MasterChef USA contestant Seby Joseph named Captain of Texas Food Revolution

Joseph

Seby Joseph, the youngest contestant to compete on celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay's hit MasterChef USA cooking competition, has joined the Texas Food Revolution -- a group of volunteer chefs who demonstrate locally-produced food at the Market at Alhambra on Saturday mornings.
  Joseph, an 18 year-old resident of McAllen, Texas, will demonstrate a dish using ingredients from the Market at Alhambra on Saturday, October 1, from 10am-1pm at 17th & Fresno in McAllen.
   "I am all up for it, man," Joseph said about being named Captain of the Texas Food Revolution.
   Now a culinary student at the Art Institute in Austin, Joseph's path to notoriety started in the Winter of 2011 when he was accepted as a contestant on the MasterChef USA television series. He was the first contestant chosen by Ramsay to pass the cutting and chopping challenge of the competition, selected from a pool of thousands of competitors to participate in the televised portion of the competition. He was eliminated in the second episode among the final 38 competitors.
   "I left high school to participate in the second season of Fox's MasterChef USA. You can imagine how upset and worried my parents were that I might be jeopardizing my college future by leaving high school during the final semester of my senior year," explained Joseph.
   "But I had to follow my dream, and the chance to learn from chefs Gordon Ramsay and Graham Elliott, and famed restauranteur Joe Bastianich, was too rare of an opportunity for me to waste," Joseph said.
   Besides hosting the U.S. version of the television series Hell’s Kitchen, Ramsay also owns several restaurants, hosts other TV shows and is a noted cookbook and biographical author.
  Elliot is also a restaurateur who was named “Best New Chef” by Food and Wine magazine in 2004. Bastianich is a well-known vintner and restaurateur with establishments in New York Las Vegas, Italy and Argentina. Together they host MasterChef USA.
   Though Joseph studies culinary arts in Austin, he said that he considers McAllen his home, a place where his parents live and where he moved to from India when he was 13 years old.
   Joseph said that he's joining the Texas Food Revolution because he believes in the quality of food that's grown and raised locally, and that he's eager to help South Texas' small farmers and artisan food producers thrive.
   "I'll be in downtown McAllen taking part in this stunning event. I'll be cooking some local favorites with a little Indian twist, always with fresh, seasonal and more importantly local ingredients," Joseph said.
   Now graduated from high school, Joseph pursues his career in culinary arts independently, making the difficult decision to act against the wishes of his parents, who hoped he would pursue a more traditional career, he said.
   The Texas Food Revolution will gather donations during Joseph's appearance at the Market at Alhambra Saturday to help with his culinary school expenses.
   Joseph joins a growing list of Texas Food Revolution captains that includes James Canter, chef at Alhambra restaurant, Lana De Leon, publisher of Namaste Valley magazine, Gene Carangal, publisher of Valley Foodie food blog, Evana Vleck, marketing director of the Edinburg Chamber of Commerce, and more than a half dozen other volunteers aiming to promote small farm and ranch food production in the Texas Valley.

END

Press contact
David Robledo 956.203.4152

Interviews with Seby Joseph and other Texas Food Revolution captains can be arranged

Farm to Table Dinner by the One and Only James Canter

What: Farm to Table Dinner by Chef James Canter
When: Sept 16, 2011, 7pm
Where: Private McAllen home open to anyone who wishes to join
Cost: $95, proceeds will benefit the Texas Food Revolution

You may have seen Chef James Canter in his youth rocking out backyard grill gatherings like an undiscovered Bobby Flay in the Guerilla Gourmet, an independent cooking show that Canter starred in. See an episode of this classic sleeper by clicking here.
   These days Canter is a little more serious about cooking, but he's still having just as much fun.
   Instead of eating drunken bearded clams on surfboards, Canter now has his culinary sights focused on promoting small-farms of the Texas Valley.
   Last year he opened a Farmers' Market in McAllen inside the Alhambra Restaurant, Bar, and Hookah Lounge, a market that you may have read about in The Monitor newspaper.  You might have read about Canter's farm to table dinners there too, as seen here.
Now everyone has the chance to participate in one of Canter's famed farm to table dinners at an exciting McAllen home. To sign up, stop by The Market at Alhambra this Saturday at 17th & Fresno in McAllen between 10am and 1pm and look for the Texas Food Revolution table. We'll reserve your spot and also offer free samples of food made using ingredients purchased at the market. Or call 956.994.9754 to reserve a spot.
   Proceeds from this dinner will help fund the Texas Food Revolution, a team of volunteer chefs who sample local food to the public.
   Eat local. It's thousands of miles better.

