A Literary Feast

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Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

Music For Forks and Knives

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Food, while central to any dining experience, is not nearly the whole of it. Sure, it is a reason, a celebrity, the birthday boy at the birthday party, and one of several make-or-break factors of the evening, but there are other considerations that make our dinners a success (or a disappointment). The décor, staff, location, company, other diners/scene, silverware, and music all play an enormous role in how we perceive a given night’s culinary experience, and whether we may try to recreate it in the future. That last one – music – may seem unimportant to a lot of people (you can’t taste it and it can’t spill Bordeaux on you), which may explain the indifferent Top 40 mixes blasting a bit too loudly…

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The Sounds of Silence

Posted on September 17th, 2012

My first day on the job, when my boss handed me a pair of oversized plastic earmuffs, I didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t actually thinking much of anything at the time, mostly because it was five-thirty in the morning and I had already been up for an hour. That I had somehow managed to pilot my bike through the streets of Portland in the half-light of pre-dawn and arrived at the wharfs safely was a miracle. The asphalt was a conveyor belt, street signs and traffic lights a non-issue, and then there I was, looking down the sketchiest dock ladder ever into a waiting fiberglass skiff. Earmuffs? They somehow made sense a half hour later at our destination, a floating tin shed…

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Knobs And Dials

Posted on September 17th, 2012

This is not an article about food—not really. I’m sorry. I know that you have your expectations and I’ve shattered them and I understand completely if you never want to speak with me again. But I hope, as the years pry us further and further apart, that you’ll at least remember that this was, after all, the Music Issue. I have recently been dabbling in one of the Dark Arts, those obscure fields of human knowledge that defy rationality while offering extraordinary results to the prudent and utter disaster to the careless. No, not wine and cheese pairing, a rite so arcane and forbidding that I dare not even approach the temples in which it is practiced by well-coiffed persons wearing expensive pants. Not…

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Everything’s Conventional

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Last night’s crowd at the reunion show of Vegan Options was small but fierce. Raging early into the evening, Jeff, Brian, and I drank seven dollar beers, debated whether unicorns would eat mayo or aioli, and screamed our protest of corporate takeover and profit off human suffering. We wrapped it up around ten-thirty; we had to work in the morning, after all, and that black eye-liner is a bitch to get off. Vegan Options, active during the winter of aught nine, was born in the cubby between registers five and six at an organic grocery store somewhere in the continental United States. As cashiers, Jeff, Brian, and I bonded over our shared struggle with working for a huge, corporate box store – especially one…

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With My Mind On My Oven, And My Oven On My Mind

Posted on September 17th, 2012

When I was teaching cooking classes I’d strongly suggest that people listen to music when they cook, as one of a number of things they could do to help themselves relax in the kitchen and get themselves excited about whatever it was they were going to cook. (Relaxation and excitement being two very powerful elements in the molding of a good cook.) “Pick something related to your menu,” I’d suggest. “Flamenco for tapas, Bollywood soundtracks for Indian food, Edith Piaf for French food. This will help you set the scene for your culinary masterpiece!” (People love being told they’re going to create a masterpiece.) But it really is true – appropriate music can put you in the right mood, and in the kitchen the…

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Stone Avenue

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Boston, a decade ago. Dark, cold nights wandering the streets of Somerville, getting drunk on Guinness and scotch, trying to one-up each other to find the dankest, divey-est bar where one of us will win the party. Inevitably, though, we end up back in the boys’ kitchen in Union Square, yellow cans of Café Bustelo along the walls. We play records loud, talk louder, and never stop cooking. Classic Tina and Ike goes with beer-can chicken, “Pet Sounds” with coconut curry, early Springsteen with spinach dumplings from the hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Winter Hill, where you can see the old ladies making them in the back through an open door, standing at a long table, pinching dough between their fingers. I eat kalamata olives…

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Little Green Knife

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Stockings have always been my favorite part of Christmas. No matter what grandiose lumpy mystery package awaited me beneath the tree, the real prize that hauled me out of my bed in the pre-dawn of Christmas morning was the knitted bulky oversized sock that hung by the fireplace (with or without care). When I was younger, it was an endless stream of trinkets, (anchored down at the toe by a corpulent orange), whose number seemed to approach the infinite. How many tubes of sparkling lip balm can this stocking hold? A billion. That’s how many. When I graduated to the realm of more sedate adult gifts, including genuine enthusiasm for woolly socks, the plump, swaying, charcuterie-esque bulge of my Yuletide stocking still held sway…

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The Incredible High-End Bird Crap Scooping Jar Opener

Posted on August 16th, 2012

In the winter of 2000 A.D., I was a penniless Psychology major with aspirational living fantasies. Wrapped in a navy pea coat, I would wander the icy streets of Manhattan, gazing with lust at the brownstones of Gramercy, dreaming of the day when I would causally look through an issue of Home & Garden magazine and flippantly say, “Well doesn’t that look nice? Perhaps we’ll buy it tomorrow.” (I still dream of that day, 12 years later, even as living in Manhattan stopped being my aspirational anything.) Christmas was approaching. I thought of my mother complaining about a jar of something or other, how it was impossible to open, how if she had a jar opener, a lot of frustration might be avoided. I…

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Spoon, Man

Posted on August 16th, 2012

“Say man, where’d you get that spoon?” As much as that could be the beginning of William Burroughs book, it’s not, and I wasn’t talking about smack when I uttered it. Instead I was in the kitchen of a beautifully restored late-17th century home here in Portland (Maine!) helping my friend Chad out with a pop up dinner. The guy is easily 6’3” but this spoon, which he was using to lovingly baste duck breasts in their own fat, dwarfed even his massive paws. It had a handle like a serving spoon but the head was almost as big as a gardening trowel, with what looked like a unique depth-to-width ratio. In a single, deft little stroke — a flick of the wrist really —…

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Coffee Chronicles: When Things Go Wrong

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Tools are overrated. Human civilization, or at least human cooking (you’re reading this—don’t tell me you believe there’s a difference), began when Thogiz or maybe Dal-Tor put one thing into another thing and then consumed it. Ate it or drank it. Hot or cold, stiff or runny, tough on the teeth or slippery down the throat. Can we agree on that much? Coffee—the cornerstone of the modern world?—is little different than our troglodyte forbearers’ meal of, say, leaves and goat bits. We take seeds. We roast and grind them. We soak them in water. Sometimes we don’t really roast them. Sometimes we don’t really grind them. We soak seeds in water and then we drink it. The technology, fire and bludgeon, has been widely…

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