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1) "Tawkwaymenahnah" by Denise Lajimodiere, Poem-a-Day | Poets.org
Tawkwaymenahnah
Denise Lajimodiere
I walk around the small tribal
welfare cabin Kookum
had lived in, searching
for her grinding stones.
On hot August days
we would sit for hours grinding
chokecherries, pits and all.
She would hum or sing
softly in Cree, put the mash
into small patties on cookie sheets,
cover them with screens
to keep the birds out,
set them on the cabin’s low roof
to dry in the hot North Dakota sun.
In the dead of winter, she would soak
the dried patties overnight,
then fry them in bacon grease,
add flour and sugar,
the small shack filling with a tangy
sweet scent, and summer
flooded my every pore.
I take my grandkids berry picking,
they complain of heat, mosquitoes, ticks,
twigs catching their braids.
I wear my apron, make a pouch
to pick the low hanging berries
with one hand and toss them in
like Kookum did.
Kneeling before the flat rock,
braids tied back,
smaller rock clasped in hand,
I pound the fresh berries
pits and all.
Grandkids want to try,
and soon the rock is singing
my grandmother’s songs.
Copyright © 2021 by Denise Lajimodiere. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 24, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“One year, after picking chokecherries, I asked my grandmother to show me how to grind them using her rocks. Decades after her death, I decided I wanted my grandchildren to experience the traditional way of grinding the berries and took them berry picking in the hills around my home on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Soon they were taking turns grinding the berries and I had to hide my tears of joy at passing on a tradition my grandmother had passed on to me.”
—Denise Lajimodiere
2) Saffron Harvest in Full Swing in Northern Greece, Greek Reporter
"The yearly saffron harvest in Greece is in full swing in the rural areas outside of the northern city of Kozani, where hundreds of farmers crouch over fields of blooming crocus flowers for hours, picking what has long been the world’s most expensive spice.
Saffron, known as krokos in Greek, is highly treasured not only for its delicate, unique taste and vibrant hue, but also because of its painstaking, labor-intensive harvesting process.
The farmers who produce saffron are part of the Kozani Collective, made up of hundreds of people from 40 villages and farms which have been cultivating saffron crocuses for centuries.
Greeks have harvested saffron since ancient times. The tradition has survived throughout the centuries, and Greece currently produces about 5% of the world’s supply of the most sought-after spice.
3) Similac Introduces New Ghost Pepper Infant Formula, The Onion
"CHICAGO—Touting the new product as a nourishing and blazing-hot way to give newborns their daily nutrients, Similac introduced a new ghost pepper infant formula this week. “Our new formula contains 70% of a growing baby’s daily nutrients plus a tongue-scorching 1,000,000 Scoville Heat Units per serving,” said Kristin Cornell, spokesperson for Similac parent company Abbott Laboratories, bragging that only the bravest of newborns would dare to try an infant formula over 50,000 times hotter than any other on the market. “This isn’t your grandmother’s infant formula—this is for newborns who turn up their nose at the bland offerings on grocery store shelves and want to kick it up a notch with a searing punch of capsaicin in every sip. Whether used as a supplement to breastfeeding or as a substitute for it, this ass-burning formula gives mothers a bold new option for testing their infants’ abilities to test spices and withstand pain. We guarantee that this’ll get even the most daring newborn shitting flames and crying tears of mercy in no time.” Reached for comment, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that infants with a flair for risk skip the ghost pepper formula and instead try Gerber’s new baby food made with real deadly nightshade berries."
4) Avocado glut leaves Australian farmers crushed as prices hit guac bottom, The Washington Post
"PEATS RIDGE, Australia — On a recent morning, Tim Kemp slid open the door of the refrigerated storeroom on his family farm near Sydney and removed nine tons of avocados.
A few years ago, the giant bins of green fruit would have been worth almost $40,000.
Today, Kemp expects a fifth as much. “We are basically selling avocados for less than the cost of production,” he said.
Welcome to the great Australian “avo” glut.
In the land that allegedly invented avocado toast, the superfood that is its main ingredient is suddenly super cheap. A combination of increased supply and reduced demand — slashed by months-long lockdowns that shuttered cafes in Sydney and Melbourne — has sent the supermarket price of an avocado plummeting to about 60 cents.
Long before avo toast became obligatory on American brunch menus, it was big in Australia, where newspapers mentioned it as far back as 1929 and a Sydney cafe began serving it in the early 1990s. As demand soared in the past decade — sparking a debate over millennial spending habits — Australian avocado production more than doubled.
This year production has risen by 65 percent, according to John Tyas, the CEO of Avocados Australia, an industry group.
The boom is partly due to ideal growing conditions after years of drought, he said. But it’s also a result of tens of thousands of avocado trees — planted three or four years ago when prices were high — now beginning to bear fruit. A recent increase in avocado imports has only added more guac to the pile.
Just as growers were starting to pick this year’s record crop, coronavirus lockdowns in the country’s two most populous states took a bite out of demand.
