We're Moving

The Proximal Kitchen blog is in the process of moving to our new semi-permanent home at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat - please visit us there!

(I will try to maintain this site as I transition the content over, but will inevitably fall behind...)

WTF is up with 'Man v. Food'?



Truth In Advertising: The Knucklehead Challenge
(photo credit: http://www.travelchannel.com/)

 Lying around in full couch tuber regalia, following the heartbreakingly tantalizing 49er game, I had the misfortune to channel-surf through the treacherous waters of Monday Night Television, only to find my mental Minnow festooned around the awful coral head of Adam Richman's Man v. Food. As if driving past an overturned car in a highway ditch, or probing a sore inside a cheek, I sat there, glassy-eyed and I must suppose mildly brain-damaged, for perhaps 15 minutes (an amount of time that, at roughly 0.00003% of my expected life span, strikes me as too long by at least half), transfixed, seemingly incapable of averting attention from either Mr. Richman's ham-handed narrative or the grotesque display of gustatory abuse which forms the dubious premise of the show.



This particular car-wreck happened to be an episode in Philadelphia, in which the host must face down a single, titanic cheese steak from Tony Luke's, the sandwich in question (although to call it that is surely to insult the Earl's good memory and proper sandwiches everywhere) weighing in at an appalling 5lbs in total, and constructed from 3lbs of meat, 1lb of American cheese, and a half-pound of fried onions, all stuffed into a 20"-long sub roll, which I suppose we're meant to infer weighs another half-pound. This is not the foul pile of landfill masquerading as food and pictured above-right; that unfortunate distinction belongs to Parker's Hot Dogs in Sacramento, home to yet another 5lbs of televised obscenity at the hands of said Mr Richman. But even to debate the particulars is to offer the offer the show far more quarter than it deserves; the what he eats is irrelevant in comparison to the why.


I've been puzzling over what bothers me so much about the show for the last couple of days: Notwithstanding the puppy-dog eyes and smarmy winks, Mr Richman himself seems inoffensive enough, and arguably knows what he's doing, both in front of the camera (he studied drama at Yale) and in the kitchen (he claims to be a trained sushi chef); nor is it the quality of the food itself, as he generally chooses destinations of some culinary merit (I have nothing against his roadie-food strong suit of cheese steaks, chili dogs, and burgers), or at least so they seem prior to his blasphemous display of eating whatever it is that they make. No, I think the problem lies with the premise of the show itself, the very idea that eating - to me, an inherently pleasurable, and literally life-giving, enterprise - should be reduced to a contest between the eater and the stuff on the plate


The great writer and patron saint of food bloggers everywhere, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, once said that the "enjoyment of the art of living, as well as of eating... are, or can be, synonymous." Man v. Food is predicated on nothing less than the complete moral inversion of Ms Fisher's guiding principle - the title itself proclaims mouth and fork to be enemies - and I'm guessing that that is what chafes me like a dull razor. Food is (or at least should be) enormously enjoyable and, served in proportion to its purpose, satisfies one of the most basic conditions for life; the absence of food implies hunger and death (the millions so afflicted are a tragedy of global proportions and a blight on our collective social conscience), and food in excess implies death by means other than hunger, but death just the same (we are a nation of over-eaters, on this the data is incontrovertible). And yet here is a major television production that exists solely by virtue of our ability to transform good food into something dangerously unpleasant. Worse still, this transformation is effected by the application of quantity: What would otherwise be nourishing, or at least tasty (I'm not sure if even the finest chili dog could ever be called 'nourishing'), becomes a threat, simply because of the sheer size of the serving.


I know, I get it, it's all just entertainment, you don't need to post a reply with a litany of even-worse sins; we can just stipulate that competitive eating likely fails to represent one of the clear and present dangers to civilization as we know it, and that there are any number of significantly more disturbing examples of televised programming (certainly, The Swan and anything even peripherally related to Toddlers and Tiaras would rank higher on both lists). But its relative innocuousness in relation to graver threats in no way obviates my argument with Mr Richman and his self-destructive quest for ad revenue: The fact remains that the Travel Channel, by aggrandizing gluttony for a nation of the epidemically obese, sells our collective good sense of what food can and should be right down the river.

Should I buy local wines at Costco?

Outstanding local Pinot Noir at big discounts

We've talked about Costco before, a conversation in which I argued that monolithic, small-business-destroying category killers still have a place in the kitchen, even proximal kitchens, if for no other reason than because saving money on staples allows us to allocate a larger share of our budget to the locally produced goods of premium quality (and, let's be honest, at a premium price), that we like to cook with. But what about buying locally produced goods at the Big C?

If the identical local product is offered at the farmer's market, the local health food store, and Costco, and I choose to buy more of it, at a lower price, at Costco, should I pat myself on the back for being such a savvy, sustainably-minded locavore and supporting the production of good, local food, all while saving my family money? Or, should I offer myself up as whipping boy du jour for the inevitable and copious tongue lashing and politically correct cacophony emanating from the barbarous hordes of checkbook liberals and self-described apostles of some quasi Pollan-esque faith lying in wait?

Let's consider the case of wine: The wine industry is Sonoma County's largest single employer (directly accounting for some 19% of all jobs county-wide, excluding all the ancillary but clearly material employment in restaurants, hotels and gift shops generated by wine country tourism), and total wine-related revenues account for 40% of the County's entire contribution to the nation's GDP. So one thing is clear: Where and how I spend my wine dollars matters to Sonoma County.

Or does it? If I buy Bordeaux in-bond from a broker in London, then you might argue that I'm not doing much to support artisanal winemakers (not that that should stop anyone from drinking the occasional Bordeaux, mind you - the road to deprivation is littered with the carcasses of overzealous locavores, and I, for one, have little interest in dinner-table asceticism), but it's far from obvious that I'm doing harm to our local economy. Suppose I take the total number of dollars that I would have otherwise spent on Sonoma County wines, at tasting rooms and specialty retailers in my neighborhood, and instead spend those same dollars, on the same wines, at Costco? Who wins, who loses, how much is at stake, and should I care? The answer is not as obvious as you may think. (Unfortunately, this post is about to run quite a bit longer than usual; call it the curse of the two-handed economist. I promise to get back on-thread tomorrow.)




Costco, the nation's largest (although I'm never sure if this statistic refers to volume, revenue, or both) wine retailer, is the elephant in the cellar, and their fine-wine pricing can be very competitive, provided you can separate wheat from chaff, because their selection, and the price/quality ratio thereof, can be inconsistent; the prices are never bad, but some of the wines are distinctly mediocre, and at prices no better than you'll find in about 5 minutes on Google. That being said, here is what I picked up the other day on a completely random visit, 3 outstanding examples of Sonoma County Pinot Noir (out of at least a half-dozen options), each from a premium local winery that I could easily drive to, and collectively a representative sample of just what is at stake, from my wallet's perspective:

1. 2006 Keller Estate "La Cruz Vineyard" Pinot Noir. Costco price: $18.49. Winery: $44.00 (current release, 2007). 
2. 2007 J Vineyards "Russian River Valley" Pinot Noir: Costco price: $24.99. Winery: $35.00 (identical bottling).
3. 2008 Pellegrini Family Vineyards "Olivet Lane" Pinot Noir. Costco: $19.99. Winery: $35.00 (identical bottling)

Thus confronting the data, we find an average savings of 43% of retail, or better than $200/case, and moves a few of what I would otherwise consider "luxury" wines back into the "maybe not for every day, but plausible and guilt-free" category. Still, while total dollars spent remain constant, who gets those dollars does not. I'm a trained economist with a weak suit in micro, so I enlisted the help of former classmate and top-shelf game theory wonk, Mad Dog, and we came up with the following economic implications:

• My wallet, and my palate (although perhaps not my liver) win, because I get to consume more and/or better wine for the same outlay.
• The County coffers are indifferent, because my total taxable consumption, as well as overall wine industry receipts, remain constant. 
• The wineries are a slightly trickier story: Definitively, some of what they would have made now goes to Costco, and their gross margins suffer; their cost-of-goods-sold likely falls (e.g., less labor, no tasting room lease), but I think it's safe to assume that, on balance, winery profits decline on a per-bottle basis. But there is a price and volume story here: It's entirely possible that the winery sells so many additional bottles, by virtue of the Costco distribution channel, that the absolute level of winery profits actually increases.
• Even if total profits in the economy may remain unchanged (it's hard to see them falling, or else why would the business model persist), the reallocation of profits from the winery to Costco would shift some income out of the County, inasmuch as winery capital is locally owned and Costco capital is not. Still, that does not necessarily imply a net loss to the County, because of gains from trade: If Sonoma has a competitive advantage in making wine but not in selling it, then we, collectively, will be better off if we "pay" Costco to sell it for us, thereby reallocating our resources to more productive ends. (This is, essentially, the "gains from trade" argument. Don't let the "anti-globalization" whack jobs bamboozle you, they have no idea what they're talking about, a world without trade would be a far darker, colder, and generally poorer place for nearly everyone.)
• Employment at Costco gains, but at the expense of jobs at the wineries. I'd rather work in a tasting room than Costco, but that's a purely personal preference, it's not my place to say which job is "better". I do, however, think it's fair to assume that Costco labor is more productive (in the economic sense, i.e., it takes less person-hours to sell the same dollar volume of wine), which would imply fewer total jobs for the County. However, one has to be careful, because that does not necessarily imply a net loss of income, but rather a reallocation of the share of total profits away from labor and toward capital, which is unequivocally bad only if you're still reading that threadbare copy of Marx from your freshman year.
• All the preceding is an inherently partial equilibrium analysis, and there may be more complex, general equilibrium considerations, particularly along the temporal dimension: It is possible, for instance, that the winery will eventually go out of business by selling via Costco, even if doing so maximizes its short-run profitability (or minimizes its losses, as the case may be). The Keller wine is a case in point: I don't know what Keller's cost structure looks like, but I seriously doubt they are making money by selling a $44 Pinot for well under $19 (remember, Costco has a margin in there too, of that we can be certain). More likely, they lose less, which is a perfectly rational thing to do, but hardly a sustainable business model. It is at least possible, therefore, that I will contribute to the demise of the local wine industry by consuming its wines exclusively through Costco. (General equilibrium analysis can get very complicated: One could argue that the failure of an otherwise unsustainable business leads to a more overall economic efficiency in the long-run, in which employment, consumption, and tax receipts could all actually be higher in the absence of the business than they were in its presence.)
• You could argue that one should "shop locally" in order to "support" the local economy, which is all fine and dandy, but starts to get awfully close to subsidization, if not outright charity. While I've got no axe to grind with charity, it's not at all clear what that should have to do with my consumption decision: If I want to subsidize a winery, I don't need to overpay for their wine, I should just write them a check and save everyone the trouble. And if you don't think that makes much sense, then you probably didn't want to subsidize them in the first place.

For all that, I think the lesson is pretty simple: First and foremost, you should buy the wine you like to drink at the best possible price. If knowing the wine is local confers other, non-pecuniary benefits (e.g., it makes you feel better about yourself), then by all means, buy locally - heck, I like our wines, and purchasing them makes me feel good. Similarly, if tasting rooms have value to you - as they do for me - then, again, buy some wine directly from the winery. If you can only afford to drink local wines from Costco, don't sweat it - you may be doing more for the local economy than you think. Above all, don't kid yourself: The wine aisle at Costo is neither good, nor bad, it simply is, and where and how you spend your wine dollars is nobody else's business but yours.

We're Moving!

Dear friends, family, fans, and followers:

The Proximal Kitchen blog is in the process of migrating to its new home at the Press Democrat.

I am going to try to keep the original site populated but will inevitably fall behind, particularly during the transition period.

Also, although new material will be going up all the time, you may notice some or even all of my old posts reappear in slightly modified versions on the new site, until the new site is fully populated with my old archived stuff.

Thanks again for your support, and come check out our new home!

- Rorschach

Alexander Valley Chardonnay Calls BS on ABC (Part 1 of 2)

Preparing to enter AV Chard Country from the 101 North

Google "ABC Anything But Chardonnay" and you'll get something on the order of 19,000 hits in the first few tenths of a second. The oldest reference I could be bothered to find dates to 1995 in a column by Frank Prial for the NY Times, but as recently as 2008, someone actually took the time to write a book with the same dated and misguided tag line, so we know that wine writers, at least, have had the ABC bug up their collective keester for the better part of 15 years now. A cursory review of the literature, such as it is, will tell you that the ABC crowd (or "movement", as they are wont to call themselves, if they're feeling more plucky and self-important than usual) represents a backlash against the hegemony of that ubiquitous style of California Chardonnay that assaults the palate in a blitzkrieg of sweet butter, vanilla, and sodden oak.

The ABCers have a valid argument, to a point: Too many California Chardonnays taste too much alike, lacking both individuality and varietal character. I have read, but cannot confirm, a plausible hypothesis that the tsunami of monolithic and uniform Chards washing over the marketplace some years ago was the industry's natural reaction to Kendall-Jackson selling of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of cases of wine in the 80s and 90s that were made in that particular style. Whatever the roots of its family tree, this style - the oenological equivalent of Marshmallow Fluff  - reaches its dubious apogee in Rombauer's eponymous bottling, which I used to care for, truth be told, but - both to its winemaker's credit and ultimate failing - now strikes me as inscrutably cloaked in wood and stupefyingly uniform, regardless of the vintage, with an inescapable impression of chewing on a handful of buttered-popcorn Jelly Bellys while licking an oak tree. Maybe that's harsh, and a bit unfair to the Rombauers (whom, unlike downmarket Marshmallow Wines that spend the tender days of their vinous youth literally soaking in a bath of oak chips, at least produce a product of quality), but one thing the ABC folks got right is that too many Chards taste indistinguishably alike in a not-very-Chardonnay sort of way, and where's the fun in that?.

What they got wrong, however, is that Chardonnay is somehow ill-suited to oak barrels and malolactic fermentation, and that Americans (or anybody else, for that matter) would stop drinking Chardonnay: In the first instance, not only do the undisputed heavyweight champions of the Chardonnay world - counting amongst their ranks the who's-your-daddy of all Chardonnays and possibly all dry white wines, Le Montrachet; some of the world's finest Champagnes (any Tete de Cuvee designated blanc de blanc,  including such luminaries as Salon, Taittinger, and Krug's mythical Clos de Mesnil); and New World "cult" offerings (such as those from John Kongsgaard and Helen Turley) make extensive use of new oak and ML fermentation; and as to the second claim, it's just plain false. To wit, Americans guzzle 5-10% more California Chardonnay each year than the one previous, and have done so since that very same NYT article appeared in 1995.

So what gives? A winemaker friend of mine once told me, "Americans talk dry, but drink sweet". He was talking about the oaky, extracted, blue-black ink wells of Cabernet Sauvignon that continue to define most of our neighboring Napa Valley, but I think the song remains the same further west as well, here in the Land of Chard: We, the American palate, like to fill our glasses with big, rich, succulent, gobs of toasty, creamy Chardonnay unctuousness. Decry it all you want, but the sales statistics don't lie, and I, for one, am proud to hold my hand up as one of the many whom they represent, provided the wines in question reflect their varietal character and a retain a sense of balance between fruit and wood, richness and structure, winemaker and vine because, at the end of the day, these are flirty, sexy, flattering wines, and a well-made, sexpot of a Chard is the sort of wine that will get you lucky.

I may live in the Russian River Valley - indisputably, home court to any number of world-class Chardonnay winemakers - but I'm here to tell you that, if well-made, sexpot Chards are your thing, then you need to get your Chard-guzzling booty over to the Alexander Valley, and stat. You won't find nearly the selection (the simple math of fewer wineries making less wine), you'll drive a few extra miles (it's a sparsely populated region), but for quality, value, and, especially, stylistic consistency, nobody is producing better hooch than the cellar rats of the Alexander Valley.

If you can picture RRV Chardonnays as the archetypal beauty queens of today's cinema (think Nicole Kidman or Michelle Pfeiffer), and Sonoma Coast as the edgy up-and-comers (say, Emma Watson or Kristen Stewart) of tomorrow's, then AV Chards would have to be the voluptuous blonde bombshells of the classic silver screen, all Mae West, Marylin Monroe, and Betty Davis, with their graceful curves, inimitable class, and breathy sex appeal. What I find so special about these wines is that, much like these actresses, they each maintain a fierce individuality, one might even say attitude, while at the same time sharing an unmistakable common thread, a sense of place or terroir that even the most die-hard ABCer would begrudgingly respect, that sets them apart from their more westerly cousins.

All of which lines me up for The World's Best Unpaid Job: I'm going to spend a few days next week soaking up the postcard-perfect scenery of the Alexander Valley, bar-hopping the tasting rooms of 128 (yes, I'll spit), and talking to the men and women that grow these special wines. Check back in for Part 2, coming soon to a theater near you.

Just Three: Tomatoes, Chilis, and Parsley

Tomatoes, dressed with tomatoes, and not much else

If you've spent any time at all with me, you already know I talk too much, so today's project is to keep it tight. Tight lips, tight keys, tight dish. Put up or shut up. Make it count. Insert cliche here, but make sure it all nets down to a tight little post.

As I've already confessed, I'm a pretty lousy gardener, but - as with most things in life - luck trumps skill, and Lady Luck planted a big, wet snog on my tomatoes this year. Seriously, to judge by my Green Zebras, she might even have used some tongue. If you're lucky enough to live here in the 707, you already understand that tomato season can acquire near-mystical qualities, spoken about in the same hushed tones normally reserved for yield, brix, and how badly hosed the wine industry may or may not be in the latest rags, so I take this bit of fortune seriously: What can I do to flatter all this sexy fruit?

Yesterday's project: Construct a complete tomato dish that even my kids would eat, using only three ingredients, all of which we grew. To hand: Tomatoes (Lemon Boys, not technically an heirloom, with their lower acidity and mildly tangy sweetness; and the aforementioned Green Zebras, their distinctive, racy zing a great match to the Lemons), chili peppers (Serranos, a great go-to chili for heat and flavor, and particularly good raw), and a bed full of herbs (a whole Simon-Garfunkle reunion of parsley, sage, rosemary, and culinary thyme, alongside basil, lavender, and chives), from which - basis the chili - I could have plucked basil, but thought the flat-leaf parsley a bit more interesting and marginally less obvious pairing. The clever if likely unoriginal (296,000 Google hits in 0.21 seconds) insight: A vinaigrette, described (as far as I know) by none other than Thomas Keller as "the perfect sauce", consists of nothing but acid, oil, and seasoning. So, why not use tomatoes as the acid, for a tomato vinaigrette? (A truly excellent discussion of vinaigrettes, citing all my favorite cook-book sources and getting it right, can be found here.)

Tomato Salad with Green Zebra Vinaigrette and a Fresh Parsley and Chili Garnish

The same tomato-tomato salad, but fast-plating version

1. Concasse a few Green Zebra tomatoes, maybe 1/2 to 1 tomato per salad (click the Foodista widget below for an explanation of the proper concasse technique) and, while slightly annoying, can be done in bulk, stored, and used later in any number of preparations). Seed, rib, and finely mince a fresh Serrano (or other red, say Arbol) chili pepper. Pick a handful of small leaves off the parsley.
Tomato Concasse
2. Push the tomatoes concasse through sieve or ricer or whatever to get a smooth texture and ensure that all the seeds have been removed (tomato seeds tend to add an unpleasantly bitter flavor and odd texture to smooth sauces) into a small mixing bowl. Season with a dash of white wine vinegar, finely milled salt and fresh white pepper (you don't want black flecks in it).
3. Whisk olive oil into the tomato base, in roughly equal proportions (a typical vinaigrette requires a 3:1 ratio of oil to acid, which would be fine here as well, but I prefer to let the tomato remain center stage, and its textural weight seemed to hold the oil just fine in this ratio), and adjust seasoning as required.
4. Spoon the dressing to cover the bottom of shallow pasta bowls.
5. Cut the Lemon Boys, remaining Green Zebras, and/or whatever other tomatoes you have to hand (Tangerines, Cherokee Purples, and Early Girls would all look and taste phenomenal; you can't go wrong, just try to balance the zesty acidity and color of the greens with sweeter, and yellow-red colored, cousins) into roughly uniform medium-dice. 
6. Sprinkle a little of the minced chili on the sauce and judiciously place the tomato cubes (skin-side up or not, depending on their look) on the sauce, adding a leaf of parsley to the top of a few of the not-green cubes.

As a speedier alternative, simply give the parsley and the whole tomatoes a rough chop, toss the tomatoes with the sauce, and then sprinkle the chili and parsley over the top.

Just Three: Polenta, Eggs, Mushrooms

Which came first, the bottle or the plate? Chicken/egg, TV/commercial, food/wine, show-me-yours/I'll-show-you-mine. In our house, such questions carry weight, a seriousness you might consider more properly reserved for electrocardiograms, or matters of national security. The thing of it is, in wine country, at least in the fractional hectare of the 707 area code delineated by my family's split-rail fence line, the debate over the hierarchical structure of food vis-a-vis wine matters, not least because you'll be neither fed nor drunk until we've settled the matter. And I seriously doubt that I'm alone in building menus around bottles at least as often as choosing wines to match food.

Context, perhaps, is warranted: My wife is on what I can like to call a Chard bender, and the wine racks where we keep our whites look a bit like the maples of her youth (she's a transplanted Right Coaster) come the first snows of November: You know they were full, you can quite clearly remember seeing them shot through with color and promise (although you can't quite place the date), but all that stands in front of you today is dry wood and the lonely spaces between. This is, to be clear, an issue of frequency, not of quantity, because my wife doesn't really drink all that much. However,  and here again I count my blessings, she is happy enough to drink small quantities frequently, thereby encouraging both my regular raids on the family cellar and my predilection for pigging, but also - when the Chard bender is in full effect - leading to Saharan absences of the one white varietal that will acceptably whet her cute little whistle.

Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0)

Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, Cheese and Cheese

I think all cooks, from the diligent amateur to the dedicated professional, have at least a little bit of OCD in their bones. Consider the working cook: Why else would someone repeatedly construct the same thing, in precisely the same manner, under extreme and unrelenting pressure, with the specific aim, not only of doing it well, but of doing it the same way, every time that knife meets board or a pan clangs down on a flat-top? Not that that's a bad thing. To the contrary, that trendy new place you've been gagging to try, the innumerable souls saved by much-needed hangover brunches, and every great sushi bar all depend on it. Can you imagine playing Russian roulette with the crust at your favorite pizza joint, the temperature of your steak, or the hardness of your egg yolk? Take away the obsessive cooks, and we'd all be eating Swanson's Hungry Man or instant ramen with a plastic spork.

All of which is a roundabout way of rationalizing my third installment of Why I'm Trying To Make Perfect Mac-n-Cheese. My wife will testify to the mountains of grated cheese, the errors like some pagan fortune engraved in burnt milk at the bottom of a sauce pot, the sweet, nutty smell of flour frying in butter that filled the house as I worked my way through v1.0 (a white version, based on Italian cheeses), on into v2.0 (a cheddar-like orange version, with breadcrumb topping), and - finally - to where I am today, Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0), wherein I learned that, unlike Crisco or tickles, if some is good, then more is better.

Just Three (Leftovers): Rib Eye, Mac-n-Cheese, Onion Marmalade

Stove-top Rib Eye, basted in Butter and Fresh Herbs

A clear violation of my self-imposed rules of "Just Three", using leftover like this, but the principal advantage of blogging, and self-imposed rules generally, lies rooted in the simple fact that one may ultimately do whatever one wishes. Of course, your readers may kvetch, but that's part of the game.

I could drape my transgression with pearls of wisdom and wit, or I could lean on my earlier arguments (e.g., here, and here) that leftovers play a fundamental role in the kitchen - the avoidance of waste, the efficiency of leveraging time already invested, and, above all, the enforced discipline of making something new out of something old - but the simple truth is that I cooked for company last Saturday night and one of the invited couples was a late-day no-show. Ergo, come Sunday, I had a spare steak (a rib eye from Painted Hills, who really do things right, by the way) and several cubic meters of seriously high-density Mac-n-Cheese (recipe forthcoming from the thread started here). I was also pretty sure I had some more of my spiced onion marmalade somewhere on an upper deck, and a plan came together, a plan with the elusive trifecta of zero prep, zero shopping, and a single pan.

Just Three: Strawberries, Tomatoes, Balsamic

Cruising the Tuesday market with my youngest daughter, under strict orders to return home with the makings of a salad but little other guidance, we walked by Lou Preston's stall, and were stopped in our tracks by Lou's strawberries. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of strawberries, finding them a poster child for the over-engineered style of supermarket fruit: Big, firm, nice to look at, but overly dry and hard to the tooth and utterly devoid of taste. On Tuesday, however, with the oblique angle of the late day sun glancing off their perfectly ripe, almost impossibly red skins, Lou's teeming baskets of rubescent little berries were like traffic lights stopping our egress down the aisle.

Farmer's markets are all about quality over quantity, and the rest of the stall was a case study: Small, compact, efficient, and I wanted to eat everything in it, the rainbow-in-a-box of plump tomatoes, the short and squat sweet peppers and the long, lean, twisting, and vaguely sinister fiery ones, the progressive shading of green into crimson and yellow tracking the late-season maturation of the fruit. On the corner of the table, a wicker basket full of crusty sourdough loaves, labeled "country white", but, to my taste, more closely resembling a dense, chewy version of the classic French miches, with its distinctive tang of rye flour. (Etymological specificity notwithstanding, I took a loaf home. It barely lasted through breakfast the next day.)

Anyway, back to dinner, and our latest installment of "Just Three". Armed with strawberries of such high sugar content, I wanted something with a bit of bite to provide ballast to the dish: Green Zebra heirlooom tomatoes (the little guys in the upper left corner of the picture), with higher acidity and more tartness than most of their heirloom cousins, would balance the flavor profile and a splash of color at the same time. Now, strawberries and tomatoes may or may not sound odd to you - they are both fruits, after all - but the what makes the match particularly interesting is that the tomato is a berry, while the strawberry is not: A botanist will insist that most of what we instinctively classify as berries (with the notable exception of the blueberry, which is a true berry) actually comprises a peripherally related cousin-class called aggregate fruit (many little fruits grouped together), while tomatoes (and bananas, which always surprises me)with their fruit, comprised of flesh from a single ovary, are true berries. Lest you think that's the end of the story, the strawberry is, in fact, neither berry nor aggregate fruit, but is instead an accessory fruit, in which the edible portion has not been produced from the ovary (apparently, the little bunches of seeds are the true "fruit" of the strawberry, but I don't really get that).

Just Three: Cornmeal, Ham, & Cheese.

Polenta with Crispy Serrano Ham and Melted Raclette

I'm going to try something new and sort of gimmicky: I'm going to see how many different dishes I can make, using just three ingredients.

The idea came in response to the frustration of cooking for my kids. Don't get me wrong: I love, love, to cook for, and especially with, my children; I find great joy in bringing children into the kitchen and watching them learn to cook, and I believe strongly that it is every parent's responsibility to help their littles learn what real food tastes like, what tastes good to them, what doesn't, and why. Nevertheless, when the homework hasn't been finished, the bath is getting cold, and our routine is less off-track than it is careening-off-the-rails into some life-imitating-art version of Wiley Coyote piloting a locomotive into a swan dive off the rim of the Grand Canyon, I will readily confess that I find preparing three separate versions of a dish, just to accommodate this week's litany of idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, exceedingly trying.

I recently found myself staring down the barrel of yet another Monday night meal (Mondays are always the hardest, for me, maybe it's the hangover from cooking fun stuff straight from the market all weekend; or perhaps the kids are grumpy with the first homework assignments of the week; and of course, there are lunches to be made; the TV is crap; all in all, I suppose it's mainly that the whole family has lived in some semblance of Party Mode since we all got let out on Friday) and figured, why not put the question back to them? I did a quick inventory of the cupboards and laid out the simplest (for me) and most likely to succeed (for them) options: The ubiquitous pasta-with-butter; some leftover mac-n-cheese; a breakfast burrito; polenta; or, barring one of the above, go get yourself a bowl and a spoon and have some cold cereal, because I'm done. The polenta took it by several lengths, leaving me with the sort of problem I like best: How should I transform a simple ingredient into a main-course dish with a minimum of fuss?

Piles of Possibility / Farming on Freeways

Farmers Zoey & Jay (photo credit www.exploratorium.edu)

Walking by a cracked and decrepit freeway on-ramp - reclaimed from the morning commute and relegated to the urban wasteland by the Loma Prieta earthquake - two San Franciscans, thinking more like old-school farmers than new-age city dwellers, look at the cracked blacktop bleeding with weeds and saw, incredibly, an orchard. And the topsoil, so manifestly absent in the windswept concrete col, in which these imagined trees would sink their roots? Heaps of rotting compost, strap-compressed cardboard, leftovers from nearby markets, and landscaper clippings - organic detritus, otherwise sentenced to serve out a capital term as landfill, from across the City.

The best bit of the slide show, the whole point really, is the lens through which the farmers see this hard, raw wasteland: Where you and I see trash and blight, they see "piles of possibility". Making soil out garbage. Growing fruit trees on a freeway. Why? Because these farmers believe that everyone - even those of us that, by choice or happenstance, live in high-density, high-land-cost forests of concrete, glass, and steel - should be able to grow at least some of the food that they eat, and that vacant space, by the miraculous fact of its mere presence, offers an invitation (an obligation?) to do so.

The punchline, o at least rwhat resonates most deeply about the project for me, is its preordained impermanence: This orchard can only ever be transitory, because, as we all know, the Bay Area's great armies of cars march through their morning commute with all the inevitability of a glacial ice floe. The trees will be uprooted; the soil scraped away; the pavement once again returned to its urban birthright as. This is not speculation: The City will take the land back - there is no question about this - and yet (or perhaps because) the farmers persist, and until such time as the rubber of our tires replace the soles of their work boots, people will, of all things, eat off that land. I don't know about you, but I think that is just uber cool.

The slide show will eat up about 5 minutes out of your life - which, truth be told, at about 4 minutes, 30 seconds longer than I typically allot to any given byte of digital cellulose, is quite a bit. But it will repay your investment every time you pass a dusty vacant lot, or wonder what to do with your terrace, your windowsill, or that weedy scrap of long-forgotten dirt in the far left corner of your yard.

The Intransitivity of Taste: Pickles, Cheese, and Chocolate

Which of these does not belong?

Pickles, cheese, and chocolate: Three ingredients, three possible pair-wise combinations, two really good and interesting tastes, and one impossibly disgusting mouthful of gag reflex (no prizes for guessing which). If I like chocolate with cheese, and I like cheese with pickles, why don't I like chocolate with pickles? I mean, other than the painfully obvious - in point of fact, it tastes even worse than it sounds - why the apparent lack of transitivity?

What Would Mae West Say? A Tomato Manifesto.

Lemon Boys and Pesto, on Cranberry-Semolina Sourdough

I thought it was Mae West who said something about good sex being great, and bad sex being pretty good too, but I can't find the attribution, so maybe I'm wrong; apparently of similar mind, I did come across one Jimmy Williams (and again, I'm honestly not sure which, but my money is on the old Red Sox manager), who said, “Sex is like money, golf and beer - even when it's bad, it's good.” Whatever the case, I'm going to argue that sex is a really lousy analogy for tomatoes.

Because the thing about tomatoes is this: There is perfect, there is nearly perfect, and there is wholly unacceptable. "Middle ground" is a term better reserved for debating the relative merits of cooking beef to rare vs. medium-rare specifications, or figuring out how to get your tween daughter to clean her room. No, with tomatoes, the territory between "good" and "bad" is more like a DMZ: It's right there in front of you, it's clear and well-defined, and if you spend too much time inside it, you're likely to end up shot. Or, if we're talking about the kitchen, with a mouthful of mealy, watery, flavorless red mush of only the most casual, and likely offensive, relation to what your palate had greedily anticipated. Come to think, maybe that's the better analogy: If your favorite, wisened grandparent, full of love, spark, and pithy bits of folksy wisdom, were a succulent, ripe heirloom cultivar, then the drab supermarket tomato, mass-farmed for the ketchup-and-shitty-pasta-sauce market, picked sufficiently close to granite-like hardness that it will endure hundreds (if not thousands) of miles of open roads, piled en masse atop eighteen-wheeler bin trucks, without suffering so much as a blemish, is a bit like that woebegone uncle or black sheep cousin in a Chevy Chase family vacation movie (or, perhaps, from your own Thanksgiving table). You know that if you actually went out and ran a DNA test, it would confirm that he does in fact share genetic code with the rest of the family, but no empirical evidence, physical nor behavioral, exists to support that conclusion.

