Egg Quesadilla with Strawberry-Chipotle Sauce and Kale Salad

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Egg QuesadillaWe know you’ve all been waiting for our solution to last week’s three ingredient challenge. Here’s how we combined strawberries, garlic scapes and Russian kale into a tasty dinner for two. The sweet-spiciness of the sauce makes a great complement to the eggs, and the citrus dressing on the salad keeps the flavors bright.

In addition to the three central ingredients, you’ll need to pull together these items: eggs, cheddar cheese, flour tortillas, scallions, canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, dried barley, limes, salt, black pepper, chili powder, and cumin. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Provenance of Our Big Gulp (1676 – 2012)

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Among my different jobs is one that takes me to public middle schools to teach creative and academic writing.  In those classrooms, I have discovered that the craptastic school lunches I sometimes ate while that age are nothing compared to the contemporary dining habits of the Bronx’s eleven-to-thirteen set.  Oversized plastic cups of sugared coffee slushy and a few Dunkin donuts, as well as the bags of Skittles or Doritos that were less of a surprise, are routine.  Of course, I had a class at one of those schools whose lunch period began at 9:10, just after first period.  It’s safe to say that our kids are both getting and seeking a raw deal.

And that takes us to Michael Bloomberg, who in spite of getting the law changed so he could have a third term, seems likely to go down in history mostly for banning smoking in bars, making us a more bike-friendly city (!), and trying to outlaw oversized soda containers in certain types of business.

Well, it's not Joe Camel...

I presume the soda ban is national news; I can’t imagine the Glen Becks of the country passing up such an opportunity.  And so I’ve scrounged up a few key pieces of soft drink history: Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Bonnaroo Edition

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Andrew at Solar CafeThere is a lot of good food at the annual Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee. Much of it, along with dozens of good bands giving it their all, can be found in the central area of the festival, but for a perennial favorite of my brother-in-law Andrew (of Andrew Leahey and the Homestead), we were going to have to venture out into the great beyond. We were headed to the end of the line, and we were on the hunt for a mean tofu scramble.

A little background here: because both Andrew and my husband write about the festival for various publications, I have become an exceedingly spoiled Bonnaroo-goer over the past few years. They had once again managed to land us in “guest” camping, which boasted benefits like free showers and actual trees to shade our tents from the broiling Tennessee heat. (“Oh, no! This weekend, we’re like the one percent!” Andrew said, with a tiny bit of genuine class guilt.) But to get a taste of a particular dish that Andrew and his wife, Emily, had come to crave in Bonnaroos past, we needed to wander into the melee of the general camping area, where the great ninety-nine percent were partying in every conceivable fashion.

It is almost impossible to describe the verve, conviviality and downright filthiness of general camping. “I bet the best food is somewhere out here,” Andrew proclaimed with authority. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Pencil Pod Yellow Wax Beans, Manhattan Bridge, NYC

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These are the source seeds. They are tenacious as hell. Props to Botanical Interests.

The Seed Saver Exchange, an organization that does just what the name states and with the authority deserving of proper noun status, has 4,000 types of bean in its collection.  Among these is the Pencil Pod Yellow Wax heirloom variety.  Pencil Pods are bush beans, meaning they don’t need the high vertical supports string beans and other pole beans do.  They were developed around 1900, soon after folks started trying to breed the pesky “string” fiber out of beans (Check out Monday’s post) and are best raw or lightly steamed.  They also have little black seeds nestled in golden flesh, giving the bean a cool bumblebee color scheme or—if you happen to be appreciate your Christian Hair Metal—making it a fine tribute to Stryper. Continue reading →

Road Harvests and Vulpine Unmentionables

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foxNot long after I was writing on this blog about cavemen and stalking the wild tortilla chip, I had the chance to sit in on a primitive skills class. Since many people are gradually coming around to the idea that it might not be such a bad idea to have the knowledge to grow one’s own food, why not go one step further and learn how to really cook from scratch?

My teacher in this pursuit was Patrick, a representative of the Sequatchie Valley Institute. Patrick had long hair that looked not terribly unlike the brush he was using as kindling, and he wore a tank top that said “Extinction is Forever” tucked into a sort of hippie version of a fanny pack. His eyes were round with an earnest sweetness. Patrick was a believer.

Before we got around to the whole fire-starting thing, Patrick explained to us the fundamentals of “road harvesting.” All sorts of useful things, he assured us, could be found dead by the side of the highway. Continue reading →

Three Ingredient Challenge!

