Early Bird Granola

Just happened to be discussing with my son, Julien, the number of good-for-you foods that were invented in the 19th century. (OK, I know it sounds phony that we were doing that, but honest, we were.)

Sylvester Graham—a diet reformer who advocated a vegetarian diet and whole foods—invented Graham bread in 1829. It was made with unsifted, coarsely ground, whole wheat flour, and no additives. (And you're probably familiar with his other invention, Graham crackers.)

Dr. Caleb Jackson, who ran a sanitarium in upstate New York, invented a cereal called Granula in 1863. It was made with Graham flour (see Sylvester Graham, above) and resembled giant Grape-Nuts.

Then there was John Harvey Kellogg, a doctor who ran a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, who advocated a vegetarian diet (and enemas). In 1894 he patented, with his brother, a cereal called Granose, later to become Corn Flakes.

Flash forward through the 1960s, where a cereal called Granola became the calling card of the hippies, to today where granola (no longer a tradename) has become an art form.

Early Bird Foods, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, is a good example of how good granola artistry can be. We'll start with the packaging. It makes you want to buy the granola just so you can have the cleverly designed bags the cereal comes in. It's a resealable plastic bag that looks like rice paper and the label is a wonderful interpretation of an old fruit crate label with a bird flying above a city skyline (I'm guessing it's meant to represent Brooklyn).

Moving on to the contents: There are six recipes, Farmhand's Choice, Jubilee, Aloha, Choc-a-Doodle-Doo, Gets the Worm, and Kiss My Oats. The base recipe includes organic rolled oats, pumpkin seeds, toasted organic coconut, Vermont maple syrup, extra-virgin olive oil, and salt. Where the recipes differ is in the kind of fruit and/or nuts that go into them, including pecans, mango, dried apples, chocolate, macadamia nuts, cherries and pistachios. The balance of sweet to salty is seductive. These are really wonderful granolas (and I've eaten my share of granolas over the years).

The granolas are sold in 38 states or you can order it directly from Early Bird.

This brings me to a small sticking point, which is the price. The granolas are made by hand in small batches, which is why they are so good and why they are pricey. They cost $10 for a 12-ounce bag, but you won't be disappointed, and you'll be a patron of the granola arts if you buy it.

Exotic food kits

A couple of months ago, I bought myself a wonderfully exotic cookbook that covered about 8 different Asian cuisines, including Burmese, Thai, and Indonesian. I was really excited to try one of the Thai recipes (a coconut custard with fragrant sugar syrup) and spent a good deal of time and energy traipsing around New York City to collect the ingredients. When I finally found everything (including pandanus leaf*), I had visited 4 stores and spent a huge amount of money. And the worst of it is that I had all these leftover ingredients that I really had no idea how to use on my own (i.e., without a recipe).

Anyway, when I saw these recipe kits called Destination Dinners, I was very impressed. In each kit, you get all the ingredients you need (minus any perishables) to make an exotic dinner. But you get only the amount you need and no more.

Each kit includes the premeasured ingredients, a grocery list for the fresh items you need, plus a little history and culinary trivia for the cuisine you've chosen. For example, one of the kits is for a Thai green curry with jasmine-scented sponge cakes, and the exotic ingredients included were jasmine rice, rice flour, green curry paste, fish sauce, jasmine water and palm sugar.

The handsomely packaged kits cost $30-35 and serve 4 to 8 people, depending on which recipe you've chosen. In addition to the Thai green curry, the 12 kits currently available include chicken garam masala (Bangladesh), jerk chicken (Jamaica), falafel (Israel), pork and egg rice bowl (Japan), beef bulgogi (Korea), baked spiced lamb (Lebanon), chicken and cashews (Thailand) and jambalaya (Louisiana).

If you really get into it, you might want to look at what they call the Destination Passport, which is basically a kit-of-the-month club. You can buy a 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month passport.

*Just in case you're curious, pandanus leaf is a long thin leaf that looks sort of like a piece of palm frond. It's used in Thai cooking to flavor coconut-based desserts and sugar syrups.

