The Lunch Encounter

Prepare for a conflicted reaction should you click the link to Eat Yer Heart Out Rachel Ray, Dan Epstein’s brilliant, albeit a bit disgusting, dot connector to Steve Don’t Eat It. Scroll down to Volume 3, if you are feeling strong.

Beggin’ Strips are bacon-shaped, bacon-flavored treats for dogs. In the commercial a dog runs around the house like a maniac shouting (shouting? a dog? bizarre) BACON, BACON, BACON, BACON, BACON! It’s weird, because I do the exact same thing. Steve follows the natural trajectory to Beggins, Lettuce and Tomato. So glad I don’t live with this guy.

Speaking of dogs, a topic I have not worn thin on this blog – surprisingly, I am reminded of a story.

• My friend Barbara, chef/proprietress of Columbine in NYC, is a very funny person. The funniest person I have ever encountered in the flesh, actually. She can’t help it. Anyway, remember Spy Magazine? Right.
• In B’s words, The year was around ’88 or ’89. Bryan Miller was writing about restaurants for the Times. Truly enamored of the word nubbins, he scattered it with abandon in his reviews. So, a kid from Spy called and asked how I would describe a nubbin. I said, “I think it is the thing that doesn’t melt when hot water is poured onto the Gravy Train.”
• Here she is, in Wisconsin, circa 1997 or so, in Rosendale – speed trap capital of the world, where we made an emergency brat stop, or brot stop. At 10 am we were the first customers of the day.
• 
  
• Speaking of dogs and food. I do a fair amount of work for Vegetarian Times Magazine (don’t tell their readers about the stylist with bacon grease up her sleeves). Had some vegan biscotti sitting around a photo studio left from the previous day’s shoot. Vegan biscotti miss the eggs real bad. Take it from me. (Apologies to any vegans out there.) So, in comes the client, a guy from USA Weekend Magazine, and I say, “Try a biscotti!”. One bite and he quips, “Will it make my coat shiny?!”
• Btw, I know this post is a mess with font sizes, lack of paragraph breaks and so on. I beg (gin) forgiveness and promise you IT IS NOT MY FAULT. It is in fact, a server problem. Was shocked to find out that the quirk is in the tool, not the operator. So.

 From Doug Michels of Ant Farm, Blue Star Human Dolphin Space Colony, Dollenium, The National Sofa, Cadillac Ranch and Media Burn.     

• 
  
• The sandwich, not the man.  Went to lunch with Peter Brett Wednesday. He’s majestic, but not po. Rich in all that counts. He’s famous, don’t you know?! The reservation at The Majestic Cafe was in his name and I was the happy beneficiary. “Casually Swank” says the Majestic’s site and, believe me, we were!
• We did a little recreational celebrity bashing. In the same vein as Frank Bruni’s recent story, TV Chefs, Far From Reality, although not (quite) as eloquently.  
• Scannned the menu for the choice with the highest housemade saturation and fixed upon the oyster po’ boy – housemade bread, pickle and fries. I gotta tell you, that pickle was remarkably tasty. Excellent balance of flavor. Hit each note and ricocheted back. 
• Peter Bakes is the name of Mr. Brett’s custom cake business, although For Pete’s Cake, was a contender, and my personal favorite. 
• An essential element of true celebrity, a celebrity we can love? Modesty! In a post-lunch email Peter writes, “I won’t really be a celebrity until I show up on your blog behind that po’ boy.” What’s not to love?

• I come by this brat pre-occupation honestly. My grandfather, Frederick Henry Schroeder, is responsible.
• FOOD MUSEUM OF THE WEEK
• Deutsches Bratwurst Museum Holzhausen
• Thuringia, Germany.  Focused on the social and political history of bratwurst, particularly Thuringian Rostbratwurst, for which a 1432 document has recently been found that established the rules of production. The exhibition includes documents, butchering tools, historical photos, and folklore. 
• When I was a kid in the late 60’s, we moved to DC from Wisconsin and my parents maintained a brat connection. At the time, bratwurst was exotic and unavailable in the Mid-Atlantic, a region (DC in particular) that was largely by-passed by the waves of Northern-European immigrants that arrived in the early 20th century. What was a good ex-pat Midwesterner to do? I remember suitcase hand-offs at National Airport. A plain, brown, businessman’s suitcase, heavy with cold, stuffed casings, packed so close the sausages were square-sided. Followed on the weekend by a backyard brat bash.
• My grandmother, other side of the family, the, ahem, pork-free side, came for visits with a large, brown case as well. Packed tightly, no wrapping, day old bakery. Ack. From my grandfather’s dairy and bakery, the Quaker Dairy. Quakers they were not. Boris and Anna Cherkasky from Ukraine. Nope. That day old bakery was a cross to bear, so to speak.

