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Something Is Seriously Wrong on the East Coast—and It’s Killing All the Baby Puffins

by porvluef Posted on May 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Project Puffin‘s live cam.

The new poster child for climate change had his coming-out party in June 2012, when Petey the puffin chick first went live into thousands of homes and schools all over the world. The “Puffin Cam” capturing baby Petey’s every chirp had been set up on Maine’s Seal Island by Stephen Kress, “The Puffin Man,” who founded the Audubon Society’s Project Puffin in 1973. Puffins, whose orange bills and furrowed eyes make them look like penguins dressed as sad clowns, used to nest on many islands off the Maine coast, but 300 years of hunting for their meat, eggs, and feathers nearly wiped them out. Project Puffin transplanted young puffins from Newfoundland to several islands in Maine, and after years of effort the colonies were reestablished and the project became one of Audubon’s great success stories. By 2013, about 1,000 puffin pairs were nesting in Maine.

Now, thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Puffin Cam offered new opportunities for research and outreach. Puffin parents dote on their single chick, sheltering it in a two-foot burrow beneath rocky ledges and bringing it piles of small fish each day. Researchers would get to watch live puffin feeding behavior for the first time, and schoolkids around the world would be falling for Petey.

But Kress soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. But Petey’s parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Eventually, he began moving less and less. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. Puffin snuff.

“When he died, there was a huge outcry from viewers,” Kress tells me. “But we thought, ‘Well, that’s nature.’ They don’t all live. It’s normal to have some chicks die.” Puffins successfully raise chicks 77 percent of the time, and Petey’s parents had a good track record; Kress assumed they were just unlucky. Then he checked the other 64 burrows he was tracking: Only 31 percent had successfully fledged. He saw dead chicks and piles of rotting butterfish everywhere. “That,” he says, “was the epiphany.”

Why would the veteran puffin parents of Maine start bringing their chicks food they couldn’t swallow? Only because they had no choice. Herring and hake had dramatically declined in the waters surrounding Seal Island, and by August, Kress had a pretty good idea why: The water was much too hot.

Karen Minot

On a map, the Gulf of Maine looks like an unremarkable bulge of the North Atlantic, but it is unique. A submerged ridge between Cape Cod and the tip of Nova Scotia turns it into a nearly self-contained bowl. Warm water surging up the East Coast glances off those banks and heads for Europe, bypassing the Gulf of Maine and leaving it shockingly cold. (I’m looking at you, Old Orchard Beach!) Meanwhile, frigid, nutrient-rich water from off the coasts of Labrador and Nova Scotia feeds into the Gulf through a deep channel and gets sucked into the powerful counterclockwise currents. Whipped by that vortex, and churned by the largest tides in the world (52 feet in one bay), the Gulf of Maine acts like a giant blender, constantly whisking nutrients up off the bottom, where they generally settle. At the surface, microscopic plants called phytoplankton combine those nutrients with the sunlight of the lengthening spring days to reproduce like mad. That’s how the thick, green soup that feeds the Gulf’s food web gets made. The soup is so cold that its diversity is low, but the cold-water specialists that are adapted to it do incredibly well.

At least, they used to.

Like much of the country, the Northeast experienced the warmest March on record in 2012, and the year just stayed hot after that. Records weren’t merely shattered; they were ground into dust. Temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, which has been warming faster than almost any other marine environment on Earth, shot far higher than anyone had ever recorded, and the place’s personality changed. The spring bloom of phytoplankton occurred exceptionally early, before most animals were ready to take advantage of it. Lobsters shifted toward shore a month ahead of schedule, leading to record landings and the lowest prices in 18 years.

Hake and herring, meanwhile, got the hell out of Dodge, heading for cooler waters. In all, at least 14 Gulf of Maine fish species have been shifting northward or deeper in search of relief. That left the puffins little to feed their chicks except butterfish, a more southerly species that has recently proliferated in the Gulf. Butterfish have also been growing larger during the past few years of intense warmth, and that, thinks Stephen Kress, might be a key. “Fish start growing in response to changes in water temperature and food,” he says. “The earlier that cycle starts, the bigger they’re gonna be. What seems to have happened in 2012 is that the butterfish got a head start on the puffins. If it was a little smaller, the butterfish might actually be a fine meal for a puffin chick. But if it’s too big, then it’s just the opposite. That’s one of the interesting things about climate change. It’s the slight nuances that can have huge effects on species.”

Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo

Life would go on without puffins. Unfortunately, these clowns of the sea seem to be the canaries in the western Atlantic coal mine. Their decline is an ominous sign in a system that supports everything from the last 400 North Atlantic right whales to the $2 billion lobster industry.

The next sign of deep weirdness arrived in December 2012, when Florida beachcombers began spotting hundreds of what appeared to be penguins soaring above the Miami surf. They turned out to be razorbills, close relatives of puffins that also call the Gulf of Maine home.

Razorbills should be high on your reincarnation wish list. Superb fliers, they can also plunge into the sea and pursue fish underwater by flapping their wings—while dressed in black tie. James Bond, eat your heart out.

But normally, they do all this in the North Atlantic. Suddenly thousands of them had decided to move to Florida. The consensus was that they had simply kept going in a desperate attempt to find food—and that it couldn’t end well for them. It didn’t. By early 2013, hundreds of dead razorbills had washed up along East Coast beaches, most emaciated. So did 40 puffins. “That’s very rare,” Kress says. In fact, finding even a single dead puffin on the beach is unusual. “They’re tough little guys! They’ll live 30 years or more.”

The weirdness continued. In the spring of 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made its semiannual trawl survey of the Gulf of Maine, dragging a net at dozens of points throughout the Gulf and counting, weighing, and measuring everything caught. There were plenty of butterfish and mountains of spiny dogfish, a small shark that used to be relatively rare in the Gulf of Maine but now owns the place. There were very few cod, the fish that made New England, that lured thousands of fishing boats from Europe, that fed millions of people over the centuries. NOAA slashed the 2013 quota for cod to a pittance, putting hundreds of enraged fishermen out of work.

In recent history, the average ocean surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine has hovered around 44 degrees Fahrenheit. 2013 was the second-warmest year in the Gulf in three decades, with an average surface temperature of 46.6 degrees. But it was nowhere near the freakish spike to 47.5 degrees in 2012, and the phytoplankton did not repeat its crazy early bloom. Instead, it didn’t bloom at all. “So poorly developed, its extent was below detection limits” was how NOAA put it in its Ecosystem Advisory, sounding surprisingly calm, considering it was saying the marine equivalent of “No grass sprouted in New England this year.” Phytoplankton feeds some tiny fish and shrimp directly, but more often it feeds zooplankton, the bugs of the sea, and these in turn feed everything from herring to whales. The undetectable phytoplankton bloom did not bode well for zooplankton, and sure enough, that spring NOAA broke the grim news: “The biomass of zooplankton was the lowest on record.” Even this dirge doesn’t do justice to the dramatic deviation from the organisms’ historical norm: Their numbers bounced along in a comfortable range for 35 years before taking a gut-wrenching nosedive in 2013.

By the time of that announcement, Project Puffin was starting its 2013 season. With spring temperatures closer to normal, Kress had hoped that his Seal Island puffins would return to their fruitful ways, but only two-thirds of the colony showed up. Still, a new chick was chosen for the Puffin Cam feed, and viewers named her Hope. For a while, all went well. Kress saw fewer butterfish being delivered, and Hope flourished. But soon Kress noticed that fewer birds than usual were hanging out at the Loafing Ledge, a rocky ridge where the parents socialize between feedings. Then he realized that the time between chick feedings was considerably longer than normal. The puffins were having to range much farther to find fish.

Too far, as it turned out. Although Hope successfully fledged on August 21, she was one of the few lucky ones. Only 10 percent of the puffin chicks survived in 2013—the worst year on record. “We’ve never seen two down years like this,” Kress told me. “The puffins really tanked.”

And how could they not? The Gulf of Maine, the great food processor of the western Atlantic, was almost out of food.

