Kansas City Food Blog

The curse of the blackened pan.

​It might make you feel so adult to own those nice stainless steel pans, but not if you can't keep them clean.

If a series of soakings and scrubbings doesn't work, don't give up -- the blackened remains of last night's dinner can be removed without scratching up the surfaces. 

First, though, if you're starting with a new pan that has a sticker or sticker residue, soak it in warm water and then use a plastic spatula to lift off the sticker. Goo Gone or any citrus oil-based cleaner will remove any leftover glue. You can also try spraying it with Pam or cooking spray and then wiping it off with a paper towel.

​There are plenty of small-plates options around Kansas City -- Extra Virgin, La Bodega, Avenues Bistro, Carmen's Cafe, Taste, One80. But you have to work your way through most menus plate by plate.

And since it's easy to get hung up on favorites and expensive to order the entire right half of the menu, it would be great to see Kansas City restaurants adopt the policy of Percy Street Barbecue in Philadelphia. Slashfood recently profiled the barbecue joint, which offers the "Lockheart": a family-style sampling of everything on the menu for $24 per person -- as long as your table is four diners or more.

​Many of us have made the mistake at Quik Trip of letting it ride with a shot of Irish Creme and a shot of pumpkin spice flavoring, laying waste to our travel mug of coffee. And yet as bad as our early morning experiments might have been, they can't come close to touching what goes on in the blog Putting Weird Things in Coffee.

It's the work of a Canadian graduate student in psychology -- it actually feels a bit like a group psychology experiment -- who "got bored with the same old cream and sugar" and decided "to document my experiments for the benefit of all mankind."

With categories like "really weird," "disgusting failures" and "cheese," you can see where this is heading.

​ABC News has the story of a family in Friendswood, Texas, that has mapped out its meals for a complete year -- cutting their grocery bill in half and turning their house into a school lunch calendar. 

I understand that planning meals is one way to cut back on grocery expenses and avoid making impulse purchases. It saves money and time, and reduces food waste.

I also recognize that once you start a family, the joy of tackling The Joy of Cooking wears off when you're getting home at 6 p.m. only to face hungry kids.

The lunch special at Bo Ling's.

​You may think Bo Ling's is good Chinese food -- but it's apparently really good Chinese food.

The Chinese Restaurant News named Bo Ling's second overall in its Sixth Annual Top 100 Chinese Restaurants in the U.S.A., which "recognizes, cultivates, and preserves the best in Chinese cuisine." Bo Ling's was recognized at an award ceremony earlier this month in Las Vegas. 

​When it comes to the safety of ground beef, the Barf Blog wants meat producers to turn platitudes into packaging labels.

In response to a recent slate of ground-beef recalls, producers at all phases of meat processing have come out to defend the industry's safety practices. For example, there was this letter to the editor in The New York Times from Jeremy Russell, the director of communications for the National Meat Association:

"The American food safety system is the highest standard in the world, and our ground beef is the safest," writes Russell.

If that is the case, the Barf Blog wants companies to reassure consumers by explaining exactly what has happened to the product they are buying. 

​If you don't have any ideas for dinner tonight, you can use the Web site Tastebuddi.es to either rule out a number of options or stimulate your oven approach. 

It's a weird site -- the "Flavour Combination Inspiration" has you click a large blue button, which says "stir it up." You're then presented with two randomly generated foods for which you can give a thumbs up (great) or thumbs down (gross). After you vote, you can see how that combination ranks among visitors to the site and share it via Twitter. As to the site's mission, the homepage has the following:

Here at tastebuddies, we're searching for the most interesting and unusual culinary combinations. If you've never tried strawberries and balsamic vinegar or mozzarella cheese with ice-cream then you haven't lived. We hope this site will inspire you to experiment with flavours.

​Once upon a time, man ate only what he was able to hunt. Apparently that time was last week in New York City, where the "caveman lifestyle" is a burgeoning trend. The New York Times profiles a group of men who live at the intersection of hipster and naturalist, choosing to eat large quantities of meat and then fast between feedings.

Bread is off limits and fruits and vegetables can be consumed at will or not at all. It's a carbs-are-evil diet via the concept of cave paintings.

So, it's official: The irritating man cave concept has leaked into the world of food. I like that the men in the story are truly attempting to return to the diet of our ancestors (though not without a three-foot refrigerated meat locker).

There is also an exercise component:

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon. In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people's ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.

