Baby Buddha Pears

Food & Design

Gao Xianzhang. a farmer from the village of Hexia, in Hebia, northern China found a way, using fiberglass and plastic, to mold pears as they grow to form the shape of the baby Buddha. This is an ingenious way of mixing both food and design into one nice package, sans package of course. He sells the pears for $7 US (50 Yuan) a piece, which might seem a little pricey, but there’s more to it than that. Apparently there’s a legend within Chinese literature regarding fruit resembling a baby that bestows immortality (See post on Kottke.org. I looked through the referenced book post on Wikipedia, but did not see anything regarding fruit in the shape of a baby. However, reading the entry to strike another cord with me. The story of the Monkey King within this novel sounds very much like Jet Li’s role in The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) along with Jackie Chan.

One link always leads to the next.

Two legends taken down

Food

This is a food update special report. It has come to my attention the end of two true legends in the food world that many people probably don’t know, but they’ve eaten their creations.

Ceasar’s Restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico
Ceasar’s was the birthplace of the Ceasar Salad in the 1920s. Yes, Mexico. The salad has nothing to do with the Roman emperors of the same name. While you can find handmade Ceasar Salads outside of Mexico, you won’t be getting one at it’s birthplace. Ceasar’s is closing due to crime, drug violence, falling economy and swine flu scares…all of which caused drops in tourism.

Here’s the classic recipe for a Ceasar Salad, give it a try sometime:

4-6 cloves garlic, finely minced
6-8 anchovy filets, finely chopped
1 large egg
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Juice of 1 medium-sized lemon
Freshly ground pepper
Approximately 1/2 cup olive oil
1 large head Romaine lettuce, cleaned, broken into large pieces and chilled
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Approximately 2 cups croutons

Use a large salad bowl, preferably wooden. Rub garlic all over inside of bowl using back of spoon to crush pieces. Do the same with the anchovies. Add the egg and beat well, breaking down any pieces of white. Stir in the mustard, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice and pepper. Taste for adjustments. Add olive oil, beating well to emulsify. The amount of oil is dependent upon the size of the lemon, etc. I always take a crouton, dip it into the dressing at this point, taste for seasonings and add more oil if needed. Just before serving, add lettuce, cheese and croutons. Toss well. Place in serving bowls.

The next to fall:

Moderno in Piedras Negras, Mexico
A Moderno waiter, Ignatio “Nacho” Anaya is credited with inventing the nacho, which was whipped up in a hurry after the kitchen had closed for American visitors. His quick thinking resulted in a toasted corn tortilla chip with melted cheese and a jalapeño slice, which he named the “nacho” after his nickname. Again, a slump in tourism cased by drug violence and fear of swine flu claimed this restaurant as well.

It’s always sad to hear of a restaurant closing let alone ones that create legendary foods. Next time you have a Ceasar Salad or Nachos, remember these folks and raise a shot of Tequila to their names. Vaya con dios.

Julie and Julia and Blogs

Food

I was finally able to see the movie Julie and Julia the other day. Julie and Julia is a movie about the life of Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), who brought French cooking to American homes through cookbooks and TV shows, and Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams) a blogger who cooked her way through Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in one year.

I’m not going to go into the life of Julia Child, you can read about her on Wikipedia, or Julie Powell either, though her blog, The Julie/Julia Project can still be found on Salon.com if you want to read the full story that was only glossed on in the movie.

What I what to mention in this post is how my life was affected by Julia Child.

I grew up watching Julia Child on television along with Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, and Justin Wilson (years later), the Cajun cook. This was many, many years before The Food Network on PBS, which was the only place to find cooking shows at the time. Kerr and Wilson never had the formal training that Julia did, but what they did have was the ability to connect with people as on-air personalities.

Watching their shows gave me the confidence to say, “Hey, I can do that”, because they made it look so easy and explained every step. And, because of that, I can cook whatever I want whenever I want and however I want without relying on anyone else to do it for me.

After watching the movie I ran home to make the first dish I learned from Julia, the French omelet. You can watch Julia make one here:

And here’s the one I made. That you Julia.

