Category Archives: Features

Spring Cleaning, or Landscape of Culinary Failures

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rock candy

No, I’m not really sure what I was going for here.

Last weekend, Jason and I decided to clean the apartment. We like to test the limit of MCHT (Maximum Cat Hair Threshold), and we had recently been attaining new heights of achievement on that count. Given that, I wouldn’t really describe myself as being in a sunny mood as the cleaning got underway, but things steadily worsened as proof of my poor food blogger performance was discovered behind every dust bunny.

First, scattered about the living room, there was the leaf litter of forgotten blog post ideas. I had been so enthusiastic about making my own homemade limoncello when I first picked up this recipe card months ago. Ditto on that cauliflower pasta recipe that someone sent me, and the instructions for infusing honey with…actually, I don’t know what you infuse into honey, but I do know that I haven’t done it yet. Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but by the time I unearthed an article that Jason had saved on making one’s own complex spice blends, I had serious doubts about the likelihood of a successful follow-through, especially since he’s married to me.

On to the TV room, where I found menus for pizza and Thai takeout lurking among the sofa cushions and under the DVD player. I had been looking for these! Even so, they made me feel a little dismal. I suppose my affinity for takeout is no secret, but it’s a little depressing when a whole room of your home is decorated in couch potato chic. Besides, what kind of self-respecting food fan loses the best menus?

But the worst room by far was the kitchen. Even if one was able to overlook the lurid green jar in the corner, containing my sadly unsuccessful rock candy experiment, and the proof in the refrigerator that I am woefully inept at estimating the usefulness of allspice-flavored simple syrup, there would still be the stove to consider, cloaked in stains and difficult questions. Continue reading →

The Summer’s Dirty Dozen: Healthy Food You Don’t Want to Serve Your Kids

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Every spring, just in time for summer, the Environmental Working Group, a D.C. non-prof that conducts research on public food safety, publishes lee marvinits Dirty Dozen list of produce most tainted with pesticides and other poisons.  They’ve trademarked “Dirty Dozen,” which I think is funny and makes me think of Lee Marvin, who strikes me as the kind of man who never ate a single vegetable.

I can see Lee eating an apple though, just ripping into it as a prop while reading somebody the bitterest of riot acts, and that only adds to my disappointment that apples are 2014’s most pesticide-laden fruit.  Pesticide poisoned, actually, since the primary pesticide found on 99% of the sampled apples was diphenylamine, a poison banned by the EU and for which the WHO has determined 0.02 parts per million to be the upper limit for safe ingestion by humans.

Our own EPA has designated 0.10 ppm to be the acceptable limit. Continue reading →

The (Almost) Ageless Tale of the Brooklyn Slice

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Viva-la-Pizza

Scott also holds the Guinness World Record for owning the most pizza boxes. One more reason to be jealous.

There is almost nothing better than a good slice of Brooklyn pizza—the molten cheese, the piquant sauce, the chewy crust. But I would argue that listening to Scott Wiener of Scott’s Pizza Tours talk about pizza might be even better than eating it.

During a recent lecture in the Brooklyn Collection of the public library, Scott won me over, not just because of his enthusiasm for pizza (which is considerable) but also his willingness to forego the easy route of merely touting the merits of various pizza joints and instead diving into the more complex terrain of pizza history. You should have seen the way his face lit up when he pulled up the PowerPoint slide of the preserved communal ovens from 1st century A.D. Pompeii. Or the way he elatedly traced the web of relationships that connected Lombardi’s in Little Italy to Totonno’s on Coney Island. (It’s true that I got a little lost during the part of the talk in which he discussed the physics of coal-burning ovens, but that might have been due to the monster pour of white wine a librarian had given me just prior to sitting down. Man, I love the library.)

Judging from the reaction of the crowd, I wasn’t alone in being wooed by Scott. There was an audible groan when the words “Papa John’s” were uttered, and crows of delight when he revealed a stream of research that hinted that the original Ray’s might well have been in Brooklyn, not Manhattan. I was a little concerned that one peculiar old dude might kidnap Scott just so they discuss the details of oven construction, about which the old dude seemed passionate.

The story of how Scott Wiener became the crowd-pleasing pizza maven he is today turned out to be almost as good as the lecture itself. Continue reading →

Garden of Victories

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melon seedling

Sure, you’ve heard of a victory garden, but what about garden victories? We at the blog feel like our gardening readers have gotten short shrift over the long winter months, but don’t worry; spring is officially in the air, and we want to give you a chance to brag about your mad plant skills.

