SRQ and...

Fire and Rice

2008-10-16T05:31:00.000-07:00

Manny Howard is a size-large Brooklynite with a generous spirit, a healthy capacity for self-deception and the cooking skills of a dude-ranch Escoffier. It is not uncommon for him to invite three dozen people for an early dinner and to serve them in inky darkness as children sleep on the couch. But those who have eaten at Howard’s table, or in his small yard surrounded by friends, do not soon forget the experience. His dreams are big and his hospitality legendary: when it arrives, his food is beyond compare.

A year ago, Howard became obsessed, he said, with the notion of paella cooked over an open fire: a peasant’s feast in the Spanish style, tended by men in the dying light of a late afternoon. He purchased two carbon-steel paella pans, wide and shallow with dimpled bottoms, each one slightly smaller than the diameter of a large Weber kettle grill.

He bought short-grain rice, for great paellas demand it, rounded and small but capable of absorbing large quantities of the stocks in his freezer. He found fine saffron, sweet onions and good olive oil. He acquired chorizos and chicken thighs and went to the fish market for clams and shrimp and baby octopus. He bought much more. He went hog-wild.

I have known Howard for the better part of three decades; the grill was hardly large enough for his ambitions. His paella took a little while to put together, in the end and particularly in the beginning. He was flying blind as the best artists do, scaring people. But dozens ate the resulting meal, men and women and children crowded smiling around the pans, loading paper bowls with a kind of smoky perfection that covered the seafood as fog does a tidal pond.

The rice was actually toothsome, faintly crusted along the bottom of the pan with a caramelized toast that the Valencians call soccarat. The chicken was moist and crunchy at once; the chorizo crumbly, salty and addictive. Opinions varied on the octopus, but the clams went fast, and the shrimp even faster. People went back for seconds, thirds. There was cheering, and then eyelids began to droop. It was, everyone said, a grand feast.

It needn’t be, of course. Paella, even paella cooked over an open fire, can be a simple meal; simplicity honors its roots in the field. And cooking, too, is mostly a blue-collar game. Don’t let anyone fool you. It’s generally rote work that rises to art only when practiced by people who can see flavors in their heads; when it’s done by chefs, not cooks like the rest of us. Mostly, cooking is craft: technique learned and applied.

So! Here is a relatively fail-safe method for making paella on top of a grill, a recipe that sees its parentage in both Howard’s extravaganza and the maternity of moderation. It requires no special skills save patience and nerve. (It does ask for a paella pan, but these are easily found in cooking shops or on the Internet for $30 or so.)

Patience: the whole game here is setup, what French-trained cooks call mise-en-place. You don’t want to be muddling about gathering ingredients once your fire is hot. You want to make everything such that you can slide your rice-filled pan on top of the fiery grill, add the stock and the proteins, cover the whole and walk away for a half-hour with your heart in your throat, wondering whether you’ll serve salad or pizza should the whole endeavor fail. (Nerve: it won’t.)

You’ll start, then, in the kitchen, browning your meats and warming the stock, softening the onions and garlic in oil, getting ready for the storm. You’ll head off to fire up the grill in the middle of that process, after the meats are brown but before you’ve added the rice to the pan. What you want to end up with is a series of bowls that can be shuttled off to a station by the grill: stock, chorizo, peas, clams, chicken, shrimp. Chopped shrimp at that — it looks good cut to the same size as the chorizo and will provide a kind of cool base line to the finished dish: the pink shrimp and russet sausage and green peas set against the yolk-bright rice.

Add that rice, not yet yellow, to the soft onions and garlic, to the fragrant, hot and plentiful oil, swirling them all together into a glistening, shallow whole. (Uncooked paella rice should never be thicker on the pan than the width of your thumb.

Now head to the grill and put the pan on the fire. Add the shrimp, chorizo and peas and stir. Now pour in the stock, which should lap at the sides of the pan without overflowing. Add the clams. Nestle the chicken thighs into the mass. By now the stock will be bubbling a little, and steam starting to rise.

Place a handful of wood chips on the fire, cover the grill and pour yourself a stiff drink. In 30 minutes you’ll be in heaven, either way.

By SAM SIFTON
www.heraldtribune.com Published: August 29, 2008

Grilled Paella - Recipe

A handful of wood chips, such as fruit or hickory (optional)
One large pinch saffron
2 ¼ quarts low-sodium chicken broth
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 pounds chicken thighs
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 pound chorizo, cut into half-moons
1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 tablespoon minced garlic
4 cups short-grain rice, such as arborio
1 ½ pounds jumbo shrimp, peeled, deveined chopped
1 cup fresh or frozen peas
2 dozen littleneck clams, cleaned
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley (optional).

1. If using, soak the wood chips in water. In a large pot, stir the saffron into the chicken broth and set over medium heat. Once hot, lower the heat and keep warm.

2. In an 18-inch paella pan, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. (A large, wide, shallow, flameproof saucepan may be substituted — or, in a pinch, an enameled Dutch oven.) Season the chicken thighs all over with salt and pepper and brown on all sides in the hot oil. Transfer to a plate. Cook the chorizo in the same pan until it starts to brown. Transfer to a second, paper-towel-lined plate. Remove the pan from the heat.

3. Light a charcoal grill with about a large cereal box’s worth of charcoal. Return the paella pan to the stove and set over medium-high heat. When hot, add the onion and cook until translucent, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic and stir until fragrant, then add the rice and stir to coat. Season with salt and pepper.

4. Bring the stock, paella pan, chicken, chorizo and other ingredients to a table near the grill. When the fire is at its peak heat (all of the coals are lit, and you can hold your hand over the hottest part of the fire for only a few seconds), quickly stir the shrimp, chorizo and peas into the rice, then add 2 quarts of stock. Add the clams hinge-side up so that when they open in the heat, their juices are released into the rice. Nestle the chicken on top. Using thick gloves and a pair of tongs, carefully remove the grill grate. Drain the wood chips and drop them into the fire. Quickly replace the grill grate and set the paella pan on the grate. Cover the grill and cook the paella until all the liquid has absorbed, 25 to 30 minutes. If the rice is underdone, add another cup of stock and return to the fire for 5 to 7 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste and, if you choose, top with parsley. Serves 8. Adapted from Manny Howard.

With Goat, a Rancher Breaks Away From the Herd

2008-10-16T05:27:00.000-07:00

BILL NIMAN is not the rancher he once was. Last year Mr. Niman walked away from the meat company he started in the 1970s with not much more than a handful of cattle and a political philosophy built on self-sufficiency.

Niman Ranch, which takes in annual sales of $85 million, was founded on the notion that the better an animal is treated, the better the meat will be. His beef was so good that in the early 1980s Alice Waters made it the first proper-noun meat on the menu at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. His pigs, raised humanely by 600 family farms in Iowa, provide pork for the Chipotle chain’s carnitas. Niman Ranch bacon, hot dogs and sausage fill grocery cases around the country.

But Mr. Niman is no longer a part of the company. Angry and discouraged after prolonged battles with a new management team over money and animal protocols, he left in August 2007 with a modest severance check and a small amount of stock.

He can’t use his surname to sell meat, and he had to surrender the small herd of breeding cattle that lived on his ranch here, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. The cattle were direct descendants of the ones he tended back in the days of counterculture, not profit margin.

But Mr. Niman, 63, is done licking his wounds. With a herd of goats and a young vegetarian wife he nicknamed Porkchop by his side, he is jumping back into the meat game.

“I think I am returning to my original roots,” said Mr. Niman, who still lives in the little house he built on ranchland that kisses the Pacific Ocean.

Mr. Niman was raised in Minnesota, and moved to California to teach poor children. It was better than being drafted. In 1968, he headed north to Bolinas, a refuge for poets and intellectuals, to practice the counterculture movement’s back-to-the-land philosophy.

He got his first cattle from local ranchers in barter for the tutoring his first wife, who has since died, gave their children. He has never left Bolinas, although now he watches over 1,000 acres instead of 11, and the land was turned over to the Point Reyes National Seashore.

He and Nicolette Hahn Niman, an environmental lawyer, were married five years ago, and now they are raising what they hope will be the best-tasting animals around. They have a handful of premier cattle that fatten only on pasture and a flock of traditional turkey breeds they personally chauffeured from Kansas to Bolinas last spring. Mr. Niman also has an organic pig project going in Iowa.

But he hopes goat will be the cornerstone of his comeback. That’s in part because he has more of them around, and because he sees a wide-open market for pristine, pasture-raised goat meat. The guy is, after all, a businessman.

“I don’t need to get 10 percent of the market anymore,” he said. “I just want to be the best.”

Chefs on both coasts are fast discovering his goat meat, although it is still available only in limited amounts, under the name BN Ranch.

In June, Mr. Niman stopped by Eccolo in Berkeley with a piece of shoulder, a loin, a leg and a rack of ribs. The chef and owner, Christopher Lee, now breaks down one or two of the 30-pound goat carcasses a week.

“It was succulent,” Mr. Lee said. “It was mild. It was just perfect.”

Like other chefs who have begun to cook with goat, Mr. Lee predicts a bright future for the meat.

“We’ve all cooked every part of the lamb a million times and we all know about grass-fed beef and aging beef,” he said. “The goat is the next thing.”

The meat Mr. Niman and a handful of other boutique farmers are producing is more delicate than the older, imported goat that is served at Pakistani curry houses, Jamaican jerk stands and taco trucks all over New York.

At a recent goat tasting in the Blue Hill at Stone Barns kitchen in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., Mr. Niman’s young goat was compared to pan-seared and roasted loin and shoulder cuts from both a small Vermont grower and what the chef Dan Barber called “commodity goat.”

The commodity goat was slightly musty and chewy. The Vermont goat was as tender and mild as lamb. The Niman goat was like lamb, too, but a lamb with a big personality. The meat was sweet and vegetal. The fat, what little of it there was, tasted rich but felt lighter than olive oil.

At Thyme for Goat, a recent collaboration between four goat farms within 25 miles of each other in Maine, goat is taking off, in a small way. People are attracted to the way it is raised and its healthful properties. Goat meat doesn’t have the tallow of lamb, and contains about half the fat of chicken, according to a Department of Agriculture analysis.

“A lot of folks said nobody in Maine is going to buy goat meat,” said Marge Kilkelly, who does marketing for the group. “We’ve found just the opposite.”

The breed of goat is important. Like the Maine collective, Mr. Niman raises some stout, muscular Boer goats. But he is particularly fond of meat from lighter framed Spanish goats, which sometimes mix with the Boer.

“What Bill is so good at is the genetics,” Mr. Barber said. “He’s the master.”

For about half the year, Mr. Niman lets the goats roam his California ranch. In the summer and fall, when the California grass is brown, they move to Oregon. He also works with ranchers raising two other herds to his specifications in California and Oregon.

Goats and cattle work particularly well together in a pasture. Goats don’t like clover or rye grass, which the cattle love, but they make fast work of scotch broom, poison oak and other plants that can take over good grassland.

“Nature is so perfect,” Mr. Niman said.

His longtime followers may be surprised that he is now raising his cattle entirely on pasture, without switching to a diet of grain a few months before slaughter.

He built Niman Ranch on the idea that raising a quality, year-round beef supply was like making dessert. You bake the cake with grass and frost it with grain. The method produces well-marbled meat with that traditional corn-fed flavor most Americans grew up eating. And it provides beef year-round. Animals that feed on pasture are fat enough to be slaughtered only at certain times of year.

But just as Niman Ranch was becoming a big, nationally recognized brand, Mr. Niman fell victim to a move toward meat purity that he and Orville Schell, his former partner, had started. Several chefs and food writers came to believe that a diet of corn was ruinous for cattle’s health and the environment.

Although Mr. Niman’s beef was quite different from conventional corn-fed beef, that he fed his animals with any grain at all was unacceptable to some chefs. Ms. Waters decided to drop it from the menu in 2002 and turn to more seasonal, all-grass options.

“It made me very sad but I just said we are at a moment in time and I just can’t do this anymore,” she said, adding that she “couldn’t be more delighted that he’s come back to his senses.”

Still, Mr. Niman continued to build the company. He took on a parade of investors. A new management team took over in 2006, led by Jeff Swain, who had been at the company that produces Coleman Natural Beef, Mr. Niman’s biggest competitor.

With the new team came changes, many of them made over Mr. Niman’s protests. The company sold its custom butchering plant in Oakland and prepared to sell its high-end feedlot in Idaho. Niman Ranch began to purchase cattle ready for slaughter from feedlots over which the company had little control, a practice that Mr. Niman said was “against my religion.”

Mr. Niman said feed standards dropped and animals were transported distances longer than 500 miles, which he said stresses them too much.

Mr. Swain said feed and care standards for the 400 head of cattle they process a week have not dropped. Contractors follow a list of protocols that are similar to those Mr. Niman developed.

And although some animals are being transported longer than 500 miles for slaughter, he said they are allowed to rest for 24 hours before they are dispatched.

The real issue, Mr. Swain said, is that Mr. Niman was a poor businessman. The cattle portion of the program was a money-loser, unlike the pork business, which processes about 3,200 animals a week. That remains unchanged, Mr. Swain said. “When we got involved, Niman would raise money and go through it and raise money and go through it,” he said. “Any change to Bill’s business model he didn’t like. We needed to make the company financially sustainable.”

The more Mr. Niman complained that the protocols he developed were being eased out, the more marginalized he became. Finally, Mr. Niman walked away, heading back to focus on the ranch where he has lived since the 1970s. Nicolette, 22 years his junior and a devout vegetarian, was there to comfort him. “It was such a dark time for Bill,” she said.

While Mr. Niman fought his battles, his wife learned how to work the ranch. She also finished her book, “Righteous Porkchop” (Collins Living, March). It is part memoir and part exposé, focusing on her work fighting industrial meat companies as a lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s environmental organization.

So how does that vegetarian thing work out? She accepts the role animals play in the human food chain, and he never pressures her to eat meat. She doesn’t cook meat at home, but doesn’t forbid Mr. Niman from throwing some chorizo on a slice of homemade pizza. He tends to go out for steaks, especially when he travels.

The one place they compromised was over a couple of her favorite cattle. She became emotionally attached, so he promised the cow and steer will not die for meat.

“You’ve got the rancher who came back home and the lovely, smart animal welfare girl who is 20 years younger and has really gone to work on him,” said Betty Fussell, who writes about Mr. Niman in her new book, “Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef” (Harcourt, October). “It is the story of the cowboy and the lady, in a way.”

Other people at his stage of life might be planning how to ride off into the beautiful Pacific sunset, satisfied with having made a real change in how people eat. But not Mr. Niman, who acts as if he’s just getting started.

“It’s the first time I’ve had a true partner at my side,” he said of the last five years. “I feel like together, we are pioneering the next generation of animal husbandry.”

By KIM SEVERSON

Published: October 14, 2008 www.nytimes.com

Fossil Fish Shows Complexity of Transition to Land

2008-10-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.

There was much more to the complex transition than fins morphing into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size — a beginning of the bone’s adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.

The anatomy of this early transformation in life from water to land had never been observed with such clarity, paleontologists and biologists said in announcing the research on Wednesday.

The scientists said in a report being published Thursday in the journal Nature that the research exposed delicate details of the creature’s head and neck, confirming and elaborating on its evolutionary position as “an important stage in the origin of terrestrial vertebrates.”

