STATE OF THE ONION
Welcome please read...
Food and cooking is both a cathartic hobby and survival for me since I live alone. I learned to cook from two wonderful sources, my Mom and a guy in NYC who owned a small eatery. My mothers kitchen, a middle class apartment in NY provided a style for food that had heart, soul and a lot of 'ta'am'. "Ta'am" means taste and flavor, eye appeal and made with love.
She cooked by taste, no books, learned it all from her mother passed down through generations. If my mother said it had "No 'ta'am", it meant it tasted like a $5.00 pizza, hmmm, like cardboard smothered in catsup. She could tell you the construction of most dishes in any restaurant with one taste. She never learned metric, everything was a pinch, a little or a fair amount! It was all by taste. I learned a lot from her. The girls from the St. Petersburg Times paper who came out to write about ethnic food on the Jewish Holidays had to reconstruct every dish and measure it for the article in the paper.
The eatery provided me with kitchen skills, short order places were very creative, and these were the days with no microwaves, just a griller, your knives, and creativity.
Healthy eating, low cholesterol, triglycerides, lo-salt and synthetic sugar hadn't arrived on the scene yet. Maybe saccharine. It was about fat cheeks and good taste. In todays world, it meant a shortened lifespan. Nevertheless with all the education and knowledge, why do we have such obesity problems?
I WISH YOU WELL
Have fun in the kitchen, just like the Dean and Duchess of French cooking, Julia Childs and Jacque Pepin used to say. "Bon Appetite"! Between her Julia's scratchy voice and Jacque's blurred French accent attempting English, I couldn't understand either of them. I called it "cooking by pictures". I couldn't understand a word.
This State of the Onion is a series on everyday places you might be inclined to eat at. I'm sure we'll get around to your favorites. Maybe they won't be your favorites for long. So we enlisted the help of others whose job is to protect us from ourselves and furnished web based information available to any one with a computer and the ability to spell.
FLORIDA HEALTH DEPARTMENT
When I decided to do the FOOD COURT, it incorporated in the evaluations, the training I got from the restaurant I worked in and a crosscheck from reliable sources. It became almost automatic now that I look before I eat. The structure of a place tells you a lot and sometimes more than you should know about the food. Cleanliness, efficiency, service all become more apparent because you know what they should be doing.
In Florida, Inspections are performed at the County Health Department (CHD) level by the Environmental Health section. Each CHDs Environmental Health section is responsible for all DOH-regulated food service establishments located within their county.
The types of inspections that you may see in this report are routine inspections, re-inspections, and complaint inspections.
REAL WORLD COOKING
When I worked in NYC, I was involved working with one of the fastest, most creative short order cooks. Had to be we were near a college. College diets don't exist, what I mean is anything goes with anything. I don't suppose you ever saw a hamburger with spaghetti and an egg on it at 1 AM. Unlimited menu, he could cook anything from scratch. He could put things together and the customers raved. Being close to a college, taught me people will eat anything. I learned a lot from him. He taught me the mechanics of the job. And how to pass inspections. NY is a tough place to keep clean. The joke was never worry about the roaches, the rats will eat them. The joke came true in 2008. A Taco Bell passed inspection for roaches on a Tuesday and that night the surveillance cameras caught rats in the place.
ABC ACTION NEWS - DIRTY DINNING:
Another source, not sauce, are the local TV food cops, one in particular does a good job. This is in addition to the he "the Poultry Police". That is the nickname for the Health Department. Their findings, excellent journalism and commentary are found at their site. at ABC ACTION NEWS. www.abcactionnews.com/kitchen.
They do an article on bad seeds called "Dirty Dinning", a nice takeoff on "Dirty Dancing". Eat in a rat infested location and you might be doing just that, "dirty dancing". Sometimes we all met at the same place in time. The Health Department, ABC and myself all had frequented the same place. A trifecta of bad news for a place but when you work in the public trust and you know the rules, there are no excuses.
WE TRIED TO BE FAIR: