Road Trip, post 4: Cal-Mex is no Az-Mex, but it’s a good 2nd

Santa Rosa, CA

I’m going to admit my bias against California burritos right up front.  My Mexican food habits and predilections were formed largely in Arizona, so I just can’t wrap my head around a tortilla wrapped around rice.  In Arizona, burritos are filled with lots of things, but not rice (unless you’re eating at Chipotle or another fresh-mex chain), so in California I pretty much steer clear of burritos, which sometimes makes choosing a taqueria difficult since so many of the online reviews focus on burritos.

You can’t swing a dead cat around these parts and not hit a taqueria, but Taqueria Santa Rosa on Mendocino Avenue seems to be one of the most popular.  I’ve been here twice and the first time had the carnitas plate, based upon online reviews.  Like the reviews said, the carnitas were certainly crispy, but they were also too dry.  On my second visit, I got tacos with carne asada and pollo asado and these were spot on– especially the carne asada.   The chicken came with a salsa verde and the beef with a red sauce.  Rice and beans are very good, as are the chips and salsa (not complimentary).  The chips are served with both an incredibly fresh-tasting red salsa, and a green salsa that is unlike any other I’ve ever had.  It seems to be a blend of traditional salsa verde and guacamole and kept me dipping for more.

The hubs had a burrito that’s about the size of a newborn, and after he eats it he looks as if he’s in his third trimester carrying a burrito baby.  I never get to try this because 1) as I mentioned earlier I’m not keen on the CA burritos and don’t press the issue and 2) If I reached for a bite I might draw back a stump.  Anyhow, the boy likes it and it usually seems to satisfy his man-wich appetite.

When we make it back to Santa Rosa there are other taquerias I must try, but I don’t expect I’ll ever find anything to meet the impossibly high standards set by the Arizona-style green chile chicken burros.

Road trip, post 3: Taylor’s Refresher: Better than In n’ Out?

St. Helena, CA

Every trip we make out west invariably includes a stop at In n Out.  My husband is obsessed with the secret menu and orders all things “Animal Style”.  In n Out is great, but I must admit, Taylor’s Refresher has In n Out beat by a mile (although the husband would argue that point until his dying breath).

First things first: for burgers, fries and shakes, this place is pricey, despite USA Today listing it as a “bargain bites” place in February of this year (are they kidding? A $7 burger and $6 shake are not exactly  ”bargains” during this sucking recession).   But was it worth it?  I set out to see if the proof was in the pudding.

The burgers actually tasted like beef (thanks to Niman ranch products); the lettuce and pickles both nice and crisp; buns toasty with just a hint of crunch.  The fries were hot and crispy on the outside, but still soft on the inside, and the strawberry shake was sublty sweet and tasted of REAL strawberries.  In fact, the ice cream was still white, not that pepto bismol pink color that is a tell tale sign of a shake concoted with artificial strawberry flavor.

So was it worth the $25 price tag for two burgers, fries and a shake?  It’s not something I could afford to have for lunch every day (or every week for that matter), but when it’s totally fresh, made with natural ingredients and  humanely raised, $25 isn’t too much to ask for real food.

Road Trip, Post 2: The movie star, the Mexican restaurant and a moral

Winslow, AZ

So we pull into this town, famous because of its mention in the Eagles song “Take it Easy”, after 16 hours on the road and ready to rip each others’ heads off while hunting for a motel in the middle of town instead of along the interstate.  We finally found one and headed to find some food, and based upon the state of the motel room, I wasn’t expecting much food-wise from Winslow.

I once lived in Arizona for 10 years and knew next to nothing about Winslow or anything in it.  But I lived here long enough to know that if you find a Mexican restaurant with a lot of cars outside, it’s probably worth venturing in.  So we went into the Casa Blanca Cafe and after picking out my usual (Green Chile Chicken, the dish I use to test the worthiness of a restaurant) I looked around and spotted someone who looked VERY familiar sitting at another table.

“Oh my God! That’s the dad from Family Ties,” I told my husband.  Then I thought, “It couldn’t be.  We’re in Winslow-freaking Arizona.”  But then I heard him talk and, sure enough, it was Michael Gross.  Then I started debating whether or not to say something to him.  I had my camera.  Do I ask to get my photo with him? Do I get his autograph? My husband told me to leave him alone, but I was unconvinced.  This is where the evening took a much more interesting turn, if you’re food obsessed like I am.

A man walks in, his arms full of jars of honey, and walks over to Dad Keaton’s table and starts handing out honey to him and his seven dining companions.  I love honey and I was super jealous. I no longer cared about getting a photo with a hollywood star, I wanted to talk to the beekeeper about his honey.  I summoned him over and he told me about the different varieties he had including desert wildflower and a camelthorn honey (we also discovered that his brother lives about 10 miles away from my hometown in Missouri which is also where I currently hang my hat).    The camelthorn was most intriguing.  It turns out this plant is considered one of the “dirty dozen” invasive species of the southwest, but this beekeeper was using it to make honey.  Sadly, he had none left, but it is on my list of honeys to try.

