Locally Grown Girl

Neighbor

Possibly the cutest college fundraising effort I've ever seen is here. Maria's driveway is right around the corner from our driveway, so I plan on ordering myself some fried chicken and sweet potato pie and (hopefully) overpaying because I've heard--a thousand times or so--that college is pricey these days. (Unless you go to Finland, in which case: free! No kidding! Although non-Finnish-speakers might see some tuition in 2010, if they're studying in English and getting a Master's degree in something.)

I looked up Grambling State U online; it's "a historically black four-year institution in Grambling, LA, chartered in 1901." Their marching band is supposed to be one of the best in the country. Ralph Waldo Emerson was its second president.

The Samosa Secret

1. On our first trip, the samosas were so delicious we made plans to kidnap the theoretical old lady who made them. And maybe the little man who told us we'd like the chutney because it's like ketchup. (There is no way that ketchup and mint chutney have anything in common.)
2. On our second trip, they were equally delicious, but we began to suspect something was up, like perhaps the lady made them and the shopman fried as needed throughout the day.
3. On our third trip, they were different. It was suggested we micro-vave them. We didn't, they were good, but it just added to our confusion.
4. On our fourth trip, Cap'n discovered that the kind little shopman was pulling cartons out of the freezer to fry samosas for us, like a...I dunno, a go-go taquito. It was a shock. They were, once again, delicious.
5. On the fifth trip, we "kidnapped the samosa queen" by simply buying a carton of samosas out of the freezer. The magic samosa is "Punjabi Style Jumbo Vegetarian Samosa" from Deep Foods. We had been paying $1.50 each, and feeling like that was a fine deal for how great they are. The carton of eight was six bucks, and came with two generous packets of the green chutney that we've started calling ketchup at some point in the last two months. We used the deep-fryer to fry four of them for dinner (with a pile of carrots for me and a salad for the Cap'n, we have not sunk that low, yet) and it was spectacularly great. They are an amazing product, and even knowing the truth--the "samosa lady" is a factory in India--they are still just pure pleasure. And the chutney is maybe the only frozen food condiment I've ever seen that contains not a single corn-based ingredient.

We have eaten samosas in New York, Vancouver and Seattle, in restaurants that range from very typical Seattle lunch buffet places to nice little Brooklyn neighborhood places that are quite different from Seattle's little neighborhood Indian places. In Vancouver, I've eaten at both Vij's and Rangoli, some of the best food I've ever eaten, period--and also at a night market, where it was halal and delicious and cheap.  But I've never had a samosa this good. My two current theories are

A: Indian food brands create frozen meals on a vastly better scale than American food brands. This won't be difficult to determine.

B: There is a vast Samosa Continuum, with US restaurant versions towards one end, and the Deep frozen ones further along. How much further along can only be determined by traveling to India and eating every samosa we're offered for about two months straight. This is more difficult to accomplish, as it should properly include home-cooked samosas from verifed non-pre-frozen sources. It should also include fancier restaurant versions, and standard lunch stall kinds. Maybe we'll learn that the Punjabi Style Jumbo Vegetarian is the best samosa on the planet. Maybe we'll find the right samosa queen to kidnap.

Fair Food

Going to the very first day of the Puyallup Fair resulted in a few bits of unexpectedness. The lines for scones were impossibly long--we ended up waiting about an hour and got a bag of 13 fresh-baked, jam-loaded scones...they were so warm, Cap'n said, "there's pain in every bite.'

He had watched the teenager split and fill the hot scones, wearing nothing but thin plastic gloves.

Because the scones were for both now and later, I wandered off the scone line to get something immediately, not line. The first no-line place I stopped at handed me a crusty golden loaf the size of pound of butter. Biting in, I discover ground meat, a few onions, and thick slabs of melty cheddar. It had been deep-fried. It fed three of us waiting in line, and was stupid good. So we'll be using our fryer to make some local versions of that.

The grange organizations were all there, as were Emergency Food Network and their awesomeness(and they had run out of magazines of ours to give away, the mags that featured them in a big story.) There were new hybrids of apples and pears I hadn't seen before, and you know, I hope city readers of this blog go and meet those farmers. They may not be the ones you meet at the farmers' market, but who they are and what they do is some of the reason that food traditions and ideas haven't been lost.

Food comes from dirt. Doesn't matter how far away--it's all dirt. Food grows, because people sprinkle tiny seeds and clippings into healthy dirt, and coddle it while it grows, then cut it down so we can eat it. Being at the ag side of the Fair is much more mission-focused than the consumer-directed farmers' market.