Please forward this message to anyone who loves fresh food.

Brownsville's eco-bus heads to the Texas Food Revolution

Boswell, eco-bus Captain, right

The eco-bus created by Brownsville's Rio Bravo Wildlife Institute that runs on discarded vegetable oil is heading to the Texas Food Revolution after finishing a six-city, statewide tour.
    The Institute will display the bus from10am-1pm at the Texas Food Revolution this Saturday August 6th at Alhambra Restaurant on 17th street in McAllen.
   After a long haul on the road, eco-bus captain and RBWI outreach coordinator Joe Boswell said the trip is a welcome one.
   "It's been a long three-months out on the road," Boswell said in an interview with Fresh Tex-Mex.
   "The trip to McAllen to visit the Texas Food Revolution has been a long time coming," Boswell said, "and I'll definitely enjoy it".

The eco bus on its Texas tour

   Boswell, who doesn't own a car,  can be seen riding his small silver bicycle around Brownsville, a bicycle that folds to the size of a sun hat.
   Click here for details about the Texas Food Revolution.

SATURDAYS 10am-1pm, 519 S. 17th Street, McAllen

The Texas Food Revolution is the hottest weekly food celebration in the Texas Valley. Held at Alhambra Restaurant on McAllen's sexy 17th Street every Saturday, it's the perfect spot to rejuvenate and fill up on fresh-squeezed juices, prepared foods like Gulf-shrimp and mango ceviche and French pastries. Or sit down and enjoy a daring brunch menu. Don't forget to stock up on locally-grown, pesticide-free fruits and vegetables, fresh farm eggs, and local ranch beef, pork, chicken, lamb and more. Vendors at the Texas Food Revolution offer a discount or freebie to people who shop with cloth or paper bags.
   Farmers & ranchers are the leaders in the Texas Food Revolution. Ask them any question about their food, and they'll look you in the eye with the answer.
   Behind the farmers are an army of chefs and home cooks who know that food grown locally is better.  When gas was cheap, our food supply system became dependent on shipping food across countries and continents. Food lost its soul along the way. Now, this Texas Valley soil is home to one of the strongest food revolutions in the country, with  fresh and delicious, locally grown and produced food to help everyone live full, happy lives ... while promoting a local small-farm economy and saving taxpayers untold indigent health care money.
   The Texas Food Revolution is being fought on terrain where a Food Revolution has been waged since 1910, when Francisco Madero launched an attack against the autocrat despot Porfirio Diaz.
   The Texas Valley, the war's north-eastern boundary, was a hideout for the rebel heroes like Pancho Villa, who became a symbol of a people's movement that fought for the right of every Mexican citizen to have land to grow food on.
   The farmers of the Texas Food Revolution grow food on this same soil that remains a sanctuary to rebel heroes who work for the people's access to fresh food.
   Get your food from the Texas Food Revolution every Saturday 10am-1pm at the Market at Alhambra, 519 S. 17th, McAllen.
   Buy locally-grown. It's thousands of miles better.
   To participate in the Texas Food Revolution as a vendor, call 956.203.4152 or email foodrebel@texasfoodrevolution.com

Madison Cowan: the Hendrix of food is now on the scene

By David Robledo

For South Texas Nation magazine



Cowan  http://www.facebook.com/MadisonCowan

Tall, dark, and lean, Madison Cowan is the Hendrix of  food, an alchemist of sorts who transmutes soul through food much like Jimmy Hendrix communed with the universe through his guitar. 
  The depth of Madison's speech coupled with his physical prowess might also remind you of Muhammad Ali. His relaxed British accent that hardly meets a consonant speaks authoritatively from another world, and food's the portal. 

   Madison, restaurateur and author of Soul Voyage, insists almost feverishly that he cooks "soul food."  Not fried chicken and waffles (though he says no dish or ingredient should ever be ruled out), but food that draws inspiration from stints in four star kitchens and character from time that he spent in the U.S. military, and then, in the usual order, homeless on two continents.

   For Madison, taller than six feet and quick like a panther, soul food is a rock-salt and frozen-vodka watermelon basil salad which he refers to as "wicked," or a knockworst and sweet potato satay which he describes as "proper".

