Frozen Yo in Columbia Heights (Flickr/Mr. T in DC)

Yesterday, as is a haphazard tradition in my office, we brought one of our interns out for frozen yogurt on her last day as a way of thanking her for all her hard work over the summer. We decided to walk to Frozen Yo in Metro Center. Afterward I felt sick.

Perhaps it was the heat. Or the fact that I had just eaten beforehand. Or perhaps it’s the fact that Frozen Yo serves their self-serve yogurt in gigantic freaking containers. They have to be at least twice to three times the size of the containers you get at other fro yo places in town like Mr. Yogoto, Sweetgreen, or Tangysweet.

The first time I walked into Frozen Yo, I noticed how much it was like a buffet, where you load a bunch of crap onto your plate and see what you like best but ultimately end up eating way more than you planned. It just seemed so — American. And I say that as a born-and-raised, third-generation, 14th Amendment-style American. But come on, a huge container where you load up whatever you mix then pay by the pound? That screams excess.

Granted, I’m not much of a dessert person in general — I far prefer a savory treat. I would probably take french fries over frozen yogurt any day, so it’s not some kind of strange diet I’m on. I’ll say it, at risk of pissing off all the native Californians out there (where I understand this tradition comes from): This enormous tub o’ fro yo thing just turned me off.

(Flickr/woodleywonderworks)

Well, the rich sure are different. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled a few cooking camps for the 10-17 year old demographic. Tuition or fees for these camps and competitions range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars:  Dorette Snover takes a group of teenagers on a 12-day trip to Paris that runs $4,750 per child; the Baltimore-based camp called For the Love of Food charges $395 for tuition; and chef Kelly Dietrich charges $2,695 for a one-week course and $4,900 for a two-week session at the Kids Culinary Academy of Vermont.

But as amusing as the story about a small army of tiny gourmet chefs is, it’s hard for me to think about the children who aren’t so lucky. America has roughly 14.1 million children that still live in poverty and an estimated 6.5 million children who live in food deserts. Even if you don’t want to talk about the children growing up in poverty, not all parents have the time or inclination to cook and teach their children to cook.

My critique of this article isn’t meant to be an attack on the rich. The parents who can afford the $5,000 tuition should by all means buy a two-week course at the Kids Culinary Academy of Vermont. But as cooking gets more bourgeois, it’s easy to remember that there are lots of children who don’t even have access to regular and healthy meals. In that light, profiling these youthful gourmet chefs is just a startling reminder of how wide that gap really is.

Luckily, I did.

This was lunch today: a succulent, spicy lamb (I… think) kebab, dusted with smoky paprika, cumin and other spices that I can’t identify. Gloriously greasy — they didn’t trim any of the luscious, gelatinous fat off the meat, so the flavor soaked through each lovely piece and down through the naan. As you can see, I opted not to try the ominous chili pepper that came wrapped in my sandwich. Braver men than myself — in particular, Army National Guard Major Fred Bates — turned bright red after biting in, proclaiming it habanero-like in its intensity. Thanks but no thanks.

Clearing our palettes were chunks of locally-grown melons. One reason to feel optimistic about Afghanistan: the Afghans have cultivated a melon that’s like a honeydew but has flavor. Firm but juicy, a bit fibrous — and, most importantly, sweet and ever so slightly sour. A dude sold me one inside the compound of the agricultural chief of Kapisa Province. I gave him five dollars before he ran to his car to retrieve a ten pound melon shaped like an overinflated football and appearing outwardly like the head of a Tenctonese Newcomer. As we drove back to Bagram Air Field, it occurred to me that the plasticware distributed for on-base dining wouldn’t be up to the job, and even if I wasted $40 on a knife at the PX that I’d have to give up when I leave here, that wouldn’t cut the damn thing either. I opted to donate it to a captain in the unit that I accompanied out to Kapisa who ogled my melon with very hungry eyes.

(Flickr/su-lin)

Tonight I made a pretty epic sandwich for dinner: provolone cheese, roasted portabella mushrooms, spinach, tomatoes, and chipotle mayo. While it’s typically paired with sweet potato fries, I’d like to gently remind everyone that it’s really tasty on sandwiches and really easy to make. Just mix mayo (or light mayo, in my case) with some pureed chipotle chilies in adobo sauce and add a bit of citrus juice. Mmmm.