Blogs, the experiment

Design

I love Smashing Magazine, an online design-oriented magazine. I can’t say enough about it. They cover advice, tutorials, free stuff, and knowledgeable articles from experts.

Their most recent article is entitled Ten Harsh truths About Corporate Blogging. This is particularly relevant to me because the company I work for is having the creatives get experienced in blogging by getting their feet wet and starting their own blogs, this one included. My blog isn’t entirely new or an experiment though. I started a version of Food & Design several years ago, but then got busy with other things and strayed away. I’m happy to be back and I hope my readers are as well.

On to corporate blogging. As Paul Boag points out in his article, the biggest challenge in corporate blogging is letting go. Blogs are not newsletters or press releases. They are not one-sided communications. Blogs are meant for feedback and discussion. And, not all that feedback is going to be good. Everyone from myself to corporations need to realize that when you offer a service, expect both the good and the bad.

But what is bad? Is it misinformation? Is it someone just hell-bent on saying bad things? Or, is it bad press because of a failing or perception? Blogs are public relations on the most intimate level. Use the medium to your advantage. Educate, inform, correct perceptions and answer questions directly.

Give the article a read and then set it into practice. Remember not all feedback will be bad and you will gain trust and loyalty through your attention and honesty.

Smoky Deliciousness

Food

What a great Sunday for ribs at the Columbus Jazz & Rib Festival. Yesterday was rainy, but today was awesome. Best of all I got to meet Butch Lupinetti (pictured above), of Butch’s BBQ, who beat Bobby Flay in the BBQ Throwdown. As much as Butch was a character and genuine person on TV, he’s that way in person. Very nice and welcoming to everyone who stopped by to say hello.

So, out of the 22 barbecue stands I picked 4 to sample. They were the ones that had 3-bone samples to try. Gotta leave room for beer, y’know.

First up was Armadillos out of Youngstown, OH. I got their three rib special and they gave me five, now that’s a deal! The ribs were very tender and that thin membrane on the inside (back) of the ribs was crunchy and flavorful. They were the only ones that I could notice that membrane and that’s one of the parts I love most. The sauce was smoky and had a nice sweet tang, you could taste the brown sugar.

Next up was Willinghams of Annandale, MN. Their three rib sample offered exactly three ribs, but they were good sized and meaty. Unfortunately I think they cooked their ribs mostly on an open grill and not a smoker. The ribs were a little tough. The sauce had a nice balance of flavors and enough heat to linger afterwards.

Big Boned BBQ of Chatanooga, TN was my next choice. Their three rib sample yielded 4 ribs, nice! The ribs were very tender, but maybe they were covered to rest too long as there was no membrane left on the backside. I added their Original flavor sauce which had a very nice hickory and tomato flavor, not very spicy, but I opted not to try the habañero sauce.

Now I didn’t try Smokin’ Joe’s BBQ, the hometown choice, this time around as I had plenty at the big community festival. The line for Smokin’ Joe’s was the longest of all the stands and I know why. His ribs are freakin’ fantastic.

So finally I went to Butch’s BBQ, from Mt. Laurel, NJ, to see how he matched up. I got the requisite three rib sampler and received three ribs. I covered them with his signature mild sauce (which they needed to pay attention to because I barely got any out of the mostly empty container). I can see why Chef Flay chose to challenge Butch, but to challenge someone who has been grilling for as long as Butch was no contest. Butch’s ribs were super tender, crisp and flavorful. His sauce is very well balanced… no one note stood out on it’s own, it worked as one deep flavor.

If you made it downtown for this festival I’d love to hear your comments on the ribs you tried.

Glorious Food

Food

Oh yeah, bacon and more bacon on the Bac’n Blog. T-shirts, recipes, how-to’s, a buy bacon section with lots of great choices for better than grocery store bacon, and don’t forget the monthly Bac’n Babe!

Foie Gras Palates, Hot Dog Pockets
In the New York Times, Frank Bruni takes a look at the elevation of American tastes and their impact on fast food. These are the days when you can get a hamburger by world-renowned, four-star chefs like Daniel Boulud, David Chang, or how about a hot dog by Michael Psilakis. How great is that?