In that case, the fish, a predator up to nine feet long, was a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The fossil species was named Tiktaalik roseae, nicknamed “fishapod” for its fishlike features combined with limbs similar to tetrapods, four-legged land animals.

The new research on the head skeleton of Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) was conducted at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the University of Chicago.

“The braincase, palate and gill arch skeleton of Tiktaalik have been revealed in great detail,” said Jason Downs, a research fellow at the academy and lead author of the report. “By revealing new details of the pattern of change in this part of the skeleton, we see that cranial features once associated with land-living animals were first adaptations for life in shallow water.”

Several skeletons of the fish were excavated four years ago on Ellesmere Island, in the Nunavut Territory of Canada, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle, by a team led by Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, and Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences. The Devonian-age rocks containing the fossils indicated that the fishapod lived in shallow waters of a warm climate. It may have made brief forays on land.

Since the discovery was reported in 2006, Dr. Downs and two specimen preparators, C. Frederick Mullison of the academy and Bob Masek at Chicago, spent more than a year prying deeply into the skulls of several fishapod skeletons. The results were also analyzed by Dr. Shubin and two other co-authors of the report, Dr. Daeschler of the academy and Farish Jenkins Jr., an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.

“Our work demonstrates that the head of these animals was becoming more solidly constructed and, at the same time, more mobile with respect to the body across this transition,” Dr. Daeschler said.

Dr. Shubin said that Tiktaalik was “still on the fish end of things, but it neatly fills a morphological gap and helps to resolve the relative timing of this complex transition.”

For example, fish have no neck but “we see a mobile neck developing for the first time in Tiktaalik,” Dr. Shubin said.

“When feeding, fish orient themselves by swimming, which is fine in deep water, but not for an animal whose body is relatively fixed, as on the bottom of shallow water or on land,” he added. “Then a flexible neck is important.”

One of the most intriguing findings, scientists said, was the reduction in size of a bony element that, in fish, links the braincase, palate and gills and is associated with underwater feeding and respiration. In more primitive fish, the bony part of what is called the hyomandibula is large and shaped like a boomerang. In this fossil species, the bone was greatly reduced, no bigger than a human thumb.

“This could indicate that these animals, in shallow-water settings, were already beginning to rely less on gill respiration,” Dr. Downs said, noting the specimen’s loss of rigid gill-covering bones, which apparently allowed for increased neck mobility.

In the transition from water to land, the researchers said, the hyomandibula gradually lost its original functions and, in time, gained a role in hearing. In humans, as in other mammals, the hyomandibula, or stapes, is one of the tiny bones in the middle ear.

As Dr. Daeschler said, “The new study reminds us that the gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles required much more than the evolution of limbs.”

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: October 15, 2008 www.nytimes.com

Pompano Beach recycler gives food waste second life

2008-08-27T06:37:00.000-07:00

Company takes grocer's waste, turns it into fertilizer. One South Florida company is attempting to turn food trash into treasure through a partnership with Publix Super Markets Inc.

How? Organic Recovery of Pompano Beach is converting the grocer's food waste into a liquid plant food for farmland, crops and golf courses.

The company expects to divert about 17,000 tons of food scraps a year from local landfills.

Launched this month, Organic Recovery collects about 166 tons of food scraps weekly from 56 Publix supermarkets in Broward County. By mid-2009, it expects to work with all the Publix stories in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

The food — deli meats, fruits and vegetables — is still fresh but no longer fit for human consumption. Organic Recovery collects the food and transports it in refrigerated trucks to Pompano where it's given new life in about four hours.

"We recycle just about everything there is a market for, yet we never really saw a market for our food waste until now," Publix spokeswoman Kim Jaeger said.

Through this venture, Publix expects to boost its recycling rate to 80 percent, up from 47 percent last year, Jaeger said.

The leftover grease from Publix also is recycled into biodiesel, which Organic Recovery uses to fuel its trucks.

It's about taking this waste material and turning into something useful, the company's co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Young said. No stranger to waste recycling, Young, 40, co-founded Advanced Marine Technologies, a Massachusetts company that makes fertilizer from seafood scraps, in the 1990s.

The customers buying the recycled Publix food waste from Organic Recovery pay less for it than chemical fertilizers. And when the plant food is used on crops or spread over golf courses it doesn't produce greenhouse gases.

While Organic Recovery remains focused on working with the supermarket chain, demand for its foodrecyclingis growing.

Young said he's received calls from local restaurants and food processors wanting to recycle their food waste.

Gov. Charlie Crist, speaking at the firm's grand opening, commended Organic Recovery for its environmentally friendly efforts.

"Recycling is something people have really caught on to," Crist said. "There's gold in green, there's no question about it."

Arlene Satchell can be reached at asatchell@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4209.

By Arlene Satchell |South Florida Sun-Sentinel

August 27, 2008

Nokomis pavilion made in the shade

2008-08-25T16:10:00.000-07:00

The grassy dunes obstruct some of the Gulf of Mexico vistas that West tried to showcase in his wide-open, horizontal design.

For modern architecture such things are important; the buildings are often designed with the natural setting in mind.

But with $1.3 million spent to restore the structure -- which reopens to the public in the next few weeks after being closed for nearly six years because of disrepair -- West is not complaining.

He simply points out the difference to show how the world changes over time, whether you like it or not.

After the high-profile demise of renowned modernist architect Paul Rudolph's Riverview High School building in Sarasota, and the recent discovery that one of West's own buildings could be torn down in favor of a boxy pharmacy, West is happy to say that the sand dunes are the only thing that have changed about the Nokomis pavilion site.

The building has been restored to its original shape nearly 54 years after first opening.

The restoration of West's beach pavilion after decades of neglect is being hailed as a victory in the long-running campaign to preserve prominent buildings from the Sarasota School of Architecture's modernist heyday in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

The key to the pavilion's longevity: It is still a useful space, West said.

"The secret to saving an old building is to make sure its function is still viable," he said.

West's beach pavilion offers a refuge from the sun, a stylized public gathering space and a unique gateway to Casey Key.

A formal ribbon cutting is scheduled for Sept. 19 at 6 p.m.

West was a leading member of the Sarasota School, a highly regarded branch of modernism known for design elements that emphasized shade and air flow in Florida's hot climate and other environmental adaptations.

The Nokomis pavilion was his first public building and his first waterfront effort and it helped launch a successful career for the Yale graduate.

West moved from working as a draftsman under Rudolph, who went on to become one of the most influential architects in the world as dean of the School of Art and Architecture at Yale and a celebrated thinker in mid-century design, to designing Sarasota City Hall and Tuttle Elementary.

West helped put Sarasota on the architecture world's map, said Gene Leedy, a leading member of the Sarasota School who still designs homes in Winter Haven.

"Because of people like Jack West, Sarasota became known all over the world for its architecture," Leedy said. "His buildings are real treasures."

Leedy said his disappointment over Riverview was somewhat placated by the Nokomis Pavilion restoration.

"It's something good that was saved and I'm glad there are some people out there that realize these buildings are an important part of Sarasota's heritage," Leedy said. "They really make that area unique."

Sarasota County received nearly $500,000 in state historical preservation and parks money for the restoration project. The other $800,000 came from the voter-approved 1 percent sales tax for public infrastructure development.

The county has faithfully restored West's structure, bringing the 86-year-old architect on board to supervise the project.

The obstructed views are not the only change, though.

A few concessions were made to the last half-century of changing public tastes.

Showers and locker rooms morphed into a 40-person community room in the main building. Sea turtle-friendly lighting was installed.

"The outside is the same but the inside was reconfigured to meet the community's needs," West said.

Aesthetically, the outside is identical to the original. It consists of two rectangular structures -- one enclosed with walls, one not -- connected by a long covered walkway.

Beige concrete block helps the enclosed structure blend with the sandy beach. The new block is an imitation of the Ocala block used in many Sarasota School buildings.

The horizontal design pulls the building into its surrounding.

Prominent Sarasota modernist architect Guy Peterson described the design as "incredibly pure with floating planes and thin columns.
Big sand dunes have built up on Nokomis Beach since Jack West first designed his sleek, low-slung, modernist pavilion as a gateway to the beach.

"It's a real exercise in simplicity and restraint," Peterson said.

West said the design largely was inspired by the waterfront view, which encouraged his modernist tendency to transfer load-bearing responsibilities from walls to steel support columns and make the entire south wall of the main building glass.

The deceptively simple open pavilion and walkway provide the necessary shade and unobstructed views that unfold like a series of picture frames.

"It's useful, functional and appropriate for the setting," West said.

West lauded the county for sticking closely to his original design.

"The contractors did an excellent job," West said. "They took an unusual amount of pride in their work."

By Zac Anderson www.heraldtribune.com

Published: Monday, August 25, 2008 at 1:00 a.m

Bivalve's return sets benchmark for bay

2008-08-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

Robert Blenker jumped into chest-deep Sarasota Bay water Saturday looking for scallops, creatures with 60 bright blue eyes and a sensitivity to pollution that had made them unable to survive here.
He landed right on top of one.

"Eight to 10 years ago, you wouldn't find this stuff," said Blenker, who lives in Palmetto.

Blenker and his extended family found 20 or so scallops in the first ever Great Sarasota Bay Scallop Search on Saturday. A fleet of 28 boats sent snorkelers looking for the bivalves that had been missing from the bay until this year.

A new nonprofit group called Sarasota Bay Watch plans to use this year's search -- 826 scallops were counted and plotted on a map -- as a baseline for how healthy the bay is and to get the community involved in preserving water quality.

"We want to include everybody," said Rusty Chinnis, Sarasota Bay Watch executive director.

When the water quality declines, bay scallops are among the first to disappear. Their reappearance this year in Sarasota Bay has environmentalists calling this the cleanest the water has been in years.

"I'm kind of amazed," Chinnis said. "I was expecting in the neighborhood of a couple hundred."

Peter Clark, who runs a similar scallop count in Tampa Bay, said the scallops could have come down from there, or migrated north from Charlotte Harbor.

The water is cleaner than in years past because the drought meant less storm-water runoff carrying pollutants into the bay. There has also been a lack of red tides, a seasonal algae bloom that chokes out sea life.

"We're seeing the best water quality we have in years," Clark said.

It is illegal to harvest scallops anywhere in Sarasota Bay.

Most volunteers found them among the sea grass on the bay side of Longboat Key. And they are active swimmers, making the search different from finding a relatively boring clam.

Sarasota High School student Kayla Vanness found one along a sandbar near the Longboat Harbor Marina, held it in her hand and watched it open and close.

Rene Janneman held one out of the water and it closed its shell, squirting water toward Janneman's goatee.

"That's how they move," he said.

BELLWETHER

The bay scallop pulls water through a filter to gather food, making it more sensitive to water pollution than other sea creatures. Because of bay scallops' filtering mechanism, environmentalists use them as a way to monitor water quality. Scallops were not thought to be in Sarasota Bay at all until this year.

By Todd Ruger www.heraldtribune.com

Published: Sunday, August 24, 2008 at 1:00 a.m.

A SHORT COURSE IN HUMAN RELATIONS

2008-08-22T16:48:00.000-07:00

The six most important words in the English language are:

"I was wrong - please forgive me"

The five most important words are:

"You did a good job"

The four most important words are:

"What is your opinion?"

The three most important words are:

"Can I help?"

The two most important words are:

"Thank You"

The one most important word is:

" You"

The least important word is:

" Me"

Submitted by Ellie Hartle

Local volunteers needed for Coastal Cleanup Day

2008-08-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

Keep Sarasota County Beautiful needs volunteers for the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day on Sept. 20. The cleanup will involve coastal areas and a few interior sites at the following locations:

Sarasota: Bay Island Park, Bayfront Park, Bayou Oaks, Bird Key Park, Blackburn Point Park, Blind Pass Beach, Centennial Park, City Island, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Indian Beach, Lido Beach, South Lido Beach, Myakka River Bridge, New Pass fishing pier, Newtown Estates Park, Palmer Point Beach, Phillippi Creek, Phillippi Estates, Pioneer Park, Point of Rocks, Potter Park, the Ringling Causeway, Siesta Beach, Shoreline Park and Turtle Beach

Nokomis: Nokomis Beach, the Nokomis East neighborhood and the North Jetty.

Venice: Brohard Beach, Caspersen Beach, the South Jetty, Service Club Park, Shamrock Park, Venetia Bay Park and Venice Beach.

North Port: Myakkahatchee Creek, Myakkahatchee Park, Coco Plum Waterway, Blueridge Lake, Shover Waterway and Highland Ridge Park. Other areas include Laurel, Manasota Beach, Osprey fishing pier and Oscar Scherer State Park.

Rain date for the cleanup is Sept. 27. To register, or to become a sponsor, call 861-6767 by Sept. 7.

Way to go

During its July meeting, the Venice Lions Club honored the Venice Lions Little League Baseball team, the county cup champions.

The team, parents and supporters joined the club members for pizza, desserts and soft drinks. In return, the Venice Lions team presented the Lions with a plaque to show their appreciation for the club's sponsorship.

Short take

The Venice Women's Sailing Squadron, also known as the "Bitter Ends" will offer a "Learn to Sail" course for women Sept. 8-12. For information, call Carol Miller at 223-6049 or Helen Gokbudak at 484-1492.

STAFF REPORT www.heraldtribune.com

Published: Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 1:00 a.m.

Florida Officials See Added Hurricane Threat: Not Enough Fear

2008-08-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

MIAMI — The hurricanes are coming. Carlos Alvarez, mayor of Miami-Dade County, cannot say when or how severe they will be, but every public speech he gives now includes a warning.

“Hurricanes are part of our lives,” he tells people, adding: “Every time you get groceries, add a few extra cans. Have some jugs to fill up with water.”

For many, though, the message has yet to register.

Florida’s faltering economy and a recent scarcity of major storms have led to what emergency management officials now describe as a dangerous level of complacency. More than two months into hurricane season, and even as Tropical Storm Fay formed on Friday over the Dominican Republic and headed west, Floridians on both coasts are less prepared to withstand a major storm than at any other time in years, according to officials, business owners and residents.

Further, a Harvard study last month identified a significant post-Katrina distrust of shelters, with about a quarter of people surveyed in coastal areas in eight states planning to stay home if a hurricane hits.

“Officials tell us that they are really quite worried about people who would not cooperate, who are not aware of what was about to happen,” said Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard report. “And just thinking of the mobile homes, if people stay and they really are blown all over, public officials, ambulance services, Red Cross units have to go find these people and provide them with support and services.”

The public cost could be significant. Miami-Dade County has spent $250 million in local, state and federal money cleaning up from the hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Wilma, and officials say that when people are unprepared, the expense rises substantially.

That is partly what worries Larry Gispert, director of the emergency management office for Hillsborough County, on the Gulf Coast. Mr. Gispert says the questions he has received at preparedness seminars this year — like “When is the next hurricane coming to Tampa?” — show that residents are woefully uninformed.

“My concern is that they will get the religion at the very last moment,” he said. “Then they want everybody to help them at the very last moment, and that’s what we cannot do.”

Many officials attribute the lack of preparedness in part to a stroke of good luck: no major storms have hit Florida since 2005. As a result, Mr. Gispert said, “there is hurricane amnesia.”

“It’s human nature,” Mayor Alvarez said. “After a couple of years of nothing, you start to say, ‘It can’t hit us.’ ”

But the economy has also played a role. Florida’s unemployment rate reached 6.1 percent in July, its highest level since 1995. And even for those working, the cost of extra food, water, gas and other supplies can be too much.

Cheth Thach, 23, the manager of a nail salon in the southern Miami-Dade city of Homestead, says routine expenses have become his main priority. Over the last six years, Mr. Thach says, he has spent roughly $2,000 in advance of hurricanes, on food and equipment, including shutters for his home. This year he has yet to spend a nickel.

“Financially, it’s kind of tough to buy everything,” he said. “You work, and there’s no money.”

Officials are also battling people’s heightened aversion to shelters and an overconfidence in the strength of their homes. The Harvard survey published last month polled residents in towns 20 miles from the coast. It found that roughly a quarter did not plan to leave at the approach of a major storm, fearing theft at their homes if they did, as well as violence on the roads or in shelters, similar to what happened in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

“I think for a lot of people’s minds the pictures are still there of the worst conditions that they saw in New Orleans, and that affects their willingness to go somewhere,” said Mr. Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In Florida, tightened building codes have given people more faith in their homes.

Albert Eiras of Miami has experienced some of the worst storms in Florida’s history, including Hurricane Andrew in 1992. For many, says Mr. Eiras, 37, that was a turning point.

“Then,” he said, “everybody was scared. They took it more seriously. But now, depending on the category, people won’t take it seriously. You live in the Keys, they probably won’t even board up. And a lot of that has to do with Andrew. People’s mentality is, ‘If I survived Andrew, I can survive anything.’ ”

On Aug. 7, scientists with the National Hurricane Center predicted that there would be 14 to 18 named storms this season, including 7 to 10 hurricanes, as many as six of which could be at least Category 3, meaning sustained winds above 110 miles per hour.

That was up from the May outlook, which forecast 12 to 16 storms for the season — June 1 through Nov. 30 — including six to nine hurricanes, with five possibly reaching Category 3 status.

Mayor Alvarez said that even a Category 1 hurricane, meaning winds of no more than 95 m.p.h., could cause damage in the tens of millions of dollars.

Mr. Eiras agreed that it was best to err on the side of caution.

“There are people who think, ‘I prepared last year,’ ” he said. “ ‘I spent so much money and nothing happened.’ But you just never know.”

Then, giving it some thought, he said he still needed to make sure he himself was ready.

“I would probably have to double-check the batteries and see if I have enough canned food and water,” he said. “Do I have enough supply to last me?”

By DAMIEN CAVE and YOLANNE ALMANZAR

Published: August 15, 2008 www.nytimes.com

Sarasota top 25 in U.S. art destinations

2008-08-13T04:08:00.000-07:00

SARASOTA - Sarasota is ranked among America's Top 25 arts destinations based on an annual readers' poll recently published in AmericanStyle Magazine.

Readers ranked Sarasota #11 in the Top 25 Small Cities and Towns category.

"This validates what we've been saying for years," said Mayor Lou Ann Palmer. "There is an emphasis on the arts in this community. People visit here and move here because of the arts. The City's public art program is quite extensive, and we are very proud to have one of Florida's most notable art museums - the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art - right here in Sarasota," said Palmer.

Readers recommended Sarasota as a top destination for travelers who love art galleries, museums and festivals. Typically, selected cities have strong public support for art institutions and galleries, and the arts serve as an economic engine for tourism.

The Small Cities and Towns category is comprised of communities with fewer than 100,000 residents. Two other Florida cities reached the Top 25 in the same category: Key West (#6) and Naples (#21). For a complete list of Top 25 arts destinations visit www.americanstyle.com.

http://www.mysuncoast.com/

The beauty of Hummingbirds

2008-08-08T19:01:00.000-07:00

Native Americans considered hummingbirds messenger of joy. They also symbolize the miraculous-the power to accomplish what seemed impossible. Hummingbirds are capable of feats no other bird can perform- they can fly backwards and sideways and can move their wings in a figure eight pattern, which is why they are also considered the symbol of infinity.

As they flit from flower to flower, feeding on nectar and pollinating their hosts, hummingbirds flap their wings 80 timers per second. One has to experience the hummingbird up close to fully appreciate its beauty. An iridescent rainbow of colors accents its tiny body. Hummingbirds are startling stunning.

The hovering action of hummingbirds teaches those who watch them to experience the present moment and to lighten up. It's impossible for our spirits to soar if we are burdened by fear and anxiety.

The lifespan of a hummingbird is three or four years. Except for the ruby-throated variety, most hummingbirds in the U.S. live on the west coast. The best way to attract these birds to your backyard is to have plenty of flowers for them to pollinate. You can also hang a feeder with one part ordinary sugar to four parts water. Keep the feeder away from windows and change the mixture every 2-4 days to prevent lethal bacteria from harming these previous birds.

Ellie Hartle

Source: hummingbirds.net(2008)

No off-season for Jazz Club

2008-08-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

With nearly 90 concerts, lectures and other events throughout the year, the Jazz Club of Sarasota is one of the busiest in the country, if not the world.

"There's nobody even close to us," said club president Gordon Garrett. "We are the most active jazz club in the United States. No question."

Examining the club's calendar -- which includes popular jazz festivals in Sarasota and Venice each year -- lends credit to Garrett's statement.

Founded in 1980 by the late Hal Davis, the former publicist for Benny Goodman, and boasting a membership of about 750, the club shows no signs of slowing down despite the annual dip in event participation during the summer.

One of the club's popular offerings during the hot months is its "Jazz At 2" concerts.

"They do very well," Garrett said. "The club used to shut down in May and start up again in September."

This month's concert features the David Pruyn Quartet from 2 to 4 p.m. Aug. 17 at the Glenridge Performing Arts Center, 7333 Scotland Way, Sarasota.

"Dave's father was head of the Ringling Bros. Circus band," Garrett said. "He also played with Mel Torme and does his whole schtick."

Advance tickets for the show are $7.50 for club members and $12.50 for the public. Admission is $15 the day of the show. For more information, call 552-5352.

The Jazz Club of Sarasota has also teamed up with the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre for "Golden Apple Jazz" to reach out to younger fans, and folks who like listening to music at night.

The Michael Royal Sextet performs from 7 to 10 p.m. Aug. 25 at the theater, 25 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota.

"A six-piece band is very unusual around here," Garrett said, "but Michael put together a very impressive group and we've also invited some younger players."

General admission is $15, while club members pay $10 and students $5. Drinks and snacks will be available. For more information, call 366-5454.

Next month, fans can enjoy an expanded Venice Jazz Festival, which features more musicians, a photo exhibit and a lecture Sept. 27-28.

"What we're trying to do is reach out to more people and try to do things that haven't been done in the past," Garrett said.

For more information about the club, call 366-1552 or visit www.jazzclub sarasota.org.

By Steve Echeverria Jr.
www.heraldtribune.com

ublished: Thursday, August 7, 2008

Sarasota Bay: Celebrating Our Water Heritage

2008-08-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

The Sarasota Bay Estuary Program (SBEP) invites the public to a free viewing of its new documentary Sarasota Bay: Celebrating Our Water Heritage. Produced by local award-winning filmmaker, Florida Journey Communications, the 28-minute documentary makes a compelling case for what’s been achieved — and still needs to happen — to sustain the health of Sarasota Bay.

The featured theme is Sarasota Bay as the economic engine of our area and why healthy ecosystems make economic contributions that transcend conventional accounting.

The film features:
• On-camera interviews with area leaders, including Jack Merriam (Environmental Manager, Sarasota County), Ernie Estevez, Ph.D. (MOTE), Jono Miller (New College), Pat Glass (Southwest Florida Water Management District), Jon Thaxton (Sarasota Commissioner) and Charlie Hunsicker (Manatee County Conversation Lands Management)

Plus discusssions of:
• Habitat restorations—20 years of progress
• Indications that the estuarine system has improved substantially
• Why continued nutrient reduction is a top priority
• Low-impact development—high-impact issue for the future
• The “Water Connection”—why citizen participation matters so much
• Gulf Coast Heritage Trail and ecotourism
• SBEP’s vision for a sustainable future

There will be two showings at each of the following locations. Each showing will be followed by a question and answer session.

Saturday August 9 – Manatee County Extension Service offices, Kendrick Auditorium. 1303 17th Street West, Palmetto. First showing 10 a.m. Second showing 11 a.m.

Saturday August 16 – FTB Jacaranda Library meeting room. 4143 Woodmere Park Boulevard, Venice. First showing noon. Second showing 1 p.m.

Saturday August 23 – Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in the Cooley Theater. 811 South Palm Avenue, Sarasota. First showing 1 p.m. Second showing 2 p.m.

To RSVP for this event or for more information on the video, please contact the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program at 941-955-8085 or visit info@sarasotabay.org.

The Sarasota Bay Estuary Program is dedicated to restoring the area’s greatest natural asset—Sarasota Bay. Its unique program strives to improve water quality, increase habitat and enhance the natural resources of the area for use and enjoyment by the public. Sarasota Bay is one of 28 estuaries in the United States that have been named by the U.S. Congress as an “estuary of national significance.”

August 5th, 2008 by Jonathan Maziarz

Snook Haven a welcome site for many

2008-08-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

Young rockers, bikers and seniors feel at home in cafe-slash-honky-tonk

The lyrics to "Old Folks at Home" looped in my head as I drove the dirt road to Snook Haven -- a hometown hangout in the backwoods of Venice.

At the end of a mile-long Spanish oak and Florida palm canopy emerged a no-frills cafe-slash-honky-tonk. Painted signs with toothy alligators and clever sayings signaled the entrance, and that "way down upon the Suwannee River" refrain resonated even deeper.

This, of course, was the Myakka River.

But there were just as many banjos.

It was a drizzly Thursday afternoon, and Greg Allen's string and wind band was plucking out ditties like "Alabama Jubilee" and "El Cumanchero." Diners in paisley button-down shirts, Bermuda shorts and straw hats tapped their sandals in time.

With an armful of food -- lobster bisque, butter-battered corn nuggets and a Snook grouper sandwich -- Chris Goldberg sauntered out of the kitchen.

"Here you go, sugar," she said with a grin, arranging my order on the table. "Enjoy."

I did, as I scanned the inside decor -- the 45s tacked onto the wall, woodcarvings of gators with fiddles, posters of Rosie the Riveter and headshots of Marilyn Monroe -- Americana at its apex.

Outside, turtles and fish were camouflaging themselves in the saw grass and murk, and herons perched on the wooden dock. During season, from October to May, "Capt. Terry" hosts a one-hour scenic tour on a riverboat here, and year-round, adventurers rent kayaks and canoes, cruising through the Myakka into Charlotte Harbor.

Concessionaire Ken Hansen took over the joint about three years ago (the three-acre park on which it sits is owned by the county, but Hansen and his crew run the cook shack, founded in the 1930s).

His clients run the gamut, he said, from twenty-something rockers to grizzled bikers and two-steppin' seniors.

"Banjo day is like the geriatric ward. People come out with their walkers and oxygen tanks and they have a great time," Hansen said with a chuckle. "It's really a place where anyone can come and feel at home."

And when Bruce Nye the Elvis Guy drops in for an impersonation, look out.

"You might see 250 Elvis fans here. The women go nuts for him," Hansen said. "One sweet little old lady thought he was the real deal, and it made her day."

That is the Snook Haven signature -- that nearly any day of the week, there will be entertainment for somebody, from Dual Sax Ron & The Hornets on Mondays to rotating acts like Rode Hard, Smoked Mullet and the Dallas Brothers on Sundays, and karaoke with open mike on Fridays.

Ron Driscoll of Nokomis, Glen Allen's resident saxophonist and an independent front man, set aside his instrument to sip an iceless root beer on break.

"I just love this place, playing here with these great musicians," he said. "It's my home away from home."

Cold beer, wine, cocktails, gator bites, tilapia, grouper and Bentley's homemade ice cream graced the outside picnic tables and interior bar.

Ilene Gutierrez and her party from Punta Gorda noshed on grilled cheese sandwiches and pulled pork barbecue. The Snook Haven first-timer said she would be back for the view, which tends to be the general sentiment.

"Early in the morning, when the birds are chirping and the squirrels are out," Hansen said, "I look around and think about how beautiful this place is."

Sounds like Hansen could write his own folk song.

By ABBY WEINGARTEN, CORRESPONDENT www.heraldtribune.com

Published: Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 2:30 a.m.

Improvements expected for Legacy Trail

2008-07-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

SARASOTA COUNTY - The Legacy Trail's parking problems on its north end and its gaps due to the lack of trestles to the south are the focus of a flurry of actions by county commissioners this week.

Another clue to the parking puzzle along the increasingly popular 11-mile trail fell into place as the county agreed Tuesday to spend $2.9 million to buy land for parking and other uses along the trail's entry on Bay Street in Osprey.

"We're pretty much good to go on the south side," said Parks Director John McCarthy. The 10-acre land purchase should relieve parking problems to the south, but parking in Palmer Ranch at the north end of the 11-mile-long trail remains a problem.

Because of neighborhood complaints, county commissioners also voted Tuesday to ban parking on the east side of McIntosh Road near the trail. There is a nearby county park where trail users can park, but apparently they feel it is too far away and have been parking along McIntosh.

The county is talking with Palmer Ranch Holdings about using a portion of its property near the north terminus of the trail, and parks staff were told to explore whether land owned by the county's sewer utility about a mile to the south could be connected to the trail and opened for parking.

County commissioners are expected today to set aside $2.5 million toward funding the final $6 million of the trail's costs.

That will be for building trestles across Dona and Roberts bays. In all, the trail is expected to cost $32 million. The county expects to put the trestles out for bid early next year and finish the projects by late 2010.

Parking on the north side of Bay Street adjacent to the trail should be in place this fall. The county will then conduct public meetings to figure out what else the neighborhood would like to see on the property, McCarthy said. Restrooms are likely, as are picnic areas. A ballfield is needed in the area and there may be a need for a simple, open, peaceful area off the trail, he said.

The property is being bought from Dennis T. and Mary Ann Marlin. With closing and start-up costs, the county expects it will spend $3.1 million opening the new park.

By Doug Sword www.heraldtribune.com 7/23/08

Osprey tiki bar can reopen, but must keep noise down

2008-07-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

OSPREY - Drinks will begin flowing again at a long-shuttered Osprey tiki bar in early October but drunken crooners be warned: Karaoke is forbidden and live music will be strictly curtailed.

County leaders agreed to end a four-year legal dispute Tuesday with Casey Key Fish House owner Jimmy Von Hubertz over his detached tiki bar, but not without some elaborate and unusual conditions designed to control noise.

Neighbors repeatedly complained about loud music at the tiki bar, leading county officials to rule in 2004 that the structure was illegal and shut it down.

Von Hubertz sued, and on Tuesday the Sarasota County Commission agreed to a settlement agreement that will allow the bar to reopen but only offer live music on weekends until 9 p.m. -- as opposed to 10 p.m. for outdoor music countywide.

In addition, the music must be kept to 70 decibels, which is lower than the countywide standard of 75 decibels.

The agreement even specifies where bands can set up on the property (they must face away from nearby homes) and the type of music that can be played: Island style, soft rock and jazz.

