adam and eve

The last time I had BBQ ribs, it was at Baby Blues BBQ on Santa Monica, just a few blocks from my apartment. It was a disappointing though lively place and the ribs were tough and less than acceptable. I ate there with a friend from Atlanta and he said "You don't know BBQ until you've eaten BBQ in the South." Well, now I have.

I have often written about life changing foods. Delicious, paradigm-shifting dishes that have set my culinary trajectory one enormous degree closer to a lifetime of enjoyment. Over time, that one degree will have sent me to a place of flavors that I may have missed otherwise. Missed by a long shot.

At Fat Matt's, I ate my first bite of ribs. Surpassing all other bones protecting the hearts of pigs that I have tried, this first bite of soft, fatty, sweet, tangy pork and I will never be the same. I also had "Brunswick" Stew which is like pot roast with a little bit of tang blended into a chili-like consistency...with corn. It was delicious. I also had a bit of a pulled pork sandwich, a few forkful of coleslaw and some mac and cheese. You can see the menu exactly like I did here.

A white-haired man with a guitar sang silly country songs on the small stage. Men from Alabama in their Crimson Tide jackets jawed on cellphones. Black ladies on their lunch break waited for a table to open up and I, with my messy fingers and white sweater ("You wore the wrong color," said my friend Matthew) sat there, smiling next to a case of BBQ sauce for the trip home. A case.

If the bible-lovers here are right, I, my sisters, all women, nay, all people have descended from a man and his rib. And that's a great lineage I'd say.

neck bones for Jesus

I don't usually go to church but yesterday I went to the United House of Prayer to have lunch at their Kitchen Café. We stood in line with our trays under the portraits of black reverends and a black Jesus. In the skylit dining room, black and white guests chatted about work as they enjoyed their lunch break.

Plates of lemon cake sat wrapped in plastic. Banana pudding in To Go clamshells. Greg ordered neck bones and rice. Karen had BBQ chicken. We shared sides of turnip greens, mac and cheese, black eyed peas and yams. I ordered crappy spaghetti bake because I LOVE crappy spaghetti bake particularly when it's covered with melted cheddar cheese. Meat sauce that has been stewed for a day combined with pasta that has been boiled for almost as long makes a squishy, lovely lunch.

The neck bones were served with brown gravy and the BBQ chicken was slathered in a dark burgundy sauce. I enjoyed the braised neck bones, the beef softened by lingering, low heat. It reminded me of oxtail which I guess is the opposite end extension to a neck. I nibbled at the sides, discovering the wilted turnip greens, slightly acidic from the vinegar used to break down the tough fibers. The mac and cheese was great and so were the yams although they were almost too incredibly sweet. We joked that this was the only way one could spread the word of obesity. Or Type II diabetes.

For dinner, Karen and I went to Wild Wing where I satisfied a craving for hot wings. We happened upon "Two-fer Tuesday" where buying 8 wings got us 8 more. I'm a wimp when it comes to wings so we had medium spicy hot wings and Jamaican jerk wings. Not to be remiss with the terrible appetizers, we also ordered loaded potato skins with cheese, bacon and jalapeños. With a dessert of peanut butter, chocolate and caramel flavors piled into a stack of wafers, cake, cream and gooey layers, our bill came to $21 between the two of us and we were stuffed. It's amazing to me how much food doesn't cost here.

As we looked around the restaurant, Karen pointed out the many tables of black and white friends dining together. You actually see less of that in LA, a more melting pot city by most accounts. How does that happen in a place that everyone claims is so racist? I suppose that calories might be the answer to a common love that transcends external appearances.

"are y'all doin' ok?"

That's what the waitress asked my friends and me about 6 times during the course of our dinner. Not once annoying, not once perfunctory...it was sincere and southern and so very different from LA!

I'm in Augusta, Georgia this week for a mini-vacation and tonight, I ate dinner at a place that had a wooden bear in the entry way and my name "Katie" tagged with a knife into one of the plexiglass windows. I was destined to eat here.

Rhinehart's has picnic tables each with a roll of paper towels on it. As he tried to explain the cuisine to me, my friend Greg said simply "It's a lot of fried seafood." So, fried seafood I had; served on paper placed on paper plates. Oysters, shrimp and instead of fries or grits, a side salad with honey mustard dressing. We all shared a paper plate of boiled, peel-and-eat shrimp dunked into cocktail sauce. The paper towels marched off their roll one at a time as our fingers became slick with shrimp juice.