This weekend I had some amazing chilled tomato and cantaloupe soup at Tallula. It took cues from gazpacho but used the melon instead of cucumber. It had good heat but not too much acidity. The flavor was incredibly full, but I didn’t detect any garlic or much onion. But the most amazing part was the broth. Sure, in this case it was probably technically just juice. But having that clear liquid to float the finely chopped veggies and lumps of crab meat on really set it apart from so many gazpachos, which can sometimes end up tasting like salsa on a spoon. It was so damn good. Knowing the farmer’s market was the next day and that I had a dinner to go to, I set out to mimic the soup myself.

What I made was delicious! I took the approach of pureeing about 2/3 of the fruit, hoping juice would pour out, and then I could chop the rest. I knew I’d get some smashed bits in there and it wouldn’t be clear juice. I food processed, in stages, about 2/3 of a perfectly ripe cantaloupe, about a pound of tomatoes, a jalapeno, a sweet pepper, one small sliver of onion, salt, and a little lime juice. I stirred them all together, and added a handful of roughly chopped basil and some super sweet halved cherry tomatoes, and let that sit in my fridge until it was time to serve. Then I topped each bowl with lump crab meat. It was stupendous!

But it was nowhere close to Tallulah’s soup, as far as texture is concerned. I got the flavors right, but it was a denser pureed soup rather than a cool liquid with chopped bits. I’m guessing they actually have a juicer, which they used to make the “broth”, maybe thinned it out with some water, maybe some chili infused oil, and then topped with the chopped veggies. Or maybe they actually cooked the fruit down until they got a liquid and chilled that. I’m not sure! All I know is: I don’t have a juicer. And I’m not sure what other approaches I could take in my own kitchen to reach similar ends. Anybody have an idea?

Also in this week’s CSA haul: 1 bundle of Swiss chard, 1 box heirloom cherry tomatoes (so yummy!), 1 red tomato, 1 green pepper, 1 onion, 1 bag Yukon Gold potatoes. I feel like a pepper/onion/potato hash is clearly in my future this weekend.

by Sara Mead

3 green cucumbers – Elm Tree Organics

1 bag red tomatoes – Green Valley Organics (2lbs)

1 bunch beets – Soaring Eagle Acres

1 bunch carrots – Windy Hollow Organics

1 bunch copra onions – Friends Road Organics

Here’s my CSA haul this week–apologies for not posting last week. The haul was pretty identical to the above, except that I got a head of cabbage instead of the carrots, and two of the cucumbers were lemon cucumbers. I made a tofu and lemon cucumber salad with them, which I did not love, and used half the cabbage to make cole slaw for a potluck and fried the other half with onions and bacon–delicous!

I’m pretty set with what I’m going to do with all my veggies this week, except the carrots. I really want to make something similar to the carrots served at AS 220 in Providence, but it’s been a while since I had them, so I’m not quite sure how to do that.

Btw, the zucchini I got this week is amazing. I love zucchini, but this has a richer, sweeter taste than I’m used to in zucchini. I actually felt bad for sauteeing it with onions and garlic.

Guten tag! Or, however you say howdy in Danish. I’m just back from a trip through Germany, with a brief stop in Copenhagen — where the food is for the most part wretched — and can’t help but reflect on the hearty wonders of German cuisine I never got around to trying.

Over the course of my trip to Germany, I visited four cities in 7 or 8 days. Only in one, Leipzig, did I eat schnitzel. There at lunch, I also ate a delicious beef dish stewed in dark beer with various onions and mushrooms, served with potato cakes. I was well on my way to shaving precious millimeters from the diameter of my arteries, I thought. But nein: no bratwurst, no sauerkraut. I didn’t have another big Teutonic meal — much less a currywurst from a street vendor — until I slipped out to a biergarten to cheer in hushed tones for the USA.

In an effort to tweak Germany’s global image, this junket involved a lot of fancier dining (thanks, Goethe Institut!). You think Germany is all beer and sausages, various deputy dignitaries would tell us, and I would agree, salivating. I would have appreciated the opportunity to engage those stereotypes on my own, especially when I was slicing into a bone-dry turkey saltimbocca and drinking a wine that was never a Riesling like I desired.

One meal, however — one meal — was unexpectedly revealing. My trip took me to the North German holiday island of Sylt. It’s pronounced “Zult” with a swallowed “L”. It means “Hamptons.” It has the highest concentration of Michelin stars in all of Germany, and one of the nation’s few important oyster beds. And it’s a helluva drive from anywhere else.

Sylt is three hours by milk train from Hamburg or 45 minutes by ferry from Denmark. Indeed, if you position yourself just right between the Gucci outlet and the Porsche garage on the hill, you can see Denmark. Or rather, you can see the windmills that mean Denmark. (From your summer house!)

