Knife's Edge - Restaurant Rants & Raves

Stranded in the Jungle

The pig is coming along and I have been documenting most of the proceedings. I've gone a little simpler this time. I decided not to do any fermented sausages because I don't have a proper drip room. Last winter/spring I was able to get away with a very makeshift solution involving a ladder, a 1" dowel, and enclosing the whole thing in plastic trash bags. During summer though, we're too busy to have that set-up taking up half the dry storage for a day or two. Plus they have to hang for about 2 months and we're going to have to dismantle our keg fridges in about a month in order to install a floor in our wait station and the keg fridges are where they would have to hang.

So, hams are the order of the day. I've got all 4 legs brining, along with the head and trotters. The loins we serve on the menu anyway, the bellies are mostly being made into bacon although I'm braising one of them tomorrow. The skin goes into cotechino. Man I love that stuff.

I'll post the details (along with pics) when the hams are close. Should be about 2 weeks, maybe a little less for the forelegs. I'd still like to do a country ham but again have no practical place for the aging. Maybe someday when I'm a big cheese like Paul Bertolli I'll have my redwood lined walk-in carved into the hillside below my house holding many hams in various stages of readiness. Or maybe I'll just have a funky home fridge that I've converted to be my equivalent.

Right now dear friends I need your help. Where the hell can I eat in Anaheim? Or Glendale? My mom and I, along with my friend of longest duration, (that's how us older folks say it) are going to see what's left of the NY Dolls on Wednesday in Anaheim. Long trip for a rock show but hey. My pal lives in Glendale so it's not a big deal for him.

At the risk of this turning into a rock and roll blog rather than a food blog, I distinctly remember seeing their Too Much Too Soon album with my mom when it came out in 1974. Food content: we saw it in a supermarket. I want to say she bought it, but I'm not sure. We definitely loved the way they looked regardless and certainly had little idea that within 3-4 years I'd be routinely sleeping on singer David Johansen's floor and having him and Sylvain look out for me (and slip me cash) like they would an obnoxious little brother.

I haven't seen either of them in over 25 years and don't know if I'll get a chance to say hi. I think I will but who knows.

So, anyway, help steer me to a decent meal if you can. Probably nothing too challenging as neither my mom nor my friend are tremendously adventurous. I'll look on Chowhound also, but it's so much crap to wade through and I'm hoping one of you knows the perfect place.

In the summer reading department I've made it through a few more of Kudzu's loaners. The Vintner's Table Cookbook was an interesting take on food and wine pairing. I enjoy reading books by people with definite opinions, even when I don't agree with them. Tried her recipe for walnut shortbread and it didn't do it for me.

MFK Fisher's annotated edition of Fine Preserving was interesting for two reasons. One is she claims to like the book, in fact getting it reissued through casual conversation with a publisher but then proceeds to poke and prod at nearly every recipe in the book. If this is how she treated things she liked, yikes. The other interesting thing is her mention of Charmoon the mushroom man. I deal with him yearly during the production of one of the food and wine festivals up here and had no idea he used to drive Mary Frances to the market weekly. I'll have to ask him a few questions this year.

Plantation Feasts and Festivities is a weird one. Recipes by the great Edna Lewis, celebrating slave owner hospitality. Hmmm...not sure how I feel about that one. The food sounds good but the issue of slavery is pretty well buried although mentioned once in very glossed over terms.

Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme was a quick read and I tried the Deep Chocolate Cream (essentially a pudding recipe) and it was pretty damned good. I'll definitely try a few more things.

I'm mid-way through Authentic Vietnamese Cooking by Connie Trang and everything sounds really wonderful. I'll let you know after I try something.

So send those So Cal recommendations now, because after I leave Tuesday morning I won't be checking in.

Major Misanthropy

Would be my name if I were in the military or could describe my state of mind this mid-August. Not long after I posted how great this summer was going and how the annoying people were noticeably absent, they started to appear. The GM had to throw someone out of the restaurant, I had a confrontation with a customer over seating, and we're not alone. The GM had a conversation with a shopkeeper who told her everyone has the same complaint. I keep telling myself I am as happy as I decide I am.

It doesn't help that I have the flu at the moment. This is quite bizarre as I never get sick. I left work early Monday which I haven't done due to illness for more than 7 years. It's been lingering for a few days which is also bizarre. On the extreme rare occasions I do succumb, it's over in a day.

Fortunately there are a couple of bright spots. We were scheduled to get a pig delivery today, but that has been pushed back to Friday. So, I'll a chance to recover, have a day off with the GM, who poor thing, worked 12 days in a row while I was gallivanting at the BBQ and enjoying rock and roll. Thank you sweetie.

