5.07.2008
Recipe Testers?
Would anyone out there be willing to act as a recipe tester for my book? I've roped about eight family and friends into the gig, but I don't want to bombard them with "work." If you're willing, please leave me a comment with your email and snail mail addresses. Thanks! Jessica, SCRATCH
5.01.2008
Make Work Grant
Today I received my full grant request from Create Here! With monies allocated for a shiny new range; kitchen hardware (pots, pans, knives, shears, scale, food processor); book artwork; ingredients for testing; and podcast equipment (microphone and mixer), a published SCRATCH is one step closer to being splattered and dripped upon in kitchens across the country! The grant application process, including the interview with the jury, was a stimulating experience, and the outcome is, to say the least, encouraging! This is the first money I’ve made, directly, from creative writing, and it’s a decent chunk! To understand Create Here and its mission, check out the website, http://www.createhere.org/.
4.28.2008
Sorta-Modern Dave's Cafe
There was nothing exceptional about the meal, but the experience was truly invigorating. Only six miles from our St. Elmo home, Dave’s Modern Café is in Tiftonia, a place very few people have any reason to go, unless you’re getting on the interstate, having glass cut at the Ace Hardware, or looking for a local hotel that accepts multiple dogs.
Modern Dave’s is plywood, literally, yes, but also figuratively—a piece-meal of old retro-modern booths from some long-gone diner, a waitress who may or may not have ever travelled the ten miles to downtown, Christmas lights, and a mauve toilet circa ‘85. In spite of all this, Modern Dave’s has a feel—perhaps it’s legitimacy, perhaps it’s just the dim lighting.
Chris’s dish Pork, Turkey, and Beef Penne utilized the smoke-house meats not consumed the evening before. And its smokiness deepened the red sauce to create a different flavor entirely. But what I truly loved was the recycled concept, the owner-chef mentality of it all. The rest of the food was good, satisfactory, but the experience—and the fake raccoon made of authentic unspecified pelt—will pull me back.
A few years ago, for a lone lunch, I went to a French restaurant located in a strip mall. The owner—in her eighties and wearing Bridgette Bardot’s eyelashes—offered me melon because it was good that day; she sprinkled it with freshly-ground black pepper. She also demanded that, after my quiche, I enjoy her Chocolate-Chambord cake; I had no choice. What I didn’t eat I was instructed to take home for my husband.
No matter how shabby or ill-located, restaurants like these have a certain intimacy that speaks of a simpler mentality—the sort of mentality that Chris and I try to live by but seem to forget when we leave the house: eating what is good, in season; utilizing what’s left over; making do. And maybe the magic of these places is that they make you feel like you’re eating in even when you’re eating out.
Modern Dave’s is plywood, literally, yes, but also figuratively—a piece-meal of old retro-modern booths from some long-gone diner, a waitress who may or may not have ever travelled the ten miles to downtown, Christmas lights, and a mauve toilet circa ‘85. In spite of all this, Modern Dave’s has a feel—perhaps it’s legitimacy, perhaps it’s just the dim lighting.
Chris’s dish Pork, Turkey, and Beef Penne utilized the smoke-house meats not consumed the evening before. And its smokiness deepened the red sauce to create a different flavor entirely. But what I truly loved was the recycled concept, the owner-chef mentality of it all. The rest of the food was good, satisfactory, but the experience—and the fake raccoon made of authentic unspecified pelt—will pull me back.
A few years ago, for a lone lunch, I went to a French restaurant located in a strip mall. The owner—in her eighties and wearing Bridgette Bardot’s eyelashes—offered me melon because it was good that day; she sprinkled it with freshly-ground black pepper. She also demanded that, after my quiche, I enjoy her Chocolate-Chambord cake; I had no choice. What I didn’t eat I was instructed to take home for my husband.
No matter how shabby or ill-located, restaurants like these have a certain intimacy that speaks of a simpler mentality—the sort of mentality that Chris and I try to live by but seem to forget when we leave the house: eating what is good, in season; utilizing what’s left over; making do. And maybe the magic of these places is that they make you feel like you’re eating in even when you’re eating out.
4.04.2008
Shame Food
As I painfully admit in my SCRATCH draft, there are two particular foods I am embarrassed not to like: blue cheese and yolky eggs. My aversion to eggs is limited: I will happily mix and enjoy homemade aioli; I’m more than pleased to sneak finger-fulls of raw cookie dough; and I eat scrambled eggs—ketchup-dipped, lots of pepper—with great delight. And cheese of any sort except blue is good-grub (as are fungus foods like mushrooms and kombucha; fermented foods like sauerkraut and yogurt).
But here’s the part that stings: millions of non-foodie, taste-challenged plebians who can’t whip together a vinaigrette love these foods. I see them everywhere: ordering black-and-blue burgers for lunch; gobbling Maytag fondue with sweet potato chips at the bar; dousing their toast points and bacon in glistening yolk for brunch. Shame on me!
But there are foods I’m embarrassed to love as well—Peeps, for instance. Last week, half-price at $.49/package, I tried to hide four packages—two pucker pink, two anything-but-natural green—among my carrots, spinach, and celery and sneaked around avoiding A.) Anyone with dreadlocks B.) Those who would recognize me as the local spice artisan. Bingo! I gleefully decapitated two pink peeps as soon as I got in the car.
Peep love is simple: I do like my Peeps stale, but I never have them around long enough to get a good, chewy one going. Instead, I embrace the contrast of the neon sugar’s grit against the fluffy nothingness of peep-body. And I will not accept bunny, snowman, jack-o-lantern, or any shape other than true Peep. It’s in the way the tail curls, the i-like-my-body-when-it-is-with-your-body crease at the chin.
I’m coming to grips with my shame foods, from chicken-to-be to chicken-like-marshmallow. Share you shame foods, and we’ll offer a nice thanks-but-no-thanks together.
But here’s the part that stings: millions of non-foodie, taste-challenged plebians who can’t whip together a vinaigrette love these foods. I see them everywhere: ordering black-and-blue burgers for lunch; gobbling Maytag fondue with sweet potato chips at the bar; dousing their toast points and bacon in glistening yolk for brunch. Shame on me!
But there are foods I’m embarrassed to love as well—Peeps, for instance. Last week, half-price at $.49/package, I tried to hide four packages—two pucker pink, two anything-but-natural green—among my carrots, spinach, and celery and sneaked around avoiding A.) Anyone with dreadlocks B.) Those who would recognize me as the local spice artisan. Bingo! I gleefully decapitated two pink peeps as soon as I got in the car.
Peep love is simple: I do like my Peeps stale, but I never have them around long enough to get a good, chewy one going. Instead, I embrace the contrast of the neon sugar’s grit against the fluffy nothingness of peep-body. And I will not accept bunny, snowman, jack-o-lantern, or any shape other than true Peep. It’s in the way the tail curls, the i-like-my-body-when-it-is-with-your-body crease at the chin.
I’m coming to grips with my shame foods, from chicken-to-be to chicken-like-marshmallow. Share you shame foods, and we’ll offer a nice thanks-but-no-thanks together.
3.29.2008
Bar Life & Lobster Looping
In the past weeks, I’ve had the chance to visit my two favorite bars. Zeno’s, in State College and below street-level, is tobacco-toned, beer-rich, and faultlessly pub-like. Zeno’s makes you feel like you have something interesting to say—maybe to yourself, maybe to the forensic anthropologist beside you—or it makes you feel that you have nothing to say at all, because taking it all in seems more intelligent still.
The Flora-Bama on, you guessed it, the Florida-Alabama line is wholly other: an encampment of shacks, tents, and stages sutured together on the white Alabama sand. Bras drape the rafters, high-alcohol Bushwackers abound, and there is no reason to think about anything except the Royal Reds, the honky-tonk cover band, and the few perfect moments eked out amid the Flora-Bama’s grit and grime.
To add to the raucous perfection, the Bama has installed a new attraction: two you-catch-‘em-we-cook-‘em Lobster Zone machines, modified versions of the stuffed-animal claw game. For two bucks, you get one try to position and drop towards a tasty crustacean—some with a $10 bill rubbed-banded to one delicious claw. I chose the lobster in the front, right corner and looped him, but, sadly and somewhat expectedly, he wriggled from the giant grab.
My husband always defines his favorite bars as places where judges are sitting with janitors—at either of these, you likely to find table-fulls of wild match-ups and wild stories to boot. At the Flora-Bama don’t be shocked if the judges are the ones in bare feet!
The Flora-Bama on, you guessed it, the Florida-Alabama line is wholly other: an encampment of shacks, tents, and stages sutured together on the white Alabama sand. Bras drape the rafters, high-alcohol Bushwackers abound, and there is no reason to think about anything except the Royal Reds, the honky-tonk cover band, and the few perfect moments eked out amid the Flora-Bama’s grit and grime.
To add to the raucous perfection, the Bama has installed a new attraction: two you-catch-‘em-we-cook-‘em Lobster Zone machines, modified versions of the stuffed-animal claw game. For two bucks, you get one try to position and drop towards a tasty crustacean—some with a $10 bill rubbed-banded to one delicious claw. I chose the lobster in the front, right corner and looped him, but, sadly and somewhat expectedly, he wriggled from the giant grab.
My husband always defines his favorite bars as places where judges are sitting with janitors—at either of these, you likely to find table-fulls of wild match-ups and wild stories to boot. At the Flora-Bama don’t be shocked if the judges are the ones in bare feet!
3.05.2008
Funds for Food Writing?
As my first draft of SCRATCH is complete, I am applying for an artist’s grant from Chattanooga’s Create Here to work on its completion. I feel confident in my project and asked two great resources—my fellow-MFA, editor Danielle Ibister and my former professor, celebrated poet Julia Kasdorf—to read my manuscript and offer references for the grant application. They both agreed!
With these great reference-writers on board, I am now considering my needs in relation to the grant and find myself somehow stumped by the requested budget list. For what, specifically, am I requesting the money? What are the tools of my trade? Unlike visual artists, I don’t need a kiln, paints, or photo-processing chemicals. But I do need a new range. The stove/oven in our kitchen—my studio—is irregular, problematic. The oven is off-temperature and the burners are touchy and flicker off when asked to offer low-flame; I don’t have an age on the unit, but I would guess that it’s thirty years old and certainly not easy to construct accurate recipes by. Still, a range seems an odd artist’s request, somehow, and, even more odd, to list grocery items.
My more standard requests: I need a good printer/copier/fax unit as well as funds for accompanying food photography—juicy, hot pictures. Lastly, I have an artist in mind—a friend of my sister—who I would like to create some scratchy-cool food illustrations—my Ralph Stedman.
I am terribly optimistic regarding the grant, believing that I offer a significant and interesting project. And I certainly stand behind in my from-scratch-for-all premise. Hopefully, mid-April, I’ll get cookin’ on perfecting my recipes—on a shiny, temperature-accurate range!
With these great reference-writers on board, I am now considering my needs in relation to the grant and find myself somehow stumped by the requested budget list. For what, specifically, am I requesting the money? What are the tools of my trade? Unlike visual artists, I don’t need a kiln, paints, or photo-processing chemicals. But I do need a new range. The stove/oven in our kitchen—my studio—is irregular, problematic. The oven is off-temperature and the burners are touchy and flicker off when asked to offer low-flame; I don’t have an age on the unit, but I would guess that it’s thirty years old and certainly not easy to construct accurate recipes by. Still, a range seems an odd artist’s request, somehow, and, even more odd, to list grocery items.
My more standard requests: I need a good printer/copier/fax unit as well as funds for accompanying food photography—juicy, hot pictures. Lastly, I have an artist in mind—a friend of my sister—who I would like to create some scratchy-cool food illustrations—my Ralph Stedman.
I am terribly optimistic regarding the grant, believing that I offer a significant and interesting project. And I certainly stand behind in my from-scratch-for-all premise. Hopefully, mid-April, I’ll get cookin’ on perfecting my recipes—on a shiny, temperature-accurate range!
Shitake Success
Yesterday
We had our first growth on our shitake log! I’m thrilled! After waiting (and waiting, nine months of waiting) for a sign of life, Chris moved the log to a location where it would get more rain water. Presto! Mushrooms in March!
I love the growth of mushrooms—from stub-ling to substantial overnight. Perfect for the impatient. And one of my favorite foods to boot. Tonight, assuming their caps have popped, I will harvest the first of them and sauté them in butter.
We had our first growth on our shitake log! I’m thrilled! After waiting (and waiting, nine months of waiting) for a sign of life, Chris moved the log to a location where it would get more rain water. Presto! Mushrooms in March!
I love the growth of mushrooms—from stub-ling to substantial overnight. Perfect for the impatient. And one of my favorite foods to boot. Tonight, assuming their caps have popped, I will harvest the first of them and sauté them in butter.
Today
The caps had, indeed, popped to parasols on many of the shitakes, so I harvested them with a paring knife (is this the best means?) and proudly carried them to the cutting board in a kitchen towel. It was serene, somehow, to harvest and eat them within the same hour.
Unlike our local grocery’s shitakes which are often tough, these Chevalier shitakes were extraordinarily tender and more subtle in flavor, soft all-around. See them here in the skillet and, following, plated with our meatloaf, Dijon mashed potatoes, and peas with bacon and shallot.
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