​A new branding campaign from the Center for Food Integrity hopes to increase consumer confidence in the food production system by introducing people to local farmers in five states.

At the Web site, Farmers Feed Us, you can learn about farm families from Missouri, as well as Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio. The site launched yesterday and looks like an attempt to tap into the locavore movement -- putting a smaller face on the world of agribusiness. This feels like a high-tech version of the old wooden billboard on I-70 -- one Kansas farmer feeds 128 people and you. There is also a contest to win free groceries for a year.

Among the members of the Kansas City-based non-profit Center for Food Integrity are the Missouri Department of Agriculture and the Missouri Livestock Coalition. The three-year-old organization's stated mission is "to build consumer trust and confidence in the contemporary U.S. food system by sharing accurate, balanced information, correcting misinformation, modeling best practices and engaging stakeholders to address issues that are important to consumers."

​Social networking now has a flavor.

In March, Vitamin Water will release Connect -- a black cherry-lime flavored beverage that's the winner of among fan-submitted suggestions on the sports drink's Facebook page. 

The new drink has caffeine and "eight key nutrients." It managed to defeat lychee, banana and strawberry/cranberry/raspberry blend in a popular vote on what was deemed the "flavor creator" application on Facebook.

If this was really meant to capture the flavor of Facebook, Vitamin Water might have considered the following names and flavor combinations:

​It is intense and off-putting and distinctly not from Missouri. But one of the premier collections of a century-old British product is in the Show-Me State.

The Missouri Marmite Museum is the collection of Doug Schneider. It resides in Valley Park, Missouri, about 20 minutes outside of St. Louis. The Web site I Love Marmite has an account of touring the memorabilia amassed by Schneider back in 2003.

Marmite feels like a century-old food.

​The future of the locavore movement might be in a cryopreservation facility in Newport, Rhode Island, where the SVF Foundation is hoping to catalog and ultimately promote rare heritage livestock breeds by freezing their embryos and semen.

It sounds like science fiction, but the science is very real and reflects a back-to-nature approach with fertility technology being used to make sure that heritage livestock are available in case things don't work out with our industrialized food system. Dr. George Saperstein, chief scientific adviser to the foundation, explained that idea to The New York Times:

"Think of this as a safety valve program. If there was a disaster, if something like the potato famine of livestock ever hit, these frozen embryos would be made available, and in one generation we would be back in business."

​Cheap food -- particularly fast food -- has become a political issue. Critics argue that dollar menus are contributing to obesity rates, while some would argue that cheap food is the the only way many people can afford to eat and should be seen as a triumph of modern agrarian practices.

In an opinion piece for the Cattle Network, Kansas City freelance writer Chuck Jolley rails against what he sees as "elitist snobbery" in which the most fortunate are trying to make value judgments for the people who are just scraping by and ignoring the fact that farming is a for-profit enterprise that has evolved in order to meet the rapidly growing population:

The food chain in America -- from the ranch-to-restaurant, gate-to-plate, farm-to-fork, whatever you want to call it -- is an amazingly complex but efficient model. It puts the product on the table quickly and at an affordable price. The centuries old curse of having to spend a majority of our waking hours and cash on feeding our families and fending off famine is a distant memory. Fortunately.

​Michael Phelps is back pitching Subway in a new advertisement that takes the chain's ubiquitous "$5 foot-long" campaign underwater.

The ad's timing suggests that Subway hopes America will remember Phelps' accomplishments in light of the Winter Olympics next month -- and that we've had enough time to forget the paparazzi-style photo of Phelps holding a bong that made waves in 2008.

On one hand it's a mini litmus test for what could happen with Tiger Woods and potential sponsors. On the other, a 15-second commercial extension of a well-developed ad campaign is difficult to consider ground-breaking or edgy.

​You can't escape bacon. You can't even contain it.

J&D Foods, the company behind Bacon Salt and Baconnaise, is back with two new pork-inspired creations: Bacon Ranch dressing and Bacon popcorn.

Yum Sugar found the ranch dressing to be dip-worthy, while the flavor of the BaconPOP was neutralized by the microwave.

A recent interview with J&D Foods founders Justin Esch and Dave Lefkow showed that bacon is a booming business -- the start-up had $1.4 million in revenue in 2008. When asked what's next, Esch jokingly suggested bacon body spray or cologne. Considering the frenzy over Burger King's Flame promotional cologne, which smelled like a Whopper, that might not be that far off the mark. 