Usually, a system as large and complex as the Gulf of Maine, sloshing with natural noise and randomness, will disappoint any human desire to fit it into a tidy narrative. It can take years to tease a clear trend out of the data. But by late 2013, things were so skewed that you could see the canaries dropping everywhere you looked.

November 30: Researchers announced that instead of the dozens of endangered right whales they normally spot in the Gulf of Maine during their fall aerial survey, they had spotted…one. They were quick to note that the whales couldn’t all be dead, just missing—probably off in search of food. Sure enough, in January 2014, 12 of the same species of whale were spotted in Cape Cod Bay, where food is more plentiful.

By now, you’ll have no trouble filling in this sentence from the December 4 Portland Press Herald: “This summer, a survey indicated that the northern shrimp stock was at its ____ ____ since the annual trawl survey began in 1984.” That’s right: lowest level. In fact, the sweet Gulf of Maine shrimp—a closely guarded secret in New England—had collapsed so completely that regulators closed the 2014 season and warned of “little prospect of recovery in the near future.” It takes shrimp four to five years to reach harvest size, and few of the shrimp born in the Gulf of Maine since 2009 have survived. If shrimp miraculously produce a bumper crop this year, there might be a few to eat in 2018. In the meantime, throw some butterfish on the barbie.

Or maybe sailfish or cobia, two Florida species hooked by bewildered New England anglers in 2013. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute scrambled to find a bright side, publishing a paper (PDF) on the commercial potential of former Virginia standbys like black sea bass, longfin squid, and scup, which are new regulars in the Gulf. Admirable adaptability, and undoubtedly a few quick-moving fishermen will profit from the regime change. But I don’t relish life in a world where only the hyperadapters survive.

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Something Is Seriously Wrong on the East Coast—and It’s Killing All the Baby Puffins

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Tom’s Kitchen: Stir-Fried Beef with Celery, Carrots, and Kohlrabi

by ChangHamblen Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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This recipe owes its existence to the confluence of three unrelated events:

• At the very end of a busy recent trip to San Francisco, I ate lunch at a restaurant called Mission Chinese, a hipster homage to Americanized Chinese food. I had the “Kung Pao pastrami”—an expertly rendered twist on a venerable strip-mall standard.

• While on the plane home, I read a New York Times style piece on “#normcore,” an internet meme/elaborate joke/contrived fashion trend that involves the “less-ironic (but still pretty ironic) embrace of bland, suburban anti-fashion attire”: stuff like “dad jeans” and Teva sandals.

• The night after I returned from my trip, my mother invited me over for dinner—a simple stir-fried pork dish familiar from my childhood. She brandished a book I hadn’t seen in years: an opulently splattered first edition of Joyce Chen Cookbook, the 1962 opus that taught a generation of Americans (including my mom) how to cook Chinese. Just like in the old days, she served it over white rice—a swerve from her decades-long fixation on brown.

Sitting there, transported by that vintage stir-fry to my ’70s childhood of Toughskins and pre-hipster Chuck Taylors, it hit me: old-school, US-inflected Chinese is a culinary embodiment #normcore. Plus, it’s really good! (When made with decent ingredients.)

It wasn’t long before I was busy in my own kitchen, contriving my own #normcore stir fry. Since I was having a few friends over, I wanted to find the “less-ironic (but still pretty ironic)” sweet spot—and produce something delicious.

From Joyce Chen‘s recipe for beef with green peppers—a childhood staple—I settled on a protein: “Flank steak is fairly inexpensive and easy to slice,” Chen instructs. And she’s as right in 2014 as she was in 1962. I found a beautiful cut of it at Austin’s excellent neo-old-school, whole-animal butcher shop Salt and Time. I also borrowed from Chen the method for flavoring the stir fry: you marinate the meat in soy sauce sweetened with a little sugar and thickened with corn starch—which gives the finished product a lovely glaze—which I goosed up with ginger, green onions, garlic and chili pepper (Chen treats aromatics like ginger and garlic as potent substances to be used in tiny amounts, and her book is devoid of hot peppers.)

