Photo of the Week – April 14, 2010 – Sea Star
Why doesn't every place have one of these?
This is probably one of our favorite lunch places, anywhere. When we were in Chincoteague last week, we were happy to find them open again for the season. You can find fabulous vegetarian food, along with more traditional sandwiches, all made with delicious bread and packed with fresh veggies. And the fudgy brownies are worth fighting over. Everything is made fresh to order. You can eat outside on their picnic tables or just take it along to the beach. I just wish we had one of these back home.
On the Ridiculousness of Soda Taxes
There has been a growing movement among legislators to place taxes on soft drinks. The justification put forth by these righteous folks is that soda is a big contributing factor to obesity and therefore it’s in the public’s best interest to discourage their consumption of these sugary beverages. Their argument is based on the soggy logic that healthier choices are more expensive and that’s why consumers choose to drink soda. The logic follows that by making soda expensive, the public will flock to the healthier choices. Ridiculous.
Let’s begin with the fact that tap water is virtually free, or at any rate cheaper than any beverage you can purchase. It could be argued that when you’re on the go, you don’t take your tap with you. However, reusable water bottles can be filled and brought along, and there are plenty of freebie water bottles given out, if you were about to object to their expense. If you have to purchase one, it’s a one time expense.
So what’s really going on here? Well, first and foremost this provides a convenient excuse to levy more taxes on consumers. It’s also a way for politicians to pretend to CARE about their voters. Really, this is for their own good. And what’s more, they can go home and feel really good about their efforts on behalf of the public welfare.
Again, I say ridiculous. There are about as many contributing factors to obesity as there are obese people. I’m no lover of soda, but hey, a piece of chocolate crosses my lips on a pretty regular basis. I certainly don’t want legislators to begin to tax my chocolate because I need to take off a few pounds. What’s next? Installing cameras in our homes to measure the length of time we spend as couch potatoes, and taxing anyone that didn’t move around every 15 minutes or so? Hey, that would probably go a lot further to improving our health than taxing soda.
I’m all for the government raising our awareness of healthy food and lifestyle choices. But, please, don’t disguise an excuse for taxation as doing something that’s good for me, because the prospect of higher taxes is stressing me out enough that I may just need to eat a piece of chocolate to feel better.
Eating on the Wild Side
Don't they look cute?
As much as I’m always looking for something good to eat, I’m not always looking for odd food to eat. For example, you’re not going to catch me jumping on the offal bandwagon that so many foodies seem to be riding these days. You can keep the ugly little parts of animals – I don’t want to know when I’m eating them, even if they slip into a hot dog here or there.
On the other hand, I’m willing to try a new fruit or vegetable on the occasion that one crosses my path, which happened just this week. I’ve read about the fiddlehead fern in one of my foodie magazines over the years, and was aware that they’re a limited season vegetable that appears in the markets during the spring. So when I found a box of them in Whole Foods this week, I decided to buy the curlicue vegetable, despite not knowing what I’d do with them. As I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I planned to prepare them, assuming I was a foodie in the know. After I confessed that I had no idea, she warned me that employees were told that they needed to cook them well, or they’d be toxic. Nice. I attempted not to flinch as she put them in my shopping bag.
Upon arriving home I did the first thing any clueless chef would do when faced with a potentially toxic ingredient, I performed an internet search for a recipe. I turned up very little, and most of what I found looked like it would mask the flavor of the fiddlehead, so what would be the point? Next I turned to my reference book, “Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini” where I found a lengthy chapter devoted to the fiddlehead, which turns out not to be a particular type of fern, but the unopened top of any fern. The most commonly consumed variety in the U.S. and Canada is the ostrich fern, pictured above.
My favorite piece of information from this chapter was the following quote from John Mickel, senior curator of ferns at the New York Botanical Garden, “”There is considerable evidence that they are a cause of cancer of the stomach and esophagus,” and he recommends only eating young ostrich fern. I was tempted at this point to toss away the entire package of fiddleheads but decided instead to continue my preparations since they’ve been consumed around the world for years, and you don’t hear about people dropping from ferns every day. I cooked them for the recommended 5 minutes, plus a few more to be sure I killed the toxins, then tossed them with butter and salt, one of the suggested simple preparations. I decided not to allow the girls to eat them given the associated risks, in case I hadn’t cooked them properly.
So did we like them? Not exactly. They seemed like an odd, chewy, astringent variation of lawn grass, not like “a walk in a moist forest” as Chef Jean George Vongerichten has been quoted as saying. This particular experience won’t be repeated, but at least I lived to tell the tale.