Baltimore.  I love Baltimore.  It’s got that cozy, quasi-beat down feel I dig in East Coast Cities, a good smattering of galleries and museums, and an idiosyncratic funkiness that appreciates the weird.  While there for a birthday weekend earlier in the month, Shannon and I and my best friends, Rachel, Tim, and Reece went to the American Visionary Arts Museum, a place dedicated to self-trained artists, heavy on the work of mental patients, and able to encompass both this haunting applewood sculpture carved by a TB patient soon to commit suicide and a gift shop in which Reece could buy a whoopy cushion for his twin five-year-olds.

And since we like to eat—and since Tim in particular loves food more than most any other product of human civilization—restaurants factored heavily into the birthday plans.  Each establishment we patronized ended up, as if by magic, to be exactly what we needed at exactly the moments in which we patronized them.

Friday night, Rae and Tim were eager to take us to a spot called Ten Ten.  We were planning on going dancing later and Ten Ten boasts “handcrafted cocktails” that proved excellent primers for the club, as well as the reason that my memories of Ten Ten are limited primarily to them.

Pretty. Lethal.

Okay, that’s not totally accurate.  Tim’s lamb shank came on the bone and looked like both a Viking’s dinner and his mace.  And the Fried Brussels Sprouts with Chili Vinaigrette were superb.  As best as I can deduce now, they’d been steamed to the perfect shade of Late Spring Green and then pan fried briefly at very high heat, giving them those caramelized-charcoal spots that make for the best Brussels.

At the time, however, I’d had, as best as I can recall, two Electric Relaxations, composed of gin, Sloe Gin, honey, Pernod, and lime, as well as a nice glass of Talisker (identified by taste alone, I might add) before leaving the house, leading me to declare authoritatively to the table that after the steaming, the Brussels had probably been subjected to a blow torch ordinarily relegated to Crème brûlée.

Tim, wary of photo documentation, contributed only his "Hang Ten!"

After the Electric Relaxations, I also enjoyed a nice pinot noir, as well as a tawny port, the names of which I can’t get within a mile of recalling.

And then we danced.  We were the oldest people there by at least eight years.  The DJ was named Harry Hotter, and the music was ridiculous.  Shannon and Tim were cranky.  Shannon told me, “I don’t know how to dance to music like this.”  Then we discovered $5 margaritas and she learned how.

Egg Factories in Training

On Saturday morning Reece arrived from West Virginia with fresh eggs from his 14 chickens.  I scrambled them up and the yellow of their yolks was so sunny as to seem almost artificial in a world of store-bought eggs.  They were delicious.  The fact that their natural color was so extreme as to make them look almost artificial kind of captures our whole modern food world in an eggshell.

Tomorrow: Elk Burgers, Fake Chicken, Food Comas

Drink and dancing photos by Rachel Gussman Costello