Brian Elliott

Wildwood restaurant in Portland is a great exposition of local, seasonal fare. When I asked the waiter about where the meat came from, he gave me a surprisingly detailed answer. “Our beef is from Strawberry Moutain in Oregon, is grass fed, and is finished for a week on grain.” Wow. That’s what you call a knowledgeable waiter. He also said that the restaurant is now close to 100% local ingredients on the menu, which was also really impressive.

Appetizer:

stuffed squash blossoms - Squash, lightly pan fried. It came with heirloom tomato slices, sweet peppers, and spicy peppers.

Entree:

Strawberry Mountain New York strip - A wonderful 12 oz cut of grass-fed beef served over organic fingerling potatoes. Wow.

Dessert:

Sauternes Poached Harmony Peach - peach sherbet, sauternes sabayon and almond wafers. Definitely a tasty treat highlighting the peach flavor in both the peach slices and the sherbet without being overwhelmingly sweet. Sabayon, as it turns out, is a custard of sorts made from egg yolks, sugar, and Marsala wine. Yum.

Dessert Wine:

1985 vintage port.

I’m digging The Albina Press, a coffeehouse here in Portland, OR.  I came here specifically to try shots pulled by Billy Wilson, this year’s USBC runner up, but quickly came to love the general feel of the place.

The cafe is in the Albina neighborhood, which feels like an ex-industrial neighborhood turning over into a hip, bohemian place to “just chill.”  The people here are relaxed, frequently tattooed, and roll through the shop looking for individually tailored espresso fixes.

My first impression entering the place was one of space.  It’s very open and spacious inside, with plenty of space around the bar.  The decor is a balance of the rugged and a more modern chic, just like the neighborhood outside.  I love the cool juxtaposition of the distressed hardwood floors and newer cafe furniture.

The bar occupies the center space like a monument to the bean.  Barista awards are draped around it and  a focused barista is stationed the Marzocco behind it.  The man with the tattoos on both arms is apparently the dude himself.  He mans the equipment with the concentration of an artist oblivious to the surrounding world.  It’s cool to see that level of detailed focused on providing me with the perfect cup.

My shot came up and he yelled out, “ristretto!”  That shot was quite short, chocolate-flavored, and very airy.  It was good enough to order a second, but Billy waved my money away when I admitted that the first was a bit shorter than I was accustomed to.  I would have been happy to pay for both, but I just love that level of attention to detail and dedication to perfection!

In my previous post I made the case for opting out of the industrial food chain in favor of going local. I’d like to call out the exception case to that rule where a particular good can’t be obtained locally due to geography. For example, I’m not likely to obtain any locally grown coffee in Illinois, so I consider it fair for a society to trade for that product. The western world has been trading with the east for spices for close to two thousand years and the practice seems to promote much more healthy inter-cultural reactions than some we can observe between modern governments today!

With that caveat out of the way, I’d like to list the suppliers in my new, alternative food chain:

Green Earth Institute - An organic CSA in Naperville, IL. Steve, the head farmer, was kind enough to let me join the program mid season and I’ve been picking up amazing, high quality vegetables there every Tuesday since! Starting next week, he’s partnering up with a pastured chicken farmer from Springfield, which will provide a convenient way to pick up some real meat.

Broad Branch Farm - An organic farm with excellent salad greens and tomatoes. They come to the Naperville Farmer’s Market on Saturdays. Their salad greens and sun gold cherry tomatoes have spoiled us greatly.

Wallace Farms - Our new supplier for pastured meats. We bought a 16 lb box of ground beef from Nick at their buying club stop in Aurora. The beef tastes wonderful and I plan to try more of their other offerings in the future.

Nichols Farm - A great IL farm that grows a lot of heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. Their Cox Orange Pippen apples are now my favorites. Unfortunately, the Nichols boys do NOT come to the Naperville Farmer’s Market and I must haul their stuff back from work in Chicago. Nichols, if you hear this, you guys have to come to Naperville!

Bauer Custom Meats - I ordered 5 chickens from these guys, which are supposed to be ready in the November timeframe. We’ll see how ordering chickens directly from the farm goes.

I still need to find a supplier for a pastured, heritage turkey before Thanksgiving. Anyone out there care to make a recommendation?

If you take all the products in the supermarket and sum their collective weight, 25% of that weight is derived from corn. At least, that’s the statistic reported by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Not hard to believe when you look at the ingredients list of all the processed foods.

• Your sodas are corn.
• Your cereals are corn.
• Your pancake syrup is corn.
• Your oatmeal is corn.
• Your yogurt is corn.
• Your beef is corn.

…and so on, ad nauseum.

Everyone knows the saying, “You are what you eat.” So by this logic, people these days are largely derived from corn. But is that so bad? I mean, isn’t corn healthy? We have in our mind endless cornfields in the Midwest growing on rich, black soils, but that’s not the modern situation.

The lifecycle of corn these days begins in an oil field. Petroleum is refined to create synthetic fertilizers that provide just enough nutrient content (NPK) to make damaged topsoils viable for growth. Farmers can skip crop rotation knowing that synthetic fertilizers will make the land produce corn for yet another year. The cost of this process is damage to the soil itself, toxic fertilizers draining into the waterways, and low nutrient content in the food itself.

Of course, describing this type of genetically modified corn food is a bit of a misnomer. Most of the “grain” corn grown in mass quantities is actually unfit for human consumption without additional processing. It is used in:

• CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) - also known as feedlots!
• Processed foods - Also known as everything in the supermarket.
• Ethanol - Oil begets oil! David Pimentel, a professor at my fine alma mater, published this paper arguing that production of ethanol nets a -29% energy balance.

This is the world our government and industrial farming practices have created with cheap corn. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

Suppose you avoid all the processed foods in the supermarket and begin to feel good about yourself. Maybe you buy extra produce and imagine that you’re getting a quality product. Labeling produce “conventional” is an interesting euphemism to describe produce grown with synthetic, petroleum derived fertilizers and pesticides in nutrient-starved soil. It might be more appropriate to name it “chemical” produce.

Organic food, by comparison, is portrayed as the saintly opposite of the convential produce. These foods are a big improvement because pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are not used, but are still not ideal. Industrial distribution processes dictate that even organic foods are delivered from places like New Zealand, California, and even Argentina. The nutritional and taste qualities of perishables generally do not benefit from being hauled halfway around the globe.

What’s the answer to all this madness? How do people obtain sane foods that won’t hurt their families, the environment, and farmers? The answer is simply to go local. Reduce the length of your food chain to the point where you know exactly where the food came from. Buy from local farmer’s markets, CSAs, or even grow it in your own garden. Ask the farmers about their growing practices. Enjoy seeing and eating foods that celebrate real biodiversity. The food you can get locally is literally not the same thing you can get through industrial food chains.

Opt out of the industrial system. It sucks for you and your family.

This post is about a month late in the coming, but I had to give it a brief write up to pay appropriate homage to both Intelligentsia Coffee and Hacienda La Esmerelda.

The Millenium Park Intelligentsia store maintains a short list of coffees you can order for brewing on the Clover. I love the Clover as an alternative to espresso shots because it emphasizes the more subtle flavors of the beans that are usually lost in a drip or french press brew without sacrificing the body. Anyway, Intelly typically has a small menu listing 5 to 6 coffees you can order on the Clover at a given time that cost $2-3 for a 12 oz. cup.
I walked in one day and coffee listed on the Clover menu with a price tag in excess of $10. The baristas confirmed that it was indeed the Esmerelda Special from La Hacienda Esmerelda that won at the 2006 Best of Panama auction. It’s not every day you can drop $10 on 12 oz of liquid and not be purchasing wine, but on the other hand, a $10 wine is nothing to write home about. Coffee prices, on the other hand, haven’t ballooned the way wine prices have. Call me crazy, but being able to taste what is literally the best coffee Panama has to offer for such a low price is a deal.

So I ordered up my unusually high priced coffee, which was served with a great degree of care and awe. (It’s likely there weren’t too many consumers there buying this stuff.) The taste was really excellent, as was the mouthfeel. Any description of the taste profile that I could give would fall short, but the overall sensation imparted was one of perfect balance. Sipping that stuff suffused my spirit with a sense of warmth and joy.

I like to think that I have a decent palate, but drinking Panama’s finest was an experience that had me out of my depth. I could tell that the coffee was exemplary, but my tasting skills were probably not equipped to identify the winner from any of the close runners up. That type of fine differentiation is best left to more qualified judges. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed the cup and even dragged my buddies in to try it themselves, but it also made me appreciate the taste buds of the experts.