A Celebration of Chefs

erc-greenspan-70kb1.jpgI think it must be old age. Once upon a time, when a new restaurant opened, my wife, Peggy, and I were the first in line. We would fight for a reservation, make sure to try the newest new thing, and then tell everyone we knew about our latest dining adventure. We just don’t do that all that much anymore. Maybe we have gotten old.

What we like to do now is eat with friends – the chefs, owners, waiters and bartenders who we have gotten to know because we eat so often at their restaurants.

We have made many friends at restaurants over the last few years. One of our friends is Eric Greenspan, the chef and owner of The Foundry on Melrose and The Roof on Wilshire. Peggy and I met Eric when we were taking a walk on Melrose one Sunday. We saw The Foundry, which was closed at that hour, but as we were looking through the window we heard a “May I help you” boomed from up the street. It was Eric coming to start prepping for the night.

We introduced ourselves and told him we were fans of his cooking from when he was at Patina. We used to go there when it was on Melrose, and we were lucky enough to twice sit at the chef’s table, where we got to watch Eric run his kitchen. Far and away the best theater experience we have ever had.

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sylvia.jpgAt our store, The Green Spot, in Maine, we seek out locally made, unusual products like freshly gathered honey, artisan maple syrup or rare apple cider made with heirloom apples. But my favorite is a handmade butter that is such a treat melted with lobsters, slathered on the breads that we bake or the sugar-and-gold corn picked that morning.

Over the years we have had several butter makers but undeniably Sylvia Holbrook’s was the best. Sylvia had been making butter for 63 years when we found her. She lives in the small hamlet of North New Portland almost 2 hours from our store on a ramshackle farm. She is a pistol – a thin energetic women in her 80’s that has made butter every day of her 63-year career.

The thing that makes Sylvia’s butter so different from all others is that she know the importance of pasturing her cows so they have a diet of fresh grass and hay from her own fields which gives it a depth of flavor like nothing else and as Spring turns into Summer the butter takes on an intense yellow color that glows through the white parchment paper. Her butter is not just lovingly made, it is what fresh is all about!

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wagon trainFrancois Truffaut has been famously quoted about the process of making a movie being similar to a wagon train crossing the country.  You start out the journey with high hopes and the spirit of adventure and halfway through, you just want to get there alive.

That’s pretty much what my journey with cooking has been like.  I seduced my husband with duck breast and wild rice pancakes with apricot sauce.  That was nothin’.  I really loved to cook.  People were always surprised by that and I was always surprised they were surprised.  What? Women in comedy can’t cook?  Every Hungarian Jewish woman has to be a good cook. It’s biological destiny.

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pepin.jpgAlthough my commute is a short one, traffic puts me in a bad mood. I’m impatient and irritated, not qualities that make for a tranquil drive.  My commuter’s grumpiness was recently soothed by none other than Jacques Pepin himself, master chef, teacher, and internet star along with the beloved Julia Child and others.  He didn’t actually sit next to me flipping crepes in the passenger seat, but he did write the wonderful book The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), and I borrowed the audio book from the equally wonderful public library. 

Pepin does not do the narrating on the audio book himself, and I suspect his accent may have been one of the reasons.  The lack of his own voice is perhaps the only issue I have with the audiobook.  The narrator speaks with just a smidge of a French accent, so he is easy to understand, but he is not a skilled reader and sometimes lets the natural drama in some of Jacques’s stories fall flat.  If you’ve ever seen Jacques Pepin on one of his television cooking shows, you know he has personality, and his energy and humor would have made the audio version of a wonderful read soar.  Stories of childhood summers spent on farms during World War II and then years in his mother’s restaurant followed by grueling apprenticeships in classical French restaurants often made me wish my drive home was longer.

 

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shirley_temple_sm.jpg Clementine, the great west-side L.A. charcuterie has amazing candies, too...

Ok, so I love Shirley Temple.  Anyone who thinks I’m a sap can eat me.  She was a genius.  There’s never been a child performer who could do what she did.  At the age of 3, she could sing, dance and act. 

When she uh, matured, one of the many things she did was a television show called Shirley Temple’s Storybook. It ran from 1958-1960. She did all the classics and even starred in some of them. 

As young as I was, I was aware of the schism between her matronly plumpness and the tight fitting costumes she squeezed into as she appeared as The Little Mermaid among others.  But, that never diminished my love for her.

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