I love working with the pig. I'll try to document the process for any who would like to see it. In a couple weeks, we'll have fresh ham, coppa di testa, crispy trotters, rillettes and other goodies. I'd still like to get a place for hanging long-term cured hams but I haven't found a good solution yet. I will make some more soppressata although it took forever to sell last batch. Perhaps I won't make quite as much.

Another bright light is that a former cook who moved away is returning to the area and I hope will be coming back to work for us. He has a gentle disposition and is a thoughtful, attentive cook, the only one I've had in recent memory who participates in menu development and who actually reads cookbooks and magazines. I left a message for him yesterday. One of our waiters saw his wife at the pizza place across the street, so she's in town but I don't know if he is.

He had moved away because his girlfriend (now wife) was going to go to nursing school. She didn't get accepted to the program and changed her plans. She is from here, her sister and husband live here as well so my sense is they will be putting down roots here. I sure hope so. In fact I'm going to go call him now.

Don't Order the Ham Steak

So many people have written their accounts of the SF Food Blogger's BBQ that I'll spare you any description I might give. I will however say I had a blast, great food, great folks, great hosts. It was a revelatory city trip for me all the way around.

Not only was I well fed at the BBQ I got to see a band, The Glimmer Stars who warmed my heart. They were about my age and about my size and they were playing some of the finest pop music I have heard in a while. Those of you who know me may know I had a musical past and my last band experience which left a bad taste, the demands of running a restaurant and the small town where I live have all conspired to keep me away from the instruments. It didn't help that the last person I played with had a heart attack two days after telling me he had waited his whole life to hear his music with pedal steel.

At any rate after playing their record all the way home I dusted off the Telecaster and the Sho-Bud and seriously contemplated playing with other people. Not that there are other people to play with here but that's another story.

I also got to stop at Pearl's to have a burger with Kudzu (who is not a guy, BTW). She's right. They have a great burger although we were both reaching for the salt shaker.

Now to the food. Tomorrow will be a monumental blackberry picking day. I grabbed a few for some blackberry lemonade as an accompaniment to our peach dacquoise, but there were so many ripe ones that I need to get out there and really harvest. Blackberry ice cream coming soon as well as blackberry chutney for our rabbit sampler. I'll probably put up some jam and just freeze some berry puree for sauce for duck this fall.

I've given up on canning tomatoes and am opting for freezing the puree instead. I may can a few (we've already used the few I did earlier this year) for those occasions when I want the entire filet looking nice and pretty. I'm glad though to be more diligent about preserving this year and to have done small batches as summer progresses. I always tried to do these preserving marathons at the end of summer but was always too burnt-out to do much of anything.

I was tagged by Culinary Fool for the childhood food memory meme. I was very excited since it was the first time anyone had tagged me for a meme but I've not been very good about posting anything. Here goes, but I won't be tagging anyone else because it's already an old meme and I don't know anyone who hasn't already done it.

Venison- crisp, nearly snowy days in upstate NY, waiting all day for the sight of a deer. Unlike here in CA where the deer are so plentiful and stupid I could hit one with a hammer in my backyard if I wanted to. Watching the skinning and butchering (should have paid closer attention but oh well) and finally the tenderloin, sauteed in clarified butter. For a hippie kid consigned most of the time to rock-like whole wheat and I mean whole wheat, not a bit of white flour in it bread stuck together with homeground peanut butter (this is a real stick to your ribs sandwich) the taste of fresh venison was pretty close to heaven.

Our still- Careful readings of the Foxfire books produced enough dubious knowledge to construct a still to run all the spoiled dandelion wine through. 20 gallons of liquid distilled down to yes, an old fruit jar's worth of clear popskull. In many years of abuse I had never come across the like of it again. Thank God.

Tiger's Milk Bars- One of the things about growing up a hippie kid is you get deceived into thinking these things taste good. Every now and then in a natural foods store I'll buy one, feeling nostalgic. In a similarly named vein I loved Chick-o-Stick candies when I could find them as well as Rock & Roll Stage Planks. I fell in love with both of these because of their names and the connotations. What marketing genius decided chicken candy was the next big thing? Or that eating sticks of wood whose wrapper depicted teens dancing on the very candy you're eating was supposed to be appetizing. Well they suckered me, and the Chick-o-Sticks actually tasted pretty much like the inside of a Butterfinger's bar despite the chicken on the wrapper. Also Funny Faces drink mix, the wacky kid's Kool-Aid with their flavors like Olly Orange, Goofy Grape (a dead ringer for Napoleon) and Rootin' Tootin' Raspberry.

