Food Notes: 12/31
Food trends, martinis, velveeta, food salons, and more
We’ve come up to the very end of 2024. For some of you, it’s already 2025, so there’s no reason to bore you with reflections on the year behind us. Instead, we shall march onward into the future!
To celebrate, I’m cooking up a few fishy dishes including seared scallops, cod cake, raw Wellfleet Oysters, and a tuna steak with soy-ginger sauce. My wife also stuffed some dumplings with pork and chive, but we ended up with a lot more dumplings than we needed.
All week we’ve been running a tabletop sushi train. The electric train carries three plates that can be topped off with sushi, intended to mimic the Japanese sushi restaurants that do the same. We’ve mainly sent cheese, crackers, and the occasional plate of pirate puffs. If you haven’t guessed, our three-year-old is the primary operator of the train.
At the grocery store this afternoon, I picked up a pack of New Year’s tiaras, horns, and streamers. The cashier had to enter my birthday into the computer for this very special holiday pack. I’m still trying to figure out why.
I want there to be some kind of grand narrative to close out the year, but sometimes there simply isn't. In the real world, daycare is closed and I’m preoccupied with a toddler who has so far terrorized the Stop & Shop robot, smashed a glass bowl for fun, and dumped out his juice just because.
The Latest
Is A Martini Even a Martini If Its Not In a Martini Glass?
Jason Diamond laments the latest trend of serving a martini in anything but a martini glass. I can understand why some trendy bar tenders might want different glassware since the martini glass is naturally prone to spilling. I’ve always assumed this is a feature, not a bug, designed to prevent over indulgence.
Food Trends for 2025
The New York Times takes a crack at predicting the upcoming food trends like more sauces, fancy fruits, more protein and hopeful for coffee to take a turn.
Farmless Food
One trend the Times missed is the increase in foods that come from processes that don’t involve farms. Startups are working on making food from raw ingredients like carbon harvested from the atmosphere. Maybe the solution to climate change is a tasty snack?
Eating at Ayat
We ate lunch at Ayat, a trendy Palestinian-inspired restaurant that launched five years ago in Bay Ridge and now is a small chain. Two words: Falafel pizza.
The Creamy History of Velveeta
David Levine at Smithsonian takes a quick look at Velveeta’s creation and rise to fame. Believe it or not it started out as a cheese recipe to use up chunks of cheese. It wasn’t until Kraft bought the recipe that Velveeta became the cheese-free product it is today.
Red Wine In a Paint Can
Margaret Eby at the Inquirer reports on a Pennsylvania vineyard has decided to package their wine in paint cans. There’s probably a joke about paint thinner and Pennsylvania wine waiting to be made, but instead I’ll just mention the how young people are not drinking red wine anymore.
Alicia Kennedy’s Food Salon
Food writer Alicia Kennedy is launching a virtual food salon. If you’re unfamiliar with Kennedy, she previously wrote No Meat Required, a history of plant-based eating. The first of the announced salons include Anna Sulan Masing, Mayukh Sen, Carina del Valle Schhorske, and Layla Schlack (who was my editor on this piece about San Gennaro).