​Even new technology is not always sure how to deal with archaic laws, as evidenced by the recent criticism of Facebook for banning any promotions involving dairy products.

Facebook has lumped dairy in with gambling, tobacco, firearms, prescription drugs and gasoline, in order to avoid running afoul of state laws. Dairy wasn't singled out; it was just a question of attempting to adhere to the letter of the law. That was what Facebook suggested after being challenged by the advocacy group Center for Consumer Freedom:

The company "initially banned dairy promotions due to individual state laws that impose penalties for distributing dairy at a discounted rate," it explained to CCF in a statement.

​Pizza is one of the few foods that is easy to share in theory but never in practice. Somebody always ends up with the smaller slice, causing a lot of relationship strife. 

Thankfully, as detailed in New Scientist, a few mathematicians have been on the case for the past two decades and have finally devised a system for determining the portioning out of pizza when two people sit down to eat an entire pie.  

​In any sport, those who compete will seek to find an advantage on their competitors, even if it means they need to cheat to do so. And so the question of performance enhancing substances has come to the world of competitive eating.

Tomorrow at the World Pie Eating Contest in Britain -- contestants will undergo random drug testing. Rather than the state fair, fruit-filled entries you're thinking of, this is the traditional meat pie concoctions.

As for what constitutes cheating, Executive President Tony Callaghan offers up his explanation:

Gravy has traditionally been the performance-enhancing drug of choice amongst pie eaters at this level, but since we banned it after a series of questionable concoctions were created by contenders, they've been trying to find other ways of generating lubricative advantage - and we're hearing rumours that cough mixture is the new Bisto [British brand known for making gravy].

​Every time you pick up a menu, you're being manipulated into what the restaurant wants you to order.

In author William Poundstone's new book, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It), the menu is broken down according to item placement and graphics, in order to show how you're less in charge of your meal than you suspect. New York Magazine has an excerpt from Poundstone's book. 

​If you're going to be milking a cow, you might want to be on a first-name basis. In The New York Times' Ninth Annual Year in Ideas, Pat Walters looks at a recent study that suggests cows with names produce more milk.

The research involved several hundred dairy farmers in Britain. Those who gave names to members of their herds had a 6 percent bump in milk production. Fat City decided to ask Donna Allen Wood, who writes about her Jersey cow Bessie Bonnie and life in Missouri on her blog, Just Me, if names might make a difference. 

"I think in a commercial dairy situation, feed would have more to do with it," said Wood.

​You had a good run, sample ladies. Your ability to slice up frozen pizza or gently stack potato chips in the mini paper cups will not be forgotten. However, the window on your ability to bring bites of meatballs to wholesale club members may be closing rapidly.

Gizmodo brings news of the latest vending machine being test-marketed in Japan, and it's basically a robotic sample lady. A customer can hold up a product's bar code and the machine will spit out a sample for the customer to try.

​A new reality show that covers barbecue competitions -- BBQ Pitmasters -- debuted last night on TLC, and Fat City was on the couch to watch it.

The premise: The show opens with an instrumental version of "The Ring of Fire," which saddens me and also gets me a bit pumped up. It's like seeing a bad action movie on TNT -- you know you're going to watch, but you hate yourself a bit for it.

The hour-long documentary is set at the Smokin' in Mesquite Barbecue Competition in Mesquite, Nevada. We're told that 47 of the world's best barbecuers have descended on the parking lot to compete for $40,000 in cash and prizes. Mother Nature threatens in the form of a freak hail storm, and she makes a good villain (just as she has ever since ice chased people in The Day After Tomorrow).
 

Get ready for more mini cupcakes in 2010.

​As 2009 draws to a close, the race to predict big restaurant trends in 2010 has begun.

The National Restaurant Association asked more than 1,800 chefs from the American Culinary Federation (ACF) what they planned to do with their menus next year. The survey results are out, and it should come as no surprise that considerations about portion size and local foods were at the top of the list.

What might be surprising is that a number of Kansas City restaurants appear to be ahead of the latest trends.

​Here in Fat City, we hope to help reduce your annual stress of picking out gifts. To get started, here are a coffee sampler from Parisi coffee and a cheese sampler from Parisi's parent company, Paris Brothers.

Parisi recently launched the line of coffee sampler sets, which are available online and at Trapp and Company (4110 Main). The single-origin roast samples are ground for French Press brewing. You get two 2-ounce bags of Guatemalan HueHuetenango, Keny Kirinyaga and Brazil Yellow Bourbon -- a collection of dark and medium roasts.

