Knife's Edge - Restaurant Rants & Raves

The Pecan is Perfect

With the weather as nice as it's been it's hard not to be trying to put summer dishes on the menu. However, it is still spring, and corn and tomatoes are still a good way off. I've been trying a new lamb dish, grilled sirloin with parathas and mint-cherry chutney. Whenever lamb is on the menu, in any form, there is always someone who wants mint jelly. So, this could satisfy their mint craving while introducing a new flavor. The problem is the parathas. They're labor intensive, which is not always a bad thing, but I haven't come up with the perfect one yet. They should be flaky and little puffy. mine have been denser, more like chapatis. I don't know if want to use that much labor producing something less than stellar so I'll be rethinking this dish.

Today I'll try halibut wrapped in rice paper with nasturtium butter. I'll probably use some black olive puree and some form of hummus, maybe one with white beans instead of chickpeas. The rice paper is nice because it keeps all the moisture from the fish inside and still provides crunch.

As always I hunger for Southern food (one day I'll have to have a down home cafe) and our current tilapia dish with its pecan crust and spicy greens is already in that camp but I'm heading more in the hush puppy/cornbread direction. I still need another outlet for the pecans. We use them in our spinach salad and it would be nice to have another dish that incorporates them. Plus they are probably my favorite food of all time. My grandmother had trees in her yard in Texas and pecans have thin enough shells for small hands to crack. I get them shelled now and it's hard to resist eating the entire can.

Oysters will be coming off for a while and I'll retire the green pea pancakes since the English peas are getting woody.

Last night we had soft shell crabs with Vietnamese dipping sauce and sauteed pea shoots. We sold almost all the crabs I ordered but I'd hesitate to put them on the menu as the supply will probably be erratic.

Still going through the new books but had a serious setback on the reading. Another friend was doing spring cleaning and offered up 5 box loads of magazines. I was inclined to pass but when she mentioned many years of Martha Stewart Living I bit.

I love that magazine. I'm not too big on Martha herself, with that steely WASP look and legendary bitchiness, although I think she got a raw deal. Insider trading? Who the hell on Wall Street isn't an inside trader? Anyway, the magazine grabs me. The typeface is elegant and the articles are typically more informative than any of the other lifestyle mags. The gardening and decorating segments manage to modernize old-fashioned styles without making them kitschy. Yes, they're selling an unrealistic dream, and yes it's easy to poke fun at. So what?

At heart I think I'm a 19th century guy making the best of 21st century life. And now I have to drag my 19th century ass under the house to clear our clogged drain.

Starter Restaurant, Perfect for 1st Time Buyer

That got your attention huh? No, we're not selling the place. The title refers to a phenomena we've witnessed over the years.

We live in a well-touristed place and inevitably some visitors fall in love with the area and decide it would be a perfect place to move. During their house search, escrow, moving in and remodeling we see them all the time. We are their home away from their new home. They sing our praises effusively, they love us. Then when they are comfortably ensconced in their new palace we never (or rarely) see them again.

We've wondered about this and have a couple theories. One is you do things on vacation you never do when you are at home and moving can be extended vacation. I know I do more cultural activities on our trips to the Bay Area in a few days than I did in a few months when I actually lived there. So there's that, but people still go out out eat so it can't be that entirely.

The other is we're not snobbish enough. We're egalitarian and offer a menu that by design appeals to a broad spectrum and is pretty affordable. After people get comfortable with the area and realize they can go to other restaurants where the food is more expensive (and often less good)and service is poor, they conclude we can't be as good as they once thought we were, because our pricing is low and we're friendly and efficient.

A friend and I have been discussing the pretension of the high-end restaurant and I confess to a certain amount of jealousy over the amount of business some places do. I'd love to be booked well into the next year and have people falling over themselves to get in the door. At least a certain part of me would. The greater part would be pretty disgusted with myself. Which is not to self-denigrate. What we do, we do well. Certainly better than anyone in this area. It would be nice to be compensated appropriately however.

Enough about that. The mechanical problems have proceeded apace. The Micros issue seems resolved but we'd like them give us a break on the machine for all the struggles we've had to go through. Now one of the refrigerators and the freezer are needing attention, I have to track down knobs for the stoves, our floor leaked onto a merchant below, the grass in the backyard is past my waist, we need a busser and a new prep cook and we're rocketing into summer. Things are just a little out of control.

So, I keep reading, trying to ignore it. The Jimtown Store Cookbook was another I wanted to like. Did this book ever see an editor?  It just seemed to fail in so many ways. The authors present menus for seasonal occasions completely out of order so there is no sense of progression as you make your way through the book. They try to put forth the tone of simple people living in a bounteous place but instead come across as people who had money who were able to buy themselves into their dream of the good life. Their connection with their place seems sooo tenuous and ultimately tedious.

So I started two others simultaneously. A Gracious Plenty which is a compilation of spiral-bound community cookbooks recipes from the South with learned commentary on Southern Culture. Great looking recipes. I got too hungry so I had to start The Unprejudiced Palate by Angelo Pelligrini. Although on the surface many might say Pelligrini's message  to America is being realized today (the book was published in 1948) I think he's probably just as disgusted/bemused by the current worship of food as he was then by the neglectful wastefulness of his adopted country.

At any rate reading him is getting me off my ass to get out there and attack the yard. So...