Sugar is as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco?  Hold on here, let's talk about this.

*We know that sugar is generally bad and generates fat

*No one is controlling this industry

*Yet we should not regulate sugar like a controlled substance

We've all heard that sugar can make us fat.  Here's how:

As we look stare deep into our magical coffee cups, we have pondered what trends we can expect to see grow through 2012 - more pig, price increases, food on sticks, locavores, and more vegetables.

Will we be graced with apple trees and catch your own tilapia ponds at supermarket by 2020? Probably not, but scientists and architects are working on that. However, in eight years, we can expect subtle and technological enhancements to our shopping experience.

My first exposure to the iconic red velvet cake was in Texas, about 1991.  I was watching my Aunt make a brilliant red wedding cake.  Being that I was young and not Texan, I had never seen such a wild creation.  My Aunt told me that Red Velvet cake was a traditional wedding cake in Texas.  Such a culinary creation left an impression on my young mind, but red velvet cake was not common outside of the south at that time.  It was not until my own wedding in 2003 that I saw the cake again, when my Aunt made us a red velvet cake.

            Then a few years ago red velvet cake came into vogue.  Every bakery, every coffee shop, and every celebrity chef was getting down with red food coloring.  Large chains such as Starbucks jumped on the bandwagon and promoted red velvet everything.  Red velvet had made it's debut on the international food stage.  

Could the recession have anything to do with the resurgence of offal in modern dining?  Based on the tattle tale grapevine, it appears that some savvy chefs have been forced to become more and more creative to keep costs under control and at the same time lure in diners.  With restaurateurs leading the way, it seems like home cooks too are developing an interest in the prudent use of the entire butchered animal, much like our ancestors did.  Several books have been published on the matter, with the very popular book The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson leading the charge.  The result has been a resurgence in strange cuts of meat appearing on the menu in trendy restaurants and food programming on television.  In example, a recent episode ofChopped depicts the chefs struggling to make beef hearts edible for the entree course.

Although America is well known all over the world for inventing thousands of food products, such as Deep Dish Pizza and Nachos as well as a number of fast food chains, such as Potbelly’s and In and Out, there are plenty of delicious foods that are simply not available out here. Read on for some tasty dishes and products – and exactly where you can find them.

You may be forgiven for thinking that Burger King is a pretty standard chain that only sells variations on the burger/fries combination, but travel further afield from America and you’ll find some rather wonderful flavour combinations. Take Puerto Rico, for example – you’ll find a traditional Puerto Rican sweet pastry bun filled with ham, eggs and cheese on the menu, as well as buffalo wings marinated in honey, and an extra-long hamburger bun filled with a hamburger patty, ham, eggs and cheese, known as the Enormous Omelette.

What’s the difference between a white truffle and a black truffle, you say? Surely the color! Whilst that may be true for chocolate truffles, truffles are actually a gourmet, relatively difficult to find type of fungus, found growing in forests in the shade of various trees. 

In our search for discover good food, we're starting a new series aimed at learning more about passionate foodies, chefs, and global gourmands. For our inaugural interview, we sit down with Chef Lisa Schroeder from the famed Mother's Bistro in Portland. 

You started out in NYC and traveled around quite a bit. Why settle in Portland?

• I always knew I'd open my restaurant, Mother's Bistro & Bar, in a city other than New York, I just didn't know which one. When I met my significant other, Rob it became clear...Portland was the perfect city for Mother's and me. It's a city that appreciates quality and value, and that's what I wanted to deliver at my restaurant(s).

What are some of the things you learned when starting up your restaurants?

• How to live on very little sleep 
• One must hire the most seasoned people possible. You cannot train people how to work as a server or a cook while trying to open the restaurant they're working in. 
• Build slowly; Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither should a restaurant. Grow the restaurant as your business grows.

Can you tell us a bit more about Portland’s dining scene? Has your cooking evolved to match the local taste?

• One of the biggest revelations was the notion of terroir, right here, in America. I had never experienced such unanimous support of locally grown berries, nuts, grapes (read: wine) as much as I have in Portland. Oregonians were locavores before it was fashionable and continue to be to this day. I make it a point of using local suppliers, farmers, meat and produce as much as possible. It not only makes good business sense...it's good for the environment and it's what any good mother would do. That's because it's usually the most economical and healthy way of feeding your family. And my guests are my family. I imagine you must have a ton of great recipes.

How did you decide on which recipes to include in your cookbook?

