Category Archives: Uncategorized

J Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic here, no here, no over here. Now you see it, now you don’t. Here! Pouf! Now conjuring Leo Baxendale. Nothing up my sleeve, atall. Mr. Baxendale is rightere, on yer screen. Our toast-r-oven does not conjure, or perform tricks, although it does sing. Frightening, the pitch that it hits. Not on cue, not on command, not on a dime, not on time, apropos of nothing, it sings. Or chants perhaps. One long, hiiiigh eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, till I give the cord a yank. That’s whatcha get, buying a toast-r-us offa eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeebay.

A pepperoni roll is a kissing cousin to the sandwich, it’s tucked-in, tidy, tote-friendly sibling.
Fast Food Even Before Fast Food

(Along-for-the-Ride Heidi, if you are reading, do you remember that we made a stab at pepperoni rolls while driving back from Champaign? Our timing was off. Next time. Next time. Next time.)

So I went to Cinncinnati and I walked around the block,
And I walked right into a doughnut shop,
And I handed the woman a five cent piece.
Said I to the woman, “One doughnut please.”

Well, she looked at the nickel and she looked at me,
And she said, “This nickel’s no good to me.
There’s a hole in the middle and it’s all the way through.”
Said I, “There’s a hole in the doughnut too.”

“Thanks for the doughnut. Good bye!”

The Nickel Diner is in downtown LA and it was the first stop off our flight. Supremely gracious Jennifer charted our weekend on a breathtaking tour of LA and Palm Springs. Where does one go from meringue-towered wig heads, you might ask. On to Cole’s, Osteria Mozza , and Clifton’s Cafeteria. For the amuse gueule only, mind you, cause there was more, MORE, MORE. 

I came face to face with a painful truth at the Nickel Diner, finding a hole in my middle that is all the way through. Ouch, that smarts. Such a delicate balance between our inner and our outer lives, sometimes tipping – whoaaaa, whooooaaaaa, whhhhooooaaaa – to the interior, and sometimes – thud, bam, whomp – bustin’ hard against our exterior shell, the safer surface, impenetrable. Sometimes the key to the balance is distance, and artificial distance is fine. Turn the binoculars inside-out on yourself and, aaaaah, you are tiny and insignificant. What do you feel? Nothing. All the long CA weekend, my sandwich monitor was at a constant peak, with no chance for a dip, other than a French Dip at Cole’s. More about that later. For now, for this post, we are smacking our mental lips at the Nickel Plate’s Patty Melt and the BLT with Avocado It was not, thankfully, called a BLAT. Now what in the name of  tropical veggie-fruit was that thing called? Take a look for yourself up above, the lovely Jenn is glowing over it. And then we must check the clever menu.

Our accommodating waiter could strike a pose – boy, could he! – with the homemade (were it someone’s home) doughnuts, ironically-yours poptarts, and fantastical cakes, this one with chocolate, salted peanuts, potato chips, icing, and….shoelaces, silver dragées, caper berries and fairy dust.

That cake-a-roonie had staying power, in my mind, on my lips, and in the box. The last 4 lbs we could not eat were boxed for us. Staggering around Jenn’s schwanky, thank you Mr. Alexander – Palm Springs kitchen two, or was it three, nights later, rustling about the frigerator, found that box, a cute white cardboard cake box, with a hunka hunka chocolate-peanut-potato-chip-911SNACK cake inside. Polished off all but one big bite and then spent several minutes pondering whether or not to toss the last big bit into the trash. I did not. Seemed bad karma. Bad karma in my quest for an Alexander house.

I want one. I want one. I want one. I want one.

It can be small. Small enough to fit in my Christmas stocking. Thank you.

Hot Dog: A Global History

London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 2009 (Hardcover)

Hot Dog Hootenanny with Bruce Kraig

When Bruce Kraig, a Chicago culinary historian and recognized authority on the history of hot dogs, e-mailed to say he was going to be in Washington, D.C. to participate in a Library of Congress symposium on baseball and its essential elements, he suggested we find an outstanding hot dog venue for lunch. My immediate response was that in D.C. the ultimate sausage experience is a half smoke, not a hot dog.