Von Hubertz also is limited to three-piece bands without amplified bass on all but seven holiday weekends totaling 20 days.

"You've gotten really specific on this, which is fine," said Commissioner Nora Patterson.

Von Hubertz sat down with neighbors last week at the bar to hash out the music restrictions. A neighbor even paid to have a sound engineer measure noise levels.

"I want to make my neighbors happy," he said.

Von Hubertz said the battle over the tiki bar -- which he plans to demolish and rebuild as a "Chickee Hut" that does not need to be permitted because it is built by American Indians -- was a battle to preserve a piece of Old Florida at the 1950s-era Fish House.

"This was a victory for the whole community," he said.

Commissioners agreed.

"This is a jewel," said Commission Chair Shannon Staub. "There were an awful lot of people that were not disturbed by the music but now that it's reined in, it's going to be as good as it was before."

By Zac Anderson Heraldtribune.com 7/23/08

The star manatee gets a party and an AARP card

2008-07-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

BRADENTON - For the guest of honor today, there will be no cake. There will be crowds of well-wishers and there will be singing -- "Happy Birthday" is at high noon -- and there will be cookies for those gathered to toast another milestone in the extraordinary life of the world's oldest manatee.

But for the object of all this affection at Parker Manatee Aquarium, there will be no cake, no cookies, no special treat beyond the apple he has come to expect first thing every morning, and perhaps an extra head of cabbage.

At 60, Snooty has a weight problem.

When he hit 1,380 pounds awhile back, his keepers cut out the pineapple and strawberries, and today Snooty carries a trim 1,260 on his 9 feet 4 inches, snout to tail, with a waist of 89 inches.

Also, there will be no cake for Snooty because Snooty is an animal, although this fact may be easily overlooked in the giddy barrage of Disney-esque hoopla his special birthday is likely to provoke.

Born in captivity in Miami and a resident of Bradenton for all but his first year of life, Snooty, nee Baby Snoots, is by now as humanized as any marine mammal ever known outside the Magic Kingdom.

He pulls himself half out of his 60,000-gallon tank (Bradenton tap water) and leans on powerful shoulders to demand a little face-to-face with visitors.

He sleeps on his back sometimes, with his flippers crossed over his chest.

He has fingernails (well, flippernails) and a navel.

He flirts.

He sulks.

He loves a party.

But birthday cake, no.

The feeling at the Parker Manatee Aquarium is that you have to draw the line somewhere.

Given to titanic flatulence in the best of circumstances, all-vegetarian, all-natural, nonfat Snooty would likely not react well to refined sugar and eggs.

Matters of metabolism aside, though, "there's a danger in going too far with humanizing any animal," says Marilyn Margold, director of the aquarium.

"With an endangered species, in particular, I don't think it's healthy. You lose respect for them in the wild."

Snooty has never seen the wild, nor will he. He is one of four manatees in the state officially designated by wildlife authorities as non-releasable, because their long lifetimes in captivity have stunted the survival skills they would need "out there."

In exchange for confinement, Snooty has survived roughly 10 times longer than the typical manatee in the wild.

As far as anyone at Parker Aquarium knows, he has survived longer than any manatee anywhere, ever.

Current laws ban the breeding of manatees, or their extended confinement for any but medical reasons, so there will quite literally never be another Snooty.

Thus, these public birthday celebrations, which have been going on annually since 1993, are an occasion of considerable magnitude in Bradenton, where last year 4,000 people turned out for the big event.

The actual date of the manatee's birth is July 21, but Mondays are no good at all for a birthday party, in part because Snooty has to work the day afterward and these birthday events take it out of him.

"He'll be tired the next day," says Margold. "He'll need Sunday to rest up."

With an active schedule of 24 performances a week, plus pretty much nonstop interaction with visitors and staff for 10 hours a day, Monday through Saturday, plus these birthday parties, plus the annual Snooty Gala every November, when black-tied donors and patrons get their own private moments, Snooty is the hardest working manatee in show business.

Lately, he has been enduring the additional burden of Baby Coral, a young manatee convalescing from propeller injuries and due for release soon.

Baby Coral is a bit of a pest. She eats his food and plays with his toys -- "environmental enrichments" to the aquarium staff, hula hoops and plastic bowling balls to the rest of us -- and she follows Snooty around like a kid sister until he sends her away with an exasperated chirp.

More than a dozen manatees have roomed here since his tank was made big enough for guests in 1993. Snooty has never shown much interest.

He prefers to swim alone, and slowly, snacking from time to time on a head of romaine, 45 of them a day, on average. When Snooty gets to the hard, white core of the lettuce he spits it out with a contemptuous smack. His pool is littered with rejected cellulose by the end of the day.

Snooty is a manatee of very specific tastes.

He enjoys pineapple juice but dislikes bananas. He prefers women to men. He retains an eye for blondes, possibly because his first keeper was a tow-headed girl.

Snooty is believed to have a special fondness for Tippi Hedren, the aggressively blonde star of Hitchcock's "The Birds" and mother to Melanie Griffith, who is one definition of blonde.

An animal rights activist, Hedren came by for a Snooty inspection when she was in the area for the Sarasota Film Festival a few years ago. She has since been back to his tank twice.

Snooty's international fan base -- he is particularly big in Germany, for some reason -- includes among its ranks a number of individuals who might on principle oppose the lifetime confinement of any animal.

"Snooty is just special," shrugs Pat Rose, longtime executive director of Orlando-based Save the Manatees, which has endeavored for 25 years to protect the dwindling species in the wild.

For his 60th, Rose's group scored Snooty a membership in the AARP.

"We talked about some sort of floating cake, but this is better.

"I hope he likes it," says Rose.

By Bill Hutchinson
Published: Saturday, July 19, 2008 www.heraldtribune.com

New group dedicated to Sarasota Bay

2008-07-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

And the Sarasota Bay Watch was born. The nonprofit organization's first official day was Monday in the form of a press conference at the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce.

The health of Sarasota Bay and its surrounding waters has a deep economic impact on communities from Bradenton to Venice. SBW President Rusty Chinnis pointed out that builders, developers, realtors, as well as fishing guides, restaurants and coastal resorts, depend on the bay's health.

Chinnis said Sarasota Bay Watch is committed to restoring and preserving Sarasota Bay's ecosystem and its resources through community education and citizen participation.

The "Sarasota Bay Great Scallop Search" on Aug. 23 will be the SBW's first event. At Sarasota's Ken Thompson Park, the boating event will be composed of 30 boats and their crews, who will be given areas of grass flats to search. After recording the scallops and bringing them back to the park, there will be an opportunity to learn about scallops from noon to 2 p.m. The general public is invited.

All boating participants will receive complimentary lunches and T-shirts.

Because the SBW is an independent, autonomous organization, SBW members will have the capacity to make a decision and carry out a certain task themselves, immediately.

There are good indications that the bay has temporarily returned to health, but much effort will be needed to maintain such healthy levels.

One of those positives is the vast supply of scallops, which MOTE Marine Laboratory staff scientist Dr. Jay Leverone said is a record number for the Sarasota-through -Tampa Bay area compared to past years. Scallops were basically wiped out locally after the 2005 red tide, but have made an astounding recovery. The healthy scallop population is an indication of good health, including factors such as high oxygen levels.

But scallop populations rise and fall frenetically, partially due to the fact that scallops can live up to one year.

Chinnis, a freelance outdoors writer, was the first president of the Manatee Chapter of the Florida Conservation Association (now CCA). He is an avid and locally well-known fly-fisherman.

Other board members of the Sarasota Bay Watch are John Ryan, Ryan Denton, Lowe Morrison, Sandy Gilbert, Charlotte Richardson and Capt. Jonnie Walker of Bay Walker Charters.

Chinnis said that START (Solutions to Avoid Red Tide) played a crucial part in the formation of the SBW.

The organization was put together in six months.

Nick Walter @ nwalter@bradenton.com
July 16, 2008 www.BradentonHerald.com

Divers Seek Ancient History In North Port Salt Spring

2008-07-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

NORTH PORT - Scientists have a good idea of what Florida was like 12,000 years ago: hot and dry and twice as wide as now, with seas 400 feet lower. That would have put the Gulf coast of Florida about 100 miles west of today's shoreline.

Turtles the size of beanbag chairs roamed the land, along with giant sloths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.

A few humans passed through, too, briefly settling in spots where food was plentiful and where fresh water, sparse as it was, could be found.

Little Salt Spring, which reaches more than 200 feet into the earth, was a hot spot back then, the Don CeSar of its time, a place where nomads gathered to spend time, hunt animals, feast and then move on. The lush, nearly undisturbed sinkhole now is a treasure of artifacts that is just beginning to spill clues about prehistoric life.

Secluded, surrounded by thick vegetation and patrolled by an 8-foot alligator and four or five of her offspring, Little Salt Spring is bubbling with activity. Divers from Miami and Tampa are plunging in, dropping about 90 feet, where the light of the sun fades to black and silt stirred by the slightest movement cuts visibility to a bare minimum.

The divers are on a mission. They're looking for old stuff, 100 to 120 centuries old. Animal bones. Fossilized plants. And maybe, if they're lucky, human remains or remnants of a long-dead culture.

Divers have been in the water every day for a week and a half and have turned up interesting artifacts, but, so far, nothing related to ancient humans.

The search continues until the end of July.

It was 33 years ago when divers brought up circumstantial evidence that humans were here in 10,000 B.C. - a giant tortoise shell with what appeared to be a spear plunged into it, said John Gifford, associate professor and archaeological diver with the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

For the past 30 years, there have been no archaeological dives to that depth at the sinkhole, he said.

It costs to mount such a project, Gifford said. This dive is being funded by the National Geographic Society. There are two teams of divers, one from the University of Miami and the other from The Florida Aquarium in Tampa.

Gifford said divers are examining the underside of a ledge some 90 feet down. That's the level at which they expect to find what was here 12,000 years ago. In shallower waters, they found 15 oak stakes pounded around the perimeter of the sinkhole. They date back about 9,500 years, Gifford said.

Ice age migratory people used Little Salt Spring for water and as a place to hunt and kill thirsty animals such as mastodons and giant ground sloths.

Those people left evidence they were here, evidence that just now is being uncovered.

"This," Gifford said of the spring, "is a real time capsule."

Ninety feet down there is little oxygen in the cold water, and that tends to preserve organic material such as bones, wooden tools and weapons.

It's scientifically significant stuff, Gifford said.

"Here in Florida, people don't appreciate the fact that we have a prehistory that goes back thousands and thousands of years," he said.

Archaeologists long have treated Little Salt Spring as an untapped gold mine of ancient artifacts, and the isolated spot is considered "one of the most important archaeological sites in the state, and perhaps the nation, for its wealth of information about the first Floridians more than 12,000 years ago," Florida Aquarium officials say.

Little Salt Spring was discovered to be an underwater archaeological site in the late 1950s.

Seventy-four-old George Guy used to teach diving classes in the sinkhole. He was watching from the shore as the archaeologists bobbed in the water Tuesday morning. It was 1966 when he first donned fins and a tank and jumped in, he said. He lived in St. Louis at the time.

Guy's dives only descended to depths of 40 or 50 feet, he said. He never knew what treasures lay beneath him. It was too deep.

But the spot was a favorite, he said. "I've enjoyed it so much, I decided to move here." Now, he volunteers at the site.

The sinkhole was donated to the University of Miami in 1982.

In 2005, Gifford and some graduate students, diving at a shallower level, discovered two artifacts estimated to be about 7,000 years old, a greenstone pendant and a carved stone artifact that appears to be part of a spear-throwing device.

Gifford said there likely are many artifacts yet to be discovered.

"The research proposed by Dr. Gifford is critical to our understanding of the first Americans," said Emily Landis, program officer with the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.

The dives are difficult and dangerous, said Casey Coy, dive safety officer for The Florida Aquarium and one of eight divers on the excursion.

"There is a lot of floc, a lot of organic material," he said. "It's easy to disturb the stuff and limit visibility."

That, and the fact divers are in total darkness, makes it dangerous.

"You can become very disoriented," Coy said. Each diver had to complete a 100-hour course in scientific diving, he said.

Gifford said the dives are exciting, and not walks in the park.

Once the divers pass the point where sunlight reaches, "the beams of our lights are all that we see."

Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760 or kmorelli@tampatrib.com.
The Tampa Tribune

In Paris, Burgers Turn Chic

2008-07-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

EVEN if you couldn’t be on the Champs-Élysées for Bastille Day on Monday to watch seven parachutists float down in front of President Nicolas Sarkozy, you can still celebrate the greatness of France with a new local tradition.

Eat a hamburger.

Beginning a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere tourists are likely to go this summer — in St.-Germain cafes, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star chefs — they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun.

“It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even,” said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant here. “Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it.”

It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued McDonald’s for $2.7 million in damages over a poster that suggested he was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.

But as French chefs have embraced the quintessentially American food, they have also made it their own, incorporating Gallic flourishes like cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme. These attempts to translate the burger, or maybe even improve it, strongly suggest that it is here to stay.

“It’s not just a fad,” said Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, who, as consulting chef at the Champs-Élysées boîte Black Calvados, developed a burger made with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of blackberries and black currants. “It’s more than that. The burger has become gastronomic.”

Some of the most celebrated chefs in the city have taken up the challenge. Yannick Alléno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. Mr. Alléno’s baker, Frédéric Lalos, a winner of one of the country’s fiercest cooking competitions, makes the buns. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs 35 euros, about $56.

Romain Corbière, the chef at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant Le Relais du Parc, in a Norman-style manor near Trocadéro, cooks a seasonal burger a la plancha. This summer Mr. Corbière, a veteran of Mr. Ducasse’s Louis XV in Monaco, is substituting a shrimp and squid patty for the beef burger he served in cooler weather.

L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon offers Le Burger, actually two small burgers topped with slabs of foie gras of almost equal size.

The only thing more surprising than the about-face in chefs’ attitudes may be the enthusiasm with which their patrons have devoured these haute burgers.

“I didn’t think we would sell so many,” said Sonia Ezgulian, guest chef at Café Salle Pleyel, which Ms. Samuel opened last fall in an airy, modernist space inside one of Paris’s most prestigious concert halls.

On some days, as many as a third of her customers order the burger, which is offered alongside Mediterranean-inspired dishes like sea bass with fennel confit and pistachios. “Sometimes we say we have no more,” she said. “It’s just too much.”

When a new guest chef replaces Ms. Ezgulian at the end of August, he will keep the burger on the menu. It’s in his contract.

IT is not as if hamburgers were unknown in Paris. American restaurants here like Joe Allen have long served them. Ms. Grasser-Hermé ate her first in 1961 at the American Legion, 11 years before McDonald’s unveiled its golden arches in France. But with few exceptions the local burgers were flat, overcooked and shunned even by American expatriates.

Other forms of ground or chopped beef have been enjoyed here for years as well. Butchers sell kilos of ground meat destined to become steak haché, a pan-seared patty made with lean meat, pressed into an oval, and served without a bun.

And while steak tartare shows up on practically every brasserie menu, chefs now recognize that a hamburger is not simply six ounces of chopped lean beef grilled until crusty.

“No, that would be an error,” said Ms. Grasser-Hermé.