Veggie U
Michael Ruhlman posted an article that harkens back to what I was saying in my PolyCultures post. An initiative by the Chef’s Garden and Culinary Vegetable Institute raised money to protect out future. How? By teaching children about good nutrition, being smart about what they eat and sustainable farming. Damn good idea! Folks we have to get smarter about our food. If you don’t care maybe your children’s children will care when the soil stops producing food and salmonella poisons the food that does exist. Maybe you think that’s an exaggeration like recycling. Perhaps you need to learn about the floating pile of garbage in the Atlantic Ocean. Didn’t know that was there? Folks, the world outside of your everyday life is not wrapped in cellophane. Teach your kids what fresh food is and where it comes from.

Design vs Advertising

Design

Thursday evening I heard Julia Hoffmann’s talk at an event by the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts (CSCA). Julia first started working at Doyle Partners when she moved to the states from Frankfurt, Germany, then at Pentagram, moved on to Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB), then to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. One observation she made really stuck with me and I’d like to pose a question based on that observation to readers of this blog.

Julia said she was trained as a designer and considers herself a designer. When CPB tapped her to work there, she had no idea who they were. So she started asking friends if they ever heard of them. Flabbergasted they told her they were one of the best known agencies in the world. She replied by saying she thought Pentagram was. So she went to check them out and found their culture interesting. People were riding skateboards and wearing jeans, business casual. At Pentagram most people, she said, people wore ties, dress shirts and slacks. Friends also pointed out that CPB is an Advertising Agency not a Design Firm.

So, through her training and work experience she noticed a split between these two fields. Designers despised ad agencies, calling their designers “sell-outs” to “the man”. Agency designers, considered outside designers amateurs only worthy of freelance work (or admired them greatly). Julia had been used to taking a project from start to completion nearly on her own and generally working on something that gets handed to the client. In the agency world teams worked on projects. There were focus groups, maybe regulatory reviews, presentations to the creative director, account teams, and maybe one or more rounds of presenting to the client.

In my career I have also experienced this dichotomy. I have now worked at both design studios and ad agencies. However, when I did make the move to the agency, one good friend and fellow designer, who also worked at the agency, told me that it is a great place to work, but know that you will be working for “the man”, if you’re OK with that then go for it. I was and did. At least it wasn’t “Big Brother”.

What differences have I noticed? The biggest differences I see are when it comes to a well-rounded knowledge of applications and web design/construction. A lot of that could very well be just me, too. In order to stay competitive I’ve had to teach myself HTML, CSS and the standard Adobe products (though I know many more than that). Of course, being adaptive in your craft should allow you to flow back and forth between the two, just like Julia.

So, the question I pose is, have you noticed a division between design firm or agency designers? What is your background? Why do you think there’s a division, if there is one?

I look forward to your feedback.

WIRED July

Food

As see in this months WIRED Magazine:

StillTasty.com: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide. OK folks, I know I harp about this alot, but being in a healthcare field (even if it is advertising) people need to realize how dangerous bacteria can be. Sure, I’ve been known to eat things that I should have thrown out, but there is a limit and somethings are more dangerous than others. So, if you’ve ever wondered how late is too late, give these folks a visit. Oh yeah, about that big pile of scrambled eggs for a group breakfast…”Refrigerate within two hours of cooking.” Please.

Spherical Ice Cubes. In Japan they carve these by hand to reduce the surface-area-to-volume ratio which makes the cube melt slower. Neat, huh? Well, before you jab yourself in the hand trying to carve ice, head over to the MoMa store and get yourself a handy ice mold.

Design

The Great Wall of Facebook by Fred Vogelstein. Facebook wants to dominate the internet (sound familiar?) and they want to keep Google out (again, sound familiar?). In the article they outline their 4-step plan of online domination, which sounds plausible. Except for the fact that Facebook is a community, not a robotized search engine. Any time people are involved, trying to control them, or profit from them, is a slippery slope. Sure, Facebook deserves to make money on the service they are providing…that warehouse of servers ain’t cheap, y’know. But, if you were standing with a group of friends at a corporate sponsored event, say a concert, how annoyed would you get if sales reps kept coming up to you offering the “latest thing”? We’ll have to see where this leads.