• The headline reads Germans Take Pride in the Wurst and goes on to tell the story of the bratwurst purity law, a “holy find”. I already knew that ketchup on a bratwurst was Barbarian, but was unaware that to fry it is a sin. Even pan fry? Oh heavens! Friars!
•  Sitting in my sunny kitchen, while out the window the wind floats the swing up high, carrying a phantom child, I could not be happier with my lunch. Still wearing the jacket I put on for the ride over to the German Gourmet where the sign read HOT BRATS TO GO – oh joy! My heart leapt. Condiments sanctioned by yours truly: sauerkraut, onions (red, paper thin, raw and wilted so unctuously) and mustard.  On a roll that is just right, crevasse down the length of the top, sharply edged with brown, looking too generous but disappearing from the plate, slathered as that bread is with brown mustard and kraut. I’m glad to be nearly alone, don’t mind my dog staring down every bite. Can you blame her? Licking my chops I’ll sacrifice a tidbit to her. We both believe in telekinesis.

The German Gourmet is a lovely place to shop for chocolates, wine, pastries, pickles, mustard, cheese, licorice, chic European toiletries and scores of other irresistible fancies. The sandwich menu will make you breathe hard if you are there just before lunch, as I was.

The place sparkles.

Loaves of bread rest in wait. Ask and someone will slice off a chunk and sell it to you by the pound.

• 
  
• You gotta cook a lot of custards before you kiss the Flan Prince. 
• While, according to the  Daily Yomiuri in its  review of Kitchen Princess , “It’s nothing new to introduce food or cooking into manga…  The Kitchen Princess stands out as it allows readers to enjoy the feeling of being a little chef while following the story and trying the recipes Najika introduces themselves.”
• I was tipped off to the world of manga by Mike Rhode of ComicsDC . Not that I was completely in the dark, but I was definitely in dusk. One could rapel on the wall of manga at the closest big box book store, and wearing a helmet would not be overly prudent. Someone is reading this stuff. Make that someones.
• The Kitchen Princess series – there are four volumes in English and eight in Japanese – was especially interesting to me for obvious reasons, although I love the manga art and the fantastical stories. In each of these satisfyingly flippy paperbacks there are 4 recipes. The odds of finding a sandwich recipe? Well, who knows, I have not read the results of that study, but I would venture a guess at somewhere around 11.2% .
• The recipes tend toward fanciful, French and feminine. When mapping your way to a heart via the scenic gastro route of the stomach, does the food matter? Or is it simply a matter of aligning your compass deftly? My cook’s heart is warmed by the earnest motives sending Najika to the kitchen – “to assuage the sorrow of a friend or to win back the hearts of people who once rejected her.” 
• And why the sobriquet “Flan Prince”? While aspiring to become a great chef like her late parents, Najika also dreams of being reunited with a boy who saved her life when she was small. Despondent over her parents accidental death, she had been wandering tearfully along a riverbank and fell into the water. The boy who rescued her then consoled with a tasty flan. I told you it was fantastical.

• Once about a time there was a Frigid Queen and a Burger King.  November, 1967. Mattoon, Illinois, pop. 18,000. Gene and Betty Hoots, proprietors, take Burger King to court over a trademark dispute. Forty years later the Hoots’ Burger King is an island, protected from encroachment by the big guys -although the moat is only 20 miles wide.
• And the famous double cheeseburger? It’s the Hooter Burger. Says the Marketplace reporter, Jeremy Hobson, “You guys are a trademark disaster area.”
• Read or listen to the entire Marketplace story.

 And I always thought they were singing, “Judy’s in the Sky”!                                 Judy’s in Disguise!?! What the?!

