Wow … I was in Wegman’s during a strange too-modern conference call on my iphone about good stickiness and page views on the Rock The Capital web site, and I happened on these really cool brown tomatoes.

They had a good heft, and a quality I can only describe as squeezability. Yeah, kinda like a hot date in high school or a good Lancaster County heirloom tomato. They smelled sweet, with an acidic side aspect. No earthy barnyard odor, no hard plastic California impression.

The proprietary name is Kumato.

They are grown in western Europe. Last time I looked, that’s about 3,000 miles away, roughly the same as California. So why do the California tomatoes taste like crap, and these tomatoes are juicy, firm, flavorful examples of veggie love?

Let’s recap. Lemme splain my local food wackiness.

Several years ago, I agreed to be a founding member of Slow Food Harrisburg. I introduced the Grand Local Slow Food Poobah to the culinary program at HACC. Dinners resulted. They were a bit precious. I mean no disrespect here. Slow Food is an okay movement; our friend Nate Keller is on a Slow Food board with Alice Waters in San Francisco, and I respect that. But Nate can source almost any imaginable food for his high-end Gastronaut catering service.

Because. It’s. California.

Slow Food in Pennsylvania, not so good. There are only so many root veggies we can get through the winter with. Tomatoes aren’t among them.

Slow Food started in Italy. This is only a guess, but I doubt there are many chapters in Sweden, fewer in Scandinavia. Slow Food is a bounteous, horn-of-plenty concept. For me, I don’t want to fly to Hawaii for a pineapple. I want it to come to me. Sue me.

The thing is, I want it to come to me in fresh shape, full flavored. As Leon Redbone says, I wanna be seduced. Too much to ask? I don’t think so. Somebody at Giant in Camp Hill should buy a Kumato and eat it … because, to me, local food means not having to drive all the way to Wegman’s.

And yes, I now know what it is like to be a jerk in a grocery store talking on a cell phone about page views, holding a tomato.

Making bread in the winter is challenging for us because we keep the house cool.  Our kitchen is maybe 62 degrees … to rise, bread dough wants to be 75-85 degrees. Usually I  solve this problem by waiting it out. Twelve hours? Who cares? A slow rise for cool dough can make the bread richer, actually. Not in a hurry.

Except when we want to have it for dinner.

So Saturday night we made a neat discovery with the help of our friend, the Interwebs, and came out with a hearty multi-grain boule.

The recipe is here.

I didn’t have any buckwheat flour — and neither did the usually reliable Wealthy Grocer. (Thanks to Nick Hughes for that apt description.) But I remembered some quinoa flour in the back of the baking supplies drawer, and I would have used it except for the hole in the bag. One of our autumn mice had been there first. We added more whole wheat and some extra oats.

But the cool part came (yes, literally) when the dough didn’t rise. At all. Our house is chillier than usual this winter because we have a new woodstove and we’re still working out the upstairs/downstairs details — stove is downstairs, kitchen upstairs.

After an hour or two of not noticing any rising in the dough, I googled bread-problem-cold-rising and was happy to see that other people live in the Northeast.

The solution I liked best seemed almost too simple: put the dough in the oven with a pot full of boiling water.

Huh? The oven is cold. At this point, 62 degrees. How much would a pot of water heat it up, even if it was boiling when it was on the stove?

Well, when I checked back an hour later the temp inside the oven was about 150 degrees, or perfect.  The dough wasn’t 150, but the air around it was. (I know the dough wasn’t at 150 because it had risen considerably, and yeast dies at 140 degrees.)  We took it out, kneaded some, rounded the loaf and put it in a makeshift banneton for a second rise and put it back in the oven with a new pot of recently boiling water.

It baked well, and after allowing it to cool for 10-15 seconds, we sliced off some hunks and ate well. As Ruhlman said, the crust was as satisfying as a pretzel.

We had it with this Chicken Adobo.

… how you treat it, apparently. Thanks to Ratio Man for simplifying yet another quirky corner of culinary practice.

“When I used to read bread recipes, I feared yeast for good reason: Bad bread recipes.  So many instructed me to heat the water to specific temperatures, between 110 and 115 degrees F., and bloom the yeast.  Some wanted sugar in the water.  Some told me to wait till I saw bubbles.  Or they were neurotic about when to add the yeast.  Or the amount, 1-1/4 teaspoons exactly.  Rest the dough in a warm place (because of the yeast), they said, or away from drafts. Or you have to bloom active dry but not instant.  Or don’t add the salt until the yeast has started its work.”

Hogwash? Read the rest here …

“I’m not a baker. I don’t have the temperament for it.  I have an aversion to precision, preferring to improvise or riff off established recipes adding my own spin. Baking, though, does not reward this trait.   In the same way that Santa divides the world into naughty and nice, I divide the world into baker personalities and non-baker personalities.  I am, without question, a non-baker personality.”

