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I like to think I’m immune to the bullshit. That the hype doesn’t get to me like the rest of you animals. I don’t believe sharks are hunting people for that week every year when there’s no news so they report some ungodly number of shark attacks. I don’t live my life in fear of what plastics ‘might’ be doing to my brain chemistry. And I’ve never once been shocked or disgusted to find out the bacteria counts on a dollar bill. I don’t fall for the media spin.

And yet when I read that 300 people had gotten sick from salmonella infected tomatoes I thought “Oh shit, no salsa tonight.” I mean, 300 is a lot right? And salmonella is most likely caused by human fecal matter. I guess someone hated to waste fertilizer.

So I thought that I should help everyone out during this epidemic. In order to prevent mass riots I would create a map showing who was living in the danger zone. That way those people could evacuate to tomato safe houses where councilors would be available.

So here’s the map I came up with:

View Larger Map

Blue areas are clean, red is suspect and orange means that certain counties are OK(damn google maps won’t show county lines so I couldn’t break Florida down any further). Notice anything? 50% of the country is clean as a whistle, 49% haven’t been cleared but that’s because the FDA is so unworried about tomatoes from Michigan and  whatnot they’re not even bothering to check them and in the one state that may have  been a source for infected tomatoes over 30% of  the counties have been cleared. And it’s entirely possible Mexico is really clean as well, it’s just convenient to blame them.

Quite frankly there’s more salmonella swirling  in my toilette bowl on a daily basis then there is in our tomato supply, why no news story about that? I’ll tell you why, nobody’s scared of my toilette(they should be). But they’re terrified of the food supply. Mostly because they’re so separated from it they have no idea how it works.

The media can create tomatophobia in most people because they have no idea where their tomatoes come from. As I’ve discussed previously, most tomatoes are gassed into a false ripeness and shipped across country to the highest bidder. Not to be all uppity, but those of us who buy from farmers markets or local produce stores know exactly where our food is coming from and don’t have a reason to get caught up in the fear cycle(even though I did).

Sure, food born illness is important but let’s not let the media tie our panites in a wad for us. 300 people have gotten sick from tomatoes, but in the time how many millions of people have eaten tomatoes? 10 million? 30 million?  One in a few hundred thousand doesn’t sound like scary odds to me, let’s not let the hype of a tomato recal ruin our perspective

Ah, the noble hamburger. Where does it’s greatness come from? From the pride of reusing meat from the butcher shop floor? From the bravery of a food that cannot be less than 15% fat? No, I think the greatness that is hamburger comes from it’s overwhelming simplicity. Nothing fancy, nothing overwhelming. Just some meat on a bun, maybe a few vegetables across the top for the sake of irony.

Beautiful.

But for all it’s simple glory the hamburger is not without depth. Which is why I’m doing this series on hamburgers. We’ll look at some tips, talk about why you want to make your own(Hint: In America it’s fucking illegal to sell you a medium rare burger) and I just may give you a peek at my world famous veggie burger recipe.

photo credit: justgrimes
But first how about a little history of this ground wonder. There are many legends around the origin of the hamburger. Some say that Odin once smacked Thor so hard that he bled hamburgers for days. Odin quite liked them, and developed the habit of beating Thor mercilessly whenever he was hungry. Others say the hamburger was a gift to the third Japanese emperor from a royal house trying to curry his favor. He immediately jailed the lot of them and had their holdings burned to the ground on the charge of witchcraft.

I believe another tale. The Mongols spend years riding roughshod over Asia and lived on horseback. They were known to keep tough cuts of meat under their saddles to pulverized it until it was edible. When the Mongols took their domination party to Russia they brought this meat with them, and the Russians made Steak Tar Tar out of it. Sailors brought it back to the port town of Hamburg Germany where diced meat(now using knives instead of a saddle, horse skin and butt force) was cooked and called a Hamburg Steak.

Naturally the German immigrants brought their food with them to America. But there things get fuzzy again.

The Menches Brothers claim their great grandfather invented the burger as we know it, ground beef patty on a bun. They were running a sausage booth at a fair in Hamburg, New York around 1885 and ran out of sausage(a critical error in sausage booth management). In a panic they fried the ground beef they had with every spice available(including coffee) just to have something to sell and when a customer asked what it was they called it a Hamburger on the fly.

However Louis Lassen claimed that in 1900 a young man ran into his luncheonette and wanted something he could eat on the go and quick. Louis pulled some Hamburg style steak out of the broiler and wrapped it in bread. There is one reason this version may be the true origin of the hamburger. Who would make up such a boring story?

The third contender is “Hamburger Charlie” Nagreen who in 1870 couldn’t seem sell his meatballs at a fair in Seymor, Wisconson(A common problem). So he figured if people could still walk around the fair with the food, they’d be more interested. He mashed one of the meat balls between two buns and Charlie went on to make a fourtune(in terms of 1870 Seymor, Wisconsin). Personally, I tend to believe this story. I mean, he has hamburger right in his name, they don’t just give that do you. You have to earn it.