Purple carrot juice

Carrots used to be purple (read more about them here) and in the past bunch of years there has been a mini-trend to grow purple carrots again. The pigments that make the carrots' skin purple (the flesh is still orange) are a group of phytochemicals called anthocyanins. These self-same compounds are what make most berries deep red to purple, and are also (potentially) responsible for these fruits' health benefits. So if you add anthocyanins to the already extraordinarily healthful beta-carotene (the carrot's orange pigment), you have a pretty cool vegetable.

A number of juice brands—including Smart Juice, Bolthouse Farms, and Lakewood—are now using purple carrots to make carrot juice, as well as including purple carrots in other juice blends to boost their antioxidant power. Purple carrot juice has the natural sweetness of regular carrot juice with an undercurrent of berry flavor (from the anthocyanins).

Have you ever heard of a carica fruit?

The carica is a tropical fruit that grows in South America, principally in Chile. It is related to the papaya, which is why it is also called Golden Papaya, Mountain Papaya, or Chilean Papaya. The carica is also grown in Indonesia, though I'm sure they have their own word for it (carica certainly sounds like a romance language word).

As with many tropical fruits grown outside this country, strict import laws keep the fresh fruit from reaching our markets. But you can buy caricas that have been trimmed, seeded, and preserved in a very light sugar syrup. (Though they were available at Amazon for awhile, they seem to have disappeared. I'll keep looking for them. You might also find them in specialty stores that sell Southeast Asian foods.)

So what do caricas taste like? Closing my eyes and concentrating and trying not to get too complicated, I would say they taste like a cross between pineapple and pear. But to me the one distinguishing feature of caricas is their texture: They're chewy!











Here's what a carica shell liberated from its jar looks like. It's 3 to 3.5 inches long and about 1.5 inches wide at the opening (which I propped open with a toothpick because the fruits are flattened when they're packed in the jar). You could fit a generous 1/3 to 1/2 cup of something inside a carica shell. 

Recipe cards for adventurous new cooks

About a year ago I wrote about a company that sells exotic food kits, the idea being that you could try out an exotic cuisine without having to invest in all the wacko ingredients that would then languish in your cabinet. Here's another little company that has taken the same idea and scaled it down to friendlier proportions. World Cuisine Institute (a lofty title for two women friends who started the company) has put together recipe cards for cool dishes like Saudi Arabian Chicken Kabsah, Mexican Mole and Ethiopian Doro Wat, and attached little bags of spices in the quantities you need to do the recipe.

The cards sell for $7 (except for the side dishes, which are $8 because they include the rice or beans) and are available in various retail locations in Colorado or on the World Cuisine Institute website. They have a number of gift sets, so if you know someone who was inspired by Julie and Julia to try to "cook his/her way through" something, you could give him/her the entire set of recipes for $100. (There are also smaller sets of 3 or 4 recipe cards, all about $20.)

UPDATE (November 2010): The World Cuisine Institute appears to have disappeared. It was definitely a home-grown business, and perhaps the women who were running it just couldn't make a go of it.

Pestos with Panache

Pesto is the past participle of the Italian verb pestare, which means to crush or bruise. (On a side note, an occhio pesto is a black eye.) So technically speaking, in the kitchen, a pesto can be any combination of things that are crushed or bruised.

However....

There is a very specific crushed concoction that has simply co-opted the generic meaning of pesto: a sauce from Genoa made with basil, garlic, nuts, Parmesan and olive oil. Food editors and recipe writers love to tinker with this idea—cilantro instead of basil, walnuts instead of pignoli—but they rarely stray too far from the mother ship.

So, it's really great to run into Pestos with Panache, a collection of sauces that have nicely pushed the pesto envelope. The titles of the pestos from Brooklyn-based Lauren Stewart (founder & CEO) are enough to make you want to try them, but luckily the promise of the titles is well delivered in the tasting.

