You may have read some statistics recently about childhood hunger in the United States.

• more than 12.4 million – 1 in 6 kids live with food insecurity, and are at risk of hunger
• nearly half of US children will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood, and
• 90% of black children will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood
• over 900,000 Illinois residents rely on food pantries
• In Champaign County, over 32,000 people (18.8%) live below the poverty line
• In Champaign County, over 7,000 children (18.7%) live below the poverty line

- stats from Share Our Strength, Feeding America, Associated Press article (link broken), and the Eastern Illinois Foodbank

Please click on some of the links to the sources of this information to learn more about how childhood hunger affects our country.  With Thanksgiving and the holiday season are coming up, we are blessed to have an abundance of food in our house, enough to share with friends and family, but others don’t have that luxury.  Giving just a few dollars can make a difference.

If you want to help fight childhood hunger across the United States, donate to Share Our Strength.  $25 dollars can provide three meals a day for a month for a child.

Since this is a food blog, your special incentive here is to donate through fellow (much more famous) food blogger, Carol Blymire, who writes Alinea At Home, and wrote French Laundry At Home.  She is giving away some great cookbooks to five lucky winners.  The only way to get a chance is to donate through her link.  Read all the details and donate to Share Our Strength through her link.

If you want to keep the money local, donate to your local food bank.  Find yours through Feeding America.

No, not that CIA.  This is a food blog.  The only CIA that matters here is the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.  I have dreamed about going there and becoming a bona fide chef, but money, time, family, work, and life all have kept that as just a dream.  No worries, though.  I’ve found many ways to educate myself in the ways of the culinary arts, especially by surrounding myself with other people passionate about food.

Some of my education has come from the web.  I know how to use Google to search for recipe ideas, which helps a lot.  I also read a lot of food blogs.  You can see a long list of sites that I regularly follow, from authors near and far, on the right side of this blog.  The web has made food knowledge very available, but people at home still need to have a large base of knowledge to know how to find what they’re really looking for and how to execute what they want.

Many cooking websites and TV shows will tell you that one of the most important things you can do to help you cook better is to get a good knife (and keep it sharp).  I was blessed some years ago with a beautiful 8″ Shun Kershaw knife, which I continue to use and love, but it’s grown slightly dull.  I know that I can send it in to Shun for a free sharpening any time, but then I’d be left with one of a handful of less-than-stellar knives.  Not any more.

I got a package today in response to a Twitter trivia contest I won.  It was held by the Culinary Institute of America (@CIACulinary) presumably as a promotion for their official CIA line of products.  You can see their Cook’s Tools Twitter feed and their official web store to find out more information about their products.  These products and more from the CIA (including many books they publish) are also available on Amazon.

The question was:

What is the name of the reaction that is responsible for the browning of meats? Spelling counts!

I saw it and I knew.  I probably learned it from an old episode of Good Eats, like the Season 4 classic “A Chuck for Chuck” wherein we learn that proteins and sugars undergo an interesting chemical reaction at high heat that creates brown color and hundreds of tasty compounds (different from caramelization).  This is the “maillard reaction“.  It’s what makes grilled food taste good, it’s why you brown meat before making stew, it’s why you sear steaks.  It is, quite possibly, one of the most important reactions you will ever need to create when cooking.

I was the first to respond, and for my trouble I won a brand new 10-inch chef’s knife from their Hyde Park collection (NB: It’s on sale right now for 50% off, so if you’re in the market for a 10″).  It came in a beautiful black box with CIA logos all around.  I opened it up and saw a gleaming piece of German steel.  It is quite a different knife from my current Japanese-style Shun Classic.  I picked it up and felt its weight–very heavy in the hand, but fitting in the classic German style of knives.  If you have a Henckls or Wusthof knife, you know the feel I’m talking about.  Japanese knives are thinner than most, and so they weigh far less.  If you’ve been working with cheap knives, then the difference in weight when moving to a real professional-quality knife can be unsettling.

I haven’t gotten to use it yet, but I’m looking forward to taking advantage of its size when preparing my Thanksgiving feast.  Maybe I’ll go brunoise two quarts of mirepoix to really start getting the culinary school experience.  I’ll have to get used to the size and weight of it, but I think in the end it will help me be more productive.  It’s surprising what you could do if you had a couple more inches.

Oh, the inside of the box, if you can’t read it, says “Experience the difference.  Savor the results.”

Thank you to the Culinary Institute of America for holding this contest.  I am looking forward to using this knife for years to come.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this knife from the contest I mentioned, and was in no way asked to promote the CIA, their products, or their Twitter feeds.  If you buy the knife from them during their sale, I get no portion of the sales, but you will get a great knife.

I got some interview questions a while back from a local newspaper reporter doing a story on Dan “the Chocolate Man” Schreiber.  The article was published today, and I thought that it was a great piece on what he’s doing and where he’s headed.  I was quoted, briefly, in the article, but I wanted to share some of what I wrote in response to Meg’s questions.  The first was “Why is what Dan’s doing with chocolate important?”