The island of Sylt itself is an unstable piece of land. Its shore along the North Sea is marked as a UNESCO World Heritage site for its dramatic changes in tide, which reveal eerie tidal pools and gross worms that form tall, poop-shaped mounds of sand by excavating the banks. The island would have disappeared altogether a hundred years ago, had some bold gray grass not taken root in dunes that would otherwise range across the land into the sea, and into oblivion.

So there’s no there there on the island of Sylt. Still, restaurateurs do an admirable job sourcing locally what they can. (They must: There’s a lot of old money to feed.) To a large extent, this means importing supplies by ferry from Denmark or by milk train over the sound from Germany, expanding the definition of “local.”

Morsum Kliff has zero Michelin stars, the restaurant’s proprietor explains, because Michelin currently has no more stars to give out in Sylt. That’s okay. They gave me a taste of something I didn’t know I wanted: German island food.

This course, for example: gratinated “Sylt Royal” oysters with spinach, served with a liaison (!) of quail eggs and salad of young herbs. I’ve never ordered baked oysters and even after eating wonderful baked oysters I’ll still never order baked oysters. But they were wonderful. Even the salad dressing, a home-made black bread vinegar, was delicious. This course also marks the first time I have ever eaten a diplomatic convention.

(On the oysters: I can’t complain at all about eating oysters baked, because the next day I got to dig around in an oyster bed, an opportunity that led me to shuck, and eat, oysters pulled fresh out of the North Sea. The North Sea is a relatively clean body of water, especially near Sylt, which makes for tasty coastal sea creatures.)

I’m passing over the codfish on potato raviolo and the Sylt-grown Galloway beef filet — both of which were local, and fine — to get to dessert. Everyone knows you don’t win the meal with dessert, and I tend to avoid sweets altogether, but . . .

. . . I would eat that sorbet of East Frisian tea for the rest of my life. Whatever that Crystalline Entity thing on top is, it gave the dish a nice crunch. And that brownie-looking guy in the back is actually by constitution a chocolat-amarena foam.

Surely Tyler’s got a good rec for where I can find proper Syltian food in D.C.? I have to say, I developed a taste.

Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi pleaded guilty today to war crimes (specifically, conspiracy and material support to terrorism) at Guantanamo Bay, where he’s lived in detention for the past eight years. The charging documents do not specify al-Qosi ever fired a shot in anger. But for five years, he was Usama bin Laden’s personal chef. All of which makes me wonder if we didn’t just miss an opportunity to turn al-Qosi and then poison the leader of al-Qaeda.

1 bag new red potatoes –  Green Valley Organics – 2 lbs

1 bunch Detroit red beets –  Farmdale Organics

2 yellow straight neck squash – Goshen View Organics

2 green slicing cucumbers – Elm Tree Organics

1 bunch Swiss chard – Millwood Springs and Maple Lawn Organics

1 head Romaine lettuce –  Riverview Organics

1 bunch sweet onions – certified organic – Sweetaire Organics

Also, I went blueberry picking this weekend and got a ton of blueberries. There are a variety of decent pick-your-own options fairly close to the D.C. area–this weekend was blasted hot, but otherwise is was a great weekend activity. They’ll still be in season next weekend, when it will be cooler, so I strongly encourage folks to check it out. We went to Butler’s Orchard.

I’ve eaten a lot of blueberries the past 2 days, and am planning to cook some, too, but most of them I froze. For those of you who don’t know this, blueberries are about the easiest thing to freeze. Just wash them, roll them on a towel to dry, and put in tupperware containers in the freezer. Some friends of mine freeze them in layers on cookie sheets and then put them in large freezer bags, which is probably a bit more space efficient but also time consuming. Some people say that you shouldn’t wash the berries before freezing them because it makes the skin tough, and to just roll them on a woolen blanket instead, but I prefer the convenience of being able to take them out of the freezer and use them, and given that many pick your own farms use pesticides, I don’t really trust the woolen blanket as an adequate berry washing mechanism (for that matter, I don’t think I own any woolen blankets!). Also, I haven’t noticed enough skin toughening to make a big difference, particularly as I mostly use the frozen blueberries in cobblers, pancakes, etc. I find that the home-frozen berries work just as well as fresh ones in most blueberry products (cobbler, cake, blueberry pancakes) as well as for things like putting on cereal. They are inferior to fresh berries for plain eating, as they get a bit mushy and the freezing process pulls out some moisture, but they’re still better than no blueberries at all :) and I believe preferable from both an environmental and economic perspective to buying out-of-season “fresh” berries. The biggest problem is having enough space in my freezer!