been fried in could not contain them and they had oozed together into delicious pale-golden globs on my waxed-paper-lined tray.  The butter was a vibrant yellow and tasted like banana peppers with some added heat and a bright, fruity tang.  The vinegary, almost mustardy heat cut through the luscious curds perfectly, leaving your tongue ready to get maximum enjoyment from the next bite.

Ultimately, I decided that it doesn’t matter what a pawpaw tastes like. The pawpaw is the chameleon, the tofu, the secret agent man of fruits.  It’ll blend in to just about anything and add a little note of complexity.  It can be light or dark, sweet or savory—it’s oh-so-accomodating. I now suspect you’d never eat something and say, “Hey, there’s some pawpaw in this sauce and it’s delicious!” but you might very well say, “This sauce is delicious and I have no idea why. I must have your secret ingredient!”

In sum, the pawpaw plays well with others. Much like the Ohioans for whom it is the native fruit. The pawpaw is quiet, unassuming.  It won’t shout to get your attention. It won’t, like Texas, brag about how big and bold it is, or like New York, dazzle you with bright lights and loud noises. The pawpaw will just sit there quietly and politely on your palate like a good Midwesterner as it makes everything you taste a little more interesting.




image credit: ars-grin.gov

W1: Remembering Home

What foods remind you of home?  Are those foods sources of pride, or like Janzen, do you have some shame-based foods hiding in your closet?

Post a response to your personal blog by Tuesday, 9/13.

Your Food Cultures

"Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are."
 ~Brillat-Savarin

What food cultures do you belong to? Most of you are part of the student food culture (pizza, burgers, burritos and beer) and you no doubt belong to some kind of regional food culture as well (e.g. midwestern meat & potatoes).  Does your ethnic or religious identity connect you to particular foods or food rituals?  Are you a foodie?  A vegan?  Post your response (at least 300 words) here. And feel free to otherwise introduce yourself to the rest of the class while you're at it.

due 9/8/11

But is it a sandwich? (W10)

Panini Happy, one of the food blogs I follow posed an interesting semantic question a couple of weeks ago: How do you define a sandwich? Is a hamburger a sandwich? What about a hot dog? A quesadilla? A crepe?

For this week's post, try to define a sandwich. Decide whether the items above are in or out and explain your rationale. (And if you have some questionable sandwich-like items you'd like to add to the mix, then go ahead).

W9 Post

Choose your own topic for this week's personal blog post.

The Moral Crusade Against Foodies (W8)

You've read Myers' argument but you've also worked with a quite a few of his "source texts" over the quarter. How would you respond to Myers? Do you think his claims are legitimate or do you have another way of looking at things?

Food, Inc.

What do you think Food Inc is arguing for and what were the most successful strategies that were used in the film? Give particular attention to
1) the overlaps between the movie and both Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma;
2) the use of people in the film (as opposed to the investigative reporting in Fast Food Nation);
3) the roles that Schlosser and Pollan played in the film.

This post is due on 2/15. You might want to take a look at the W6 blog prompt before you respond to this so that the two posts don't overlap too much.

Our Fast Food Nation (W4)

For this week's post I'm interested in your own "fast food story" but then I really want you to move beyond that and do some thinking about why America is such a fast food nation. I've traveled quite a bit and I know that many of you have too. Nowhere else in the world does fast food like America does fast food. In developing countries places like McDonald's are luxury items. When you walk inside you'll see a pretty wealthy clientele. In other developed countries (say, in Europe) fast food tends to be relegated to freeway rest stops and a few locations "downtown".


What is it that makes fast food so American? (And, what have you seen fulfilling this role in other countries if you've traveled? How are those foods different from fast foods?)

Guilty Pleasure

Liesener writes about the origins and fate of the Fluffernutter. The Fluffernutter (especially to the politician who tried to ban it from schools) is a guilty pleasure kind of food--the nutritional value is questionable, we all know we shouldn't really eat them, but we eat them. What food (or foods) are your guilty pleasures? 

Post your comment here (to the Course Blog) by class on 1/20. Remember that blog responses need to be at least 300 words.

What is "American Food"? (W3)

Here's your task for this week's post: You get to design the menu for a new "quintessential American restaurant" in, let's say, Germany.   What foods best represent "America" and why?  At a minimum, your post should list the menu items and the rationale. But no burgers, fries, or pizza.  Those are a given--let's dig deeper. 

The Legend of Jan's Green Beans (W2)

As I read through the first couple of chapters of The Language of Baklava Abu-Jaber's memories triggered dozens of memories for me--memories of school lunches, of family recipes, and of family gatherings. For this week's post, write about a family recipe that represents your family--something like Abu-Jaber's shish kabob, Wizenberg's french toast, or Janzen's warmer kartoffelsalat.  Or if something else about this week's reading triggered a stronger memory, feel free to go with that.

My mother learned how to cook the old-fashioned way, from her mother and grandmother. The women in my family (unlike me) are of that lost breed who can open the cupboard, pull out five seemingly random ingredients, and put together a meal (much like Janzen describes in her family). I don't have this talent (can I blame my mother for that??) but I have great respect for it. It's a particularly valuable skill if you're perpetually broke, and we were.

But while my mother knows how to cook in a deep sense of the word, I think that as she moved into her 30s, she realized she didn't really give a stuff about cooking. I don't think she derives the kind of pleasure from it that I do (and for that perhaps we can all blame my father, who has never learned how to cook anything but a microwave dinner...)

