Author Archives: Shannon

Martha’s Grub Match Pick: Lyon Hall

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Our second contender in the Washington D.C. Grub match is Martha Bowen, international relations guru and future ambassador to Indonesia. Her pick is Lyon Hall, a hotspot of homemade mustard and cured meats. Here’s more from Martha, including why you should never underestimate the power of a good bathroom:

lyon hallIf you could eat only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Tomatoes. Raw, California-fresh with just a little salt, drenched in olive oil, sidling up to some glorious cheese. I love them.

Do you have any food pet peeves?
People who won’t try new foods.

You’re headed to a deserted island to live on grass and coconut milk–what’s your last meal before you go?
Carnitas made by Vince. (Editor’s note: Vince is Martha’s significant other and possible Grub Match Secret Weapon.)

Have you ever worked at a restaurant?
Yes, several, but only in national parks – Mt. Rainier in Washington State and Denali in Alaska. So I only really understand serving to tourists, where you have to be able to talk like a park ranger while serving up ridiculous quantities of clam chowder. Continue reading →

Squirrel Stews of Our Forefathers: Oddities in Presidential Eating

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rushmore

Jefferson is thinking, "Seriously, Abe, you should check out this waffle iron I found in Holland."

Presidents’ Day is one of those holidays that I have too often let slip by without much notice, so this past week I resolved to make it a more personal experience. Given my obsessions with food, I landed on the presidential page of foodtimeline.org and quickly became entranced. Food Timeline is a dizzying array of food trivia, all compiled and maintained by a single reference librarian who, it would seem, likes to eat. Let’s go ahead and get the criticism out of the way: it is not the sexiest of websites. The whole thing is an off-putting beige color, over which is a seemingly endless scroll of text. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only target audience (other than me) is the average elementary school child saddled with an interactive social studies report. I know this because the page devoted to presidents is peppered with advice like, “Need to make something for class? How about President Taft’s beloved almond snack?” and “NOTE: boiling fat is very dangerous. Adult supervision is strongly recommended.”

Nevertheless, I find Food Timeline riveting. As might be expected given the privileged, gentlemanly upbringing of our early presidents, there are a more than a few gourmets among the bunch. Jefferson loved bringing the discoveries of his European travels home with him, making his table a cornucopia of French sauces and Dutch waffles and Italian cheeses. Chester A. Arthur brought a French chef with him to Washington. And Dolley Madison, by all accounts, could throw a seriously fab dinner party.

It isn’t that evidence of discriminating gustatory taste makes me think less of these presidents. But far more endearing, I think, are the presidential foods that are commonplace or even rather lowly. Isn’t that one of our mightiest democratic fantasies—the greatness in every man, and an everyman behind greatness? Continue reading →

Mignon’s Grub Match Pick: Bayou Bakery

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bayou bakeryGrub Match is back, and this time we’re rumbling in a new city. ‘Tis the season of Presidents Day and inaugural balls, so we’re bringing the ruckus to the nation’s capital where three feisty female contenders are ready to duke it out over which restaurant will take home the D.C. Grub Match title. First up is elementary school teacher Mignon Miller, with her favorite outpost of Big Easy flavor, Bayou Bakery. Will her midwestern sweetness and spicy taste in restaurants knock out the competition? Here’s more from Mignon:

If you could eat only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Definitely cheese, or possibly ice cream.  Or even better, cheese ice cream!

Have you ever worked at a restaurant?
I used to sling garlicky breadsticks from a basket to customers at Fazoli’s fast food Italian chain during high school.  Later, I specialized in spilling drinks on kids at their own birthday parties when I waitressed at a country club in Ohio. Continue reading →

Historic Blizzard: Dairy Queen of My Heart

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dairy queen blizzardI grew up on the edge of the Great Lakes Snow Belt, so impressive snowstorms were no rarity. Any notable storms of my childhood, however, only caused my parents and elder siblings to reminisce about THE storm, the one that had wreaked havoc in the 1970s before I was born. “Remember when Dad shoveled a tunnel through the eight feet of snow on the porch after we’d been stuck inside for three months?” they’d sigh, with nostalgia and, one hopes, some measure of exaggeration. “Now that was a real blizzard.” This weekend it seems that I narrowly missed another historic storm, New York now a slushy, melting mess while our neighbors to the north are still shoveling themselves free. Even so, it has put me in mind of another blizzard, one that I know very well.