Don't you just want to eat all of these?
Fabulous Fig & Gorgonzola
Decadent Dark Chocolate & Ancho Chile
Pumpkin Chipotle
Prosciutto & Smoked Almond
Succulent Strawberry
Bangin' Blueberry

You can buy them straight from Pestos with Panache in 4, 6, 8, and 12 packs for $52 (4 pack) up to $120 for the 12 pack. The prices include shipping. (And if you happen to be planning a giant feast, Lauren also sells 1-gallon food service containers; contact her for pricing.) To see where the pestos are available offline, check the list of stores.

Crackers gone wild

When you go to a fancy food show, you start out all bright-eyed and hungry, but as you're charging down the 149th aisle filled with cheese and chips and barbecue sauces, you start to get pretty persnickety about what you're willing to stop and taste.

It's hard to say what actually catches your attention when you're feeling that jaded about food. Some of it is eye-catching packaging, some is the interesting people behind the product, and some is just happenstance.

So here's a group of crackers that each in its way made me stop to taste.

1. 34° Crispbread: Their tagline is "a most clever cracker." I simply had to stop and ask what made the cracker clever. The answer is that the Colorado-based company is the clever one, because the crackers were just as inarticulate as any other cracker I've met. But they were super-thin and crisp, so that's a good thing. They come in Natural, Sesame, Cracked Pepper, and Rosemary. Check them out at 34-degrees.com.

2. Food Should Taste Good: I stopped by the booth of the aptly named Food Should Taste Good, because I already knew how good their products are, and I could see they had three new flavors that I had to try. They didn't disappoint. The new flavors are Cinnamon (really good), Potato & Chive, and Lime. Check all their other flavors (including chocolate!) on their website. P.S. You gotta love that the lime chips are shaped like a lime wedge.

3. raincoast crisps: These crackers from Vancouver are densely packed with fruit and nuts. I stopped to taste these because I really liked the name and the packaging, and a couple of aisles earlier I had met the fig-growing cooperative that supplies them with the fruit for their Fig and Olive crisps. Other crisp flavors are Rosemary Raisin Pecan, Cranberry Hazelnut, Salty Date and Almond. Read more about them at raincoastcrisps.com.

Yummy tarts from the freezer

I wouldn't have predicted that the words tart + freezer would equal yummy, but I was more than pleasantly surprised to find out that in the case of the Daphne Baking Company the equation works.

The tarts come in six flavors: lemon, chocolate, macadamia nut, pumpkin, chocolate-raspberry and passion fruit (my personal addiction). They're two to a box for $7 to $8. This seems like a pretty small price to pay to end a meal in great style without having to do all that work. Just take them out of the freezer to come to room temp while you eat dinner.

Daphne's tarts are currently only available in the Northeast, including at many Whole Foods, so check their store locator. However, if you really, really, really wanted to have these tarts, you could order them by the case (12 tarts) for $88 from the Daphne Baking Company website. The cost of the case includes overnight delivery.

Beyond yuzu: intriguing Asian citrus juices

I don't know how many of you have encountered the yuzu, which is an East Asian citrus fruit with a very complex tart flavor (it makes our regulation lemons taste like an amateur citrus). The fruit itself looks like a very small grapefruit and it has a bumpy skin, sort of like an Ugli fruit. It can probably be found fresh in Chinatowns, but most of us have probably only had it in juice form, and probably in a restaurant.

Well, just when I was all smug about having cooked with yuzu, I ran into two more Asian citrus juices at this year's summer Fancy Food Show. I spoke with a guy named James Felling (from Chicago) whose company is importing Asian citrus products from Yakami Orchards in Japan.

In addition to yuzu juice (and yuzu marmalade and zest), WA Imports is also selling bottles of pure kabosu juice and pure sudachi juice. The kabosu, which is related to the yuzu, is harvested green but matures to yellow. The sudachi is a small green citrus that in Japan is used to flavor all manner of foods from soft drinks to ice cream.

Jim set me up with 3 little glasses of citrus juice so I could taste the differences, and the differences were pronounced. I will borrow his tasting descriptions, because they were spot on.

