Last January, we were excited to learn that Anthony Bourdain was going to be coming to Milwaukee to do a piece for his show Anthony Bourdain:No Reservations. A James Beard award winner chef, Adam Seigel, was chosen to prepare a meal from him, featuring locally sourced ingredients. The Bartolatta restaurant group have been long time customers of our, if you have ever eaten at any of their restaurants the attention to quality is very obvious, so naturally they want the freshest, highest quality spices also. They contacted us and asked if it would be okay if the show’s crew and the chef came in to film, it would take maybe an hour or so. We were told Anthony would not be along, it would be just the crew, darned. However, on the off chance that they might just say this in order to keep chaos to a miminum, I decided to make the dreary winter drive from Chicago to Milwaukee. It is never that owners Tom and I feel the need to hog the spotlight when cool things happen in our shop, it is just that we don’t want to miss out on anything! (I will always lament that I was in a Chicago shop  working when Paul Prudhomme dropped into the Milwaukee shop for a spontaneous visit which turned into a house tour.)  

Chef Adam Seigal and Patty Erd mixing up some curry powder.

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Imagine my surprise this morning when upon looking through tweets, I learned that today was National Herbs and Spices Day. And they say that twitter is useless, how wrong they are! If only we had known before today, we might have made this into a nice excuse to throw a Spice House party with lots of spicy tidbits and libations for our customers. We are making a note for next year. This made me track down exactly who claimed this to be NHSD. Eventually, I came upon a very interesting list called American Food and Drink Days. Much to my surprise every day of the year is some sort of food day. Some lucky days have multiple foods per day, like August 29th which is More Herbs Less Salt Day (another party op here), Whiskey Sour Day, Lemon Juice Day (which is a lovely coincidence since lemon juice goes into sour mix, which goes into Whiskey Sours), Chop Suey Day AND Swiss Winegrowers day. 

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Michael Pollan, one of the best food writers in America today, just published an article in the New York Times Magazine bemoaning the fate of modern cooking.  He points out that despite the increasing popularity of the Food Network, people are spending less and less time actually turning fresh ingredients into meals.  This, he argues, is bad for both individual and societal health.

I?ve read the statistics and I don?t doubt them, but here at The Spice House, it can be hard to remember how little interest most Americans have in the act of cooking.  The staff here are excellent cooks, passionate and adventurous about food.  Many of them have culinary degrees and extensive kitchen experience.  Our customers are eager to share their favorite recipes and ideas, and will often spend half an hour debating the best spices to use with the latest ripe produce from the local farmers market.  Those of us who work here spend our days in a rarified bubble of culinary experience, often forgetting about the apparently vast numbers of people who wouldn?t know how to use paprika or have never heard of Chinese 5 spice powder.  We just don?t encounter them very often.

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I had the opportunity to attend a cooking demo/lecture last night at Now Were Cooking, a lovely cooking school very close  to our Evanston shop location. It was a rare appearance out of the Alinea kitchen for hard working Sorcerer/Chef Grant Achatz. It was a very thought provoking presentation, I think you could call it both Food for Thought and, on Grant’s part, Thought for Food.

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Reading the title of this blog, I imagine many of you assume I am referring to a restaurant, a food or wine shop, possibly a museum. Not at all, although we do enjoy these too.
It is probably in the nature of the beast that all foodies really enjoy their relationship to not only food,  but also to food communities and the fellow food lovers that populate them. I belong to several of these organizations, however this one is not a club, anyone can join in. I refer to Chicago?s Green City Market. How can Chicago have a farmer?s market in the dead of winter, you lucky warm population inhabitants wonder?

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