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Aaaaaiiiiiieeeeeee!

Man Vs. Food is a funny name, sorta, and not. Don’t like to think of food as part of a battle, but must admit food often presents a challenge. Too big, too weird, too expensive, too, too, too. Sometimes, as my friend Jane says, “It is all too much”. (She wasn’t talking about food, but no point in splitting hairs.)

At any rate, Man Vs. Food is a Food Network show that I am supposed to be watching. Monday night they featured a middle-of-the-country size sandwich, the Dagwood at Ohio Deli in Columbus. In my house it is Humans Vs. TV so we do not have cable. The humans were ahead at last count.

My eyes were opened to Columbus by That Tall Handsome Sandwich Man in Ohio who posted about the Thurman Cafe a while back. Columbus has Nancy’s, Jeni’s Ice Cream, Pistacia Vera and Rosendale’s, for example.

When the Olestra chip was debuted, focus panels were run first in Columbus. Those smart Ohioans rejected Olestra and that is good enough for me.

It is!
Especially when country ham is on the menu.


Finch’s is the sort of restaurant about which I fantasize. When my car is pointed down some freeway, tearing towards a work gig, I imagine continuing on and on and on, radio stations easing from static to clear and back to static again. Well, I’ll be darned! Before coming to my senses I’ve pulled into Finch’s parking lot, seven hours from home.

When you walk in to my fantasy joint you are neither ignored nor acknowledged, you are just there, as though you have been a well-oiled, solidly performing fixture for a decade. Heads don’t turn away from their grits and eggs. Comfort in that.

Photos by Heidi Leech, weekend partner in crimes and dishdemeanors.

During the week Heidi is working her fingers, brains and the TV tubes. All that industry will produce an appetite in a girl, making for a superb traveling companion. We were in Finch’s together, a trio with Coffee Monkey, the morning after a Bottle Rockets show at the Berkeley Cafe in Raleigh.

While I can’t say for sure Finch’s pulls a strong draw should you crave a sandwich, I can promise you that your thick, oval breakfast plate will yield a large enough ham harvest to cover two meals. Got some bread on ya around noon? You’re all set, darlin. Dig around in your pockets for a bit of onion to stand up to the salt and that sandwich will turn you inside-out with yakkety yak good taste.

Were I to serve a
BLT Cocktail
someone might say I am a F**d**.

Could never live that down in the household of my snobbish, no-trend-too- precious-to-disdain, prideful self. Althoououugh…..a post-modern, chI-cHI-CHI-baby, BLT Cocktail sounds tas-teeeee.

Baconsalt rimmed glass, icy tomato-lettuce coulis and a crunch-diddy-um-delicious toast point on the bevnap. Okay! But we’re gonna have to wait till next summer.

No way. No how. No chance. Nosirree.

In December I will return. With an agenda.
The Duck Room.
The St Paul Sandwich. At Park Chop Suey perhaps.
Gioia’s Hot Salami Yowza.
Toasted Ravioli.
The Slinger, an entire breakfast covered in chili. I believe this can be had at the Diner Grill on Irving Park Road. The word is, it it’s the drunk’s late night friend. Sounds it. Double yowza.

Lord have mercy, it’s December already. December 2008! The year evaporated.

Photo by Dan Whipps

Story from another life. I remember it, but I can’t feel it in my bones anymore.

My boyfriend was sitting at the breakfast table, coffee cup raised and wide-eyed as I snatched the hot waffle iron – waffle baking inside, snapped the plug out of the outlet and slid the whole mess into a doubled paper grocery bag. Swinging the front door open wide I marched down the apartment building hall to the trash shoot. Wham! went the iron into the shoot. Swoosh~ went the bag as it slid into the dark. As the shoot’s maw creaked shut I brushed off my hands and sighed.

Final episode of the sticking waffle battle. Waffle iron 1, Lisa 0.

I now know better. Cold batter + hot iron = permanently affixed waffle. Scrape, scrape, scrape with a table knife.

