health – Sam’s Food Blog

Back in Black

Two years ago I stepped away from working in the culinary industry due to some medical issues that I was dealing with. The job I moved to was in retail with full insurance benefits. It was the first time that I had any amount of sick leave, paid time off, national holidays off with pay. It was easy and detail oriented, and though a major departure from what I was used to, it was a blessing as I was treated for and recovered from my illness.

I saw an opportunity to work at a prestigious and popular restaurant in Manhattan. A new adventure was waiting and I was the one that had to make the decision: keep living a relatively easy, but unfulfilling life? Or dive off the deep end back into a world that I had long since said goodbye to. I chose the latter, with hope and fear tangled around each other in my head like a Russian wrestling a bear to the death.

Two weeks in it’s like how I remembered. Constant until the end, especially at a popular place like this one. In Garde Manger (or garmo for short), it’s s lot of the same things with the occasional outlier dish. Both cold appetizers and desserts populate my side of the menu. The alpha and omega of the meal, our position is prep heavy with more to be done during service.

The main difference this time around comes from within myself. Before, I had undiagnosed ADHD and general anxiety disorder (not that it’s excusable), and I was a nervous wreck. Getting stoned on my lunch break kept my mind even hazier than it would’ve been otherwise, combined with being the lone hot line cook, garde manger and somehow the main dishwasher. It was a lot of pressure and u fortunately I crumpled like a RAW rolling paper.

Since then, I’ve been through a considerable amount of shit and learned a similarly considerable amount of shit about people, jobs, cooking and life in general. Right now I’m ambitious and proud, excited to put my head down and finally hone my craft through action, rather than my mind. The goal remains the same, to get to a point that I can write recipes for a living, write a cookbook and start a family. My pathway to those places is a but different than I expected, but I’ve found out that that doesn’t really matter by the end of your life.

I’m back in black pants, nonslip shoes, apron and a white button down cooks’ shirt, equipped with my knife roll and a few sharpies. I miss the ones that helped me get to this point, that I don’t get to see as often anymore. But it does still feels good to be where I should be. The universe feels more satisfied with me, like I don’t have as much of an urge to fight against it.

I’m tired, but I’m happier too.

Brown Butter Egg Whites

Have you ever made a recipe that calls for egg yolks, leaving you with multiple eggs’ worth of whites to waste?

Don’t fret, I’ve come up with a perfect use for those lone whites that is delicious enough to make keeping up with them worthwhile.

Ingredients

1 Tbsp butter

4 egg whites/ 1/2 cup liquid egg whites

1 slice white american cheese (broken up into small pieces)

salt and pepper to taste

Something carby to accompany your eggs (crusty bread, toast, rice, etc)

Equipment

small nonstick pan (you can use a well seasoned carbon steel/ cast iron of you’d prefer), rubber spatula

Heat your tbsp of butter over medium-high heat until the bubbling subsides and the milk solids have darkened. Season your egg whites with a pinch of salt, 2-3 cranks of freshly ground black pepper and your broken up slice of cheese.
Immediately turn the heat down to medium-low, and add your egg whites.
Stir it quickly with your rubber spatula, incorporating the butter into the eggs and breaking up any large curds that form.
Once the whites are no longer watery and are almost completely firmed up, remove them to a plate and enjoy with your preferred carb!

De-Elitizing High Quality Food

The year is 2024.

Consumers are scrutinizing what they put into their bodies more than ever. Regular, middle class people are actually caring about how they eat, going so far as to label certain ingredients as “toxic” based on advice from non-experts on social media, and further blacklisting a ton of seemingly inconspicuous products because they can’t pronounce a handful of the listed ingredients. These people needlessly fear mongering over “seed oils” and other superfluous buzz words only do so because they can afford to. Meanwhile, the rest of us have become practice dummies for the greedy corporations to crank prices up to see just how much stress they can put on the working class beneath them. The real issue isn’t antibiotics in your chicken, it’s the fact that a lot of people can’t afford anything but the cheapest option in the meat section.

I’m all for caring about this side of processed food, and holding a magnifying glass up against greedy companies pushing “health food” to people desperate for nourishment. More than ever has it become clear that a lot of the mass-produced foodstuff that we see advertised as wholesome and healthy are really just a branding exercise on how deeply misinformed so many of us are about food. In terms of fresh produce, prices are unsettling to say the least. We can tout “eat organic” all day, but when the organic onions are almost 50% more expensive than their non-organic counterpart ($1.69 for non-organic vs. $2.49 for organic), it feels like less of a “rule of thumb” and more like a luxury most available to those who are ahead financially.