For vegetables, green bell peppers felt too on-the-nose #normcore for me. So from that Kung Pao dish I had at Mission Chinese, I lifted the idea of celery, which strikes me as both a pretty #normcore vegetable itself, and also quite delicious and underused. Carrots, too, seemed right. But I only had a little of each, so I filled out the dish in decidedly un-normcore fashion: with a gorgeous bulb of kohlrabi leftover from the previous week’s farmer’s market run. That kohlrabi bulb sported a generous set of leaves—similar to kale, a related vegetable—so I threw those in, too.

A vegetarian was among the guests, so I had to come up with a non-meat alternative protein. Tofu would have been the straight-ahead #normcore move, but all I had in the fridge was a block of tempeh, so I went with it. Here’s what I came up. Enjoy with canned beer—Bud Light if you want to go full-on you-know-what, or a new-wave canned craft brew like Dale’s Pale Ale if you want a twist.

Stir-Fried Beef With Vegetables

(Serves four, with leftovers.)

4 spring onions
2 cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
1 knuckle-sized nob of fresh ginger, peeled with the edge of a spoon
1 tablespoon (organic) corn starch
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon of crushed red chili flakes
Freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons of good soy sauce (my favorite is the Japanese brand Ohsawa Nama Shoyu)
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 pound of flank steak
2 stalks of celery
2 carrots
1 bulb of kohlrabi
A few kohlrabi leaves (optional; kale will do as well).
Peanut oil, for stir frying
More soy sauce, rice vinegar, and black pepper, to taste

First make the beef marinade. Cut the spring onions to separate the white and green parts. Slice the green parts into two-inch sections, set aside. Coarsely chop the white parts, and place them in the bowl of a mortar-and-pestle (a small food processor will also work here). Chop the ginger and garlic and add it to the mortar. Top with the corn starch, sugar, chili flakes, and a good grind of black pepper. Crush everything vigorously together into a paste. Add the soy sauce and vinegar, and mix it with the pestle. Dump the marinade into a medium-sized bowl. Cut the steak, against the grain, into quarter-inch strips about two inches long. Add the beef to the marinade, along with the green onion tops, and toss to coat well. Set aside.

Now prep the vegetables. Slice the carrots, kohlrabi, and celery into two-inch matchsticks. (Here’s a great Jamie Oliver video that explains how to do that better than I ever could in words). Set the carrots and kohlrabi aside in one bowl, and the celery in another. Slice the kohlrabi or kale leaves, if using, into thin strips, and set aside.

Now the stir fry begins. Set a bowl large enough to incorporate all the ingredients by the stovetop. Put your biggest, heaviest skillet—or wok—over high heat and add enough oil to cover the bottom. When the oil shimmers, add the celery sticks and sauté, using two spatulas to keep them constantly moving. Continue until they’re just cooked—they should retain a little crunch. Place them in the large bowl.

Put a little more oil in the pan—still over high heat—and add the carrot and kohlrabi sticks. Cook them as you did the celery sticks, and then dump them in the same bowl when they’re done. Repeat with the kale leaves, if using.

Again, add a bit of oil to the hot pan. Dump in the meat, onion greens, and the marinade. Spread the meat out across the pan’s bottom, so it forms a single layer. Let it sizzle for a minute—this will allow it to caramelize a bit, and then toss with the two spatulas as with the vegetables, until the meat is cooked through. Add the meat to the big bowl, and toss everything together—the glaze that coats the meat will also coat the veggies. Taste, add a bit more soy, pepper, and vinegar to taste. Serve over brown rice—or white.

The tempeh version: #notsonormcore, but still delicious.

