Memorial Day. The unofficial first day of summer. Across the country, people are taking the covers off their pools, firing up their grills, and celebrating the start of another year of red-blooded American backyard living.

Here in Manhattan, some of us lawyers (particularly us junior lawyers) are in the office on Memorial Day. It could be worse; after all, we don't have backyards, we don't have outdoor grills, and we sure as hell don't have swimming pools. No, we live in 500-square foot apartments; pay more in rent per month than the mortgages on those houses with the outdoor grills and the swimming pools, and work 100 hours a week to pay for it. So today instead of grilling up a batch of steaks, burgers, and chops; instead of whipping up some fresh mayonnaise for a homemade potato salad; instead of cracking open a cheap domestic beer with family and friends; I billed 10 hours and ordered in sushi for one, which I ate at my desk.

But city life has its advantages. At Citarella this weekend, there are three crates of softshell blue crabs in the center of the fish display, with a little sign in front of them that reads: $2.99/ea. Softshell season began the day after the first full moon in May, and the little critters are waiting for me, practically right outside my front door. So in one of my free moments this holiday weekend, I fried up some softshell crabs, tempura style, and made a sandwich with shredded raddichio, fresh basil, and miso-sesame vinaigrette.

You can have your fishmonger clean your softshells for you, but you'd better be ready to cook them right away. Otherwise, get crabs that still fight back a little when they're picked up, keep them on ice until you're ready to cook, then snip their heads off just behind the eyes with a sharp knife or scissors.

When I was a kid, we went crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay with a chicken thigh tied to a wire trap. Growing up in Maryland, they teach you to distinguish male from female blue crabs based on the shapes of their bellyplates (girl crabs have a capital dome, boy crabs have a Washington monument). Any softshell you find at market will likely be a female, which makes cleaning it easier.

After you've snipped off the crab's face, peel back the bellyplate to expose the gill filaments underneath. Brush those back with your fingers, uncovering the body shell underneath.

When you've pulled the bellyplate down, grip it firmly, twist it back and forth, and break it loose, pulling out the intestinal vein along with it. If you don't like the flavor of the crab liver (a/k/a tomalley), press down on the body to squeeze out the yellow goo inside. Rinse your softshell, pat it dry with a paper towel, then coat it with crumbs or batter and fry it up.

Maybe I don't have a backyard full of friends and grilled meats and cold beer. But hey, look what I can put together on a moment's notice with the vast epicurean resources at my fingertips. Surely the conveniences and luxury of fine city living are worth the price we pay with the best years of our lives. Clearly, I have made the most of Memorial Day weekend in Manhattan.

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The Associated Press reports that the Italian government is doing for pizza what the German government did for beer ages ago: regulating its contents and production. The regulations include restrictions on the diameter and thickness of a pizza, the types of flour and yeast that are used, and the permissible baking methods (a wood burning oven that reaches 485 degrees Celsius). At least the Italians are being more helpful with Pizza Napoletana than the French are with Cassoulet.

If you understand enough Italian and can figure out how to navigate the site, you can read the official rules in the Gazzetta Ufficiale of Italy. I have found what I believe to be the proposed text of the regulations here (whether this is the text that was adopted, I have no idea). And just in case AP decides to make you pay for this story after it gets archived, you can also get it from CNN.

As always, you can read more about good old New York style pizza on Slice.

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Reuters reports that cilantro -- also known as Chinese parsley -- contains a chemical known as dodecenal, which has been found to kill Salmonella bacteria that cause foodborne illness. Dodecenal is present not only in the leaves of cilantro, but also in its seeds, which are more commonly known as coriander.

Personally, I find the flavor and aroma of cilantro to be overbearing and its usefulness to be limited outside of Latin American or Chinese cooking. Furthermore, the amount of dodecenal in cilantro is too miniscule to stand a chance against the hordes of bacteria that are present in most of the foods that can cause illness. So while it's nice to know that this herb is doing its best to keep us healthy even as we dismember and consume it, I probably won't be stocking up on the stuff.