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We want you to put on your most creative apron and help us with a new little Pitchknives tradition called the three ingredient challenge. We’ll give you three seasonal delights and you tell us how you’d put them together in a dish or cohesive meal. (You can, of course, use other tasty items at your disposal to bring it all together). Ready? This week’s ingredients are (drum roll please….)

The kale, of course, has a long growing season, but this was some of the finest local kale we’ve seen so far this year. The scapes look a little like scallions, but are in fact the green shoots from a garlic bulb and have a more subtle taste than the more familiar clove. And who can resist a spring strawberry?

Share your recipe ideas with us at submissions@pitchknives.com. We’ll show you how we combined these ingredients at this time next week. Until then, happy cooking!

Dead Man Gnawing: The Stringless Bean (1884)

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This isn't Keeney's brand, but I do love the old-time packaging.

For most of the thousands of years that humans have grown them, beans have had long, fibrous strings running along the pod seam (hence “stringbeans”) and a tough lining between the peas and the pod.  The original bean farmers, native tribes in the Americas, raised beans to shell and discard the pods, not enjoy fresh what we generally know today as green beans.  There are far more fresh, eatable beans than just green beans, of course, but that’s not we’re addressing today.   We’re addressing the origin of those fresh snap beans, a dude named Calvin Keeney. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Melting Pot Edition

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mural in AstoriaA lot of people think of Astoria, Queens as being synonymous with good Greek food. But the truth is that, like a lot of New York City, Astoria is a little bit of everything. Queens’s status as the most diverse county in the nation is on display no matter which way you turn. Take, for example, the block I walked around when I first stepped off the Q line: a Chinese acupuncture place across the street from the Thai restaurant that was next to the Spanish café that was just a few steps from the Cuban bakery (Havana Express) where I stopped to get coffee and biscotti. And that was all before I even set foot on Ditmars Boulevard, where everything about Astoria becomes squared.

It’s hard not to stand on Ditmars without thinking the word “bustling,” so I decided that the Bay Ridge strategy of taking a lunch spot survey would work well here. For an hour, I zigzagged around the surrounding residential blocks, soliciting lunch recommendations. While my methods were hardly scientific, I did speak to a lot of people: white people, brown people, Greek people, Italian people, grumpy people, talkative people, dog-walking people, frat boy-looking people, tattooed hipster people, and lots of elderly people.

Their responses, of course, were no less diverse. Continue reading →

Stalking the Wild Tortilla Chip

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cavemanWhile eating breakfast tacos at our heavenly neighborhood taqueria, Gueros, this weekend, I began to muse on fat. After all, I could think of many reasons why the tacos were delicious (The tang of those pickled onion! The salt of that queso fresco! The bite of that habanera sauce!), but the plain tortilla chips were just as irresistible, and I had a feeling that it was because of the sheen of glistening oil that they wore after their bath in the deep fryer.

I formed an extemporaneous theory that this must be because of some evolutionary phenomenon. After all, it’s not that fat is bad, necessarily, just that it packs a huge wallop of calories and energy all at once, which was probably quite helpful if you were trying to, say, survive a famine. Jason was skeptical of this thinking—if fat was actually good, then why did his stomach feel so lousy after eating all that grease? If he had stalked a wooly tortilla chip across the icy tundra for four days, I retorted, his stomach would probably feel just fine.

While little information is available about the elusive wild tortilla chip, I did find some interesting evidence that scientific thought about fat is still evolving. Continue reading →

Our Newest Contributor Is…You!

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fifties cookSure, we love writing for the blog, but it’s not just about us, us, us. One of the reasons we started PitchKnives is so we could hear your stories about food and gardening. So in our second month, it’s time to make your voice heard. All you need to do is write to us at submissions@pitchknives.com

Here are some easy ways to get involved:

  • See one of Jason’s Concrete Jungle signs? Snap a picture or tell us about how you found it.
  • Have a great restaurant you’d put up a fight for? Tell us about it and you might just get picked for Grub Match. Next up are NYC brunch favorites, but other themes and cities are already in the works, so elect the place you love most.
  • Need a lunch date? Convince me that there’s a spot near your subway stop that I have to try, and you could be part of our Lunch at the End of the Line series.

But that’s not all. You (yes, YOU) possess the power to write an awesome food feature. Did you just make a rad new chimichurri sauce? Did you just discover the secret to growing the perfect carrot? Did you put together the perfect picnic? Send your ideas to submissions@pitchknives.com. We love photo galleries, too.

So, go on! Make our mouths water!
–The Editors