So send us your best gardening victory stories. These can be brief–a couple sentences or a photo or two. For example, check out this scrappy little melon plant that sprouted on our windowsill this week. I think it’s cool that you can still see the watermelon seed whence it sprang. It’s like the chick who is still mostly inside his egg on Garfield and Friends.

Anyway, whether you’re looking for a forum in which to brag about your prize veggies (I’m looking at you, Farmer Dwight) or just particularly good at capturing the wonders of the garden in word or image (I’m looking at you, Keiko), send us your beauties, and we’ll gather and post them throughout the gardening season. And you know what they say: where there are victories, there are usually fabulous prizes. Hit us up at submissions@pitchknives.com.

Haiku Contest Winners!

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cherry blossoms

Lovely cherry blossoms at the BBG

It’s cherry blossom season here in New York, the time to sit in silence beneath a tree, observe nature, put quill to parchment and compose some traditional Japanese poetry. Or something like that. The entries to our National Poetry Month Food Haiku Contest were an artful blend of the ancient, the modern, and the kind of gross. It was no small job to judge these beauties, but we have for your enjoyment three finalists and one grand prize winner. Here in no particular order, were the Runners-Up…

Food guru and blog favorite Roger LaMarque (Brooklyn, NY) sent in this haiku (imparting some sage advice, as usual):

let me be your guide
eat pork butt and spotted dick
but avoid sweetbreads

From mountain man musician Dave Humeston (Columbus, OH) came this Appalachian Trail-inspired haiku:

stewing fiddleheads,
bring up the royal boil;
top ramen crowns out Continue reading →

Do You Like Me, Ooey-Gooey? Check Yes or No

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ample hills cookbookIt’s a little embarrassing that I’ve developed a hardcore crush on Ample Hills Creamery just as they are taking on a celebrity shine following the release of their eponymous cookbook. I would like everyone to know that I have totally liked this Brooklyn ice cream shop and their Salted Crack Caramel flavor for years at this point, the same way I liked Leonardo DiCaprio starting with his What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? days, way before everyone jumped on the Titanic bandwagon.

But there’s no denying that I have experienced a fresh rush of Ample Hills love ever since I went to an event last week at Powerhouse Books to celebrate the release of the book, and now, as happens with every good crush, I see them everywhere and find myself thinking of the texture of the St. Louis butter cake in the Ooey-Gooey flavor while at work, doodling pictures of ice cream cones in the margins of my notebooks, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations about my beloved in bars, etc. If you’ve never had it, you just have to trust me that this is sublime ice cream.

It is only fair to note that not everyone shares my unconditional excitement. Some people say it’s too sweet, some people say it’s too expensive, some people say that it rests on the laurels of a few stand-out flavors while everything else is sub-par. I understand that there might be a tiny kernel of truth at the center of each of those complaints. But this is a crush we’re talking about. So I think those people are stupid.

My concern at the moment is that this crush is almost certainly unrequited. At the Powerhouse event, the authors of the cookbook (co-owners Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna with marketing director Lauren Kaelin) asked the crowd to submit ice cream flavors inspired by books. Be still, my heart. If ever there were a contest made for me, it was this one, but I panicked and spent most of the allotted time wondering if maybe I could base an ice cream flavor on Slouching toward Bethlehem. Continue reading →

Food Haiku Contest!

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Half of National Poetry Month has already slipped by! Doesn’t it make sense to use these last two weeks of April to create something poetic and tasty? As motivation, we’re holding a food haiku contest. Send us your best food-themed haiku by Monday, April 28th. We’ll post our favorites on the blog, and the top haiku will score its author an awesome prize.

You remember how to write a haiku, don’t you? You definitely learned in second grade. Here’s an example:

food poetry

Photo from Smithsonian Magazine

This onion bagel
Spackles the hole in my heart
With its thick cream cheese.

If any brave individual wants to experiment with more complex poetic forms, we will definitely post those endeavors, as well, but for the purposes of the contest, we’re just looking for the ol’ 5-7-5. Send your entries to submissions@pitchknives.com. Please limit two haiku per contestant. Happy poem-writing, everybody!

My Beef with Culinary Prodigies

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mcgarry

Glamour shot of Flynn McGarry from the recent NYT Magazine profile

Being both a writer and a voracious eater, I work up a nerdy store of anticipation in advance of the annual food issues of The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. So there was a little twinge of disappointment in my heart when I finished the cover story from this year’s NYT Magazine offering. It’s about Flynn McGarry, a fifteen-year-old prodigy chef, who aspires to own a New York restaurant by the time he is nineteen. Am I the only one who thinks that the editorial choice to focus on this kid, above all other possible stories from the world of food, smells kind of funny? Like something just went really rotten in the crisper?

Let me be clear, before the haters get all over my case: I have never tasted anything from the kitchen of Flynn McGarry, but I have no doubt that he is very talented (and cute—he kind of has a young Harry Connick, Jr. thing going on). And I totally buy the idea of culinary prodigies being a real phenomenon; the mix of physical and conceptual skills necessary for preparing inventive haute cuisine seems similar in many ways to those celebrated in musical prodigies. And we can even leave aside the fact that every quote from his mother, Meg, made me grind my teeth in irritation, because that’s just me being a judgmental jerk.

So why do I have a bee in my bonnet about this? I think what bugs me about McGarry’s story (and maybe all child prodigies’s stories) is that it seems engineered mostly to serve adults’ delight at a high-class version of a freak show. “Hey, look, the kid who made the asparagus gelée I’m eating can’t even drive a car yet! Dance monkey dance!” It feels a little icky to me. I buy that McGarry cooks because he loves it, and it’s cool for his parents or other people in his life to encourage that love. You want to grow edible flowers and micro-lettuces in your backyard? Go for it. You want to roast a couple of goats over a fire with the owner of Alma? Knock yourself out. But why the need for an eleven-year-old to start a weekly $160-a-plate supper club patronized mostly by L.A.’s rich and famous? Continue reading →

More Gadgets from Nancy: Time Travel Edition

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Yes, dear readers, some time has passed since I last posted. There are a few reasons for this, the most excellent one being that I was visiting my parents in Florida and communing with my spirit animal, the manatee (quiet, gentle, vegetarian, spends most waking hours eating). But the blog was on my mind while I was traveling, as my mother, Nancy, introduced me to a new batch of fun kitchen gadgets.

tasting spoonA couple of these were a blast from the past, like this rad hand-carved tasting spoon from the Berea College in Kentucky. This place is worth checking out; they give scholarships in exchange for work in their crafts studio, and the students make some beautiful stuff. But back to the spoon: you use the big end to stir with, and instead of slobbering all over it with your dirty mouth, you tip it backward and the soup or sauce runs backward along the channel where you can taste it from the little spoon. Apparently these have been used in France for ages, and the ones from Berea have a nice old-fashioned feel, meaning that they make great gifts for both those with Little House on the Prairie sensibilities (me) or germophobes (you know who you are).

baker's broomAnother find from Berea was this little baker’s broom that you hang in your kitchen. “What do you sweep with it?” you may be asking. Nothing! Ha! Got you! When you bake a cake, you’re supposed to snap off one of the bristles and use it to test if the cake is done. Seriously, how did my mom know that Jason tried to use a chopstick to test banana bread last week? Anyway, she thought that this might have been an old Shaker invention, and though I couldn’t find any proof of that, I believe her, the Shakers being notorious for their furniture-making, riotous dancing and cake-testing. Continue reading →

Food News: Obama, Chicken, Crap Part II: The Shadowy East

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Two weeks ago, I noted changes to the USDA rules regarding poultry that include as a solution to hygiene issues the spraying of chemical baths in lieu of washing all the shit off your dinner.

An article on the site Nation of Change reminded me of something my man Reece, of Cluckin’ Awesome Coops, made me aware of last September: American chickens are going to China!

On one hand, I find this exciting.  All Americans should travel to the far abroad to expand

Yum yum. I found this photo with a related article at The Gaia Health Blog.

Yum yum. I found this photo with a related article at The Gaia Health Blog.

their horizons and see how their fellow creatures live.  But in this case, the chickens will already be dead, so they will have no functioning eyes to take in fellow creatures or horizons.

The gist:

  1. New rules at Obama’s USDA will allow chickens raised and slaughtered in the U.S. to be shipped to China for processing before being shipped back to your neighborhood grocery.
  2. These birds will not be labeled.  You will not be able to tell which bird was prepared according to Washington’s hygienic standards and which according to Beijing’s.
  3. The USDA will inspect birds as they come in—perhaps according to the same rules soon to govern States-side poultry plants—but will not be present in the Chinese facilities.

The specifics: Continue reading →