Yuzu: Tastes like lemon juice but with undertones of tangerine or orange.
Kabosu: Tastes like lemon juice but with notes of mint and melon.
Sudachi: Tastes like lime juice but with accents of pepper and cumin.

At the moment WA Imports is negotiating to have a retail presence for all of these products. Currently, however, they are still only available to chefs and restaurants. Keep an eye out, though.

Vegetable-based wraps

Last February I wrote about the work that the ARS—Agricultural Research Service, part of the USDA—was doing on edible films made of pureed fruits and vegetables (see Making food safer, in a cool way). Now it turns out that a small company in Stockton, California, called Origami Foods has taken the ARS technology and turned it into a commercial product.

The company makes two products based on the technology: Chef Wraps and Glaze Sheets. The Chef Wraps were designed to replace seaweed in sushi, although their use does not have to be confined to fish. For example, Origami Foods suggests using their carrot/ginger wrap to make a "sushi" roll with pork tenderloin, sweet potato and cilantro. Or use the strawberry wrap to make a sweet sushi with fresh strawberries.

The Glaze Sheets are edible films that have flavorings in them. The film is used to cover a piece of meat, poultry or fish; it then dissolves onto the surface like a glaze and in the process transfers the flavor to the food. An example is an apple-based film flavored with maple and cinnamon, used to flavor something like ham. Or a smoked mango film, which would be great on salmon.

You can buy the Origami products at some Trader Joe's, Wegman's and Costco outlets. Or you can order them online directly from Origami. There are 12 flavors of Chef Wrap (including carrot, broccoli, tomato-basil, peach and barbecue). They come in packs of 10 sheets (7 x 8 inches) for $5.50 or 20 sheets for $10.50.

Black garlic

Black garlic is amazing looking, but even more amazing tasting. The shiny ebony cloves are sweet and sticky and garlicky, but in an only mildly spicy way. It tastes like what roasted garlic wishes it could be when it grows up.

The garlic turns dense and black during a month-long process that slowly, slowly caramelizes the garlic's natural sugars. There are no colorants or additives of any kind. It's just garlic.


The real question is, how do you use black garlic? I think, because it's an interesting blend of sweet and savory, that it would work in savory dishes where you might have used either raisins or sun-dried tomatoes. I think it could be nice as flecks in a fennel bread. It would be great with broccoli rabe, or in homemade sausage, in guacamole, or tossed with pasta. But on a website called Black Garlic (home of the company started by Scott Kim, the "inventor" of black garlic), you'll find a small collection of recipes, including the following, which is something that I would never have come up with, but absolutely intrigues me:

Baked Bananas with Black Garlic

1 Cadbury's Flake chocolate bar
1 peeled clove black garlic, minced
2 teaspoons runny honey
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 banana, skin on
2 tablespoons brandy or dark rum
Vanilla ice cream for serving

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. Mix together the candy bar, garlic, honey and sugar.
3. Place the banana on a piece of foil. Make a slit along the top of the banana through the skin and half way through the flesh. Stuff the mixture inside the slit. Pour the brandy on top.
4. Seal the foil around the banana and place in a baking dish. Bake for 20 minutes.
5. Remove from the foil and serve hot with vanilla ice cream.

Soy wrappers for sushi

Who makes sushi at home, raise your hand? I saw these colorful soy wraps and thought how cool it would be if I actually made sushi at home, especially since I am a borderline seaweed hater. But then I thought (because I'm in the clutches of a low-carb diet at the moment) that it might also be cool to use these as low-carb sandwich wraps.

The SushiParty soy wrappers are about 7 inches square. Each sheet has 15 calories, .5 gram of fat, and 1 gram of carbohydrate. Just for the sake of comparison, sandwich wraps (of a similar size) can have 170 calories, 5 grams of fat, and 52 grams of carbohydrate.

And [insert trumpet fanfare] they're gluten-free. (When will GF issues subside? Anyone?)