If there’s a vegetarian coming to dinner: Before you start the vegetables for the main dish—in a medium-sized bowl, mix two tablespoons of olive oil, two of soy sauce, and a dash of maple syrup. Take a block of tempeh and cut it lengthwise into quarter-inch strips. Add the tempeh to the bowl and toss. letting it marinate for at least 5 minutes. (This is a twist on the tempeh technique from Heidi Swanson’s great cookbook Super Natural Every Day.) Put a separate skillet over medium heat, add a little peanut or coconut oil. When the oil shimmers, remove the tempeh from its marinade with a slotted spoon and stir fry until it’s cooked through. Place it in a bowl. Then, as each round of veggies come off the main skillet, add a portion to the tempeh. When done, toss together, along with a bit of the marinade.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Stir-Fried Beef with Celery, Carrots, and Kohlrabi

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Wasted food is a huge climate problem

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on September 16, 2013

Wasted food is a huge climate problem

By

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Global warmer.

If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.

The results, published in a new report [PDF], were as nauseating as a grub-infested apple:

Without accounting for [greenhouse gas] emissions from land use change, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated to 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent: as such, food wastage ranks as the third top emitter after USA and China. Globally, the blue water footprint (i.e. the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage is about 250 km3, which is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva. Finally, produced but uneaten food vainly occupies almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; this represents close to 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land area.

In the West, most of our food waste occurs because we toss out leftovers and unused ingredients — and because stores won’t sell ugly produce. The FAO found that some farmers dump 20 to 40 percent of their harvest because it “doesn’t meet retailer’s cosmetic specifications.” In developing countries, by contrast, most of the wasted food rots somewhere between the field and the market because of insufficient refrigeration and inefficient supply chains.

The FAO estimates that when we throw away more than 1 gigaton of food every year, we are throwing away $750 billion with it — an estimate that doesn’t include wasted seafood and bycatch.

“All of us — farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers — must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement. “We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Wasted food is a huge climate problem

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Vegetarian ‘Tuna’ Salad Sandwich (Recipe)

by Cindy Lin Posted on September 10, 2013

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Vegetarian ‘Tuna’ Salad Sandwich (Recipe)

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Tom’s Kitchen: the Coolest, Easiest Summer Eggplant Trick

by oe8o7kdg Posted on August 3, 2013

Mother Jones

During the broiling-hot Texas summer, I search for dishes that fall into a sweet and cool spot: seasonal produce prepared with minimal heat. Tomatoes are easy. Eggplant, one of my very vegetables, presents a special challenge. The ways that I love to cook it—searing and roasting—are just too damned hot for August. I sometimes grill it, of course, but standing in 100-degree heat over a fire doesn’t always appeal.

After a sweaty recent visit to the farmers market, I found myself the owner of three gorgeous purple eggplants—and feeling no desire to fire up the stove or grill to cook them. Then, from the depths of my culinary memory, I recovered a technique I learned from Paula Wolfert’s outstanding 1994 book The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean: You simply wrap the eggplants in foil, prick them all over with the tines of a fork, and cook them on a gas stovetop over a low flame—so low it barely heats the kitchen. Then you separate the flesh from the skin and puree it with a few other ingredients into baba ghanoush, the classic Levantine eggplant spread. The open flame gives the eggplant a subtle smokiness that really elevates the dish. (Of course, cooking it over a charcoal grill is even better.)

Guided by Wolfert, one of my culinary heroes, that’s exactly what I did. The following recipe is adapted from Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, which brims with summer-ready ideas. (Note to self: try a chilled version of “Yogurt and Leek Soup with Mint.”)

Baba ghanoush gear

Baba Ghanoush
(Makes two cups)
3 medium-sized eggplants
2 small cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
A couple of strips of pickled red onion (optional)
5 tablespoons of tahini
One lemon, sliced in half
3-4 tablespoons of water
Sea salt and freshly gound black pepper, to taste
Extra-virgin olive oil

Garnishes
Some kind of ground chile powder—Allepo pepper (as Wolfert suggests), paprika, or, as I used, ground chipotle pepper
1 small ripe tomato, diced
A few sprigs of parsley, chopped

Trim the stems from the eggplants and wrap them with foil. Using a fork, prick them in several places, all over. Set two gas stovetop burners to a low setting, and place two of the eggplants on a grate directly over one, and the third over another (see photo). Let then cook, turning them occasionally with a tongs, until they become quite squishy and are releasing steam. Their collapse should be complete, abject. Wolfert suggests dumping them into a basin of cold water and peeling them immediately. I simply let them sit for 30 minutes or so in a bowl, then I stripped away the foil, rinsed them in cold water, and then peeled them over a bowl.