Meat, Braise, Love II: Chocolate & Lamb. Seriously.

Braised lamb w/ bitter chocolate-rosemary sauce, preserved Meyer lemons, and minty gremolata

Sometimes, despite all the planning, the search through my personal Library-of-Congress of cookbooks, the endless page views on epicurious.com, and all that frigging prep work, I'll find out the hard way that it's what I don't have, what I didn't plan for, what I can't do, that ultimately determines my success or failure in the kitchen. Maybe it's a forgotten ingredient, poor time management, or, most frequently, just a simple mistake, something I've done with ease dozens of times, but that, in the presence of friends/kids/wives/copious wine/whatever, suddenly becomes daunting.

Typically, the requisite discipline will be imposed by some highly technical flaw, like spacing out on the kitchen timer when I'm roasting nuts (great tip I read somewhere but can't place: always put a nut on your cutting board as a reminder whenever you're roasting nuts) - a clear indication if ever there was one of too much fun, too much wine, and too little focus on the task at hand. Typically, but not always; sometimes, discipline is imposed because, for a lack of a better turn of phrase, stuff happens.

To wit, I was recently tooling around the market in anticipation of a visit by our dear friends, the C's, and the dinner I had volunteered for. I wanted most of the cooking to be done in advance, the weather was still unseasonably cool, I had a great bottle of Syrah floating around, and I had just been chatting with Deborah Owen of the Owen Family Farm about their humane and healthy ranching - in short, we were having braised lamb. In keeping with our MO here in the Proximal Kitchen, my intent was to keep it as simple as possible, to highlight the quality of the ingredients in a simple, well executed dish, so I decided on a classic preparation: Shoulder of lamb, in a braise of Syrah wine with lots of garlic and rosemary from our own garden. The catch? Ms C does not, can not, eat garlic. But of course, I wouldn't find this out until all the marketing was done and the meat was literally searing in the pan, mere minutes before the garlic cloves were destined to meet their flaming cast iron maker.

Cooking With Friends

Cold Sandwiches of Pork Loin Sous-Vide, Onion-Cranberry Marmalade, and Pt Reyes Original Blue

Cooking for friends and cooking with friends can both be immensely rewarding, but they require different rules, different ways of thinking about food, different ways of physically traversing the kitchen floor, of juggling burners, pots, and knives, because - no matter how social the event and how much enthusiasm (and aptitude) for minor prep, plating and service the guests show up with - cooking for company remains an inherently solitary undertaking, while cooking with company is as much about social interaction as it is about food. Partly, this is a function of logistics (unless you're talking about a pot luck or whatever, but a pot luck is not cooking with anybody), but not principally. True collaboration, my home turf, with another cook whom, in all likelihood, I've never shared a kitchen, requires humility, compromise, and adaptability - three words that, truth be told, I very nearly had to spell-check, as rarely as they enter my lexicon. I am not, as a rule, much beholden to the way other people things should be done, and I tend to cook that way. Of course, I also drive that way, talk about politics that way, and do math that way, so this is hardly a unique pattern. And, really, it's a reasonably effective pattern, so long as I have room to maneuver and I more or less know what I'm doing; the downside is that the converse - in which I'm boxed in, confused, and resolve turns to obstinance - isn't pretty, but that's a story for another post.

The thing to remember, if you invite a friend to come over and help you cook, is that it's a good bet that they aren't expecting to show up for the express purpose of prepping your mise or doing your dishes; no, they'll want to contribute, in some way related to the application of heat and knife-force to starch and protein, to the final product. Indeed, they're likely already to have a dish, or at least a central component of one, in mind, if not par-cooked and in-transit. And, of course, they may well fail to appreciate that you know the right way to do something, all of which necessitates a degree of flexibility I generally lack: Seasoning to taste, presentation, and the menu itself all become a product of more than one person's labor. But that needn't be a bad thing, and that is the point of this post: To the contrary, it means less work for me, a chance to check out someone else's chops and maybe even learn something, and - this is the key, really - the opportunity to come up with something, working together, that neither would have come up with alone. Courtesy of my friend B, his love affair with thermal circulators (the technical gastro-toy used to cook sous-vide), and an escalating afternoon party at our casita, I recently had just such an opportunity, and received the commensurate payoff: A near-perfect little sandwich, constructed on a foundation of B's perfectly prepared homage to swine, accompanied by some of my favorite local goodies from the previous day's famer's market, and all tied together with a recent experiment of my design, an Onion-Cranberry Marmalade that I adapted from Tom Colicchio and a staple of many years' worth of Gramercy Tavern menus.

Palate Fail

I have a pretty good palate, generally speaking. I don't lay claim to the sensory capacities of a professional cook, merely to the ability to perceive, in a broadly objective sense, whether or not a dish tastes right - whether or not it has been properly seasoned, is in or out of balance, consists of flavors that work well or poorly together, that sort of thing. The flip side of training one's palate to taste objectively (OK, fine, "objective taste" may be conceptually oxymoronic, but I'm sticking to my guns on this one - there is such a thing as objective quality with respect to food, and no matter how many shades of subjective gray might litter the middle of the spectrum, the "good" and "bad" at the extremes remain unequivocal) is that one must - eventually and, more likely, frequently - face the fact that what is good and what one likes do not always describe the same mouthful.

Case in point: Coffee. I recently posted about the merits of local, "micro" roasters, and specifically why freshness - of both the roast and the percolation - has such a dramatic impact on the flavor of coffee. The thing is, once you understand why the flavor of coffee goes bad (it's all about the reduction-oxidation process, as explained by the Specialty Coffee Association people here), you must also accept that the most popular, commercially available "fresh" beans are overcooked: Heat is ultimately an enemy of coffee aromatics, so really hard roasting, at least as practiced by the industry leaders such as Starbucks and Peets, inevitably raises the proportion of "bad" flavors and certainly degrades the proportions of many "good" ones. My personal coffee mea culpa is this: I like bad coffee. Not shitty coffee: I care not at all for the taste of two-day-old-and-tasting-of-burnt-gym-socks coffee, of low-grade beans apparently canned sometime during the early days of the Cold War, of Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's "Cafes".

Naughty and Nice: Salty Vodka Whipped Cream

Vodka Whipped Cream: Naughty & Delicious

Last Saturday night was date-night-at-home for us. In and of itself, this was not an uncommon occurrence - our preference for what passes, in our house, for a big Saturday evening oscillates between getting a sitter and going out like real grown-ups, and spending the evening raiding the wine cellar and figuring out what do with whatever we picked up earlier at the farmer's market - but it was a particularly special one, because we were celebrating the opening of my wife's new business. If you've ever watched anyone open their own business (much less done it yourself), I think you'll agree that there aren't many better reasons to celebrate; and if you like to eat (much less cook it  yourself), surely you'll agree that big celebrations and great meals flatter one another like familiar lovers, both habitual and new, relaxed and exciting, and loads and loads of fun.

Armed with such an excuse, I'll often feel inspired to spend half the day prepping and to concoct some relatively elaborate dish; but at least as often, either I won't have the time or inclination to spend in the kitchen, or perhaps I just won't be in the mood to do something complicated. Indeed, increasingly I find my tastes, both in the eating and in the cooking, running to the simple rather than the complex - finding a few really good ingredients and trying not to screw them up being a sort of Proximal Kitchen mantra. In any case, the choice was made for me yesterday, because between my wife's open house and the munchkins, I simply didn't have the time. So I took the kids to the market with a loose sketch for dinner: Something based around whatever we found at the market; something suited to my wife's palate; something relatively quick and easy; and something very adult, even a little naughty even - this was, after all, to be a date night. Oh, and in an ideal world, something suited to Champagne.