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Bourrez Votre Visage beat me to the punch on a story I really should have been on top of. Yesterday the Supreme Court granted certiorari (i.e., it agreed to hear arguments) in a set of cases that could completely reshape wine consumption in this country. The question is whether your state government can forbid wineries in other states from selling their products directly to you, the consumer. Interestingly enough, the state line between you and your vintner means that the answer to this question can only be reached by reconciling two apparently contradictory provisions of the Constitution of the United States.

When the Constitution was first written, the dead white men we refer to reverently as the "Framers" wanted to make sure that parochial interests and petty protectionism couldn't throw wrenches into the free flow of commerce among the still largely independent states. Accordingly, they wrote into the nation's primal law a rule that the federal government would have the authority to regulate interstate commerce (it's called the "Commerce Clause"). Over the years, courts have read into this rule a converse proposition: that the individual state governments are forbidden from creating rules that interfere with interstate commerce (this is what's known as the "Dormant Commerce Clause").

Of course, when the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition, it indirectly provided the states power to pass laws concerning "[t]he transportation or importation into any state, territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors". Ostensibly this allows the states to exercise their historic "police power": to enact laws to preserve the public safety and morals, which are apparently threatened by intemperate and unrestricted consumption of alcoholic spirits. (Incidentally, this is the same power that has more recently been enmeshed in the gay marriage debate, which is why Republican crusaders have to resort to a constitutional amendment to stop states from allowing same-sex couples to get hitched). Many years ago, state regulation was also an important bulwark against monopolism, price-fixing, and collusion among booze-peddlers in the pre-New Deal days of a weak federal government.

Today, though, the primary purpose of state regulation appears to be protection of local middlemen, rather than of the consumers who really suffer from anticompetitive business practices. Even the Federal Trade Commission thinks state barriers to direct-to-consumer wine importation are a bad idea. Which is why the wholesale alcohol distributors are the only ones fighting to keep winemakers from selling their wares over the Internet directly to thirsty gourmands like you and me.

Here's hoping they lose big, so we can all start getting shipments of family-produced wines delivered to our door without the double-markup of a wholesaler and a retailer tacked on to our bill. Cheers.

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For today's "Is My Blog Burning?" event, I decided to draw on some family history. My mother's family is from Baghdad; they are among the hundreds of thousands of expatriate Iraqi Jews who fled their home of two thousand years in the wake of rising Arab-Jewish hostility. Today the Iraqi Jewish community -- which once numbered over 100,000 strong in its native land -- is scattered across the globe: in England, Australia, India, Canada, and the United States. Traditions that held sway since the time of the Hebrew prophets are slowly fading into oblivion. So the IMBB? "rice" theme has offered me an opportunity to keep one of those traditions alive: the Sabbath meal.

This is T'beet, the traditional Sabbath lunch of Iraqi Jews. Jews are forbidden by religious law from kindling or extinguishing a flame on Saturday, the Jewish day of rest. Accordingly, any meal to be eaten hot on the Sabbath must be set on a fire before sundown the night before. The Jews of Europe have accomodated this imperative with cholent: a slow-cooked stew of meat, beans, and vegetables, which I find utterly revolting. My ancestors relied instead on the middle-eastern staple of rice in composing their Sabbath lunch: a stuffed chicken stewed in tomato sauce and spices and baked into a cake of aromatic basmati rice. After twelve or more hours of cooking, the rice forms a hard, delicious crust on the outside, while the rice surrounding the chicken becomes irresistably tender and absorbs all the flavors in the pot. A rice stuffing within the chicken is the most intense of all: it is heavily spiced and absorbs all the juices of the chicken as it cooks.

As you can see in the above image of T'beet deconstructed, you can have your rice three ways. The rice to the left of the chicken has hardened into a crunchy, nutty shell. At top right, you can see the pillowy rice that surrounds the chicken. At bottom right is the intensely flavored rice from the stuffing. Incidentally, a chicken cooked in this manner emerges from the oven tender enough to cut with a spoon.

