No Guts, No Glory
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IN THIS ISSUE: Nanny duty at the food coop and a freezer’s depths plunged.
Appetizers
Park Slope Food Scöop
It’s been a while since our last bit of Park Slope Food Coop Gossip (PSFCoG). So I was pleased when a Friend of Gourmet (FRoG) wrote in last week: “Latest gossip from the nanny community in Flatbush: parents are making their nannies sign up for the Park Slope Coop under the parent’s names so that the nannies can work their shifts.”
This comes on the heels of actually good PSFC news. Last week, members voted in favor of boycotting products from Israel. This was a long-simmering issue, and the outcome was decisive at 67 percent of the 7,000 people who voted (the entire coop is made up of around 17,000 members). One must wonder: if the nannies have been doing the working as well the shopping…how many of them also did the voting? In any case, if you have more PSFCoG, I’m all ears. —Cale
Frozen Assets
Recently, an illness had me on a self-prescribed liquid diet for a day or two. I drank a [redacted] brand meal replacement beverage and regretted it—undignified and untasty. Then I remembered that I’m a freezer hoarder, so I rummaged around until I found it: a zip-lock bag of exactly twelve chicken wing tips, stashed after butchering whole wings to get flats and drummettes for Amiel’s chicken long rice back in January. The wing tips became six cups of simple chicken stock and then a pot of congee that I slurped down garnished with a few drops of sesame oil and soy sauce—dignified and tasty.
What a treat it is to find a weird thing in the freezer and then the perfect use for it! I swear that frozen baggie of eight wonton wrappers is going to come in handy…soon. What’s the deepest cut waiting in your freezer for the right day? I want to hear about it. —Nozlee
No Guts, No Glory
By Olivia Gieger
To envision Maine’s culinary future, one small company looks to the ancient, fermented past.
Maine Garum Company’s headquarters, nestled into a row of small warehouses in Waldoboro, Maine, smells like what it is: a room full of fermenting fish guts.
Inside the roughly 400 square foot space, Liam Fisher, the creator of Maine Garum, clicks open a blue plastic barrel to reveal a glopping brown sludge the consistency and color of urban slush the day after snowfall. A delayed plume of funk wafts out a few beats later.
Fisher has a poetic way of describing the vat that contains his life’s work at the moment: “this brown, muddy diarrhea crap.”