family meal n.“I had arrived at 4 p.m. to experience a daily ritual that takes place in hundreds of restaurants across the city, and in thousands more across the country: family meal. Chanterelle was the last stop on a month-long, eight-venue culinary tour of Manhattan. My mission was simple: to see how a restaurant, with seemingly endless talent and resources in the kitchen, nourishes its staff, and how that 20-minute meal impacts the seven hours of dinner service that follows.”

haji stove n. “The chai itself is usually green, but sometimes will be black. It is made by putting the tea leaves in the pot and boiling the water, often on a burner sitting directly atop a propane cylinder. If they are making shiir chai (milk tea) the leaves are put into the milk directly and the milk is not quite boiled. The propane rigs are commonly referred to in American parlance as haji stoves.“

sad adj. “For Cathy Riddle, another Appalachian Fair champion who uses White Lily for everything from green tomato bread to sad dumplings (the kind with a chewy center), the selling point is consistent good results.”

bathtub cheese n.“The germ can infect anyone who eats contaminated fresh cheeses sold by street vendors, smuggled across the Mexican border or produced by families who try to make a living selling so-called bathtub cheese made in home tubs and backyard troughs.”

Courtesy of Double-Tongued Dictionary

I was originally going to make this with chicken breast cutlets, but the turkey cutlets were half the price in my grocery store, so I went with them instead. The recipe is relatively low fat. If you’d rather not waste the egg yolks and don’t mind the extra cholesterol, substitute the 3 egg whites for another whole egg, but the extra egg whites seem to make the coating stick better after cooking.

¾ c pecans
1 egg
3 egg whites
¼ c flour
4 turkey cutlets
salt and pepper to taste

Take ½ c of the pecans and pulse in a food processor to make a coarse chop. Set aside on a plate. Take the rest of the pecans, plus the flour, salt and pepper, and process until a fine powder, and set aside on another plate. Put the eggs in a bowl and mix.

First, dredge each cutlet in the fine pecan and flour mixture. Then, dip into the eggs. Then dip into the coarse pecans. Let the cutlets set a bit.

In a frying pan, heat 2 tablespoons of oil, and then slip the coated cutlets in, and fry until golden brown, about 3 or 4 minutes a side. Remove to a paper towel to wick off excess oil.

You may remember my entry from a few weeks ago where I described all of the food served in the elaborate ten course meal in the first class dining room of the RMS Titanic on the night it sank, April 14, 1912. In it, I was unable to provide the recipe for the dessert named Waldorf Pudding, but I speculated that it didn’t necessarily have to have apples, raisins, or walnuts just because those were signature ingredients in another recipe named after the New York hotel, the Waldorf Salad.

Well, a bit of research turned up a couple of cookbooks dating back to the turn of the 20th century. One is the Calvary Presbyterian Church Ladies Aid Society (of Springfield, Mo.) Cookbook, dated 1903 … A “Mrs. Milligan” submitted a recipe for Waldorf Pudding that clearly contains apples. It is as follows :

A WALDORF PUDDING.
Fill a buttered pudding dish with peeled and sliced apples, alternating layers of stale cake or bread crumbs and allowing two tablespoonfuls of melted butter to each pint of apples. Crumbs should be on top. Set in a moderate oven to bake until the apples are tender. Pour over a cup of milk and two eggs beaten with half a cup of sugar and bake to a pretty brown. Serve with cream. — Mrs. Milligan.

On the other hand, in another cookbook, called Everyday Desserts, by Olive Green, dated 1911, there’s another recipe that has no apples at all:

WALDORF PUDDING
Break up half a pound of stale lady-fingers and cook to a smooth paste with a quart of cream. Add half a cupful of sugar, three tablespoonfuls of butter, a wineglassful of sherry, and a sprinkling of grated nutmeg. Cool, add the well-beaten yolks of four eggs and three tablespoonfuls of almonds blanched and pounded to a paste with lemon-juice. Turn into a baking-dish, sprinkle with sugar, and bake in a quick oven.

Here’s a very interesting bit of information from our friends at Serious Eats about the numbers they put on those little stickers on items from the produce department…

Conventional produce gets a four-digit number.
Organic produce gets a five-digit number that starts with 9.
Genetically modified items also get a five-digit code, but that code starts with 8.

