Beer Bistro Dinner at Pines Tavern

The Pines Tavern is a neat little place not far from our house. We eat dinner there on occasion, but not necessarily frequently.

Generally speaking, the food produced by the kitchen is high quality. The only problem I have with The Pines -- and why we probably don't eat there more often, despite its close proximity to the Fillippelli household -- is that the food tends to be very heavy. This is particularly true at lunch, where sandwiches, which are typically chock full of great ingredients, are just weighed down by too many of those ingredients.

On the plus side, it has a spectacular back patio. When you're sitting out there, you deservedly feel like your somewhere in the French countryside. not just around the bend from a run-down 7-11 and a slightly less rundown pizza joint.

Where the patio succeeds, the interior leaves something to be desired. The dining rooms are in desperate need of being updated. They are designed more for, well, a geriatric-leaning clientele. The bar area is cozy, great for a cold fall or winter day, but not ideal once the weather warms up.

Back on the plus side, and this is a big plus, the Pines grows a lot of its own produce throughout the spring, summer, and fall in gardens just across the street from the restaurant. It also sources lamb and, I believe, other meat from local farms. So the folks who run this place make a valiant effort to follow the local route, which is why I try not to forget about it.

One regular event that has caught my attention are these enticing-sounding "Beer Bistro" dinners held every month. The dinner is three courses, and features beers from a single brewery, a different one with each course. This month's dinner is being held this week, featuring beers from Pennsylvania-based Victory Brewing. The menu, particularly the ribs and grilled peaches for desert, is calling out my name.

It runs this Wednesday through Friday: $39 if you're getting the beers, $32 without. That's a good deal!

Too Many Drugs, Too Much Safety

I don't know if this has legs, but I'm amazed that it was even introduced in the first place:

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans. In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease.

The reason: giving antibiotics to healthy animals so that they grow faster can promote antibiotic resistance. As Dr. Kellog Schwab, director of Johns Hopkins' Center for Water and Health explains it:

"This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me. If we continue on and we lose the ability to fight these microorganisms, a robust, healthy individual has a chance of dying, where before we would be able to prevent that death." Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of resistant pathogens than a factory farm. He, Silbergeld, and others assert that the level of danger has yet to be widely acknowledged. Says Schwab, "It's not appreciated until it's your mother, or your son, or you trying to fight off an infection that will not go away because the last mechanism to fight it has been usurped by someone putting it into a pig or a chicken."

Next, although the article is somewhat hard to follow if you're not familiar with the broader topic of food safety, it still paints a scary picture:

Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides.

He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.

"I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop," he said. "On one field where a deer walked through, didn't eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop."

Basically, you have food safety measures being taken, much of it done in a proprietary fashion, to address problems being created by factory farming operations, not many of the little guys who actually do things like, you know, plant other plants to protect their products from bugs, instead of bombarding it with pesticides. And many of these safety practices are, according to this article, being proposed for use on national level.

Watcha Been Doin'?

I don't know. Watching the Tour De France, I guess...

What can I say. I've had ideas, thoughts, urges, inspirations. But nothing's been enough to get me to post anything new. Was a cooking fiend this weekend.

Just tonight made this Batali chicken dish, via Gwyneth Paltrow (via my friend/colleague Brittany) that was really quite delicious. On the side some potatoes, parboiled, tossed with olive oil, crushed fennel seed, sweet paprika, a little cumin, salt, and pepper, and finished on the grill (in a grill pan). A very nice partner for the chicken. Next time, more salt, more fennel, more paprika, cooked over higher heat to make the potatoes crispier (although I wonder if that might dry them out?).

Last night made some fish tacos, on excellent flour tortillas from Reyna's in the Strip, using the blend of fish for the fish tacos at Penn Avenue Fish Company. I purchased said fish from... Penn Avenue Fish Company. Topped with, among other things, purple cabbage from Blackberry Meadows Farm, purchased at Farmers @ Firehouse.

Friday it was finally time to cook the scallops we picked up on the way out of the Outer Banks a few weeks ago. Seared, on top of a pea puree (peas, courtesy of the farm, a little butter, a little more half-half, mint, basil, salt, pepper, a little lemon).

Speaking of tacos, Yo Rita, on the South Side, may be the place to go. Until January 2009, I believe, it was called Iguana Grill. Its food, and apparently whole way of running the operation, has been remade by Kevin Sousa, who from my reading, is as close to a "celebrity chef" as there is in Pittsburgh. Sousa is apparently doing side gigs while he waits to open up his own place, Salt of the Earth. That's the name of his blog, which is fun reading. The tacos sound like my kinda deal. I will go there soon. I hope.

I've also been working on a food-related short story -- a send-up, of sorts, of myself. I hope to publish it on this blog in several parts. I hope it's good. But who knows. I write about cancer research most of the time, and have maybe completed one or two fiction stories in all of my writing years. So it may stink.