• First of all, I absolutely had to include the most -requested recipes, thus making it easier to answer those requests in the future. (A little selfish time-saving device!). Second, I went with the most approachable and likely to actually get made dishes. I didn't want to create a coffee table book. "Mother's Best" is intended to teach and be used. A lot. There were over one hundred recipes that were written and tested but didn't make it into the book, due to space constraints. It wasn't easy to whittle them down, but it had to be done.

Do you have a favorite ingredient? Why?

• I hate to admit it, but butter. Mo' butter, mo' better - that's my motto. It adds richness and flavor to a most anything, viscosity to a sauce, mouth feel to a dish or dessert. It is extremely versatile. It's also an ingredient about which one should be picky. I recently did a taste test and learned the amazing differences between butters and the significance of flavor to all the dishes it becomes a part of; especially toast!

As we understand it, your menus are seasonal – what is your process for deciding what to put on the menu?

• There is a good portion of our menu that doesn't change. We have to have Pot Roast, Chicken and Dumplings and Macaroni and Cheese on our menu everyday. But we also have a section of our menu called the "Mother of the Month" (M.O.M.) where we highlight a different mother each month, offer some of her dishes and tell her story. We use this part of our menu (as well as a daily special menu) to be seasonal, featuring a mother from eastern Europe in the winter months and a Mediterranean mother in the summer months, for example.

How do your meals at home differ from what you serve at your restaurants?

• I rarely cook at home and when I do it's either something simply roasted or grilled like a whole roast chicken, bone-in pork loin or steaks. If I'm really cooking at home, it's rarely for less than 20. My mantra is: cook for 6, cook for 20!

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

• On television, still working in my restaurants and teaching cooking at home to small groups.

Thanks Chef Lisa!

New York again leads the US in the sheer number of restaurants (five out of six) featured in the world’s top 50 list, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to book a ticket to the Big Apple to enjoy the world’s best meals.  Like the party busting contrarians, we’ve decided to search elsewhere for top grub and have discovered the following through our own research -

• San Francisco is tops for finding good eats.  With a small population and creative bourgeois establishment, finding tasty food can be just around the corner
• New York lags in per capita availability. Le Bernardin, Per Se and Daniel are still rocking the top 50 list and out represents every major city in the Top 50 list.  But New York also has 8 million people.   Give me 8 million people and I’ll give you a ton of good restaurants.
• Less obvious culinary destinations like Boston and DC are tops in our own list. With big government getting bigger and more students flocking to Boston to escape the recession, someone’s got to feed the hungry mouths

So how’d we figure this out? Well, we started out analyzing destinations according to the number of Michelin Guide stars available per person, but unfortunately were limited to San Francisco, New York, and Chicago (see below for the results)

New York Not Doing So Well In the Michelin Index

To circumvent the shortage of available Michelin guides in the US, we then developed own index, the Cupcake Index. Based on the premise that every culinary capital should have an ample supply of gourmet cupcake establishments, we ranked the cities based on the number of 4 and 5 star (summed up) Yelp Cupcake destinations in each city. This should have favored New York, with the cupcake trend starting at their very own Magnolia’s, but the results beg to differ…

New York Also Lags in the Cupcake Index

Does this mean New York food sucks? No…but this should open up everyone’s eyes to explore other fine dining destinations this summer.  Instead of praying for the last open table in Per Se, go venture out and try Acquerello in San Francisco, Komi in DC, or Taranta Cucina in Boston. 

So you know those hilarious and insightful descriptions you look forward to reading every morning when you check that day's special at The Sherp? Well, someone writes those- someone who single-handedly came up with the phrase The Sherp. That's right; it wasn't a team of comedians working around the clock, it was one man. And that man has a name. It's Nick Plagman, the [self-proclaimed] World's Greatest Non-Famous Comedy Writer of all-time ever in history.

Although only 28 years old, Mr. Plagman has toured the world for nearly four decades, even spending two years living in England during the late-90s, during which time his parents dragged him all over Europe. If you're wondering if there's any greater pleasure than for a 15-year-old boy to be in the Austrian Alps on the Sound of Music Tour in the dead of winter, the answer is, of course, no- there is no greater pleasure. That tour makes you appreciate every second of every day that you spend NOT on that tour- really puts things into perspective...

Having lived and traveled all over the world (i.e., America and Europe), Mr. Plagman has experienced many different cultures and developed a keen sense of humor about life, one that he finds very entertaining and that the rest of us can occasionally enjoy, as well. One of his fondest memories was actually when he saw Fried Calf Brains on the menu at a restaurant in Venice and bravely chose not to order them. To this day he doesn't regret that decision, and has apparently dedicated 5-days-a-week to informing you, the casual food connoisseur, about the Sherp's daily offers- offers that epitomize the polar opposite of fried calf brains (i.e., our offers are delicious AND are sold at a discount- a discount in Europe is $5 for a small cup of soda instead of $6).