The key to this dish is the Iraqi Jewish version of five-spice powder: an aromatic compound of cardamom, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, and turmeric mixed in equal portions (with maybe a little extra cardamom for good measure). It will fill your kitchen with the most fragrant aromas all night and into the day. Just be sure to use a non-stick, oven safe pot: you have to be able to get the burnt rice crust out eventually (it's the best part). Teflon is fine, but for a more traditional preparation I use enamel-coated cast-iron.

Recipe: T'beet

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken
  
• 5 tbsp olive oil
  
• 1/3 cup diced onion
  
• 1/3 cup diced tomato
  
• 3 29-oz. cans simple tomato sauce (I use Hunt's)
  
• 3 tbsp Iraqi Jewish five-spice powder (see above)
  
• 3 tsp. salt
  
• 8 3/4 cups basmati rice, rinsed
  

Mix the diced onion, diced tomato, 3/4 cups of the rice, 1 tbsp of the spice mixture, and 1/2 tsp of the salt in a bowl. Add 2 tablespoons of the tomato sauce and, if available, the diced giblets of the chicken (heart and gizzard only; not the liver). Keep refrigerated.

Rinse the chicken thoroughly inside and out and pat dry with a paper towel. Stuff the body and neck of the chicken loosely with the stuffing (the rice will need room to expand as it cooks), and either sew the openings shut or skewer them closed.

In a 10-qt., non-stick, oven safe pot or dutch oven, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the chicken breast-side up. Brown until quite dark, 5-6 minutes. Turn and brown the breast side, another 5-6 minutes.

When the chicken is thoroughly browned on both sides, pour the remaining tomato sauce over it (the chicken should be breast-side down at this point). Fill the pot with water to cover the chicken, making sure there is still room between the water level and the top of the pot. Add the remaining five-spice mixture and salt, and stir to combine. Cook uncovered until the boil is reached.

Once the liquid begins to boil, bring the heat down to a simmer. Cook, partially covered, for about 30 minutes. Then add the remaining rice to the pot, pouring it around the sides so it does not pile on top of the chicken. Cover the pot and put it in the oven. Allow to cook overnight.

At lunchtime on Saturday, remove the pot from the oven and uncover it. Let it stand for about 10 minutes, then invert it onto a serving platter. Scrape any remaining crust off the inside of the pot with a wooden spoon (or other utensil safe for non-stick surfaces) and layer it over the T'beet. Serve to a large, hungry family, making sure everybody gets a little of the chicken and a little of each of the three types of rice. Be careful to remove the skewers or twine you used to seal the chicken as you carve it up. A large serving spoon is the only serving utensil you will need.

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A few weeks ago, I bought a handful of ramps at Fairway. The ramp season, which begins in April, is only a few weeks long. I just barely caught the end of it. But I bought my ramps on the way home from work on a weeknight, at about 11:00 p.m., and never cooked them. I just snapped a photo and tossed them in the fridge. A week later, they were gone. Fairway wasn't stocking them anymore. I resigned to waiting another year for this most evanescent member of the leek family.

Tonight on the way home from work I stopped by the Whole Foods Market in the Time Warner Center to pick up some fresh fruit for tomorrow. I was walking through the produce section, when I saw these: Canadian ramps. Ramps, also known as wild leeks, grow in the forests of the Appalachian range, with the mountain regions of West Virginia being most famous for their ramp festivals. Apparently ramp season doesn't just end all at once; it moves northward to Canada. The Canadian ramps are slightly slimmer than their southern cousins, but just as full-flavored.

Ramps have a potent garlicky, oniony flavor, which is rather difficult to tame. Some enjoy their brash, stinging aroma and taste, but for most of us ramps require a long, slow cooking process to mellow and sweeten them. In fact, overconsumption of raw ramps is said to cause a pungent odor to exude from the pores of the consumer. I like to stew my ramps: brown them lightly in a little butter and then add some chicken stock, simmering them for about a half hour. When you first heat the ramps the leaves will inflate like a balloon; this is just the water in them being converted into steam and trapped between the layers of the leaves. As you cook the steam will escape and your ramps will return to normal.

