The Lunch Encounter

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.

February is Black History Month!

Curator’s Choice Talk: Greensboro Lunch Counter

Wednesday, February 6, 2008
12:00 p.m.–12:30 p.m.
Location
“Treasures of American History” National Air and Space Museum

Free

First-come, First-served

This is a really cool link with voice and images and a story well told:
NMAH Object of History: Lunch Counter

and this is a great resource, too, for events and activities:

Black History Month 2008

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students protesting segregation entered a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at this “whites-only” lunch counter, and politely asked to be served. When their request was denied, the students refused to leave.

For six months, students and supporters staged a sit-in protest and boycott of the store. In July 1960, the Woolworth’s lunch counter was desegregated. A watershed event in the civil rights movement, the student-led Greensboro sit-in ignited similar protests across the South.

Photography © Renee Comet

Foodstyling by Lisa Cherkasky

You got your drippy, garlicked duck breast, your blop of cider crème fraiche and a little something crunchy and wet. Dispense with the fork. Don’t you want to touch this stuff? Pile it all on toast and use your teeth to tear it apart. You were born an omnivore!

Real estate. It’s unreal, it’s state. A hole in the wall is no more. The walls are all too new for holes. Downtown anyway. Where there were holes to be found, rubble was replaced with gleam. Looking for something a bit under the radar, something where !Location!Location!Location! is not the draw, you better look in a mall, a strip mall. Strip. Maul. Apt moniker.

That’s where you find em these days. Out in the reaches – nearer and farther, in rectangular concrete boxes, where the price is right and the walls are plumb.

Columbia Pike, where Atilla’s dwells, is not the far reaches – there is a sidewalk after all. Not many strolling on it though, primarily clutches of waiting bus riders, bunched like penguins. One can dream – Atilla’s two outdoor tables have been anticipating occupants for the 15 years I’ve been passing by. And, the website lures with promise of a grand dining room. Never been there. Of the joint’s dual personalities, I’ll take the hole-in-the-wall lobe. In the strip mall.

Sucuk and Kasar Cheese on Pita Bread was hot and pleasantly squishy. Plus oh so salty, with a trickle of orange grease slithering out. A telltale of deliciousness. I admit this looks a little, um suggestive, but closed up it resembled a deflated punch-ball. Barely suggesting food, I’d say.

Horsemeat is illegal, yes? So this sucuk must be beef. Mmm, drying makes this sausage dense. The better for frying, my dear. Betcha it’d be good with eggs, over-easy yolks busted into pools.

Did a little reading up on kasar cheese and, according to the Turkish Culture Portal, “Cheese is one of nature’s most tasty foods.” Huh, who knew? Okay, okay, it’s easy to tease. A little ribbing is not gonna ding the glow on this cheese’s chrome. Sheep’s milk it is and boy does it melt nice. Produces a “pull” to make my food stylist’s heart leap with joy. Pretty.

*

Were I to crusade, it would be for the return of the corner store. Toyed with the idea of a speakeasy in my dry, little-used basement. We could sell a few things – pickled pigs feet, sandwich bread, beef jerky, two-pill aspirin packs, essentials. Need a little company and an icy beer? Happy to sell you the cup, but not the beer, thankyouverymuch. Come sit by me for a bit and tell me a story.

While the college fund could use fattening, the driving spirit is to open a spot – privately public – for a bit of soc-ial-iz-ing. I have it in mind to contribute to the re-creation of civilized society.

A speakeasy is most likely a long shot, and risky to boot. Imagining the long arm of Virginia law would not be sympathetic to my view. A corner store, though, within the neighborhood? Think of that, mixed zoning! A place nearby, not an industrial-cleaner-perfumed 7-cough-11.

I grew up with The Pink Store. The Yellow Store, too. Same store, new paint. The official name may have been Zussman’s and Mr. Zussman presided. On a brown cardtable chair, in the shadows, sat a quiet, stout, ageless woman, in a dress pulled firmly to her calves. Mrs. Zussman? I will never know because I was afraid of her. Hers was not a welcoming lap – too shallow. Her counterpart, Mr. Zussman, behind the counter, just as stout, not much taller standing, took our dollars and sent us home with the change.

Oh, to send my kid out the door clenching a dollar, or five, on a mission for late Saturday-morning-what’s-for-lunch-fixins, and a little candy on the side…

The neighbors would fight it, slippery slopes looming. Corner store → tavern → brothel →crack den. From a basket of eggs to hell-in-a-hand-basket, faster than you can say theregoestheneighborhood. But I long for a quick stop that dispenses what 7-11 does not. The cures for what ails you – bread that needs chewing, conversation, stinky cheeses, a bit of gossip, non-neon mustard, an eagle eye on your child, real coffee, opining…

Leave your damn car at home and stop in for a little something you didn’t know you needed. Never know who you might run into (and didn’t knock down), and what you might find out. Better than any old neighborhood listserv. By a long shot.

*Crusader Rabbit

From alacritous Chicago correspondent Bottle Rocket(s) fan Linda:

It’s Super DAWWWWWG! And his lovely SUPERETTE!

(At the corner of Milwaukee, Devon and Nagle in Chicago since 1948)

Take warning, the website talks. Startlingly so, mind you. When the woman in the cyber-drive-in exclaimed boldly, “Thanks for stopping!” I glanced around. Didn’t know I was going, let alone stopping.

Suddenserv? More like Suddenswerv! Swerve on a dime and get in line!