Chicken Paprikash- The first thing I cooked from the Joy of Cooking and still a favorite. Of the chores which had to be done, cooking seemed the least physical. I was a very lazy child, preferring to read above all things, to the point that when told to go outside to play I would bring a chair, sit outside and read. So when confronted with the choice of what chore to do I figured cooking was the easiest. Clearly all that reading didn't make me any smarter.

I found the chicken paprikash recipe and it seemed pretty exotic, with the paprika and sour cream, so I decided to give that a go. The Joy in that edition recommended serving it with spaetzle so I figured I had to make that too. The paprikash was great but the spaetzle congealed into an alarmingly large mass (we had a big household) since the directions didn't seem to mention anything about cooling them, or rinsing them or in general taking any steps to prevent it clumping together after boiling. Fortunately for my budding culinary ego the entire Hog Farm commune showed up completely unannounced and completely devoured the entire giant mess.

Most of my other childhood food memories are really adolescent memories. After leaving home and school at 13 to become a rock star a reasonable portion of my time in Manhattan was spent thinking about food and the best way to acquire it. Had I been possessed of a clearer head in those days I may have found my way into my profession much earlier. As it was my only restaurant experience until much later in life was at a club/restaurant on 17th and 10th Avenue. I don't remember what the place was called but I was about 12, maybe 13 and doing prep and trying to keep up with the demands of the Puerto Rican cook who hated every single customer who came in the door. He in particular seemed to loathe the people who ordered the ham steak since he would slide every ham steak in between his ass cheeks before slapping it on the griddle, vigorously cursing and telling anyone passing by exactly what morons all the customers were. I lasted there a little less than a week. I then got a job delivering flowers for a very nice fellow in the West Village and left not long after my realization that he paid me more when I wore my leather jacket.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Yes, the latest equipment casualty is the hood fan. Of course living in a small town means finding a 1 hp capacitor start motor anywhere is impossible. And most of the over night services don't deliver here on the weekends. So, if the store 3 hours away has one, I may be able to get it tomorrow morning.

Then comes the exorbitant install fee. I may just do it myself, except for two things. There is a youth soccer tournament in town which we know from experience books up nearly every available hotel room and fills up many of the restaurants. The bridge will also be partially closed this afternoon for its grand opening parade. So, just when the soccer moms are trying to get their kids into town, well you get the picture.

In other words my time is limited today, we'll be busy as hell and tomorrow I may be too exhausted to put in the motor and do the prep.

Just got word that the motor will be here tomorrow morning. You'll love what I'm going to do for today. Last night I pulled the whole fan assembly from the duct so we now have essentially a chimney, which should draw some. Today I'm going to put in a 20 inch household fan and run a loooooong extension cord up to the roof.

I'm scheduled to go out of town Sunday-Tues. We'll see how we stand after the next two days. And those two days are pretty much starting now at 9:07am because in addition to all the other crap I have to do I've got to get my long overdue tax paperwork to the accountant and he of course is just on the other side of the bridge so I need to do that before the festivities start. Then I've committed to appetizers for the bridge party and they're being picked up at noon And I have to send out our birthday greetings to our customers.

I'll let you know how our new smokehouse is going.

Lost In Translation

Tomorrow tea ceremony instruction starts again. I wrote about my previous attempt in Spiritualitea so we'll see how I fare this time around. Certainly part of the problem is just getting up early enough to make class. The other problems I've written about so I won't repeat.

Preparing for the class does bring up a perpetual dilemma for me which is reconciling the spiritual and material worlds. I know they are one and the same. Perhaps a better description would be the intellectual and the physical worlds. This is the dilemma described by Mishima, one of my favorite authors when I was a young man, in Sun & Steel. His will not be my solution but I certainly am attracted to Japanese culture as an embodiment of the physical manifesting itself creatively.

My problem comes when trying to translate the experience to my own sensibilities. I've been trying Japanese cuisine because it appeals on so many intellectual levels but viscerally I've yet to connect. There are textures and flavors at play which I just don't "get" on a taste level. I have your basic American palate, salty, sweet are my first choices, crunchy and creamy are preferred textures. Some Japanese food translates and some confounds. I suppose this is a good thing. But it is illustrative of the division in my life between the head and the body.

I really wish I were an integrated person. Unfortunately I really have no role model for that. The examples I see just seem one-dimensional. Perhaps I am just too resistant to the idea that mind and body can be one to see clearly. Perhaps at this point I'm just not making sense to anyone so I'll shut up.