Now that we know the anthropological origins of the Hamburger(always vital for cooking) we can get down to how you can build a better one. Next time.

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• Click Here For The Whole Series
• Next: Bad Ass Burgers Every Time

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Kait over at Kait’s Plate had this sugestion concerning my gravy woes:

I used to make gravy with cornstarch, but when I’d heat up the leftovers it ended up looking like gravy jelly. Not appetizing. Gravy is not supposed to hold its shape like that. Now I make it with a roux instead and it heats up better.

Pointless misspelling of common names asside, she has a point. A roux, for those of you who don’t know, is a mixture of flour and fat. You usually melt some butter in a pan and vigorously beat in a few tablespoons of flour, or if you’re making gravy you can just use the fat in the pan of what you’re cooking.

The nice thing about making a roux before you add the liquid to make the gravy is that you can control how “thick” the gravy is. The more you cook the roux the darker it gets(and the stronger the flavor). The darker the roux the less thickening power it has.

So if I took the exact same gravy recipe I was using, poured about 3 tablespoons of the fat into another pan and then slowly whisked in 3 tablespoons of flower, I’d have a roux. If I let that roux cook until it starts to get dark it will make a more fluid gravy when I add it back to the first pan which will reheat better the next day.

Good looking out Kait. And good looking too

Bah. Back in civilization after an extended time in the wild. Including all the typical pleasures of the open world like no Internet access, limited shelter and illnesses not seen in modern times.

But while out there I was able to try that “Beer-can-up-the-butt” chicken recipe I linked to last week from Serious Eats. Besides the inherent joy of violating a chicken this recipe has the added bonus of being really, really good. I’m definitely going to use it again in the future, but I’d like to list a few observations below:

• My bird cooked way faster than the time in the recipe. It wasn’t a problem for me since I use a leave in thermometer but if you were cooking it based purely off time I don’t think it would turn out right.
• This bird was beyond moist. It was porn star wet. I cut into it and juices overran the cutting board. I let it rest for at least 10 minutes so I don’t think that was the problem, I wonder if in the future I should skip the brining step? It didn’t hurt the taste just a bit messy.
• At then end of cooking you have a delicious chicken, sitting on a grill and filled with a fucking molten core of hot beer! Plan for pulling that beer can out ahead of time, it’s hard to eat when your hands have blistered beyond recognition.
• While this was good chicken, at the end I was reminded that it was just chicken. It seems there’s not a whole lot you can do to dress up chicken. There’s a plainness to it you can’t seem to cover up even with a good rub(that is a good poultry rub).
• Relatedly, don’t expect any kudos from friends and family who don’t eat the skin. That’s where all the flavor is on this bird. Don’t be angry though, their punishment is going through life avoiding taste in the vain hopes that they’ll be healthier, when really if the worst thing you ate in a day was the skin of a roasted chicken you’re eating pretty healthy.
• You could do this chicken in the oven. I think the reason it’s a grill recipes because a lot of juices, fat and beer drip out but if you put a drop pan in your oven it should be OK.

So that’s the report. Overall a great chicken, still just a chicken. But I’m always looking for new ways to cook a whole bird since that’s the cheapest, freshest meat you can find and this is a good one.

In spite of my massive number of readers, I’m not making much money off this site. I’ve got a little adsense up, but unless you scroll down the main page a few posts you’ll never see it. I’ve posted some affiliate links, but for some reason no one is buying my favorite zester. And all over this site I’ve had the tipjoy button up:

And so far I’ve gotten a whopping 0 cents.

And according to this article from TechCrunch I’m not alone. They’ve only collected about $2,500 for all 300 blogs that have signed up. I’m not complaining. Nobody owes me anything and a silly little tip button isn’t the kind of thing I would normally click on either, but I hope to do this professionally some day and I think tipjoy could be a big part of that. Let me explain why.

I genuinely believe people want to give to bloggers, writers and video creators who make something good. What they don’t want to do is go out of their way for it. And let’s face it, currently tipping a web site is a pain in the ass. You have to go through paypal and they take a certain percentage and you never know how much to give. Is a dollar enough? If you give $5 are you covered for life? If you give $10 and the guy quits blogging next month does he owe you a refund? The point of tipjoy is to remove all the headache.

Give a dime to any website, the only info they need upfront is your email address. When enough people promise money for it to be worth everyone’s while, they send you an email asking for whatever you promised. It’s a great idea, even with all the news sources I use a dime a piece wouldn’t feel like a burden to me. And I’m a cheap fuck. So what’s the point of this post?

I’m begging for a tip. Please click on the button below and give me a dime. If you’re reading through your RSS reader you may need to click through, or if you have javascript blocked you’ll need to enable it for this page. I think I’m worth it.

In addition to giving me a little bacon money, this is something of an experiment. I want to know how this works for you guys. Do you like this idea? Was this as easy as it seems? I’m looking to make this work for you really, since without you I don’t have a damn thing. How would you like to handle tips, ads or anything else on this site? Let me know with a comment or on the contact page.