Note the low flame.

Add the tahini, the garlic, and the onion (if using) to the basin of a food processor fitted with a blade. Squeeze half of the lemon (over a metal strainer tio catch the seeds) into the basin, and add a pinch of slat and a grind of pepper. Process until absolutely smooth, pushing down the sides of the basin with a rubber spatula in between whirs if necessary. This step is crucial to Wolfert’s brilliant baba—creaming the tahini, lemon, and garlic at this point will give the final product a gorgeous lightness. Now add the eggplant flesh, two tablespoons of water, and a glug of olive oil, and puree until absolutely smooth, again pausing to intervene with a spatula if necessary. If you’re having trouble achieving absolute smoothness, add another tablespoon of water. Now taste, adding a bit more salt or lemon if it seems necessary.

To serve, spread as much baba ghanoush as you expect to eat in one sitting on a plate. (The rest should be kept tightly covered in the fridge—it will maintain peak flavor for a few days). Give it a few lashings of your best olive oil, a brisk sprinkle of ground chile, some grinds of black pepper, and some diced tomato and chopped parsley. Serve with good crackers. This spread would also be a good excuse to make Alice Waters’ fast-and-easy flatbread—but that would mean turning up a stovetop burner all the way to medium.

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Tom’s Kitchen: the Coolest, Easiest Summer Eggplant Trick

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4 Veggie Burgers That Don’t Suck

by N0bodyh56 Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s a warm summer evening, and you’re on a back porch with a group of friends, drinking a beer and getting ready for dinner. Someone passes you a paper plate, a seeded bun, and—wait, you don’t eat meat? Oh. Well, here’s a tomato and some lettuce.

If you steer clear of beef, you’ve probably experienced a similar scenario. If you’re lucky, you maybe even found a frozen soy patty masquerading as a burger that, when grilled, sort of tasted like nothing, and drenched it in mustard.

I know: Vegetarians need to stop whining about missing out at barbecues because we choose to cut delicious juicy hamburgers out of our diets. But even if you’re just trying to cut back on meat, or trying to impress a vegetarian, the alternatives usually offered are lackluster at best, and unhealthy and environmentally questionable at worst. As my colleague Kiera Butler reveals, it can take just as much energy to produce a veggie burger as a beef burger, and many soy-based fake meats are processed with hexane, a neurotoxin.

Luckily, there are savory alternatives to this dilemma, made from ingredients you probably have at home. I reached out to a few vegetable-oriented chefs and cookbook authors for their favorite burger recipes, which are shared below. Some of them are vegan and gluten-free, too. And you can always freeze them after you’ve made a bunch, so next gathering, you’ll come prepared with a burger made with unprocessed ingredients and devoid of mystery chemicals.

Mushroom Burgers with Barley (vegan)

Lukas Volger takes his vegetarian burgers very seriously, as evidenced by his book on the topic. He also hosts the cooking show Vegetarian Tonight; see below for the episode featuring the Mushroom Burger with Barley, which Volger cooks while clad in a neatly arranged apron and hipster glasses. Volger opts for potatoes rather than eggs when binding his burger, meaning the result is vegan. Writes Volger: “This burger, based in part on the fortifying soup, is simple and delicious and abundant in mushroom flavor. Substitute other mushroom varieties, such as oyster mushrooms or plain button mushrooms.”

Ingredients:

Makes four 4-inch burgers

1 small potato, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 portabello mushroom
12 cremini mushrooms
10 shiitake mushrooms
½ teaspoon dried thyme
2 Tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 cup cooked barley
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Steam or boil the potato until tender. Mash with a fork. Trim off the stem of the portabella mushroom and scoop out the gills. Chop into 1/2-inch pieces. Thinly slice the crimini and shitake mushrooms. Preheat oven to 375° F.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over medium heat. Cook the portabello mushrooms and dried thyme for 6 to 8 minutes, until the mushrooms begin to soften and sweat. Add the crimini and shitake. Cook for 10 minutes, until the mushrooms have sweat off their moisture and it has dried up in the pan. Deglaze with the vinegar, scraping off browned bits with a wooden spoon.

