On this holiday shrine of comestibles, I want to take this moment to wish everyone a happy day of thanks. Blogging will resume soon.
Thanks for hanging tight with me.
Corey

My garden is done for the year. All in all, I think it was an overwhelming success. I grew 100% organic vegetables. No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or genetic fucking around. Just plants, water, and various vegetarian animal shit. It served us well. We had tomatoes for the bulk of the late summer. We had peppers we didn't entirely know what to do with. We ate a smattering of what surely was the broccoli of the gods. We claimed some zucchini and squash for the grill. We even got a jar of pickles out of there.
I learned some hard lessons.

Soil prep never stops. I don't think a pet cow can shit enough in a year to turn bad soil into great soil. But I am confident that I will get there eventually.

Plant early. I took a risk. Every old-timer in the neighborhood thought that I was crazy putting my wee plants in the ground in early May. Whatever. I got harvest way earlier than they did. And really, what's the worst that can happen? They all die from frost damage and I have to replant. Pffffft. If you don't like me planting my garden pre-June, hide and watch. I still think this is a great idea with some acceptable risk.

Composting is harder than it should be. Containers, aerating, the unholy stench, doing ratios of green/brown waste, drainage, and pH all suck! But I believe it's necessary. I know that it has to get easier as we go along.

Check pH often. I got Blossom End Rot that entirely wiped through all of my squash. Killed every plant in under a week. BER has several contributing factors and apparently one of them is bad luck, which I have for days. But ammonia content in the soil is one that can be remedied.

I am planting a plot twice as big next year with more variety. I kinda dig this organic gardening for food thing.

I often talk a lot about what I don't eat. Occasionally I'll share what I do eat. But I think it's come time to share what I truly love to eat. The foods that inspire passion in me. The foods that make life truly marvelous and amazing. The foods that make me want to write a blog.
Anyway, this is just a short list of what's on my mind right now.
My favorite:
Vegetable - Fresh heirloom tomatoes. I know that they are technically a fruit, but that spot is already taken.
Fish - Toro Sashimi. This fatty belly meat of the tuna comes in season near my birthday. It literally melts on your tongue.
Soup - My wife's chicken noodle. It's essentially my own recipe, but there's something special about it. It tastes of warmth, love, caring. When you're sick you get the undertones of concern and hope. This is more than a meal. It's an expression of what home really is.
Fruit - Pawpaw. The pawpaw is a most curious fruit. It is indigenous and native to the hills of West Virginia. It tastes familiarly of apple, banana, mango, and some say pear. But it's still so exotic. I grew up eating them and its been so long since I've had one. If I could pay a fortune for one, I would.
Breakfast - Most develop their love or loathing of eating cold pizza for a morning meal in college. I think I developed my taste for it in elementary school. Chewing cold pizza allows time for reflection on the evening before. Which brings me to...
Beer - Beer is the nectar of the gods. Beer is there for you. In good times and bad. It refreshes you when you're thirsty and it can drown out the pain of a bad day. Beer is glorious and my flavor of choice for some time now has been Newcastle brown ale. Not as heavy as a stout, but plenty of bitter to chase away the domestic piss drinkers.
Charleston Area Restaurant - This is a tie at the moment. Murad's has been a favorite for a long time. Great pub food all made in house and a great wait staff. It's completely non-pretentious atmosphere and menu  is art in simplicity
The Vandalia Grill is a fairly recently found treasure. I love the atmosphere. The menu is creative and modestly priced. The preparation is spot on. I totally dig this place!
Sandwich - Toasted artisan bread, thick-sliced heirloom tomato, mayonnaise, salt and pepper. I've always said that if I was a restaurateur this would be the centerpiece of my menu. It's proof positive that spectacular ingredients make for spectacular results.
Dessert - Key Lime Pie. There can be no other.

These are just a few of my favorites. I'm sure I will revisit this topic from time to time. Please, share what foods you can't get enough of.

