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Floaty, wafting white bread. The stuff of blanched dreams. Gently puff-landing in the toaster slot and ~ poif, poif, pop, poof, popping ~ up again with its eyes peeled for butter and jam. Not brainy, this bread. For those who awake groggy and not looking for something with serious bite. More brainlike, impressionable. Press your thumb in and leave a smooth, dense doughmass, almost shiny.

Brains are softer than soft. Delicious too. You can hardly buy them though, cause skulls are hard. Mining a calf’s brain is not worth its price, apparently. A shame for your average grocery shopper like me. A brain is a terrible thing to waste.

Should you wake up talking (not naming any names here), your brain hankering for super-nutricells,
you find them in this. It will even penetrate a vacation-addled mind.

Or this. The orange soda will drive you.

Far from home in a no-sandwich zone.

It takes guts to open a restaurant. And extreme amounts of optimism. (Unless you have been sitting around a board room charting minutiae until every drop of soul is squeezed dry and your plan is airtight.) The folks running San Vicente Restaurant did not dream this up while in the palm of investors. While I don’t know the specifics, this place looks like a typical small business high wire act. They have poured their hearts into it and you feel like warmth when you walk in.

I was praying they would have some kind of sandwich so I’d have a springboard. To pupusas, horchata, tamales….

There are nice women at this adorable joint. They will take your money, cook your food, bring it to you, and chat with you about the Spanish soaps if you are in the know.

Look how sweet the dining room – the only room – is! It was all tarted up for Valentine’s day and I was touched by the touches.

San Vicente Restaurant serves breakfast. So snug here. I will intentionally stay out too late and drink too much so I can be comforted here. Could anyone’s kitchen cradle a hangover better than this?

The only thing that excites me about Wonderbread is the polka-dot package, but this Wonderbread is enhanced by the company it keeps. Corn. Corn in a bowl. Corn that was recently shucked. It seems unnecessarily mean to look down your nose at the bread. Anyway, hot off the flat-top it was tasty. Caramelly brown-speckled.

Hot bacon. Cold lettuce. They bring out the best in each other. Warmed my soul. Cooled my heels.

San Vicente Restaurant

“Best Salvadoran & Mexican Food on Columbia Pike”

2599 Columbia Pike

Arlington, VA 22204

(703)920-1130

7 am – 1 am Seven days a week

2008 Napa Valley Mustard Festival

In their words,

The Napa Valley Mustard Festival celebrates its fifteenth season of sensational events in the year 2008. This two month season, during which fields, vineyards, and hillsides are vibrant with wild mustard in bloom, celebrates the rich, unique agricultural and cultural bounty of Napa Valley – and YOU ARE INVITED!

Okay, the guy up above is standing among domesticated mustard plants, not the wild ones. I know, I know, but I would venture a guess that there will be mountains of domesticated mustard consumed in Napa while

mustard the condiment shares center stage with mustard in bloom throughout the season – appearing at events and in mustard recipes, from entrées to desserts.

Put that way – mustard the condiment – I hear rounds of thunder in the distance and have an urge to prostrate myself before the mighty seed. Powerful stuff. I don’t see much mention of sandwiches at this extravaganza – too plebian perhaps – but there is a dance! Looks a little rich for me, all the way around, although I could justify mustard flavored lipstick application and an ochre pedicure were I to be invited.

Slip a few jars of mustard swag into my bag while I’m at it…..

Valentine’s Day

Esquire Magazine has got me convinced they’re having more fun than the rest of us. I want me an Esquire dude cause he surely knows the best sandwich spots, the chicest bars, and how to pronounce pho.

My tips for modern man? It’s a billfold not a wallet, use moisturizer, and keep your sandwich away from my roses! (That ethylene-puffing tomato causes premature aging to flowers.)

The Best Sandwiches in America

The March issue will send you scrounging for your dob kit, muttering under your breath, “life is too short….”

By next Valentine’s Day I plan to have a few more greasy entries in my little black book of sandwiches!

Color my world orange.

(Can you believe Stockphoto put out their own line of chips, each one handstamped??)

My friend Miriam says she’s surprised that I like bbq potato chips. I don’t know that I like them exactly. I eat them. Umami makes me do it.

Umami, not my mommy, although my mother claims a person can survive on potato chips. After all, the potato famine would not have occurred had the Irish not become so dependent on potatoes, neglecting to grow much of anything else.

“Potatoes are a near perfect food”, claims the Idaho Potato Museum (well, they would, one would hope). And gift shop! I’ll bet they have snazzy souvenirs in there.

The US Department of Agriculture has stated that “a diet of whole milk and potatoes would supply almost all of the food elements necessary for the maintenance of the human body.” According to my professional opinion the missing elements are butter and salt. Mash em up and eat. 24/7.

Miriam adds this note,

I eat them probably if really desperate. They taste so phony with that sugar-salt thing which is most likely high fructose corn syrup.

Yes, delicious desperation. Boink! Nail on the head! And such purity of phoniness. Bingo!

