Dancing Spoon

Best Tips: Bakin' Bacon

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler

Bacon tastes sooooooo good. It’s great with eggs in the morning of course, and crumbled in salads it adds a nice contrasting layer to the greens. Cooked bacon adds flavors to quiches, stews, and soups. (I just made a potato soup and the added bacon took it to a new level.) 

But standing over the stove with those pork slices spitting up at me, feeling guilty about pouring the bacon fat down the drain, and scraping all those bits off the pan and soaking it and washing it had me thinking about the soy alternative again.

And then, that wacky pork lover himself, Alton Brown, showed me the light. Well, actually, he showed me the oven and the joys of bakin’ bacon.

Best Trends: Eat Your City

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler

The Urban SkyFarmer
Want to be a farmer, but don’t want to give up the city life? Well, if the city can’t come to the farm, the farm just might make it to the city soon. We’re not talking balcony gardens here; we’re talking skyscrapers filled with green.

Imagine a 21-story circular greenhouse with rooftop solar panels powering 24-hour grow lights and irrigated by advanced evaporation-capture technology. Dickson Despommier, an environmental science professor at Columbia University, imagined just that. He called it Vertical Farming. Despommier’s 21-story vertical farm could be as productive as 588 acres of land, enough to grow 12 million heads of lettuce a year! (The Vertical Farm Project was established in 2001, and is an on-going activity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City.)

Best Recipes: Roasted Yellowtail

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler 

Pan Roasted Kona Kampachi® (Yellowtail) with Swiss Chard and Garlic Fingerling Potatoes

As part of our series on Sustainable Agriculture we featured Kona Blue Water Farms (see Fish Farm No. Two). Their fish, Kona Kampachi®, a sushi-grade Hawaiian yellowtail, is sustainably raised in the pristine open ocean off the coast of Hawaii.

Like hamachi (yellowtail), Kona Kampachi® is at home at a sushi bar and it’s firm flesh and a high-fat content make it suitable for virtually any cooking method, from gentle steaming to high-heat searing. Its subtly rich, pure flavor complements a variety of different culinary styles, simple and straightforward or spicy and complex.

Chef Roy Yamaguchi
Widely acknowledged as "the father of modern East-West cooking," chef and cookbook author Roy Yamaguchi is the founder and owner of Roy's Restaurants, serving Hawaiian fusion cuisine in 34 locations around the world. The recipes in this series have been provided courtesy of Roy’s Restaurant, Honolulu and Kona Blue Water Farms. You may use yellowtail (amberjack) fish if you are unable to find Kona Kampachi®.

Best Beauty: Skin Spa

2007 Best of...

by Fiona Barrett

A Spa for Your Skin 
If we think of our skin as our body’s protective layer (it is our “outer covering” after all) and as one of the major organs in our body, then what we eat to feed and nourish our skin is critical to creating “beautiful skin.”

Our skin helps regulate our body's temperature by increasing perspiration when our body gets too hot. As the perspiration evaporates it cools our skin, and our bodies. Our skin also helps eliminate toxins from our body. Did you know that over one pound of waste products from our body is excreted through our skin each day!

Best Tips: Spin It Baby

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler 

I use my salad spinner for cleaning and drying lettuce, parsley, sage leaves, green beans, brussel sprouts, and any other herb or vegetable that needs cleaning and drying before using.

Here's how to keep lettuce, parsley, and other leafy (but not too delicate) vegetables and herbs fresh and crispy for a long while (in lettuce-years anyway).

The sooner you do this after coming home from the market with that great head of lettuce or bunch of herbs the better. Do it right away. (Sure. How about just soon.)

Last Minute Holiday Wines

Wine About

by David Haley

Okay, you have waited, like me, to make the last minute wine purchases. No fear: the legwork is done! Here are 18 easy to find wines will make great gifts for friends and family.

Sparkling wine and Champagne
Great values exist in the ten to fifteen dollar range in sparkling wine. If you want to splurge, Champagne is always a welcome item around the holidays.