Greg told me he was interested in what I thought of the "chain restaurant hell" that is Augusta's food scene. I told him that after many fine dining experiences, you start to become a little jaded. Then, something natural happens. You rebel against the foams and veloutés and search for the perfect cheese enchilada or the ultimate corn dog. In Augusta, Georgia, you don't have to look too hard though because here, the corn dog (and funnel cake) booth from the county fair pops up in the Wal-Mart parking lot now and again. I took a photo of it today.

Speaking of chains, at the airport, I fell in love with a Hawaiian pizza from Domino's. It was an unfortunate but delicious misstep. After 5 hours and two planes, I waited for my friends to pick me up and devoured this cheesy, doughy disc and bought the Sunday New York Times. As I read, an airport worker sat down at my table with her own Domino's pizza. Then her friend joined with her soda. Then a third friend sat with his baked potato, the green scent of it rising to my nose. I listened to them talk about how tired they were. I took in their "mmmmmm HM"s and wondered about their fatigue. Of course they were hard workers, two of them wearing navy blue dickies and fluorescent vests. Maybe they weren't eating properly. Surely they weren't. The newspaper cost more than my meal. If that isn't an indicator of the state of this state, then butter my butt and call me a biscuit.

cake pops

There is a thin layer of brown dust on my kitchen. The stove, the counter, the handles of the fridge. This is what happens when I play with cocoa powder.

Last week I baked a cake for my sister's birthday, a Devil's Food cake with a dark chocolate whipped cream frosting. It seems excessive but I had to use a $300 sashimi knife from Osaka to cut cake layers because I don't own a bread knife or a similarly serrated knife of the appropriate length for the task. In producing even layers for the cake, the crumbs I sliced off were kept in a take-out container for tonight's experiment: cake pops.

Cake Pops have somehow become a cottage industry for bloggers who like sweets. There's a company in Irvine that makes them in an actual bakery and packages them for you as gifts. A friend brought some to a party I went to and I was hooked. Basically, you have cake bits mixed with adhesive (frosting works) dipped in chocolate and stuck on a lollipop stick.

I had cake crumbs but no lollipop sticks so I just decided to make them into little cake truffles. I mixed the crumbs with a mixture of cream cheese, unsalted butter, confectioner's sugar and cocoa powder. I cooled the mixture, formed them into balls and then dipped them into chocolate melted in a glass bowl on top of a pot of boiling water. In the future, I'll freeze the balls before dipping them in COOLED melted chocolate. The temperatures were too high all around and my first attempt became a soggy mound of shiny, runny chocolate on top of a slowly oozing cake falling through the grate of a cake rack.

When I gave everything a chance to cool, I resumed and produced some lovely looking truffles dusted, like the kitchen, in cocoa powder. I ate a tester and between the few that I ate to ensure the right flavor, I feel sick and jittery. This coupled with the brown smears across my chef's coat make me look like someone you'd stay away from. But I bet you can't...because I've got all the cake pops.

the average bear

Call me a food Samaritan.

I was standing outside my apartment the other day with my upstairs neighbor, a stylish gay who drives an X5 and listens to loud pop music in the morning to prepare for work. I know this because he dances on my ceiling and I awake to his routine almost every day.

Mid-conversation, an apartment door opened and out came John, our new neighbor.

"Hey, how you guys doin'?" John asked, "Did I meet you already? I'm John, I just moved in."

We exchanged names and he then asked, "I have a strange question. Do either of you have a rolling pin?"

An odd request. "What are you rolling out?" I inquired.

"Pizza dough."

Now, unbeknownst to John, I know a little bit about food and about pizza dough having worked for a pizzeria as its marketer. I know how to explain the basics of pizza dough to press so I thought maybe I could help John the new neighbor cum pizzaiolo.

"You can just knead it with your knuckles." He said he'd tried but the dough was just too hard and his hands were tired and sore. Sounded a little odd to me. So I asked him about the temperature of the dough. Turns out that he had just taken it out of the fridge and it was still cold. I told him to let it come to room temperature and try again, perhaps using the side of a bowl or mug to help him since he didn't have a baseball bat.

John closed the door to his apartment after he'd gone back inside, probably to get back to pounding the dough with a hammer. I wished his pizza well.

bartlett

Some people have memories of their childhood that involve summer swims and lakeside cabins or first kisses behind the couch. Some remember a topsy-turvy night out with their compadres. Others remember a sentence that changed their perception like one of those quarter-driven stationary binoculars. I remember fruits.

I remember a peach I ate in 1996. I remember the moist buzz of the skin as I pulled it away from the flesh. I remember the flavor and the juice, the pit's easy release. This peach had a slightly tannic taste but it was wonderful.

