Where to find a really great burger

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I have never eaten a beef  hamburger at Fuddruckers, but I am a loyal fan of its naturally raised ostrich burger and its great salad bar. Fuddruckers opened its Paramus restaurant about 20 years ago, the pioneer among so-called better burger chains in North Jersey.

My wife and I had a terrific lunch there yesterday, but noted a few changes from our last visit.

 The red-meat ostrich burger, which has much less fat than a beef burger,  is one-third of a pound and comes from New Jersey-based Fossil Farms, which sells naturally raised meat from many animals -- alligators to yaks (Web site link is below).

Fuddruckers offers other alternatives to its hamburgers -- two kinds of farmed fish, chicken and buffalo, and you can sip wine or beer with your meal. One of its best features is the salad bar, which allows you to add freshly made salsa with cilantro and sliced jalapeno peppers to your burger, as I did along with ketchup and mustard. But you can no longer get a baked potato in place of the excellent skin-on fries, and you seem to be penalized if you order cole slaw with your burger, but not fries.

My wife ordered a half-pound beef burger for $5.49 and added cole slaw and fries for $2 more. I added only cole slaw to my ossi burger ($6.99) and it cost me $1.39 more. Fuddruckers says it beef hamburgers are made from fresh, prime beef, the highest USDA grade, which has the most fat of the three grades, and that the cattle were vegetarian-fed. This means they weren't fed animal by-products -- kitchen scraps and bits of dead animals.

The ostrich burger has so little fat, Fossil Farms recommends you order it medium rare, which I did yesterday, but I have also ordered it medium and it has always been moist and delicious. A quarter-bottle of merlot ($4.50) went well with the orstrich.

You can keep your Smashburgers, your Five Guys burgers, your Bobby Flay burgers -- all made from cattle raised conventionally. These places seem to spend more money on marketing than on ingredients, and gushing articles about them in The Record make them suspect. If I want a beef burger, I go to Tasteatery in Fort Lee for one of its wonderful, naturally raised, grass-fed patties, such as the West Coast burger with greens and hummus.


Fuddruckers, 282 Route 4 east, Paramus, 201-343-4533,
open seven days. Second restaurant on Route 23, Wayne.


http://www.fuddruckers.com/

Other Web sites:


Tasteatery


From alligator to yak

Quick-cooking wild salmon from Costco

The cooking time I gave in yesterday's post for Alaskan wild sockeye salmon from Costco -- 15 minutes -- is for steaming the fish when it is still frozen. Last night, I defrosted three skin-on fillets first and they cooked in barely six minutes in a Pyrex glass dish set atop a pot of boiling water.

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The fillets came out moist with medium interiors. I seasoned them with salt and black pepper and a little cheap sake, soy sauce, sweet cooking wine, rice vinegar and Thai fish sauce, and covered the dish. I waited for the water to boil before placing the dish on the pot. I plated the cooked fish and spooned a tablespoon of sauce over each.

I don't see why you couldn't steam the fish with white wine, lemon juice, garlic and a bit of olive oil, if you don't care for this Asian spin.

I had set a timer for 12 minutes and put Idaho potatoes into the microwave to bake for 11 minutes, but in only six to seven minutes, I ended up eating the fish with a big organic spring mix salad, then finishing the last few pieces with the potato and salad. With warmed halves of Syrian pocket bread, I enjoyed a couple of salad and salmon sandwiches, too. Yummy.

This fish, sold under the Kirkland name in three-pound bags for under $26 (eight fillets in my bag),  will be great once a week until summer, when fresh Copper River salmon fillets from Alaska start showing up in Costco's refrigerated cases. You can also find frozen Alaskan salmon and other frozen fish at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Market.

Can you trust big-city paper's food writing?

The Record today carries an article from the Chicago Tribune on nutritious foods, including sardines. Because I eat a lot of sardines, one sentence caught my eye: "Avoid sardines packed in vegetable oil, which is high in pro-inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids."

Before I dump all my sardines in oil and replace them with cans of fish in tomato sauce, I did some research and came across this from the American Heart Association:

DALLAS, Jan. 27, 2009 — Omega-6 fatty acids – found in vegetable oils, nuts and seeds – are a beneficial part of a heart-healthy eating plan, according to a science advisory published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

So who do you believe, Julie Deardorff of the Chicago Tribune (whoever she is) or America's heart doctors? The link to the AHA article is below:

Omega-6 fatty acids can be part of healthy diet

Food prices go up and down

You can find wild Alaskan sockeye salmon three ways at Costco -- canned, smoked without preservatives and frozen in fillets. I picked up the last two yesterday at the Hackensack store and one pound of the wild lox rang up at $14.79 -- a hike of 80 cents and the first price change in a long while. Even at the higher price, you won't be able to find smoked wild-caught salmon for less at Trader Joe's or Fairway Market.

