I know who moved my cheese

Didn't I say this would happpen? (And by "this," I mean WholeFoods would wait until I was addicted to Seaside Cheddar and then take it off the shelves?)

This weekend, on our grocery hunt, I blithely strolled into the cheez dept to score my fix.

But.

I.

Couldn't.

Find.

It.

I peered behind Piave, looked under Limburger, searched by the Stilton. Nothing.

So I asked the cheeseguy, who gave me a sympathetic look and said, "Yeah ... I'm not sure whether we'll be carrying it any more."

What??

Apparently, the cost went up; instead of being sold to the store by the pound, it was now being sold per piece, and the price difference was going to be too great to be worth it.

And then I learned something interesting about WholeFoods's business model: according to cheeseguy, each store orders its stuff separately.

So rather than all Boston-area stores getting together and putting in a bulk order for Seaside Cheddar, it seems, the orders trickle in from individual branches. So much for buying power.

This does mean, of course, there's still reason for optimism: just because one branch of WholeFoods is no longer able to feed my addiction, it doesn't mean I can't score elsewhere.

Anyway, I suspect Seaside Cheddar is a gateway cheese. If I can't find more, I'll be forced to move on to the hard stuff (like a salty-sweet, butterscotchy aged Gouda).

Aaaahm ... waitin' for my (cheese) maaaaan ...

To reassure The Boy

The Boy is away in Miami this week, being corporate. As is often the case when he leaves me to fend for myself, he worries that I eat enough (bless 'im).

He knows I'm not likely to spend hours creating a culinary masterpiece when I can quickly slap together a couple of slices of bread and cheese (like the fabulous Seaside cheddar with which I am currently obsessed; it's strong and mature, with crunchy calcium bits. Apparently it's a WholeFoods exclusive. I'm convinced that they're waiting until I'm completely addicted, and then they'll stop carrying it ...)

Sorry, that was a tangent, wasn't it?

Anyway, to quell The Boy's fears that I'm starving myself, this was last night's dinner:



Okay, I did slap some bread together, but it was organic wholewheat, filled with Alaskan salmon and cucumber. Add a couple of grilled asparagus and some leftover salad (greens, tomatoes, apple, green beans) and it's a tasty plateful.

And this morning's breakfast?



A yogurt-banana-strawberry-orange smoothie and a bowl of oatmeal topped with strawberry-rhubarb sauce.

Yeah, I'd say I'm eating okay.

Weekend food roundup: Morocco, Mexico, France

Saturday night
The Boy whipped out his tagine (ooer missus!) and threw together Tagin Djaj Bi Zaytoun Wal Hamid, aka chicken stew with preserved lemons and green olives, from Claudia Roden's cookbook Arabesque.

The recipe calls for some of my favorite aromatic ingredients--saffron, lemon juice, garlic, ginger, cilantro--and even though I was supposed to be doing other stuff, I kept wandering into the kitchen to inhale. And take photographs.



In goes the cilantro:



The Boy discovered preserved lemons at WholeFoods, so every now and then he brings some home. They're marinated simply in salt and lemon juice, and have a bright flavor that combines the best aspects of lemon and salt while minimizing the brash sharpness and intensity of both. Unsuprisingly, they keep pretty well, so over the next few weeks we'll find excuses to chop up a chunk of rind and throw it into anything that needs a lift.

Sunday morning
We'd dined at Tu y Yo on Friday night, and came home with leftover rice, black beans and cochinita pibil--the result of a deliberate act of sacrifice on my part. Even as I ordered the dish, I was already dreaming of the reheated remains on a warm tortilla with grated cheddar and a fried egg.



Sometimes, dreams come true.

Sunday afternoon
You know how you develop certain expectations of a dish, based on repeated encounters? Take apple pie, for instance. You start to define it as a kid, and refine your benchmark at diners and holiday meals. Right now, you can probably conjure up your definition of apple pie: the depth of the dish; the level of cinnamon in the sauce; whether the crust is glazed or sparkling with sugar granules.

And then, one day, you meet a pie that blows all your preconceived notions out of the water.

My awakening came over lunch at Petit Robert Bistro in Kenmore Square. The source of my enlightenment: coq au vin.

I thought I'd had coq au vin before. But apparently that was merely chicken that had shared a pan with red wine.

This was something else entirely: deep and rich, the red wine sauce almost carmelized onto the meat, with a generous fistful of bacon to add a smoky undercurrent.



It was amazing, and it is now my gold standard for the dish, but it was also not my lunch of choice: I had andouille and boudin noir, which was lovely, especially as it came with thinly sliced carrots bathed in garlic butter. (They're vegetables, so it's healthy.) The Boy was lucky, though, that I didn't steal his entire plate of chicken.

It was our first foray into this restaurant; it won't be our last, especially as they also have such interesting options as calf's liver and tripe and sweetbreads. The Boy points out that it's close enough to my office to be a lunch destination, which is a frighteningly tempting fact.

Sunday evening
On the menu tonight: baked haddock with steamed bok choy. It's probably for the best.

WholeFood HealthFood

Yeah, I'm still on the nitrates-are-bad-but-red-meat-is-okay rant. Deal.

This is what we had for lunch today. Salad, yes (and good, too: mixed greens, shaved carrot, pear, cucumber, cherries, plus asparagus thin and tender enough to eat raw), but also a three-quarter-pound hunk-a hunk-a burning (grilled) toploin beef topped with chimichurri.

Plus a fabulous 2005 Bordeaux.



At least it was nitrate-free.

Breakin' bacon news

This morning, during our weekly grocery run, I checked in with the people at WholeFoods' cheese department to see whether they were likely to get the Vosges chocolate bar with bacon any time soon.

"Oh yeah, I heard about that," said the assistant cheesemonger. "Let me go check."

He came back with another guy, obviously the Big Cheese (oh, like you didn't see that coming), who explained that any new inventory additions needed to be approved at a regional level before making it to individual branches.

But there was an added wrinkle. An extra-thick rind, if you will.

"If it turns out the bacon has nitrates, we won't order any," he said. "That's what happened to the wasabi bar; turned out it had Yellow No. 5, so we stopped carrying it."

So WholeFood's selections of chocolate, wine, butter, beef, heavy cream, pork-liver terrine and brie are all healthy dietary choices, but a little nitrate is going to kill ya? Yeah, I know, I know ...

As we're heading to Austin in a week, home of WholeFoods' flagship store (80,000 square feet of organics, including walk-in beer cooler! Chocolate fountain! Live music!), I can check to see whether they care about nitrates. They probably do, the spoilsports.

And of course, worst-case scenario is just ordering some from the Vosges website, nitrates and all ...