Grilin'

Guys like to Grill because it isn’t cooking

How many guys do you know (including yourself) who “don’t cook” but are the Grill Master at home, amongst friends or even the neighborhood?

But……

Isn’t the most basic and fundamental element to cooking the process of applying heat to food in order to alter some aspect of the food’s taste, texture or color in order to make it edible, or at least more edible?

So, isn’t grilling or bar-b-queing cooking?

Yes.

So why claim not to cook and then profess a passion for cooking by another name?

In a word, perception.

Even with massive media presence of celebrety chefs such as Bobby Flay and Emeril, the act and concept of cooking remains closely associated with maternal or feminine roles such as nuturing and caring for the family.

Meanwhile, grilling and bar-b-que are associated with images and concepts related to “the hunt”, survival, and the outdoors.

Don’t believe me? Compare the images of Rachel Ray and the Barefoot Contessa vs Bobby Flay and Guy Fierri.

Adding fuel to the fire, is how cooking is portrayed as difficult, time consuming, and something enjoyed only by the “elites” – those with time, money and/or “culture”. So now, not only is cooking perceived as feminine, it is also difficult, time consuming, elite-ist.

In summary:

cooking = woman, nurture, care, work, tedium, NOT FUN.

grilling/bar-b-que = man, hunt, survival, not work, FUN, cool (not literally),

Hmmmm, which one looks (will be perceived) as fun, not feminine, something a man/father will enjoy, and will be accepted and approved by other men?

Now, how does this relate to social media?

Perception – how a thing is perceived governs how how treat it.

If have something you want people to notice and engage with, try to be your audience’s concept of bar-b-que/grilling and not their perception of cooking.

Use social media to talk with and listen to your audience. Listen to their likes, dislikes, rants and raves. Talk with them on a person to person level, telling the story, details, etc of you, your product, company or vision. Most importantly, make sure you are letting them hear how and why you are grilling and not cooking as if they were saying to themselves.

Approximately one third of the world’s people suffer from a lack of micronutrients. Micronutrients are “any substance, such as a vitamin or trace element, essential for healthy growth and development but required only in minute amounts”  More specifically, micronutrients in food include essential things such as: folic acid, iron, vitamin D and iodine. Although they are consumed in minute amounts, the have profound implications on our health and wellbeing.

According to the World Health Organization, “these substances are the “magic wands” that enable the body to produce enzymes, hormones and other substances essential for proper growth and development. As tiny as the amounts are, however, the consequences of their absence are severe. Iodine, vitamin A and iron are most important in global public health terms; their lack represents a major threat to the health and development of populations the world over, particularly children and pregnant women in low-income countries.”

The proposal to address this problem is to enrich food staples and salts with micronutrients. It is true that enriching food staples such as adding iodine to salt and vitamin D to milk has been practiced in the US for a long time and is a primary cause in the elimination of nutrition based diseases such as rickets. Also, the article correctly notes that the cost of fortifying food stables with micronutrients is extremely cost efficient.

But, doesn’t this seem a bit like treating symptoms instead of treating problems?

The problem is not exclusively a lack of access to foods containing micronutrients. In all reality, the problem is a lack of access to an entire diet capable of meeting the current nutritional needs of people.

In a sense, fortifying food staples is the somewhat the nutritional equivalent of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The situation is akin to switching from regular to diet drinks as a way to regulate sugar and calorie consumption. The switch comes with the trade off of increased caffeine consumption as well as increased exposure to artificial sweeteners. At the end of the day, all you are doing is playing a game of nutritional three card monty by trading one bad thing for another.

It is critically important to ask what food staples that will be fortified. If fortified food products in the US serve as an example, they will be highly refined or processed, bearing little-to-no resemblance to their traditional form or place in a person’s regional or ancestral diet.

Considering:

“[When we eat refined foods] … we limit the opportunity to bolster our immune system, keep our blood sugar and emotions balanced, keep our blood sugar and emotions balanced, protect against degenerative diseases, maintain a trim and fit body, and in general, keep our integrated experience of life harmonious.”

“Our desire to overeat can stem from eating foods that are refined and therefore missing ingredients; these deficient foods can foster addiction as we are instinctively driven to over consume them in our endeavor to obtain the missing nutrients that are never there.”

Healing With Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford (2002 edition) pgs 16 -18

And, according to Harriet V. Kuhnlein, Professor of Human Nutrition and Founding Director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) at McGill University in Montreal, Canada:

The development, health and scientific communities do not usually understand the food resources that indigenous people know and use. Scientific identifications and laboratory data for nutrients and other phytochemicals for a food system may be unknown for many species.

A possibly better solution to this issue might be re-examining and then reintroducing traditional dietary and agricultural practices “upgraded” for current daily life instead relying upon artificially fortifying foods derived from highly refined and processed foods frequently from foreign sources and diets.

So, at first impression it seems this spouse deserves a gold star for supporting the partner and understanding the challenges of following an unconventional diet with many possible restrictions.

Then the spouse laments for the days of gluten foods and half jokingly says gluten free foods taste “like straw”. Now, it seems that re-evaluating those gold stars might be a god idea.