“A hamburger is the architecture of taste par excellence,” she explained. “The meat needs to be a mix of fatty and lean. Not raw, not rare. It must be medium rare. At the same time the bread needs to be smooth, tepid, toasted on the sesame side. I like to brush the soft side with butter. There needs to be a crispy chiffonade of iceberg lettuce. Everything plays a role.”

In developing the Salle Pleyel burger, Ms. Samuel and Ms. Ezgulian felt the weight of tradition. “We’re a little terrified of making a mistake,” said Ms. Samuel. “We cling to things like the soft buns, sweet-and-sour pickles, onions, tomatoes, cheese. We need these guideposts because we don’t have the history, the context. Otherwise, for us, it’s not a burger. It’s a hot sandwich.”

Yet Ms. Ezgulian has taken some liberties. The current version of her burger is a riff on steak tartare. She’s kneaded a mixture of chopped sun-dried tomatoes and tangy cornichons and capers into the ground meat. Parmesan shavings stand in for the usual Cheddar.

Céline Parrenin, a co-owner of Coco & Co, a two-level place devoted to eggs that opened in St.-Germain last year, didn’t feel any such compunction when she and her business partner, Franklin Reinhard, invented the Cocotte Burger. The Cheddar cheeseburger, with pine nuts and thyme mixed into the meat, sits on a toasted whole-wheat English muffin pedestal. In a wink at the restaurant’s egg theme and recalling the time-honored steak à cheval, a fried egg is placed on top.

All the chefs are making hamburgers for the first time, and they are uncertain about the exact cuts of beef they are using. Mr. Alléno, for example, simply relies on his butcher, Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, whose shop, Le Couteau d’Argent, is in the Paris suburb Asnières.

For Mr. Alléno’s burgers, Mr. Le Bourdonnec delivers a mix of chuck and beef rib. But the butcher thinks the American T-bone steak is an ideal cut. The T-bone does not exist in France, but to make his point, Mr. Le Bourdonnec made his own. He combined a piece of filet, which is tender but less flavorful, with a piece of contrefilet, which is marbled and tasty, but slightly less tender.

Using a long, razor-sharp knife, he sliced the meat into quarter-inch dice, chopped it fine with a cleaver and shaped it into patties, to be cooked rare in a hot skillet filmed with olive oil. No bun, no pickles, no cheese, no special sauce; only a few grains of fleur de sel.

“What you have is texture and the flavor of meat,” he said. “No artifice.”

“That’s not a burger, Papa,” pointed out his 13-year-old son, Paul. “There’s no bread.”

HOW did the dripping, juicy hamburger come to be one of the signature dishes of Paris? For one thing, expatriate French chefs reinventing American classics in the United States made it safe for their countrymen to try it back home.

“I didn’t have this burger culture,” said Ms. Samuel. “A hamburger, what’s that? I didn’t get it. Then I tasted it at DB Bistro Moderne,” she said, speaking of Daniel Boulud’s restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. “If Daniel hadn’t done it, maybe I wouldn’t have either. He helped me understand.”

Mr. Corbière grew up with burgers, but he didn’t think of putting one on the Relais du Parc menu until he tasted Laurent Tourondel’s Black Angus burger at BLT Market in New York last October.

Both Mr. Tourondel and Mr. Boulud laughed when they were told that they had helped the hamburger conquer Paris.

“I think it’s shocking, but at the same time the French are realizing that a burger is real food, it’s good,” said Mr. Boulud.

Mr. Tourondel grew up in a small town where, he said “nobody ever saw a burger until 10 years ago. Everybody was against it, but everybody goes to eat it.”

Whether the interpretations are classical or whimsical, Americans would probably recognize most of the burgers in Paris. They might be flummoxed, however, by the etiquette associated with eating them.

Ketchup does not automatically come with a burger. If requested, it may appear in a porcelain bowl. At the Café Salle Pleyel, servers do produce a ketchup bottle on demand. At lunch there one recent day, a businessman shook the ketchup onto his plate, then, taking a knife in his right hand, spread the condiment onto a forkful of hamburger in his left hand before lifting it to his mouth.

Alicia Fontanier, the co-owner and chef at the tiny gourmet bar Ferdi on the rue du Mont-Thabor, laments that many of her customers insist on using silverware. Ms. Fontanier is the sister of Maria Luisa Poumaillou, who owns a couple of boutiques down the street, and many of the socialites, expatriate international types and fashionistas who shop there invariably stop in for her burger, the Mac Ferdi, and guarapita de parchita, a potent drink of cachaça and passion fruit juice.

“Eating with your hands is part of the pleasure,” Ms. Fontanier said, seated in a dining room decorated chiefly with her 15-year-old son’s childhood toy collection. “But nine out of 10 people use knife and fork. I’m happy not to see it. I’m in the kitchen.”

At Floors, a three-story diner in a former printing shop near Sacré-Coeur that features custom burgers, Emil Lager, a waiter, said that many of the diners seem self-conscious about ordering.

“Another thing I’ve noticed is that the muscled guys order the boeuf double with bacon, egg and fries, and a Diet Coke,” he said. “Then they share a cheesecake. They don’t want to gain weight.”

Also, he explained, Parisians don’t really understand about drinking a milkshake with the burger. They order it as dessert.

By JANE SIGAL
Published: July 16, 2008 www.nytimes.com

Venice Theater - 2008 Summer Rep Series @ Yvonne Pinkerton Theatre - August 12 - 24, 2008

2008-07-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Graduate
Adapted for the stage by Terry Johnson
August 12, 2008 @ 8:00pm
A college student spends his first summer out of school in the arms of his father's best friend's wife. Meanwhile, he is falling in love with the man's daughter.

Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted
by Christopher Trumbo based on the letters of Dalton Trumbo
August 13, 21, 2008 @ 8:00pm & August 17, 2008 @ 2:00pm
When legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he was thrown in prison and blacklisted as one of the "Hollywood Ten." Based on his brilliant and razor-sharp letters to friends, former friends, and family, Trumbo reveals how the author of Spartacus, Roman Holiday, and Exodus took on Congress, Hollywood, and the Red Scare -- and won.

The Little Dog Laughed
by Douglas Carter Beane
August 14, 18, 2008 @ 8:00pm & August 23, 2008 @ 4:00pm
The Little Dog Laughed follows the adventures of Mitchell Green, a movie star who could hit it big if it weren’t for one teensy-weensy problem. His agent, Diane, can’t seem to keep him in the closet. Trying to help him navigate Hollywood’s choppy waters, the devilish Diane is doing all she can to keep Mitchell away from the cute rent boy who’s caught his eye and the rent boy’s girlfriend (wait, the rent boy has a girlfriend?). Will there be a happy ending as the final credits roll?

Regrets Only
by Paul Rudnick
August 15, 19, 23, 2008 @ 8:00pm
This comedy of Manhattan manners explores the latest topics in marriage, friendships and squandered riches. A powerhouse attorney, his deliriously social wife and their closest friend, one of the world’s most staggeringly successful fashion designers come together in a Park Avenue penthouse. Add a daughter’s engagement, some major gowns, the president of the United States, and stir.

Love Drunk
By Romulus Linney
August 16, 20, 22, 2008 @ 8:00pm
An older man picks up a much younger woman in a bar and brings her to his retreat, an Appalachian palace. Her littered past collides with his need and what follows is an inspired dance of sexual tension. This yet to be published play is set to open at the Abingdon Theatre Company in 2009 starring Austin Pendleton.

King Lear
by William Shakespeare
August 24, 2008 @ 2:00pm
Shakespeare's dark tragedy, King Lear begins with the fictional King of England, King Lear, handing over his kingdom to two of his three daughters whom he believes truly love him. Angry that his youngest daughter does not appear to love him as much as the others, Lear banishes her. She leaves and is taken by the King of France as his Queen. Illegitimacy, devious plots, and threats of invasion, are but a part of this classical bitter story.

Country, the City Version: Farms in the Sky Gain New Interest

2008-07-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president.

When Mr. Stringer heard about the concept in June, he said he immediately pictured a “food farm” addition to the New York City skyline. “Obviously we don’t have vast amounts of vacant land,” he said in a phone interview. “But the sky is the limit in Manhattan.” Mr. Stringer’s office is “sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm,” and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor’s office within the next couple of months, he said.

“I think we can really do this,” he added. “We could get the funding.”

Dr. Despommier estimates that it would cost $20 million to $30 million to make a prototype of a vertical farm, but hundreds of millions to build one of the 30-story towers that he suggests could feed 50,000 people. “I’m viewed as kind of an outlier because it’s kind of a crazy idea,” Dr. Despommier, 68, said with a chuckle. “You’d think these are mythological creatures.”

Dr. Despommier, whose name in French means “of the apple trees,” has been spreading the seeds of his radical idea in lectures and through his Web site. He says his ideas are supported by hydroponic vegetable research done by NASA and are made more feasible by the potential to use sun, wind and wastewater as energy sources. Several observers have said Dr. Despommier’s sky-high dreams need to be brought down to earth.

“Why does it have to be 30 stories?” said Jerry Kaufman, professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Why can’t it be six stories? There’s some exciting potential in the concept, but I think he overstates what can be done.”

Armando Carbonell, chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., called the idea “very provocative.” But it requires a rigorous economic analysis, he added. “Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.”

Mr. Carbonell questions if a vertical farm could deliver the energy savings its supporters promise. “There’s embodied energy in the concrete and steel and in construction,” he said, adding that the price of land in the city would still outweigh any savings from not having to transport food from afar. “I believe that this general relationship is going to hold, even as transportation costs go up and carbon costs get incorporated into the economic system.”

Some criticism is quite helpful. Stephen Colbert jokingly asserted that vertical farming was elitist when Dr. Despommier appeared in June on “The Colbert Report,” a visit that led to a jump in hits to the project’s Web site from an average of 400 daily to 400,000 the day after the show. Dr. Despommier agrees that more research is needed, and calls the energy calculations his students made for the farms, which would rely solely on alternative energy, “a little bit too optimistic.” He added, “I’m a biologist swimming in very deep water right now.”

“If I were to set myself as a certifier of vertical farms, I would begin with security,” he said. “How do you keep insects and bacteria from invading your crops?” He says growing food in climate-controlled skyscrapers would also protect against hail and other weather-related hazards, ensuring a higher quality food supply for a city, without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

Architects’ renderings of vertical farms — hybrids of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Biosphere 2 with SimCity appeal — seem to be stirring interest. “It also has to be stunning in terms of the architecture, because it needs to work in terms of social marketing,” Dr. Despommier said. “You want people to say, ‘I want that in my backyard.’ ”

Augustin Rosenstiehl, a French architect who worked with Dr. Despommier to design a template “living tower,” said he thought that any vertical farm proposal needed to be adapted to a specific place. Mr. Rosenstiehl, principal architect for Atelier SOA in Paris, said: “We cannot do a project without knowing where and why and what we are going to cultivate. For example, in Paris, if you grow some wheat, it’s stupid because we have big fields all around the city and lots of wheat and it’s good wheat. There’s no reason to build towers that are very expensive.”

Despite its potential problems, the idea of bringing food closer to the city is gaining traction among pragmatists and dreamers alike. A smaller-scale design of a vertical farm for downtown Seattle won a regional green building contest in 2007 and has piqued the interest of officials in Portland, Ore. The building, a Center for Urban Agriculture designed by architects at Mithun, would supply about a third of the food needed for the 400 people who would live there.

In June at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center in Queens, a husband-wife architect team built a solar-powered outdoor farm out of stacked rows of cardboard tube planters — one that would not meet Dr. Despommier’s security requirements — with chicken coops for egg collection and an array of fruits and vegetables.

For Dr. Despommier, the high-rise version is on the horizon. “It’s very idealistic and ivory tower and all of that,” he said. “But there’s a real desire to make this happen.”

By BINA VENKATARAMAN
Published: July 15, 2008
www.nytimes.com

Sweet Heat: For Jamaicans, It’s About Jerk

2008-07-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

ON most summer Sundays, Brooklyn is burning.

Smoke rises from grills, many of them charcoal-fueled, illegal and loaded with jerk chicken — the spiced, smoky favorite of the borough’s large Jamaican community.

“We don’t mess around out here,” said Hubert Lawton, an owner of Boston Jerk City in East Flatbush, where an oil drum full of charcoal belches smoke onto Utica Avenue. Mr. Lawton’s jerk chicken and jerk pork are among the best in Brooklyn. The mix of herbs and spices he rubs on the meat is so pungent and coarse that you feel thyme twigs and cracked allspice berries when you bite it.

“My jerk is all natural, and a gift from God, and I give it all respect,” he said.

Jerk is Jamaica to the bone, aromatic and smoky, sweet but insistently hot. All of its traditional ingredients grow in the island’s lush green interior: fresh ginger, thyme and scallions; Scotch bonnet peppers; and the sweet wood of the allspice tree, which burns to a fragrant smoke.

“It’s not a sauce, it’s a procedure,” Jerome Williams, a Jamaican-born Brooklyn resident, said on a recent Sunday in Prospect Park, where families arrive as early as 6 a.m. for lakeside grilling spots, a few of which are actually authorized by the parks department. “It has to be hot, but it cannot only be hot, or you get no joy from it.”

Done right, jerk is one of the great barbecue traditions of the world, up there with Texas brisket and Chinese char siu. Its components are a thick brown paste flecked with chilies, meat (usually pork or chicken, occasionally goat or fish) and smoke, from a tightly covered charcoal grill, that slowly soaks into the food.

“Making jerk is like spending time with a kid,” said Oneil Reid, the chef and owner of the shiny Jamaican Dutchy food truck that parks daily on West 51st Street in Manhattan. “You have to watch it every second.” His care pays off: the Dutchy’s jerk chicken with two sides is one of the best truck lunches in the city.

He said that he would like to make jerk pork sometimes, but that many of the other food vendors, and the taxi drivers who inch past his cart in Midtown traffic, are Muslim, and the pork smell bothers them.

That, however, is one of the few concessions he makes to New York.

“I don’t change what I do,” Mr. Reid said. “I give them the straight-up Jamaican thing, and they eat it up.”

Some of jerk’s special qualities often get lost in translation to the United States, where the sticky-sweet chicken salads and gas-grilled wings sold as jerk have little to do with the real thing and its particular balance of flavors.

“You have to taste that scallion, taste that fresh herb, taste that Scotch bonnet,” said Marilyn Reid, an owner of Islands restaurant in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, who is not related to Oneil Reid. “It has to absorb all those flavors,” she added, punctuating each item with an emphatic nod. “You can’t just throw some sauce on grilled chicken and call it jerk.”

Jerk began with the Taino Indians, who lived on Jamaica and used the sweet wood of the allspice tree to cook the meat of local wild pigs. As Europeans planted the island with sugar cane, bananas and coffee, the Taino retreated to the safety of the vast inland forests.

The particular genius of jerk — the play of sweet and smoke, green and wood, spicy and herbal — is credited to the Maroons, Africans who taught the Taino their method of smoking food in pits dug into the earth. The Maroons were brought to Jamaica as slaves, but began escaping in the 1650s, joined the Taino in the forests, and fought British and Spanish dominion over the island. (The words jerk and jerky come from charqui, the Spanish version of the Quechua word charki, meaning dried meat.)

