Wanted: Columnists

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Shannon

Have you ever been browsing through PitchKnives & Butter Forks and thought to yourself, “I could do that”? Well, you probably could. In fact, now’s your chance to prove it. We are currently seeking new writers willing to commit to a regular monthly or bi-weekly column. Aspiring columnists should have a theme and an idea of how to sustain that theme over numerous posts, though topics could fall anywhere within the larger categories of food, drink, cooking or gardening. We cannot provide payment, but we do provide access to an instant audience of foodies.

If you’d like to see an excellent example of format and style, click on the Just Add Beer button to the right and check out the posts by our resident beer maven Llalan Fowler.

For application details, please contact us at submissions@pitchknives.com.

Potato Weather

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Shannon

Hark! I have come to save Europe!

It was around the same time that the wind turned nastily sharp that Jason and I decided that there weren’t enough baked potatoes in our lives. Surely, the main reason that potatoes are a central component in cold-weather cuisines is that they grow best in places with relatively cool springs and summers. But it seems to me that potatoes warm the eater, too, their starchiness bolstering us through harsh winters. I once had a history professor, an elderly, tweed-jacket-and-leather-elbow-patches sort of fellow, who passionately preached the glory of potatoes, claiming they were “the crop that saved Europe.” (His point, as I recall, had to do with the fact that all those fiefs could survive a long time on potatoes alone because of their carbohydrates and abundant vitamins, far longer than if they were eating only, say, barley.) Anyway, if they’re good enough to save Europe, they’re good enough for me.

They’re also a breeze to make: a little oil, a little salt and pepper, a couple jabs with a fork and they’re ready to go in the oven. While they bake for about an hour, you can dream up fun things to put on top, like broccoli or chili or leftover Indian takeout.

But if you want to mix it up a little, here’s a potato recipe that I always begin to crave at around this time of year. We call them Brad’s Potatoes because…well, because my cousin Brad likes them. (This is standard naming procedure in my family. We also have Bobbie Kay’s Pasta Salad, Marilyn’s Cookies, Louise’s Potato Candy, and on and on.) Believe me, they’re far tastier than French fries and maybe even a little better for you. Continue reading →

Nogging in the New Year

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Shannon

Never mind the taste; few words are so pleasing as "nog."

After days of consuming rich holiday treats, Jason and I were pretty sure we didn’t need to add to the load. Yet there was one recipe that we hadn’t gotten a chance to try over Christmas, and we couldn’t resist giving it a whirl on New Year’s Day. The New York Times had run a recipe for Nog, the Hard Way in December, and we have a known weakness for things that are a) alcoholic and b) more difficult than they really should be. And so we put the black-eyed peas on to boil and got down to the business of nogging.

The NYT recipe is broken, rather arbitrarily, into five steps, but let me assure you, there are more than five steps. In fact, reading the thing beforehand made Jason (a wee bit hungover) threaten to wave the white flag. But once we got going, it wasn’t so hard after all, and despite a small disagreement over how fast a whisk should be moving before the action can be considered whisking, it made for an excellent tag-team cooking experience. For instance, Jason could stir in the heavy cream while I was preoccupied with cursing the fact that we only had three ice cubes left in the freezer with which to create an ice-water bath for the pan. (We ended up improvising by using an ice pack.)

Sometimes, you just have to improvise.

Jason was a tad skeptical of the raw egg factor, and we’d splurged on the freshest, most pristine eggs we could find. But regardless, it was amazing to witness how thorough of a transformation the eggs go through. After all of that whisking and beating, it seemed a chemical impossibility that they would be at all slimy or unpalatable.

Would all this intrepid nog determination turn out to be worth it? Continue reading →

Grocery Shopping for Good Fortune

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Shannon

Here we are, staring down the barrel of a new year, a suspended moment that can feel both hopeful and intimidating. Luckily, our forefathers have left us traditions of “lucky food” to bolster our fortune for the coming year and to give us something to chew on besides our fingernails as we contemplate the uncertain future. And so, a rundown of some essentials for this weekend’s grocery list:

Sauerkraut: I thought everyone ate pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day, but when I Googled it to find the backstory, the first thing to pop up was an article called, “Why do Ohioans eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day?” So maybe it was just us, all along. Even so, Tuesday’s feast wouldn’t be complete without a healthy dose of the German cabbage staple. Roots of this tradition are vague, at best, though I think I was told as a child that cabbage is green and represents wealth. I also have a sneaking suspicion that all those Cleveland Germans were probably just tossing together what they had left in the pantry after Christmas. By far the most creative answer, though, was one I found on Yahoo Answers that posited that people eat pork because a pig roots forward with its nose similar to the way we forge into the new year. Even if it’s not true, I like the idea, so I’m going to get some soy sausage to complement my kraut.

