Ingredients and Homemade
I ran into this article on the web... I was just thinking about how supermarket ingredients can never touch homegrown. It is a shame when a person tastes a REAL vine ripened tomato for the first time and thinks it is a strange new breed.
Ah isn't modern science wonderful. We can feed the masses. It is just too bad that most of that FEED tastes just like tasteless cardboard mush. Wonderful thing modern supermarkets. Oh well you get what you deserve.
IF you try a recipe and go YUCK see your ingredients and go get some REAL stuff at the local farmers market. Not only will you be supporting local enterprise but the food will taste wonderful or hey go buy some standardized mush. IF you are what you eat... nuff said.
List of Ingredients
Suzanne Martinson: Some restaurants give 'homemade' a new meaning
Sunday, July 08, 2001
By Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The evidence was ugly. It was an apple pie a la mode eaten the last
day of our vacation. A gelatinous mass of canned apples between two
iron-clad crusts I could barely get my fork through. It was topped
with a blob of ice cream, not real ice cream but soft-serve that
hadn't ever been close enough to a cream separator to fit my idea of
what ice cream can do for a piece of pie.
Now, I am a person who has always said that I don't just have a sweet
tooth -- all my teeth are sweet teeth -- but this filling was
sickeningly sweet. One bite and my hair hurt.
On the last day of vacation, when a woman is looking to pay penance
for the ravages of nine days of heavy eating, I had ordered two
forks. My husband, Ace, loves apple pie.
Disgusted after the first bite, I played my cards all wrong.
"This may be the worst apple pie I've ever tasted," I said. "Would
you like some?"
I forked over a fork. "I don't want any," he said. Wise guy.
We sat in a sprawling, north-central Pennsylvania restaurant in the
Middle of Nowhere (as city people like to think) that looked so cute,
so appealing, so homemade, and a troubling thought stuck in my craw.
It came from no less than the president of the Culinary Institute of
America in Hyde Park, N.Y., which we had just visited. On the four or
five holidays a year, the family still cooks its traditional dishes,
but the rest of the time ...
I'll let CIA chief Ferdinand Metz tell you: "Restaurants are shaping
the memories of people" of how food should taste."
Scary thought, especially if a person was plopped into this booth and
assumed, "This is apple pie." The next logical conclusion might be,
"I guess I don't like apple pie." This "farm" restaurant served pie
that wouldn't be served by any self-respecting farm wife I know. Of
course, I come from a long line of people who could cook, a line that
has extended to our daughter, Jessica. On our Woodstock, N.Y.,
vacation with two couples we have vacationed with for 12 of the past
13 years, our communal daughter was much missed.
"Where's the apple pie?" asked Rick, a Castle Rock, Wash.,
restaurateur who recognizes a beauty of a pie when he tastes one.
There are gradations of "homemade" pie-making, of course. Jessica's
is the purest form: Crust made by cutting in shortening, rolling out
dough, crimping edges. A filling that starts with a pile of apples
purchased as close to where they were grown as possible and cored and
peeled by hand. (She will have nothing to do with my apple
peeler-corer-slicer machine.) We cut a little slack on the a la mode
-- homemade ice cream if we have it, top-quality vanilla bean if we
don't.
In our definition, if there's not flour on the floor and peels in the
sink, the pie is not homemade.
Some markets and restaurants buy frozen prepared pies and bake them
off -- to my mind, it's stretching it even to call these
"home-baked." Then there's what we might call "speed scratch," a
canned apple filling, perhaps, or a refrigerated crust with a
fresh-sliced apple filling (or both prepared crust and filling that
have to be crimped together).
The pie debacle in the restaurant probably evolved from commercially
prepared crust (I have a picture in my mind of the pastry being run
over and over by motorcycle tires to make it that tough) and that
sickeningly-sweet filling from a giant can. When I asked, "What do
you make here?" the waitress said they made their own pies. To find
what they did to accomplish something this bad would have required a
spirited game of 20 Questions.
I may eventually work on 20 Questions for Homemade Pie, but I have
already perfected the game for mashed potatoes. I used to ask, "Are
your mashed potatoes real?" to which the answer was always in the
affirmative. This is not a lie, exactly. I have come to believe that
in the mind of many a waitress, potato flakes poured from a box into
boiling water are real.
Now I ask, "Does someone in the kitchen peel the potatoes and mash them?"
Answer in the negative, I order a bison burger, though Ace hangs in
there with the meatloaf and alleged mashed potatoes. "They're not
very good," he said. "The meatloaf is great, though." (He's a
terrific judge of quality meatloaf, and since his recent repotting,
he has also become an excellent mashed potato cook. Motto: "Made the
old-fashioned way: We peel 'em, we mash 'em." Not even a mixer for
this purist.)
This disparity in the quality of food on the very same plate is what
drives a person crazy doing what I like to think of as eating off the
land (spurning chain restaurants in favor of local joints). It's
always risky.
We could opt for the be-sure-what-you're-gonna-get-even-if-it's
mediocre chain restaurant route, but what's the adventure in that? In
a crapshoot, sometimes you lose. Maybe at the CIA, there is a body of
knowledge about menu names, but it never reached a breakfast joint in
Clarion. Naively, I ordered "home fries," which to me is last night's
leftover baked potatoes, chopped up and fried with a few onions and
served beside my eggs. Wrong. These deep-fried potato slabs were
fries without soul.
But if we weren't willing to take a chance a few years ago, we
couldn't have pulled into Sunny Day Diner in Lincoln, N.H., where we
ate fries hand-cut with bits of peel, and enjoyed three kinds of pie.
Serendipity smiled that day.
But things have come to a pretty pass if Ferdinand Metz is right, and
the closest we get to "homemade" food is in a restaurant. Yet even
trying a new recipe at home requires a certain risk. The ones we
like, we pass on to you, like the Tropical Pork Kebabs, which we made
on vacation.
Turned out that "diner" in New Hampshire was run by two CIA grads. I
can still taste their Oatmeal Pie. (We're reprinting the recipe for
you.)
The "diner" on this trip was run by freezer specialists. The menu,
which was the size of a bedsheet, should have been a dead giveaway.
Although the pie place of infamy couldn't cut it with my order, they
did OK with Ace's. "This hamburger is delicious," he said. "That's a
surprise."
When on the road, think positive. When the pie is bad, the calorie
count crashes. Take a page from the food editor's book, and give up
eating bad food.
What hurts me most is when somebody doesn't know the difference.
Recipe
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