The American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston chronicled an overnight boar hunt with the Maroons in 1939. “Towards morning we ate our fill of jerk pork,” she wrote. “It is better than our American barbecue. It is hard to imagine anything better than pork the way the Maroons jerk it.”

The legend of the Maroons’ daring and resourcefulness lives on in the islanders’ pride in jerk. “This is a dish that is ours, not coming from England like the patty, or from India like the roti,” said Winston Currie, owner of the Best Jerk Center in St. Ann, Jamaica. “Real Jamaicans can eat jerk every day; we never get tired of it.” Employees from a nearby bauxite mine, their work boots coated with red dust, line up daily for Mr. Currie’s dry-rubbed jerk.

Although the seasonings of jerk do not change much around the island, some cooks use more liquid — usually soy sauce or vinegar — to transform the rub into a kind of marinade. A dry rub makes for crustier jerk; a wet rub produces juicier meat. (The recipe on this page is somewhere in the middle.)

Boston Bay, on Jamaica’s east coast, has become the island’s most famous destination for jerk. The beach is lined with stalls selling jerk, and the sweet and starchy foods that go well with it: “rice and peas,” rice cooked in coconut milk with small red beans; sweet potatoes roasted in charcoal; and “festival,” a missile of sweet fried dough that resembles an oversize hush puppy.

“People drive all the way from Kingston for Boston jerk,” Mr. Williams said. That’s a four-hour journey of hairpin turns over the Blue Mountains, where allspice trees grow wild.

Purists say allspice smoke is a defining element of jerk. The entire tree, which Jamaicans call pimento, is used: the crushed berries are rubbed into the skin; the wood burns hot and slow; the green leaves are tossed on the fire, releasing a sweet smoke that flavors the meat with a warm, woody pepperiness.

Last year, because of the efforts of Gary Feblowitz, a jerk-obsessed cinematographer for television documentaries, pimento wood for grilling became available in the United States. It took him five years to clear red tape in the United States and Jamaica.

“We are very careful about taking trees,” said Mr. Feblowitz, who works with several pimento farmers in Jamaica to ensure a steady supply without any deforestation. “The trees have about a seven-year fruiting period, and after that the farmers cut them down and sell or burn them anyway.”

After I acquired a supply of pimento wood, dried leaves and berries — the box alone made the lobby of my apartment building reek of allspice — the only remaining challenge was the rub.

Jerk is so ingrained in Jamaican cooks that the notion of getting a recipe is entertaining, something like asking a Midwesterner for a hamburger recipe.

“Go around the corner to the cellphone store, the music store — you will always find someone to tell you how to do it,” Mr. Williams said, gesturing toward Flatbush Avenue, the main artery of West Indian Brooklyn.

Ms. Reid, of Islands restaurant, bakes her jerk, as her mother did before her. “I think men like messing around with hot coals,” she said, proving that some gender-culinary stereotypes transcend geography. “Women just want to get a good dinner on the table.”

In the end, I tried many methods as I jerk-cooked eight chickens, and they all worked, just as my Jamaican sources had so casually promised. Pimento wood is an expensive novelty, and none of the jerk makers I found in Brooklyn are using it. But the smell and taste of pimento-grilled jerk is highly satisfying.

Refusing to fuss with pans of water and smoker boxes as some grill experts demand, I just dumped in one chimney of hot coals, added the pimento wood, put the chicken on the grill, covered it tightly and left it alone for half an hour. This produced the best jerk I’ve had outside Jamaica.

The jerk I made with plain hardwood charcoal, showered during the cooking with handfuls of allspice berries, was excellent, and even the batch I baked in the oven wasn’t bad. But once you’ve had the smoke, it’s hard to give it up.

To find good jerk in New York, one place to look is near hospitals (serving the many Jamaicans who work in health care), busy subway stops, or better yet, both.

Yvonne’s Jamaican food truck, which parks on East 71st Street near New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on the Upper East Side, sells jerk pork only on Tuesdays and Fridays, and jerk chicken only on Wednesdays, but a fiery sauce of chopped Scotch bonnets pickled in vinegar every day of the week. The sauce is available by the shot and, alarmingly, by the quart. (Most local jerk is made mild, with hot sauce glugged on afterward at the customer’s request.)

“Jamaicans and Trinidadians like heat,” said Tamika Macintosh, a nurse’s assistant and an Yvonne’s regular. “The other West Indians can’t take it.”

Alternatively, follow the smoke. Some fancy West Indian restaurants make very good jerk rubs, but they are too mindful of the law to put a charcoal grill out on the sidewalk. You have to seek out the renegades.

“If the smoke is so thick outside on the sidewalk that you can’t see to put the quarter in the parking meter, that’s a good sign,” Mr. Williams said.

“We get tickets, sure,” said Desmond Mailer, the manager of McKenzie’s on Utica Avenue in Flatbush, where smoke billows from blackened oil drums 16 hours a day. “But you know, cops like jerk, too.”

By JULIA MOSKIN www.nytimes.com July 2, 2008

Charlotte Harbor's ecological recovery threatened by rains

2008-07-05T08:57:00.000-07:00

For the first time in four years, clams in Pine Island Sound are ready to harvest, oysters are growing in thick clusters on pilings in the Caloosahatchee River and shrimp are teeming in the seagrass beds of San Carlos Bay.

Two dry years have kept Lake Okeechobee’s polluted water away from Charlotte Harbor, helping the estuary spring back to health and make fishing profitable again.

But only abundant rainfall stands between a harbor bursting with life and collapse. The flawed water management system that supports agriculture in the heart of the former Everglades still artificially connects the big lake to Charlotte Harbor.

It could be more than a decade before that plumbing is fixed, despite Gov. Charlie Crist’s bold plan, announced last week, to reconnect the lake to the Everglades by buying out U.S. Sugar for $1.75 billion.

Until Lake Okeechobee’s water is directed south again, as Crist aims to do with the help of 300 square miles of sugar land, fishermen can only hope for good weather.

“We cross our fingers and keep our thumbs up,” said Ralph Woodring, a shrimp fisherman on San Carlos Bay in Lee County.

Those fingers will have to stay crossed while the government decides whether an Everglades restoration project designed to benefit Charlotte Harbor will be sacrificed to help pay for Crist’s plan.

The Everglades spending requires approval from the governor-appointed board that controls the 16-county South Florida Water Management District.

The district’s board meets today Monday to discuss the governor’s proposal and what it means for the $11 billion Everglades restoration plan.

The decisions will affect the future of Charlotte Harbor, Florida’s second-largest estuary — fed by three Southwest Florida rivers, the Myakka, Peace and Caloosahatchee — and one of the state’s most productive.

Moving water

The Everglades, a vast sawgrass marsh interspersed with oak hammocks and cypress swamps, once extended from Lake Okeechobee to Florida's southern tip.

The lake, fed by the Kissimmee River, overflowed its shallow banks in the wet season, sending a slow-moving sheet of water across the flat Florida plain.

Sawgrass helped hold water year-round and trapped layers of rich muck.

Settlers discovered the muck would produce bountiful crops if they drained the northern Glades. Engineers designed a dike around the lake and a canal to the Caloosahatchee River to divert excess water toward the Gulf of Mexico. A canal also was built to drain water east to the Atlantic.

Drainage allowed two companies to emerge from the soil -- U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals. The sugar companies grew towns -- Clewiston, Belle Glade, Pahokee -- and political alliances that proved valuable when water became a precious commodity needed for growth.

Although South Florida receives about 50 inches of rain a year, most of it falls in summer. Drainage projects kept sugar fields dry in the wet season, but made water scarce in the dry season.

Complicated engineering projects sought to balance water needs with flood control, but they carried polluted water to Lake Okeechobee and severed the Everglades from its lifeblood.

When serious Everglades restoration talks began in the 1990s, scientists argued that the best way to reverse the damage would be to clean up Lake Okeechobee and send the water south again.

The sugar industry balked at the prospect of giving up its land, leaving only one option: building canals around the sugar land, as well as reservoirs and hundreds of underground storage wells.

No one considered the plan perfect, but many thought it was better than nothing. Congress approved it in 2000, but little progress has been made, to the detriment of Charlotte Harbor.

In the very wet years of 2004 and 2005, water managers dumped billions of gallons of polluted water from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee, to keep from flooding sugar farms and communities.

The lake water turned the river black with mud and later green with algae. Murky water in the estuaries killed oysters and clams, drove out crabs and fish, and caused blankets of algae to smother the seagrass beds in San Carlos Bay.

Living on the edge

With the recent drought, the Charlotte Harbor estuary has bounced back, but the water in the lower Caloosahatchee River has become so salty that it has killed off all the underwater grasses, which provide critical habitat for tiny fish.

Long periods without flow from the lake this year turned the middle of the river stagnant, spawning blue-green algae blooms that have forced a water plant on the river to stop operating since June 5.

"You can't even stand outside with the odor; it has a very strong ammonia smell," said Katee Minneker, who lives across the river from the plant and just east of the Franklin lock and dam.

The dam is the only obstacle keeping the stagnant water from the estuary. Once rains cause the dam to open wide again, the algae will flow into San Carlos Bay, which flows into southern Charlotte Harbor.

"It's the same situation where there is either too much or too little water," said Kurt Harclerode, a water policy expert with Lee County's natural resources department.

Those who live on the river and rely on the estuary have waited more than a decade for a remedy to the imbalance.

Relief was supposed to come by 2011 through a $450 million reservoir to hold water on 11,000 acres for more gradual release and an artificial marsh to filter pollutants.

The reservoir was part of the original $11 billion Everglades restoration plan that now hangs in limbo.

"If they delay it much longer it's going to kill off our estuary system here," said Roy Kibbee, who sells crabs, mullet and clams in St. James City. "There won't be nothing left. They might as well just flush it, make it a sewer system."

Southwest Florida does not want the Caloosahatchee reservoir project lost in the excitement over the U.S. Sugar deal that Crist has dubbed the "missing link" in Everglades restoration.

"It may be a great big link in the chain, but it is a link," Harclerode said. "You need these other projects that go along with that to have full restoration."

Coastal communities have been asking for lake water to be moved south for a long time, but the reservoir projects should not be shoved aside, he added.

"We're still at the mercy of weather the way the system is now," Harclerode said.

By KATE SPINNER|

Published Monday, June 30, 2008 at 4:30 a.m. www.heraldtribune.com

Healthier Aging

2008-07-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

Mice fed an ingredient in red wine are healthier, although they don't necessarily live longer. Aging mice fed a chemical found in red wine were healthier in their twilight years, scientists have confirmed, although the rodents didn't necessarily live longer.

The anti-aging effects of the compound, resveratrol, mimic those of a calorie-restricted diet, which has been shown to give mice, dogs, and worms longer, healthier lives. Although resveratrol only extended the lives of obese mice in this latest study, it made all the animals healthier. They were spared the worst of some of the declines that come with old age, and they had healthier cardiovascular systems and stronger bones than did untreated animals. Non-obese mice fed resveratrol also had significantly lower total cholesterol. The study was done by the National Institute on Aging, as a follow-up to 2006 findings that resveratrol improves the health and longevity of overweight, aged mice.

The study offers yet more evidence of the possible anti-aging benefits of resveratrol. "Is this too good to be true?" asks Harvard Medical School's David Sinclair, one of the authors of the paper, which appears this week in Cell Metabolism. "I think we'll know in the next few years." Sinclair initially showed the anti-aging effect of resveratrol several years ago. Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, the company that he cofounded to develop anti-aging drugs, including ones based on resveratrol, was recently sold to GlaxoSmithKline for about $720 million.

Sinclair and his colleagues gave one-year-old mice--that's middle-aged, in mouse years-- high doses of resveratrol. It's found in the skins of grapes--which are left on the fruit when red wine is fermented but removed from white wine before fermentation--and in lower amounts in peanuts and some berries, including cranberries and blueberries.

Resveratrol had a broad range of health benefits for mice, the researchers confirmed. The mice had fewer cataracts, better bone density, healthier cardiovascular systems, and better motor coordination than did untreated animals, and resveratrol also made obese mice more sensitive to insulin.

"Let's hope it will do the same things for humans," says Mark Leid, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Oregon State University. He wasn't involved in this work.

Other studies have found that resveratrol extends life span in various organisms, including fish, flies, and yeast, and in mice fed a high-calorie diet. This study found the same effect in obese mice, although they still didn't live as long as mice on a normal diet. Resveratrol had no effect on the life span of animals fed a normal diet, although they had a healthier old age.

It's possible that in this case, the mice didn't begin resveratrol treatment when they were young enough to get the full benefits of the compound, perhaps including a longer life, Sinclair says. Also, unlike humans, mice don't die from cardiovascular disease or suffer serious consequences from brittle bones, so it's possible that resveratrol may be an even greater boon to aging humans than it is to mice, says Rafael de Cabo of the National Institute on Aging, who also worked on the project.

Sinclair's team also monitored gene activity patterns in various tissues in the treated mice and found that they were similar to those in animals on a restricted-calorie diet. Scientists have found that reducing mice's caloric intake by 30 to 50 percent while maintaining adequate nutrition can ward off age-related diseases, improve stress resistance, and slow the declines in function that come with age in many species, including mice, fish, and yeast. Mice treated with resveratrol in this study "have a younger gene-expression profile," de Cabo says.

It's not exactly clear how resveratrol works. There's evidence that the compound activates proteins called sirtuins that play a key role in controlling aging. However, a recent study using lower doses of resveratrol in mice suggests that there may be another mechanism at work, at least when lower doses are given.

The daily dose of resveratrol that Sinclair and his colleagues gave mice was the equivalent of more red wine than most people will drink in a lifetime, so "wine isn't going to do the trick," says Leonard Guarente, a professor at MIT and a pioneer in the study of sirtuins. (Guarente is on the board of Sirtris but didn't work on this study.) "There's going to have to be a supplement," he says.

Resveratrol pills are already on the market, but until more studies are done in humans, de Cabo advises caution. Even though you'll get much less of the compound by eating berries and drinking wine, he says, "I'd rather people buy grapes and red wine than take compounds off the shelf."

Sirtris is conducting clinical trials using resveratrol to treat type 2 diabetes. The preliminary results look promising, and no serious side effects have surfaced, notes Sinclair.

He and other scientists are also studying the anti-aging properties of similar compounds--some of them apparently much stronger than resveratrol. "There's a whole pipeline of better molecules coming along," Sinclair says.

By Anna Davison Copyright Technology Review 2008.

A little change at Venice Theatre

2008-07-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

Venice Little Theatre is not little anymore. The 58-year-old organization is the third-largest community theater in the United States, with the largest professional staff of any community theater in the Southeast.

Consequently, its board of directors voted last week to change its name to Venice Theatre.

The name change had been kicking around the organization for several years, said Artistic Director Murray Chase. But with the impending retirement and replacement of Maureen Holland as publications director for the theater, VLT decided to conduct an independent marketing study. Over six months, several focus groups of ticket buyers, donors, community leaders, volunteers and people with no connection to the theater met to share their impressions of the theater.

What they said surprised Chase and the board of directors.

"No. 1, people thought we were a children's theater," Chase said. "People had no idea about the breadth of our programming. Here's another one: Community people who knew us very well were not aware of any nonprofit organization's constant need" for development and fundraising. "That was an eye-opener. The other thing was that some people thought it was a theater for old people solely."