A lot of upside. The downside is that, like many things made with soybeans, it has an extremely neutral flavor. (Can things be extremely neutral? Is it like very unique?) But they look mahvelous. Each package has 5 different sheets: yellow (turmeric), orange (paprika), plain, green (spinach) and sesame. You can find them in sort of random places, including Walmart. They cost about $3. Or, if you're really into the concept, you can buy a 6-pack from Amazon for $24.

The best frozen pizza

I'm not a big fan of frozen pizza. It's always too bready or too cheesy or too soggy. So when I was at the Fancy Food Show earlier this month, someone offered me a piece of pizza that I couldn't squirm out of accepting....thank goodness, because it knocked my socks off.

It's called American Flatbread and it's been around for a bunch of years (since 1987, in fact), so maybe I'm the last person on the block to get a taste of it. American Flatbread began as a local bakery with a wood-fired oven on a farm in Waitsfield, Vermont. There are now several restaurant/bakeries scattered about the state (plus one, and another on its way, in Virginia), and Lareau Farm (which still houses the principal bakery) is a working farm that also operates as an inn.

The pizzas are organic, hand-made, wood-fired and delicious. The 4 varieties are: Cheese & Herb, Revolution (tomato sauce, caramelized onions, mushrooms), Sun-Dried Tomato & Mushroom, Tomato Sauce & Three Cheese, and Ionian Awakening (tomato sauce, Kalamata olives, 4 cheeses, rosemary). The pies come in 12-inch or 9-inch sizes, depending on the variety; prices are in the neighborhood of $7.50 for the small pies and $12 for the large.

P.S. Their tomato sauce is wood-fired, too [swoon].

To find a store that sells American Flatbread pizza, check their store finder.

Boxed water is better

A company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, called Boxed Water Is Better has come up with a product that is part philosophical art project and part solution to the bottled water conundrum. Their idea is that bottled water should not contribute to our environmental woes, but should actively help alleviate them.

They propose to sell water in cartons, because:

• 90% of the container is from a renewable resource (when the trees are responsibly harvested, they are quick to point out).
• The cartons are shipped flat and then filled locally, thus reducing their carbon footprint (it reduces the size and number of truckloads to get the water shipped anywhere).
• Post consumer, the cartons can be recycled in most places (for more information on recycling cartons where you live, check the Carton Council's website).
  

On top of that, the company is donating portions of their profits* to the resources their product uses: 10% to world water relief foundations and 10% to reforestation foundations.

Boxed Water is currently only available in Michigan, but here's hoping the idea spreads. If I see one more plastic water bottle wash up on the beach I'm going to explode (actually no, first I'll pick up the bottle and throw it into the trash, again, and then I'll explode).

*In the name of full disclosure, the company mentions that as a young start-up, they haven't actually made any profits to donate yet. They're also looking for more suggestions on worthy foundations.

Lemon Bird homemade jams

Amy Deaver, the brains behind wonderful handmade jams called Lemon Bird, grew up making jam in her native Midwest, but got inspired to return to her canning roots on a trip to Provence. Her jams are all made from fruits that are locally grown--luckily for her (and for us) she lives in California, where the options for local fruit are huge.

You can check out her website at lemonbirddesign.com, but if you're interested in buying some of her all-natural, lovingly made jam, you can skip straight to her store on Etsy.

The jams currently being offered (because naturally they change with the season and the availability of the fruit) are: Kumquat and Tangerine with Vanilla, Kumquat with Dark Chocolate and Espresso (wow!) and Blood Orange Jam. They cost $7 for a 6-ounce jar (plus shipping).

But if you have a reason to splurge on a gift for someone (maybe Mother's Day, or someone getting married, or graduating from college), I think it would be great to offer a membership to Lemon Bird's Jam of the Month Club. For $145, you (or your giftee) get two jams the first week of every other month (12 jams a year). The membership fee includes the cost of shipping. Check out the etsy shop to get more details on the flavors of jam you could possibly receive with the Jam of the Month.

