The FDA said it can’t guarantee that all the contaminated dog and cat food have been removed from store shelves. I’ve been feeding Pokey Pedigree for the last few years (luckily not on the Menu Foods recall list). Regardless, this toxic dog food business has got me thinking of what the hell I’m forcing my dog to eat.

When Matt and I were apartment hunting, we drove by a Merrick truck. I had never heard of Merrick before. I saw there was a picture on the side of the truck of a tin can labeled “turducken” and I flipped out. Matt and I could’t figure out what it was. I was hoping it would be delicious stock or broth. Matt thought it might be gravy. It took us a few minutes to figure out it was dog food. I was kinda jealous.

It just so happens that the New York Magazine’s best pet store in Brooklyn*, Love Thy Pet, is a block away from our new place. So I took Pokey there and they gave him treats and a free can of dog food - Wingalings, made by Merrick ($1.79-$2.38 for a large 13.2 oz can).

This stuff looks good. Like REALLY good. Like if I was drunk enough, I’d probably try it. Hey, don’t judge - it’s free of artificial flavors, colors and preservatives. There are even whole chicken wings inside the can! The label says the bones have been softened and are perfectly safe for your dog to eat. Unlike those tainted Menu Foods dog foods, Merrick uses minimal processing. I figured since I started eating better in last few months, Pokey should too. Especially since he’s become a lazy, fat bastard. I am pretty sure that a can of Merrick dog food is healthier for you to consume than a Hungry Man Dinner - in case you are poor, hungry and/or drunk.

Merrick dog food, cat food and treats are available at better pet stores, some health food stores and online.

Soft food (what you probably call “wet food”) flavors come in: Thanksgiving Day Dinner, Turducken, Venison Holiday Stew, Wild Buffalo Grill, Wingaling, Wilderness Blend, Working Dog Stew, Rocky Mountain Rainbow, Senior Medley, Smothered Comfort, Puppy Plate, Mediterranean Banquet, New Zealand Summer, Cowboy Cookout, French Country Paté, Grammy’s Pot Pie, Harvest Moon, Brauts-n-Tots and a tasting menu called Gourmet Lunch Box which contains eight different flavors ($13.50-23). Hard food (what you probably call “dry food”) also available.

Merrick’s website (You can find cheaper places online to buy it then directly through them - like in bulk on Amazon!)

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*By “Brooklyn” I mean Boerum Hill / Cobble Hill / Carroll Gardens - The only parts of Brooklyn (aside from Park Slope) that that magazine deems worthy of recognition. Unless they are picking on hipsters in Williamburg, which is like shooting fish in a barrel.

It’s been awhile since I posted something about libations.

Here’s an article about how to best score buybacks from a bar.

How to Get a Buyback 

Too much bacon can be bad for your lungs?!

So during my second trail, the chef and sous chef were telling me how I did better at my first trail then two Culinary Institute of America graduates, who had also trailed last week. Not so much as taking it as a complement, I was more dumbfounded. The sous chef asked me if I knew the internal cooking temperature of chicken. I replied, “Um. Like 165, right?” He shook his head and said one of the CIA kids told him 135. I don’t understand how one of the best cooking schools in the world could turn out someone like that with their seal of approval. I mean, the internal cooking temperature of chicken is something a lot of avid home cooks know. Especially someone who wants to do it for a living. Obviously, that CIA kid doesn’t really love to cook. Then why the hell did he go to a prestigious cooking school?

I’ve had two people tell me, that in terms of culinary school, you only get out what you put into it. But why would you half-ass it? I mean, it’s not like business school, where you can coast by with a 2.0 then get a job with one of your dad’s companies. Cooking is a skill and you can’t fake that. I really don’t understand most people. I thought I would escape those spare parts in the kitchen, I but guess I’m wrong. Again.

I dug up this old article I remember reading in Village Voice over a year and a half ago. It’s about different fats and mentions how now lard is the way to go for your added fat because it has half the amount of saturated fat of butter.

“Grease is Good!: Are lard, eggs, and fish tacos the new health foods?”

I was on the terlit, reading “Techniques of Healthy Cooking ” by The Culinary Institute of America and it had a page on MSG.