Dragon*Con.
It's the dork Mecca of the east coast. Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, comic fans, vampires of all sorts, gamers, goths, BDSM'ers, and everyone and everything else under the sun is represented. Put 60,000 of them into a blender, add copious amounts of booze and drugs, remove all morality and dignity and set them upon downtown Atlanta. That's the best description of Dcon I can give.

It's Sodom and Gamorrah with lightsabers.

The stories I could tell here would make a sailor repent, but we're here to talk about food. Right? Right? Who's with me? Well.. I'm going to talk food anyway.

There's something that I learned a long time ago about convention survival. Hot dogs are $6, sodas are $5. If you want to pay to eat, you're going to pay a lot. I treat going to a con much like camping. I pack in breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and drinks. I usually do eat my dinners in a nice sit down restaurant. So we took with us poptarts, cold cereal, oatmeal for the coffee maker, and plenty of sandwich fixin's. We took very little soda and tons of bottled water. And booze. We took more booze than anything else. Nothing exciting there at all. But Max Lager's was exciting indeed.

Max Lager's is a wood fired grill and brewpub at the corner of Peachtree St and West Peachtree. I shit you not. We decided on Max's because we were standing on the street corner across from it arguing on where to dine. We noticed it and gave it a go. The first night, I ate grilled trout topped with roasted pecans. It was served with black truffle grits and wild mushrooms with spinach. Fucking phenomenal! It was the best food I had eaten in a restaurant in YEARS! Everything was fresh and prepared to absolute perfection. My wife's bacon bison cheeseburger was also a work of art, but it didn't hold a candle to the trout. The in-house brew I had to accompany my fish was an american brown ale. Perfect bitterness, plenty of body. More flavor than any American dark beer I'd tasted in some time. Spectacular meal. So we went back the next night!

I'm climbing onto my soapbox.

Where do you get your eggs? Wal*Mart? Some other faceless corporate food empire? I know where I get my eggs. Every week Breezy Knoll Farms in Gap Mills, West Virginia provides me with one dozen of the most perfect, enormous, ultra-fresh, vegetarian fed, truly free range chicken eggs I have ever had the delight of  shoveling down my gullet. If I ever get sick from eggs they sell me, I can drive down there and beat the ever loving shit out of someone. More likely they would apologize all over themselves and happily refund my paltry $3 for the bad carton (they even recycle their own cartons). Can you do that? It takes something fairly special to fuck up one of natures perfect foods. Eggs are packed with protein and some yummy bad fats all encapsulated in protective nearly impenetrable hard white shell. It took the laziness and greed of corporate foods to find a way to give us disease from this delicious bounty. There are 2,000 of us seriously ill with salmonella RIGHT NOW because they don't have the luxury of keeping their egg farmer honest with threats of physical violence.

It's past time that I pimp a film that changed my life. Food Inc is the movie that pushed this lifestyle shift into overdrive. It is not a grotesque look at the meat industry trying to sway you to veganism. It is not a commie film telling you to live on a commune and save the environment. It is a very clever film that did it's homework on corporate foods. And if you care about your body, your children's bodies, it will scare the fuck out of you.

So work sends me off to Chicago for a few days on a quest for big sales and lots of hand shaking. They do this once in a while. I have to dress up and speak well, in exchange, myself and my family get to see cities we normally wouldn't. Chicago has so much to offer a foodie. I focused on three things. A steak, a deep dish, and a hot dog. All three are foods that Chi-Town is renowned for.

The Steak
It didn't happen. Money, time, exhaustion from a long day, and other factors all kept me out of the steakhouse. Chicago is known for the stockyards there and the superior steaks that come from them. Beef is manna from the heavens, but it wasn't in the cards. We did, however, eat at an Indian diner called Chutney Joe's. They assured me it was the only location, but it had that franchise feel. Whatever. The lamb was good, the naan was exceptional, the rice pudding was too small, but tasty. The prices were on par with McDonalds garbage. It was a win!

