The recipe journal is part of Moleskine’s “Passions” series that also includes a wine journal, which I should also probably get since I’m always forgetting the names of wines that I like. Clearly, I’m going to need to start carrying a backpack again.

Meet Chef Dan Coudreaut

“Ray Kroc hand-picked the famous Chef René to come on board in the 1980s. He helped create the McRib Sandwich and the Chicken McNuggets.”

“My key responsibility is to help the creative team of chefs ideate and develop new menus for McDonald’s approximately 14,000 restaurants.” [Ideate? Sounds tantalizing.]

“The challenge is to create something that will taste the same in Alaska as it does right here in the Test Kitchen.”

And that, to me, is the problem–McDonald’s food tastes the same from Alaska to New Zealand because it’s more a product of the lab than the kitchen. Chef Dan, top of his class at the CIA, could really put his culinary credentials to better use than creating the next McRib.

Entomo-Cuisine will include a four-course tasting menu, curated by Critter’s Philip Ross and in partnership with the EyeLevel show Wurmhaus. (The dinner and exhibition are in turn part of the citywide Celebrate Mexico Now festival.)

WHERE: Brooklyn Kitchen, 100 Frost St.

WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 18, 8PM

Tickets are $85 and available here.

Guest chef Amy Seidenwurm keeps bees with her husband in Silver Lake. As she told the L.A. Times, “They’re like our 50,000 pets.” But no cat will help you prepare dinner. Here’s the seductive menu:

Honey and pimenton roasted root vegetable salad.

Cocoa-rubbed beef tenderloin with honey jus, corn pudding, and greens.

Eastside honey tasting with cheese and nuts.

What: Friends Cook at Canelé with Amy Seidenwurm

When: Tuesday, August 31, 5:30-10:00PM

Where: 3219 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles

Q: I was in Madrid recently and splurged on some memorable Ibérico ham. I was tempted to bring some back to the States, but since you can now buy it here I thought I’d avoid the risk of having it confiscated at customs. Which raised the question—if you can buy it in the U.S. now, why are they still throwing it away at the border? The ham dealer in Madrid told us it was because it’s not actually the same ham. Is that true?

Some day, I am confident that we will look back at this age of forbidden pork products as an American folly. Ibérico ham is truly the apex of cured pork products, and Spaniards have been eating ham made from wild pata negra pigs, cured in caves in the mountain air, literally since prehistoric times. But the USDA doesn’t take millennia of hale and hearty Spanish ham eaters at face value, and insists that imported meat products be processed in USDA approved facilities. (But ammonia-treated pink-slime burgers are totally A-OK. That’s logical.)

Since December 2007, Ibérico ham has been legally imported to the U.S. by a single company, Férmin, which, according to Donald Harris, an owner of Spanish-goods retailer La Tienda, was simply  “willing to go through the time consuming (and very cautious) bureaucratic process” of getting USDA approval. This fall, two more companies will jump into the American market, Cinco Jotas and COVAP.

Even in Spain, Ibérico ham–and especially Ibérico de Bellota, which is made from free-roaming, wild-acorn-fed pata negra pigs–is extraordinarily expensive. When I was in Spain, bellota was roughly 100 Euros per kilo, or $70 per pound. That same jamon in the States, though, can cost twice that. (Hence the $40 ham sandwich.) Still, Hispanophiles and hardcore cold-cut-lovers’ are putting it in their shopping carts. Are they getting what they pay for?

According to Miguel Sanz of the Consorcio del Jamón Serrano, “There are absolutely no differences between the ham exported to the USA and the ham marketed in Spain. The raw material and the method of curing are the same.” However,  only a couple of relatively large companies have been able to afford the investment required to pass USDA muster, which involves making changes to traditional facilities. Says Sanz, “The Ibérico sector consists mostly of small companies that have no financial capacity to face such investment.” Moreover, “the USA market for this kind of product is really very small, which is not a commercial incentive to invest in adapting any company facility … In 2009 Spain exported just 379 tons of dry-cured ham (Serrano and Ibérico).”