There are numerous interesting things happening on the food policy front. I've been unable to keep up with them, except for the fact that the prez appointed a former Monsanto lobbyist to be a key advisor on food safety at the FDA. Not change I can believe in. Although some respected people don't think it's necessarily going to be a disaster. For the best policy updates, I highly recommend The Ethicurean and La Vida Locavore (note to self, that's two additions to blog roll. Get on it!)

Oh, and I got a new digital camera, one that has a setting just for food. Because there are like a million food blogs out there. Mine, no doubt, is the best. Just that nobody knows it yet...

Greens of the Beet

Had some beets from the farm. The beets have long stems and large, chard-like greens.

Kathy from the farm said they are excellent to eat. I have seen them in the foodie mags. I must try them.

I chose to braise them. They were tender and delicious. Here is how I cooked them.

Braised Beet Greens

• 1 large bunch of beet greens
• 2 large cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
• Extra virgin olive oil, good pour
• Butter, 1 tbs
• 3/4 - 1 cup chicken stock
• Salt and pepper
• Lemon wedge

Clean the beet greens (I removed the stems all the way up to the beginning of the leaf, but not sure if this is necessary) very well in cold water and dry (salad spinner works well).

In a large pan, heat olive oil and butter over medium heat. When the butter is melted, add the garlic and saute for a minute or so. Then add the beet greens and toss well for a minute or two. Add the chicken stock and cover the pan. Cook for 10 minutes until well wilted.

Remove the cover and continue cooking until most of the liquid is gone, about 10 more minutes. Remove from heat, add salt and pepper, squeeze the lemon over top, toss and serve.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Scrapin' Up the Bits... CSA Style

Ahhhh. That sigh of relief is because CSA season has begun. Picking up some vegetables that had been in the ground just 24 hours or so before is such a welcome change from buying them in the grocery store. There is an extreme difference in freshness and flavor.

For our first pickup of the year - courtesy of Harvest Valley Farms in Valencia -- I chose:

• Beets, of which I have never been a fan, but I'm going to give them a second chance, hopefully this weekend
• Onions
• Spinach
• Spring mix
• Asparagus
• Eggs (from another local farm, free-range bad boys with bright orange yolks)
• Bumbleberry jelly
• Carrots (little 'uns, perfect for roasting, perhaps with the beets!)

The spinach (sauteed, side dish) and onions were used yesterday in a Greek-style shrimp dish, which was excellent.

For those who missed a CSA sign up and are still interested, the folks who put on the local Farm to Table conference every year have launched one. Can't vouch for it, but might be worth a shot.

For those who are concerned about where their food might be coming from, Food & Water Watch has launched the "Global Grocer."

Bonnie at the always excellent Ethicurean has an excellent summary of two recent papers that sound like must reads... and which I actually hope to read this weekend. The papers, as she explains, are the product of a researcher, Don Lotter. In it, Dr. Lotter...

makes a persuasive case that the transgenic seed industry is built on fundamentally flawed science, and that companies like Monsanto have used their vast market power to reshape university research, manipulate public opinion, and coerce regulatory agencies into reckless acceptance of risky technologies. And that scientists have looked the other way while they did so.

I wish I were more informed about the genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, that are masquerading as fruits and veg on grocery store shelves.

But one thing I do know is that they have not been adequately tested. At their most basic, these are food products that have been produced from seeds that had foreign genes inserted into them. Any time you start messing with nature in this way, you'd think that you might want to have some sort of data in actual humans that demonstrates the introduction of said genes -- via consumption of these foods -- into the population at large might not have some, well, unintended consequences. These papers, according to Bonnie, get at this issue and much more.

Based on our own experience as parents with young kids who won't eat anything, I guess this was fairly obvious.

The popular belief that healthy eating starts at home and that parents’ dietary choices help children establish their nutritional beliefs and behaviors may need rethinking, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. An examination of dietary intakes and patterns among U.S. families found that the resemblance between children’s and their parents’ eating habits is weak.

I mean, we literally are awash in fruit and veg in our household, and our dinnertime meals are full of variety, to say the least. Our kids eat the fruit, a good amount, and they both have their moments (my 4-year-old daughter, for instance, loves pesto and various Italian cheeses, and my soon-to-be 7-year-old sun scarfed down shrimp and pork dumplings at Lulu's Noodles and grilled squid in romesco sauce at Dinette) but vegetables have been hard to come by, despite the example mom and dad set. Meanwhile, at a Memorial Day picnic, I watched this 5-year-old kid pounding through carrots and raw cauliflower. Apparently this was not something he had to be coerced into. It just happened.

Then again, I barely ate any vegetables until I was in my 20s, and I turned out mostly all right.

Sadly, it's not even that. We just don't like being short-order cooks at dinner time!

And, finally, a serendipitous find on the Hopkins Web site that I must now add to my reading pile, "Farmacology," about how factory farming is leading to widespread antibiotic resistance. A teaser:

Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, refers to a typical pig farm manure lagoon that he sampled. "There were 10 million E. coli per liter [of sampled waste]. Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That's a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment."