EGGS, Lets Start at the Beginning

Marco Pierre White says you can tell a lot about a cook just by the way they prepare an egg. When he talks about fried eggs he explains it’s more poaching in butter than it is frying. “If you can hear the egg cooking when you put it in the pan… your heat is too high.” After the whites have set carefully spoon the melted butter over the top of the egg until the tops of the white are set and voila, the perfect fried egg complete with a yolk that for all intents and purposes is its own sauce. It compliments anything it goes on from a cheeseburger to pizza even the toasted bread of a simple egg sandwich. Today I know this to be gospel yet somehow, that wasn't always the case.

I started cooking eggs not long after “The Great Pudding Incident of 80.” This cooking thing was fun and easy and hey, I even managed not to kill anybody! I made fried eggs for sandwiches that were cooked past Silly Putty stage both in texture and flavor. I couldn’t manage to flip the egg without breaking the yolk which although being fine by me, it was sacrilegious to my father.  My scrambled eggs were surprisingly good being both creamy and yet somehow fluffy. 

Then there were omelets, sadly I made my parents eat all manner of omelets not fit for human consumption. Sure there were some winners with onion, peppers and ham topped with cheese. But then there were those oregano, garlic and ginger fiascos that they somehow managed to choke down. They were overcooked, rarely folded in an omelet like manner and most definitely awful. My parents never said an ill word about any of it… and today I have them to blame for my love of cooking.

Dad’s famous egg dish was the simple fried egg. To pull this off you need a white hot cast iron skillet heated to somewhere between 1200 degrees Kelvin and the sun, a dollop of bacon grease (you mean there are other fats you can use?) and an egg. Melt the grease then drop your egg into the pan then as soon as you can grab your spatula your fried egg is done. This will give you a perfectly laced nearly burnt egg white on the bottom, on the top you get the stuff that hangs from the jowls of a St. Bernard and the yolk will be nearly as cold as it was when the egg was cracked. Dad liked to dip toast into this mess and I liked to drown mine with ketchup.

Mom’s Idea was a little different with regards to eggs and actually had the right idea in theory if not in practice. She would crack a dozen or so eggs beaten with a touch of milk and a little salt and pepper, cooked slowly in a low cast iron pan. She cooked the eggs slowly taking care to keep stirring the bottom of the pan nearly constantly making sure to hit the entire bottom in a back and forth motion like a tractor seeding a field. I suggested she turn the heat up but she wouldn’t hear of it and kept stirring gently. The only thing mom did that made them less than perfect was she cooked them a little too long.

Her hardboiled eggs were incorrect in every way imaginable in that you cover the eggs with water, boil them just shy of a decade, and take them off when there was no water left in the pan, or the egg. This would make for a Sahara dry green yolk perfect for adding to everything from salmon pea wiggle to potato salad?! My mother dearly loves adding eggs to dishes and if you turn your back long enough they’d end up in who knows what and for some reason, I still love them. Yes I love a creamy yolk as well, but I never balk at a mom’s cooked to death hardboiled egg.

Today as I start making what I now know to be a perfectly “fried” egg I realize I can learn a lot about myself just by looking at that egg “not making any noise in the pan.” I can see the evolution of me in it as a cook, not only the present successes but also what I’ve learned from my past failures. Then I smile and turn the pan up just a little and hear the egg start to spit. I grab two pieces of bread to toast and reach for the Sriracha to do an over easy egg sandwich. A little bit over cooked, a little bit under cooked  to honor the people who faced odd combinations and botulism to help me become the halfway decent cook I am today. Oh and mom, dad… thanks for not becoming physically sick from the canned tuna and macaroni omelet.

Fair Food

Last weekend I attended the 161^st annual Carhartt convention in Maine or as some folks lovingly call it, the Fryeburg Fair. Since I was a little kid I went to fairs every year and to this day Fryeburg is still my favorite. They have the most animals by far, probably enough to sink Noah's Ark. They have tons of food vendors and not just your typical New England fair favorites of Italian sausage, fried dough, French fries and cotton candy. 

At the Fryeburg Fair you can get everything from a deep fried Oreo to Thai food and darned near everything in between. I even saw a vegetable stand and talked to the woman who owned it whom I had at first dubbed “the loneliest person at the fair,” but after talking with her and upon further inspection I saw that the veggies were battered, deep fried and covered with a mayo based sauce…way to keep it healthy veggie lady!

Growing up I remember going to the Cheshire Fair in Swanzey, NH every late summer as a child. The best part was after we were done setting up our vegetables for judging on the evening before the fair started, we were allowed to ride all the rides for free. In hindsight I’m not sure going on a thirty year old tilt-a-whirl for its “shake-down” cruise was such a good idea. 

But as children are immune to such logic, and are in their own minds immortal… I caught a lucky break and fate smiled upon mine and my brothers nights of fun. I remembered going into the main building which in winter was the ice arena my brother and I played hockey in and being in awe that this would ever be a rink again, especially with all that dirt, tractors, horses and of course horse manure covering the skating surface.

I always walked through the barns to look at the animals. I took the obligatory look at the cows and horses, but as I saw them at the farm all the time I was looking for the really exotic animals like turkeys, miniature lop eared rabbits and Lucifer eyed goats. After walking around for several hours through countless piles of manure smelling of animals, hay and sawdust, it was time to walk the midway and listen to the barkers cry. 

Since I had ridden every ride I wanted for as much as I wanted to the night before the fair opened, I was more interested in the food. Walking past the pretzel, cotton candy and candied apple stands (aside from six year olds, who’s eating candied apples and why?) I made my way towards the one constant at the fair that always made it seem complete…the Italian sausage stand.

This was one of those foods my father, my brother and I would always get at the fair and to this day it isn't a fair unless I have one. Mom wasn't much of a fair person and stayed home, as this left Dad to his own devices from a culinary standpoint we always went straight for the holy grail of fair food before joining my Uncle Gene in the stands to watch the tractor pulls. The traditional sausage stand had little diner seats along the sides and big circular ropes of Italian sausage along with onions and peppers sizzling away on the flat top. I don’t recall the first time I had one but I know it had to be at the fair as we never ate it at home, and to this day every time I bite into one it reminds me of my father and the fair. 

The most exotic ethnic food we ate at home was probably kielbasa sautéed with sauerkraut, which everyone but me smothered in yellow mustard. As I wanted to be authentic (to which country Poland or Germany I had no idea) I ate mine au natural.  Then there was “Spanish rice” which had nearly zero Spanish ingredients at all unless you count tomato as Spanish. Basically it was rice with ground beef and mom’s homemade meat sauce…Olé!

Of course I would eat the obligatory fried dough which is the north’s answer to the funnel cake. French fries smothered in malt vinegar, which being Acadian French was a given as we would eat a trailer hitch if it had vinegar on it, and a kiddies pool worth of lemonade. Today walking around I’m seeing lemonade that costs as much as my first apartment. Fried Kool-Aid which in as much as I could figure was Kool-Aid dumped into “clam fry” then deep fried, and eaten by people with a horrid contempt for their health and self esteem. 

I did see some good looking food in the way of wood fired pizza which had a nice “up skirt shot” and was crispy and bubbling, and Thai food which was probably as Thai as my childhood Spanish rice was Spanish but it looked hot and tasty regardless. That being said with only one day at the Fryeburg fair, barely enough room for a quart of Mylanta and a couple food items, I’ll take the Italian sausage with onions and peppers…it always makes the fair a fair. 

No...not from this mess! Sadly it's the only flat top pic I got...*sigh*

Ate BBQ sample at Fair in Northern NH earlier in the season...what was I thinking?!

UGH! Can't I go anywhere without politics?!

WOW...FREE DIPPING SAUCE?! Must be my lucky day!

As I told my friends relax I split this one... with myself! Hellz yeah I ate it all... I ain't scared... but my aorta probably is.

Same as above... who the hell wants boneless fried chicken?!

MMMM...Fried Kool-Aid! But uh yeah, I'd definitely eat the fried pickle chipe...wonder if they came with free sauce?

I saw the "up skir" shot on the pizza but in Northern Maine where guns are carried and cops are few, I didn't feel right asking the guy to take a picture of the underside of his pizza...go figure.

Dear Serious Eats

Dear Serious Eats,

    After waking up on a Saturday you were the first thing after my morning coffee that I looked forward to. You were interesting, topical and fun. You used to not only inform me, but you also entertained me. Because you were engaging, actively participated in your own as well as other peoples stories and threads. You were wonderfully warm, personal and different from any other food site/community. 

There was always someone there to learn from or commiserate with on cooking, and even though it wasn't interactive per se it was interactive enough. Talk was topical and even if it strayed off course from time to time you would bring it back to center with a friendly post. You were different, you were unique and everybody noticed.

Things took a dramatic turn when you made a decision to make personnel changes and in one fell swoop a big piece of both your personality and charm that made the site special and welcoming were gone. 

Things were exciting for a bit as you added science with the food. This was interesting and most probably enlightening for anybody who had never read Harold McGee’s book “On Food and Cooking”. The person behind the science was fun, engaging and seemed to fit in nicely even though there was an obvious and large gap to fill. 

It wasn't long after this that things seemed to take a turn eventually becoming in my humble opinion, a downward spiral. Your staff became increasingly detached and less involved with the community only taking time to comment with other staff members threads to tell inside jokes, and cajole each other into telling even more inside jokes that made us feel more like outsiders looking in. 

I’m not sure what happened but the whole look of the site became sterile and oddly colored, ads became hair triggered and talk threads seemed to almost disappear and people became unattached. Meanwhile content became so bloated and uninteresting as to appear like overzealous children looking for their parents attention and approval. It looked like you had caught Food Network Disease or FND...you poor thing.

You have had opportunities with your social media to embrace the community and if not promote them at least follow, like or otherwise acknowledge they exist. Twitter has something called Follow Friday which is an opportunity to mention people you like, or people who patronize and support you. 

I can only surmise you either don’t like anybody or… don’t feel there is anybody worthy of your mention. I’m not convinced it’s either, but rather something even worse…you don’t know how to use social media. Your people are all very smart, super smart...hell probably even genius smart, and I know you and they have the credentials to back it up. 

Unfortunately as sometimes happens, very smart people have one inherent flaw… they are too smart. Some say “long on smarts, short on common sense.” It seems someone in your group should have noticed that social media has the word “social” in it and took that as a clue to be... social. Not a one dimensional billboard becoming so much noise in the ever noisy Twitterverse.

Now I never claimed to be a smart man, but when all you do is pedal your wares, self promote and in general ignore all but the crème de la crème of the food world, you’re not being social but rather snobbish and boring. I'm sorry I know that seems harsh. But you’re now "that person" that wants to come over and show your four hour slide show from a trip to Panga Panga, and you shush anybody that tries to ask a question.

I only go there now for the sake of one person’s musings and rarely anything else, and I hate that you've driven me to that. I’m sorry you changed for the sake of progress, money, influence or whatever it was you changed for the sake of.

I do however think you’re missing some opportunities, let me explain. 1) Improve your social media, it isn't very good and it's not social. 2) Improve your interaction with the community both in, and out of the site..If you don't have the time to talk, it means you don't have the time to listen either... I promise you there will be time to post soup dumplings tomorrow. 3) When possible try talking "with" people and not "at" them, this is called a conversation. I know it sounds cliché but people have conversations and learn from each other every day.

You can probably speak to unbelievably successful numbers and staggering growth since "The Change" and to that I'd say good for you. But just because you're successful doesn't mean you know everything. Don't stop listening and learning.

Sure you could tweet this story and get a million people to call this letter and me... bullshit. That's because you have a million followers, not friends. If you listened to, cared about, and interacted with, the people in your community...you'd have a billion friends and they'd not only follow you, but they'd care. No man is an island.

You might say it's a case of the site growing in scope and content, that people move on and find something else and that technology is ever changing, that you have added responsibilities. Those things are all valid no doubt about it, but there's one thing people always respond well to and want to treasure, hold close and not let go of... friendly personal interaction... you've lost yours, and I wish you would get it back.

Love always,

Pavlov

SAUCEAPALOOZA 2012

Looking inquisitively I asked “What is this?!” “It’s a hot pepper so you might not want to touch it… it’ll make your mouth burn.” My mother said. Saying this to a six year old is like saying oh heck you’re gonna love it, why not just grab a fork and help yourself!! So naturally I waited until my mother turned her back and began stirring the sauce…looking like a red bell pepper I took a nice sized piece and got maybe three chews in before my face felt like it burst into flames. Running through the living room past my bewildered father I ran into the bathroom and dunked my face into the sink where my face and lips remained for the better part of the next hour. This was my intro to canning and sauceapalooza.

I had always remembered my mother canning but this was the first year where I got to see it up close and until the pepper incident, very personal. Peeling tomatoes, seeding, crushing them right through to the processing when the windows were all flung opened and made our house look like a steam factory, but it prevented the kitchen ceiling from raining down drops of condensed steam and turning the floor into a slip and slide. My mom pretty much canned or froze damned near everything from our garden and from shared gardens of several aunts. Enough to fill a standalone freezer from top to bottom and a garage type metal 5 tiered rack until I was nearly a junior in high school.

Suffice it to say mom has canned or frozen quite a few things since she was a little girl at my grandmother’s side, using the old fashioned canning jars with rubber seals. From applesauce to summer squash and everything in between… but nothing was ever as much fun as spaghetti sauce, or smelled any better. By the time I actually started helping with the knife work of mincing garlic, dicing the onion, carrot, green peppers and learning how to separate the skins plus seed and dice tomatoes I was maybe eleven or twelve. 

The time seemed to fly by and at the end a sense of disappointment prevailed until we got to eat the fruit of that year’s labor. There was no comparison between spaghetti sauce to when I was helping to pick, sort and then freeze blueberries, or as I like to call it…eternal damnation. The blueberries were easy but offered no magic as a reward for preparation… only stained hands and faces.

Over the year’s mom’s canning slowed, first the green beans stopped then the pickles until my father passed. It has only been spaghetti sauce for the last four years. I always joked with mom and called it sauceapalooza, even going so far as to filming it the year before my father died… sort of an “every boring thing you ever wanted to see about canning, and then some!” 

It’s almost unwatchable as the audio is bad except for the parts when my father would come into the kitchen and being half deaf from being a tool and die maker/machinist his whole life and asking my mother the odd this or that question… then a smile and wave he’d give to the camera and out of the shot he’d go. Typical ham that he was makes the whole thing worth playing every now and again.

“So I guess that’s it.” Mom says as the final canners are wrapped and stored. I said “yeah… done for another year.” She gave me a strange look and said “no I mean that’s probably the last time I’ll be canning.” “You know I was talking about selling the house and if that happens then those canners are yours.” I guess she had told me she wanted to sell. I thought of it every now and then, but quickly set it aside. 

My parents bought the house in seventy three and it’s the only home I ever knew short of a few oddball memories of falling down stairs when I was three in Worcester, or waving down the milkman for a ten cent pint of chocolate milk in Hinsdale when I was four. I walked around the yard and thought of how the neighbors that used to stop and comment about how good the sauce smelled have all gone or have passed away. I want to be selfish and come up with reasons for her to not sell, but I know in my heart that it’s time.

Sure I can invite her to my home to do spaghetti sauce, but it’s really not the same. Until now it’s been the familiar rhythms of seasons, of enjoying each other’s company…of home. But I guess that’s what life is all about isn’t it, change. I can tell you this, if those canners are mine come next year I’ll be breaking them out more often than just for saucezpalooza. 

I see jellypalooza and picklepalooza not to mention a few others besides. Because even if I can’t have the feeling of “that” home anymore at least I’ll be able to share a few days doing something I love and enjoy. Plus I’ll be doing it with the person that not only taught me how, but made it a home for all those wonderful years. Whatta ya say mom…pickled ramps too soon for our first canning event?!

Professional Cooks and Sacrifice

Sacrifice…” Sacrifice of one's personal interests or well-being for the sake of others…” Think about this the next time you’re in a restaurant on New Year’s Eve, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, or hell even Arbor Day. I mean damn, those cooks and chefs would like to be out planting trees too! But they’re not; they’re forgoing being with their husbands, wives, children and loved ones to ensure you have a good time and great food.

  

In exchange for their sacrifice they have some of the highest incidences of alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, suicides, stress related health problems and injuries in the working world. So with these problems so prevalent in cooking… why do they do it? Why would you give up so much time with friends and family to cook with such a band of social miscreants?

Must be the money right? How does a cook become rich and successful? Well that’s an easy one; he/she quits cooking and gets a job as a hedge fund manager. Sure there’s still a high incidence of stress, alcoholism and drug issues, but at least when you die you can be buried in a Ferrari and leave a billion dollars to your cat Fluffy McWhiskers. This is something a cook could never do. 

No folks it’s not about the money and it’s not about fame…it can’t be. It has to be something deeper and more personal. Becoming a cook for the money would be akin to becoming a convict for the excellent health benefits.

Some folks say it’s because cooks don’t fit in anywhere else in the working world and it gives them a sense of anonymity while at the same time the opportunity to belong, a sense of being or purpose. I think this might hold true for a couple of percentage points of the industry as a whole but not nearly as many as some would have you believe. Cooks by their very nature are gregarious types and fiercely competitive so in theory they could fit in just about anywhere in the work field…although I wouldn’t suggest you hire them to take inventory of your liquor cabinet.

Passion? Because what’s not to love?! I mean who wouldn’t want the chance to work in front of a wall of flame on the grill station, with the instant read in your chef’s coat telling you it’s 125 degrees and your face is telling you it’s more like 200! Yes without a doubt there is passion involved but probably not to the extent you’d think. You obviously have to like what you do or you wouldn’t do it, otherwise we’d all be floating around in a pool sipping daiquiris. Sadly this floating and sipping thing doesn't pay very well and besides, the straws and umbrellas can ruin a pool filter.

The long and short of it is there is a combination of things deep down in a cooks very being that makes them do what they do. There are intangibles that can’t really be quantified as well as some things that can. I posed the question to highly acclaimed and respected Saint Louis, Missouri Chef Josh Galliano…

“Why do you do it?” His response was brilliant… “I love it, but why do I love it is a better question. I grew up with so many creative people around me. They played guitars, or painted... I didn't really feel like I had anything. Cooking is that creative outlet for me and it is even better than all those others... First, I get paid, and I'm not sure if they will get paid to paint or sculpt...  Second, instant gratification. I cannot tell you how huge that is… it's instant because you get feedback from the person eating it. Third, I have an instant rewrite if I don't think the product is good enough. I didn't waste the clay or the canvas. I wipe the plate clean and I start over.”

I asked Chef Galliano why he thought other people cooked, what with all the personal, emotional and physical sacrifice involved… why are people doing this? “I never believe the guys who say they can't do anything else. Or that they are just there for a paycheck. You can clock in and space out somewhere else for a lot less stress. It's always something more with cooking, that you are master & commander of a ship. You can be better than your "place" in the world…you get to be better… because you know how to cook that food to get the most out of it and they don't.”

So next time you're in a restaurant on Valentine’s Day and you’re playing kissy face with your soul mate or date du jour over filet mignon and lobster tails… think about that person in the kitchen helping make your dreams of getting lucky a reality. They don’t do it for the fame or the fortune, but they don’t mind a thank you once in a while either. Send a personal thank you through your server to those cooks…or better yet… tell your friends and your social media outlets how much you enjoyed their food.

In closing I asked Chef Galliano if he’d like to add something I overlooked he said… “How many chefs out there need counseling? Probably all.” HAHAHA…eh…thank you Chef… and… I’ll be over here in the corner until you’re done frenching that rack of lamb…Valium anyone?!