More Questions of Authenticity and Fusion
Members of the Daring Kitchen take on Robb Walsh’s recipe for stacked green chile enchiladas. Australian suggestions for simulating tomatillos include gooseberries with sugar and green tomatoes mixed with tamarind paste, lime juice, and prune juice. Robb Walsh’s report on the results of the challenge links to recipes from London, the Netherlands, and Canada.
Taste of Beirut reminisces about a childhood favorite, chocolate salami: a French confection made from American and Middle Eastern ingredients and exported back to the Middle East. In which of those locations is it most authentic?
The National Museum of American History’s cafe celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May) by adding Asian flavors to the menu at each of its stations. You’ll find pizza with Asian plum sauce and black rice used in a recipe that actually called for purple rice, but the title of their blog post about it proudly proclaims the exclusion of one of the oldest Asian-American fusion dishes (one with a history similar to chili gravy’s): No Chop Suey Here.
Locavores Tackle Meaty Questions
Culling the pest population in a deer-hunting class (actually, a deer skinning and processing class) in Charlottesville. Thanks to Jon of Audrey and Jon for the tip.
Mission hipsters consume another kind of pest at a cricket- and mealworm-tasting.
More Things Hipsters Do
Sell coffee from a bicycle-mounted stall.
Sell seed packets (seed bombs) from old gumball vending machines.
Follow-up: More on Arizona, Tavern on the Green, BP
Arizona’s racial profiling law raises worries about this fall’s lettuce harvest in Yuma.
New York City has revoked Dean Poll’s contract to re-open Tavern on the Green after he failed to reach an agreement with the restaurant’s workers’ union. The city is looking for a new new operator.
It’s about time: the BP oil slick has made Cake Wrecks.
Tex-Mix 
Hah! I didn’t know anyone actually read our blog. Love the “they cook” explanation :)
We came into possession of a few pounds of fresh sour cherries (Hey, so, we went a bit overboard at the U-pick, OK?). I’ve been googling about for ideas, and came across the concept (which I’ve latched on to) of creating homemade, HFC and Red-5 -free maraschino cherries. Authentic ones. No, not the “authentic” ones like from the stores, or as described in ye olde southern housewife’s bible of preserving, the Ball Blue Book. That authenticity is defined by a post-prohibition editing of history as “cherries which have been dyed red, impregnated with sugar and packed in a sugar sirup [sic] flavored with oil of bitter almonds or a similar flavor” (http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyGuidanceManual/ucm074535.htm). Compare that to the description of the 1912 USDA guidelines for the same: “Food Inspection Decision 141, issued in 1912 under the Food and Drugs Act of 1906, stated that “maraschino cherries” should be applied only to marasca cherries preserved in maraschino. This decision further described maraschino as a liqueur or cordial prepared by process of fermentation and distillation from the marasca cherry, a small variety of the European wild cherry indigenous to the Dalmatian Mountains.”
That’s downright D.O.C. And further; “Products prepared from cherries of the Royal Anne type, artificially colored and flavored and put up in flavored sugar sirup might be labeled “Imitation Maraschino Cherries” or, if there was no reference to “Maraschino,” might be labeled to show that they are preserved cherries, artificially colored and flavored.””
The lowly imitation maraschino cherry is now the real deal, and we somehow lost the liqueur qualities at the same time.
The ones we have in the fridge are the “authentic” ones from stores, not dyed, but packed in sugar syrup with bitter almond or some such flavor. Since they don’t have maraschino (that resides in our liquor cabinet), we call them our “fancy cocktail cherries.”
Are yours ready to eat? How did they turn out?
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