The pain was initially felt on the farms of northern Queensland, where the orchards ripen first. Alan Poggioli is normally able to sell his small or blemished avocados for use as guacamole paste. But this year, the market was too flooded with fruit. So, for the first time, Poggioli took 10 to 20 tons of avocados to the back of the farm and dumped them.
“We just ran over them with some tractors,” he said.
The rise of the avocado, America’s new favorite fruit
“You’ve been really looking after that fruit, keeping everything off of it to give someone a good eating experience,” Pratt said. “To have it fall on the ground, it sucks.”
The Pratts scrambled to save the avocados, only to find they were often making just a few cents for each one they sent to market. Julie Pratt took to social media to sell avocados directly to customers. Tony began hawking them on the roadside and giving 110-pound bags of them to friends to feed to their cattle and pigs.
“They love the things,” he said. ... "
The 29-year-old private chef, who lives in New York City, had recently found himself out of work last year when he turned to baked goods, churning out cookies from a friend’s restaurant in Williamsburg. “I was biking 30 miles a day selling chocolate chip cookies,” Dreifus recalled in a phone conversation with Jewish Insider on Tuesday.
Business has grown considerably since then. Best Damn Cookies, as the company is called, now operates out of a permanent storefront in the market line at Essex Market food hall on the Lower East Side, where Dreifus oversees production at a nearby commissary kitchen. He says he is making thousands of cookies a week, while shipping orders nationwide.
When he spoke with JI, Dreifus was on his way to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant to pick up 30 pounds of chocolate. “A classic day,” he chuckled, “in the owning of a bakery.”
While Dreifus had previously done tours of duty at such Michelin-starred establishments as the French Laundry and SingleThread, Best Damn Cookies is, in many ways, a return to his roots: His paternal grandfather, Armin Dreifus, once ran a Jewish pastry shop, Stern’s, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Midwood.
“It’s deeply personal,” Dreifus said. “He came to this country from Germany as a Holocaust survivor, and it’s just kind of in my blood to open up this bakery.”
Until recently, Dreifus had largely ignored his Ashkenazi culinary heritage, highlighting different cultures instead. “If people inquire and are interested, there’s deep meaning behind each one of our cookies,” he told JI, citing one collaboration with a local Mexican restaurant, Sobre Masa. “We use their roasted corn and cinnamon and chile de árbol to make this gluten-free pinole cookie.”
His latest offering, however, hits closer to home. “Every cookie that we’ve made has a story to tell, except the most recent one, which is rugelach, because that is my story,” Dreifus said. “This is the first one where, basically, I’m collaborating with myself.”
Just in time for Hanukkah, which begins Sunday at sundown, Dreifus unveiled his latest creation, as part of a limited initial run, earlier this week. “I want it to feel sexy and exclusive,” he told JI. “I want people to feel really proud to eat this, versus just like, ‘Ugh, it’s just rugelach.’”
Even for an old-fashioned Jewish pastry, his approach, as he described it, is somewhat high-toned. Call it Jewish fusion. “My grandpa traditionally used walnuts, golden raisins and cinnamon. I was like, ‘Walnuts, raisins … that’s basically charoset,’” Dreifus said, referring to the sweet, chunky mixture traditionally served at Passover Seders. “So I started making a charoset rugelach.”
His take includes cinnamon walnut butter, apples and golden raisins, stewed with white wine and apple brandy — all combined with homemade cream cheese and sour cream.
For Dreifus, his foray into Jewish cuisine, particularly after years in fine dining, represents the answer to a question he has long been mulling. “It’s about finding my identity and how I feel,” he said. “I think most chefs grow up feeling this idea about, like, ‘What am I going to cook?’”
“To be frank, I felt a little like, ‘Am I going to make knishes?’” he said. “Like, ‘What am I going to make, Lipton soup mix, pot roasts?’ Which I love. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily what I want to do professionally.”
The rugelach, he suggested, is just the first step in a new direction, one that includes moving beyond cookies as he seeks to celebrate his past. “I’m an Ashkenazi Jew — German, Hungarian and Russian,” he said. “I have aspirations of opening up my own deli one day, named after my grandparents, Hannah and Armin Dreifus.”
The deli, which, he suggested, is likely a year or two in the future, will highlight “Central European food” through a “Jewish lens,” as he put it. “I have every intention of making this a reality,” he said, “of trying to push Ashkenazi cooking a bit further.”
“My family had very specific traditions, and I’d really like to show them in a little bit more of a microcosm, but also I have all these skills I’ve gotten from all these fancy restaurants, and I’d like to utilize them,” he said. “What’s the best way to showcase brine or mackerel, herring and pickles? Everybody freaks out about eating mackerel when you go to a Japanese restaurant, but maybe they’re a little bit more reserved when they go to Russ & Daughters.”
Persuading customers otherwise, he said, will take what he described as “a bit of chutzpah” and “a bit of pride.”
“What we have to offer is badass and amazing,” he said. “I don’t want us to feel timid by our food.”
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