eggbeater

watermelon p o e m. by Shelly Butcher

Watermelon Grace

Crack open the green womb
juicy red fertility within
freckled by black seed.

Touch the velvet surface
Feel it ooze beneath
the pressure of eager fingertips.

Smell the faint odors
of sugar cane and pollen
of hot summer sun.

Bite the soft fruit
hear the crunchy chatter
of teeth on flesh.

Slurp sweet red blood
runs down mouth
fingers
neck.

Lick the last sticky dew drops
breathe summer breeze
Remember
how sweet, how cool.

- Shelly Butcher

(circa 1996)

Shelly's wit, words & wisdom can be found at her own blog, An Open Cupboard & examiner.com & within the Wellfed Network.

As a reminder, while I'm buried alive by opening a restaurant in NYC, there's an open call for guest authoring on eggbeater! email me directly if you've got something...

Napa Grown Organic Produce Summer 2010. In Need of Home. Now.

About two weeks ago Patrick Ridder called me, worried. He'd planted what he calls a garden but what any chef would call a small farm, and he has no one to sell its growing produce to. He got too excited, he admits, when he began buying seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds...

and now he has too much of a great thing on his hands.

Are you interested in buying any or all of it for your restaurant?

Patrick's garden sits on a dash of ground between his house on the levee, and the Napa River. About a mile south of Yountville. The land is CCOF Certified Organic, but between all y'all and me, he farms 'beyond organic,' meaning he doesn't use any nasties, not even the ones the USDA allows for Organic Certification.

His dilemma means that you, or a restaurant, chef or food professional you know, in Northern California, could buy all or most of his garden's bounty, if you act now. 

You will not see Patrick at a farmers market. You will not see a stand by the side of the road. You will not even see a sign leading to the garden, or the fig trees, the cherry orchard or the grapes. Massa Ranch is not a U Pick or an advertised farm.

But, if you want to taste his okra, his 6 kinds of tomatoes, 4 varieties of eggplant, the best, most densely flavored Black Mission Figs from the ineffable Fig Church, roast his beets, make ratatouille with his summer squashes, char his peppers with fire on the grill or braise collards or slice melon or steam Blue Lakes or just wrap your tongue around Quadrato D'Asti Rosso {pepper}, Tondo Scuro Di Piacenza {summer squash}, Thai Long Green {eggplant}, Jaune Dickfleischige {cucumber}, Canton Long greasy-Back {pole bean} and more,

contact Patrick Ridder by leaving a comment here with your contact information. Or hit the email link on his gorgeous blog Root Cap.

Your information will not be published if you leave it here. It will be passed on to Patrick directly.

I hope you take me up on my fruit and veg pimping.

Believe me when I say you will not be disappointed if you do.

Want to Cook in New York City?

The world is your oyster. Right now. As spring turns into summer. Before the holidays and after late winter's lull.

Restaurants have seasons they like to open in. They follow the moon, in a crazy sort of way.

And right now, the moon is very full, pregnant, in fact, with imminent births.

If you want to cook New York City, may I suggest you check in with Craigslist today? Whether it be in San Francisco, somewhere in the delicious deep South, or right here in the Big Apple, a city for which sleep is not needed, you might see a posting you want to answer.

 

New York is your oyster. Whether you swallow or chew, spurn or hoard, relish or retch, eat traif or not, come and get it while the gettin' is good.

{see you soon?}

The Mermaid Day Parade! CONEY ISLAND! Brooklyn, NY! Saturday June 19, 2010

if you know me, you know i adore the mermaid day parade in brooklyn.

if you really know me, you know why. 

if you've known me a long time you have seen me dress up for it at least once.

if you have no idea what i'm going on about, now even you mermaid day parade virgins can listen to the whispering words of the wild & wacky isle of coney.

if you want to come/go this year, i cannot endorse, suggest, cajole, force, beg, suggest, carry, kidnap, mention, guilt, announce, and/or tell you enough.

i can personally guarantee that   you've never seen,  whispered, sorted, bitten, felt, tasted, touched, licked, breathed, smoked, peeled, sliced, diced, sanded, snorted, cooked, eaten, plugged in, sweet nothinged, ridden, nibbled, undressed for, taken the subway to                       anything else like it!

you have my word{s}.

"Sycamore Trees" by Ricky Ian Gordon at the Signature Theater, Arlington Virginia until June 20, 2010

Just in case you live anywhere near Arlington, Virginia, USA, please consider making your way to my uncle Ricky's new play, Sycamore Trees.

Writer David Hoffman for the Fairfax Times writes about this incredible work best.

Twenty five years in the writing, almost 50 years in the living, and directed by Tina Landau, something tells me you won't be disappointed by Sycamore Trees. The only disappointment I have is I live far away.

You have about a week & a 1/2 more to go.

Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington, VA 22206 | 703-820-9771

Katmer making: video by Anissa Helou at Orkide, in Gaziantep, Turkey

Making Katmer from anissa helou on Vimeo.

Anissa Helou, a friend I was honoured enough to meet, eat with, and feed, in London is busier than most of us dream to be. Here is a short video she's made worth watching if for nothing else than to watch someone's brilliant hands handling pastry more pliable than pizza dough, as thin as strudel. And look at the color of that pistachio dust! 

The world of pastry is an endless as the hands and the cultures that dream them up! Never be limited by what merely lives in the books and kitchens of your home country. All pastry is related, bound by common history.

opening a restaurant. again.

I haven't disappeared.
but maybe I have.
it depends on how you look at it.
many people will tell you I'm more present than ever.
many of these last days have not been spent in the kitchen.
but soon that's the only place I'll be.

These days I'm shaking hands with a lot of guys who sell big machines.
They say things to me like, "Why are you being so fucking polite?! We don't trust you if you're too nice..." {Not gonna lie-- It's a strange acclamation to go from London to NYC.}

Excel has become a great friend of mine. 

I've built a database in fact.
One wouldn't think a pastry chef could do such a thing.
The database does all sorts of mathematical tricks.
And all the pages talk to each other.  
VLOOKUP and Dropdown Menus, yo.
So few restaurants, and less chefs {who are not hotel/corporate trained, which I am not} understand the power of internal, back-end organization.
The Excel document is a list of all raw product, a compilation of recipes, a break down of all product to show price per gram, a relay of price per gram embedded in each recipe to cost out each recipe, and, as we move through costing out each product, we can add these "working products" to our "list of ingredients."
So if you want to know the cost of butterscotch ice cream you take the cost of ice cream as a recipe and add to it the cost of butterscotch, a working product, by the gram amount you need.

If this sounds too nerdy for you, or if this doesn't sound like cheffing as you know it, think about it this way:  for every skill you add to your resume you become that much more valuable, can garner a higher wage and you might even be able to keep your job when the economy tanks.

This is the second restaurant database I've written, and if we all use it to its potential it will also help us with inventory, ordering, wholesale/catering, and price tracking.

Or think about it this way: It's easier to work in your business than on it.

When you think, "I want to be a chef when I grow up," remember that just being a great cook is not enough.

What else am I doing? 
Test baking,
measuring my station and the equipment I've ordered,
having lots and lots and lots of menu meetings,
talking to future staff about the possibility of working with me, with us, 
visiting the future home of the restaurant in all its stages: raw, midrare etc. {we are going to inhabit a building that basically needed to be gutted & rebuilt from the inside-out},
tracking down an ice cream machine,
attempting to navigate the farmers market and taking notes on which farmers have what produce during which weeks/months/seasons,
organizing recipes & recipe notes,
finding hard to find product through available purveyors and looking under rocks for the rest,
going on field trips to places I won't be able to once we open the doors to the public,
and spending as much time with my family and friends as I and they can and have time for.

Opening a restaurant is like nothing else. Joanne Chang of Boston's incredible, incomparible Flour bakery put it best,

"There's a lot of 'hurry up and wait.' You have all this time to organize yourself, your time and the project. But you wait. A lot. And then when the restaurant is going to open any minute you have a thousand things to do and no time to do them!"

I know you want to know more about the project. Where it is, who its with, what my menu will be like, when we'll open. I promise you'll know, as soon as I can tell. 

Until then, eggbeater is taking suggestions for posts &/or 'bids' for guest authoring. Know anyone?