Drop that megaburger!

Comes as no surprise to discover that a website called TheGiantHamburger sells a do-it-yourself “16-inch giant hamburger kit” for $19.95 plus postage. All you need is 10 pounds of ground beef and one or two friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mention this in passing because Burger King, which has been running a distant third in the burger wars ($1 million per store, compared with $1.9 million for Mickey D), is beefing up its sales with a new 1,000-calorie Quad Stacker. It complements last year’s entry in the megaburger sweepstakes, the 1,230-calorie Triple Stacker With Cheese, also from BK. The winner, calorie-wise, is the Double $6 from Carl’s Jr., weighing in at 1,530 calories and 111 grams of fat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The winner, sales wise, is actually In-n-Out, at $2 million per store, but they’re a small, region chain by comparison. BK, on the other hand, has three stores north of downtown, two south, and three on the east side. Mickey has 25 locations within 10 miles of the Needle. In case you’re still hungry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But there’s hope! Remember the 5-second rule: If you drop something on the floor, no cooties if you pick in 5 seconds. A recent study warned that bacteria actually swarm cookie crumbs on contactm but it turns out, the experiment was rigged; researchers had salted the floor with deadly e.coli bacteria. The very latest study, reported today in Newsday, refutes that with a real-life experiment conducted at a high school cafeteria. No harmful germs arrived for a full minute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So go ahead, order that Quad Stacker, that Triple With Cheese, that deep-fried BaconMegaCheeseBurger, and don’t worry if you happen to drop it on the floor. The staph and strep bugs won’t touch it. They know what’s going to kill them.

Ladies who lunch

Over in Ballard, Archie McPhee sells a cheerful Lunch Lady action figure for $9.95. Tell the disgruntled lunch ladies in Chicago, who are demanding respect from a school system that pays them peanuts (well, $10.46 an hour) and expects them to serve slop to thousands of kids.

 

“We’re looking at each other like, ‘I wouldn’t eat that.’ We wouldn’t give our kid that at home,” one lunch lady told the Chicago Sun-Times. No wonder that kids revolt. Just outside Chicago, a vast, unsavory food fight made headlines around the world.

 

Meantime, there’s Vincent Jarousseau, an up-and-coming Paris politician, deputy mayor of the bohemian 14th arrondissement, in charge of schools. Among other things, school lunches, whose menus he posts on his blog. Three-course lunches</a>, mind you, with a classic appetizer like hard-boiled eggs, or a fresh vegetable salad; a main course of beef, turkey or pork; cheese or fruit for dessert. French schools teach kids how to eat right; or, rather, they serve decent food because it’s what the kids, their families, the school administrators and the country’s elected officials expect.

 

The most emailed story over at the New York Times last week lamented the crummy choices offered by restaurants on their so-called Kids’ Menus: mostly chicken strips and fries. Deep-fried crap, in other words. No wonder we’re raising a nation of gastronomic illiterates. If you don’t learn to eat at school, at home, or in restaurants, you end up with a range of flavor preferences that runs the gamut from Coke to Pepsi, from Mickey D to Burger K.

Alinea

The following review is from correspondent Jack Fisher, who lives in Los Angeles. (You might also want to read Jess Thompson’s hilarious review on her blog over at Hogwash along with images from her Flickr stream.)

During our recent trip to Chicago Myra and I had dinner at Alinea, a new restaurant in the city. It has been given 5 stars by AAA, selected as the best restaurant in the country by Gourmet magazine and received many excellent reviews from restaurant critics. Most notably, on the restaurant’s opening night in 2005, the New York Times restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, showed up unannounced. The NYT does not review out-of-town restaurants, but the following week featured an article that stated the opening of Alinea “marks a milestone and invites an examination of how meaningfully this kind of cooking, born in Europe and pioneered in large part by the chef Ferran Adria in Spain, has taken root in the United States.”