I understand that bbq chips and cigarettes make a lethal combo, something to crave when in the mood for punishment. With a book. Top corner of every page smudged orange. The hangover headache would surely pack a wallop. An orange-additive-and-nicotine-thrashing.

***************************************************************************************
Make Herr’s Yours
Does that rhyme?

Make Her’s Yers looks better to me.

The spring equinox is a mere 36 days away. Thirty-six days till the tipping point. Feel the earth gently heave the weight of its northern hemisphere towards the sun.

Tonight, once darkness filled every nook, ice fell like upholsterer’s tacks. Put my foot down and my leg flew away from me, stretching long and taut and elastic like plastic man. Had to tear the car doors open, ri-i-i-i-ip.

Traveling at about 11 mph my son says with urgency, “Drive slowly, Mom.” Pause. Then, “Akem, Mom, drive slowly.” Akem?! I don’t have the heart to correct him.

Bundling’s cozy, yes. But peeling to your skin is lovely. I’m down to one green glove and we’ve got 36 days to go.

A mom-made plate, no question. Not by my mom, but it coulda been. Mine favors blue table linens, too. Artfully applied mustard….

Clue number 1: Fruit salad

I see this and feel instantly toasty. Flip-flopped feet done pier-dangling and now tucked up under a picnic bench, crossed ankles switching, toes rubbing arches.

Following closely on the heels of the equinox, summer solstice!

February 9, 2008

Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the year of the Rat!

Talking kosher today on the Splendid Table, Lynne Rosetto Casper hosted Jane and Michael Stern.

Landlocked Tucson is home to a true deli, Feig’s, lucky for Arizona’s desert rats. Feig’s has my favorite not-quite-pickle – half sours. I wouldn’t give up true pickles for their quasi-selves, but the half sour is so terrifically crunchy and noisy.

Learned a little something from Dorie Greenspan on the show today. Odor. Specifically, what it is. Odor is the smell you get when you breathe something directly through your nose. Only your nose. Mmmmm.

And then we have smell, scent, perfume, bouquet and aroma. All good. All stinky. Brings you nose to nose with life.

Du 2 Luv 4 A Sub, I missed a lot of high school. Good planning on my part – older boyfriend, with a car. He 2 suffered from Luv 4 A Sub.

That boyfriend was exceptional, with good taste and good ideas. He had the wherewithal to go to the auction of J Edgar Hoover’s detritus – what remained after the dissemination of anything of value – and to bid successfully on a large, pig-shaped cookie jar with a graphic USA stamped into its snout. The purchase itself was quite exceptional in my 16-year-old eyes, but the commerce that followed was cunning.

Courteous phone call to Andy Warhol, collector of cookie jars, and an arrangement was brokered. The trade took place in Mr. Warhol NYC apartment. Cookie jar – feel it’s heft – for two large, signed lithographs, Chairman Mao and The Cow – feel their weight. Both hung in a college dorm room. They were large, floor to ceiling, and had impact.

That boyfriend was resourceful, ingenious, creative and adventurous.

We drove to town in his brown Impala, for Italian subs that dripped olive oil and pink vinegar, staining the waxell wrapping. Lunch hour cut into third and fourth periods deeply. A small sacrifice for sub-edification.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Subs. Chain Subs. Ugh.

At the bottom of the sandwich food chain. The bottom.

Can A Sandwich Be Slandered?
Quite the cat fight between Quizno’s and Subway.

Weighing one on each hand. Quizno’s (feel the weight of air). Subway (feel the weight of helium).

I dunno. You call that a sandwich.

Puffy Bread vs Cottony Bread. Not much of a battle. Pretenders, both.

Resolute Portland correspondent Kit reports from:

Jade on 36

where the menu degustation once included a single giant French fry.

Jade on 36 in Shanghai serves “avant garde” food. Is avant garde relevant in these postmodern times?

My personal experience with molecular gastronomy (other than armchair) is limited, but I have an opinion anyway.

Vanguard cuisine in 1979 was Nouvelle Cuisine and I spent that year (nearly all the hours of it other than sleeping and eating a few bbq potato chips late at night) in the kitchen of Le Pavillon, experimental, fantastical, pure, essential , and above all, radical. Reading about the vanguard of 70’s haute cuisine, it sounds so tame, with barely an echo registered. Not true, in fact. Okay, there was ridiculousness, and that went to the cutting room floor. Food these days, without the incorporation of nouvelle cuisine notions and practice would be stodgy and dull. It’s an open and shut case.

Molecular gastronomy will fare similarly in culinary history’s great sausage machine, imho. Not sure which gizmos and devices will stick though…

“BLT Chic”

Yes!

“Bread”

No! I draw the line at foam.

With all due respect to Jeffrey Steingarten who claims in The Man Who Ate Everything, “No smells or tastes are innately repulsive”, before he goes on to sketch out his “Six-Step Program to liberate my palate and soul.” He’s absolutely right, of course. It’s all learned.

Photography © Renee Comet

Foodstyling by Lisa Cherkasky

Quick pickles! With mint! Only 2 months till the mint emerges. A little longer for the cucurbitaceae.

Tip your monitor for proper doneness.