Three pounds of frozen wild salmon runs about $8.50 a pound at Costco. I put these fillets into a glass dish and place it over a steamer. I cover the fish after adding cheap sake, sesame oil and some fish sauce, and steam them for about 15 minutes for medium. I've cooked them frozen and defrosted.

Also at Costco, small, round Campari hot-house tomatoes were $4.99 for two pounds -- 50 cents less than a couple of weeks ago. These are not herbicide-free, however.

At H Mart, the Korean supermarket near the Little Ferry Circle, five pounds of Earthbound Farms organic carrots were $5.49 on Saturday, according to the sign on the shelf, but mine rang up at $4.99, the old price. Green Swiss chard was $1.49 a pound, according to the sign, but mine rang up at 79 cents a pound. I bought collard greens there in previous weeks that also rang up less than the price on the sign, but eventually the store computer caught up. At ShopRite, my experience often is the opposite -- the register charges you more than the sign price -- and you curse if you don't see that until you get home.

Also at H Mart, I bought 20 pounds of Kokuho-brand, yellow-label, California-grown rice for $12.99, on sale from $19.99. This rice also was on sale a month ago and that's what we've been eating ever since. In the southern United States, some rice is grown in old cotton fields and carries traces of the arsenic used to kill pests.

Chuck, one of my readers, reports that Murray's free-roaming, antibiotic-free boneless chicken breast is on sale this week at Kings Super Markets for $1.99 a pound, a great price.

A cross-cultural breakfast

Image by wka via Flickr

When it came time for breakfast today, I found I was out of my usual fish -- canned red salmon and smoked wild salmon, and though I had sardines, I ate those most of last week.

So I immediately thought eggs and assembled a quick meal from a number of sources:

First, I made a plain egg-white omelet in organic, Italian extra-virgin olive oil (eggs and oil from Costco, Hackensack) and seasoned it with salt and coarse red Aleppo pepper (Fattal's Bakery in Paterson). I heated up leftovers -- scrambled eggs with strips cut from whole-grain tortillas (Trader Joe's, Paramus) and tomatoes, and plated the omelet next to it, dousing both with Valentina's Mexican hot sauce (Hackensack Market, Hackensack).

I warmed four pocket bread halves (Fattal's) in the toaster, took prepared Libano Verde-brand hummus wuth tehina from Lebanon (also Fattal's) from the fridge, put some Arirang-brand cabbage kimchi in a bowl (Gaboh Inc., Englewood) and dug in. I drank Bromley black tea (ShopRite).

Gee, what's that in my kimchi?

Image by Taekwonweirdo via Flickr

With the wind howling and temperature falling, is there a better meal than a stone bowl filled with bubbling Korean soft-tofu stew, another bowl of steamed rice and several side dishes? So, last night, right after we placed our order at So Gong Dong in Palisades Park, a waitress brought us four side dishes to quiet our hunger.

We immediately attacked the cabbbage and cucumber kimchis, but my wife and son ignored the other side dishes -- bean sprouts and raw squid in a spicy sauce. Then, my wife's fork uncovered something odd in the cabbage kimchi -- it looked raw, almost rotten. I hit the button on the the table and a chime sounded, summoning a waitress, who said it was just a raw oyster. A raw oyster? My wife was horrified. She hates raw seafood, especially oysters and clams, and refuses even to eat cooked squid or octopus. We gave the waitress our cabbage kimchi and she quickly replaced it and added another dish of  cucumber kimchi.

My first taste of kimchi was in the late 1960s, when my Korean roommate at the University of Missouri-Columbia offered me some. Since the late 1990s, I have eaten it regularly at Korean restaurants in North Jersey, including So Gong Dong, and New York City, and now, I always have a bottle of cabbage kimchi in my refrigerator. I have never in all that time seen an oyster in my kimchi. In fact, the only seafood ingredients listed on the label of the Arirang-brand kimchi I often buy in Englewood are salted shrimp and anchovy sauce.

So Gong Dong offers soft-tofu with oysters and may make its own kimchi, so is it possible one of the oysters fell into the kimchi? Or are oysters an ingredient some kimchi-makers add?

Restaurant So Gong Dong, 118 Broad Ave., 2nd Floor, 
Palisades Park; 201-313-5550, open seven days.