   His creations consistently floored Chopped's foodie icon judges -- restaurateur Mark Murphy, chef-star Amanda Freitag, and new-Italian authority Scott Conant -- during the show's finale, aired Tuesday, May 24.

   Like a black and agile E.F. Hutton, when Madison talks about his food, judges hang on every word. Through the show's four rounds of elimination, Madison's food is only able to inspire judges. His work remains virtually impervious to criticism other than Murphy's whimsical "too many prunes on my plate" critique. Slightly pudgy and with the over-partied look of a privileged, third-generation Jersey mobster, Murphy might have benefited greatly from eating the eight prunes Madison served him.    
   "You sing with your soul, you make love with your soul. You definitely must cook with your soul," Madison lectured the judges as they nodded, making sure to throw in a gratuitous sex and food correlation.

   Explaining that "99 percent" of his food is "connected with women," Madison is fond of reminding his public that the food that he cooks from the soul can in fact be used to convey emotion to women, or convey emotion about women.

   Everything Madison says and does seems larger than life, as if he's keyed into a world of food essences through which he's able to transmute soul.
   Despite his ability to flavorfully execute the talk, he notes that "It's what you do, not what you say," that's important, advice he hopes to demonstrate to his daughter with his performance on Chopped.         

   Madison defeated three chefs to win the competition, including a former working associate with Anthony Bourdain whom Bourdain characterized as an "evil Energizer Bunny," and a self-professed Christian chef whose cottage cheese-orange-juice ice cream and beignet dessert riveted and titillated judges.
   Though Madison has created a Facebook page hoping to persuade the Food Network to give him his own show as a celebrity chef, we desperately hope that, instead, Madison is simply given time to cook without the shallow, distracting pressures and demands of production deadlines. Like Jimmy's experimental, self-recorded eight-tracks laid down before his career took off, what Madison does for the sake of food itself could in the end define any greatness he might achieve. +

Source: Chopped's final episode at  http://www.hulu.com/watch/230491/chopped-crunch-time#s-p1-so-i0

A Garagiste for the wine revolution

Page uncorks The Stash at the Santa Fe.

This story first appeared in South Texas Nation magazine. To participate in this year's Bryan Page wine dinner at the Santa Fe Steakhouse in McAllen, click here.

By David Robledo
Like musicians who open doors of perception, Bryan Page, a winemaker from Orange County, California, will usher you to the other side using fermented grapes.  He smashes them by hand with his brother Chris to produce limited edition wines spanning Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay under Page Wine Cellars and Le Nu labels.  Bryan’s solo-project, the Revolver Wine Company, offers edgier, brasher wines.  All Page wineries are part of a broader garage movement of Napa Valley vintners who handcraft wine in small warehouses, often to the sounds of exceptional Rock & Roll. 
   Page has deep roots in the world of cuisine. His track to hand-crafting wine includes working as server and sommelier in noted California restaurants.  But it was during a food and wine tour through France’s  Bordeaux, where the renegade Garagiste movement was born, that Bryan first imagined making wine as a trade, applying the insights he’d gleaned throughout a decade or so working Napa Valley’s food and wine scene. He no doubt hoped to apply the Garagiste’s penchant for technical excellence, a balls-out work ethic, and avant-garde sensibilities toward fermenting Napa Valley grapes.  The first barrel casked in 1997 yielded 36 cases of Page Proprietary Red,  a highly-sought commodity.