Photo by Bruce Kraig

So on Friday, October 2, we headed for Ben’s Chili Bowl in the U Street/Cardozo area where we were joined by Janet Riley, president of the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council and self-described “Queen of Wien,” as well as another of Bruce’s local friends, Joan Nathan, who brought along a visiting friend, Betsy Apple. Betsy, who shared her late husband’s food adventures for years, reported that his last book, Food Stuff, a collection of his essays from the New York Times, has just been published.

Photo by Bruce Kraig

Ben’s was crowded, as always, with a line of people waiting to order, so we were seated in one of the back rooms where it was the famed chili half smokes all around, accompanied by potato chips and a lot of paper napkins, and a chocolate malt, a “sweet [iced] tea,” a Coke, plus other beverages. With 2-hour parking meters demanding attention, we all left reluctantly but well-satisfied with the food and the lively conversation.

Shirley Cherkasky

My mother was kind enough to invite me to join them for lunch. Alas, I was at work that day. Will need to get a smoke in soon enough on my own.

We have been living in Zombieland. Take a 3 day flu, add 20+ hours of Wii. Whaddya got?

A zombieboy.

As opposed to a Zombie Hot Dog

Alacritous Chicago correspondent Bottle Rocket(s) fan Linda got her Halloween copy in way before deadline. Waylaid on the editor’s desk, it was, and now made undead on time for  El Dia de los Muertes.

Time Out Chicago
Hot Doug’s and Lula channel Zombieland

Lula Cafe has earned a cult following for its brunch, but even more so for its Halloween transformations. Each year for the holiday, the restaurant gets in costume by dressing up as an entirely different restaurants—one year it became Olive Garden, complete with all-you-can-eat breadsticks and servers in loud ties; another year Houlihan’s took over, bringing its tacky fake ferns and stained glass table lamps with it. We just learned that this year the Lula crew will team up with Hot Doug’s to turn Lula into “Zombie Doug’s,” with an undead Doug Sohn manning the counter in his usual order-taking mode and zombie servers delivering signature haute dogs rechristened with classic zombie names—basically Doug’s sausages and dogs topped with Lula’s product for gourmet Doug’s-style dogs. Given the typical popularity of Lula’s Halloween night festivities, we expect the line to look eerily similar to that at Hot Doug’s, so at least they’ll win points for realism.

As opposed to a zombie dog.

Yes, I know this is out of focus, even without my glasses, even while wearing a pirate’s eye patch. It is not me. It is the snapshot. Blurrrrry.

Went to hear David Sax talk about his new book, Saving the Deli, at Sixth and I the other night. Ezra Klein interviewed him, and both men had precisely-chiseled personalities. Types. Types I could wrap my intellect around with ease, leaving the conduit between ear and brain free to absorb their words and expressions.

* fress  [fres]
–verb (used without object) Slang.
to eat or snack, esp. often or in large quantities.
Origin: Yiddish fresn or G fressen (of animals) to eat, eat ravenously

There is no saving the deli. There is keeping those that persist. And then there is boutique deli. Or artisanal deli. Call it what you will, we are in the era of either/or. Authentic is, well, um, ugh, overused, sadly. A sad comment on where we are as people, that we have to work so hard for authenticity. There is no saving the deli, less you want to look at it behind bars. Start again. Here’s one, for instance. Take it to its essence and begin again.

When I cooked at the Tabard Inn the mid-eighties I had a reputation among the cooks for being able to make lunch specials out of seemingly incompatible odds and ends. As we cleaned out our reach-ins first thing in the day, drinking coffee, blasting music, shouting “I’ve got a some coulis-this and eggplant-jam-that”, the lunch specials codified in our fertile cook’s minds. “I’ll take it!!”, said I, not to anything, but to lots of things, and they all came together in a lunch collage that made perfect, edibly-understood LUNCH.