The Dog
From Wikipedia: A Chicago-style hot dog is a steamed or water-simmered, kosher-style, all-beef frankfurter^[1][3] on a poppy seed bun,^[4] originating from the city of Chicago, Illinois. The hot dog is topped with yellow mustard, chopped white onions, sweet pickle relish (often a dyed neon-green variety, sometimes called piccalilli^[5]), a dill pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, pickled sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt.
Yup. It's all of that and a bag of chips. My wife was kind enough to trek 5 blocks while I was working to bring me back this Frankenstein of a frankfurter. They really don't travel well. With all that shit atop them, they fall apart and crumble rather easily and then everything falls off. Or maybe they just look like that all the time. I ate mine with a fork and knife. It was really, really good. Not the hot dog experience I'm used to. Definitely more of a deli sandwich experience. It was awesome.


The Pie
I have had deep dish pizza before. We had a Pizzeria Uno's franchise locally and it was pretty good stuff. We ate at Lou Manalti's, a place that finds it's way to the Travel Channel and Food Network regularly. It was close to the hotel and had a great reputation. I understand why. It was terrific. The crust was crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and buttery. The sausage could've used some more pizazz, but the mozzarella was fresh and the tomatoes were phenomenal. I'm also fairly certain that Buddy Guy was sitting at the next table just 5 feet from me. Maybe his aura seasoned my meal. No matter, I want to go back.


Chicago is foodie town. I want to spend a week eating on it. So much to experience and so little time.

I FUCKING HATE WAL*MART!!


Now that we got that out of the way, I'll tell you why. I so wish there was some noble GeoSocioPolitical reason.

There's not.

It has nothing to do with how they treat their employees. Yeah, I'm certain it blows rotting goat dick to work there. There's a lot worse jobs for worse pay out there, I assure you. I've worked a couple of them. WalMart would've been a few steps up from what I've done for a paycheck. WalMart employs some people that just could not work anywhere else. This is benevolent. They have systematically made it so easy to mindlessly work for them, nearly every warm body can do it. I applaud that effort.

WalMart is accessible and convenient in todays 24/7 society. It's comforting to know that if I run out of rifle shells AND shit-paper at 3am, WalMart has my back. There are other 24 hour locations, but none with such a varying degree of goods. This has its drawbacks, however. If you choose to shop at 3am when the store is 20% less suck than normal, they will punish you by closing large portions of the store to clean the floors. You will feel like a rat in a maze. Sorry. Shop during peak hours or feel the wrath of the Floor Lords.

WalMarts give money hand over fist to educational institutions. It's true. But it's kinda like they're buying good press. Oh well, it's a mean to an end.

WalMart, for being such an ENORMOUS company, is fairly environmentally conscious. They have box recycling within the logistics of their shipping and supplying. They carry many "green" and organic products. They almost always offer recycling facilities onsite for customer use. Frankly, WalMart may be the only source of environmentally friendly education that some of their customers will ever get. Chalk this one up as a win.

I hate them because when I'm there I loathe myself and all of humanity. I want the entire planet to burn to ash the moment I walk through the doors. This temple of convenience and indulgence brings out every terrible, disgusting demon that us as homo sapiens have to offer. From the assholes in the parking lot to the degrading experience that is checking out, the store is a pox on the world.

I stopped shopping there when I realized that, while within WalMart's confines, I treat my family different. I am shorter. Quicker to anger. I realized that I was compromising on goods that I normally buy because WalMart no longer carries them. I was settling for inferior, chemical grade foods because that's what WalMart says we should be eating. I was buying clothing that I normally wouldn't wear and I looked like EVERYONE ELSE because we all fucking shop at WalMart. WalMart, at one time, was great. It was a manifestation of freedom. I could buy that paintball gun at midnight with the intent to get drunk and shoot up some poor asshole's garbage cans. Somewhere along the way, they did some dark sorcery and turned that freedom into chains. People believe that they must shop there. That it's normal to feel that way. To compromise your integrity of goods and the quality of food. I get dirty looks when I say things like, "I wouldn't know. I haven't been to WalMart in months".

Look. I'm not calling anyone out as a bad person because they shop there. Just ask yourself when the last time you were truly happy standing in the infinitely long checkout to buy a bunch of shit you really don't need or want. I'm probably preaching to the choir here. I know that. So I ask the handful of readers that I have a favor. If you enjoyed this post and agree with me, pass it along. Send it to someone you know who is a WalMart regular. I can take the hate mail. I promise.

I don't want to shut down one of the single most powerful economic forces in our country. I just want them, and their customers, to give a fuck about each other.

I'm always a busy fella. I stay that way. I always say that I'm going to slow down and enjoy what I have, but it's just not my nature. I can't do it. July through the end of August is always hell on earth for me. The day job is as busy as it can possibly be.  The convention season starts winding up. The out of town family starts  making noise for us to come visit. Everything always seems to hit all at once.
This is when laziness sets in. Wendy's or Burger King beckons for the quick, easy, cheap meal. This year my wife and I are taking our first grown-up adult vacation together since we had our daughter. Due to some unforeseen events, our budgeting for this adventure got off track. This actually works in our favor. By examining every single dollar we spend, we are forced to cook at home. Good food, even unintentionally, is still good food.

Yesterday I pulled a total of 5 tomatoes, 7 Anaheim chilies, 4 green bell peppers out of my garden. It was the first time that I needed a bag to haul in the bounty. I was proud. This was food that I grew without chemicals at my home for my family. This was my penultimate stab at a great big "Fuck you!" to industrialized food. And it worked. One of my crazy, hair-brained schemes actually paid off. It's a lot of hard work raising a garden organically. A friend asked, "How do you keep the weeds out?". Well, you weed or hoe almost every single day. We don't use any kind of weed inhibitor or chemical based plant foods. It's just elbow grease and animal shit. Vegetarian chicken and bovine to be exact. Thus far, I figure we're still in the hole monetarily but things are looking promising and it felt good to bring food into the house.

As for what's happening in the rest of the garden, not a lot. I did take king zucchini out. He tasted okay. I grabbed him a little late. The seeds were big and tough. We now have another white zuke growing in his stead. I don't get why they're white. It's a genetic mutation and it's rare. I understand that. But can I please just have one green one?

I have taken two squash. They were yummy on the grill. I took 8 pickling cucumbers and jarred them. I got one good meals worth of broccoli and not much since. I have to be doing something wrong there. The handful of red onions seem to be doing awesome.

The modicum of success we have enjoyed has inspired us to expand next year to nearly double the length. It will be a tremendous amount of work, but we want to do corn, carrots, asparagus, and some leafy greens. Also, we intend to grow sunchokes next in 2011. We will definitely plant garlic in the fall. There are lots of other possibilities rattling around my skull.

E-I-E-I-Oh!

So I pulled my first harvest of pickling cucumbers this Saturday. I have never preserved anything on my own, EVER. It's a bit daunting. My kid inhales dill pickles. Loves them. This was a project that kind of was a necessity. After a soak overnight, the recipe was super easy. The anxiety set in while waiting for it to seal. I could only think about wasting my first, and maybe only, harvest of cucumbers.
It didn't seal. Hours after pouring the boiling liquid into the pint jar, it didn't seal. Shit! I left it on the counter overnight. It was still too hot to refrigerate, I was disgusted and really just kind of forgot about it. When I woke this morning, they jar had sealed and all was well in the world.

Anyone that knows me personally, knows I have this man-crush thing on Alton Brown. Science and food. How do you make television more entertaining. Maybe if Adam and Jaime from Mythbusters blew up everything he made at the end of every episode. A couple of years ago, I watched Alton Brown lose his damned mind. He is all about the most simple route to great taste. When he made cottage cheese from scratch it perplexed me. The simplest route to great taste in cottage cheese is cracking open the Breakstone's container and shoveling it in. Right? Alton kept assuring me that once I tasted this homemade stuff, I wouldn't go back to store bought. Hmmmm...
Flash forward to now. I'm paying more attention to the ingredients labels in foods. Cottage cheese is definitely processed and definitely fortified with chemical shit that I don't want in my kid (if it requires "natural flavors" it's probably not fucking natural). She eats the stuff in such quantity, I'm contemplating my own milk cow. So she and I set out this evening with simply skim milk, white vinegar, kosher salt, organic half and half, and a candy thermometer to cross that next hurdle in a more natural diet.
Results: It's good. Actually it tastes great! The texture is definitely different. It's kinda chewy. Sorta like mozzarella. That was a bit of a surprise but it doesn't take anything away from it being a damn fine cottage cheese. Alton, I'm sorry I doubted you.
As an afterthought, his yogurt cheese recipe is AWESOME. It's like a healthier cream cheese, absolutely foolproof to make, and it's lactose intolerant friendly! Get some!