I understand the concept of making more money and rightfully being able to provide yourself with a better quality of life. Love it or hate it, that is the reality of the capitalist society we live in. I would be pissed if my raise in pay ended up not showing in how well I can live for myself. However, it should affect things like your brand of sneakers, the size of your TV, or the maker of your car, not the quality of your necessary provisions. After all, from early childhood onward we are told that god himself wants us to have access to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Obviously that “life” isn’t guaranteed, the “liberty” has become a shrinking list of shit choices, and the “pursuit of happiness” has been reduced to a desire to achieve what others have, rather than an actual path upward in life.

I’m not saying that everyone needs organic everything all the time. I’m not even saying the organic issue is the most pressing part of our food system here in the USA. What I am saying is that eating healthily shouldn’t be a luxury. Having access to clean, well processed meat and poultry should be expected in the “richest country of the western world,” without exception. Our cultural obsession with always getting bigger and faster and more profitable has officially undermined our ability to properly provide for ourselves, and even when a company comes along to provide that service, it’s typical, sooner or later, for that small business to sell-out to the highest bidder and rid themselves of the headache of operating a business like that as a non-corporation. And the cycle begins again and again. “We want our high quality product on she shelves of every grocery store in America,” is what we hear time and again from local mom-and-pop brands on the come-up. The American Dream was never about creating a better America, it’s been about winning at life. And now it’s not even about that, it’s become more about just getting to the finish line of line with you and yours intact and nothing more. Don’t worry about your neighbors getting screwed, just keep your head down and make it to the end and you’ll be just fine.

I don’t know about you, but I want better for my fellow American no matter how differently they look, think, or vote than me. Better starts at the bottom with strong integrity of individuals, and I fear that we may never return to that type of strength. Yes, an 80¢ difference in onion prices seems insignificant. It’s a minute difference that a lot of people won’t notice, but it is a sign of something that’s wrong with the priorities of our leadership.

Yes, I think everyone at some point in their lives should experience the taste of a perfectly ripe, in-season tomato. Yes I think that sort of experience can convert seasonal produce detractors to agreeing that local, seasonal produce might be good for our communities, even if a little more expensive. But that’s the difference in that sort of thing. Produce like that is a luxury right now for a disturbingly large majority of our populous, not an expectation.

My goal is not necessarily to make the absolute best version of every single dish or idea. My goal is to make the best version of things that can be made just as well for a family who eats produce exclusively from Walmart-Mart or any other large-scale chain grocery store with mediocre produce. I used to easily get caught up on specifics like particular ingredients and brands. I used to get very frustrated when people didn’t take specifics like that as seriously as me. Now I know that technique, intuition, and the ability to adapt are the most important aspects of cooking, and the world would be a better place if everyone had that capacity.

The Demonization of Washing Meat

It’s funny to see so many chefs that are blown away by the concept of people washing their meat. “If you’re buying chicken that seems like it needs to be washed, you’re already fucked” is what I heard most recently, and it got me thinking; Not about why people wash chicken, but why so many people have a problem with it. Though food standards are good enough at this point in time that washing chicken is technically unnecessary, the tradition still holds strong for many households of color.

The reason behind this is an unfortunate one, but one that more people aught to know. For decades, there has been fear in colored communities that the people that don’t want them to live where they do sabotaged products and services in their communities to get them to relocate. In sociology there is a concept that states “if one defines situations as real, they are real in their consequences,” and that means whether these communities were sabotaged or not, they believed that they were, and acted accordingly. Washing chicken is a byproduct of overcoming adversity and doing what one needs to keep their family as healthy as they can. Not to mention the fact that many don’t have access to cushy Whole Foods meat sections with their corporate-friendly overly sanitized kitchens and meat cases.

So let me ask all the chefs that scoff at home cooks for washing their meat: If generations of your family felt that they had to wash their chicken so it would be safe to eat, and there wasn’t a trusted-by-you food-handling professional there to tell you not to and explain the reasoning, wouldn’t you wash your meat too? “That’s unsanitary, it spreads chicken particles everywhere” I hear so many cry as they judge behind their smartphone screens. Has noone ever heard of a wipe down? Surface cleansing wipes for the surfaces around the kitchen? If kitchen cleanliness in these situations leads to people getting sick, the cook probably would’ve made a similar mistake in the case that they didn’t wash their chicken.

It’s time to stop assuming and start letting people prepare food how they and their families have prepared it for generations. It seems many are mistaken believing that it was a “trend” around the mid 20th century, and that big names like Julia Child, Betty Crocker and James Beard were doing It in their own kitchens based on antiquated food cleanliness practices. This whitewashes the early struggles of a marginalized America, which is a regular practice in the US’s culinary zeitgeist. This information is out there, we just don’t see enough white chefs acknowledge this practice as traditional and not foolish.

Wash your chicken if you want. Simply pat down the meat with a paper towel if you want. But whatever you do, don’t demonize a whole culture of people just because you don’t get it.