On The Outside, Looking In

Food & Wine Magazine is visiting our winery today for a food and wine photo shoot. While I’m tucked away in my office, selling Chardonnay to Florida and New York, they’re down in the tasting room kitchen cooking up a storm. Every fibre in my being wants to be down there with them. I found an excuse to penetrate: heat up my coffee in the microwave, never mind the fact that I have a microwave in my own office. I was so nervous, I set the cook time for 2 minutes and the coffee boiled over, giving me an opportunity to spend another minute or two in the presence of food professionals while I mopped up the mess. A girl about my age was mincing parsley. I want to mince parsley for Food & Wine. Instead I have to reconcile winery inventories. Oh, and sell wine.

I asked a zillion questions, and they probably think I’m some hyperactive food nerd hopped up on too much caffeine. And I guess that’s a fairly accurate conclusion.

But they said they’d let me eat their food.

My officemate pulled me away, “C’mon Jenna, time to sell some wine.”

Pooey. 

 

“Tidbits” and This Week’s Box

In this week's box:

~The Most Ginormous Head of Romaine Lettuce I Have Ever SEEN (with not even a nibble from the friendly little bugs… Not even a NIBBLE! How'd they do that?)

~Zucchini- The squash is coming, the squash is coming!

~Vidalia Onions- Yum, so sweet!

~Spinach

~Carrots- I finally found a use for all those carrots I get every week. I guess I'm just not a carrot eater, as my carrots just sit in the drawer until they turn to rubber. But not any more. I've been shredding them up and using them in my bean burgers!

~Bright Lights Chard- This makes me nervous. You can use chard in basically any cuisine, from Italian to Cajun to Japanese. Cook it up in a stir fry, wilt it with garlic and red pepper as a side dish, make it a star in your frittata. But, in my fridge, among that always-growing community of vegetables, chard has become the proverbial middle child. It's so well-mannered and quiet that it just gets forgotten. But I'm determined this time to treat my vegetables equally, so it's time that chard receives the attention it deserves.

~ Parsley

~Cilantro

And from my biweekly newsletter, Organic Bytes:
Organic Marketing Facts:

~23% of U.S. consumers now buy organics at least weekly.
~"Organic" has replaced the word "natural" as the mainstream food buzzword.

~Asian Americans and Latino/Hispanic Americans are more likely to purchase organics than Caucasians.

~African Americans are more likely to be what the Hartman Group calls "Core Organic Consumers," those most involved in the organics world.

Source: Conagra consumer survey released last week

Fuel Facts:

~Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable and seed oils like hemp. In fact, when the diesel engine was first introduced at the World's Fair in 1900, it ran on peanut oil.
~Two decades later, Henry Ford was designing his Model Ts to run on ethanol made from hemp. He envisioned the entire mass-produced Model T automobile line would run on ethanol derived from crops grown in the U.S.
~Even in the 1920s, the oil industry had massive lobbying power in Washington. Lobbyists convinced policymakers to create laws favoring petroleum based fuels while disgarding the ethanol option.
~Nearly a century later, amidst oil wars in the Middle East, Global Warming, and a nearly depleted oil supply, the U.S. government is finally shifting attention to fuels that are more along the lines of Diesel and Ford's original ideas.
~In an interview with the New York Times in 1925, Henry Ford said: "The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumac out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years."

Learn more: http://www.organicconsumers.org/2006/article_666.cfm

 

Chew On This….

Six Rules for Eating Wisely, by Michael Pollan from this month's issue of Time Magazine. Brilliant, but I knew it would be the minute I saw the author's name…

 Also, kudos to Barbara from one of my favorite foodie reads, Tigers and Strawberries, for her quotes in another article in the issue focusing on the Locavore movement! 

I can't wait to go pick this up off the shelves this afternoon and show my husband, who thinks I'm crazy, by the way. "See?" I'll shout, "Other people are crazy, too!"