So, if you'd like to thank him for making your life better for 14 seconds a day, offer him a job paying six-figures and a Megan Fox look-a-like as a secretary, ask him if he's as good-looking as he is hilarious, or tell him he has an "infinitesimal brain" because when you* try to insult people you mix up "infantile" and "infinitesimal," he'd love to hear from you! And that can be achieved via nrplagma@gmail.com.

If I needed an ad agency, I’d hire the National Pork Board.  Their marketing campaigns don’t make any sense, and yet bacon is omnipresent.  In honor of the Pork Board moving away from ‘The Other White Meat’ to ‘Be Inspired’, we at foodsherpa decided to trace the history of bacon, and plot its future.  Not too long ago, bacon was something you had with eggs, in the morning. From the old-fashioned base used in tasty breakfasts, bacon has become, in the last few years, the special ingredient we add to everything we cook and use. Side dishes, main-dishes salads, pasta, desserts, and now even attires.  And it’s future seems just as interesting…

Foodies, rejoice with the bacon timeline (click to enlarge):

Bringing back the dignity into food

Being born and raised in Transylvania, I’ve always understood the importance of local food in my culture – even more so than the vampire stereotype commonly associated with Romanians.  Unfortunately for True Blood or Stephanie Meyer fans, there aren’t any vampires amongst us, aside from the occasional blood sausage diners.  Yes that’s right, we’re not vampires, but we do enjoy our blood sausages.  In fact, as a rural civilization that for centuries had to rely on meals produced locally, it is amazing to see society move full circle towards celebrating local food.  However, as any rural denizen and food purist will nod, local is only the first step in developing a connection with your food and culture.  In a rural economy, food came from neighbors and nothing that came from them was wasted.  My grandmother raised poultry, and every time she cut a chicken she put the entire bird to good use - even the blood, which would be left out to coagulate.  To the delight of my family, it would be fried and eaten.  I’m guessing that for most people the idea of eating fried, coagulated blood sounds quite gross.  Most people would probably prefer to watch Andrew Zimmern tear apart the coagulated chicken blood than enjoy it themselves. 

The Wasted Pig

Ah hello your majesty

But I digress. With community supported agriculture popping up in metropolitan areas and local farmers markets becoming the norm in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, local food is certainly heading towards main street.  But it pains me to see us green wash our local farmers markets.   Sourcing locally only solves one part of the equation. In rural Transylvania, every household was not only self-sufficient, but also efficient.  Vegetables and fruits were plucked from the garden, dairy products taken from sheep and cattle, and meats enjoyed from head to toe.  Slaughtering a pig an ancient tradition, is still followed religiously by Transylvanians. As with the chickens, every piece of the animal would be used. The intestines would be cleaned up, stuffed with minced meat and transformed into sausages.  The belly fat is fried in a big pan and transformed into cooking lard, while the fat from the back is salted and smoked, and enjoyed with goat cheese and fresh tomatoes.  Yep, every part of the pig is used!  The ears and the tail, considered great delicacies, are fought for diligently by children. It’s fascinating to see the entire ritual – and it lasts all year.

Dad prepping up the feast

Unfortunately, with the industrial food machine providing access to an endless supply of meat, fruits and vegetables, using all the parts of an animal now seems disgusting…seems like something a town in Bram Stroker’s Dracula would enjoy. But, not too long ago, it was a matter of survival.  It was a matter of honoring the animal’s life.  It was a matter celebrating your meal.  Think about all the food that is wasted and all the energy used to create that majestic animal. Next time you are worried about your carbon footprint, don’t just buy local.   

Why are we disgusted by the idea of eating pig ears and at the same time eat UEOs (unidentifiable edible objects)? Seems bizarre that we can enjoy mechanically processed pig carcasses mutated into a pink paste, containing bits and pieces of Jimmy Hoffa, packed in tubes of 6 and sold by Oscar Mayer.  What’s bizarre, I ask you now?  At least, when I ate my grandma’s fried, coagulated blood, I knew what was on my plate.

Maria is a journalist and freelance writer from Cluj.  Maria's daily regimen is composed of reading, writing, and cooking.and is passionate about the environment, bio agriculture, and healthy eating.  A big cheese fanatic, she will take anything made by a sheep, goat or cow - sounds tasty! Hopefully you'll be able to discover something new from her passion with food.