Category Archives: food

Jumpmeat

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Via FoodReporter:

In an effort to promote the eating of kangaroo meat (tastes sort of like auk), the Australian kangaroo meat industry association sponsored a contest to come up with a more, um, palatable name, along the lines of ‘ham’ or ‘pork’ instead of ‘pig meat.’  The eventual winner, from thousands of suggestions, ended up being ‘australus,’ which is fine but not interesting.  My favorite: ‘jumpmeat.’  Also, you can apparently buy ‘kanga bangas,’ sausages made from jumpmeat, in Australian supermarkets.

Locavore

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We had a nice dinner tonight at The Linkery in San Diego, which has a locally-oriented menu.  Their menu goes to great lengths to describe the origin of each ingredient, so it takes a long time to figure out what you want to eat.  But by the time you do, you know the name of the farm that grew the greens and the variety of pomegranate and the breed of pig that went into the making of your bacon.  They’re meat centric, which is unusual for that kind of place, but I had a great sea bass entree.

Best of all, we were there with our kids and the kindly staff took them in stride.

I especially appreciated the coffee menu, which described the origin and roast of each of their offerings.  It’s a pet peeve of mine to see descriptions such as “Vienna roast” and “hazelnut” and “Columbian” and “shade grown” listed in succession; they’re all different variables and you could easily have a Vienna roasted hazelnut flavored (yuk) shade grown Columbian coffee.  The Linkery got it right and I ended my meal with a great apple pie and coffee from a Sr. Juan Leon.

Very hip of them, they also have a blog, with a useful entry on their categories of meat.

“Fresh & Easy”

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Tesco’s new medium-format grocery has a name, “Fresh & Easy“, and a new location in my neighborhood, at the corner of Mountain View Ave. and Redlands Boulevard, in Loma Linda, CA. I had thought that they were going to build at the corner of Mountainview Ave. and Barton Road, a few blocks away; more importantly, the latter was on the all-important route to the kids’ school. Still, I’m curious to see how this expensive retail experiment is going to pan out, especially in the rapidly changing demographics of the Inland Empire.

Tesco coming to Redlands!

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Tesco, the big British grocer, has a secretive $1b plan to open medium-format stores in the US, starting in the Southwest. I read something about it in The Economist a while ago (PR here), but just figured out that the distribution center, near the old March Air Force base, is going to support, among others, a store in my town of Redlands. They’re planning to rapidly build out medium format stores, positioned between Whole Foods and Ralph’s, say. There’s some question whether the format, which has been wildly successful in the UK, will work in the US, but Tesco has decided to go big quick and trust that their ability to rapidly respond to changing customer needs will serve them. Just in the same way that a British family will pick up dinner and groceries at the Tesco store near the train station on the way home, the new Tesco in Redlands is going to be on the route from our house to our kids’ school.

Redlands doesn’t have a Whole Foods, much to my chagrin (but good for my wallet), but it does have a successful Trader Joe’s and the usual large-format players: Ralph’s, Von’s, Albertson’s, Wal-Mart and Cosco. Interestingly, my neighborhood also has an 0ld-school family-owned medium-sized grocery, Gerrard’s, that would seem to be in the cross-hairs of Tesco’s plans. But maybe not.

This should be interesting.

If you like coffee, you’ll like…

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…single estate, often organically grown, light roasted fresh coffee from Terrior. I can still remember the first time I had a cup of La Minita (Tarrazu, Costa Rica) coffee at George Howell’s old Coffee Connection store in Harvard Square in the early 90s. Mind opening. He’s still selling La Minita, although they’re done for the season. Here’s what I’ve got lined up next instead:

  • Sing Addis Ketema Cooperative, Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia
  • Daterra Farm Special Reserve, Cerrado, Brazil
  • Elkhill Estate, Coorg, India
  • El Injerto, Huehuetenango, Guatemala SHB
  • Maria Santos’ Los Sauces, Cauca, Colombia (great great coffee from a tiny 13 ha farm)

And he’s on a mission to wake America (at least) up to lighter roasts, alternatives to the dark roasted style popularized by Starbucks. I suppose Starbucks roasts that way so that their coffee retains some flavor in their milk drinks.

The emphasis on single estates, of course, is an echo of vineyards and he uses the language of wine tasting to describe these coffees.

George Howell is the Emmet Eiland of coffee. More on this later.