In the 80s and 90s though, in the Midwest, potluck culture was big and everyone expected that the women would lug the pots. Between church potlucks, family potlucks, "progressive dinners" and other dinner invitations, Mom must have been expected to produce a potlucky kind of dish 10 or 15 times a year. Mom worked full-time though and also went to college through the 90s, so she was always on the lookout for the quick potluck recipe. And then she found "Jan's Green Beans".

I cannot remember the beginning of "the green beans", really. I can remember life before the green beans. Back then, I think mom's standard potluck dish was the Seven-Layer Salad. Tasty, but awfully labor intensive. Plus, buying all those ingredients could be a pain in the butt and assembly really took awhile. We also used to make an Applesauce Cake pretty often--yellow cake mix with a cup or so of applesauce and some cinnamon-sugar to dust the bundt pan and make a swirl through the middle. It tasted great, but was pretty humble looking. It usually got passed up at potlucks in favor of something slathered in whipped cream, drenched in chocolate, and/or crusted in Oreos. I couldn't blame them. Plus, it meant more leftovers for me. The Applesauce Cake made a killer breakfast.

I can also remember life after beans, but I'm not quite sure of the trigger point. Jan of the "Jan's Green Beans" was one of my mother's best friends when she was in her twenties. My middle name is after her. I guess the story must have gone that Jan brought these green beans to a church potluck once in the mid-eighties and the recipe got passed around.

Now where I grew up there was an unwritten Potluck Code. If someone had a winning recipe she was expected to share it; in return the recipients of the recipe pledged never to bring it to an event that the original owner would attend. Competing versions of the beans would have been very gauche. So one got new recipes from family members to take to church potlucks and new recipes from church potlucks to take to the family potlucks. And so the recipes proliferated, but never competed. It was the recipe Circle of Life.

***

I'm suddenly wondering what would have happened to my mother's green bean legacy had Jan's husband not left in the summer of 1989. It was terrible when it happened; I hadn't really known anyone who'd gotten divorced before. As a result of the divorce Jan left the church and this meant that the green bean slot was open on the Potluck Dance Card. My mother snatched it up. (Though let it be said that I know  she would have rather kept her friend than the rights to the green beans.)

***

The virtues of the green beans as a potluck recipe are many. The beans are quite cheap to make, but also very fancy looking. Dump about three cans of green beans (the French-cut ones look the nicest) into a casserole dish. Slice an onion or two into thin rings and create a layer of onions on top of the beans. While you're working on the onion, cook the bacon. I myself am not a particular lover of bacon, but the smell of bacon in the oven was the "Tomorrow There's a Potluck" smell in our house. Mom would spread the slices of bacon in rows on a baking sheet and bake them until they were crispy. Then she'd set them out to cool and drain on some layers of paper towels. Scatter the top with a layer of sliced almonds (slivered works too, but sliced is really the prettiest) and once the bacon is cool enough to touch, you crumble it over the top . Then you make a speedy dressing on the stovetop of bacon drippings, white vinegar, and a little sugar and pour the whole thing over the top.

Which brings us to the beans' other chief virtue: they can easily be made the night before and only get better with time. They thus possess the Potluck Trifecta: Fast, Cheap yet Fancy, and Make Ahead! You can't ask for much more than that...well, except for portability, which is the beans' only flaw. All of that dressing has a tendency to slosh around and wind up all over the floor of your car, leaving it smelling like vinegar and bacon. There are worse things your car could smell like, but still.

Over the years Mom developed an elaborate system to keep the car free of bean juice. In the Pre-Bean Age, potluck foods were always carried in a big Longaberger basket (which is probably worth a small fortune by now). But alas, the bean juice leaked out and stained the bottom. So Mom began looping those big rubber bands that you sometimes get with your mail over the handles of her battered Corelle baking dish, circa 1975 (a dish unsurpassed in its hideousness...). Then she'd take a shallow cardboard box and line it with newspaper and maybe a few kitchen towels. The bean dish would get nestled in among the towels and the combination of the towels, newspaper, and cardboard box would contain the leaks. And Woe Unto You if you messed with Mom's cardboard bean box. Those things were like gold. I think the best bean box we ever had was leftover from a high school sausage-and-cheese sale. It was just the right size for the bean dish and Mom kept it until it disintegrated...or Dad used it for kindling--I really can't remember.

I'm realizing now that my mother has been making those beans for probably 25 years, with exclusive rights for 22. She probably makes them five times a year or more; people freaking love those beans. I think it's a combination of America's obsession with bacon and the fact that the vinegar helps cut through all the fat that typically accompanies everything else on the potluck plate. People request 'em. People get grouchy if she doesn't bring 'em. They have a following.

Jan's Green Beans

4 cups canned green beans
1 onion, sliced into thin rings
8 slices cooked bacon
1/2 cup sliced almonds
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup white vinegar

Drain beans and spread them into a 2-quart casserole dish. Cover with a layer of sliced onions  and then sprinkle with sliced almonds. When bacon has drained and cooled, crumble bacon over the top. Save bacon drippings and dissolve sugar and vinegar into them over low heat. Let cool slightly and pour over beans. Bake 45-60 minutes at 350 degrees. (Better if allowed to marinate overnight before baking.)

letter of introduction

Post your letter of introduction assignment here. It should be +/-300 words.