Followers of my previous blogging efforts might remember a summary of food I was eating in Egypt and a particularly appetizing picture of the Egyptian delicacy known as kushari. To refresh your memory:

I haven’t had kushari since I was in Egypt, which was in the summer of 2006. It is not something I have ever tried to make at home since it involves making rice and pasta and lentils and chickpeas and tomato sauce and fried onions and is nowhere near good enough to justify the effort. Plus, in Egypt, a bucketful could be had for about 50 american cents.  So imagine my joy when I walked into the Lyndale Grill & Grocery for a gyro but saw on the specials board “koushary”. Here it is, hot out of the microwave:

This was an especially felicitous discovery since I was working through a daunting hangover all day and there’s nothing better for it. Here’s a detail shot so you can see all the delicious ingredients:

So, how does Minneapolis kushari compare with the real thing? You can see that the only pasta here is rigatoni, whereas in the Egyptian version there were two kinds of vermicelli and something like ditalini. The smaller pasta shapes give the kushari a more cohesive texture. Also, one of my favorite things about kushari in Egypt was the vinegary hot sauces that came on the side and could be applied liberally. The tomato sauce on the Minneapolis kushari was very good and nicely spicy so hot sauce wasn’t strictly necessary but it would have been nice. On the other hand, the use of yellow (probably too much to call it saffron rice) instead of the plain white used in Egypt added flavor to a dish that is so heavy on starch that it leans to the bland side. Eating kushari out of a foam tray rather than a plastic bucket was not really the same, and a metal fork was no improvement over a plastic spoon but, such are the trials one must endure. In any case, kushari is not something to be analyzed, it is something to be shoveled down the hatch.

I saw this in the Brooklyn Museum’s online shop and thought it was rather timely…

You may recall my mentioning a desire to post these pictures here. This stuff is good. It’s so good I wrote them a letter about it (I used to write companies a lot when I was 8. Then they sent me free stuff. So far no free gelato by mail.). The “Lisbon Lemon” is still the favorite after trying “Roman Raspberry” (below) and “Malaysian Mango.” Here’s a link to their website. Don’t try to order it online—it costs about a billion dollars to ship. Instead, come visit. We’ll pick up a pint for dessert.

Talenti Gelato e Sorbetto :: Available at Kowalski’s Markets :: Open 24-hours

Ever since I noticed it opening in the old My-T-Fine (great name for a tea shop, why did it close?) on my way to work, I have wanted to try Cafe Agri. I think I was mostly drawn in by their logo and their slogan “from field to fork”. At the time I was under the sway of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (I still am, but it was fresh) and excited by the idea of another restaurant based on local and seasonal food close to my home. 

Reviewing the menu that was posted a couple of weeks later gave me pause. The food did appear to be local, but what was all this tempeh nonsense? As it turns out, Agri focuses not only on local and sustainable food, but also on vegetarians and vegans. Fair enough, but not the kind of place that calls my name. Still, I was intrigued and, after a few months, decided it was time to give it a try.

On entering the place, we couldn’t help but be impressed by the decor, particularly the many interesting light fixtures. Martha could probably say more about this but she’s not here so hah.  Anyway, Agri gets high marks for atmosphere.

They also have a very good selection of interesting wine and beer, mostly organic. You might miss this while trying to decipher their inexplicably centered drink menu, but there really are a lot of good, reasonably-priced choices. We both went beer.

And then there was the menu itself. Reviewing the six entrees, I began to despair. There was plenty offered to make the vegetarian, vegan or celiac sufferer happy: very limited meat (one entree with trout), tempeh and tofu aplenty, and as little gluten as possible. But, since I am none of those things, I wondered what exactly I wanted to order and pay $16 for. Butternut squash ravioli? Now where have I seen that before? Tempeh terrine? With pork or goose liver? Penne Primavera? In inverno? In the end we decided to just have a couple of appetizers and head for greener (well, less green) pastures. So keep in mind that this is in no way a fair review.

We ordered two dishes: the yam crisps with fresh guacamole, described as “baked—not fried!” which I assume was meant to be a recommendation rather than an apology, and the falafel (also baked) with cucumber salad and yogurt dill sauce.

