The Perfect Meal

                I want to prepare myself for the perfect meal, but I don’t know what that is to me yet. Pollan spoke of his as knowing the full karmic consequence of everything that was available at the table. To be involved in the hunting, gathering, cooking, and consumption of the meal is no easy feat, and definitely brings one closer to the meaning of you are what you eat. However I have no yew branches, flint, or twine available to me, so loosing an arrow at the lone bunny rabbit that lives in the unkempt grove behind my house isn’t an option.

                Realistically though, I felt like the whole point of being directly involved in one’s food is the idea that they witnessed every step. When we as a class brought up a few weeks ago that there is a disconnect between the general public and the food they consume, I agreed. People have no idea what they are eating most of the time, having been catered to by colorful labels and engineered flavors. But it goes beyond just knowing where the food has come from, and into the whos, whats,  and wheres that were all involved in the process. The energy that is being placed into every item of food on our plates is astounding: the planning, the preparation, the hunting, the gathering, the cooking. Once you have finally gotten to the eating portion of the food one should be downright exhausted—except we are no longer involved in all of these steps.

                Now it would be out of my means to recreate Pollan’s situation, both financially and physically, although more the former. While I am sure I could forage the forests of Kalamazoo for some nuts and berries to grind into a lovely paste, that doesn’t seem up my alley.

                So I return to the drawing board. While the access to the food didn’t resound with me too powerfully, Pollan’s choice of guests hit home. All those that had taught him, been his Virgils, were at the table. And while the conversation came right back to the topic of the book, the food, each person had more or less been a part of the meal in front of them. They were all involved. It wasn’t as if Pollan had plopped down a frozen pizza in front of them and they had been in the car with him when he had picked up the damn thing from the supermarket. No, each had taught himself something about what he was eating there, what he had cooked, and why he had put himself through the whole process.

                This kind of meal makes someone hungry. It is smart food. The idea that you are learning as you eat about those around you, yourself, and the dish you are cooking, is a fantastic one. And I think that the integral piece is the communication via the food to those around you who took direct place in its creation or presence. 

*I also apologize for the lateness of the response. In my attempts to ponder the perfect meal, something else thought I would make an ideal dish. See you all in the morrow.

Perfectly Ponderous
 

-Espo Clark

A Tapas Tasting; Downtown Kalamzoo's Fandango Bistro (Redux)

Tucked into a little corner on Burdick Street within the Kalamazoo Mall, Fandango Tapas Bistro provides a mildly exotic night-spot for various twenty-something year olds to go out and sample Spanish cuisine.

First and foremost, Fandango is a night-hopping sort of place. There is no lunch crowd, as they are open for 5 hours, from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday. There is a big, semi-circle bar, tiled in the style of a Spanish ranch, which takes up most of the space. Little fern plants stand guard next to the liquor rack and a lonely LCD television keeps the single avid sports watcher’s attention.  Orange-red, swipe-painted walls are decorated with various, generic, Spanish covered paintings there to evoke a sense of exotic night life. Low lights hang and there are tall-tables all around. The place has energy, decent cocktails, and a quick and helpful serving staff that guides you on your little culinary adventure into Hispania.

Tapas are a finicky food—you get a little for a lot. By no means is Fandango cheap. Prices range from $6 to $12 for tapas dishes, and servers will recommend that patrons order 2 to 3 dishes per person throughout the night. While it isn’t necessary to follow their advice, eaters are going to want to take a smattering of this and that from the menu—this is the devilish thing about these small dishes— eyes and stomach not leaving them with much of a choice. 4 different dishes and a dessert to split can easily end up running to about $40 without tip.

But that is the price one pays for intimacy. As previously mentioned, the whole place is packed into a corner of the Kalamazoo Mall. It is a black-Lego block of an awning that has nibble-sized-section of street right down the way from Rustica. According to the owners, the place seats 87 individuals at maximum capacity, but don’t imagine ‘comfortably’ being thrown in there afterwards. The place is built more like a coffee joint in downtown Chicago, with the bar taking up about half of the floor space and the kitchen smashed in further behind it. Whether you like it or not, you are going to become familiar with that 25-year old law student sitting behind you, her 3-minute jogging routine, and her various previous flings she’s had over the past month. The 28-year old bachelor across from her is about as fascinating.