Read the rest here …

And go here for Ruhlman’s Bread Baking Month

I make a simple salad almost every night — greens and onions and tomatoes with a tart garlic vinaigrette — so the vessel is important to me. If I were John Thorne, I’d get a book out of that. But not.

My new bowl is an inverted glass hat of the style worn by Italian members of the Curia in movies about exorcisms. We got it as a wedding present at our surprise nuptials on Thanksgiving a long long time ago. I think it was from our neighbor, Dee thinks it was from the Newspaper Guild local.  Empty, it’s not impressive.  It wants to hold something, like salad.

For a while, I withheld approval of the glass bowl just because I don’t like to take to things too easily.  But it works. In its way, it is pleasing. Which is about all you can hope for from kitchen ware.

So I wash it every day and put it back on the granite island and trust it to hold our vegetable friends in their orgasmic acidic glory. The omelets I made last night, the bean torte tonight, the legs of lamb and the roast chickens and the country pork chops rest easy on the plate knowing they have the full support of the glass hat. Here is how odd I am: it makes me happy.

My cigar store friend Joan Baker asked me today what I was doing, in the WTF sense of what do you do when you are retired. Got me, I said, but I’m always busy, every day, even when I’m just sitting around looking good. Like my former salad bowl.

Read it here

Read more here.

If you’re vegetarian, getting to know your food is certainly more dainty. Pick up a bunch of asparagus at the market and you never think about the rude, dirty hands that wrenched it from the ground and threw it into the back of a pickup. You never wonder if the asparagus liked life better back in the ground or if it is stressed by the crowds and the lights at the farm market.

But if you’re an omnivore, well, yeah, you might have a lot of those thoughts. Like the language. You don’t go to McDonald’s and ask for some dead cow with lettuce and tomato because we don’t eat cow. We eat beef. Like we don’t eat pig. We eat pork. It’s nicer.

Once you get past that to acknowledge that the chop on your dinner plate was part of a live animal a few days ago, the questions become more serious. What kind of life did this pig have? Did he grow up on a farm in Lancaster County where he roamed around the yard and got fed watermelon by a visiting chef?

Or did he survive a brief existence on a factory farm in a filthy cage so tight he couldn’t turn around?

Here’s what I know: the relatively small portion of your grocery dollar that goes for meat should support local organic, free-range farms where animals live a decent life before we kill them and eat them.

The people in this LA Times story go a bit farther.

This is no Halloween gross-out stunt. This class is just the tip of a very porky iceberg. In part, it’s the latest step in the ever-advancing search for connection to where our food comes from.

“I’m all about a direct connection from farm to table and I want to take the next step into meat,” says Kanno, the tattooed, 33-year-old director of Long Beach’s Wrigley Community Garden.

“Some friends and I are trying to find a way we could bring in local meat. And if we do end up sharing a pig, we’re going to need to know how to break it down. So I wanted to familiarize myself with that and hopefully eventually I can take the next step into hog sharing or something like that.”

Read the LA Times story here.

Now at home, I have to negotiate both Dee’s WW addiction and her aversion to really hot stuff … so I roasted the wings and made several sets for dinner: Unhot, Sorta Hot and Hot. I don’t go to Suicide Wings myself, so why make them?

Roasting does not get the crispness of deep-frying, but it does avoid the WW perception of overly fatty/greasy food. Although next time I might sear the little guys first, then roast, for crispy.

No matter what you see elsewhere, Buffalo Wing Sauce is just butter and hot sauce. I made one sauce 2-1 and the other 1-1 (pour moi). Sauce does not adhere to the roasted chix as well as it does to the deep-fried, if you’re trying this at home.

Dee liked the 2-1 but mostly ate the Unhot Wings. In all, probably 4oz chix.

I ate the hotter sauce first, then the Less Hot. Liked the hot. On the side, green salad with mustard vinaigrette. Nice dinner.

Kitchen work attracts an extraordinary percentage of intelligent, humorous, hard-working people. For every lazy ignorant jerk, there are five or six people who will jump head-first into whatever job has to be done — pile of pots and pans or plate-up for 600. Not for the hotel or the restaurant or the college, but for their buds.

I will miss my friend Amy, a tough little chick, and Tiffany, another one. When the cooking and the presentation and the eating are done, Amy absolutely drove the dish line to get everything cleaned up faster than we thought possible.  Tiffany was simply awesome on the power washer. The kitchen floor shook beneath her.

Allen, exec chef at the Sheraton, scored a 98 on today’s practical. No surprise. Yeah, he’s already a chef, but his platings are significantly better than anything I’ve seen in this town.

AJ — Jamaica Joe — is drifting away too, slowly, on island time. When he left today he turned around to everyone and said, “I love you.”

Sticking around are Josh, pining for LA, and Robert, who is planning a Puerto Rican catering company. Should be a good time.

I did okay today on the practical with mystery box #1. I made Cream of Mushroom soup, Filet Mignon,  Roasted Red Potatoes and Asparagus with Hollandaise sauce. Protein went past medium rare, veg a little soft, got a 91.  I’ll take it.