A Celebration of Chefs

BrisketMy friend Bobby is a really good cook. OK I know, we all have friends who are really good cooks but my friend is also really, really, REALLY brave. He doesn’t just cook for family and friends the way a lot of good cooks are happy to do, just leaving it at that. No Bobby cooks for famous food critics. Who does that? That’s like inviting Joan Didion or Richard Price to come read my stories. I’d be physically ill.

But Bobby invites Merrill Shindler, editor of the Zagat Los Angeles Survey, host of KABC’s radio show, Feed Your Face, author of several cookbooks including “American Dishes” and thousands upon thousands of restaurant reviews, and his wife over with a few other couples quite regularly. They are neighbors and as friendly neighbors they are prone to eating together. Yikes!!

Bob and his brother Peter Kaminsky, the noted food writer, are east coast guys who grew up loving to eat. Their grandparents owned and lived above a candy store in New Jersey. Bobby remembers his grandmother cooking brisket on the stove upstairs and running up and down to and from the store to brown it, with the candy store smelling like roasting meat and onions! After Peter graduated from Princeton, he used his degree to get a cabbie’s license so the brothers could drive all over Brooklyn searching for ethnic dives to eat in.

When Bobby graduated college he moved to Boston and worked at Joe’s Blues Bar as a bartender / bouncer / fill in guitar player. He’d often invite some of the out of town bands back to his place for home cooked meals. Calling food a “social lubricant” he’d get to hone his guitar skills with some of the best blues guys around while feeding them pasta with home cooked red sauce or his grandma’s brisket.

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aoc3.jpg 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. 
   
sign.jpg 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. 

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pancakes.jpgThere 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.

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homegirl.jpg A few years ago I became a head chef flunky at the Culinary Stage of the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. It was a way to keep up my prep cook skills, meet some heroes (Suzanne Goin, Lidia Bastianich, Martin Yan, Mary Sue Milliken & Susan Feniger, Govind Armstrong, Nancy Silverton) and TV star chefs (Giada DeLaurentiis, Tyler Florence, Dave Lieberman, Cat Cora). The stage’s consulting producer, Michael Weisberg, took a leap of faith and allowed me to bring along Patricia Zarate and a few of her girls from the Homegirl Cafe to assist the celebrity chefs. This will be their third year at the Culinary Stage.

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samcookingguy.jpgThere is one cooking show on television that Jeff and I enjoy watching together: Just Cook This with Sam The Cooking Guy. Actually, it's the only cooking show that we enjoy watching together. Why? Because as the name implies, it's more about Sam than the food. And that's a good thing, because unlike many t.v. personalities, Sam is funny, often irreverent, and completely laid-back. He keeps cooking real. For example, he doesn't delete mistakes from the show. As he said yesterday, "Shit happens in the kitchen, and we leave that in the show. People like that." We do, Sam.

Sam The Cooking Guy tapes his show in his own kitchen (which I can tell you is gorgeous), and prepares no-fuss meals that are big on taste. When he started it in 2001, his goal was to make cooking easy and appealing for the average home cook. So he nixed the fancy kitchen equipment and esoteric ingredients and achieved his goal -- his show has won 11 Emmys. His first cookbook Just a Bunch of Recipes was published in 2008, and he has two more coming out in 2010.

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