"local food" news and stories

• American breweries used to look to Europe for pointers. Now the tables are beginning to turn.
• What do you do with an unlimited supply of olive oil? You cook with it...in everything. And we mean everything.
• Santa Monica high schoolers are getting schooled in local food -- and they're finding it a delicious lesson.
• Roy Choi, the mind behind the moveable feast that is the Kogi Korean BBQ truck, has opened the A-Frame, which is (always) in Culver City.

• Latin-style franks teach old dogs some new tricks.
• The Turnberry Isle in Aventura, FL, uses very local food -- growing right in the resort's front yard.
• Ever heard of Scottish tablet? It's the sweet-tooth's sweet.
• If your baby carrots are ready to grow up a little, check out this gingery, buttery recipe.

Social networking is helping local food growers and processors find ways to sell their wares to local food service businesses in the Pacific Northwest.

FoodHub, an interactive online tool launched in February by Portland-Ore.-based nonprofit Ecotrust, helps growers and food professionals find each other, The Oregonian reported.

With a revamped site set to launch in a few weeks, Ecotrust VP of food and farms Deborah Kane talked to the newspaper about FoodHub and how it works.

There's a farmers market coming to a decidedly un-farmy location on September 2nd: Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago's signature restaurant, Sixteen (it's on the 16th floor of the 92-story building), is having a brunch with an ancillary rooftop farmers market. It will be open to the public from 7 to 11 a.m. (you can visit whether you have the brunch or not).

With each season of this year, Chef Brunacci has been whipping up menus with his favorite farms in mind for a series called "Feasting at Sixteen with Frank Brunacci." Now in its third installment (late summer), Brunacci will focus on "prairie produce."

While Sixteen has always served Midwestern-grown ingredients, every meal of "Prairie Produce" week will only feature food harvested within driving distance of Chicago. The meals will have detailed menus, highlighting each ingredient by source and history, and the staff can also answer questions about the ingredients and how or why the chef chose to use them.

More after the jump ...

It's the core of a summer promotion called "From Here" running in western Washington state: McDonald's is using TV and print ads, billboards and a website to hype the local potatoes, apples, fish and milk it uses.

True? Yeah.

A wee bit disingenuous? Yeah. Since McDonald's was 1) Already using all this stuff anyway, and 2) The region in question happens to be the largest national supplier of most of these products.

A McDonald's spokeswoman said "From Here" grew out of focus groups last spring with customers in western Washington, who said they wanted to know more about where their food came from. (Did they really need a focus group to know "local" is hot?)