Both the bulb and the leaves of the ramp can be eaten, but there is a thin, slimy film surrounding the bulb of un-cleaned ramps that must be removed before cooking (you can pull it off like a sleeve). Any spindly roots and their root cap must also be trimmed away before cooking. You can find Canadian ramps at Whole Foods Columbus Circle for $9.95/lb. (Don't worry; you couldn't possibly eat more than a quarter pound of these little stinkers).

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Kaleberg calls me out in a comment on yesterday's post:

I'll start by saying that it is surprisingly easy to make offal taste delicious. It is no harder to grill a lamb kidney or liver than to grill a lamb chop. Marrow bones are usually sold cut, so cooking marrow is as easy as cooking a potato in the oven. Don't confuse unfamiliar or out of fashion ingredients with hard to cook ingredients.

An interesting rumination on the past, present, and future of the foodstuffs market ensues. But I'm curious about this first passage. Is it harder to grill a lamb kidney than a lamb chop? Is a marrow bone as simple as a potato? Is the unfamiliar hard to cook?

I experimented with kidneys in law school. Not knowing how to soak or season them, I ended up with a mouthful of ammonia. I've played around with marrow bones before. Not knowing how heat conducts through an inch of solid bone, I've produced both shrunken, grainy clumps and raw, bloody paste. The funkiness of tripes will linger in a pot for hours, and may never leave if you don't know what you're doing. Sweetbreads can be creamy and smooth, but they can also turn into rubber.

Let's not forget the vegetable kingdom. When was the last time you cooked a parsnip? What do you do with neeps? How much attention do you give to the stems of your herbs? What becomes of your onion skins and leek greens?

Perhaps these items aren't inherently difficult to deal with; perhaps they're only difficult because they're unfamiliar. Garbage vegetables and "specialty" meats are often so far out of sight as to be completely out of mind. How is one to learn to properly cook them? Why would one bother? Where fillet mignon is found in every meat case but trotters and tails have to be specially ordered days in advance, can we be blamed for finding skillfully prepared peasant food novel, exciting, or extraordinary?

I have my own answers to these questions, but I know there are more interesting answers out there. So tell me: What is your experience beyond the realm of the fillet? How has it shaped your attitude toward cuisine? What room is there in our modern gastronomy for the unfamiliar? If you've read this far, you surely have an opinion; now is the time to share it.

Posted by jeremy at 01:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend pointed out to me that my discussion of ingredient-focused cuisine in my last post is somewhat ambiguous (most of my friends are lawyers; they're real big on precision). So let's clear things up a bit.

There are at least two ways ingredients can occupy the center of a culinary philosophy, and I sort of conflated them the other day. The first emphasizes the skill of the chef in taking what most would consider undesirable ingredients and turning them into something magnificent. It requires a deep knowledge of cooking techniques and a sublime understanding of the ingredient itself. You can see this attitude at work in the bones and tails of Blue Ribbon, in the delicate cold tripe salad at Cibrèo, or in the celebration of offal on display at London's St. John. These are just some examples of a school of thought that seeks out the true nature and the inner virtues of that which is edible but generally overlooked in favor of less challenging, more predictable, more expensive ingredients. At its core, the philosophy underlying this trend is to rediscover and celebrate the primitive, humble ingredients that have been given short shrift by the luxury and rigidity of modern Western cuisine: marrow, viscera, sinewy cuts of meat. Like the romantic poets casting off the shackles of neoclassicism, chefs in this school of cooking are invoking primal lessons from the cuisine of poverty to teach us something we already knew, but had forgotten for want of practice. They are awakening the nobility in the most common ingredients.