Since this is “FOOD for the rest of us” and not “MARRIAGE counseling, guidance, and judgement for the rest of us”, I lets focus on the food.

This spouse is not the only person in the world to consider gluten free foods to be unpleasant.  In fact, I have previously blogged about a NYT article where celiacs’ laments for gluten foods such as pasta and breads were followed with praises to the food industry for coming up with increasingly “better” imitation foods as substitutes.

In fact, while making a birthday cake with two layers of genoise brushed with sherry and iced with mocha butter-cream and chocolate icing using regular all purpose flour, I found myself thankful for not having to counter balance any of the garbanzo bean flavor sometimes found in many gluten free flour mixes. I was also glad to focus on the cake and not if the amount of xyntham gum added was sufficient or too much.

So, while I wasn’t saying it tasted like straw, I was viewing it as something inferior to a gluten based product. Then I realized this was probably due to the fact that I was automatically assessing the possible tastes and textures of something made with out gluten against something made using gluten.

Just as substituting beef or chicken with some sort of soy based product, using vitamin pills instead of eating fruits and vegetables, or eating farm raised vs wild or “free range” fish, fowl, or beef leads to all kinds of dietary issues and doesn’t taste all that good; forcing an over processed, chemically stabilized, and artificial-in-nearly-all-aspects-of-its-existence food item to replace is not exactly a good idea.

Instead of looking for substitute food products or items that can be swapped in and out of your eating habits as if they computer parts or brake pads, maybe it is better to consider it time to undertake a food odyssey, searching for new to you foods that are fun to eat and do not conflict with your dietary choices.

After all, just because a meal or a specific dish or food item is made to be gluten free does not mean the food should not be good.

For example, the other weekend I cooked great meal.

The salad included fresh cherry tomatoes, sweetened red onions, basil, sheep’s milk feta, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

For the main course, I roasted beef sirloin with a rosemary, sage, thyme, parsley, Grana Padano cheese and garlic crust. The beef was accompanied by roasted apples, parsnips, sweet potatoes, and turnips, a pan sauce, and rustic mashed potatoes.

For dessert, I used Giffords’ double chocolate ice cream with warmed “Last of the Season” peaches and a ruby reduction.

Although I added toasted bread croutons with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, garlic, parsley, and basil to the salad, and the salad would have been equally good without them, the meal was essentially gluten free.

Nothing came out of a box, was almost entirely gluten free and it did not taste like straw. In fact, I was later told the meal was “Kick A** Good.”

Pan Roasted Venison, Roasted Finglering Potatoes with Green Sauce of Cilantro, Galic, Lime juice, and seasoning

Growing up in Oregon, I knew people – friends in school or friends of friends – who hunted deer each fall. I knew they also ate the deer successfully hunted but called it venison. Although I was never really one to associate Bambi with a food item, the concept of eating venison was foreign to me and foreign enough to many more that it was not exactly something seen on every menu.

Fortunately, times and tastes have changed.

It seems the unique flavoring and the healthier-than-beef-if-not-raised-like-beef traits of venison have helped bring it to many menus. At the same time, since moving to the East from the West I have had the pleasure of cooking and eating amazing venison many times with each better than the last.

Last Monday, January 12, 2009, I threw together the venison dish pictured and described on the right.  Normally I try to complete most, if not all, of the main preparations or cooking for the week by Sunday or, if time allows, Monday afternoon or evening. On this particular Monday I had cooked the meals for the week and so was faced with trying to cook food for the week and dinner, at the same time and to be completed with the cooking before 10:00 p.m.

So, once I put a chicken in the oven to roast (more on this particular chicken in another blog entry), I focused on the venison.

Broken down, the venison dish has three components: venison, roasted potatoes, and sauce.

Here are the guidelines I followed for each:

Venison- although last to be put on the stove or to put into an oven, the seasoning and cooking of this meat was probably the most important part of the dish.  I seared each side in a cast-ion saute pan and then placed it in an approximately 400 degree oven to finish (about 12 – 14 min total.  The venison steaks were seasoned with salt, pepper, just enough to coat olive oil, and freshly grated or cut lime zest. The lime zest was a great addition and really added a lot to the flavor of the meet.

Roasted Fingerlings-a variation on my standby – olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper: instead of putting them to roast in the oven after either starting on the stove or at least warming (or more accurately heating) the pan in a 450 – 500 degree oven, the potatoes were put into a pan with some grape seed oil and the heat at high. Once they started to brown, the heat was dropped and freshly chopped garlic was added. Keeping the pan on the stove top instead of the oven was a challenge because I had to stir the potatoes and garlic to prevent everything from burning.

Green Sauce: Basically – a cilantro version of a more traditional parsley green sauce.  I loosely or hash chopped the cilantro and garlic, added them to a blender with a touch of olive oil and season with salt and pepper to taste. Blend just enough to mix all the flavors with the oil. As you can see in the picture, this is a rough or “country style” sauce, it should be bold and not look like it was just pureed.

Wrapping up as I fall asleep, the sauce a normally good meal and elevated it to excellent, we even used it for salad dressing the next night.