   WINE REVOLUTION
Bryan named his Revolver Wine Company after The Beatles’ Revolver album, that renegade work whose title suggests the pscyho-spiritual changing of perception that the beat generation yearned for.  Born in 1966, the year of Revolvers’ release, Bryan might be a wine-crafting Dionysian love child of the album’s spirit.  You may literally transcend upon first sampling his wine, and more than likely you will become a devotee.  Revolver also suggests an old-fashioned six shooter, a fitting image to connect with a winemaker whose tasting room is in a ghost town and who ends days of hard work popping open Maker’s Mark. 
   Nods to music history saturate Bryan’s solo project.  He respects Johnny Cash by using jet-black wine labels.  Titles with Rock & Roll attitude convey a condemned chic of deserts and criminals on the run.  The Fury, for example, is an appropriately-named Cab-Franc, a style usually associated with elegance and dedication to historical wine-making methods.  Bryan uncorks a wild spirit in The Fury, unleashing his style against Cab-Franc’s usually medium-to-delicate grain. He does the same with Perdition, a Petit Syrah that recklessly drives to flavors that few would imagine possible for the delicate grape.
   In a black country-western shirt with white-hot stitching, Page led a wine dinner for an unsuspecting 40 people at McAllen’s Santa Fe Steakhouse on Cinco de Mayo last year, a fitting date to present wines that embody the revolutionary Garagiste approach.  Among wine lovers wearing family pearls or three-piece suits, Page’s just-off-the-plane blues-bar attire conveyed the rebellious spirit and unpretentious elegance of his wines.  And in an inspired nod to Rock & Roll history, Page took the Jesus Christ pose late that evening, spreading his arms wide against a backdrop of artisan crosses that decorate the Santa Fe’s dining room.  As if reaching for Chris Cornell at a Soundgarden concert, fans reached for Bryan in this South Texas setting of fine crystal and linen.  Page had just introduced a 2005 bottle of  The Stash, a Cabernet Sauvignon you think might first knock you over.  When its more subtle flavors settle and you’re hopefully left standing, you know something much like Rock & Roll has just occurred.
   That legendary night, when Page took the Jesus Christ pose in the Texas Valley, a Catholic stronghold where the devout spot figures of Christ in tortillas, the Santa Fe paired Proprietary Red with a creamy roasted-duck soup with duck-skin cracklings.  The wine’s cherry notes played to the duck’s propensity for fruit pairings, and the rich cream sauce held oak-aged spice long on the palate.  That and other pairings impressed Page enough to draft a letter to the Santa Fe, complimenting an intricate menu.
   “Each course worked wonderfully with the wines my brother Chris and I produce,” Page wrote. “The presentation of each course reflected creativity and refined coordination....  I cannot emphasize enough how impressed I was.... “    
   Similarly talented pairings are typical of the Santa Fe’s wine dinners, monthly events that bring selected vintners or styles from wine regions to their 10th Street dining room.
   Getting to the point that food and wine make such complimentary statements is a demanding process. Co-owner Sony Rego and chefs Jennifer Guerra, Juan Guerrero and Zenon Ollis brainstorm before creating dishes whose revision often spans days.
   Featuring Bryan Page, a cutting-edge wine maker by any definition, shows that the Santa Fe can harness talent as it arrives on an international, culinary scene.  For the Santa Fe to execute wine dinners in step with such emerging names requires technical and instinctive skill that is itself much like Rock & Roll, in a windswept Texas Valley that could be a stop on Page’s enticing train ride to flavor ... somewhere near The Fury, not far from Purgatory, and all too close to Perdition itself. END
To attend this year's Bryan Page wine dinner at the Santa Fe Steakhouse, call 956.630.2331. It will be held Friday May 6, 2011 at McAllen's Santa Fe Steakhouse

NOTES FROM THE GARDEN OF EATING

This story was first published by South Texas Nation magazine.

By Jack Moffitt

Before I farmed, I noticed the weather. Now, I bet on it. Time spent, money for gas equipment, repairs, seed money, irrigation — all poker chips on a slow moving game of chance. Planted a couple of beds of Butternut squash in late winter. Still planting some Proso milo. Watch for some Butternuts in May. I’m feeling pretty lucky.

   I’m reading Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and the diatribe in it about how we have been misled about our food for a good while. The Government, according to Pollan, led gullible Americans to consume more carbohydrates by warning about fat in the diet, sparking a wave of carb bingeing, obesity, and diabetes. The end result is not disputable. The arguments regarding how the end result came about are like any political argument — multi-faceted and influenced by more than just facts. Pollan points out that the food pyramid was not so much the culprit as the methodology it employed called nutritionism, the practice of referring to food by its nutritional make up (carbohydrates, fats, proteins, etc.) instead of its type (fruit, meat, veggie). Once you buy into nutritionism, health food becomes low-fat cookies with a low-carb beer chaser. And what the heck, since its low fat, double up.

   Pollan’s conclusion is seven words of advice: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants," specifically food you can recognize that’s minimally processed. Onion. Steak. Carrots. Potato. Get some at the Brownsville Farmers’ Market Saturday mornings, the SPI Farmers’ Market on Sunday mornings, and other markets at varied times and places, fresher than you’ll ever find in a store, and pesticide-free.