My response:

Dan is a scientist.  He’s a really smart guy.  As much as he deals with high technology in his work & studies, he has a very deep appreciation for the traditional, some may say “old-fashioned” way of doing things.  He makes fermented foods, like sauerkraut, that most people just don’t make any more.  He is making chocolate using modernized traditional means–motorized stone grinding.  Much of the chocolate we buy in stores is mass-produced from a set of industrial candy-making materials including chocolate, flavorings (often artificial), emulsifiers, and sometimes other chemicals as well.  It’s made on a scale that requires consistency–every Hershey’s milk chocolate bar will taste the same.  They blend cacao from different places and roast it and treat it in such a way that it will give the same taste and texture experience every time.  There’s some value to that, but you also lose a lot of the characteristic flavors that chocolate can have.  Once you pay attention to it, you can taste things in a hand-made single-origin chocolate that you’ll never taste in the Hershey’s from the checkout lane.

I’ve come to realize that it’s somewhat like wine.  If you want to buy the cheap stuff, sure it will be “wine” and it can get you drunk, but the experience of even a $12 or $20 bottle can be so much more.  Yes, artisan chocolate is more expensive, but like fine wine you (can) get what you pay for.  Dan has an excellent reference “flavor wheel” on his site describing all the different flavors that may be found in your chocolate.

Aside from all that, Dan has already shown success in making great chocolate.  If/when he can manage to grow this into a larger business, our community will benefit from it.  Look at the Urbana farmers’ market, Common Ground Co-op, the various CSAs available–our community values high-quality, local, handmade food.  Dan’s chocolate fits the bill.

I was always skeptical of sweet potato pie.  I’m not sure why.  I’d say it was the idea of vegetables in my dessert, but I got over that for the delicious Indian dessert made with carrots cooked down in milk, gajar ka halva*.  I had it at a few different restaurants, still just trying a bite of my wife’s pie selection, since I didn’t want to commit to a whole slice.  I liked it.  It usually had a blend of spices similar to pumpkin pie, and a texture, well, a lot like pumpkin pie.  Some were bland, some were dry, and most had horrible crusts.

Pie crust is hard to get perfect all the time.  I’ve made some really good ones and some less-than-stellar examples of crust, but if nothing else they all tasted good.  The crust that went into this pie was a simple 3-2-1 ratio (as codified by Michael Ruhlman in his book, appropriately titled Ratio) of flour to butter to water.  I won’t go into the gory details of pie crust particulars as there are plenty of other people who can do it very well, like local food lover Anna Barnes in her Smile Politely piece Perfecting Pumpkin Pie.  Ruhlman also gives a lot of great tips in Ratio, and if you love to cook, I highly recommend this book.

The pie crust was initially made for Halloween night, as my wife and I dressed up as Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd from the 2007 Tim Burton musical film.  If you haven’t seen the movies or seen the stage musical, Mrs. Lovett is known for making little meat pies (possibly the worst pies in London) out of Mr. Todd’s unfortunate customers.  Not being a demon barber myself, I made cute little apple pies perfect for two people (or one glutton).  I didn’t remember to take pictures of those pies, but they were cute and delicious (probably the best pies in CU).  If nothing else, we won the costume contest at the party we went to, thanks to my wife’s expert costume-making skills.

I froze the rest of the pie dough, until one day I found myself in possession of two largish sweet potatoes that I had gotten from the farmers’ market.  For whatever reason, sweet potato pie sprung into my mind and I scoured the web for recipes.  I rarely give about.com much attention, but this time it seemed like the best recipe I could find was there, titled Mississippi Sweet Potato Pie.  I sliced the sweet potatoes and boiled them until soft, then (mostly) followed the recipe.  I reduced the sugar, increased the cinnamon, and added a little bit of some of my favorite fall spices like ginger and cloves.  I mixed it up with my immersion blender and got my crusts ready.

The recipe says two pies, but I didn’t believe it.  I think I was just in denial because I could only find one pie pan.  I made one pie and had some of the filling left over.  It wasn’t quite enough for a whole deep pie, but it was enough for a tart!  Thankfully, there was more than enough pie dough to go around, and so it went.  The pie turned out delicious and creamy.  It was moist and sweet, but lots of flavors coming through from the spices.  We’re still working on the last of the pie (which was unanimously loved by all in the house), and the tart will be sold tomorrow at our daughter’s school in their fine arts bake sale.  Since I mentioned it earlier, there’s already at least one person interested.  Here’s a sneak preview of what the buyer can expect.

* I know you might have been thinking pumpkin pie, but pumpkin’s actually a fruit!  I’m sure I didn’t know that as a child, but hey, it was covered in whipped cream.

Local legend, meat master, and friend Laurence Mate knows a thing or two about bacon.  I’ve written about him before at Smile Politely.  Two articles, actually.  People like Laurence are a great example of why the coming and going of food trends is meaningless.  What matters is the truth, the heart, the soul of it.

“For those of you who don’t give a shit about the fad but care about actual bacon, I am the bearer of glad tidings.” – Laurence

He wrote a post yesterday that talks about how many sources claim that bacon is dead.  Or, at least the fad of bacon in everything has passed.  I have succumbed in the past to bacon’s siren song.  Come on, chocolate bars with bacon and bacon ice cream are delicious.

Bacon as a trend, a fad, a meaningless addition to a sandwich, or as the flavor du jour may be on its way out.  Get the cheap, paper-thin, watery, national brand rashers off our plates.  Keep bringing on the good stuff–as long as people like Laurence are keeping the tradition alive, taking sublime meat and fat from well-raised animals, bacon deserves to live forever.