(Via Serious Eats.)Prior to starting Ezra Pound Cake in March 2008, I was head pastry chef at a German bakery in my hometown. Before that, I spent 10 years as a professional writer. Now, I use my master’s in English strictly to come up with badass blog names.
I write Ezra Pound Cake to chronicle my life, share recipes and encourage people to cook real food.
Louisville is awash in bourbon. And beer. It's a drinking person’s town, due in no small part to the state’s bourbon heritage and the city’s nickname-namesake brewery, Falls City. This is where the Old Fashioned was invented. It’s where Al Capone dodged the law during prohibition, ducking out of the Seelbach Hotel through secret passageways. And it’s where barkeeps plied their customers with rolled oysters and bean soup to keep them coming back. Louisville’s private clubs, hotel bars, and neighborhood taverns are rich with drinking history and lore, and there’s always time for another round.Serious Eats/Southern Foodways: Bar Culture in Louisville, Kentucky — An Oral History Project
In January Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian Amy Evans bellied up to many a bar in Falls City, chatting up bartenders, bar owners, and bar patrons, gathering their stories one drink at a time. She met with John C. Johnson, 50-year employee of the Pendennis Club, where the Old Fashioned was born. Greg Haner, fourth-generation owner of Mazzoni’s, talked about his family’s 100-plus-year history of making and serving rolled oysters. Edward Winfield shared stories of the legendary Seelbach Hotel and the much-loved Louisville bartender Max Allen Jr., whom he had the opportunity to learn from before he passed.
Save the Deli is a space dedicated to the preservation of the Jewish delicatessen, a hallowed temple of salted and cured meats. The past half century has seen the deli’s numbers decline greatly, in New York, across the USA, in Canada, and Europe. Those that remain are endangered and in need of our support. Though the challenge is arduous, and the deli’s foes are many, we will persevere.
Working as a caterer throughout [Emory Medical] school, he continued to be involved with food and cooking but noticed a lack of knowledge in the medical field about eating healthy and eating well. Neither patients nor health care providers understood much about a healthful diet. Patients, it seemed, were usually told not what they could eat but, rather, what they could not eat.Indeed. Aside from registered dietitians--and they are, pardon the expression, thin on the ground--very few medical folks seem to have solid medical-nutritional chops. I've bookmarked the site and plan to try some of the recipes.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
Unhappy Meals (Michael Pollan, New York Times, Jan 28 2007)
FreshDirect doesn't sell us everything that we need, but they don't want to, either. They are delighted to sell and deliver relatively high-margin items, and we continue to shop at our local grocery store (or the Greenmarket) for staples and locally grown produce, respectively.[T]he idea behind Webvan is finally starting to look good. Since its demise, smaller players have been slowly and quietly building online groceries into a legitimate business. The most intriguing of the group is a little New York company called FreshDirect that may well be offering us a glimpse of the next wave of Internet commerce.
It has already become something of a cult in New York, thanks to produce, fish and meats that put most supermarkets to shame, usually at lower prices. A handful of new apartment buildings have installed refrigerators in their lobbies, built to FreshDirect specifications, to lure residents who want their groceries delivered during the day. Real estate agents selling home buyers on up-and-coming neighborhoods like Inwood have taken to emphasizing that FreshDirect delivers there. When a friend of mine saw a delivery man walking on her Brooklyn street, she chased him down to confirm that, indeed, the company had begun delivering to her part of Park Slope.
Today, which is FreshDirect’s busiest day of the year, it will deliver many of the 2,000 fully cooked Thanksgiving dinners and 6,000 uncooked turkeys that it has sold in recent weeks. Operating out of a single warehouse in Queens, the company brings in about $240 million a year, up from nothing in 2001. Its executives talk as if they’re planning someday to expand to other cities, where they would compete with services like Peapod run by existing supermarkets. In all, online groceries are still only a $2 billion business, but they are growing quickly.
...FreshDirect stocks less than a complete selection of certain staples, like cereal, giving customers a reason to shop elsewhere for them. When the tennis partner of the company’s chief executive, Dean Furbush, sheepishly confided that he shopped at both FreshDirect and Costco, Mr. Furbush replied that he loved hearing that.Very interesting read about something that may be coming to your town soon, if the demographics and population density are right.
