Off topic again….

A great piece on Max Cleland’s new book on NPR.org . Max CLeland is a personal hero of mine and a rough around the edges character who speaks the truth, a serverely undervalued quality these days. I love that he quotes Hemingway from “Farewell to Arms”  “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places” It’s a hard won blessing to see how truly fragile life is. One of my favorite books of all time is Hemingway’s “A moveable feast” , Hemigway moved to Paris after the war to write and be amongst artists and intellectuals. Hemingway’s descriptions of the meals that he ate are so descriptive, it’s obvious he is a man resolved to enjoy life to the greatest extent possible. Max CLeland was broken, figuratively and literally, he lost both legs and an arm but he found the strength and purpose to help others experiencing the same fears and trauma as himself. It’s easy to get wrapped up in numbers of dead and physically wounded soldiers and forget that very few people make it home without the mental scars. I hope alot of them get to read this book.

no ,it isn’t about food

I always want to avoid posting personal things on September 11th because it gets political and i learned long ago, we probably don’t agree, I have a different perpective spending many years growing up in cold war mindset Europe where my father held watch over a stockpile of nuclear weapons and everyone knew terrorism existed…. there are evil people in the world and that is as old as time and the solar system, I lost a friend in a war, a war in a country not responsible for September 11th but nonetheless, I lost him to that day, Isabel his Daughter celebrated her 6th birthday a few days after he died, a birthday that fell the day of his funeral on September 11th 2006. I grew up around the military when i married a guy in the military i became a caretaker, a caretaker of a bunch of guys far from home who missed a home cooked meal , missed being around children or a house. I resent all of the times people questioned how patriotic i am to question war… to question violence in retaliation for violence. I question why Isabel will celebrate her birthday every year without her father. I question how we remember the casualties of September 11th without including casualties of war in that number. I question why terrorism was an accepted part of  life in the rest of the world and continues to happen daily and we simply can’t stomach the idea when it happens here. I believe peace and understanding is only possible when we become the peacemaker, when we open our hearts and minds to different ways and means. In no way do i not feel sick when  I think of those innocent people going to work, never to see their families again, it’s the same feeling i have about anyone , anywhere who suffers for the sins of others. September 11th will always signify that to me, The people who suffer the greatest are the people who often deserve it the least. It a moment to be reflective, to not forget what we have lost but to try to understand how we ended up here. If patriotism means never getting to that place, if it means we continue to hurt others to numb our own pains, to put a band-aid on a flesh wound then i am not a patriot but i love my country enough to not want anymore of my fellow countrymen and women to be a casualty of a day, 8 years ago.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.“

Probably never on Sunday

Many times i wonder why I decided to get into the restaurant business. Many a Saturday or Sunday passes by when I wish i could be joining my friends for an afternoon cocktail or visiting my family up in NY. Today likes many days I lost another employee, This time with a text message that said “I would rather kill myself than come back to work at Slainte”. it’s not a suprise when another one gives up. You either are with us or against us, to borrow fromW. It takes a special sort of person to tough it out. I may spend most of my days cursing the restaurant business as a bunch of dummies or come home exhausted after an unforseen busy day but I wouldn’t trade it. It’s like a second family, we might hate it most days but we hate it together. Most of us don’t even like working our hours but will gladly cover for a friend or lend a hand when they need it. When we get off and we could just go home we stay for a drink so we can catch up. I might say i’m going to do something else, find a job where i can do other things on the weekend but shhhh…. it’s most likely never going to happen. Anyone know a food runner??

With one bite i knew.

Great article in The Times this weekend by Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/dining/19note.html?_r=1&ref=dining The article was about how much you can tell about a person in relation to how they interact with food. Food is so much more than a basic necessity of life, Food is a central, if not THE central part of our lives. We plan our days around events which might take place before breakfast, after lunch etc…. When people are not up to trying new things, gastronomically speaking you can pretty well imagine that the same is true for all other areas of their lives. People who love big flavors and innovative combinations of ingredients also love new experiences. Maybe it’s because I make my living buying, preparing and creating new foods  and my pre-occupation with analyzing human behavior which made me love this article so much, Perhaps it’s not just food,maybe it’s just that there are very few primal, intimate moments of peoples lives that we get to observe so often. Our relationships with food are often as complicated as any of our relationships with other people and its often the case that it’s a relationship that can be alot more satifying.