The owner/chef, Grant Achatz, previously worked in the kitchens of both the French Laundry and Charlie Trotter’s. After that, he was the executive chef at Trio in Evanston, just north of Chicago, where he became well-known for pioneering many innovative dishes. Myra and I dined at Trio several years ago. With his departure from Trio he, with a partner, found a property on North Halsted Street in the Lincoln Park area of the city and designed his new restaurant from top to bottom.

The restaurant is in a rather nondescript area although it’s only about 3-4 blocks from Charlie Trotter’s. It’s a converted residence with the eating areas on the first and second floors and the kitchen in the basement. The restaurant’s name does not appear on the front of the building, just the address. Walking through the front door you enter a hallway to which there is no obvious exit. As you walk towards the back the hallway narrows, then suddenly a door mystically opens on your left. At this point you are greeted by the staff who takes your coats and escorts you to a table. When you make a reservation you select either the 12-course or 24-course tasting menu and are asked about food allergies, preferences, etc. We had selected the 12-course dinner and I, of course, selected the accompanying wine pairing.

No menu was offered as we sat down. The menu that we received later as a keepsake is shown below. Note that although 12 courses are advertised 14 are actually provided. The wine pairings are also shown. A total of 8 wines are offered in about 2-oz pours. For several of the wines a second pour was provided. All of the wines were quite good, interesting and well matched with the food. The bubbles on each line of the menu provide information about that course. The size of the bubble represents the size of the course–a small bubble is a one-bite course. The location of the bubble from left to right represents the flavor intensity. As each course was served the server would provide a description of the course and if necessary provide eating instructions. In several cases this was essential.

I will describe of several of the courses. The duck, course #6, was served on a pillow of lavender air. Prior to arrival of the plate. an inflated pillow the size of a large napkin was placed before each of us. The plate bearing the duck was next placed on the pillow. The weight of the plate forced the lavender air out of the pillow so that we could enjoy the aroma while eating the duck.

When we were seated the black table was completely bare. Shortly after we sat down two branches of rosemary were placed on the far corner of the table. We wondered at the time whether this was a decoration or even perhaps the first course. With the arrival course #9 the rosemary was put to use. The lamb was served on a cast iron plate about 1 by 6 inches that had been heated to a temperature sufficient to cook the meat. As this was placed on our table the server took the rosemary branch and placed in a small opening at the far end of the plate. The heat released the aroma of rosemary to enjoy with our lamb.

This is cutting-edge cuisine and you must employ all five senses to enjoy what is offered. Sight to appreciate not only the food as offered but also the manner of serving; taste and smell obviously; touch to appreciate the texture and feel of the food; and that leaves hearing which must be utilized to understand and appreciate your server’s description of the course.

Oh yes, our dinner took something like 2-1/2 hours to complete. We left the restaurant comfortably full and dazzled by our dining experience.

Eat me?

 

The Fido-fodder scandal is spreading. Now it’s tainted poultry in Indiana, chicken laced with melamine sold as pet food.

Like the contaminated spinach scare last year, the story has everything, including a vague, ominous threat (adulterated food supplies), cute, innocent victims (Fido, Fluffy), and an amorphous, unknown villain (The Chinese? Greedy American capitalists? Our own government?)

RobertInSeattle added a great comment to Cornichon’s original post a couple of days ago: don’t automatically blame the Chinese, he says; consider the possibility that American buyers of contaminated feed were aware of what was going on.

So where’s the FDA as this menace moves from dog dish in the general direction of our own dinner plates? Aren’t they ones who are supposedly protecting the food supply? Well, they just got around to appointing a Food Safety Czar.

Dispatch calling all czars, this is dispatch, come in please: AIDS czar, Iraq war czar, drug czar, food czar …

Whew, we feel a lot safer now.

