Plus: Bud Light’s cowardice; I can’t stop cooking; and my refrigerator, exposed
Manu Buffara, today’s guest on Food is, unequivocally, what you would call a fancy chef. Her food is elegant and thoughtful, she loves sourcing ingredients for her restaurant, Manu, in thoughtful ways, and she has working relationships with her local fishermen. Much of what she does can be seen as a template for how restaurants–notably, yes, upscale restaurants–should be moving forward. This was an energetic and fun and diverse and wide-ranging conversation, and I’m so glad we got to meet Manu and hear about the work she’s doing.
Can I make an ask? If you love the podcast, and you haven’t yet, would you please leave us a review on Apple? It really helps. Marksisms below!
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This Week’s Marksisms
Greenhushing Rears Its Ugly Head
Some friends and I had a discussion yesterday about ‘greenhushing’ – companies that kind of do the right thing, whether around sustainability, equity, gender, cultural issues, or anything else – and then stay mute or at least quiet about it, for fear of reprisals from those who will, whether out of ignorance, vested interest, or bias, criticize them for it.
I found this WaPo piece stunning. Bud Light (I found it surprising that it’s not Bud “Lite”), a brand not exactly known for its progressivism, sent a trans person some personalized cans of beer. She did a TikTok with Anheuser-Busch to publicize this. So far, who cares? This isn’t exactly earth-shattering.
But a number of anti-trans people – what do you call them? gender intolerant? jerks? regressives? fearful little children? – reacted predictably. Hatefully, spitefully, idiotically.
Brian Broome, in this piece, uses this situation to explore the concept of masculinity in a way I found helpful. But there’s another point here, which is that Anheuser-Busch beat a hasty retreat from their originally gender-tolerant stance.
I don’t expect a lot from corporate America. Bud Light’s simple gesture was not exactly bold, but it was at least a bit enlightened. Its lame retreat, however, was cowardice, and perfectly defines greenhushing. If you’re going to do the right thing, you’ll probably get criticized for it – that’s how things are when everyone has a loudspeaker – so you might as well acknowledge that in advance and be prepared to explain how what you did was right in the first place. (More here.)
Wait: There’s Too Much Good TV?
Suddenly, there is too much TV. Like if it were January, and I had a cold, and it was snowing, and my car was broken, I’d be pretty happy about it. As it is, it’s freaking inconvenient. I’m trying to keep up with the NBA; that’s impossible. I’m trying to keep up with this completely bizarre Great Expectations; that I can manage. I’m keeping up with Barry, out of loyalty, even though it may well have jumped the shark. But now there’s The Diplomat (on Netflix, which maybe is emerging from its slump), which is more fun than all the other stuff put together. If I didn’t have to work, I’d have finished that thing already.
More Root Vegetable Love
I continue to cook. I seem to have fallen into a pancake-flatbread mode in the last week, a funny kind of one-“pot” thing that relies either on my sourdough starter or root vegetables.
The starter thing I’m not getting into right now; suffice it to say that I’m still playing. But the root vegetable pancake situation began with my grandmother’s potato “nik” – which is essentially a giant latke, and about which I’ve written many times (and included in probably ten cookbooks) – and continued with Michael Romano’s beet “roesti,” which he taught me around 1988 (and which has been reprinted all over the place, including here, evidently “my” recipe).
My grandmother used potatoes, onion, egg, matzo meal. Michael used grated beet, a little flour, rosemary. But purity is unnecessary here; the fact is, of course, that you can combine almost any shredded root vegetables (and even add greens, if you like), as long as some of them have starch (or you’re willing to add egg and/or flour, or anything else with a binding effect), and you cook them gently and long enough. The other day I did a mix of about one-quarter beet, one-third potato, one-quarter turnip, and (let’s see, that’s ten twelfths?) one-sixth shallot (all measurements approximate!), pressed them into this (rather beautiful Made In) nonstick pan, with some butter (in this case), and cooked that mess slowly and lovingly for like a half an hour, turning once. I love that thing so much, and so does everyone else. Don’t give me that “I’m sick of root vegetable” thing: I’m going to miss them.
And a Refrigerator Revealed
Finally, though not unrelated: The comedian Dan Ahdoot, who was on our podcast and just had me on his (stay tuned) asked me to take a picture of the inside of my refrigerator. As a disclaimer, I’ll say that the inside of my refrigerator is about five percent of the food in my house, because we have four freezers (I know, but it’s working out) and a sizeable pantry. But even I was kind of amazed that it looks like a bunch of plastic bags and root vegetables.
That’s kind of what it is. The bags are mostly greens (and a few more root vegetables). There’s some other “normal” stuff, as well as some things that have been sitting there for months or years. A little dairy. It’s not all that interesting, I see.
Dan teased me mercilessly. But as I said, it’s working out.
See you later, friends!
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