tastes of home

When I think about “going home” it’s kind of complicated, I grew up kind of a nomad, moving every few months to every few years, Oklahoma, Texas, California, Georgia, Europe. Home was always the Adirondacks, my grandparents house on  Lake Champlain. Jenniffer and I would spend the summer walking “upstreet” to the grand union or Jimmys for candy and soda or the beach for ice cream. MY grandmother like most mothers of her generation spent alot of time in the kitchen, every meal was prepared at home expect maybe a lunch every other weekend that they would treat us to when we went to Burlington or Plattsburgh for shopping. My grandmother wasn’t an excellent cook by most standards, food was mostly a necessity rather than something to be savored and enjoyed, Lunch would occur at exactly 11:30 am everyday when my grandfather would return home to eat lunch and talk about the goings on in the town for the day. Dinner was between 4:30 and 5, in time to watch the news after and then sit on the porch swing in the backyard or drive down to the beach to gossip with friends and neighbors. Food was both a huge part of  daily life and also not something anyone thought much about, We never considered when the food came from, organic, sustainable, factory farmed etc… but about 50% of what we ate in the summer came directly from the vegetable garden in the backyard and my grandmother spent days in the kitchen at summers end canning pickles and tomatos, grating horseradish and cooking squash that would months later be served with Thanksgiving dinner. My grandmother loved to bake and dessert was always a part of the after dinner ritual. When I think of home I think of the smell of things baking in the oven, apple dumplings in the fall, biscuits for strawberry shortcake in the summer. When I think of home I think of food, homemade and homegrown and made with love to nourish family. When I feel homesick I want to make a polish cheesecake or a cake donut or pear sauce that might resemble the kind my grandmother made in the fall from the pears on her neighbors tree. I can’t ever really go home again but i can always taste something familiar and remember how good it felt when i lived far away and returned home to something familiar.

Let’s taste some sabotage

From last weeks Hell’s Kitchen, the blue team may have made a sad attempt at sabotaging the women’s team by making a poor tomato butter sauce for dinner service, but when it was remade, in little time, it turned out pretty good.  Since we’ve come into a nice stash of butter I wanted to try to recreate a tomato butter sauce myself. After looking at a recipe or two, I figured a tomato butter sauce couldn’t be that hard, I mean, there are 2 ingredients in the name. After sauteing a medium onion in a few pats of butter I tossed in a medium can of diced tomatos   and let them simmer. Then came the butter. On the show their sauce was almost orange.  It takes a lot of butter to reach that point but Paula Dean would have been proud. Some red shrimp, basil, heavy cream and some red pepper helped finished off the dish. I’m not sure how anyone could mess up such a simple sauce, but there are some really poor chefs on Kitchen this season. Top Chef can’t start soon enough.

Monday's Dinner

On roux and Risotto

Branch made us a delicious Valentines Day dinner of Seafood risotto, Poached salmon in dill and asparagus. As delicious as it was I didn’t search too deeply for signs that this dinner was ultimately uber romantic, it was just delicious. Tomorrow being Mardi Gras though I was prepping some delicious cajun things at work. Namely, Crawfish pie. Anything traditionally creole has a few components, The holy trinity of veg. Onion, Bell pepper and celery. The creole version of the french standard, Mire Poix, Heat- Mainly cayenne or tabasco and Roux. Roux to the cajuns means DARK! You may be tempted to give up too soon, it takes forever. Maybe when it’s golden brown and your arm is tired you decide the difference in flavor is worth stopping. You would be wrong. Just like with Risotto, you might be tempted to stop stirring when the rice is al dente. It still tastes wonderful but it’s not quite there. Patience is  a virtue. Keep stirring. The love you put into it will be reflected in the final dish. Food and love, they are the same. They require patience and stamina and the awareness of what you expect in the end. Just keep stirring , the outcome will be worth it.

Coffee makes the yerba mate go down.

One of the perks of living in a culturally diverse neighborhood is the abundance of interestng “food finds” at the neighborhood markets. Yerba Mate wasn’t necessarily something new(see Anthony Bourdain- No Reservtions Argentina) but finding it in a 500 gram bag for $1.60 is a pretty good find when you consider the amount of trendy “energy” beverages that feature Yerba Mate in small amounts for an unreasonable amount of money.

The thing one has to keep in mind when trying some freshly pressed Yerba Mate is that it tastes awful. I mean, very bad, think about collecting the butts of used cigarettes from an ashtray and pureeing them into a warm beverage and you may be experiencing a similar flavor profile.

That being said, After you get a few swallows down you can get used to it. It is a stimulant much more effective in my opinion than coffee, however just as a little butter and cream never hurt any food items, coffee and whisky have a similar effect on anything liquid. 1 part yerba mate- a few parts coffee, add cinnamon, cardomom and proceed to french press it and add a bit of the sweetner you prefer with a healthy splash of whisky… perhaps the way Branch prefers with Chocolate silk soy (light) , a splash of espresso vodka and you have made yerba mate delicious!

Plain yerba Mate= not very good.

yerba mate + coffee, alcohol and sweetness= good for american tastebuds!

yes, i’m a sucker!

something happens in the fall.. everything becomes “limited edition” Pumpkin Spice flavored. I hop on this marketing bandwagon every  year, it started innocently enough with the evil and delicious Starbucks Pumpkin Latte, somhow it got away from me.. pumpkin cream cheese, pumpkin bread and then suddenly as if they knew the only route left to go with my pumpkin addiction

It’s delicious..that is all. Ben & Jerry’s is the devil.