I remember a nectarine I ate sometime between 2002-2004. I had rinsed it with tap water from the kitchen faucet, taken a quick bite out of idle hunger and stopped to marvel at its bright, bold perfection. I remember sitting down on the sofa, in the sunlight, telling myself to eat the nectarine slowly so that I would enjoy every bite of the firm, juicy flesh. Its gold color sparkled and the red bleed from the stone reached towards the skin ever so shyly.

Moments ago, I stood in my kitchen and cut bruises from a Barlett pear that I had a suspicion would be delicious. I cut slices away from the core and placed them in a bowl. From the core, I took a few bites of flesh and instantly, I felt its memory forming in the most sturdy parts of my brain. This pear will go down in my tastebud history as one of the greatest to ever exist and then cease to exist by the greedy slurping of my tongue and teeth. Its friends are green with envy, ripening to their pale yellow best on my kitchen counter. This pear was curvy and lumpy like a hardworking mother of 5, grandmother of 15. The flesh near the skin was slightly bitter, its core was a bit acidic. But both qualities brought to life its slippery, soft meat, replete with pear magic.

Go find pears (and pomegranates!) at the farmers markets soon, my food loving friends. May they have been harvested for a worthy reason, not to succumb to spots of mold which according to Chef Dong Choi are "Mother Nature's fingertips coming to take back what's hers."

pillowside library

When I turned 27, I bought a big girl bed. After years of sleeping on a European single which is like an extra-long twin from your old collegiate days, I bought myself a $150 frame from Ikea and a $700 full-sized mattress. Oh, how the extra inches felt like yards and yards of drowsy terrain.

On the bed, during the precious few moments before slumber rolls over me like a fog approaching the shore, I read a few pages from whatever books I'm into. Being too tired to return them to their respective shelves, I've allowed a pillowside library to erect itself on the corner of my mattress. The library usually contains anywhere from 2 to 4 selections. When the number of volumes becomes too high and I can't sleep for fear of a stack of books falling on my head in the middle of the night, the lesser titles find their way to the floor.

It's an interesting barometer of my mental or intellectual state. Sometimes of my emotional state. Consistently over the past few years, dictionaries have appeared and disappeared from the library. In the periodicals, there's usually a section or two of the New York Times. Over the summer, I read On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. Then it was the September issue of Vogue and the Food Lover's Companion (3rd Edition). A UK paperback of "The Prophet" by Gibran travels back and forth between the mattress and the floor.

If you didn't know me, you could easily take the books and conjure what would probably be fairly accurate assumptions about my interests. I'm probably a "foodie". I'm probably a woman. I probably went to college. Maybe I'm an artist or perhaps a wannabe hippie. Maybe, based on the frequent appearance of dictionaries, I'm an English professor. I'm probably an old English professor as many of the dictionaries were published before 1960. Maybe one of my liberal and fairy-headed students gave me a copy of "The Prophet" as a gift. These are all reasonable paint strokes giving context to a stack of books.

Right now, the assortment of books is fascinating. I'm currently sleeping with three, independently published poetry books one of which was copied at Kinko's and stapled by hand and a book on self-defense. I recently saw the poets Ellyn Maybe and my idol and friend Rachel McKibbens and quickly snatched their chapbooks from them, shoved money into their hands and ran off to immediately crack them open. The "Complete Guide to Unarmed Combat Techniques" was written by man whose nickname is "Lofty". Presumably a reflection of his goals. This one I found sitting in a friend's box of discards.

To save myself, I'm armed with the writhing, tentative words of two poets. I've got the curt directions of a British Survival Instructor whose orders are accompanied by agitated black and white illustrations of people fighting off attacks. You can tell the women by their skirts and black high heels.

Defend your body with your body. Defend your heart with your heart. Here's a better glimpse into the pages that punch and jab and wriggle me free. Reprinted without permission.

"I found a year that likes my body
1921
girl sitting on a rock
Picasso painted a woman with my thighs."

"I lean into the paintings.
I veer to the outside to find out what Picasso
called each work.

I like titles.
Their vocabulary of oil."

-Ellyn Maybe, from the poem "Picasso" found in walking barefoot in the glassblowers museum


"The head on a hinge, the man notices a small light coming
from somewhere inside the cat, possibly between the fourth
and fifth cervical vertebrae. He takes his pen and digs around,
parting flesh and fur chips as best he can.
Inside, he finds Theresa, the first girl to tell him "no."
He can tell it is Theresa, even though she is considerably smaller, because she is sitting on a stool polishing spoons by candlelight and of all the women he has ever known,
only Theresa would do such a considerate thing
at at time like this. Theresa! I knew it was you! How are you?

