Eating Out The Food Gestapo

Ohhh, here we go boys and girls. It’s time for the mixed message post. This morning, I done got me an urge to ask the people of the Vineyard Farmer’s Market the burning questions that I made up in hopes that you too, my beloved public, would want to know. And the day started off in the most lovely fashion.

First we stopped off with our friends at Fabiano’s to ask our silly questions. Fun and hilariousness ensued. Next up, we went over to Perfect Edge Sharpening for his take on things. I must say, I was happy to be schooled in some of the subjects I was asking about. For a dude who works with metal, he knows his stuff about the things that it cuts. And so we jumped around. Sun Smiling Farms, Moa’s Farm, VT Iwo Ranches (the Kumquat Lord), the awesome preserves lady and the nursery dudes, all understood that we were there to have a goof and happily played along in the spirit of stupid bloggery, answering what they wished, ignoring what they thought was dumb.

Then the vibe changed. As I sidled over to the KMK Farm’s table and asked if I could give a goofball interview, suddenly things got cold. Like frost burn your Peter Peppers cold. At first I figured, “Hey, folks can be busy and not want to fart around with a jackass.”. I *AM* a jackass afterall. But it slowly got weirder and weirder. Like an outlander in Children of the Cornville. I was waiting for a giant ginger kid to call me out while he was dragging my woman through the market in chains.  Outlander!  We have your woman Outlander!!

So it’s in the midst of my interview with the lovely ladies of Moa’s when the owner/manager/organizer/Lady Master of the Vineyard, Felix happens to pop in with a “So what the hell are you doin’ in my backyard?” vibe. Like somehow I’m a NARC or something. Apparently it was a terrifying debacle when I asked folks how many people they had working their acreage. Like I was somehow a drunken reprobate representative of Child Protective Services hunting for abusers of child labor. KISS MY ASS! I *WAS* child labor. Totally legally to boot. Your folks own the land, it’s part of your chores. City kids take out the garbage, country kids tend the farm.  That's country living.

And the worst part about this sudden, ugly change in attitude is how terribly misperceived my intentions were, by the Organic Powers That Be. I love local produce. I love local farmers. I love that I can meet them personally, develop a passive customer to farmer friendship. That these lovely people recognize me and are happy that I want to wake up early to buy the bounty of their lands and labor. And I want to highlight that the FARMERS themselves were nothing but open and kind. The only ugliness came when the Vineyard owner decided to drop into the middle of the interview and sniff us out just in case we were Dept. of Agriculture/Labor/CIA/FBI/NSA/CSI/NCIS, and when the watercolor lady decided to point out that we appeared to be rabble rousers out to cause strife and trouble in their little community.

Quite the opposite! My intentions this morning were to ask some fun, funny and a couple poignant questions of the grand people who get up at 5am to provide we lucky Fresnans with their goods and services. I myself, beyond being a lame ass food blogger, attend the market to frequently blow between $50 and $100 per visit. In the course of today’s blogging jackassery, I still managed to spend about $85 spread amongst my favorite vendors. And to be honest, I left with $5 still in my pocket that I fully intended to spend as well, leaving me with empty pockets and too many good things to logistically eat before time and biology render them inedible. Why waste so much cash? I’d rather waste my money on local farmers than have grocery store veg going bad just as readily in my crisper.

But this…this is a hard crux for me. You see, short of the cold shoulder threeway, each and every vendor at the Vineyard Farmer’s Market is still my friend. I still want to buy their delicious goods. But. And it’s a BIG but now. A huge part of me doesn’t want to be paying into the “club” or “clique” society that attempted to close ranks with me on the outside. It boggles my mind that there would be such a hostile vibe towards someone who only wants to say good things about the market. It created in me an instant opposing sentiment towards something that I had cherished only minutes before. And strangely, the thing that turned the vibe was someone asking questions in a light hearted and friendly way, so as to be able to further promote their goods and maybe be able to add in some interesting tidbits and conversational topics to better help the Fresno food buyer make the decision to wake up early on Saturday and go get some excellent, local, produce.

To everyone that gave us an interview, I pledge that I personally and Eating Out Fresno as a whole shall not say anything defamatory or mean about you or your products. I very much meant what I said at the outset of the interviews. It’s for a goof. I like food. I like you guys and girls. This is for fun. Hell, I don’t even merchandise the site, since I could care two shits less about the half nickel a month I’d get from Gooble. And I will follow through and put together a fun and uplifting post based around your answers. I might even try to highlight some of the stronger points made about issues that are very important to Valley farmers, such as my convoluted and poorly worded question about the uses of the Central California watershed. But I’m sorry to say, that the people you pay for spaces at said market did a bang up job of making me and my wife feel very unwelcome. It wasn’t my intention to write an angry piece. But they put forth a superlative effort to direct me towards being the person they perceived me to be.

