A Celebration of Chefs and Others

There is really nothing better than a crisp golden pancake in the morning after a long night of boozing. I woke up yesterday morning with a wicked craving for pancakes and even recall dreaming about them as I slipped into a deep slumber after bar hopping with friends. I have experimented in the past with packaged pancake mixes of various styles and flavors though nothing compares to a homemade buttermilk pancake.

The recipe I use comes courtesy of Alton Brown, the Food Network personality famous for the “Good Eats” series. I owe my fascination with all things gastronomic largely to the Food Network, one of the few channels I watched religiously growing up. While other kids were watching cartoons and local sports, I was at home in the TV room watching cooking shows.

I remember the old days before the Food Network established itself as a predominant channel where the low budget programming could only fill a six-hour slot that ran on a continuous loop throughout the day. Early Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Alton Brown were my favorites and I never missed an episode of their shows.

My twin brother’s name is Paul Newman and when we were growing up in Beverly Hills in the 1960s, because Paul had his own phone line, and because he was listed in the phone directory, we often got calls from fans thinking it was the home of the movie star. When you’re a teenager and you’re desperate for something to feel superior about, this fit the bill quite nicely.

“How could they possibly think he’d be listed?” we’d scoff. 

I never had a crush on Paul Newman, the movie star. He was no David McCallum, that’s for sure.  But I could certainly appreciate what a good actor he was. After seeing him in Slapshot, The Verdict, Absence of Malice, Sometimes A Great Notion and The Hudsucker Proxy (the funniest I’d ever seen him) I was an admirer.

I’ve had some interesting influences in my life. Two of them were goats. Both were in baseball, but in very different ways.

One was Mickey Owen, the catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1941 World Series. In Game 4, the New York Yankees were trailing by a run with two out and nobody on in the ninth inning when Tommy Henrich swung and missed for strike three. That should have ended the game, but the ball got away from Mickey, and Henrich wound up on first. The Yankees rallied to win the game, and went on to win the World Series. Despite being a four-time All-Star in his 13-year career, Mickey Owen was always remembered for his dropped third strike and was forever known as a goat. 

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.