Apparently MSG (which has 1/3 the amount of sodium of salt and is more delicious - falling into the umami category of taste) is perfectly safe to eat in moderation. There have been dozens of studies and they found no link between moderate intake levels of MSG and any problems in normal, healthy individuals. But MSG never shook off the bad rep it got in the late 60’s. The book says that people who think they have an adverse reaction to it may have a food allergy to something else or some other medical condition (or maybe the chef did something awful to your food).

Lots of junk food products contain MSG, just look at the ingredient list on the back of a sack of Doritos for “monosodium glutamate”.

Bring on the delicious seasoning!

I wasn’t always a snotty foodie. I wasn’t always as anal I am now about caring for my kitchen gear. I’m not above admitting my ignorance about things, like I used to put my Wusthof in the dishwasher and when I was ten years old I put a finished wood bowl in the microwave. So I have stayed away from wood gear for years -the stuff kept splitting on me and no one ever told me it was because you had to oil it and couldn’t soak it in water. (This was in the days before the wealth of knowledge on the information superhighway.)

Matt and I purchased a butcher block from Ikea for our new apartment. It’s made out of solid birch and metal, the GROLAND ($199). Here’s a photo of it (unoiled). Ikea says you should ONLY use their oil blend, BEHANDLA, on your Ikea gear. First of all, I usually call shenanigans when a company says to only use their products. Secondly, the vague ingredients listed on the website is different from what the actual container says: Linseed oil, tung oil, mineral oil, and lot of things that start with “benzo-” and end in cancer. Plus, it’s an Ikea product and that in itself doesn’t gain my confidence in their quality.

I took a chance and purchased John Boo’s Mystery Oil ($6-8 for 16 oz) based on John Boo’s reputation. The “mystery” is that it doesn’t tell you what the ingredients are. Various websites say it’s made of pure mineral oil, raw linseed oil, tung oil and natural citrus extracts. I couldn’t dig up anything else with my world class detective skills (read: Google searches). The bottle does say safe for any food preparation surface. I’ll let you know if I develop a toxic shock syndrome or something.

I read online that you are supposed to oil your new wood products once a week for the first month and once a month for the first year. And sand it down with fine sand paper once in awhile. I guess it’s a good thing I have a lot of time on my hands.

I went to shopping at Whole Foods to pick up some shit as I was in the mood to do some serious cooking this past weekend. I was planning to test out the Chewy Noodle Soup recipe and make some fancy burgers, a chorizo/black bean soup and being my experimentation with Chinese Beef Noodle soup. On the ingredient tip, I had pretty much all I needed but, instead of normal pepper I only had the gay tri-color pepper…which really isn’t that bad if you need to spice up some cock or add that extra kick of flavor to the salad you are about to toss, but for my purposes, it was not what I wanted or needed. I wanted to get me some old school whole black pepper – no fancy colors or anything, just OG pepper. Anyway, so I’m at Whole Foods looking for pepper and I find this 1lb bag of the stuff – normal black pepper and there’s no price on the bag – whatevs – it’s fucking pepper…how much can 1lb of pepper cost?

Apparently, $18…

Which, by my calculations, is almost six times how much I should have paid for a pound of pepper. As I was opening the package and putting the pepper into my grinder (true hotness – peep the Alessi grinder, son! Which, parentheticallier [as we’re already in a parenthetical], is a pretty damn decent grinder, easy to clean and allowing you mad control over the size of the grind), I was thinking that this pepper had best have slices of gold in it or some sort of peppercorn genie that is gonna give me free blowjobs to justify the price I paid for it.

Grind, grind…

HOLY SHIT!!!

The second I started grinding, my olfactory senses (yes, I have more than one) were assaulted by the bright aromatic smell of pepper. Not some normal shit either, this smell was big, bright and fresh and actually smelled a bit spicy…kinda like the distilled essence of pepper.

Taste test results = HOT DAMN!!! This shit is without a doubt the best pepper I have ever tasted in my life. This is what pepper is supposed to taste like! A sharp, long lasting flavor, spice that literally dances on the tip of your tongue, a flavor that develops - just a little bit and yer all set on flavor. This is the pepper God likely uses in his kitchen (yes, god exists, god is a man and he’s a fucking awesome cook – fuck you aetheists!).