Dr. Evermor makes sense to me, other than what looks like a missing e. My mind is dogged by the lack of that e. Good for me perhaps, so says Oprah, to be outside of my comfort zone. Little does she know though, that I have never found a comfort zone. That  in itself, must be one. For Dr. Evermor too, one might surmise.

The lunch special last August at the good doctor’s was made of seemingly incompatible odds and ends. Trash, refuse, leftover, orts, till they are brought together. Imagination’s fairy/troll sanitation worker works magic on the stuff, and it is new. Newer than new.

We had been out to Dr. Evermor’s before, but we wanted to go back. Fresh blood was along, and we knew we would see it with fresh eyes. 

The sanctuary is outside Madison, WI. Not a very long drive. A quiet 4-lane. Seems to me that Wisconsin traffic has not kept pace with the east coast. They are not, I repeat NOT, doing their duty in producing greenhouse gases. Sheesh. What shirkers. 

Eating in Madison, A to Z

We walked and smelled the rust and the sun and the clover-grass. Minerals standing on vegetables in the form of animals. Marvelous to marvel over, on and in. Smaller than a bread box and bigger. Very largely hugely manificently bigger.

Our fresh appetites took us by the nose to the Union Terrace for brats and lemonade, a mythic obsession.

The boy may have been born Korean and raised by a mother who is half (the wrong half) Jewish, but he speaks the universal language of brats. All communication is conveyed with a wide-open mouth and a mustard grin.

And the reveal…

Canned Sardinewich

And when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid. Was every kinda mad today about every little thing. And then we went to get pumpkins. So I was bad, very, very bad, and then we went to get pumpkins. Good then, very, very good.

The little things, well, the little things are microcosms of the big things. Don’t sweat the small stuff, sez they. Okay, I can work with that. The catch is – and it’s a catch big enough to fill the hold of a seafarer – the small stuff is often a microcosm of the big stuff. And that, I can’t work with, around or after. I get mad. Horrid.

And when I am good, I am very, very good. Do so love vague cooking instructions. They are, after all, after all the small stuff and all the big stuff, much more precise than precise cooking instructions. Vague cooking instructions such as “At the right cooking point it must be removed from the heat” are quintessentially precise. Smell, listen, let your sense of time tick away methodically, you will know, or you will be checking often to be sure that you know, when the “right cooking point” has arrived. Precisely. I can work with that.

Today was the day to get pumpkins. We knew. And too early for carving. Sprayed down those blue, white, orange, knobby, smooth, and lumpy beasts with hair spray to keep the squirrels from munch, munching, munching them to rot. Squirrels are on the raw food diet and perfect timing is their MO. The thing drops, THUD, a squirrel appears on cue, stage left, chippety, chippety, chippety, munched to mulch and chips. We have seen our jack-o-lanterns disappear from the inside out, squirrels doing the incisored microwave. Wave. Wave bye bye bye.

All by way of saying, everything must be stirred from time to time, and everything must be removed from the heat at the right cooking point. When it’s getting stuck to the bottom, stir it up! When it’s about to boil over, stir it up! When all the good stuff has settled, stir it up! I can work with that. watchit. Watch it. Watch it! WATCH IT! WHATCHIT!! Remove from heat, please. Done. I can work with that.

“I don’t see what’s so odd about spaghetti sandwiches,” says Hachihiro, the older of the Yonekura brothers. “Japanese like them,” he says, eyeing a pile of left-over spaghetti sandwiches from the lunch rush. “Well, at least, some Japanese like them.”

I had a sustaining lunch from Z Burger, giving me the spark to build this ginger thingamajig. Quite proud of the result, part of a series of eleven. More to come, when I am feeling boastful.

Z Burger is not too shabby.

Among the plethora of reasons that my job is not too shabby is the quality of lunch. Always high.