The Rake Magazine

My very talented co-blogger Ann Bauer is much too modest and self-effacing to mention this herself, but she just published another terrific piece in Salon.com, on the impact that global warming is having on the world's top wine-growing regions. You can read it here.

When Jim Harkness, the new executive director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, dines at Little Szechuan in Saint Paul, he orders in Mandarin, and sometimes he throws in a Szechuan accent, just to mess with the waiters' head. My Rake co-blogger and I will be having dinner with Jim this Sunday, September 2 at 7 p.m., and we would like to invite some Rake readers to join us. It'll be a chance to learn more about the cuisine of Szechuan, and the work that Jim is doing with IATP. We'll split the bill - we'll try to keep in under $20 per person - - and you have to pay for your own wine and beer. Probably about half the dishes will be vegetarian or seafood. If you would like to join us, please email me at iggers@rakemag.com, no later than this Friday at noon.

If you drink a lot of pop or bottled water, then recent news reports have given you one more thing to feel guilty about. You have probably read about how producing all those plastic bottles requires millions of gallons of oil every year and that most of those plastic bottles wind up as landfill.

And you probably already know that a lot of those best-selling brands of bottled water, like Aquafina and Dasani, are really just glorified tap water, and you also know that Minneapolis tap water has beaten the bottled waters in blind taste tests.

So giving up plain old bottled water shouldn't be too hard.
But if you are hooked on sparkling water, like I am, it's a little harder to give up that habit. In hot weather, I drag home a six-pack or two of Mendota Springs every week, held together by those plastic carrier thingies that kill turtles and sea birds.

Or rather, I used to, until I discovered Soda Club, a seltzer and soda pop-making gadget. (Yes, folks, you read this far only to discover that this post is actually an unpaid, unsolicited info-mercial for sodaclubusa.com, which sells these gadgets.) I ordered the Fountain Jet Value Kit ($129 including free shipping) which includes a tabletop soda maker, two cannisters of compressed CO2 that screw into the soda maker, and four reusable one-liter plastic bottles, plus 18 different soda pop flavor bases, regular and diet. (It's easy to make sparkling water or pop - watch the video on their website for details.)

The CO2 cannisters each make about 110 liters of sparkling water, so, if you figure that a six-pack of Mendota Springs is equal to three liters, then each cannister is equal to about 36 sixpacks, which run about $2 a piece. So, by the time you use up both cannisters, the kit has more than paid for itself. (You exchange the empty cannisters for full ones for $20).

I haven't figured out yet how to make flavored seltzers, like Mendota Springs' lemon and lime flavored varieties, but otherwise I am pretty satisfied. I don't drink a lot of pop, but the homemade cola and root beer flavored pops I tried are actually pretty good, and I haven't bought a six-pack of Mendota Springs since I got my my soda maker.

I did have a momentary panic when I thought I remembered reading something about cows contributing to greenhouse gases by belching CO2 into the atmosphere. Is my sparkling water habit creating similar harm? I'm still not sure, but it turns out that the real bovine emissions problem is not carbon dioxide but methane. I'll save the problem of human methane emissions for another column.

Got plans this morning? Come over to the Mill City Farmers Market, at 2nd and Chicago in downtown Minneapolis (next to the new Guthrie Theater). It's the peak of the growing season, there will be lots of fresh produce and locally made products on hand, and besides, I will be judging a pie contest. The contest starts at 10 a.m. - hope to see you there.

You can add the Grand Cafe to the list of restaurants participating in the Wedge Natural Foods Co-op's Eat Local Challenge. (See Ann's post below.) The popular south Minneapolis bistro has a new chef: Jon Radle, but don't expect any big changes at the popular south Minneapolis bistro. Owner Mary Hunter says that the cafe menu will keep its Euro-American flavor, but with a greater emphasis on local and organic ingredients. Radle, formerly Doug Flicker's sous-chef at Auriga, has already added a few new entrees to the dinner menu, including a very local dish of pan-roasted pork sirloin and ribs, accompanied by a sweet corn porridge and sauteed rapini; the pork comes from Fischer Farms near Waseca; the sweet corn from Axdahl Farms in Stillwater, and the rapini from Riverbend Organic Farms in Delano.
Grand Cafe, 3804 Grand Ave. S., Minneapolis, (612)822-8260.