Now here’s a good one for you Industrial Designers. Did you know that in 2004 Edgar Burchard redesigned a packing peanut far superior to the ones we commonly see today? His little insight was to create sheets of refrigerator foam cut in a wavy pattern that could be efficiently stored as blocks. Just give a twist and viola! Peanuts that lock together naturally instead of slipping past each other. Briiliant! So what happened? They didn’t sell well because they were just too different. That pretty much sums up a lot of designers woes.

How’s this for irony…want to learn about blogging, where it’s going and why? Buy the book! Salon co-founder Scott Rosenburg has published Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Become, and Why It Matters. Catchy title, eh? It sounds like a good read though, if you’re into reading geeky things like that (guilty), and it’s probably easier to read on a plain or the toilet than on your iPhone.

To read more about these fascinating items and more, pick up the latest WIRED Mag at your local magazine rack.

Raising Awareness

Design

Jeff Zeldman posted an interesting article that includes why the general public is barely aware of Opera and Firefox. Basically, only the web geeks know about them. Why? Well, Firefox and Opera were two of the early adopters of adhering to web standards. Naturally, if you’re trying to develop websites to the standards you need reliable browsers to display them correctly. The rest of the public, they just want websites to work when they go there. Zeldman also looks at the future of mobile browsing.

I learned to code HTML and CSS by looking at Zeldman’s code. His site turned me on to web standards and the amazing group of people at A List Apart. Like Firefox and Opera, I’m barely known among web design trailblazers like Zeldman, but I was right there, along his side, learning and developing like all the rest.

Still, new web designers and people building website appear every day. If you’re new to building a website, check out these sites. Knowing how to build standards compliance sites will give you the flexibility for mobile devices.

On the print side of design, Smashing Magazine posted an interesting article on developing your “Design Radar”:

For instance, when it’s time to grocery shop, are you in the get-in/get-out as fast as possible mindset? Or do you treat the experience as a journey through Design Mecca – with sources of inspiration lining the shelves from wall to wall? When you’re waiting on the unbearably slow line at the post office do you temper your impatience by burying your nose in your iPhone? Or do you make note of the ugly signage covering the walls and kill the time by redesigning it better in your head? “Cranking up your design radar” is about never turning off the designer in ourselves.

PolyCultures: Food Where We Live

Food

Today I viewed the screening of this documentary by LESS Productions in Cleveland, Ohio (http://www.lessproductions.com/). The film explores the topics of sustainable farming practices in urban community settings. Community and food are inseparable and in many depressed areas of the country, including Cleveland, where grocery stores have closed and fast food has moved in the health of that community is doomed. Luckily there are visionary and ideologic people who are creating small organic farms, community gardens and affordable CSAs (community supported agriculture) to bring these impoverished areas a glimmer of hope.

The film featured several farm organizations within 50 miles of Cleveland that grow and sell produce in community food shelters, like City Fresh. Great Lakes Brewery demonstrated how a local business can create sustainable agriculture by having a small farm at Hale Village, where the grain waste from brewing is used as compost for the garden and the produce ends up on the menu. Through the course of the film they cover seven groups that are working toward better foods for America without the aid of fossil fuels or pesticides.

One area the film covered, and would have liked to heard more, were interviews with Michael Pollan of USC. Michael has written many articles and books, like The Omnivore’s Dilemma (named one of the ten best books of the year), which have garnered the attention of chefs nationwide to support locally and sustainably grown food. In Cleveland this movement has gained speed with activism by author Michael Ruhlman (Soul of a Chef) and Cleveland’s first completely green and sustainable restaurant, The Greenhouse Tavern, created by Chef John Sawyer.

Being originally from Cleveland this film hit close to my heart. I have seen the severity of depressed areas and watched communities fall. Food is one of the most basic human needs. Last year Cleveland passed an ordinance to designate areas for community farms that can only be rezoned by community vote. This is something that every city should enact. If they can’t give jobs to the poor, let the poor farm and feed themselves. Every one of our useless green lawns could be converted to gardens that can feed neighbors or be sold to restaurants. Think about it.

If you can see this film, do so. If you have a local farm market or CSA, buy from them. If you have community gardens, volunteer. You’ll be helping a lot of people eat better and stay healthy.