Swift Level: Natural Beef is without a doubt the best tasting ground beef I have ever eaten. I'm wondering if it's the best animal I've ever eaten. The Co-Op paid off if for no other reason than this. The eggs were fantastic. The greens and spinach were awesome. But the burgers made from Swift Level 90/10 is flat out fucking stupid good. You people aren't eating cow. I don't really even know what you're eating. But tonight I ate cow. And went for seconds.

Today I placed my first order with the Co-Op. A real live Co-Op. That's pretty damn hippy. I'm still digesting it. Don't get me wrong, I think Co-Op's are a GREAT idea. Food just doesn't get any closer to the farm. And the right people are making the money from it. It's a big step and a commitment to the quality of what I'm putting in my family's bodies. I'll keep you posted on the results.

I've almost always regarded restaurant food to be better. Better tasting, better ingredients, just better. My grandmother was an amazing cook. I loved eating her food, but it was always a treat to go to a sit down food joint. Even if it was just the 'Sizzler. Somewhere along the way, in the past few years, I've had a change of heart. It's taken such a long time to realize that restaurants, even the good ones, don't have to be better. Good food tastes good if you simply don't fuck it up. That's the mantra. That's all you have to do. It's a very simple equation. Good Food + Don't Fuck It Up = Tastes Good.
Let's break this down.
Good food. I specifically said good, not healthy. Diet "this" and fat free "that" have no flavor. I also suspect that they hold a closer relationship to plastics then consumable natural foods. More on that in a different post. At the risk of sounding like a hippy, natural organic foods taste better. I will not debate it. They just do. Meats, dairy, vegetables, fruit, grains all taste better when they're not genetically engineered like some Captain America clone. I eat real butter! Not even the crap formed up in sticks from the supermarket. I use real, unsalted Amish roll butter. Why? because it infuses everything with awesome! The first time you eat fresh organic eggs and see that rich dark orange yolk, you will understand why i pay a whopping 80 cents more per dozen.
There is a trade off. These awesome tasting foods have no chemicals or preservatives in them and therefore do not have the half-life of U92. It means more trips to the butcher or farmers market to obtain the freshest food you can or more waste in spoiled goods.
Don't Fuck It Up. When your food is high quality, it will benefit most from the LACK of dressings and frills. A simple seasoning and properly cooking it really is all that it takes. I recently grilled organic yellow squash for company. The recipe was foolproof. Slice thick, toss in olive oil, kosher salt and pepper, grill till done. The dish was the talk of the party. "What did you put on that squash?" "Oh my god, it's so sweet!". I realized that maybe people didn't really know what squash tastes like. Great food doesn't need a balsamic reduction or a cranberry chutney. It just needs to be treated with respect.
Tastes Good. Trust me. Give it a shot and see if you agree. Great quality food prepared delicately will taste amazing on it's own merit. And it will be kind of healthy when you don't pile on the dressings, sauces, and condiments.
I don't expect to inspire anyone to break out of their Walmart induced food coma. But if anyone reads this, I just want to set the stage for what's to come.

I would say that this blog died off, but it never really lived. Truth is that I started it to continue some of the ideas that I had published and before I had much invested here, I got a better writing gig.
So here's the idea. This time around, no more reviews. No more structure. I am going to just talk food. My passion. I may be all over the place. Gardening, shopping, cooking, all of it. It's all fair game. Food, I know you're out there and I'm coming for you!

Should I, yes or should I, no?