Anyway, I purchased a non-stick iron shortly thereafter and began life anew. The boyfriend knew what he was getting into, I would say, and he stuck around. Tiger by a tale, I was called, and so obviously so. No apologies for natural disposition.

That was 20 years and a few crispy waffles ago. Now I have bigger waffles to fry and can’t go to battle with appliances. We have more than one waffle iron model – the Flip ‘n Fluff, whose sobriquet is The Flippin Fluff if it misbehaves,and a Waffle Stick Maker, the better for dipping, my dear. The nice people at Hamilton Beach gave them to me.

See the Publisher’s Weekly review of Tom Colicchio‘s ‘wichcraft, written with Sisha Ortuzar, right here.

Witch craft, for good or evil, is behind motherhood.

Tonight, over dinner – sandwiches at the bar – he said he would like to time travel to the future. To find things out. Would he die from tragedy? Destruction? Assassination?

One can only hope that their child thinks these horrid thoughts because tragedy, destruction and assassination are so far out of their realm. Exotic, extreme, unimaginable.

Tom Robbins says, “It is never too late to have a happy childhood,” a funny notion. While I believe it’s true that where you have been is not where you are going, it does take hocus pocus aplenty to dissolve an unhappy childhood and replace it – true witchcraft.

Tryin’ with all my might and right to be at least 60% Glenda the Good Mum, and hopin’ my 40% Wicked Mum of the West will become memories deeply buried and never exhumed. Stirring a child-brew slowly and steadily, with dreams my son will rise from the cauldron right as rain. Right as rain while he is a child by nature and stature. Right as rain on the first go round.

Is this an art or a craft? A craft, I think. But which craft is it?

When the market is down, Spam is up! Read the story in the NYTimes Business Day, November 15, 2008.

I am a defender of Spam although I have to admit that my opinion is just that. Opinion. No facts about it, I have not eaten Spam in over 40 years. Maligned foods almost always appeal to my tough-tender heart, whether they are a part of my practice or not. The name is not glamorous, the package shouts at you, Spam itself screams budget. The name is brilliant. As good as Kleenex, PF Flyers and Tater Tots. 

 
Ouchy! HOT!
The Toastove turns up the dial on combo-vision. Toaster, hot plate and warmer. Keep it next to your bed, you never have to get up.

A couple weeks ago the Post food section added feathers to the beds of praise for Taylor Gourmet and for Andy Smith’s new book about burgers. Both entities, sprung from the imaginations of verdant minds and hearts, were known to me, as peripheral acquaintances, so I learned a bit more about them from the Post’s reporting. I was in pursuit, the Post upped the heat on the trail, and soon both Taylor Gourmet and Hamburger: A Global History will own real estate in my collective unconscious. You might want to make room too.

Here is my earlier, albeit brief, post on Taylor Gourmet. And the Post’s words on
Taylor Gourmet  The local rag got scooped by me and I was scooped by that e-rag, Daily Candy.

The hoagie guys who run Taylor are attached to their Philadelphia roots. Is DC north or south? Philly leaning or more toward Atlanta? We do not call them hoagies here. Simply subs, which to me is newscaster-speak, no known affiliation or accent. DC is stateless, but not without identity.

Andrew Smith spoke last Sunday to the Culinary Historians of Washington about his new book Hamburger: A Global History. This week the Post ran a short interview with him. You saw it all first here. Oh, cutting a scorching path!

While we are on the hamburger trail, I must chime in on Ray’s Hell-burger. The word is not chime. The word is pontificate. Hell that’s a hell of a burger. A leap followed by a long, slow, airborne sail over most others. Dastardly delicious. It’s the meat. Meat. Grass fed? Don’t know. Outspoken. Do know. Yes.


I’m of two minds, at least two, on burgers on this blog. They are sandwiches, no doubt, but such an enormous sub-section that they rule a separate and equal universe. Sub, the burger is not. One mind warns against wandering too far down the burger trail, and the other mind says, Oh what the hell!

Why is plain almost always old?

Plain is good. Think Donald Judd*. New can be good too. Think bread.

*

Donald Judd corner chair.