Ladies and gentlemen. Business owners and growers. I am but a simple blogger. I have no cause for which I fight, except maybe decent customer service and quality of product. And the growers at the market fight on the same side that I do. They’re outright wonderful. But, you should be aware that some people, by way of their perceived authority can reflect poorly on everyone when they decide to be reactionary and unfriendly. I carry no press card, and I have no authority over anything except this sad little blog. I dress like a scumbag to highlight the fact. I’m a nice, if goofy guy. If you were really terrified that I was there as an undercover sting operation for underage labor…well, I guess I must have that secret government agent look about me. Poor choice in judgment and poor eyesight in spotting a Fed. It’s not like drug enforcement, where they let the undercovers grow their hair long and “imbibe” to gain people’s trust.

Were we an actual news publication, we’d be ethically bound to contact our detractors and get their input on the situation before we go to press. But, I haven’t slept, haven’t had enough beer to make a difference and got piss poor customer service from what serves as the manager of the market. So, as concrete proof that we are neither undercover Bee reporters or agents of any governmental office, we’ll go to press half assed, with the short, but powerful impressions that ruined an otherwise lovely morning.


-Pook

P.S. For reference, these are the horribly invasive and dangerous questions I was asking.  All answers were optional, and alot of folks felt free to use "No Comment" without any further digging by myself.

1: How many acres do you farm?

2: How many people do you employ?

3: Do you farm organic? Why/why not?

4: What is your favorite produce that you grow? And the Least?

5: What is your most profitable produce?

6: How do you feel about heirlooms vs hybrids vs proprietary Monsanto style copyrights (Frankenfood)?

7: What do you think the best item to eat every day is? And the worst?

8: If you could make beer out of any plant you grow, what beer would it be. What would you name it?

9: Peter peppers…whats your standpoint on pornographic vegetables?

10: Do you think vegans are the new wave of diet fads? Or do you they they’d be delicious to eat, since they’re free range organic long pig?

11: Can I touch your squash?

12: Is it ok if your squash touches me?

13: As a farmer, what is your general stance on the California water situations, vis a vis the projected new dam construction, water being pumped hundreds of miles to other municipalities and 100 year old family trust contracts with the state that give a tiny minority of the state a vast access to it’s yearly watershed?

14: If you had to name 12 people for a Pin Up girls of Fresno Organic Gardening, who would you nominate and how many would be from Sun Smiling?


Terribly dangerous questions aren’t they? Ah well, back to undermining 3rd world regimes for The Man.

Eating Out Vocab Test

There are so many damn weird ass words for food these days that it’s a nightmare to figure out which language to learn, so you can speak the words of food with smartness. Give it up. Latin, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, on and on and on. So many fucking words for a cut up potato. But sadly, a lot of them do a good job of describing the state and condition of the food item in question, some intimating entire recipes or several combined, just by it’s name.

Motherfuckers.

So, in the short but illustrious history of Eating Out Fresno there have been some high falootin’ kewlinairy turms that have been bandied about that do bear a bit of explanation. We’ve got boil, fry, bake and sauté down. But what in the living fuck is a concasse? Great grandma knows. She called it getting ready for canning season. What jackass called cut ribbons of leaves a chiffonade? Fuck me sideways if I know, but I’ll do my best to tackle these fancy linguistic sudoku puzzles and put them in regular, if overly wordy terms.

Concasse: as in concasse’d tomatoes. This is where you quick boil (blanch) and shock tomatoes that you have scored on the bottom, so that the skin of the fruit will slide off of the flash cooked exterior without cooking the majority of the fruit. Then removing the seeds and stem area. Leaving them ready to chop or puree. (the ACTUAL definition is just to chop up something…stupid language)

Shock: (not the Shocker!  Dirty minds...) When you boil an item and then remove it from the heat and immerse it in ice water to stop the cooking process.

Score: In the case of tomatoes, to make a shallow ‘X’ at the bottom for the skin to peel away from or to otherwise make a shallow cut into the exterior of an ingredient in some form.

Sachet: Bunch of spices and herbs in a teabag or cheesecloth that you figure some magical way of closing (sewing anyone?)

Chevre: Silly French word for goat cheese.

Herbs de whatever: This is always a good one to Gooble. Whichever one it is (5 spice powder, chili powder, herbs de provence, etc) it’s usually pants-easy to make yourself and you might even have most, if not all of the components in your spice rack already.

Chinois, china cap: Fine mesh strainer and something to mash stuff through the mesh. Easily faked in the home kitchen with a decently tough wire strainer and a wooden spoon. If it’s about well strained, clear broth, a wide mesh coffee filter will serve the purpose in a pinch. After all, all they do is throw a cheesecloth into the chinois.

Brunoise: A tiny cube-ish dice. It’s the old trick with an onion or other veg where you make several horizontal cuts, then several vertical, then slice across the grid. Tiny 1/8th inch squares of whatever. At some point I think I’ll actually make a video of how to do it, or at least link a better example of how (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpqEu-YDWVQ)


And so there we go! A small handful of words that I had to bug the shit out of people to learn what the hell they really meant and how to achieve the actual reality that they implied. They’re all bloody sonovabitches, that’s for sure. And if there are any more bizarre food words that are puzzling you, send them to me! I promise to learn to the best of my interweb abilities what they actually mean and compile them into a further list of culinary vocab that I’ll wind up drunkenly posting at 3am. Promise!


-Pook

Eating Out Sadness

I heard recently that my very first Chef passed away last week. Part of me was shocked at how much anguish I truly felt. One can get close with co-workers in just about any job. I have lost co-workers and acquaintances before. But this is very different. Even though it has been close to 4 years since we last saw each other, he’s always remained in my thoughts and I would check up on him via mutual friends still in the kitchen trenches.

There’s something different with the relationships that one develops in a kitchen. For good or for ill, there’s always much more passion in the feelings you have for your fellow kitchenite. And just as some could completely get my goat, shave it and put mascara on it. Or then you've got Frankie reaching out and trying to teach me how to not be a complete screw up and ruin everyone’s day. A kitchen is a hard place to learn without guidance. To put it plainly, people are dicks until you have earned their respect in some form. That pretty much means being a complete screw up for a month unless someone takes pity on you and explains how fryers work and the methods you need to practice to not burn food. Seems simple. But when you’re in an environment that can be more cliquish than jr. high, where EVERYONE is on their period, ALL THE TIME. Where you can find yourself in the most absurd pissing matches, over the most ridiculous shit. Frankie was my life preserver. “Send the servers to me, they shouldn’t even be talking to you.”, “Don’t even worry about that manager, they’re just like that on Tuesdays.”, “See? That’s how you don’t burn shit!”.

Take that and add a sprinkle of fuckitall humor and you’ve got the guy that you wanted to work with, no matter what shift. When you were in his kitchen, he had your back. And you had his. His kindness and his leadership style made it very easy to want to give him your loyalty. He really understood the meaning of the word. And honor. In a corporate kitchen, some astoundingly stupid things come down the pipe. From unreasonable prep requirements on the line to outright stupid uniform decisions, he’d be in the office giving them what-for. It’s hard to stop the moronic will of corporate, but at least we knew we had an advocate fighting on the side of common sense.

Kitchen families are weird dysfunctional messes. Much like regular families. And we all shared each other’s triumphs and tragedies. I remember the mutual happiness we all felt for Frank when we found out he was going to be a father. And how awful we all felt when he fell ill and found out it might be cancer. I was overjoyed for him when he got well and said he was planning to finally leave the trenches to finish his degree and get a job that involved things like sitting and air conditioning. It was around there that we lost contact as his life decision had inspired me to leave the drudgery of the kitchen-that-doth-not-teach-one-to-cook and continue on my own path to learn how make good stuff to eat.

Though paths diverged, I would still hear from pals about how things were going. Asking after him and his family, wondering if his dad was still the head Chef for the restaurant, if his sister had finally grown sick of the yearly Mother’s Day and all-you-can-eat holocausts in the dining room. But this week, the check-in held no joy. I found out that he had again fallen ill and rapidly deteriorated in the hospital. At that point, it really hit home how much of an impression he made on my life. And how disappointed I was that we’d never have the chance to get together and laugh about old times in the lobster mines.

I know how shallow that sounds in the face of what his family and close friends must be feeling. To me he was a great guy and a great teacher. But to these folks he was a husband, a father, a son, a brother and a close confidant. My heart goes out to all of you for your loss. I really can’t think of warm words of comfort that wouldn’t ring hollow in this moment of mourning.

Frank Peres, you were an awesome man. A big man with a heart bigger than the sky. I shall miss you keenly. And I will think fondly of you any time I’m in a kitchen, sweating, worried and in the weeds. I’ll remember your words of wisdom. "Dude, chill out. It's just food, bro." I'll miss you man.


-Pook