The market was really rocking, with lots of stuff - tomatoes and peppers in particular, having waited through our abnormally cool summer - the best it has been all year. But in keeping with my tactical objectives, I grabbed a dozen eggs from the good folks Wyeth Acres, purveyors of good vegetables and even better meats, thinking that breakfast-for-dinner might be just the ticket: Eggs and Champagne are a classic combination, not too much prep, and a house favorite. Next stop, a loaf of Full Circle sourdough for toast and some just-dug Yukon Golds from Foggy River Farms. Other than the wine and a bit of color for the plate, I figured I was just about done. But, as good as I know it would be, it wasn't quite enough. After all, this was a celebration, and a date night. In short, I wanted to dress my country breakfast in a suave dinner jacket.

Luckily, I remembered one of my favorite recipes to steal from: Louis Outhier's fabulous Caviar Eggs, popularized (and I believe still served) by Jean-Georges Vongerichten at his eponymous NYC restaurant. However, I didn't want to deal with the egg shells, and I wanted to use the potatoes, so I figured I'd make potato gallettes, top them with creamy scrambled eggs, and garnish it all with Outhier's outrageously decadent Salty Vodka Whipped Cream. A dollop of caviar on top - with its shot of dark color, bright, salty tang, and ability to shine with Champagne - but, alas, for all the cosmopolitan development of our little wine country town, nobody had caviar. The horror! I should have thought of using some smoked salmon instead, for the same reasons, and serving it with a pink Champagne, but I wasn't thinking; in the event, it wasn't half-bad without the fish - but, to be clear, it would have been better. I'll get around to posting the full recipe (scrambled eggs are a chapter unto themselves - so simple, so good when done properly, and yet so frequently butchered in the kitchen), but for now, here's my adaptation of Outhier's topping. It is outrageously good and could just as easily be used on top of fresh berries for dessert as with eggs or caviar.

Salty Vodka Whipped Cream (adapted from L Outhier)

1. Whip a half cup of heavy cream until stiff
2. Whisk in a tablespoon of good Vodka and a large pinch of salt - maybe as much as half a teaspoon. It should taste savory, not sweet.
3. Optional, and depending what you're serving it over (e.g., impeccable with caviar, but skip the cayenne for berries), whisk in 1-2 teaspoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice (Meyers, if possible), a pinch of cayenne, and - if you want a little color - some very finely minced lemon zest.

Naughty and nice. Trust me.

Putting down roots

Salad of Purple Cherokee, Green Zebra, & Roasted Peppers

I'm a slow learner. I can live with that, provided the  emphasis ends up on the noun rather than its descriptor, at least in the main. You might think that slow learners would also be gradual learners, that the rate at which we assimilate knowledge might be in some sense proportional to the time it takes for the process to complete. You might think that, but you would be wrong, as I just learned from the tomato plant.

Too Much of a Good Thing? Mac-n-Cheese, v2.0

All-American Super Cheesy Mac-n-Cheese

In our first post, we waxed philosophical on the gustatory wonder and sundry therapeutic benefits of a classic macaroni and cheese, but offered precious little in the way of actual cooking. On our next pass, we began to think about actually making the dish, and wondered about the the appropriateness of breadcrumb toppings, cheeses other than cheddar, and the optimal pasta shape. While the end result - ziti baked in a sauce of bechamel, provolone & parmigiano - was good, maybe even satisfying, it nevertheless fell short of transporting. And a truly classic mac-n-cheese must, above all else, transport us somewhere: Perhaps to a time when we were younger, or in circumstances more care-free, or maybe precisely where we are now, but with softer edges.

With this schmaltzy sentiment firmly ensconced, for this week's installment, I decided to try a riff on the undeniably classic, if not particularly gourmet, version from 1937 known simply as Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (or, if you're Canadian, Kraft Dinner). What could be more iconic than a lifeboat-orange, rib-gluing plate of Kraft? The problem, of course, is that it basically tastes like crap. Which is not surprising, considering you could probably whip up a box from the original 1937 production run and probably eat it without getting sick. Hey, give credit where it's due: I've fed it to my kids, more than once, and I invariably sneak a bite. So what I'm after is the essence of Kraft - a thick, creamy sauce; a blazing orange so rarely found in nature - but with the taste of real cheese, minus the food colorings, some texture to the pasta, and ideally a consistency a bit less like Elmer's.

Meat, Braise, Love

Short Ribs, Carrots, and Potatoes in a Zinfandel-Chili Braise

Just for the record, I've neither read the book, seen the movie, nor, for that matter, given any serious consideration to either, for the simple reason that, fairly or unfairly, I'm reasonably certain that I'd be repulsed but, like a car accident, find it impossible to look away. I strongly suspect that the experience would be very much like being force-fed Indian desserts while attending one of those made-for-TV mega-church Sunday sermons: Cloyingly sweet and offensively preachy, all at the same time. Although, come  to think, perhaps there's a novel strategy in there for producing a decent fois gras.

Still, while I don't really mind dishing out snippy reviews of books I haven't read, this post is about food, specifically the sort of food that you get to smell all day long while it cooks, that makes you want to open your best red wine and eat in your PJs at the same time, the sort of food that can make a girl's toes curl. For better or worse (likely both), my wife doesn't really eat land animals, so my best shot at getting a toe-curling endorsement, inasmuch as cooking is concerned, is probably mac-n-cheese, but that is the subject of another post. Today, I want to talk about braising. Specifically, braising hunks of prehistoric-looking meat, wrapped in butcher's paper and replete with large bones and the potential to disturb small children when first unwrapped. Producing a braise in your own kitchen is a bit like making porn in your own bed: It rewards practice, because if you can get it just right, it's the best you'll ever have, and all the times you can't, it'll still be a long way from sucking.

It matters where it's roasted

Buy it, grind it, brew it, and serve it. Fresh.

I hate the taste of oxidation. Or, having puzzled over the chemical processes involved, I should say  that I hate the change in flavors and aromas caused by reduction-oxidation, but that takes too long, and efficiency matters in the kitchen. Furthermore, while my math skills may be passable and I find physics fascinating, chemistry has, at least since the 7th grade, given me a headache: Something about all that rote memorization and what I always took to be an unhealthy and mind-numbing emphasis on the "what" at the expense of the "how".

In any case, suffice it to say that the taste and smell of  foods - and, more to the point, beverages -  changes due to contact with the air we breathe, and most of these changes are not for the better. Oxidation creates that nasty metallic taste, the perception of acridness, of overcooked. This process is particularly acute in two of my favorite beverages, wine and coffee (water, by my accounting the only other liquid truly essential to the sustenance of life, seems a bit more stable).

In the case of coffee, the important thing to know is that the process of oxidation begins immediately, and the engine for this process is heat (the excellent if slightly more technical discussion I base this on may be found here).

The Pirate Lord of the Hot Line

Prologue: Two cross-country flights with three young children and unavoidable transfers in both directions, separated by less than 72 hours in-country, on my non-native coast, for a theocratic church wedding packed with in-laws and people I don't know well enough to drink with... Clearly, quality reading material is essential packing, somewhere just below, and possibly preceding, a decent pair of shoes and a clean shirt for the wedding itself. I show up to SFO without so much as a day-old copy of the Times.

Actually, I'm taking at least a little literary license. Not with the horrors of the 15 or so hours my family would  spend in the care and company of commercial air carriers, not with the other factual particulars, but with the implication that I forgot to pack something to read. I spent many years traveling for work in a previous life, mostly long-haul, and, while I have forgotten virtually every essential one can forget at one point or another (passport, socks and underwear, foreign currency), I have learned - the hard way - never, not ever, to travel without a book. If at all possible, not without backup. I left our house without a book on Thursday morning because I knew we'd be at the airport with loads of time and access to a passable bookstore, and I really, really like picking out new stuff to read with my hands: The tactile sensation of the pages, their weight in one's hand, even the font chosen for printing - all these things matter. While I, like you, buy most of my books online for convenience and price, I will mourn the inevitable death of the physical bookstore, and I regret that my children will, in all likelihood, never even know what I'm talking about.

Also, for the record, any insinuation that either my in-laws, or the family they're marrying into, were anything other than lovely would be grossly unfair: They were, to a name, lovely people who had the foresight to cater cute little mac-n-cheese ramekins and chicken in zinc buckets for the kids alongside plenty of booze for the grownups. I can't speak to the wedding cake, except to say that it looked very classy, without so much as a single square meter of overworked fondant in sight, and it got raves from the munchkins. (Granted, the bar for that last bit consists of little more than sugar, but still.) Even the church service was manageable, and I say that as a non-practicing Jew: I don't think we had to spend more than a few hours on our knees or otherwise flagellating ourselves. Kidding.