So Michael Gross leaves, and I’m having a few regrets about not asking him for a photo until a woman pops up out of the booth behind us while the waiter, waitress and I were talking about our celebrity sighting.  She starts talking to my husband and me and it turns out she’s the owner of the restaurant. 

Helen Ribera looks like she could be anybody’s Nana.  She’s dressed in a purple print top and is wearing a large, striking necklace that hits just above her waist.   She proceeds to tell me that she’s owned the restaurant 40 years and that she makes sure everything in her restaurant is made from scratch.  The beans soak overnight and are cooked slowly starting in the morning.  She makes sure the rice is made in 4 quart pots so everyone gets it fresh– no bain maries keeping food warm here.  The honey served with the sopapillas? She gets that from the honey man who was in the restaurant earlier.  It was so great to find a small-town restaurant that’s committed to fresh, homemade, local-when-possible food.  The food doesn’t have to be fancy; at Casa Blanca  it’s just good and simple home cooking.

The green chile chicken enchiladas, which were excellent along with the homemade beans and rice

Sopapillas with honey made locally in Winslow, AZ

 Mrs. Ribera was an absolute gem and I’m so glad she told us about her restaurant and her food.  After meeting her, I no longer minded that I didn’t talk to Michael Gross.  In fact, I decided I’d rather have her picture than his.  Unfortunately, she had already left when I went to ask if I could take her photo.  But I managed to talk our waiter, Stephen, and the waitress who is also Mrs. Ribera’s granddaughter, Brianna, into letting me take their photo.

Stephen and Brianna, servers at Casa Blanca Cafe

So the moral of the story: Flash and fame may be impressive, but it’s usually the quiet people who have the best stories to tell.

* For those who are wondering what Michael Gross was doing in Winslow, it seems he was on some sort of train tour.  Winslow is a big railroad town and it turns out Michael Gross is a train and railroad enthusiast.

Road Trip, Post 1: Czech this out

Prague, Oklahoma

As my husband and I set off from Missouri bound for California with a mission of finding a job, I really didn’t think we’d make too many food discoveries along the way.  Boy, was I wrong. 

I was totally sick of paying tolls on I-44/I-40 in Oklahoma, so being a massive cheapskate about things like that, we took an exit that gave us a partial refund on our toll and took the back way into Oklahoma City.  About halfway into our detour, we hit Prague, and I see this sign:

Did someone say kolache?  I grabbed my notebook to mark the date, just in case I could make it back here for the festival. 

And then I saw this:

 

I had my husband swing the car around like he was Luke Duke driving the General Lee.  The Prague Bakery, which was full of locals  enjoying coffees, pastries and each other’s company at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, had lots of different sweet rolls and donuts, but there was only one object of my desire.  I wanted a kolach, but I couldn’t buy one individually.  I had to buy them by the dozen.  Darn.

Kolache (plural for kolach) are small pastries filled with fruit or cheeses that hail from Central Europe and they are an ideal companion to a cup of coffee.  We opted for a mixed pack of cherry, apple and apricot.

These were delicious (especially the apple and apricot) and managed to last us for three breakfasts on our road trip.  They were also the perfect reminder that getting off the interstates is a great way to find good food.

Even better than the real thing

Okay.  I know I totally railed on sugar consumption in my last post, but I didn’t say we shouldn’t consume ANY sugar.

That said, who is with me that Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs are so much better than regular Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? I’m quite certain it’s the higher peanut butter-to-chocolate ratio that makes them so over-the-top to-die-for.  I think they tasted better to me this year than any other because I haven’t had them for a few years.  Although I found Reese’s cups in Australia in specialty candy shops that cost an arm and a leg, I never found Reese’s eggs, so now that I’m back in the good ol’ U.S. of A I’m on cloud nine. I know I should say Easter is all about Jesus and the resurrection, but seriously, Easter is all about the Reese’s Eggs .

Sugar-coating the truth

We Americans are a bunch of sugar-addled addicts, a fact that has become  painfully clear to me while  carrying out some simple research on eating habits. 

A recent article in the  in the New York Times on the comeback of sugar completely missed the real issue at stake: we eat WAY too much sugar and sweetener of any kind.  The article did sort of pussy-foot around that issue by saying that nutritionists would like to see us eat less of all caloric sweeteners, but it really just wound up being a trend story about a backlash against high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in favor of sugar.

Perhaps the reporter didn’t want to upset the people in the HFCS industry, but the truth is, Americans started consuming more and more sweeteners just after HFCS hit the market in the mid-1970’s, according to statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).  As a basis for comparison, I’ve also dug up the sweetener consumption statistics for the UK and Australia, two countries that have fairly similar diets to ours, minus the HFCS.  Interestingly, sweetener consumption in those countries actually decreased while ours was skyrocketing upward:

Consumption of Sweeteners 1961-2001

              U.S              U.K.            Australia

1961    52 kg         52kg             56 kg
1981    56 kg         44 kg            54 kg
2001   71 kg         41 kg             45 kg

Source: FAOSTAT

 For those who don’t do the metric system, 71 kg is 156 pounds of sweetener every year– which is the weight of an average woman, give or take a few pounds.  We eat, far and away, more sweetener per person than any other country in the world.