Transfer mushrooms to a food processor and coarsely purée. (Alternatively, chop the mushrooms finely by hand.) Combine the mushroom mixture with the potato, barley, salt, pepper, and mushroom mixture in a mixing bowl. Shape into patties.

In a large oven-safe skillet or nonstick sauté pan heat the remaining 2 tablespoons oil over medium-high heat. When hot, add the patties and cook until browned on each side, 6 to 10 minutes total. Transfer the pan to the oven and bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until the burgers are firm and cooked through.

Don’t forget to “go crazy with the condiments,” adds Volger: Yogurt sauce, caramelized onions, homemade pesto, or more sauteed mushrooms, as pictured above.

Recipe from Veggie Burgers Every Which Way: Fresh, Flavorful and Healthy Vegan and Vegetarian Burgers—Plus Toppings, Sides, Buns and More, copyright © Lukas Volger, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The Experiment, LLC.

Beet and Bean Burger

Courtesy www.theKitchn.com

Recipe editor Emma Christensen loved the legendary beet burgers at the Northstar Cafe in Columbus, so she and fellow Kitchn bloggers set out to recreate their own version. The resulting burger, writes Christensen, “had a deep, savory umami flavor” and unlike other veggie burgers, “captured that unique hamburger texture.” Dice the beets really small, she notes, and don’t use a food processor if you’re trying to avoid mushiness. I liked how this burger uses lots of cheap and readily available ingredients; find the full recipe here.

Falafel Burger (vegan and gluten-free)

“Whole-food dishes like falafel—chickpeas ground up with spices and then deep fried—might be a better beacon towards a less meat-intensive future,” writes MoJo‘s food and agriculture blogger, Tom Philpott. Falafel might be the ticket to a better burger, too.

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4 Veggie Burgers That Don’t Suck

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Tom’s Kitchen: Chipotle-Rubbed Grilled Whole Chicken

by Shawanna11 Posted on May 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Because I’ve lived in two meccas of smoked meat—Central Texas and North Carolina—people often ask me for tips on barbecue at this time of year. Here’s the thing: barbecuing is long, smoky cooking over low heat. If you want to get the flavor of how to do it, check out the “Fire” chapter of Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked. The chapter ends with Pollan smoking a whole hog overnight in his backyard—a tricky process that takes practice, skill, and lots and lots of time. For me, barbecue is like beer: its making is best left to pros and obsessive amateurs.

Meanwhile, Tom’s Kitchen is devoted to simple home cooking, so you won’t see me devoting a column to proper barbecue anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like to have a bit of fun with fire and smoke. What people usually have in mind when they ask me about barbecuing is really what should be called grilling—essentially, roasting over charcoal. (I’ve been told grilling also happens over gas flame, though that concept is foreign to me.) What follows is a dead-simple way to turn a whole chicken into a cookout through the magic of butterflying—cutting out the backbone with a sturdy pair of kitchen shears. Don’t be intimidated. It only takes about 15 seconds and it gets you a moist, evenly cooked bird with a crisp skin.

You can take your butterflied chicken party in many different directions. You could slather it in a barbecue-style sauce before crisping off the skin and serve it with slaw and other traditional ‘cue sides; you could go Mediterranean and marinade it in lemon zest and chopped rosemary and serve with a fresh salsa verde (essentially a parsley pesto); or do as the recipe below suggests, which is to look south to Mexico for inspiration. I hacked the meat up for tacos, and served with tortillas, guacamole, and a charred-tomato sauce.

