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What we’re reading, cooking, and watching this week in the worlds of food, travel, and beyond.
Summer squash, polenta, feta cheese
Tour of Flushing with Jason Wang of Xi'an Famous Foods and Biang!
We are biased, of course, because we live in Queens, but articles about eating out in Flushing, our borough’s chaotic Chinatown, never, ever get old. There are just too many gems in the neighborhood! On our next visit, we’ll seek out some of these, from Serious Eats New York. NYC tourists: You should too!
Taco Bell’s Sophisticated Side
File this one under “positive baby steps in the fast-food industry”: With its Cantina Bell line, Taco Bell, with a nod to Chipotle, is trying for healthier, more upscale (but still inexpensive) Tex-Mex food. And maybe to ditch its reputation for being, as Slate’s Matthew Yglesias writes, “the restaurant for you if you happen to be very drunk or extremely high.”
Where does your grocery money go? Mostly not to the farmers.
On Eatocracy, The American Way of Eating author Tracie McMillan writes about the high distribution costs that cause small and midsize farmers in the U.S. to see just about 16 cents of every dollar we spend on food. Just another reason we’ll keep shopping at our local farmers market.
Summer Squash Sauté with Corn and Goat Cheese Polenta
Speaking of the farmers market, what to do with all our summer squash this week? Via Gourmet Live’s awesome recipe-by-ingredient roundups, we found this idea on Three Many Cooks (we swapped feta for goat cheese and added tomatoes). It’s a beautiful dish, though we found it required extra salt and cheese for sufficient flavor.
Running With the Bulls Video
This short video over on Four Jandals of Pamplona’s famous bull-running is pretty insane. It’s very shaky and out of control at times, but it obviously captures some of the total madness that ensues when those bulls are at your heels.
Joy in the Congo: A musical miracle
We recently stumbled upon one of our favorite 60 Minutes segments online, about a 200-musician-strong symphony orchestra in Central Africa’s war-torn Congo. An unforgettable, moving 13 minutes.