I’m not going to argue whether HFCS is worse than sugar.  That’s not really the point.  The point is, that ever since HFCS came onto the scene, our collective sweet tooth has gotten even sweeter and our consumption of caloric sweeteners climbed 40 percent in 40 years.  Now, you tell me why America has an obesity problem.

Would you like poop with that?

The U.S.D.A. just announced that it has approved an E. coli vaccine for cattle.  They say that like it’s a good thing.  But really, all this vaccine is doing is treating the symptoms rather than actually doing anything to solve the bigger issue of a food system gone completely awry.  It’s the equivalent of a restaurant in Mexico telling you to go ahead and eat the lettuce but giving you an Immodium A-D chaser, just in case.

Granted, the vaccine isn’t all bad if it leads to fewer E. coli infections, which affect 70,000 people each year in the U.S.  But really, the only true winners in this are the beef industry people who hope to make more money by telling us their beef is E. coli free.

What the vaccine does not do is get to the heart of the real problem, which is the American feedlot industry.  Feedlots handle about 88 percent of the beef that Americans buy, and feedlots just happen to be breeding grounds for E. coli.  Every cow has E. coli bacteria, but one strain, E. coli O-157, is the bad E. coli that makes humans sick.  It also happens to grow really well in the stomachs of cows who are fed grain, the staple diet at feedlots, as opposed to cows that eat a more natural  diet of grass.

Eating a cow that had E. coli O-157 in his belly won’t make you sick, unless for some reason you were actually eating fecal matter from said cow, or cow shit to put it bluntly.  That’s the other problem with feedlots.  Cows stand knee-deep (do cows have knees?) in poop at these places.  They go to the slaughterhouse covered in crap, and if they aren’t cleaned off real good, then poop gets into the beef, and if it’s E. coli infected poop, a lot of people are going to get really sick.

What really freaks me out about the vaccine, is what if it gives people at the slaughterhouses a false sense of security?  What if they think, “Well, hey, this poop isn’t going to kill anyone now, so if I don’t get the cow as clean as I used to, no biggie.”   To quote Betty Fussell in her book Raising Steaks:  “Sterilized shit is still shit.”

So lets review: The E. coli vaccine is merely a band-aid.  It is not a solution to the bigger problem, which is cattle raised on filthy feedlots.  The only winners in this scenario are the beef producers who are hoping to sell more beef because it’s “safe”.  The farmers don’t win, because they won’t get any more money for their cattle when they sell them to the feedlots.  The cattle sure don’t win, because they’re still living their miserable feedlot existence.  And consumers don’t win because the USDA just fed us a shit sandwich and called it a victory.

Finally, a President who gets it

So glad to wake up and see this, this morning:  President Obama has announced an overhaul of the FDA. 

I’m sure some people (and by some people I mean Republicans in Congress) are going to piss and moan that he’s making the government even bigger.  Really, though, and I’ll have to read more before I weigh in on this, it sounds like he wants to streamline things among several agencies in order to make sure our food is safe.

We’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid…

… so I find it kind of hard to blame a woman in Arkansas who accidentally served kids at her daycare windshield wiper fluid instead of Kool-Aid.  Of course, she can’t be the sharpest knife in the drawer if she’s stupid enough to put  wiper fluid in the fridge in the first place.

But still. Some of the Kool-Aid colors look positively radioactive.  I seem to remember one that was the color of antifreeze, so it seems entirely logical that one could mistake a household chemical for a kiddie cocktail.  And if an adult can make that mistake, how many clueless kids have been bamboozled?

If the color of some of these drinks doesn’t worry us, the names of the  flavors should at least give us pause: Purplesaurus Rex… Eerie Orange… Scary Black Cherry?  If you buy into that, you’re just asking for trouble.  Oh Yeah!

Springfield, MO: Center of the Culinary Universe

Just kidding.  But at least it is today.  I about fell over when I clicked to the NY Times food section today saw this article on Springfield-style cashew chicken. 

To those unbaptized in the oyster sauce gravy, this is a dish that unites Springfieldians culturally.  It’s basically fried chunks of chicken (all white, naturally), bathed in the aforementioned gravy and sprinkled with cashew nuts and chopped green onions.

I took this photo at Fire & Ice while I was in town visiting last summer.    This recipe is THE original SSCC.  Fire & Ice only serves this dish on Wednesdays and native Springfieldians pack the place to get a taste of  this particular cashew chicken because of its pedigree.  The then-chef at Fire & Ice was Wing Yee Leong, the son of David Leong who is the father of SSCC.

When I went back to Fire & Ice in January something was terribly wrong.  Someone had tinkered with the recipe.  I detected Chinese five spice in the batter and I was not pleased.  I looked around the restaurant’s open kitchen and noticed Wing Yee was not there.  Today’s NY Times article confirmed my suspicions. He left the restaurant in December. 

Even though SSCC isn’t authentic Chinese cuisine, its authenticity comes from its roots here in Springfield. And for people like me who cut their teeth on spare ribs at Leong’s Tea House and Gee’s East Wind, when you mess with the original recipe, you mess with perfection.