Grilled Whole Chicken with Charred Tomato Sauce

Prep and marinade bird

2 cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
½ teaspoon powdered hot chile pepper (could be paprika, smoked paprika, or ground chipotle pepper—I used the latter)
½ teaspoon of cumin, ground
A bit of fresh oregano if you have some on hand
½ teaspoon sea salt
Several generous grinds of coarse black pepper
I tablespoon of olive oil
1 4-pound chicken, preferably raised on pasture

Place the first five ingredients, garlic first, into a mortar and pestle. Pound the garlic into a rough paste. Add the oil, and pound a bit more.

Using kitchen shears, carefully cut the backbone out of the chicken (see this Melissa Clark video for an excellent demo), and using your hands, open the chicken outwards and press down down vigorously, flattening it. Now turn it skin-side up and rub the paste all over the skin. Let it sit in the fridge for at least 30 minutes and optimally overnight.

Prep the grill

Get some good hardwood charcoal going by whatever method you prefer—I use a chimney. When the coals are white-hot, collect them on one half of the grill basin. The goal is to create a hot side and a cool side. Put the grated grill top, which should be clean, in its place and let it heat up for a minute or two.

Prep the salsa

6 medium-sized, ripe tomatoes
1 clove garlic, crushed and peeled
1 to 2 fresh jalapenos or serrano chiles, roughly chopped
Sea salt to taste

Put the garlic, half of the chopped chiles, and a pinch of salt in a food processor and set aside—you’ll run the blade after adding roasted tomatoes.

Grill time

Place the butterflied chicken, skin side up, on the cool side of the grill, and the tomatoes on the hot side. Cover with the grill lid. Let the tomatoes cook, turning and recovering the grill as needed, until nicely charred all over. Add them to the food processor and whiz until you have a smooth salsa. Check for seasoning—add and process more chile pepper and salt if needed.

Meanwhile, leave the chicken cooking on the cool side, covered, until a meat thermometer plunged into the deepest part of a thigh reads 105 degrees. When it reaches that temperature, you’re ready to crisp off the skin. Simply flip the bird over, skin-side down, onto the hot part of the grill and let it cook there until he skin is crisp and caramelized and the thigh temperature reads 180 degrees.

Let it rest off the grill for 20 minutes before cutting the meat off he bones into taco-ready chunks. Serve with the salsa plenty of hot tortillas.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Chipotle-Rubbed Grilled Whole Chicken

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GMO labeling initiative gets rolling in Washington state

by olikellopas Posted on January 4, 2013

GMO labeling initiative gets rolling in Washington state

By Susie Cagle

Label It Yourself

A ballot measure that would have required labels on all genetically modified frankenfoods failed in California this past fall, but 2013 is a new year with new hope and a new roiling labeling movement, this time in Washington state.

Supporters of a GMO-labeling ballot measure have collected far more signatures than necessary, and if they’re certified, the proposal will hit the state legislature in the upcoming session and then likely be on the ballot in November. The movement’s colorful spokesperson is spreading the word, as The Seattle Times reports:

“Here we go, Round 2,” said the Washington initiative’s sponsor, Chris McManus, who owns a small advertising firm in Tacoma. “They got us the first time in Cali, but we’re stitched up, greased up and ready to go.”

McManus told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that the measure is not a scare tactic.

“A little bit more information never hurt anybody about the foods they eat.”

But opposition is beginning to coalesce. Farm industry representatives call the proposal an attempt to scare people away from food sources that have no known health risks. If the initiative wasn’t about scaring people, asked Heather Hansen of Washington Friends of Farms and Forests, why did supporters deliver their petitions in an old ambulance?

Because that’s awesome! I bet it doesn’t get great mileage, but sirens, wheee!

If anything is deserving of sirens, it’s the frankenfish that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently deemed safe, which would be labeled under such an initiative but likely not otherwise.

The initiative would require special labels on any raw or processed food sold in Washington with any genetically modified ingredients. That would include fruits and vegetables, processed foods and even some seafood like genetically modified salmon, McManus said …

Opponents said that would create big problems for farmers and food processors, who would have to put different labels on the same products if they’re sold in Washington and in other states.

It seems like threatening those of us who don’t live in Washington with unlabeled monster salmon is a real scare tactic. Get ready with those stickers, folks!

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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GMO labeling initiative gets rolling in Washington state

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