Theresa looks up and smiles.
I'm doing just fine, Charles. Thank you.
She sets down a polished spoon inside of the other.
There are tall stacks of spoons spooning that surround her
feet and stool. She pulls a new spoon from a crate
and huh huhs her breath into its shallow bowl,
rubbing it with a handkerchief. She is mesmerizing.
A three-inch tall Elizabeth Taylor.

She continues to polish spoons as if he is not there.
The man realizes he has interrupted a meaningful pattern
of pure and absolute beauty. A natural machine, designed for no
one other than the machine itself. Clumsy, he interrupts one last
time. Are you thirst Theresa, would you like me
to bring you a cup of tea?

Theresa continues her stack, then reminds him:
There isn't a teacup small enough. The words
form a dinner table of malice inside his chest,"

-Rachel McKibbens, from the poem "Thirsty Theresa" found in Tomatoes and Daffodils


"The teeth can be very useful in self-defense. If you're a woman, bite on whatever you can get hold of, ideally the ear. And once you bite don't let go - you'll just arouse the attacker. Bite into his neck, his throat, his ear; just bite, chew, rip and spit."

-John "Lofty" Wiseman, "The SAS Self-Defense Handbook: A Complete Guide to Unarmed Combat Techniques - Chapter 2: Your Body's Weapons"

chickenhead

I roasted my first chicken last week. When I purchased the bird from a Korean market, I stared wanly at the chicken head encased with the body under the cellophane skin. It looked sleepy and featherless.

I prepared a brine with Kosher salt, garlic and a little bit of sugar. "It should taste like the ocean in terms of saltiness" said Nate, my professor. I took teaspoons of brine from my stock pot until the mixture reminded me of my first surf lesson.

Upon tearing the plastic wrap off the bird, I realized that the chicken still had its head on. I had picked it up out of the tray with my bare hands so I leaned over the sink to have a think. Do I put the bird down, wash my hands and take out a knife to decapitate it or do I brine with the head on and return later with the guillotine? I decided on the latter so the whole bird went into the pot and I washed and returned to my other prep.

When it came time to cut it off, I wasn't as squeamish as I thought I'd be. After a pointer from Nate, I took my gyotou and cut the head off at the base of the neck and threw the head into the trash. The stuffing, salting and tying took a while but eventually the bird was placed on a bed of spinach and yams to roast for about an hour. Meanwhile, I made creamed corn with what I thought was fresh corn from the market and a basil plum cobbler.

The chicken was saltier than we thought it'd be but most of the salt fell into the spinach and yams. Those were eaten sparingly. The creamed corn suffered due to old, tough kernels and the basil plum cobbler was surprisingly minty due to Thai instead of Italian basil. All in all, we had a good meal and a lesson that sometimes you have to deal with life head on.

how it all comes around

About a year ago, I posted about returning my keys and my thanks to New York City. I'm back on the blog now, with a year of stories from the marketing trenches of a small, burgeoning restaurant group. I will share some of those moments in time. For now, I want to offer a bit of ridiculousness about how things come around.

I have a baker friend. A brilliant and profoundly dedicated baker. The first time I tasted his pain au lait, the world seemed to shift ever so slightly. The light, slightly elastic white bread melted in my mouth and I understood that I had not eaten the right bread for most of my life. What does right mean? I wish I had the words to explain it. It was as if clarity burst into my brain through the roof of my mouth. The pain au lait was ever so sweet with a moisture-leaving quality that most breads don't have. What do you give to someone who has changed your understanding of a food? Who has created loaf after loaf, croissant after croissant of wonderful, well groomed yeast and flour?

He likes Rice Krispy Squares.

Making him Rice Krispy Squares leaves me feeling like the Little Dummer Boy haphazardly whacking a tom-tom for the baby Jesus. But I took to the task with the precision of a professional. I read and re-read the 5 lines in the recipe (3 of the lines are occupied by the ingredient list) and prepared my mise en place. I measured the marshmallows with my digital food scale. I microwaved the butter in 15 second increments so that I would not overheat it. I stirred in the marshmallows until consistently melted; whatever evil they are made of adequately softened and wrangled. I added the Rice Krispies slowly so that I would not have too thin a coat of this sweet, gooey white gold. I shaped the squares by hand on a Silpat.

They're sitting on the counter now. A far cry from frankincense and myrrh but we do what we can and we give what we are able to make without fucking it up.

Let the food blogging begin.