Now, my amazement at the flavor got me into research mode – how can pepper be this delicious? What kind of ambrosia is this and where did it come from? Is it actually a gift from God or was it made by the Devil to tempt us into his fiery kingdom of pain and suffering?

The answer lies in India.

Specifically in Tellicherry, on the Malabar Coast of Kerala in Southern India. That is where Tellicherry pepper is grown and word on the street is that Tellicherry pepper is the bestest pepper in the universe (Malabar pepper is #2). Both grow on the east coast of India. Tellicherry is a large berry, very black, with a bold flavor, whereas Malabar is slightly less black, smaller and less pungent. Tellicherry pepper and Malabar pepper come from the same plant and are harvested at almost the same time. Tellicherry pepper however gets to chill on the vine longer and mack out, thereby incresing the percentage of essential oils in it, which in turn makes it more aromatic and jacks up its deliciousness like it was on steroids.

So, was it worth $18?

(Keep in mind that I am a cheap bastard)

Hells yeah! Totally worth it. This is like top of the line when it comes to pepper and seeing as how you put pepper on so much damn stuff and it often plays a central role in increasing the deliciousness of food, $18 is a fucking paltry sum to spend to increase the deliciousness of all your meals so much. Not to mention that the shit needs to be used in such small quantities that the 1lb bag will last you for at least a year – so yer really paying like a buck fifty a month to substantially increase the awesomeness of all your meals. Knowing that, how could you not buy it?

Final Verdict:
YOU BUY NOW!!!!!!

Today I got another book sent to me from a friend. “Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors” by Andrea Nguyen. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. So I was more than pleased to receive it. I’m actually surprised it’s taken Vietnamese food so long to catch on with Americans, considering that it’s French influenced (due to France’s colonization of the country from 1858 until 1954), based on fresh ingredients, generally healthy and visually appealing. This book is HUGE. It breaks down Vietnamese cooking and dishes so they are simple and not intimadating. In the beginning is a brief history lesson and in the back is a descriptive glossary for the exotic ingredients.

I haven’t met anyone who didn’t like pho or a banh mi. But there’s so much more to Vietnamese cuisine than those two.

I really miss my mom’s banh xeo - savory crepes made from rice flour, coconut and tumeric and stuffed with deliciousness like shrimp, chicken, mung beans, bean sprouts and julienned veggies and eaten with lettuce, mint, cucumbers and nuoc cham (seasoned fish sauce and rice vinegar dipping sauce). It was so very good that even though I haven’t had it in over seven years, I can still visualize it, photographically remember the base recipe and practically taste it - hot and cold and crispy and crunchy and soft and little sweet and a little spicy and a little salty all in one bite. It was quality. It’s hard to find banh xeo the way my mom made it in restaurants in NYC due to either regional variations or half-assed cooking. Some place will serve it soggy and floppy. Some are too oily. Some aren’t yellow enough. Most of them are stingy with the stuffing. I won’t randomly order it in restaurants without a referral because I’m scared of being disappointed. And being let down by food really bums me out.

Something I love about Vietnamese food is that’s it is unpretentious: There are no rules to eating it*. You don’t want hoisin sauce in your pho? No problem! You wanna eat with your hands? Go ahead! Slurp your broth? Of course! Whenever my mom would have her white friends over, they were polite and respectful of etiquette (like not eating until everyone is seated and until the host takes the first bite), but my mom would yell at them to dig in while she was still cooking. Eat all you want and get as messy as you want. How can you not get into that?

*The only thing my mom was strict about was how I held my chopsticks: Paupers, she said, held theirs lower down, closer to the food and royalty could manage them from the very top of the sticks.

I was listening to an NPR podcast about an anthropologist, Timothy Jones, who basically went through people’s garbage for years. He was researching the eating habits of Americans. Jones came to the conclusion that the average American wastes about 14% of their food (or $600) a year. He said many people do their grocery shopping on Sundays, but barely use their perishables during the week (being too tired to cook after work). They also think they are being healthy by buying fresh fruit and veg, but they don’t actually eat a lot of it. Another factor is that Americans tend to buy more things in bulk and Europeans tend to buy smaller portions*.

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