Animal Butter: Welcoming Sophisticated Street Food to Tuscaloosa

Epiphany, a farm-to table restaurant serving what it calls “new American cuisine,” has established a niche in Tuscaloosa’s foodie market. Since its opening in 2009, Epiphany has served fresh and creative dishes in a high-class but comfortable setting. Exposed brick and immaculately clean glass doors emphasize the rustic, farm-fresh qualities of the restaurant, and the ever-shifting menu and tastefully quiet indie music appeals to the environmentally conscious foodie crowd. Executive chef and owner Tres Jackson has expressed the desire to use his thoughtful and locally based restaurant methods to promote ethical eating for customers and the community.

Members of the class with Executive Chef Tres Jackson at Epiphany

   As Epiphany has met with consistent success, Jackson is looking to expand the reach of both his impact and his innovative food creations. He, with Epiphany’s chef de cuisine Joel Frederick, plans to open an international street food restaurant entitled Animal Butter (presumably acknowledging the frequent use of various animal butters in Epiphany’s dishes). As developing food writers, the students of Dr. Cardon’s class had the opportunity to taste a selection of dishes on Animal Butter’s menu-in-progress. Continue reading

“Eat Food”: Sweet Tomato Soup with “Real” Ingredients

Sweet tomato soup served with grilled cheese

Sweet tomato soup served with grilled cheese

“There are in fact hundreds of foodish products in the supermarket that your ancestors simply wouldn’t recognize as food…”

­­––Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, whom most of us know from his best-selling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a simple suggestion for his readers: “Eat food.” Not processed, chemically-altered food, he explains, but the kind of food that our ancestors could identify, that comes from a plant or an animal. In his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, he questions how we define food. Should we assign that label to anything we eat, or should we apply the term more frugally, to that which nourishes and enriches our bodies? Continue reading