 Small comfort, I know. A Bacon Bandaid boo boo strip can only do so much.

• One more post about bacon and I will have to change the name of this blog to the Pig ‘n Counter. 
• Attempting to comfort Dan Whipps, recent recipient of Cheese-of-the-Month as a nuptial gift, lamenting he was yet in need of Bacon-of-the-Month Club, I suggested Bacon Salt. Not that I have ever had it. Just a thought. Dan sez, ” You know, somebody was just talking to me about Bacon Salt. They said it was TERRIBLE. They used it once and threw it away. I’ll stick with the real thing.”
• I recently posted about Bacon Salt under The Salt Special. Had not tasted it, but thought it might be good on an egg sandwich. On second thought…I’ll take Dan’s word for it. 
• Joanna Preuss, author of Seduced By Bacon,  recently visited Lynn Rosetto Casper on her radio show, The Splendid Table. While at the mic Joanne mentioned three top-of-the-line bacon makers in the US, Nueske’s, from my home state of Wisconsin, among them.
• Better Cured Meat Begins On the Hoof at Home
• OR At Home On the Hoof, cause they roam at home, and are free to roam, and free to get FAT. And that is what makes a nice pig, if you are thinking about a pig as something nice to eat.
• I would like to get my cook’s hands on some good old-fashioned pork. It seems not that long ago that pork was lovely braised OR grilled, cause it was so moist, and juicy, and, yes! fatty. Lean, mean, white, pristine…..does not a good chop make. Boneless skinless chicken breasts are to the-other-white-meat pork loins are to textured vegetable protein. Blech, splect, yechtch. Let them eat acorns!
• Oh look! Your own pig from Wooly Pigs, or from La Quercia’s Acorn Edition (718-842-8700, you will need $3285.00 before they will even crack the barn door to you, whoa)  to cook or cure any way you you like. Some pork, some salt, a little dry curing, some sandwich fulcrum!

Photo by Renee Comet Foodstyling by Lisa Cherkasky 

• Picturing this on a favorite channel of the cable package that is my collective unconscious:Hitchhiking in Denmark in the 70’s. I’m 17 and my boyfriend, who’s a year older, is Apache with black hair flying. While we did not do the bait and switch, I was dangled closer to the shoulder than he. August, height of Danish summer. It’s a moderate height. Short sleeves and long jeans.
• We prayed for a Citroën cause we had never been in one. I wanted to experience the hydraulic suspension. The closest we came was a Jaguar and that was good. Bucket seats so I sat on his lap, my face pressed up close to the windshield. I have yet to ride in a Citroën.
• Danes will always feed you. Or they would then and I suspect 30-some years has not changed that. Perhaps this has changed, but back then we ate 6 times a day. Breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, evening tea. Drop in on someone and the odds were good they would be eating.
• Many of the meals were smørrebrød. Buttered bread, open-faced, with something on top. Unlikely for dinner, but most likely at all other times.
• Some memorable meals:In a farmhouse, outside Copenhagen, breakfast. Warm from the oven, bumpy-textured brown bread, butter at a spreadable temperature (Danish summer, perfect for butter, cool but not cold), last night’s potatoes. Butter bread, slice potatoes, stick potatoes to butter. Eat and repeat. I have no memory of ever being full when I was 17…………………………………………………………………………Morning after a blow-out party, bedroom doors open, folks emerge in jumbled pairs, breakfast is served. Bread – brown, thin and densely crumbly + white “Franskebrod” – butter and what’s in the fridge. Tubes of mayonnaise and remoulade, canned liverpostej, cheese, smoked fish, other odds and ends. AND – bottoms up in tiny, icy glasses – aquavit, caraway flavored. It went down easy that a.m. when I was resilient as a trampoline. 
• And now, here in DC, every Veterans Day weekend my extended family lines up early for the Danish Club of Washington’s Christmas Bazaar. We are Danes, after all, or at least partly so. Lots of family Christiansens behind, beside and yet to come. We go for lunch, not so much for shopping. The smorrebrod have become bigger (Americanized?) over the years, and some of the shrimp have been replaced by macaroni, but the combinations remain the classics, and we love them. Three would be plenty, but I always take four – and feel just a teeny bit older than 17.