Examples
4139: Conventional Granny Smith apple
94139: Organic Granny Smith
84139: GMO Granny Smith

As an aside and an update to the last entry about the Titanic, some people who saw it were wondering what the other people on the ship were eating. The 2nd Class Dinner Menu for April 14, 1912 lists :

Consummé
Tapioca
Baked Haddock
Sharp Sauce
Curried Chicken & Rice
Spring Lamb, Mint Sauce
Roast Turkey, Cranberry Sauce
Green Peas
Purée Turnips
Keep reading…

I wrote the entry on braising this morning because I made braised lamb shanks the other night. Looking over this weblog, you’d think we eat lamb every night. I guess I’m just on a kick. According to the US Department of Agriculture, I’m apparently making up for the rest of America. (It’s really hard to find precise numbers. Even USDA reports from the same year vary in exact quantities.)

Americans only eat an average of .8 pounds of lamb per year, and that number didn’t vary by much between 1998 and 2005. In England, the number rises to 13 pounds, but we’re all wimps compared to the Kiwis (New Zealanders), who pack away 50 pounds of lamb and mutton per year!

According to USDA statistics, the average American consumes 110 pounds of red meat, including lamb, but beef makes up most of that amount, at 62½ pounds per year. (And animal activists, take heart : we eat less than half a pound of veal, annually.) Americans consume the same amount of chicken per year as pork (46½ lbs.). And we consume only 16 pounds of fish and shellfish a year.

But those numbers are dwarfed by the quantity of fruit and vegetables Americans eat… 687 pounds per person, per year. (It breaks down to about 272 pounds of fruit and 415 pounds of vegetables.)

According to the USDA, Americans consume 1,965 pounds of food per year, or about 9/10ths of a metric ton of food. That’s 5.4 pounds per day, 1.8 pounds per meal. 1,965 pounds is exactly what this Lotus Elise sports car weighs.

(Source, source, source.)

It was on April 14th, 1912 — 96 years ago — when the last meal was served in the first-class dining room on the RMS Titanic. As we all know, later that night, the ship collided with an iceberg and sank, with the loss of over 1500 lives. Here’s a detailed look at what was on the menu for the first-class passengers. Keep reading…

Courtesy of The Double-Tongue Dictionary

break beef v. phr. Every Friday, he picks up a carcass or two from Redwood Meat, then brings the meat back to the store and cuts it into rib-eyes, prime rib, filet mignon—just about every cut you can think of. What’s not used in the cuts is turned into ground beef. And what’s not used for ground beef—including some of the internal organs—goes into Reed’s side business: A line of grass-fed beef products for cats and dogs called “Heartfelt Foods.” ”We use the whole cow,” Reed said. This process—called “breaking beef”—isn’t easy. ”It’s physically demanding,” Reed said. “I don’t think the average person knows what it takes to get that little steak.” Reed was taught how to break beef by Nick Stiles, the previous meat cutter at the Co-op, who was responsible for getting the store’s grass-fed beef program started.

buddy adj. Syrup made from trees that have already started to open their buds is referred to as “buddy” syrup and it tastes pretty awful!

meez n. Literally “put in place,” mise en place is the kitchen term for your set up, the gathering and preparation of all the tools and food you need to complete the task at hand; mise en place can refer to a cook’s organization on the line before the evening’s service (line cooks often refer to it simply as “meez” and can be extremely territorial about their own); mise en place can refer to the wooden spoon, wine, stock, rice, and salt you gather before starting a risotto.

hardbone n. It didn’t take long to see that the rib tips of one carcass had turned from cartilage to bone—indicating the animal was at least 4 years old, a “hardbone” in meat-locker parlance.

food desert n. Health experts have taken to calling low-income neighborhoods “food deserts,” and it is easy to see why. Supermarkets are usually in short supply and specialty produce and health-food stores are even rarer. Residents are often forced to do their food shopping in small grocery stores that carry few fresh fruits and vegetables.

banana-box grocer n. Some reclamation centers then sell these goods to brokers, which hawk them to small salvage stores. The goods are typically contained in boxes that once carried bananas, so these smaller operations are often called banana-box grocers. Some food-industry experts say one drawback to the banana-box stores is that fewer damaged goods are being distributed to food banks, which have reported steep inventory declines over the past year.

flossy adj. Most of the good Portland restaurants serve what is known as “flossy” food (for fresh, local, organic, sustainable, seasonable). Flossies are people who believe in these ideals and try to eat in that manner.

foodshed n. the area which can, or is sufficient to, provide food for a given location.

meat diaper n. the absorbent pad packaged between a (styrofoam) tray and meat for sale.

smash cake n. a celebratory cake intended to be destroyed, especially by a child.

For more, food-related or no, check out The Double-Tongued Dictionary.

Here’s a hint : It has nothing to do with rabbinical oversight.

Answer : It’s the garlic. Without the garlic, it’s just another dill pickle