The other way one can focus on ingredients is to insist on only the very best ingredients and manipulate them as little as possible, simply allowing them to speak for themselves. In an age where most of our produce is picked weeks before it is ripe, where most of our meat animals are raised on high-volume farms on a diet of formula feeds and antibiotics, the chefs who focus on the natural beauty of the life on which we feed -- its seasonality, its eccentricity, its subtle and marvelous variety -- are doing us no small service. Their influence is evident in contemporary cuisine; my friend pointed out the work of Tom Colicchio at Craft; Anthony Bourdain describes the same phenomenon at Masa Takayama's sushi temple (scroll down). Of course, if this trend is reduced to the point of absurdity, the chef becomes little more than a broker: seeking out the very best ingredients from around the world for the benefit of those who lack the time and skill to do so themselves but have the money to pay for it. We haven't reached that point yet, though, and for now these chefs are still bringing considerable expertise to bear on the preparation of their painstakingly selected raw materials.

My friend seemed to be quite content to have both these schools of cooking at work in the world today, and I think he's got a point. From an ideological perspective, though, I have to admit to being more enamored of the first trend than the second. Seasonality, variety, and quality are all obviously virtues, but they shouldn't be the exclusive province of elite restaurant chefs. If we could learn how to better nurture and develop our food supply, I think the brokerage function of high-end restaurants would quickly collapse as rank-and-file food lovers were able to find fresh, high-quality, seasonal products for themselves. But the world will always need skilled chefs to coax out the grandeur of challenging ingredients. It's easy to make offal taste foul; it's nearly impossible to make it taste glorious. That's why I have boundless respect for chefs who face challenging ingredients head-on, and show us how rich our lives can be if we are willing to let go of the familiar. Their restaurants are examples of how cuisine can transcend its function as nourishment, transcend even its potential to be art, and become something far more significant: culture.

Posted by jeremy at 01:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

97 Sullivan St.
(212) 274-0404

Today my law school roommate and co-founder of the Frost Street Dining Club Tony engaged me in a thorough discussion of everything we think is great about restaurants these days, and everything we think is wrong with restaurants these days. We were pretty much in agreement that the best thing that has happened to the restaurant scene in the past few years is the overriding emphasis on ingredients. We credit Mario Batali and his ilk for a lot of this recent trend here in the states, although it can certainly be traced back at least to Alice Waters. Across the pond you can find kindred impulses in Fergus Henderson's abbatoir cuisine. What it comes down to is respecting even the simplest, humblest ingredients, treating them as well as you can, and turning them into more than you thought they could be.

Case in point: Blue Ribbon's Marrow Bones with Oxtail Marmalade. Bones and tails, with stock vegetables and white toast -- the dish is nothing but odds and ends. But treated with care and skill, it becomes something totally, miraculously satisfying. Sweet, fatty, salty, meaty, all-around honest food. Food that doesn't apologize, and doesn't need to. Hearty, simple food you'd wait two hours for. This is exactly what the good restaurants are doing right for us these days.

Now if we can only learn to do it for ourselves, we'll be in business.

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164 West 75th Street
212-787-6300

I struggle to come up with an excuse for waiting this long to try 'Cesca, Tom Valenti's celebrated new entry just two blocks from my apartment. I don't dine out much unless Lisa's around, and she's only around on weekends when 'Cesca is generally pretty solidly booked, so I never really bothered to try to get a table. But on Friday Lisa came into town late, and I called to see if I could get an 11:00 p.m. table. I could, and did, and so prepared myself to confront Valenti's much-admired homestyle Italian fare.

The layout of 'Cesca is similar to that at Valenti's highly successful Ouest: an open kitchen bordered by a wraparound bar; three-quarter circle banquettes interlaced with smaller deuces and four-tops; a large separate bar area. The main difference is the color scheme: gone are the brash reds and blacks of Valenti's modern bistro. The decor at 'Cesca is a distillation of Upper West Side bourgeois chic: Dark walnut, soft-lit plaster, natural linen, faux-wrought-iron. Very Pottery Barn. Valenti wants you to feel like you're a guest in a pre-war West 70s co-op; you and about 60 other people.