That closeness follows through past the social bubble popping, however, and communicates through the food. The idea of tapas is grabbing little bites of everything. Remember when you went to the buffet as a kid: grabbed a buffalo wing here, a taquito there, and then plopped that pizza puff that looked way too tempting sitting in all that grease right in the middle of the plate on top of all the other food you got? Imagine that, except with goat cheese, chicken, seafood, and other nibbles of Spanish cuisine, served in individual skillets or bowls just a little bit larger than a man’s hand. One should go here in an attempt at satisfying their palate rather than their stomach, so don’t expect to loosen any belt notches.

Which is perfect, really; bloating would ruin a meal at Fandango. Each dish, such as the patatas bravas for example; sautéed potatoes, garlic and onions, topped with a perky pepper sauce that sparks on your lips and the tip of your tongue, is designed to be a snippet of flavor and texture. Imagine potato chips dipped in bacon grease then sprinkled with a hot-pepper sauce.

The meal will hinge around the order and collection of tapas—and that was what remains concerning about Fandango. The aforementioned patatas bravas are hearty, and one could nibble on them as the night goes on—but other dishes disappointed. The cheesy roasted eggplant, thinly sliced eggplant served with a delicate cheese crust and a red sauce on the side, is filling at a first, but ends up tasting a bit too much like sit-down pizza, as well as being a bit rubbery. Is it also so salty that it may end up leading eaters to gulp down water like a cowboy in a Spaghetti western just in from the desert.

And while the habanero chicken looks intimidatingly enticing, its Scovilles just fail to sizzle—tasting a bit more like sweetly glazed Asian chicken from your local Chinese-place.

The mango shrimp cocktail, what is basically a bowl of shrimp smothered in your average cocktail sauce, is presented charmingly in a glass goblet with bits of mango thrown in with and a bit of a lime zest for flavor.  It wasn’t over complicated but served as nice talking food, occasionally biting at you with a fruity after taste.

But talking food is the deal at Fandango Bistro. With spill-over from Rustica, and only five hours of kitchen time, everything is placed upon the diner rather than the restaurant. This is a place where one creates their food experience for themselves with the list of over 40 tapas on a Friday night, then either goes over to one of the bars that is open later, or continues on with whatever other late-night plans they have for the evening. One takes a bite, and sucks in the atmosphere and continues speaking with whichever guest they have brought along. That said, don’t go to Fandango alone. This is a place for the quick in and quick out. A few spicy bites here and a few sweet bites there, coupled with spicier and sweeter conversation with the crowd whom you brought in with you. Where a restaurant like Rustica or Manga Manga may invite you to sit down, fill up, and stay awhile; Fandango is the place that tells you to go to the bar, whet your appetite, and get on with the rest of your night.

Pasturized Grass and All Its Delights

Local farms. So Pollan proceeds to scare the lunch right out of me, and then tells me there might be hope? Blasphemy. I want to wallow. I want to whine. I want to whip those bovines out of their pens until they revolt against their masters and graze upon their very flesh so they fatten up and I may feast upon them in turn. I want to….eat that delicious beta-carotene filled eggs that sound like eating a little piece of protein filled sunshine.

And I mean it when I say sunshine. Pollan’s description of the Polyface Farm had me hopeful, hungry, and enlightened. It also almost had me sign up for an internship to go put my hands to work up on a farm in Northern Michigan, but who would want these pasty fingers away from the keyboard? Pollan’s reiteration of food from sunlight truly hit home within his “Pastoral Grass” section within The Omnivore’s Dilemma, along with his description of Joel Salatin’s world view and farming system.

How could one not feel so pure, so hard working, so bleeding bloody American, when working on that kind of farm. Constant observance and dedication is needed in order to make sure the chickens/cows don’t over-peck/over-graze their specific little sections of the 500 acre Salatin farm, but in no way is this diligence unrewarded. A healthy mind, a healthy crop, a healthy herd, and a hearty stomach are all benefits of this lifestyle. Dear god, he may make a neo-foodie of me yet.