The first step in changing community misperceptions about Venice Little Theatre is to drop "little" from the name.

"Little theater" once meant a particular form of community theater. But, Chase said, "'Little' has become increasingly pejorative in people's minds. 'Children' or 'small' or 'limited,' 'amateurish,' all of those things kept flying by."

The organization has long since outgrown any of those meanings. With two stages and an annual operating budget of $2.39 million for 2008-2009, Venice Theatre presents plays, musicals and concerts year-round and supports a full theater curriculum for students starting at age 5. It routinely wins awards at theater festivals regionally and nationally.

"So looking at it pretty hard, the No. 1 suggestion that came back was to change the name," Chase said.

Among the new names considered were Venice Theater Arts Center, Venice Stage and the Stages of Venice (in a nod to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice"). But rather than complicate the organization's identity, the board decided to keep it simple.

"We have Venice Symphony, we have Venice Arts Center, and now we have Venice Theatre," Chase said.

The theater's mission will not change at all, Chase said. The staff is developing a new logo, "very simple, very clean, kind of dynamic. It lets go of some of the quaintness and tradition, which is a bit of a shame."

The name change is the first step in a process of getting people "to understand what it is we do now," Chase said. "I believe that actually getting people to understand what we do now will draw people with ideas for helping us reach a greater vision. It's a thing that kind of builds upon itself."

Within the next couple of years, Venice Theatre will begin a capital fundraising drive to expand its current facilities at 140 W. Tampa Ave.

Chase said the response among donors and volunteers to the name change has been almost entirely positive.

"Among donors I had no negative reactions," he said. "Among volunteers, I had two. It's not going to be as big a hill to climb" as it would have been "if we had done something more radical."

By Susan L. Rife

Published Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 1:10 p.m.
HeraldTribune.com

Biscuit Bakers’ Treasured Mill Moves North

2008-06-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

WINTER WHEAT A staple for Southern bakers since 1883 will now be milled in the Midwest. The White Lily plant in Knoxville, Tenn. is closing this month. For generations of Southern bakers, the secret to weightless biscuits has been one simple ingredient passed from grandmother to mother to child: White Lily all-purpose flour.

Biscuit dives and high-end Southern restaurants like Watershed in Atlanta and Blackberry Farm outside Knoxville use it. Blue-ribbon winners at state fair baking contests depend on it. On food lovers’ Web sites, transplanted Southerners share tips on where to find it, and some of them returning from trips back home have been known to attract attention when airport security officers detect a suspicious white dust on their luggage.

White Lily is distinctly Southern: it has been milled here in downtown Knoxville since 1883 and its white bags (extra tall because the flour weighs less per cup than other brands) are distributed almost solely in Southern supermarkets, although specialty stores like Williams-Sonoma and Dean & DeLuca have carried it at premium prices.

But at the end of June, the mill, with its shiny wood floors, turquoise and red grinders and jiggling armoire-size sifters, will shut its doors. The J. M. Smucker Company, which bought the brand a year ago, has already begun producing White Lily at two plants in the Midwest, causing ripples of anxiety that Southern biscuits will never be the same.

Maribeth Badertscher, a spokeswoman for the company, said the new White Lily was the result of thorough product testing and promised that customers “won’t know the difference.” But in a blind test for The New York Times, two bakers could immediately tell the old from the new.

No test was necessary for Fred W. Sauceman, author of a series of books called “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South, From Bright Hope to Frog Level,” who said White Lily should stay in Knoxville. “It’s kind of like the use of the word terroir when you’re talking about wine,” he said. “It means something to have been made in the exact same spot for 125 years, and it’s unconscionable not to respect that.”

He continued, “People felt so strongly about this flour that in the South it was reserved for Sunday dinner. It was called the Sunday flour.” A White Lily cookbook, now out of print, capitalized on that sentiment with the title “Sunday Best Baking: Over a Century of Secrets from the White Lily Kitchen.”

LaDonna Hilton, whose baking has won more than 200 ribbons at the Appalachian Fair in Gray, Tenn., said she has tried other flours and simply discarded the results. “You wouldn’t think you’d be able to tell the difference in the taste,” she said, “but you can.”

For Cathy Riddle, another Appalachian Fair champion who uses White Lily for everything from green tomato bread to “sad” dumplings (the kind with a chewy center), the selling point is consistent good results.

The passion for White Lily is more than simple nostalgia.

“All you have to do is take a little bit in your hand and take some all-purpose flour in the other hand and just look at it,” said Shirley O. Corriher, the Atlanta-based author of “CookWise,” about the science of cooking, and a forthcoming companion volume called “BakeWise.” “There’s an incredible difference. It’s much, much finer, much whiter and much silkier. You’re going to get a finer textured cake.”

The difference in White Lily flour begins with the kind of wheat it is made from, soft red winter wheat, a low-protein, low-gluten variety. “Protein is the enemy of light, high-rising, delicate baking!” the package says.

Most other all-purpose flour is made from a blend of wheat varieties that differs from region to region and generally has a much higher protein content. “It’s a little bit good for everything, but not that good for anything,” said R. Carl Hoseney, a retired grain science professor at Kansas State University who is now a cereal consultant.

Soft wheat is, in fact, the key to understanding why the South is better known for cakes, biscuits and pie crusts than for yeast breads, which require the strength of high-protein flour. Soft red winter wheat was once grown primarily in the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee and, in the days before national food distribution networks, it was the only wheat widely available in the South. Nowadays, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are among the largest producers.

It may also explain why many Northerners’ attempts to replicate Southern delicacies fall flat. Low-protein flour absorbs less liquid, so a recipe designed for White Lily won’t work with other flours. Cake flour or another low-protein flour like Martha White are the closest substitutes.

Carolyn Durst, 62, a sweepstakes winner in the pie competition at the Kentucky State Fair, said, “I give pie crust demonstrations to my friends, and I tell them, No. 1, you’ve got to have White Lily flour.”

Ms. Badertscher said that the new White Lily is also made solely from soft red winter wheat. But there are many other variables, like the grind of the flour. The Knoxville plant has long claimed that White Lily is ground finer and sifted more times than any other flour on the market. All that work costs a bit more — at an Atlanta supermarket this month, five-pound bags of White Lily went for $2.99, more than Gold Medal, which sold for $2.79, or the store brand, $1.82, but far less than specialty and organic brands.

Then there is the matter of what part of the grain is used. Underneath the husk of a wheat kernel, a layer of bran encloses the germ and a white substance called endosperm. White Lily is a patent flour, meaning it uses only the heart of the endosperm, the purest part. With wheat prices more than double what they were last spring, some fans fear that selectivity may be compromised.

“At the turn of the century, the question was, how pure and white can you get it?” said Fran Churchill, a former White Lily plant operations manager. “For economy, millers have pushed closer and closer to the bran,” she said. “Everyone in the industry is getting as much flour out of that kernel right now as they can.”

Unlike most all-purpose flours, White Lily is bleached with chlorine, a process that not only whitens the flour but weakens the proteins. Chlorination alters the starch particles to make batters more viscous, and thus less likely to fall. It loosens the strict balance of starch, liquid, fat and sugar that baking requires to allow for higher proportions of sugar — thus, sweeter cakes.

The chlorine makes White Lily more like cake flour than other all-purpose flours. But there again is another subtle difference, Ms. Corriher said. While White Lily can be used in cakes, it is not bleached as much as cake flour, which gives White Lily a better, less acidic taste, Ms. Corriher said. Pastry flour is also made from soft wheat, but it is not chlorinated.

Milling experts said that in theory, it should be possible to replicate White Lily. “If the source of the wheat is the same, the mill itself won’t be that hard to duplicate,” Mr. Hoseney said. Ms. Corriher, on the other hand, was more skeptical that a process perfected over more than a century of milling and subjected to Knoxville’s intensive quality control could be easily replicated.

A blind test by two bakers, who were sent bags of the old and new product marked only A and B, underscored Ms. Corriher’s concern.

Zoellyn Smith, who worked in both quality control and research and development at the Knoxville plant, accurately identified the new product before she began to bake. Sample A, the new product, had “a grayish color” and made a “dense and chewy” cake, while Sample B, the old, made for silky, rather than stiff, dough and a “light and airy” cake.

“When I looked at just the flour I thought that Sample B was milled in Knoxville,” she said. “After performing the bakes there was no doubt.”

But it did not take a specialist in food technology and plant sciences to guess right. Ms. Hilton, the amateur baker, said, “There wasn’t a big difference, but I could tell the difference.” Even her family knew which batch was made with flour milled in the Midwest. “The biscuits came out just a little more dense, and the texture wasn’t quite as smooth.”

Told of the results, Ms. Badertscher said, “White Lily flour continues to be made from the same quality ingredients and processes as when it was produced in Tennessee.”

For many Southerners, though, comparison is a moot point. At a Knoxville grocery store, Peggy Melhorn, 85, was spied with a bag of White Lily flour in her cart and asked if it was better than other flours.

She shrugged. “It’s been my favorite for a long time, so I don’t know if there’s other good flours out there or not.”

Erica Yoon for The New York Times

Researchers hit a homer with 'The Odyssey'

2008-06-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

Using astronomical clues, they date one of literature's most heralded events: Odysseus' slaughter of his wife's suitors. But the finding leaves many questions unanswered.

Delving into a 3,000-year-old mystery using astronomical clues in Homer's "The Odyssey," researchers said Monday they have dated one of the most heralded events of Western literature: Odysseus' slaughter of his wife's suitors upon his return from the Trojan War.

According to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the wily hero who devised the Trojan Horse hefted his mighty bow on April 16, 1178 BC, and executed the unruly crowd who had taken over his home and was trying to force his wife into marriage.

The finding leaves many perennial questions unanswered, such as whether the events portrayed actually occurred or whether the blind poet Homer was the author of the tale.

But it casts a new sheen of veracity on a story that has existed in a hazy realm of fantasy and history since it was first composed 400 years after the Trojan War.

"They make a wonderfully persuasive case," said Scott Huler, author of a book about his efforts to follow Odysseus' journey. "I do find myself convinced that some of these events Homer described" are based on actual history.

"The Odyssey" tells the story of the king's 10-year journey home after the capture of Troy. Odysseus spent seven of those years as a captive of the nymph Calypso, then was delayed another three by Poseidon, who was angered by the blinding of his son Cyclops.

When he finally arrived at Ithaca, he was angered to find 109 men urging his wife Penelope to accept that her husband was dead and marry one of them. Spurred by Athena, Penelope declared an archery contest with Odysseus' bow, saying she would marry the winner.

Odysseus, in disguise, won the contest, then killed all of the suitors as well as a dozen maids who had slept with them.

The key passage in dating the tale is highly ambiguous.

As the suitors are sitting down for their noontime meal, the goddess Athena "confounds their minds" so that they start laughing uncontrollably and see their food spattered with blood.

Then the seer Theoclymenus prophesies their death and passage to Hades, ending with the phrase: "The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world."

The Greek historian Plutarch interpreted this as signifying a total solar eclipse, and many others have agreed. But modern scholars tend to discount this interpretation, arguing that the passage is simply metaphorical.

Previous researchers have determined that a total solar eclipse occurred in the region over the Ionian Sea on April 16, 1178 BC, which would be in agreement with recent data suggesting the fall of Troy around 1192 to 1184 BC.

To investigate, astronomer Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University and Constantino Baikouzis of the Observatorio Astrónomico de La Plata in Argentina read the text of "The Odyssey" carefully, looking for other astronomical clues.

They found three definitive events:

The day of the slaughter was a new moon -- a prerequisite for a solar eclipse.

Six days before the slaughter, Venus was visible and high in the sky.

Twenty-nine days before, the constellations Pleiades and Boötes were simultaneously visible at sunset.

They also identified a potential fourth event 33 days before the slaughter. Homer wrote that Hermes, known to the Romans as Mercury, traveled far west to deliver a message and flew all the way back east again. Magnasco and Baikouzis interpreted this to mean that Mercury was high at dawn and near the western edge of its trajectory.

Each of these astronomical events recurs at a different interval, so the precise sequence identified in their reading should be unique.

Using computer analysis, they searched for the sequence between 1250 and 1115 BC, roughly 75 years on either side of the putative date for the fall of Troy.

They found only one sequence, and it coincided with the eclipse of April 16, 1178 BC.

Whether the events of "The Odyssey" occurred or not, the authors are interested, at least, in reopening the debate.

"If we can get a few people to read 'The Odyssey' differently, to look at it and ponder whether there was an actual date inscribed in it, we are happy," Magnasco said.

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer June 24, 2008
thomas.maugh@latimes.com

With no clear ID on bones, there's always imagination

2008-06-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

The mystery is still unsolved. The experts at Mote Marine Laboratory still have not had a chance to examine a set of strange remains found on a Longboat Key beach.

A family on vacation found the bones last week.

With a long, sloping head, sharp spikes and large eye sockets, the creature was like nothing they had seen before. It was several feet long -- and the Robinson family only found half of its torso.

Curious, they took the bones to scientists and sent photographs to researchers throughout the region.

The guesses were varied: red drum, black drum, Goliath grouper, even a saltwater sturgeon. No one has provided a definitive answer. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission asked if the Robinsons found the lower part of the jaw.

They did not, but FWC guessed something in the Sciaenidae family -- like the drum.

At Mote, mammal researchers took a guess -- a snook or tarpon -- but the experts who study fish were not around to see it yet. And with the Robinsons returning home next week, Mote may not have another shot to investigate.

So the Robinson family, vacationers from Texas, will go home with a preserved skeleton and a good story to tell their friends.

But they probably will not have an answer.

With no clear ID on bones, there's always imagination Published Saturday, June 28, 2008
Herald Tribune

County, state team up to plant scallops

2008-06-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

Scientists are putting scallops in Sarasota Bay for the same reason people used to put canaries in coalmines. The county and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute will soon be using caged scallops to spot water quality problems from Sarasota Bay to Lemon Bay, and are looking for help from volunteers who live along the waterfront.

The project — similar to ones done by the Sarasota Bay National Estuary Program and Mote Marine Laboratory that were stymied by poor water quality — will also enhance a budding scallop population, which had been wiped out in recent years by pollution and red tide.

The fan-shaped bivalves are sensitive to myriad water quality changes and will help researchers pinpoint problems.

“If we can identify when scallops die, we can narrow down the environmental factors affecting their health,” said Rene Janneman, environmental specialist for the county.

But the double-edged effort needs the help of people who live along the bay and who are willing do monthly monitoring of the cages or allow monthly access to them.

Leading up to the placement of the cages, researchers are using scallop “traps” in the bay to figure out where they have the best chance of survival.

“We are going to put those scallop seeding cages in the areas that have the best chance for survival,” Janneman said.

The researchers plan to recruit volunteers to allow them to put the cages just offshore. The cages will hold scallops grown by Fish & Wildlife.

At one time, Southwest and the central coast of Florida harbored dense populations of scallops. But changes in water flow and other factors led to a decline.

To bolster their numbers, the state closed its waters to scallop fishing in 1994 and severely restricted recreational harvests.

To volunteer for the program or host a scallop site, contact the Sarasota County Call Center at (941) 861-5000 and ask for the scallop seeding project.