Oddball flours

If you've ever had a reason to seek out a nontraditional flour--such as garbanzo bean flour (used in both Italian and Indian recipes) or flax meal (because of its health benefits) or other nonwheat flours (for anyone avoiding gluten)--then you have probably run across Bob's Red Mill brand. This Oregon-based company sells more than 400 grain products nationwide, and not just in little health-food stores but in supermarkets, too.

The other day I happened to be looking for coconut flour (this will show up in a later post), which eventually led me to Bob's Red Mill website. This got me poking around to see what other oddball flours were there, and I found black bean flour. I love the flavor of black beans, but what could I do with flour made from them?

Well, the answer (from Bob's database of recipes) is kind of cool: Almost-instant black bean dip.

Here's how it works. In a small saucepan, you whisk together black bean flour with chili powder, salt and cumin. Then you whisk in hot water and cook for about 5 minutes. Stir in some picante sauce and chopped scallions and you're done. The recipe for the bean dip as well as recipes for Black Bean Burritos and Black Bean Taco Pizzas are on the back of the bag of flour.

Brie log

When I was living in France, I discovered that there is an etiquette to serving/eating cheese that is rarely observed in this country. Each cheese, depending on its shape, is served differently. And the one shape that always presents problems is cheese served in wedges, like Brie.

The first thing to know is that it is considered extremely bad form to cut the "nose" (the pointy end) off a wedge of Brie. Instead, you should take a kind of sideways swipe at the wedge to remove a slice, not a chunk. This of course gets harder and harder to do as the wedge gets whittled down.

So Président, the French cheese company, has decided to make a Brie in a log shape (something that no doubt horrifies cheese aficionados). The virtue of this shape, however, is that it gets you around the ticklish issue of how to serve. The cheese slices also fit very nicely on a cracker. This does mean foregoing the runniness of a perfectly ripe Brie (because you wouldn't be able to slice it), but I'm pretty sure your guests won't complain.

Mini pastas

Everything is cuter in miniature: puppies, toddlers' shoes, dollhouses. That's the way I feel about pasta, too.

Barilla has a line of pastas called Piccolini (which loosely translates as itty-bitty) that are miniature versions of regular pasta. There are currently five shapes: farfalle (bow-tie), wheels, fusilli, penne and ziti.

If the cuteness weren't enough of a draw, the pastas also cook more quickly than their grown-up counterparts: only 7 minutes.

In order to appreciate their size, you need to know that in the recipe above the tomatoes are grape tomatoes.

Noble juices

The name of the company that makes these juices is Noble with a capital N, but it turns out the company is also noble, small n. They claim the honor of being the first national, premium juice brand to package their juices in PLA bottles, which are eco-friendly and biodegradable. PLA stands for plastic polylactide, a natural polymer made from corn.

At first I had this image of juice bottles all over the land self-destructing on supermarket shelves. Well as it turns out, the biodegradability of these "E-Bottles" depends on being composted in an industrial composting facility, where they will "return to nature" in just over 3 months.

But enough of this palaver about the container...the juice inside is delicious. It's fresh, 100% pure and deeply flavored. The newest juices are Blood Orange (yum) and Tangerine-Cranberry, but they also have Tangerine-Clementine, Guava-Mango (double yum), Ruby Red Grapefruit and plain Tangerine.

To check on retail availability, go to the Noble Juices website.

Starbucks oatmeal

Starbucks is getting all serious about nutrition. They've hired a nutritionist who has been given free rein to make the company responsible for the nutrition of the food they sell. They have completely eliminated some of the gargantuan calorie monsters they used to sell, and others have been slimmed down. And starting this fall, they will introduce a line of whole-grain baked goods as well as--and this is my favorite--oatmeal.

The oatmeal is served with a choice of toppings, including dried fruits, brown sugar and nuts. But staying true to the good-nutrition mission, the toppings are portioned in sensible amounts: The brown sugar is 50 calories and the fruit and nuts are 100 calories each. The oatmeal will sell for $2.45 with a choice of 2 toppings.