Being a Wine Afficianado and not really a Foodie, on June 1st I attended my first
gourmet eating event Share the Strength’s Taste of the Nation in Culver
City, California, which has apparently become a food-lover’s mecca over
the last few years. This event occurs over 55 times a year in locations
across the U.S., gathering the top chefs in each place to showcase the best
the host city has to offer. At this incarnation, the group included
Brent Berkowitz (BOA), Tom Colicchio (Craft), Evan Kleiman (Angeli
Caffe), Mary Sue Milliken (Border Grill), David Myers (Sona), Remi
Lauvand (Citrus) and chefs from about 25 other leading restaurants on
the L.A. scene.
None of the restaurants were familiar to me because I choose my dining
experiences on cost (under $40 per person), convenience (can’t be more
than 2-3 miles away) and what’s on the wine list. If I could get
protein from Pinot Noir I would never eat again. Needless to
say, I was way out of my element. Thankfully, I went with friends who
are Food Network junkies and knew their way around a food festival.
A Celebration of Chefs and Others
A Celebration of Chefs
Bonded By Foods
My daughter has the kind of relationship with her grandmother that I envy. I have only one memory of my maternal grandmother; she’s lying in a hospital looking small and old offering me Schrafft’s sourballs out of their clear glass jar. At 55, after birthing 13 children, she died of breast cancer. My paternal grandmother lived with us for a year when I was a girl so I have more memories of her. In each one she is wearing black from head to toe and in all of them, clutching her rosary beads.
Besides the black outfit and the constant Hail Mary’s, I remember my mother describing her as “straight off the boat.” (From Ireland) I also remember the nasty “game” my sisters and I played on her the year she lived with us. We would steal her eyeglasses, hide them and then collect a dollar from her for finding them. That’s it, my pocket full of grandma memories.
My daughter, Siena, though, has a grandmother who, at 93, is very much alive and kicking…and getting awards! Lucky girl, not everyone gets to have the famous recipient of the James Beard Lifetime Achievement award, Cecilia Chiang, for a granny. More of a rock star, Cecilia was never the kind of grandmother who knit booties or baked cookies. She gave gifts of green jade and cooked dim sum!
And I was never the daughter-in-law she could relate to. Back tracking a bit here let me say I’ve had three mother-in-laws and all three have been pretty much the same person only with different cultural backgrounds. A coincidence? In therapy it’s called a pattern!
La Grande Bouffe
Suzanne Goin, the uber-talented celebrity chef of Lucques and A.O.C.
Wine Bar fame, was rumored to be the front runner for the
2005 James Beard Chef-of-the-Year award, and as far as I was concerned,
she could just skip the swim suit competition and pick up her gold
toque and tongs. Because praise the lord and pass the friggin’ salt
cod, if food could cure cancer, it would be this food. May The God of
Good Eatin’ please keep Suzanne Goin’s hands hale, hearty, and forever
heating up the small plates.
Having earlier experienced both the exquisite pleasure and excruciating
pain that comes from washing down four or five pounds of Chicken Liver
pate with fifteen dollar glasses of 2001 Chateauneuf du Pape, I was
careful to prepare my sensitive digestive tract by fasting for
practically an entire half-day on Fiji Natural Artisan water, plus a
supplemental half-inch rind of smoked salami that I discovered under a
plastic tankard of Barefoot Contessa Moussaka that I accidentally made
five weeks ago in a bizarre attack of culinary industry. As a note, I
have a firm policy of never throwing away any left-over that originally
took more than sixty minutes to prepare, unless it starts to stink
worse than my daughter’s feet did after two weeks at Catalina Camp,
where filth is a fashion statement.
The Bottle Caps of Camelot
In 1944, Ella Mae Morse had a hit single that began:
Milkman, keep those bottles quiet
Can’t use that jive on my milk diet
That was before my time, but in the ’50s and ’60s the milkman came to our house three times a week, leaving bottles of milk on the back stoop and taking away the empties. The glass bottles would clink in the milkman’s wire basket – a gentle sound I took as a music cue to start my homework.
The Pusher Man
The other day, my daughter Hannah and I stopped by Surfas. It always
surprises me when she wants to go there, since their prepared food is,
lets just say..um..esoteric. She ordered the 72 layer biscuit with ham
and cheese and drank a Bubble Up. Oh to be 13, 5’5” and weigh 98 lbs.
After that, as we crossed over into the store, a fellow cradling a
basket of hot baguettes narrowly missed running into me as he made his
way to his station or should I say ‘kingdom’, because this guy rules!
Hannah and I watched him set up the baguettes and tend to a customer at the newly established Cheese Bar. If you haven’t been to Surfas lately, there have been some delightful additions to the whole experience.
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