The food at 'Cesca is fairly good, but frankly, not worth all the hype it's been getting. Lisa's beef carpaccio, flecked with chips of dried bresaola and studded with croutons, was pleasant but not memorable. My roasted oysters with tomato zabayon, which kept up the dried-dried-meats motif with flecks of crunchy prosciutto for garnish, provided a warm, creamy squirt of tomato flavor but not much else. Any trace of the oyster's flavor was irretrievably lost to the onslaught of eggs and tomatoes, and all that remained was the serving-dish of a shell and a squishy little nugget of anonymous sea-flesh.

My main dish was my favorite of the night: an expertly braised pork shank, sitting in a bowl full of pastina floating in a delicately sweet broth, topped with perfectly roasted carrots, celery, onions and garlic. Lisa fared not quite as well: her bucatini all'amatriciana was too clever by half. Valenti, straying from his cucina di mama formula, has deconstructed the classic amatriciana sauce, tossing his snakelike pasta in fresh tomatoes, pancetta crispies, pepperoncino flakes and chopped-up hard-boiled egg. I prefer an amatriciana that allows all the components of the sauce to come together smoothly. If I add egg at all, it's off the flame, raw, similar to a carbonara preparation, allowing the heat of the just-cooked pasta to gently coalesce the egg around the noodles and thicken the tomato sauce. It's better than cheese, better than cream, and a hell of a lot better than Valenti's bucatini. Consider the chunky confusion of 'Cesca's pasta bowl against the balanced smoothness of this amatriciana dish, from San Teodoro in Rome (just a stone's throw from the Roman Forum):

I ask you, gentle reader, which would you rather eat?

Dinner ended well though. The most endearing element of the 'Cesca experience is its amari tasting - a trendy gimmick that Batali et al. have also been trying to popularize. 'Cesca has a wide selection, and offers tastings of three for around the price of a good glass of port. Not for the uninitiated, amaro is a potent digestif -- literally, it means "bitter". But after a rich, full meal, I find that the potent aromatics of herbs and bitter fruit essences enliven the palate and revive the body -- like smelling salts after a blow to the head. This being a rarity in the still-underperforming restaurant scene of the West 70s, I might be inclined in the future to stop by 'Cesca after dining elsewhere, just to sidle up to a sleek walnut table with a glass of rosy spirits.

So what do I think of 'Cesca? Contrary to the hype, Valenti isn't turning the Upper West Side around singlehandedly. That's not really a fault; I don't think any one chef could do so. And though I find some of this chef's efforts to be confusing or simply off the mark, I have to give him full credit for trying. But 'Cesca is not the second coming, and it doesn't make my neighborhood any more of a dining destination. It's a decent neighborhood trattoria, slightly upscale, with some winners and some duds. When the hype dies down, I think it will be a perfectly pleasant place to dine, but in the meantime you won't be finding my name on the wait list.

Posted by jeremy at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

For the next few minutes, it's still Cinco de Mayo on Frost Street (link via Gothamist). Today is the only day of the year I drink tequila. I believe I drank to within a few ounces of my lifetime quota during my freshman year of college; for years I couldn't even smell the stuff without gagging. Like this lively Mexican spirit, though, I mellow with a little aging.

Everything you could ever want to know about tequila has been ably documented by Ian Chadwick. The most important points:

• To really appreciate tequila, you have to appreciate real tequila. You should avoid the Montezuma Gold variety of spirit that we used to vomit up by the quart in college. Buy tequila that is labeled "100% de Agave": this tells you it is made from the distilled spirits of the blue agave plant, with no other distillates. Anything not labeled "100% de Agave" is "Mixto", containing as little as 51% agave spirit (with the remainder made up by corn or cane spirits). You might as well buy a 100% agave tequila and mix it 50-50 with bourbon or rum.
  
• Gold does not mean "one better than silver". "Gold" tequila is usually just artificially colored with caramel to simulate the patina of wood-aging. Sometimes caramel or oak essence is also used to flavor young tequilas. If your tequila is labeled "Gold" but does not have one of the age-identifying labels listed below, you're paying extra for food coloring.
  