It is my firm belief that even people who are largely devoted to healthy or carefully prepared meals have a few fast food skeletons lurking in their pantries. One of mine is the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Dairy Queen opened their first shop in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois (just a hop, skip and a jump away from where the original Ray Kroc McDonald’s would descend fifteen years later), and they first coined the term “blizzard” for their ultra-thick milkshakes. It wasn’t until 1985 that they introduced the Blizzard as we know it today—candy or other sweets crushed and mixed with soft serve ice cream into a cholesterol-laden sludge so dense that it will not slide from the cup when a Dairy Queen employee turns it upside-down. (At small outposts of the chain, they will still enact this ritual for you, unbidden). I love them.

I don’t think I have ever eaten a Blizzard without feeling slightly nauseous afterward, but that’s not important. To me, Blizzards are sacred totems of the open road.

Continue reading →

Unordinary Sweets for Your Valentine

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macarons

You're the wind in my mill, baby.

As the blizzard looms, so looms Valentine’s Day. It’s the last weekend to dream up something sweet to woo your Valentine, and people will almost certainly be rushing to snap up the famed chocolates at Jacques Torres and Kee’s. But what if you long for a more unorthodox and inventive way to express your undying love? I have some suggestions.

Papabubble, 380 Broome Street
If you’re one of those people who thinks that hard candies are only for grandparents, you’ve probably never had one flavored with pear and bergamot or raspberry and sage. In this little shop in Little Italy, hard candy is the only thing offered, but it is raised to new heights. The candymakers (all of whom have such ostentatious facial hair and earnest expressions that you’ll wonder how they made it over the bridge from Williamsburg) hang and stretch and color and mold enormous hanks of sugar as customers look on, hypnotized. Special Valentines offerings include a “heavy petting mix” (featuring faces of cute animals) and a double-ended heart lollipop.

Mille-Feuille, 552 LaGuardia Place
I went many years confusing macaroons with macarons. For anyone who has suffered from similar bafflement, the latter are the small French pastries made of meringue and almond flour that look like Day-Glo sandwich cookies. Continue reading →

Carrot Cake Breakfast Porridge

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carrot cake for breakfastThere are some food textures that I cannot abide. Enormous hunks of sun-dried tomato make me gag; the mealy, fibrous feel of some kinds of squash turns my stomach. The soggy consistency of overcooked, waterlogged rice might top both of these, however, on my personally calibrated grossness scale. Last week, when Jason got distracted with multiple other components of an ambitious dinner and let the brown rice go too long, I just couldn’t eat it. But since both of us hate wasting food, the conundrum became what to do with a giant pot of leftover rice.

Thus began my scheming for a grand resurrection of the watery grains. In the past, I’ve enjoyed both a Moosewood recipe for stovetop rice pudding and a slow cooker recipe for oatmeal that tastes like pumpkin pie, so I thought I might be able to combine them into a yummy weekend breakfast. Also, we had an abundance of carrots in the fridge after Jason found a mother lode of root vegetables at the farmers market, and when I recalled that I do now have a modicum of carrot cake experience, a plan began to take shape.

Below is the recipe that I came up with. When the rice was cooked with almond milk until it had the consistency of oatmeal, I no longer found it repulsive. And despite having the word “cake” in the name, most of the ingredients are terrifically healthy. You deserve a merit badge, however, if you manage to leave off the cream cheese (cheese of wonder!) and honey glaze that I added at the end for a boost of carrot cake flavor and a touch of decadence. Continue reading →

Popcorn, Mon Amour

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popcorn cart

"Better make that a double; I'm going to see Die Hard: With a Vengeance."

I was sitting in a darkened theatre on Saturday, munching handfuls of popcorn, when suddenly the entire tradition of movie popcorn struck me as absurd. In Brooklyn, so much as whispering through a movie would probably get me punched in the face, but I am allowed to eat the loudest, smelliest snack possible a mere two feet from another patron’s head, and no one is allowed to say anything. I think this revelation was spurred mostly by the fact that we were watching the dismal and quiet French film Amour (spoiler alert: unhappy beginning, unhappy middle, unhappy ending, followed by me extacting a sworn statement from Jason that he would never smother me with a pillow, diapers or no), but even so, I couldn’t help but consider the weirdly powerful love affair between celluloid and popcorn. After all, potato chips and corn chips and pretzels have the same salty-oily-crunch factor, and though those snacks are more popular in virtually every other venue (including the realm of house cats), cinemas are the domain of popcorn alone.

Apparently, like any number of romantic pairings, the match between popcorn and movies began because both parties were in the right place at the right time. The portable popcorn popper and the nickelodeon were bright young things together in the late 19th century, and it didn’t take long for popcorn vendors to start parking their carts outside the theatres to take advantage of the crowds. Later, the popcorn moved inside to boost theatre profits during the depression. Not even war could tear the two asunder: sugar was rationed during World War II, so candy disappeared from concession stands, but the War Department gave the official go-ahead to theatres to continue to serve popcorn. Continue reading →