Segura Viudas Brut NV (Spain) Excellent value, dry, lively, and fresh  $10.00

Nino Franco Prosecco “Rustico” NV (Italy) A bit less dry than the Segura Viudas Brut, with melon and honey on the finish. Very good. $12.00

Saint-Hilaire Semi Sweet 2004 (France) Sweeter than Prosecco but never cloying. Delicious with fruit, cheese, or as an after dinner celebration. $12.00

Recipe: Holiday Bouillabaisse

Gloria Cooking With

by Gloria Bakst

Extraordinary Bouillabaisse: A Great New Year’s Celebratory Dish
Bouillabaisse is a traditional Provençal fish stew. The original bouillabaisse was from the Calanque coast between Marseilles and Toulon. Although called a soup, this is really a main dish, a full meal in itself.

Bouillabaisse was first based on local fish, a "fisherman's" dish, and never contained any expensive ingredients such as lobster. The many regional variations are based on the different local fish, and the color can change from place to place because of the types of fish used.

True to the dish, my bouillabaisse is very flexible in its ingredients. We live in New England and the fish I used was Chilean sea bass, Sable, and Cusk. I prefer to use a firm fish that won’t fall apart in cooking such as Haddock or Cod.  Other choices would be Bluefish, monkfish, whiting, and red snapper. 

Recipe: Sautéed Calamari

Gloria Cooking With

by Gloria Bakst

Sautéed Calamari with Garlic and Onions
While some might think that Sautéed Calamari has nothing to do with the holiday, in many Italian households, people celebrate Christmas Eve with the traditional "Feast of the Seven Fishes." Calamari is one of the traditional dishes served.  This Sautéed Calamari has lots of seasoning and the whiff of garlic will greet the visitors as they park their cars!  It is not for the faint of heart! The flavor is outstanding.

Although I give you the choice of using two, three, or four cloves of garlic, I admit that I am crazy about a lot of garlic with calamari and so always go for four cloves! You may not be as much of a garlic lover but if you like slightly salty, pleasingly chewy calamari, you’ll love this recipe. The trick to cooking calamari or squid is to keep the cooking to a bare minimum — in this case, three minutes.  Overcooking only results in rubbery calamari and that’s a shame.

Shep's Grilled Turkey

Grilling Summer/Winter

David Shepherd sent this recipe to me. Shep is an old friend, a foodie, an avid fisherman, and will brave the New England winters to grill up a turkey for a mid-winter’s feast.

First step for the bird is a 24-hour spicy brine. Then the turkey is coated with a BBQ sauce-based marinade and allowed to rest for another 24 hours. Grilling time: the turkey is browned on the grill and cooked with the indirect heating method.

Big Biz and Green Food

Green Becoming

Big Biz will help save the environment because it’s, well, good business. Fast Company (November 2007) lists 50 ways the Big Boys are greening-up. Here are some of the food-related ones:

General Mills makes Cheerios and tons of oat hull waste. Disposing of those oat hulls cost the company $100 a ton. Now they sell the waste as burnable fuel. In 2006 General Mills recycled 86% of its solid waste, earning more from that than it spent of disposal.

The money in the box. This year, General Mills redesigned the packaging of its cupboard standby, Hamburger Helper. It reduced the size of the box by 20%. The astounding result: 500 fewer distribution trucks delivering the same amount of product each year.

Getting gassed up on beer? Coors now produces 3 million gallons of ethanol a year by distilling waste beer. The brewery sells 200-proof ethanol to Valero Energy to be distributed to gas stations in Colorado. The program was so successful that Coors doubled its capacity in 2005.

More beer news: Sierra Nevada Brewery, Chico California, installed a 250-kilowatt fuel-cell power unit and will be able to produce so much energy that it will sell surplus wattage back to Pacific Gas & Electricity.

Whole Foods Market has replaced its salad bar plastic containers with ones made of sugar cane waste. The new ones decompose in about 90 days.

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