Category Archives: Food

It’s not hard to see that hibachi is one of the biggest fad/trends in American-Asian cuisine in the last ten years. I thus present to you a scenario where car salesmen or stuntmen take charge of a 1,000,000 BTU hibachi griddle.

…no, not literally cooking the dog, but cooking along side the dog. That’s what the Japanese cooking show “Cooking with Dog” is all about. Check out this, um, uniquely Japanese twist (?) on the traditional cooking show.

Courtesy of SeriousEats

The organic movement started in the early 1900s by a small group of farmers who believed in fresher foods in a time where chemical fertilizers were just becoming the norm. And this trend continued for most of the 20th century. Now, however, there are a myriad of governmental regulations that determine whether or not that coveted green and white seal gets slapped on to the side of a jar of peanut butter or a box of crackers.

For awhile I’ve always thought that large scale organic food, like so many other things, was a gimmick that stemmed out of a legitimately good-natured cause. My mom and I had bantered about it before, with her saying that she didn’t want those pesticides in her food (valid point), and me quoting a statistic I read somewhere saying that if everyone in the world ate organic food, half the population would starve. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the concept of something being organic is one of the best things in the world of food. I just question the legitimacy of the current mass produced “organic” foods.

Now I might have a reason to think that it is just a smoke screen.

An article published in the New York Times yesterday cites the recent outbreaks of salmonella in peanut products, including some manufactured by Clif Bar and Cascadian Farm.

“The plants in Texas and Georgia that were sending out contaminated peanut butter and ground peanut products had something else besides rodent infestation, mold and bird droppings. They also had federal organic certification.”

Well that certainly makes me feel good about the safety of organic foods. Sure they may not have pesticides in them, but the illusion that they are “safer” cannot necessarily be maintained. Come on, if I’m going to get salmonella or bird droppings in my organic peanut butter that I paid 50% more for, what’s the point of buying organic?

As the article quotes, “Although the rules governing organic food require health inspections and pest-management plans, organic certification technically has nothing to do with food safety.”

So buying organic might keep some pesticides out of your home, but it won’t necessarily bring safer products in. Is there a solution ? I think so: buy locally at farmer’s markets.

Although there is no guarantee that the foods you buy there are organic, there’s a pretty darn good chance that they are. And in light of the green movement, it is a much more ecologically sound action to buy foods locally over organically. You’re supporting local farmers in your community, and you’re keeping the amount of fuel needed to transport those foods to a minimum. They usually cost the same or less than regular organic supermarket foods, and usually are fresher than anything you buy in a supermarket, organic or not.

I’m not saying to eliminate organic foods from your pantry. Just next time you’re about to buy something organic from a commercial supermarket, ask youself, “is there somewhere that I could buy this locally, and probably fresher as well?” The results won’t let you down, and you can feel good about supporting the local ecomony and the earth at the same time.

I can’t say that I have ever been as excited to eat at a restaurant as I was the night I stepped into the Original Pizza Palace for the first time in nine years. From the moment my feet walked up the cement steps, complete with metal handrails, and over the threshhold onto ancient, weathered hardwood floors, I knew that I had struck gold.

 The place had but little changed. The spot lighting highlighted the same eclectic mix of local art hung tastefully yet unfussily on the newly painted yellow and green walls. The mood seemed the same, from the hustle and bustle of waiters and waitresses scurrying to and fro, from kitchen to table to kitchen, to the antique coke machines that still sat in the corners. And then there was the smell. 

Dear god, that smell. I walked in through the doorway and it hit me like a well-aimed brick: I smelled my childhood of eating out, at least once a week, at this place. It was as if nothing had changed. Garlic, light albeit present, wafted through the dining room, accompanied by the smell of tomatoes and baking dough…. I was in heaven.

This was before the food reached the table. Because the ovens were packed that night, I myself didn’t order anything that needed to be baked. I was lucky, however, as in addition to my white clam sauce with spinach fettucini (!) and copius garlic bread, a friend a few tables over let me have a slice of her pizza as an appatizer.

I held the piece up to take a bite, but before I could, I got a smell. In that smell, ten years or so of memories came running back to me. I litterally sat there with this piece of pizza hangning from my mouth for a good ten seconds, looking like a total idiot, before I realized that I was getting stares. I finally let myself take a bite.

It was incredible. The exact same taste as I remembered it. The clam sauce was amazing. Everything that I had there was amazing. There was nothing wrong, nothing out of place, nothing unpleasant. It was pure epicurian, cuillinary bliss.

I have, in the last week, made another two visits just to make sure that I wasn’t fooling myself with the quality of the food by the placebo affect. I was not.

Pizza Palace is back, fired up, crankin’, and ready to roll back into Gainesville’s food scene as an incredible Italian joint à la bohème, full of spunk, local history, and above all, great food.