Harris, of La Tienda, concurs, and says that American and Spanish Ibérico hams are “identical, and all are bred in Spain.” He argues that factory farming of pata negra pigs doesn’t exist: For one, there are simply not enough of them to fill a factory, and the market is too small to warrant it (only 8% of Spain’s ham production is Ibérico). Plus, pata negra sows produce just a few piglets per litter, and “the animals live for a full two years before slaughter—sacrifice is the Spanish term. In the USA must pigs live only a matter of a few months [before slaughter], not years.”

It is worth noting that serrano ham, which is also completely delicious, has been available in the U.S. longer and costs a mere $40 5o $50 per pound. This is because it is made from ordinary white pigs, and while it is cured in Spain, Harris says the pigs are often “slaughtered in Holland and Denmark (due to the shortage of USDA approved slaughterhouses in Spain).”

Whether you are buying ham in the States or in Europe, it’s about the producer. Says Harris, “certainly there are some boutique ham producers in Spain which are so small that all of their product is sold domestically, and depending upon the producer, they might among the best. We have a delicious one called Encinar de Cabazón–which Pedro carefully produces from his own herd. But we only sell it on our Europe site as he does not have his own slaughtering facility and is too small to go through all the hoops to get USDA approved.”

So in the end we are missing out on some of Spain’s best Ibérico–and Pedro is missing out on an increasingly ravenous American market. But there’s no reason to dismiss the jamon we do have access to. If you can afford it, go for it. Eventually that will lead to wider, and presumably less expensive, Ibérico offerings for the rest of us.

Just use the promo code Table20.

Some of my favorites: The “Juniper” apron (seen here).  “Static” potholders in magenta. “Porter” table runner in moss. And anything made out of “Lush Turquoise“!

From Meatpaper: “The Reuben is a sandwich characterized by its Russian dressing. What exactly is in that pink-hued spread? You’ll find out as we make our own homemade version. Along with the spread, you’ll assemble this classic with sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, corned beef, and rye bread to be thrown on the griddle. As you munch, Faun Skyles, Bi-Rite Market’s deli manager and an overall deli historian in her own right, will discuss the anatomy of the perfect Reuben, as well as the many beliefs behind the birth of this iconic sandwich. Beer to be provided.”

When: Tuesday August 17, 7 to 9 pm

Where: 18 Reasons
593 Guerrero
San Francisco, CA

Tickets are $35

(with a wave to William Carlos Williams)

Thank you for the peach pie

red gold, gooey, thick and crusty:

peaches carried heaped in a basket

up the hill from the tree we planted

seven years ago, watched over,

pruned, debugged, (harvested

one rock of a peach that first year)

and now its branches bent to the ground

on the uphill side, their burden of fuzzy

softening fruit almost more joy

than they can bear.

You rolled the dough

while I peeled fruit into a pail

my hands deep in the juice and pulp

my mouth smeared where I sucked

my fingers, my hair sticky on my forehead,

tiny fruit flies buzzing in the kitchen.

I helped you lift the flat crust with spatulas

and we laid it safely in the pan. You spiced

the golden bowl with cinnamon and other secrets,

crisscrossed the top with lattice crust,

and this morning, you gone off to school,

I cut a piece and served it on a small blue plate

with milk in a blue cup.

I ate it slowly,

noticing every bite, watching the grasses move

as the breeze swept across the distant hills.

I’ve left the rest for you, sweet baker girl.

I’ll be gone a few days,

but I’ll be thinking of you

eating peach pie.

Gail Rudd Entrekin’s collections of poems are Change (will do you good), which was nominated for a Northern California Book Award; You Notice the Body; and John Danced. Poetry editor of Hip Pocket Press since 2000, she edits the press’ online environmental literary magazine, Canary.  She is editor of the poetry and short fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants and the poetry anthology Yuba Flows. She and her husband, writer Charles Entrekin, live in San Francisco’s East Bay.

Peach Pie by Elizabeth Klos, a painter based in Solana Beach, California. Visit her online shop on Etsy.