​When the Ulterior Epicure remembered a childhood metal lunchbox featuring the cast and crew of The Dukes of Hazzard, it seemed to raise a good point about whether we have let the practical demands of bringing our lunch to work take away some of the joy we once felt sitting down at cafeteria tables and snapping open our decorated boxes.

It makes sense that, once we started packing our own lunches, it's anticlimatic to open a lunchbox. Without the element of surprise -- namely the possibility of a treasured dessert -- there is only the certain reality of leftovers. And if you're bringing your own lunch to save money, it can transform the mid-day meal in the same way having to shovel your own driveway changes the way you look at the first snow of the season.

​The cereal aisle seems to grow every year, making the choice for your bowl more difficult. Eating the Road has set up a flowchart to help you determine which cereal you should be eating.

It's a way to narrow down the options between gravel-like substances (Grape Nuts), pretentiousness (Kashi), and whether you care about the roof of your mouth (Cap'n Crunch).

Apparently, cereal has replaced the eyes as a window into one's soul, since breakfast-food choice is indicative of personality. What's in your bowl might help determine who's the right match for you. Even the marshmallows in Lucky Charms say something about your personality type. 

If you need some actual guidance, The Impulsive Buy reviews new cereals in the manner typically reserved for snarky celebrity coverage. It's nice to know that even Cookie Crisp can generate the type of enthusiasm typically reserved for Twilight.
 
[Image via Flickr: kinoko parfox]

Wonder if Bessie is thinking about a deluxe apartment in the sky?

​If you take the old axiom about how they're not making any more land and apply it to farming, you realize that, if you can't expand out, you have to go up.

During a lecture at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, last Friday, Dickson Despommier, director of The Vertical Farm Project, explained how vertical farms could be the answer to reduced yields and meet the increasing needs of a swelling human population.

The Center for a Livable Future recaps Despommier's reasons as to why vertical farming is a system that produces less waste and uses fewer resources:

According to Despommier, the benefits of vertical farms include: lack of farm runoff, year-round production, no crop loss due to severe weather, 70 percent less water use than traditional farming, and no use of fossil fuels or pesticides. By moving some farming into the city, he says it will also allow some damaged ecosystems to be restored.

​Fat City is running a correction -- the event referenced after the jump was not sponsored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the killing of the lobsters was handled by the organizers of the event, who are not affiliated with PETA. Thanks to Lindsay Rajt -- a campaigns division manager with PETA, who was quite quick to point out the error -- text from her e-mail to Fat City follows the story.

History has focused on building a better mousetrap, but one British inventor thinks he has finally discovered a better way to kill lobsters. The CrustaStun is the result of British Barrister Simon Buckhaven's belief that there had to be a more humane way to kill crustaceans than dropping them in boiling water or a putting chef's knife to their heads.

The CrustaStun looks like an oversized steel computer scanner. Inside the rectangular casing is a steel plate covered by a shallow pool of salt water. Once the lid is closed, the device sends a burst of electric current through the lobster. The current is 2 to 5 amps at 110 volts, which knocks a lobster unconscious before killing it. All of this takes less less than five seconds.

​What could make turkey better? How about turkey stuffing? Serious Eats unveiled the turkey-stuffed turkey last week. It's a Thanksgiving take on the classic French preparation known as the ballotine.

The article explains the steps behind the classic French technique:  

A bird is boned, stuffed with a forcemeat (aka sausage), rolled, and then either poached or roasted. To stuff the breasts, you first have to butterfly them.

The end result is a series of rounds that alternate between the crispy outside and warmer, lighter inside -- similar to pinwheels or a stuffed roast.

​It's hard not to like Adam Richman, an everyman who takes on an eating challenge in every episode of the Travel Channel's Man v. Food. He isn't a competitive eater, just a food show host who happens to be astonishingly good at meeting the biggest eating challenge in a given city.

And yet it's easy to dismiss the travelogue/food show because of the oversized eating hook. Richman talked about this on The Johnny Dare Morning Show on 98.9 FM back on September 2. 

"There's great, great food in Kansas," said Richman, who hadn't heard of the Bacon Explosion but tried to make it clear that oversized foods are not what the show is meant to be about:

"People very often mention dishes we should have on a show. That's kind of the challenge to keeping the show. There's a fine line between doing something that is super indulgent and something that is super interesting that might be unhealthy for unhealthy's sake."