We iz poopin in ur spinach

U feedz us grain. Better dan cheezburger, but we wantz grass, not grain. Grain makes us sick. U feedz us meds but meds put more ecoli in our poop. All dat poop! Ecoli poop everywhere! In da spinach even. Plz feedz us grass so we dont poop nasty poop in ur spinach.

Hot date

How to tell Jon Rowley’s dating service from Deborah Jean Palfrey’s:

Business entity
• Palfrey: Pamela Martin & Associates
• Rowley: Taylor Shellfish Farms

Business activity
• Palfrey: as DC Madam, offers adult fantasy service
• Rowley: as lifestyle guru, offers sensory compatability research

Client base includes
• Palfrey: Department of State
• Rowley: Department of Ecology

Operating environment
• Palfrey: hot water
• Rowley: cold water

Locations include
• Palfrey: Washington DC
• Rowley: Washington coast

Physical characteristics
• Palfrey: (one assumes) soft, clean
• Rowley: crisp, clean

Services involved
• Palfrey: hookers
• Rowley: bivalves

Latest news
• Palfrey: former client resigns as assistant Secretary of State
• Rowley: announces best wine-oyster matches for 2007

Sluurp!

Modest proposal

In Chicago, the food police are throwing people in jail for serving foie gras because it comes from obese geese. Elsewhere, they’re trying to get rid of junk food in schools because it causes the kids to become obese.

Meantime, there’s a new, flexible tube that’s supposed to make gavage (French for “fattening up”) less painful.

I say put the damn hose on the vending machines down at the high school. You fork over a couple of bills to the Lunch Lady and the machine grinds up a tasty mash of Twinkies, Snickers, Ruffles and Diet Pepsi. Glug-glug, gulp-gulp, and you waddle off to class, happy as a clam.

Dinner with Covey Run

Covey Run, which began life 25 years ago as Quail Run in a spectacular winery with a four-star view from its Whiskey Canyon Vineyard overlooking the Yakima Valley, is now part of the world’s largest beverage conglomerate, Constellation Brands. Sure, it’s “sad” that you no longer have family ownership (even the founders company, Holtzinger Fruit, has been taken over by Intracorp Capital), but this is a good example of the advantages of corporate marketing.

 

Covey Run now concentrates on a specific segment: the market for wines priced under $10. And for all of the hyperbole about winemaker Kerry Norton “crafting” the wine, it’s the quality of those Yakima Valley grapes that makes these wines possible.

 

A corporate marketing budget also lets the PR department send samples out for review. A box of Covey Run appeared on the doorstep this week, with technical notes and suggested food pairings. Time to go shopping and make dinner!

 

Menu, tasting notes and a recipe follow.

 

Chenin Blanc: our aperitif, bright, crisp, not too sweet, paired well with slivers of asiago cheese.

Sauvignon Blanc was something of a failure with freshly shucked Hamma Hamma oysters (too flabby), but a real delight with seafood linguine. Maybe it was because we deglazed the sauté pan with it?

On the other hand, we dind’t find the Pinot Grigio particularly impressive, on its own or with the pasta.

To test the three reds, we broiled lamb chops in a coating of mustard, rosemary and garlic, accompanied by stuffed tomatoes and fresh asparagus.

Syrah was the standout, with its own flavors of black pepper complementing the lamb. Lemberger was soft and pleasant, while the Cabernet Sauvignon seemed overly tannic by comparison.

For dessert we whipped up a Sicilian cheese torte: equal parts ricotta and goat cheese, a couple of eggs, some sugar, a bit of lemon juice and orange zest, and baked it in a pie tin for about an hour at 300 degrees. It made a terrific foil for the final wine, Morio-Muskat, and allowed its flavors of tangerines and peaches to shine.

Consensus scored the Morio-Muskat highest, something of a surprise for a wine that retails for $8. The Syrah was second, at $13. All the other wines carry a suggested price of $9.

In theory, this means they should be about $20 on a restaurant wine list. Wouldn’t hesitate to order any of them.

Thanks to Dr. Joe for hosting!