• 100% de Agave tequila is further classified by its age. Young distilled agave that has never touched wood is "Blanco" (white); it may be aged in stainless steel for up to 60 days. After two to twelve months aging in oak barrels, it becomes "Reposado". Past the twelve month mark, it becomes "Añejo". The benefits of aging tequila significantly longer than a year are disputed, and there are no official appellations for longer aging periods. Each level of aging has its own balance of aromas and flavors; they each have their merits and their shortcomings, but each is worth trying.
  

So, next year when Cinco de Mayo rolls around, you'll know everything you need to know to celebrate in style. ¡Viva!

Posted by jeremy at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

Lawyers get a bad rap. You've heard the jokes. Maybe you've told them. We're soulless, bloodsucking shysters who would push our own mothers into traffic for a buck. We lie. All the time. We'll lie to your face while we're picking your pockets. And then we'll bill you for it.

I don't really believe all this. After all, I'm a lawyer, and I like to think I'm a decent person. But the strangest thing happened to me today... I lost my appetite.

I didn't see something that made me sick. I didn't eat too much at lunch and not have room for dinner. I've just been under so much pressure, on so little sleep, for so many consecutive days, that I find that I don't really want to eat anything. And now I am really terrified of what I might be turning into. Is this what it means to become a lawyer? Because it feels ever so slightly like dying from the inside out.

What are we if we don't eat? If we can't taste? If we won't enjoy? Everything important in life can be found in our gastronomic experiences: simplicity, luxury, companionship, passion, pleasure and, yes, sometimes pain. Chicken soup isn't for the soul, it is the soul (but with noodles). If I have no appetite -- if I never crave and can never be sated -- what is left of me?

I think maybe all I need is a good night's sleep. But I worry. I wonder if this is a setup for some really awful punchline. Because frankly, I don't laugh at lawyer jokes as much as I used to.

Posted by jeremy at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

For those seeking some further insight into why a lawyer working 80-hour weeks would take the time to keep up a food blog, I direct you to an article in today's New York Times. I think it hits the nail rather squarely on the head. And it notes the passing of two supermarkets where my culinary adventures began, the UFM and the West Side Market in Morningside Heights, where Columbia students living in kitchen-equipped dorms were privileged to do their shopping for decades, never knowing just how good they had it.

Next time you're at the supermarket, start talking to the guy behind the fish counter, or the deli case, or the butcher display. Learn something about your food and the people who bring it to you. This is the matter that sustains your existence; take an interest in it. Share a love of it with your neighbors. Food is a miracle; it is the staff of life; it is the mortar of community. That's why I write about it, at the end of a twenty-hour day, even when I have to be back in the office four hours later. Man cannot live on bread alone.

Posted by jeremy at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Is it already the day of the Kentucky Derby? Fantastic! The perfect excuse for the most refreshing drink you can make with brown liquor: the Mint Julep. The best way to make mint julep is to brew the mint and bourbon together on the day of the Kentucky Derby one year before you intend to drink it. If you don't have that kind of foresight, pray for a cloudless day, and brew it like sun tea, then chill it in the fridge. In law school we brewed a couple handles of Jim Beam with fistfuls of mint on the tarpaper roof of our crappy apartment house, and drank it all weekend. If you have a tarpaper roof and a sun overhead, there are worse things you could do with your weekend.

Recipe: Mint Julep

Ingredients:

• 1 750 mL bottle Kentucky Bourbon
  
• 3/4 cup washed, packed fresh mint leaves
  
• 1 cup sugar
  
• 1 cup water
  
• Ice

Pour out about 3/4 cup of the bourbon. Drink it or cook with it immediately. (It helps to have friends around when you're making this.)

Stuff the mint leaves into the bottle and re-seal it. Store it in a cool place for a year, or put it out in the sun for at least an hour. Put it in the fridge to chill.

Meanwhile, dissolve the sugar in the water in a pot over medium heat to make a simple syrup. When fully dissolved, remove to a storage container and put in the fridge.

At ten minutes to post time, pour 1 part simple syrup and two parts of the mint-bourbon brew over ice. Garnish with fresh mint leaves. Drink with caution: it goes down easy but it's hella strong.

Posted by jeremy at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)