WV Gourmet

Please give this a read before you give your family salmonella.  It’s a great article about how all sorts of cooking methods are breeding grounds for bacteria.  They also advise you to be careful when deep frying a turkey, as it is a good way to either burn your house down or get some nice second degree burns, or both.

The famous Belgian beer, Chimay has finally made it to the liquor stores and bars of West Virginia. Many of you may have heard about it, but never tried it. There are three varieties available in the States: red label, blue label, and white label. Here are my thoughts:

Chimay Red in the little bottle is really good. On tap and from the big bottle, it’s too clovey.

The Blue is sort of okay, but nothing special.

The White, like all trippels, sucks balls.

*Rich Ireland’s more rosey view can be found here.

This is a real crisis:

http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/11/17/eggo-waffles-facing-shortage-until-mid-2010/

Much as I dislike the constant, nigh-insufferable mockney banter of my compatriot Jamie Oliver, I have immense respect for the man in a way that I don’t have for any other celebrity chef.

He’s a fine and (broadly) well-respected chef, proven by a successful set of restaurants, a clutch of TV shows that offer a real sense of delight in good ingredients and an appealingly slapdash approach to prep, and a decent collection of books. He makes Real Food.

But folks like that are ten a penny nowadays. Even just taking the Brit pack, there’s Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson, and Rick Stein, all of whom boast comparable credentials and are less insufferable (to varying degrees). No, that’s not why Jamie Oliver has a special place in my affections.

It’s because of a TV series he made for the Beeb called Jamie’s School Dinners. Oliver, disgusted by the appalling crap that is shoveled into the waiting maws of British schoolchildren day after day, set out to reform the way school meals were supplied in Britain. He introduced local produce, fresh vegetables, ditched the pre-processed shit, retrained the school staff — and retrained the kids, too, when they turned their noses up at the vegetables he tried to feed them. Watch him take a boy of maybe twelve from point-blank refusing anything that’s not chips (that’s fries to you) to happily chowing down on greenery, and you’ll understand: he’s a great communicator, really cares about food, and has an infectious commitment to health and wellness that’s clearly genuine.

When I finished watching Jamie’s School Dinners, I moaned to my family for weeks. “Why can’t he come and do that here?” I said, wringing my hands at my stepdaughter’s tales of her struggles to find anything remotely healthy at school. Now, in a twist of fate that I’m still having trouble believing, he is.

Most of the folks I’ve been talking to about this show are worried that it’ll just be a flimsy attempt to laugh at all the great fat Huntingtonians, wobbling like great blancmanges from Hillbilly Hot Dogs to Fat Pattys, randomly shedding forgotten cheeseburgers from between their immense rolls of flab. Perhaps I’m naive, but I don’t think that’s his style.

School Dinners ultimately convinced Tony Blair to pour almost a third of a billion pounds into improving the quality of the horrific slop that’s served up in British schools. If Oliver can put together something even remotely like that here, it’ll be the best thing to happen to cuisine and health in the area (the state?) for years.

And if he can do that, I don’t care how much of his twaddle I have to sit through.

West Virginia has been named the third fattest state in the Union, behind Mississippi and Alabama.
http://wvgazette.com/News/200907010156