We have been really busy, which is good. We seem to have reached another plateau in customer attraction. Our reputation has grown in some way that appears to have weeded out a lot of the annoying summer customers. With that change comes higher expectations and I've noticed the comment cards are getting more nit-picky. That's great, because it means people are searching for things to critique. Hopefully we'll be able to keep a balance between a reputation that invites discerning diners to find us and one which invites people to come to try to tear us apart.

The season is taking its toll on us and the staff. Some are hitting burn-out. I'm certainly a lot more tired. I know the GM has been dragging. Unfortunately this season too shall pass.

Pork Bellies

Some of you know we have animals. Two cats, two dogs. We have an equal distribution of male and female among all the species in the household and in each case the males are older than the females. At bedtime it's often the case that the male cat, male dog and I go into the bedroom to sleep while the female cat, female dog and the GM stay in the living room and watch movies. You know those young girls. They like to stay up late.

As animals of restaurant owners you can imagine the kind of treats which these animals get. Perhaps not quite as lavish as Pim's post about a lucky dog at the French Laundry, but good treats nonetheless. Speaking of the French Laundry I thoroughly enjoyed the article in last month's Gourmet about three Chinese chefs being taken to the Laundry.

The older male dog is an adoptee from the shelter. He's a lab/pit bull (I suppose I should really say Staffordshire Terrier if anyone from our insurance company is reading this) mix, very quiet, solidly built and low to the ground. After we had had him about a year we noticed he was limping more and more. A trip to the vet revealed he had arthritis, which was exacerbated by his gaining 25 pounds in the year. Immediate diet time. Both dogs went on a spartan regime of 1 cup of kibble per day, half in the morning, half in the evening and minimal (practically zero) treats. Sometimes I do feed them meat or scrap from work but when that happens they're supposed to get half of their allotment since the meat is denser than the kibble.

They've been on the diet quite a while and it's worked. At last weigh-in the old guy had lost nearly all the weight he had put on, the younger female was looking nice and thin and we even increased her ration slightly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah you say. Who cares about these damned dogs. Sorry, I was proud of the weight loss. And that the arthritis seems almost non-existent between his being thinner and an addition of buffered aspirin and glucosamine to the diet.

Anyway, when smoking the bacon I wonder how tantalizing the smell must be for them and as a kindness to them (and to protect the bacon) I've kept them in the house while smoking out in the yard. I imagine they have dreams that evening of pork chops, sausage and bacon like in the cartoons. I can almost see the thought balloon above their heads.

As summer has progressed and I've become more harried, I've had to leave the smoker unattended and go to work, coming back from time to time to add more chips. I didn't want to take the smoker to work because, well it makes smoke, I have no room under the hood for it and I didn't want to smoke my neighbors out. OK, maybe a few of them.

I've also had to have the dogs in the yard unattended while the smoker is going because I didn't want them locked up in the house all day. I keep an eye on them while I'm still in the house and after an initial period of curiosity and admonishments to keep away, they find their shady spot and settle down.

Yesterday I had a large batch of bacon and andouille gently smoking away, the GM was working on a large stained glass project and it was a beautiful sunny day. We had a wedding to attend and I needed to drop the smoked goods back at work some time before service was over. We also wanted to see Charlie & The Chocolate Factory later that evening.

At the wedding we had a long conversation with one of our very good customers and stayed a bit longer than we had planned. I know you can see where this is going. Indeed, when we got home the smoker door was open and two large pieces of bacon were missing. And our dog's bellies, particularly the male one's, were grossly swollen and they were drinking water by the gallon.

Yes, my two Augustus Gloops had raided the smoker. The poor old guy is fatter than ever. I'm sure it's temporary but he does look like a small pig right now. Most of the bacon and all of the andouille was untouched. I'm bringing the smoker to work and will figure out a way to deal with it.

We did see Charlie, which I thoroughly enjoyed and when we came home watched Off The Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's which was so sad. It's a documentary of the final two weeks of Chasen's in LA, a Hollywood institution fallen on hard times. What was so sad was not the restaurant closing, or even the staff's dedication to the job and their identification with the restaurant although that was quite touching. What was sad was that their dedication and identification was primarily to and with the celebrities they had served and who had abandoned them only to turn out in force when they heard the place was closing. As the bartender put it "When you're sick, nobody calls you, but everyone comes to the funeral."

For those who've asked, I did order a range. A Montague Grizzly should be making its way to me in a few weeks. Now I need to find a home for this broken down Wolf. I have a friend who may need it for parts. Of course by the time I get the range summer will be close to being over and I'll have little need for it. No, regardless, it was time to get something new. After I described the shape it was in to someone at the wedding the GM said "I had no idea how bad it was." Just as she tries to sometimes keep the ugly truth about the bank balance from me, I try to spare her the gory details of the equipment.