The Conscious Diner

Taste of Travel: Locro argentino

gute1977 — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:49:50 +0000

Traveling to distant lands is not only a pleasurable experience but it can be educational as well. Food can say as much about a culture as its literature does. The ingredients, the cooking techniques and how people serve and eat their food show unique traditions and folklore. For Argentinean culture, locro represents a mix of local indigenous traditions of its north-west region with a history of colonialism. Locro is a stew normally prepared with seasonal local ingredients, slow cooked and served in clay pots or inside a pumpkin, preserving the customs of an era long gone.

Argentine Northwest. Source(c) adnmundo.com

Today, most culinary authorities in urban areas mimic the freshness of the dish preparing it seasonally with ingredients purchased at farmer’s markets. The slow cooking method is respected to a tee.

Locro. Source: (c)Recetasdeviajes.com

A recipe:

1 lb of white corn (hominy)
2 lbs of chuck—diced
¼ lb of bacon—diced
2 lbs shoulder pork meat—diced

1/2 of large white beans (can be replaced with cannellini beans)
½ medium-sized cabbage
3 sweet Argentinean chorizos—diced (can be replaced with Italian sweet sausage)
3 medium potatoes, diced
1 orange squash, diced

Sauce:
2 green onions
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell pepper,

Salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper to taste
The Stew
Soak the hominy and beans overnight. The next morning, cook the beans until soft. On a separate pot, sauté the bacon until it begin releasing fat. Add the chorizo and red and pork meat and let them brown. Once they are brown, add water, salt, the cabbage and the hominy. Cook until it boils and let it simmer for a couple of hours at low heat. Add water if needed. Then add the beans, potatoes, squash until cooked.

The sauce
Sauté one onion and sweet pepper; season with salt, black and cayenne pepper

Serve
Serve in a clay pot, with a spoonful of sauce on top. Sprinkle with a handful of sliced fresh green onion.

¡Buen apetito!

Restaurant Review: Good eats at the Brick Café

gute1977 — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:27:11 +0000

Picture a night when you and your friend decide it’s too cold, too wet and you’re too tired to get on the subway. So you stay in your ‘hood. After wondering where to go you remember that cute café on a less transited street that served amazing cappuccinos with a great atmosphere. Maybe it also serves delicacies to pick on and wine to make you feel cozy. So to the Brick Café we went.

The atmosphere conveyed the impression of a warm café across the Atlantic. The dim lights and rustic décor embraced customers with a sense of familiarity. Service was friendly and the menu offered mainly Italian cuisine with a modern twist.

I felt very adventurous that evening and ordered the octopus carpaccio. My friend chose a safer dish and picked a mixed green salad with sliced apples, walnuts and gorgonzola cheese. Her salad was very balanced and tasty but not memorable. The octopus carpaccio, on the other hand, screamed a much different story.

Visually, the plate was gorgeous to the point where I couldn’t resist snapping a shot with my phone camera. Bad, bad photo, I may say. For that reason, the featured photo is a similar looking carpaccio but from a different restaurant. Next time I will hire a professional, I swear.

The ensemble resembled a perfectly defined white and pink flower and the flavor was equally delicate. On top rested the ideal companion, a salad with organic mesclum, roasted grape tomatoes and chive vinaigrette. Such delicious gourmet treat could only be paired with the French Bordeaux wine, blending tastes spectacularly.

The Brick Café adds to the neighborhood a magnificent option of international cuisine, easily becoming one the best restaurants in Astoria.

Great-grandma knows best: Reviewing Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food

gute1977 — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:58:51 +0000

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” reads In Defense of Food. By this simple statement journalist and food guru Michael Pollan summarizes about two hundred pages of multifaceted criticism to our current food system, how food science got us eating all wrong and the Western diet is to be blamed for the incidences of many chronic preventable diseases.

What nowadays is considered a health and food trend is in fact an urgent outcry to revise our deep-rooted food values and culturally defined eating habits that are, in resumed words, killing us. Statistical data show increasing numbers of health problems in America. What is contradictory is that the more we know about food, the more we do research on it, the more we become overweight and sick from diabetes and heart disease. Why? What is in our diet that has such negative effects on people? In Defense of Food is determined to answer these questions and it succeeds in its efforts.

The writer’s main methodological strategy relies on scientific research results to either support his statements or discredit what he defines as false health claims. By no means the author intends to challenge scientific advances. On the contrary, the nub of the problem lies on scientific reductionism and the potential negative consequences of it. The whole is not simply the sum of its parts, as nutritionism implicitly preaches. Isolating variables are indeed essential to science to understand the properties and effects of a given nutrient; however, promoting these nutrients as the sole benefactors of a good diet is incomplete and wrong. Food is not a vessel to carry nutrients that are good for us. Whole foods, Pollan explains, have properties we do not fully understand and the benefits of these properties should not be decontextualized from the whole and from the ways in which we eat that food. Unfortunately for us, public policy, the food industry and journalism have joined forces with food science and have gotten us convinced that this the way we should eat. The results are known to us: Americans are fatter and sicker.

In a nutshell, Pollan invites us to voluntarily remove ourselves from this old paradigm. Shop local, help traditional farmers to be sustainable, buy organic, seat at the table with your family and friends, enjoy your meal, do not binge, eat food not nutrients, mostly veggies, eat fruits, treat meat as a side dish, avoid packaged foods, reject processed foods, disregard foods with health claims, read ingredients carefully, buy only foods great-grandma would recognize, do not bother with supplements and do not, after any circumstances, follow advice from food trends supported by pseudo-science, the food industry or the government.