The yam crisps themselves were good. Besides having beautifully curled edges, they were, in fact, crisp with a pleasant, not overwhelming sweetness. The guacamole, on the other hand, could not be described as good. It was severely underseasoned, resembling those awful supermarket guacamoles made with sour cream or mayonnaise. I suspect, had the lighting been bighter, its color would have been closer to brown than green, but I have no way of proving this. I also wondered from which farm in Minnesota they had obtained the fresh avocados, especially in winter. 

As for the falafel, I should never have expected to like it in the first place since it was billed as “Baked Falafel” and I don’t like baked falafel. This certainly was baked falafel, in all its sandy-textured mediocrity. It was topped by a tasteless tomato slice (did I mention it’s winter?) and yogurt sauce, which deserves neither praise nor blame. The cucumber salad was really a quick pickle of thick-cut, seeded cucumber slices and onion. Serving pickles with falafel makes good sense since pickles are very popular in the Middle East, but this was a sweet pickle rather than a sour-hot pickle as you might expect with Middle Eastern cuisine. Inauthenticity is of course not a fault per se, but I didn’t think the sweet pickles really did anything for the falafel. In any case I would have preferred fresh cucumber.

And that was all we tried. Hardly enough to base a review upon, even in these troubled economic times. But I think our reaction to the menu points to a problem with Agri and other restaurants like it. Local, organic and sustainable food are all good things. We really need more restaurants to make such food a priority; indeed, it should be the default. For that future to happen, however, food that is local, organic and sustainable has to appeal to the public: it should be relatively inexpensive (which should happen anyway because of reduced fertilizer, equipment, and transportation costs) but more importantly it should be delicious. Instead of seeing these things when he goes to a restaurant like Agri, average, closed-minded John Q. Public just has his presuppositions about this kind of food confirmed: bean curd compressed to various textures and shapes prepared in thin sauces by ascetic health nuts. Not for me. Organic and sustainable does not have to mean soybeans, and maybe it shouldn’t at all. Of course, Agri might not even want these customers. They may have intended to primarily serve vegans and vegetarians (god knows they could use a few more places) and not to be the ambassador of local/organic/seasonable/sustainable that I had made them in my mind. If Agri’s content to preach to the choir, that’s fine, but I won’t be in the pews.

WOW! My place of work became the most exciting place to be ever today. Look who visited me at my window…

Can you identify my new friend?

UPDATE: This is indeed a saw-whet owl. Here’s what I found out from Dr. Phillips, a favorite professor and friend, about our little guy here…

“I think what you’ve got there is a Saw-Whet Owl, a pretty uncommon sighting (although my Peterson’s Bird Guide lists this species as “a very tame little owl”). The last time I saw one it was about 1979…. What were the circumstances when you took this photo?”

Now that I’m not at work, I can write a little more about what happened. I was on the telephone talking to one of the Swedish instructors when a *thump* little owl hit the window. I was already looking out the window and saw it hit “The Posten Window” which is at a right angle to the original glass that the owl hit around maybe 3:30 in the afternoon? At this point, it sort of floated down onto the snow pile gathered around the Christmas tree decorated with lights for the holidays. Still on the phone, the first thing out of my mouth was “Hur säger man ‘owl’ på svenska?” (Turns out the word is uggla.) After finishing the conversation and promising to take pictures for her, I hung up. In the only way I know how, I started to freak out and try to take pictures, alerting lots of colleagues in the meantime. Still, I was walking slowly so that I didn’t startle my new friend. I didn’t want him to leave! I got more daring and starting opening our double-wooden doors just a crack to get pictures without a pane of glass in the way. At some point I decided to call another person on the staff who has helped to rescue birds in my window in the past. Seeing the owl so still, we wanted to make sure he was okay. Our rescuer arrived with gloves etc. to check out the situation. I was able to capture the above photo just before the rescuer got too close with a cellphone camera and scared the little guy away. At least we knew he could still fly! My last sighting of the saw-whet was after his flight into another nearby evergreen. Can you find him?