                For the first time in my life I really looked at the labels—I also critiqued those I already knew who did. There was a difference between looking at the label—your nutrition facts, dietary labels, calorie counting, so on and so forth—and knowing if a food is good for you. Sure, this may sound a tad bit asinine, but Pollan opened my eyes: I need to know where my food comes from.

                For instance: the café. Oi vey, is there a dozen complaints for every compliment, but that isn’t the point. I wanted to know the story. Did the food come from nearby? Did they grow it “humanely”? Did that even matter? If anything, Joel Salatin taught Pollan that it doesn’t matter how food is killed, but how often the one who is doing the killing is subjected to their role. Yes, I realize the power dynamic here, but we have always been genetically engineered to kill for sustenance, be it the life of a plant or animal.  I think Pollan was on to something when he commented that there has been a shift in income from 20% to 10% devoted to food—sustenance has stopped being a priority and has become privilege.

                All this typing has given me the urge to get my hands dirty—my hands should be half-way delved into compost and neon-green hot peppers. Maybe I should apply to an internship or something.

-Consciously Carniverous

E. Clark

The Horror

First, a poem:

Totally

Eating

Ruined

Ruminants

Is

Fretful,

You’re

Intentionally

Nuking

Gastronomy

                When I first picked up a copy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, I was half-expecting the pages to be slathered in the blood of bovines and Bolsheviks alike. It had been hyped up by my parents and teachers as one of the most disgusting books ever written. “I wasn’t able to eat hot dogs for years,” my mother once told me after her perusal of the Rudkus’s socialistic trials in the stockyards of an early 1900’s Chicago. Like any avid reader, my skin crawled in anxious anticipation; the new book smell wafted into my nostrils promised notable memorable moments; possible mental scarring. So exciting!

But when I finally got around to reading it, I found my appetite barely bloodied. My stomach didn’t curdle, my eyes didn’t cringe, in fact I felt vaguely sleepy. While the original public that Sinclair had written for had been scared shitless over their food regulations, and my parents—with hot-dogs and hamburgers sweeping the nation during their childhoods—spoke of its horrors and gastronomically gory descriptions as if they were the stuff of Lovecraftian horrors. Jeez, can’t a guy get a little excitement?

I found my Cthulu with The Omnivore’s Dilemna, however. Where Sinclair failed to scare me or rile me into political or gastronomic activism, I bolted straight out of my room when I read Michael Pollan’s first section on “Industrial Corn,” except there was nowhere to run. Corn is everywhere: in my clothes, hair, food, cars, and textbooks. Holy bejeesus. Now, this may sound unreasonable to those unfamiliar with this book, so let me explain. Corn, as Pollan is so eager to show, has become this genetically altered mutant plant that has been skewed as  such to suit our industrial needs, both within the gastronomical realm and within the commercial realm. But just like dipping your chicken nuggets (also made of Zea Mays, a.k.a. corn, coincidentally) in a bucket of nuclear waste, this leads to atrocious and unforgivable consequences to our health both as individuals and as citizens of the earth. In order to fulfill the quota for our insatiable desire programmed to convenience and capital, we need to grow more. And more. And More. Fuck the consequences.  I wish I could list all the things awful for you about super corn, but I’ll just link to one or two articles for a quick example:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/255609/king-corn (not so quick)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/21/147190101/how-using-antibiotics-in-animal-feed-creates-superbugs (re-post lolz)

  This about summed up my experiences with “Industrial Corn,” the first section in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemna. I don’t think even Lovecraft could have even conceived an all-present, super-horror as great, or as influential as industrial corn.

More Terryifying Things

Oddly in stride with our reading: NPR SUPERBUGS

A Tapas Tasting; Downtown Kalamzoo's Fandango Bistro

Tucked into a little corner on Burdick Street within the Kalamazoo Mall, Fandango Tapas Bistro provides a mildly exotic night-spot for various twenty-something year olds to go out and sample Spanish cuisine.

First and foremost, Fandango is a night-hopping sort of place. There is no lunch crowd, as they are open for 5 hours, from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday. There is a big, semi-circle bar, tiled in the style of a Spanish ranch, which takes up most of the space. Little fern plants stand guard next to the liquor rack and a lonely LCD television keeps the single avid sports watcher’s attention.  Orange-red, swipe-painted walls are decorated with various, generic, Spanish covered paintings there to evoke a sense of exotic night life. Low lights hang and there are tall-tables all around. The place has energy, decent cocktails, and a quick and helpful serving staff that guides you on your little culinary adventure into Hispania.

Tapas are a finicky food—you get a little for a lot. By no means is Fandango cheap. Prices range from $6 to $12 for tapas dishes, and my waitress recommended that we order 2 to 3 dishes per person throughout the night. While it isn’t necessary to follow their advice, you are going to want to take a smattering of this and that from the menu—this is the devilish thing about these small dishes—your eyes and stomach won’t leave you with much of a choice. When I went, I ordered 4 different dishes and a dessert to split, which ended up running to about $40 without tip.

But that is the price you pay for intimacy. As I previously mentioned, the whole place is packed into the Kalamazoo Mall, a black-Lego block of an awning that takes up the kitty corner across from the Kalamazoo Gazette—and that is it. According to the owners, the place seats 87 individuals at maximum capacity, but I can’t imagine ‘comfortably’ being thrown in there afterwards. The place is built more like a coffee joint in downtown Chicago, with the bar taking up about half of the floor space and the kitchen smashed in further behind it. Whether you like it or not, you are going to become familiar with that 25-year old law student sitting behind you, her 3-minute jogging routine, her various previous flings she’s had over the past month, and the 28-year old bachelor who is agreeing with her about as furiously as he is trying to get in her pants.

That closeness follows through past the social bubble popping, however, and communicates through the food. For those of you not familiar with the idea of tapas, the whole idea is grabbing little bites of everything. You know when you went to the buffet as a kid: grabbed a buffalo wing here, a taquito there, and then plopped that pizza puff that looked way too tempting sitting in all that grease right in the middle of the plate on top of all the other food you got? Imagine that, except with goat cheese, chicken, seafood, and other nibbles of Spanish cuisine, served in individual skillets or bowls just a little bit larger than a man’s hand. One should go here in an attempt at satisfying their palate rather than their stomach, so don’t expect to loosen any belt notches.

Which is perfect, really; bloating would ruin a meal at Fandango. Each dish, such as the patatas bravas for example; sautéed potatoes, garlic and onions, topped with a perky pepper sauce that sizzles on your lips and the tip of your tongue, is designed to be a snippet of flavor and texture. The animal fat the dish is cooked in will stick with you for the rest of the night, and the crispness of the thin slices potatoes can’t help but bring baconized potato chips to mind.  You think “wow, that was unique” and go on and order something else off the 40-plus menu of snacklets and appetizers.

The meal will truly hinge around that first tapa, though—and that was what concerned me. The aforementioned patatas bravas will definitely be a conversation (and meal) starter, but when it came to some of the other dishes I grew a bit disenchanted. The cheesy roasted eggplant, thinly sliced eggplant served with a delicate cheese crust and a red sauce on the side, was hearty at a first, but ended up tasting a bit too much like sit-down pizza, as well as being a bit rubbery. I also feel it is important to mention that is was so salty that my chapped lips began to throb while eating it, leaving me to gulp down water like a cowboy in a Spaghetti western just in from the desert. And what I had hoped to be a enlivening end to evening ended up being a bit of letdown, as the habanero chicken that had been glaring at me from the menu all night and sounded so sadistically promising with its sweet glaze and Scoville searing sauce ended up tasting more like Asian chicken with some sweet sauce on top.

The mango shrimp cocktail, what is basically a bowl of shrimp smothered in your average cocktail sauce presented charmingly in a glass goblet with bits of mango thrown in with and a bit of a lime zest for flavor, however, grew on me.  It wasn’t over complicated, nor presented many ‘unique’ or ‘exotic’ flavors, but served as nice talking food, occasionally biting at you with a fruity after taste combined with a touch of the sea.

But these are only four dishes, not even a tenth of the tapas menu, and that is not including the variety of flatbreads, paella, and salad dishes that are served as well—although ordering these would be akin to ordering a hamburger at a high-end Italian restaurant after pouring ketchup all over your breadsticks. One should go in with a group of friends and take a little nibble, sometimes it only takes one bite to get hooked.

Frankly quite full,

-E. Clark