A CABBAGE TO RULE THE WORLD

We are deep into the season the vegetables love. Cool weather, regular rains, foggy mornings,

harvests of lettuces, greens, and carrots. Bunching salad onions are thickening up. There will be several more weeks of good quality citrus. The cool weather and rain has made for nice harvests of broccoli and trusty cabbage.

   Cabbage seems to have Celtic origins, according to archeo-veggie-ologists. Perhaps the Celts were fueled by cabbage during their conquering days. Cabbage is very low in saturated fat and cholesterol. It is also a good source of Vitamin A, Thiamin, Vitamin B6, Calcium, Iron and Magnesium, and a very good source of dietary fiber, Vitamin C, folate, potassium and manganese.

   There is a lot of cabbage at our markets right now, but the supply will dwindle as the heat comes on. Cabbage stores well. It can be frozen blanched or unblanched for later use in cooking. If you want to experiment with extremely retro food preservation techniques, try making some sauerkraut. Or make a huge bunch of egg rolls. They freeze well and can become a family activity tradition like making tamales.

ATOMIC REDS, YET ANOTHER CHOICE

In a country where the pursuit of cheap food is king, the Imperator carrot is the one most of us grow up eating. It gains weight well, so it appeals to the farmer, who usually sells by the pound. The Imperator stores like a phonebook, so the grocers like them, as well. Processors have found they can carve "baby" carrots out of them, so yet another faction drives the Imperator sales.

   We are fortunate to have local farmers markets, otherwise we might never taste the likes of the Chantenay, the Nantes, the Atomic Reds and the other varieties of carrot. The Nantes variety is one of my favorites with a small blunt cigar shaped root. The Chantenay looks similar but is a bit wider at the top. Both make great baby carrots, with lots of color. We grew some Atomic Reds last year, and they were fun, but the red dissipates pretty quickly after they are picked.

   Our pickiest customers prefer our smallest carrots. At first that seemed backwards to me, but the aroma, taste and texture of the baby is so superior that the extra processing per pound in the kitchen is well worth it. I’ve gone from tapping my foot waiting on growth, to apprehension that my carrots are growing too big. That is a real benefit in the farmers market setting — feedback.

   Carrots are one of the veggies that actually have more nutritional value cooked and processed than raw and whole. We sell our carrots with the tops on … or should I say the carrots with the tops on, sell themselves. The tops wick away water from the root, which will become rubbery as it becomes dehydrated. You can combat this by cutting the tops off as soon as you get the carrots or soaking them in cold water for a few minutes. Or you can keep the roots wrapped in a wet cloth or plain paper towel while in storage. I have gotten my carrots to stay perky with their tops on for a week this way.

   Last week we found a green tomato laying next to a plant, mysteriously severed at the stem. It looked nice so we put it up on the kitchen window sill, and over a week’s time it turned a beautiful red. We put it in with a box of salad mix for our favorite chef, Chef Nori at Cafe Shiraz, who informed us that we stumbled on the preferred way of treating heirloom tomatoes, picking green and ripening at room temperature. My mom passed a tip on to me as well, to never refrigerate a tomato; it destroys the flavor. Weird, but true. It was probably widely known before tomatoes became the mass produced tasteless product we are served today (other than at local markets).

FOOD ECONOMICS & MYSTERY POLICIES

By happenstance, two people brought a website (Farm Subsidy Database) to my attention, a site that has stirred a lot of thought. Type in a zip code and the people in the neighborhood getting government farm subsidies are shown, with amounts and crop programs provided by year. One puzzler was the huge government subsidies for cotton production. Is there a T-shirt crisis I haven’t heard about? No, in fact the world cotton supply is over-saturated by six months compared to annual usage. In other words, a year and a half worth of cotton was produced in the year.

   I thought I might find some rational explanation for these policies by consulting the writings of one of my favorite economists, Stephen Dubner, author of the "Freakonomics: The Hidden Side of Everything" column and blog in the New York Times. That just led to more food for thought (pun intended). Searching his columns for references to farm subsidies discloses many references, usually combined with explanations for obesity. Dubner points out there is a correlation between farm subsidies and obesity rates. From Nixon to Obama, both have risen steadily.

   Similarly, several economists and nutritionists have documented another strong correlation: food as a percent of expenditures has fallen while obesity rates have climbed.

   Another mystery — putting the cheapest possible fuel into the only body you will ever have. Don’t do it. Buy quality, buy local, eat food that is clean, pure, and fresh. Take care of yourself. 