County, state team up to plant scallops by Cathy Zollo Published Monday, June 23, 2008
Herald tribune

The Economics of Bananas

2008-06-28T12:33:00.000-07:00

The papers yesterday were full of news about bananas.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Chiquita Brands International, “the Cincinnati-based banana distributor” (I love that phrase; it evokes Lardner, or at least Runyon), was expected to report a third-quarter loss due to higher fuel costs and bad weather in banana-growing countries. Chiquita stock fell sharply on the news.

The second article was far more interesting, and answered a question I’ve long wondered about: why are bananas so cheap relative to other fruit, especially since a lot of the fruit we consume in the U.S. is grown here while bananas are not?

Dan Koppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, wrote an Op-Ed in The Times that is packed with interesting stuff about the Freudian fruit. The economics are particularly interesting:

That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers, and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.

Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here. They became a staple only after the men who in the late 19th century founded the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) figured out how to get bananas to American tables quickly — by clearing rainforest in Latin America, building railroads and communication networks, and inventing refrigeration techniques to control ripening. …

Once bananas had become widely popular, the companies kept costs low by exercising iron-fisted control over the Latin American countries where the fruit was grown. Workers could not be allowed such basic rights as health care, decent wages, or the right to congregate. … Over and over, banana companies, aided by the American military, intervened whenever there was a chance that any “banana republic” might end its cooperation. … Labor is still cheap in these countries, and growers still resort to heavy-handed tactics.

The final piece of the banana pricing equation is genetics. Unlike apple and orange growers, banana importers sell only a single variety of their fruit, the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas — most of them in Africa and Asia — but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. … By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality, and universally affordable.

Some readers may recoil at this description and vow to never eat another banana. Others may thank their lucky stars that free markets are able to deliver a tasty, healthy, peel-intact fruit to their corner stores at very affordable prices.

Koppel’s larger message is that the Cavendish banana is under fungal threat and may disappear. And, because Koppel seems to endorse the locavore movement (unlike some of us), he doesn’t sound all that sad:

In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy, and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. … [B]ananas have always been an emblem of a long-distance food chain. Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.

I am guessing this prognosis is alarmist but I have no way of knowing. Can anyone out there add some insight?

The Economics of Bananas By Stephen J. Dubner

Life and death at the shore

2008-06-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

Turtle facts

In summer, an ancient reproductive ritual begins when the female leaves the sea and crawls ashore to dig a nest in the sand. She uses her rear flippers to dig the nest hole and then she deposits about 100 eggs the size of ping-pong balls. When egg-laying is complete, the turtle covers the eggs, camouflages the nest site, and returns to the ocean. Nesting turtles may return several times in a nesting season to repeat the process and usually nest every two to three years. As is true for some other reptiles, the temperature of the sea turtle nest determines the sex of the hatchlings. Warmer temperatures produce more females, whereas cooler temperatures result in more males. Consequently, conservationists prefer to leave turtle eggs in their original location whenever possible so that sex ratios are determined naturally. After incubating for about two months, the eggs begin to hatch. A few days later, 2-inch hatchlings emerge as a group. This mass exodus usually occurs at night, and the hatchlings use the bright, open view of the night sky over the water to find their way to the sea. For more info click here. Artificial lights on beachfront buildings and roadways distract hatchlings on their way to the ocean. Because of this danger, many beachfront communities in Florida, including Sarasota, Lee and Charlotte Counties, have adopted lighting ordinances requiring lights to be shut off or shielded during the nesting and hatching season.

Source: Fish and Wildlife Research Institute Visit: myfwc.com

A stroll along the beach is supposed to ease stress and aid relaxation, but for Coastal Wildlife Turtle Patrol members, the dawn’s light showcases the juxtaposition of human’s wants and needs versus the survival of wildlife. For turtle patrol volunteers, the light shows how the barrier island habitat is shrinking as condominiums line the shore of some of Florida’s prime sea turtle and shorebird habitat.

Loggerhead turtles, other sea turtles and shorebirds are endangered, in large part due to human encroachment on their nesting grounds and pollution along Florida beaches. Four-legged predators including the family dog destroy many nests and kill baby sea turtles each year, according to Florida Wildlife Commission. Life for a sea turtle is so perilous, that only 1 of 1000 ever become adults to reproduce.

On a recent Saturday, some Coastal Wildlife Turtle Patrol members walked south from the Range Light to document sea turtle activity in areas known as Zone 8 and 9. A week earlier, they had found up to six or seven nest sites per day. Saturday, two nests were marked, measured and documented under islander Grace Harvey’s authorized permit holder.

This year is a good year so far for the loggerhead (Caretta caretta), according to Harvey.

As of June 20, 2008, Gasparilla Island turtle nest totals as of June 20, 2008, 23 nests and 12 false crawls have been reported by Turtle Patrol volunteers and 110 nests and 60 false crawls have been reported in Lee County, according to Norma Jean Zvosec, a volunteer with the Coastal Wildlife Club Inc., an award-winning non-profit organization helping to protect endangered and threatened sea turtle nests from South Venice to Gasparilla Island.

Sadly, Saturday’s patrol also documented lack of knowledge by local residents and vacationers about the needs of sea turtles and shorebirds during the nesting season that runs between May 1 and Oct. 31 each year.

Almost immediately upon stepping onto the beach, Coastal Wildlife Club co-founder Wilma Katz and two-year volunteer Cherie Laflamme saw three things that bothered them. First, Katz stopped a porch light left on at a condominium that was shining brightly in direct line of a marked nest.

“Lights are bad for adults,” Katz said, “but light can affect hatchlings more.”

Second, Laflamme noted a nest had been inundated by the tide. “Nests can tolerate moving water,” Katz said as Laflamme documented the information in case the nest failed to hatch. Third, as far as the eye could see there were toys, beach chairs and canopies left on the beach. Laflamme pulled out a fresh tag that explains politely that beach furniture and toys should be removed from the beach nightly. She tied it to a beach chair. “This is the frustrating part,” she said as she marked on tag that had been attached to the same beach chair more than a week prior. “Either people are not informed or they lack respect. Maybe they don’t realize it can cause a turtle not to nest or cause false crawls.” Just up the beach a few yards from the site of a newly found nest, a jumble of beach furniture and an old canopy lie in a direct line south of the new nest.

While turtle nesting continues through August, by next week, loggerhead hatchings should start emerging and heading out to the Gulf waters. They will continue hatching through late October. Katz urges anyone to report any lights they see on the beach to Grace Harvey or to the condominium’s management, so the lights can be shielded or turned off between 9 p.m. and dawn each day.

At the moment, beach furniture and lights are the biggest detriment to nesting sea turtles as well as nesting birds. Katz pleads: “Please check the lights. We’re happily busy with nests and it’s easier for management to the check their own lights than to wait for us to notify them.

Remember, for a sea turtle mother to be, the light may confuse her as she labors in the night, so she could head toward land instead of back out to sea. And, for a hatching sea turtle, light is life. Unfortunately, sometimes the light holds a false promise and it means certain death.

Most of the lighting issues could easily be remedied with shields or a simple flick of the switch, according to Katz. “We need to have a natural light sky or the hatchlings will become disoriented.”

Editor’s note: Each week, the Gasparilla Gazette reports turtle nesting number and offers turtle tips from local Island School children

by TAMI PATZER email: tpatzer@breezenewspapers.com

Siesta Key Beaches Named the Third Best Beach in the United States

2008-06-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

Siesta Key, FL (PRWEB) June 9, 2008 -- Siesta Key beach earns the number three spot in the 18th Annual Top 10 Beaches in the United States by Dr. Beach, Dr. Stephen Leatherman. Siesta Key has been a constant on the Top 10 Beaches in the United States for the past two years, last year taking the 10th spot. Recognized for its powdery, white sand, the crystal quartz keeps the sand cool even on the sunniest Florida day. Unlike most beaches, when the Siesta Key sand is packed near the water's edge, you can easily jog, ride your bike or push a stroller.

50 criteria are used to evaluate the beaches, including water and sand quality, as well as facilities and environmental management, as part of the National Healthy Beaches Campaign (NHBC). The NHBC is dedicated to creating a balance between the recreational use of our nation's beaches and maintaining the environmental quality and safety of this prized resource.

South Miami favorite comes to Siesta Key: Deli Lane Café & Tavern

2008-06-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

South Miami favorite comes to Siesta Key. There beneath the blue suburban skies ... Deli Lane Café & Tavern celebrated the grand opening of its third location at 2157 Siesta Drive.

Jan Kirchoff and Mike Maler have been partners in this South Beach institution for 20 years now. The award- winning restaurant has been rated one of the best in South Florida by the Zagat Survey, while America Online customer reviewers call it a "South Miami staple."Excited to be on the west coast, they have duplicated the concept with longtime friends and new partners Sue Russo and Eileen Russo-Whitney.

What's the secret that makes this local deli a neighborhood favorite with a strong fan base? It's always fresh, satisfying, tasty, substantial and, above all, affordable.Among the tempting options are Vegetable Gumbo, Brutus Caesar Salad and Pressed Duck Sandwich. Or if you have a hankerin' for an old-fashioned deli breakfast, Deli Lane serves it every day, all day long.

There's even Key lime pie for you diehards, and yes, it's white, not green.So, go ahead, try it. The place has good food, good vibes and good prices, inspiring good times.

Published Wednesday, May 21, 2008 - Herald Tribune

Neighbors OK waterfront park plan

2008-06-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

OSPREY — The first major new waterfront park developed by Sarasota County in years will have three fishing piers, two boat ramps, room for 55 boat trailers and the blessing of neighbors who initially opposed the plans. If all goes well, construction on the 15-acre park on Blackburn Point Road could begin late next year, parks officials said Friday. The park is symbolic, and county leaders are closely monitoring its progress. The Blackburn Point land was the first in a series of waterfront properties acquired during the real estate boom to counter diminishing public access to the water. On Friday, parks officials updated county commissioners on the plans, which initially drew intense criticism from neighbors who worried the park was too large and would jam roads and disrupt the quiet community. More than 200 Osprey resident jammed a recent workshop to protest. By incorporating the neighbors' input on parking, increasing buffers, and moving the children's playground, Parks Director John McCarthy turned their criticism into praise Friday.

"We're pleased they took the neighbors' design and worked with it," said Diane Pick, whose home is only a few feet from the park's southern boundary. "We do feel like they're finally moving in the right direction." However, Pick is still concerned that 55 parking spaces might bring too much traffic onto narrow, two-lane Blackburn Point Road and too much noise to her neighborhood. She also worries about the environmental impact boaters will have on the Intracoastal Waterway, where she routinely observes dolphin and manatees from her back porch.

McCarthy said the environmental issues will be fully vetted during the state and federal permitting process, which begins this summer for the boat ramps and piers. Commissioners unanimously praised the revised park plan Friday, calling it a valiant attempt to balance the concerns of neighbors with the need for more boating access. "I think it's really nice," said commissioner Nora Patterson. "I followed all of the concerns from citizens. I think it answers them, short of just making it a passive park." There are more than 22,000 registered boats in Sarasota County and about 16,000 moorings. Residents without a boat dock or marina slip must vie for the limited parking spaces -- between 500 and 600 -- at the 12 Sarasota County parks with boat ramps. McCarthy said Blackburn Point is the first Sarasota County park purchased to expand boater access to the water. "This is really without precedent and it's all because the public said they wanted more access to the water," he said. The park is expected to cost between $3 million and $4 million. Money for the project will come from the 1-percentage-point sales tax reauthorized by voters last year, and is not affected by budget cutting.

On Friday, Osprey retiree Ron Buettner watched as snook, sheepshead and mullet swam in the Intracoastal near the future park. Kayakers paddled nearby as a Sarasota couple ate lunch at a picnic table. "This is a nice place," Buettner said. "I'm glad more people will be able to enjoy it." By Zac Anderson Published Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 4:30 a.m. Herald Tribune

Curry Creek Cafe

2008-06-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

Lunch at casual Curry Creek included Rofie's Egg Rolls, light and crispy, good to the last bite. Hearty Little Gasparilla Seafood Stew is shellfish and grouper, tomatoes and vegetables, all in creamy shellfish broth with garlic, herbs and wine. Bibb & Watercress Salad with dried cranberries, candied almonds, sweet onions and blue cheese was wonderful. Pan-Fried Crab Cake Sandwich had so little filler, it fell apart. Mini seafood potpie was full of seafood, peas and carrots, topped with a round of pastry. Mango cheesecake was light and not too sweet, with a graham cracker crust. Desserts and breads are made in-house. Wine and beer. 920 S. Tamiami Trail, Nokomis; 485-6560.

Oscar Scherer State Park

2008-06-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

Oscar Scherer State Park offers visitors a number of recreational activities, as well as a preserve of Florida's natural habitat and wildlife. Several threatened species, including the Florida Scrub-Jay call the park home. Bald eagles, bobcats, river otters and alligators can also be seen in the park.For bicycle enthusiasts the park offers several trails totaling approx. 15 miles. Mountain bikes are recommended due to the sandy nature of many of the trails.

Canoeing in South Creek is one of the more popular activities at the park. You can bring your own, or rent a canoe or kayak by the hour or day. South Creek, fed by rainfall, flows through the park and out into the Intracoastal Waterway which leads out to the Gulf of Mexico. A variety of wildlife can be seen from a canoe or kayak including heron, egret and other wading birds.

Oscar Scherer wouldn't be a Florida State park without fishing. Lake Osprey, inside the park, is a 3 acre freshwater lake offering anglers a chance to catch bream, bluegill, largemouth bass and channel catfish. A fishing license is required for anyone over 15 and can be purchased at most bait and tackle shops or at the Sarasota County Tax Collector's office just up the road across from Sarasota Square Mall about 4 miles north.

Picnic areas are available in the park along with picnic tables, charcoal grills, pavilions and a playground. The South Creek picnic area has a restroom, pavilion and canoe launch. At Lake Osprey, there's a bathhouse and nature center and a small swimming beach on the lake.

Florida state parks are open from 8 a.m. until sundown 365 days a year.

Casey Key

2008-06-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

Casey Key is a spectacularly lush barrier island 15 miles south of Sarasota. Named for Captain John Charles Casey—an English-born army officer who graduated from West Point with General Robert E. Lee—Casey Key stretches from Siesta Key on the north to the Island of Venice at its southernmost tip, allowing boaters and fishermen easy access to the Gulf of Mexico. The majority of the island is a conservation district, established in the early 1970s by the Florida State Legislature. Casey Key has matured well, its charm being its single greatest attraction.

Visitors and residents enjoy the beaches and recreational opportunities on the island. Shore-side activities include volleyball, picnicking and simply soaking up the sun and scenery. Fishing is also a beloved activity.

Historic Spanish Point

2008-06-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

Historic Spanish Point was named for the Spanish and Cuban sailors and traders who paid regular commercial visits. It is a 30-acre site which juts into the waters of Little Sarasota Bay. It is bordered by mangroves on its west and pine flatwoods (and a residential neighborhood) to the east. Historic Spanish Point was first occupied as early as 3,000 BC, as evidenced by a prehistoric Calusa Indian burial mound and two shell mounds. Here, you have a rare opportunity to walk INSIDE a midden, one of the high shell mounds created centuries ago. Similar to modern land fills, these high mounds contain society's cast-offs, including broken tools, pieces of pottery and bits of bones and shells