In the event, I bought two books with vastly inflated, travel-desperation sorts of profit margins: "All The Pretty Horses", by Cormac McCarthy (arguably America's greatest writer of fiction and whose work I carefully ration in order to extend for as long as possible the literary cherry-popping that only a McCarthy first page can deliver), and "Cooking Dirty", by Jason Sheehan (a food writer I had not previously heard of and whose book I bought largely on a whim). Jay Sheehan's book is a revelation if only because, like food itself, so much of what is produced is irredeemable shite, the moral equivalent of an Applebee's salad bar, that one often forgets what the real thing, done properly, can be like.

Why do wedding cakes usually suck?

I've probably had a good slice of wedding cake, but I can't recall it. My wife and I went to some length to make sure ours was better than average - we ordered carrot cake w/ cream cheese icing, figuring that we'd have better odds if we could avoid entirely the words "butter cream" and "genoise" - but, in the event, it was disappointing. Don't take this personally,but in all likelihood, your wedding cake sucked, too.

But why? I'm about to spend all day on an airplane in order to attend a wedding, so I have vested interest in the answer. On the face of it, the problem is not a budget constraint: We Americans spend, by most counts, between $3 and $5 per slice on our wedding cakes. A slice of cake from a quality baker generally costs a bit more than that, but I've had plenty of very good slices of cake for that sort of price, and that is by the slice. Clearly there are economies of scale to cakes: The cost of the ingredients may be roughly proportional to the number of servings, and perhaps even declining, because you use less frosting per unit of cake as the cake gets larger (butter costs more than flour, and ratio of surface area to volume should fall with size); and the larger input, labor, should clearly exhibit increasing returns to scale (it takes no more time to bake 2 layers than 1).

So if we spend enough to get a good cake, why do so often fail to do so?

In praise of street food

What could be a more proximal kitchen, at least from the consumer's perspective, than street food? In my own cooking, I generally think about the proximity of my primitive food sources to my kitchen, but the cart warrior offers another perspective: He (or she) cooks it fresh, all day long, right in front of you, not in some glass-walled, Michelin-starred kitchen, but on the sidewalk. I don't know about you, but I reckon whipping up massive quantities of super tasty food, on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, without giving your customers food poisoning, with Mobius-like repetitive consistency, is one of the great culinary feats of our times. I mean, seriously, are you kidding me? The best of the best of the street food community - not to be confused with the ones serving stale pretzels and three-day-old boiled hot dogs, I mean the ones preparing food of real quality, fast, cheap, and on the street - is, if you'll excuse the language, the effing bomb.

This particular thread occurred to me because the finalists for the Vendy - the biggest award in the street food hierarchy, the moral equivalent of a third Michelin star or a food-tops rating in Zagat's - were just announced. If you're not familiar with NYC street food, and you get the opportunity, I highly recommend working off of NY Mag's list of the Concrete Elite (it is to the undying credit of the city and the vendors that this list, while dated, remains virtually unchanged by either name, location, or qualitative scale). Seriously, the Vendys are fine, but why bother buying tickets and fighting the throngs on Governor's Island? If you had the choice, would you rather have Thomas Keller cooking for you in his own kitchen at the French Laundry, or at some kitschy demo for the Food Network? I say, go to the carts. You can do unfathomable arterial damage well inside of a 10-block radius in midtown, so why mess with it?

I have not had the pleasure of eating at any of this year's finalists, but I was in NYC last month, and I made a point of visiting what I take to be The Best Halal/Gyro In The Known Universe, the guys on the southwest corner of 53rd St and 6th Ave. There are dozens of impostors, and many within a one-block radius, so if you go, be sure to check the corner; you'll know when you're there, because the line is longer than the competition by a thoroughly justifiable order of magnitude. What other gyro-style stand has its own Wikipedia page? Who else make lamb-on-rice so good that you can get knifed for cutting in line (yes, it really happened). Where else have the customers taken to referring to the white sauce as "crack sauce"? Trust me, it's worth it.

I'm sure the other guys (they are almost exclusively guys, sorry) have their own merits, but if I were to do the street-meat tour, and I faced either temporal or gastrointestinal constraints, I would - in addition to the Halal gurus above - make sure to stop by Rolf's Hallo Berlin sausage cart at 54th and 5th (between the Democracy Special and the Dictator Special, you can't go wrong) as well as Mohammed Rahman's Kwik Meal at 45th and 6th (the only street chef I know of who trained at the Russian Tea Room and marinates cubes of lamb - not pressed into gyros, fresh cubes - in his own concoction of papaya juice to tenderize it - be sure to try it with a side of his freaky, very hot, not-quite-Middle-Eastern green jalapeno chili sauce).

Pie for Breakfast

Championship Brunch: pie, coffee, Mimosa

Come-clean: This is not my pie. In point of fact, I don't really do sweets and, with the notable exception of pizza, I rarely bake. Suffice it to say that we all have our place in the kitchen, and mine is not at the pastry station.

Which is by way of saying how exceedingly fortunate I am to have married a woman who can bake her butt off, because just saying the word "pie" makes me happy. Seriously, until you've had one of my wife's pies, your gastronomic bucket list will remain at least partially incomplete. She has no weak suit: My birthday happily coincides with our own lemon crop, so Lemon Meringue has always been my personal favorite. But they are all exceptional: Chocolate Pudding (filled with a homemade dark chocolate custard), Apple (which I otherwise don't even eat), and - one of the Himalayan peaks of the pie-baking landscape - Mixed Berry, defined by whatever local berries are currently at their peak, and what I was lucky enough to have for breakfast this past Sunday.

What makes a great pie? The trivially obvious: A great crust (consisting, as I understand it, of all of three ingredients, flour, fat and salt), and a great filling (which can be relatively complex, as in puddings, as well as incredibly simple, as in most fruits). It is this very simplicity which belies the difficulty in achieving pie-greatness:

Just-filled with Middleton Farms' berries

• Consisting of almost nothing while demanding great attention to small technical details, a great crust offers the cook boundless opportunity to screw things up; the crust must remain structurally sound in the oven, it must cook evenly, and it must not only be flaky - both light and rich, crunchy and soft - but it should exhibit the same flakiness on the bottom as it does on the top. When it comes to crusts, technique is everything.
• Fillings are similarly unforgiving, if for different reasons: When it comes to filling a pie, there is nowhere to hide. No amount of sugar, lemon juice, and stove-top wizardry will impart flavor to bland berries, texture to mealy apples, or the scent of a perfectly ripe Meyer to bitter lemon juice. When it comes to fillings, there is no way around the imperative to start with great fruit. 

My advice, as a non-participant in the pie kitchen, is this: First, buy the best fruit you possibly can. Almost any fruit can make a great pie, but no great pie can be made from fruit of poor quality. (Please don't list for me the virtues of instant pudding mixes. They have their place, but not in homemade pie. If you are going to roll out your own crust, then by all means, cook your own custard.) Second, read up on pie crusts, paying particularly close attention to the technicalities of temperature and speed (see McGee or Corriher, for instance - and sorry for the AMZN plug, I don't care where you buy it, the link is just to get you the title).

And last, but most certainly not least, always save a slice for breakfast.

Mac-n-Cheese, v1.0

Mac-n-Cheese I: Ziti regate w/ provolone & parmigiano

OK, it's Monday, enough of the booze chatter. We promised to engage in the pursuit of mac-n-cheese perfection, and here in the Proximal Kitchen, we don't take such promises lightly.

If you caught my previous post on mac-n-cheese, despair not yet another trip by the culinary pulpit, because today's post - our introductory foray into the mac-n-cheese sweepstakes - is all business. I have little doubt that my previous wax-on, wax-off meanderings will return to this thread, but not now.

I've been reading up on mac-n-cheese. Unsurprisingly, the Internet produces information overload: Lots of great-sounding recipes, a far larger number of suspect ones, and all sorts of claims and factoids, both interesting and banal, about the history of this profoundly American dish (Thomas Jefferson apparently loved to serve a baked macaroni and cheese). My first realization: I will need to focus and compartmentalize this project. I am not going to try every conceivable variation; nor do I think I have to, because I have a pretty good idea about what I want the final result to be, and it doesn't include broccoli, brie, or artificially-low fat substitutions. I also believe quite strongly that you can train your palate to 'think', to envision the character of a recipe, and the likelihood of its success, before you ever make it.