Black-eyed peas: While I was munching sauerkraut in Ohio, Jason spent the New Year’s Days of his childhood eating black-eyed peas with stewed tomatoes. This is typically considered “a Southern thing,” and there’s a Civil War story that goes along with it, in which the modest pea was the only thing left in the fields after Sherman’s notorious march to the sea, and the Confederate soldiers felt lucky to have them that winter. True? Well, maybe. Continue reading →

ABCs of Baking: Cheese of Wonder, Cheese of Light

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Shannon

Nothing sounds more relaxed and delightful than a potluck (just listen to the word roll off your tongue—a combo of steaming, cozy kitchen and good fortune), but as the holiday potluck at the literacy center approached, I admit that I was feeling anxious. Looking at the list of suggested dishes, I began to suspect that I didn’t really have the same taste in food as many of the other people attending—half of the list was meat, which I don’t eat, and I wasn’t even sure what mauby was. (It’s a drink, in case you’re interested, though I still haven’t had the chance to try it.) So I took a deep breath, thought of my winter baking initiative and volunteered to bring a cake.

I have, in fact, made cakes before, but only of the packaged cake mix variety, so this seemed the perfect opportunity to expand my horizons. Because it is the season of root vegetables, I decided to dwell in the C section of the alphabet a touch longer and make a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. The recipe in Better Homes and Gardens seemed a little work intensive (three cups of finely grated carrot = almost certain thumb abrasions) but rather simple, and I had a pleasant reunion with an electric hand mixer that had been tucked away on a shelf in our kitchen for many moons. It wasn’t until the cake was in the oven that I realized I’d only put in about half of the baking powder and baking soda that the recipe called for. Here is a good baking lesson: you really should read the lettering on those measuring spoons, no matter how strongly your intuition tells you which one is a full teaspoon.

As it cooled, the cake was looking a little dense. Had it risen enough to be edible? It actually didn’t matter much, because here, dear reader, is an even more important lesson: Continue reading →

The Spruce Goose (and Other, Less Risky Infusions)

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Shannon

A few years ago, when Jason and I were trying to think of a fun theme for a holiday party, our friend Ethan told us of a longtime dream of his: to bust open a piñata full of tiny bottles of booze rather than candy. And how often, really, do you get to make someone’s dream come true? Realizing Ethan’s vision, however, put us up against a few obstacles.

The first was that the only bottles we could find that were plastic rather than glass contained vodka, and we worried that having only a single kind of alcohol would dampen the fun of the enterprise. We solved this by infusing the vodka with whole a range of ingredients (ginger, chili pepper, rosemary, etc) to give them more variety. It worked like a charm, because such a tiny amount of liquid infused very quickly. The second stumbling block was that a piñata full of bottles is very heavy indeed, and the poor thing strained and sagged under the weight so much that I was certain it was going to burst onto some unsuspecting partygoer’s head at any moment. Thankfully, it didn’t, though unleashing a piñata full of candy-colored booze on a roomful of people who’ve already been drinking for hours did its own kind of damage.

Though the piñata may have been a one-time only affair, some of the infusions were so good that we’ve made them many times since. Cinnamon is a personal favorite: a beautiful red color and, mixed with tonic, it tastes pleasantly like Big Red gum. Give it a try. This year I decided to experiment with a few other wintery flavors as well, and when I read a recent snippet in the Atlantic about someone making a cocktail syrup out of pine resin, I knew I had to try making a spruce-flavored vodka. Continue reading →

Holding Fast

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Shannon

Lunch.

At the moment of typing this, I haven’t eaten for about seventy-two hours. I actually feel a little better than at hour twenty-four, when I couldn’t read or watch TV for the fear that a character might have the audacity to eat something in front of me. But more about this later. First, I should mention why someone who loves food as much as I do would ever consider embarking on a fast.

1) Foremost was the notion that a relatively brief fast might help my turbulent stomach return to its usual steely resolve. I’m not sure why it’s been in such a huff lately, but not much seems to soothe it, and I was reminded of a friend who fasts about once a year mentioning that it helped her sort out the foods that she can’t tolerate. If you clean out your system, she said, you’ll know immediately when you start eating again if there’s something you should avoid. I liked this idea of a gastric reset button and decided that this might be a way to clear my stomach’s fog of confusion.

2) Although it’s far from a proven fact, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that fasting might benefit you in the long run. An article in Harper’s magazine explores the possibility that simply not eating for a few days might help patients undergoing anything from epilepsy to chemo. The problem is that not doing something doesn’t really benefit anyone financially, most obviously pharmaceutical companies, so fasting hasn’t received the funding for rigorous testing. At any rate, I do recall being scared a few years ago by some news article that likened burning calories to putting miles on a car—eventually, the engine, or the body, just wears out. Yikes, I thought. I eat way more than a lot of people. Maybe I should give the engine a rest for a few days.

3) There was a chance, however remote, that fasting might bring some sort of clarity and insight. People describe having this sort of experience on a fast, and I thought that perhaps I was missing something. Flaubert ate virtually nothing while writing his novels (though if you’ve ever seen his portrait, you can probably guess that he gorged himself as soon as he delivered a manuscript to the publisher). Maybe the next Madame Bovary is lurking within me, blocked until now by food. Continue reading →

Cinnamon Girl

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Shannon

Boiling some smaller pieces of the bark

“People think cinnamon, it is like a little twig, but this is not true. Do you know?”

“Sure,” I said, because I was pretty sure I knew what cinnamon looked like.

“No, you do not know,” Veronica said, sighing heavily, because she was pretty sure I didn’t.

As it turned out, she was right, but let’s back up a step or two. Veronica is one of my students at the Bedford Learning Center, a doggedly determined woman who is a few decades older than me and likes to pepper our conversations with bits of wisdom, usually about the differences between men and women. But that evening, she had turned away from gender problems in favor of the flora of her homeland, St. Lucia. A friend visiting from the island had just brought her a new supply of herbal tea-fixings, including the bark of the native cinnamon tree.

“You will see,” she said, and I did, because at our next meeting, she brought me a big Ziploc bag of leaves and nuts and the bark of what looked like a very large tree. In fact, it looked like someone had hacked off a chunk of a sizable oak tree or something and dyed it a more reddish color. It definitely did not look like what passes for cinnamon at any grocery store in America. Continue reading →

The Audacity of Restaurant-Closure Denial

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Shannon

Happier days: a photo of Wally's from their website

According to the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross outlined, I am still in the first stage: denial. I know this because when Jason told me that Wally’s Square Root Café had permanently closed, I asked him several times if he was sure and then, in my heart of hearts, decided that he must be wrong. I know this because I hopefully check their still-intact website and have several times dialed their phone number, even though it has clearly been disconnected. I know this because I can’t quite bring myself to walk by its shuttered storefront.

Wally’s was a diner near the Pratt campus in Clinton Hill. It was a little rough around the edges, with mismatched furniture and modern proverbs scrawled all over the walls and a slightly dazed-looking waitstaff and strange aging artifacts, like toy slot machines, sitting around. But I, for one, found all of this rather charming, and the food was heavenly, making Wally’s one of those neighborhood ace-in-your-pocket places that you keep at the ready for guests or for a lazy Sunday morning. The pesto-laced Green Eggs and Ham was a wonder on a plate, and they could make it vegetarian in the blink of an eye. The potatoes were crisp little nuggets of pure joy. And the Dirty Mac—I can’t even describe it for fear that I might begin to weep. It might have just been a hole in the wall, but it was my hole in the wall.

There is a particular kind of restaurant grief that overtakes me in situations like these—situations in which not just an eating establishment but an entire series of unwritten future experiences are shut down forever. I know that things change and that neighborhoods evolve. I have been guilty of rolling my eyes when Jason speaks with a kind of nostalgia about the liquor stores and fleabag hotels that have all but disappeared from our neighborhood. But I would be lying if I really care about that at the moment. What I really care about is the lemon-ginger sweet tea at Wally’s and how I will never drink it again.

I can think, really, of only one semi-comparable experience: Continue reading →

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