Having now read a goodly number of varations of, and hypotheses concerning, macaroni and cheese recipes, I would separate the key decision variables as follows:

1. Unadorned or All Dressed Up? You can make a compelling case for mixing in diced ham or broccoli, for a crispy shallot topping, for any number of additions that raise the apparent sophistication of the dish. I don't object to any of them, so long as they serve a purpose. But none of them are essential, and that is what I'm after; howsoever wonderful bacon may be, the soul of mac-n-cheese does not depend on it, and neither will our recipes. (I'm undecided on breadcrumbs; my intuition says "no", but I'm kind of a sucker for crumbly toppings, and I'm reserving the right to try one variation.)
2. Sauce or Just Cheese? Most of the classic recipes start with some version of a bechamel sauce, and then build a cheese sauce from there - essentially, a variation on the classic Mornay. But not everyone agrees; there are those who argue that flour has no place in a true mac-n-cheese, and that the cheese alone should be sufficient to bind the pasta. Like the question of adornment, I don't need to cook to answer this one: I will never get the texture and depth of flavor I want - both crusty, gooey, and creamy all at the same time, with layers and layers of flavor permeating into the noodles  - without some sort of a mother sauce in which to embed background flavors, to mix and bind the cheeses, and to fill in the the spaces between the layers of pasta. All our recipes will start with a basic white sauce based on the classic bechamel.
3. Just Cheddar or Something Else? Most of the recipes I read, and particularly those of the more "classic" variety, depend heavily, if not entirely, on cheddar cheese. I'm unconvinced, and this is where I expect to invest the most time, because, quite obviously, the dish will ultimately fail without the right mixture of cheeses. Furthermore, when I think about the classic cheese sauces, typically some variation on Mornay, I tend to think of Swiss, Alsatian, and Italian cheeses, more than I do cheddar (both Larousse and Michel Roux, in his essential "Sauces", agree). Cheddar also presents some textural challenges, as I find that it has a proclivity for breaking (the fats separate during cooking) and for turning grainy. For all these reasons, I'm going to try Swiss- (broadly construed), Italian-, and cheddar-styled cheeses before taking my final stand. 
4. Choice of Pasta. It may seem oxymoronic to debate the shape of pasta for a dish that is named after one particular shape, but in fact the Italian root - maccherone - is used to refer to most any tube-shaped pasta cut into short, regular lengths. The more important feature, it seems to me, is how particular shapes hold the sauce and whether they maintain their integrity during the second cooking (baking in the sauce after boiling). Also important is how a particular shape sets up because - no disrespect to the oozing-pile approach - I'd prefer to serve a structurally coherent slice of the final product without it spilling all over the plate.

A quick inventory of the cheese drawer yields some aged Provolone, a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, but no real cheddar or Swissy-type stuff. The pasta shelf has a few options, most of them (spaghetti, capellini, and a variation on the corkscrew the kids are fond of) inappropriate to the task at hand. I spy some ziti regate, an over-sized, grooved version of penne, which sounds like a good test-case of a larger, straighter tube than th elbow-macaroni benchmark, and also strikes me as fine in its own right. As regular followers already know, I depend heavily on leftovers (indeed, I take the creative and productive use of what is already sitting around to be a badge of honor - it saves time and money, it reduces waste, and it forces me to think like a cook), and thus my first attempt at mac-n-cheese is born of a Provolone-based white sauce over some big, fat pasta tubes.

Mac-n-Cheese I

1. Cook the pasta: Boil about a 1/2 lb of dried, large-ish tubular pasta, preferably grooved to help grab on to the sauce, such as ziti or rigatoni, in a large pot of salted water (I tend to cook a little extra and then adjust the final quantity of pasta to match the final volume of sauce). Cook only until just barely al dente - the pasta will continue to cook in the oven, and you don't want it turning to mush. In practice, assuming you are using an Italian boxed pasta that has been packaged for American distribution, this will generally mean you want to pull it off the burner about a minute before the low end of the recommended range (and certainly no later than said lower end). While you're at it, pre-heat the oven to 350F.
2. While the pasta is boiling, start the sauce: Make 1/4 cup of blonde roux by cooking 3 tablespoons of flour in 3 tablespoons of butter over medium-low heat. You want to cook the flour, but whisk it around and watch the heat so as not to let it color. Scald 2 cups of whole milk or even cream (although, honestly, I used 2% and it still came out fine) add it slowly to the roux, whisking constantly to avoid lumps (if it gets lumpy, your milk was likely not hot enough, or you added it too quickly; you can always strain it out if that happens). You have what is now a bechamel sauce, but you need to season it - add a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg (maybe 1/8th of a teaspoon - not too much), white pepper (black pepper will screw up the color - this isn't sausage gravy, it's a white mac-n-cheese), and salt. Don't skimp on the salt; it's important to season each layer of the dish, or the final result will be under-seasoned and bland. Bring to a gentle boil and cook until the sauce thickens up and you no longer taste a raw, floury taste. Don't forget to take the pasta off the heat and drain it while this is going on!
3. Stir in the cheeses, starting with about a half-pound of shredded, aged Provolone (slices will melt OK as well). I would not use Mozzarella (not the right texture for melting, or flavor profile, really), but a 50/50 blend of Provolone and Fontina would probably work very well. Once the Provolone has melted completely and the sauce is hot, turn off the heat and stir in most of a gently packed cup of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano, either by itself or mixed with a little Pecorino Romano for extra bite; reserve a small handful. Check the final sauce for seasoning and adjust, if necessary.
4. Combine the pasta and the cheese sauce: Transfer most of the pasta back to the pot from which it came, or to a large mixing bowl (glass better than metal, because everything will still be quite hot), pour most of the sauce over the pasta, and gently fold them together to avoid damaging the pasta. Reserve a small amount of pasta and sauce so that you can adjust the quantities, if necessary. Make sure to distribute the sauce uniformly in order to coat all the noodles. The stuff should look like almost as much sauce as pasta, with every noodle heavily coated in a thick slathering of the sauce.
5. Bake the pasta: Gently fill a small, buttered casserole dish, pie plate, or earthenware crock, pouring the pasta and sauce down in layers; delicately compress the pasta as you go in order to ensure it is basically solid and of a uniform density throughout. Pour any remaining sauce over the top and then sprinkle with the reserved cheeses and dot with butter. Transfer to the bottom rack of a 350-degree (F) oven for about 20 minutes; it will be done when the top and sides are bubbling and just starting to brown. Turn the oven to broil - this will brown the top and create a bubbly, cheesy crust. But watch it carefully, now is not the time to do anything else! (I never, not ever, turn the broiler on without setting  a timer for a minute or two.)
6. Let it set: Do not attempt to taste or serve for at least 10 minutes - 15-20 is probably better (I'm assuming your kitchen is pretty warm; if not, adjust accordingly). Like any baked pasta, you need to give it time to cool and bind up with some structural integrity; it will also save you and your family from a blistering case of pizza-mouth. Alternatively, if you're worried about the top getting cold, or timing it for service, remove it from the oven when it's done, but before broiling it, let it set, and then return to the broiler just before you're ready to serve it.

My family had the version pictured above for dinner last night, and found it very satisfying. It was a little too sharp for the kids, but I knew going in that this would be a more adult version (the same basic recipe with just a bit blander cheese, and a little less of it, would be more kid-friendly). However, this was only an experiment, and I'll definitely change some things next time:

• I'm not sure the large pasta shape was ideal; next time, I'll either use a smaller shape like penne, or the classic elbow macaroni. 
• The cheeses had great flavor, but were a little one-dimensional, so I'm going to move into the Swissy or Cheddary families next, although I can definitely envision a cheese blend including some of what was used here (particularly the final sprinkling of Parmigiano). Also, the texture was good, but not perfect - the final sauce, out of the oven, would ideally be a bit smoother and more consistent. 
• I think I would raise the proportion of cheese in the sauce in order to make it slightly less like a cream sauce and slightly more chew in texture.

In short, this is very much worth making, but stay tuned for future upgrades.