Red Sauce

The Old Man and Scotch on the Rocks

The lemons were as big as grapefruit. They brought down some branches of the lemon tree so low that they touched the brown, Arizona desert leaving a round, soft indent in the sand.
“Do they taste sweeter than regular lemons, more tart?” I kept asking this, incessantly. The question itself was annoying me and my eagerness and earnest tone was cloying. Oy.
“They are lemons. They taste like lemons. Lemons aren’t sweet. Are you crazy?” my dad said. And that was the obvious answer.
My dad was showing me his garden, full of lemon trees, a fig tree, a nectarine tree and a few apple trees. In a corner was a smaller garden with peppers, tomatoes and zucchini.
He took me to Mrs. White’s in Phoenix and we bonded over the little things like the crushed and whole fennel in my grandfather, his father’s, Italian sausage and then we marveled at the uptight 'tude of my body building brother.
I haven’t been around here in a while, but I am going to post a previously posted and then deleted post I wrote about my dad.
Just visited the old guy in Arizona, home of wrinkled, tanned, turqoised Midwesterners and New Yorkers who go to the land of the sun to live our their last days. I fell in love with the Southwest and with my dad all over again.
So no matter what anyone thinks of this post (which I took down after someone that I relied on at the time told me it didn’t “do it” for her) this post was all about love. So fuck the player haters and upward and onward. Here's to cheating, stealing, tanned, wrinkled dads who live their life like they know it's going to end abruptly and ugly one day.

Show and Tell, Just a Game You Play

After a harrowing day at the runners’ office, I headed downtown for some wine and some nosh. (Nosh-a horrible word)
I was meeting a fellow GPer who was very excited about going to Centovini.
As I passed through the double glass doors of the mini mall like building and parted the ridiculously thick half circle of gray curtains that proceeded the doors, I was bombarded by a short man with slicked back hair and an overzealous Italian accent who thrust a rectangular plastic card with a number on it in front of me.
What’s this?
For the umbrella, he said.
And another for the coat.
In another awkward moment that happened at lightning speed, another short man with slicked back hair grabbed my backpack as I started to disrobe of my coat and hand over the offensive umbrella.
I looked at yet another person, a woman this time, who was staring at me and I quickly said, I am just going to go to the bar to wait for my friend.
Once at the bar with wine menu in hand, my disappointment and awkwardness continued. As two women bitched about another woman, a friend, who "has simply lost it. I mean have you seen her lately?" I was actually surprised by the menu that has been applauded by so many other food writers. It was boring and obvious (obvious cheese choices, meats and the standard antipasti).
The wine choices by the glass were not all that interesting or affordable if you like the bolder reds, either. Prices by the glass in the heavier reds category start around $15.
The Italian cheeses were nothing special and the Italian sausages that our bartender convinced us to order were a bit precious and redolent of mint, of all things.
So, as we finally prepare to leave, the wrong coat is brought to me. And my umbrella is lost.
It’s just then when I thought, the image of you is what I hoped you’d be. Isn’t that always the case in life, love and precious wine bars that everyone is talking about?

I Like My Oysters With Just Lemon, Thanks

Aah, yes, blogging. I have not been so into it, lately, as you can see.
So, I am here today to tell you the obvious. Blogging will be sporadic but still here in the future.
I am just not feeling the blog lately. I am feeling dreadful and embarrassed that this has become more diary than anything else and that grosses me out, as any articulate might say.
One too many people in my life have cut me off, mid-story to tell me, “Oh, I know that already, I read it in your blog.”
My intention was not to make this a diary. But alas, intentions are meaningless sometimes.
Let me just recap some great food moments of late and then hope that when I begin working at home in my skivvies in a couple of weeks, I will have more interesting things to share than what I ate, where I ate it and what I am thinking about Mariah Carey and/or my mother that day. Oy vey…
Oysters, Crab, Aretha
Crab cake, oysters, at Grand Central Oyster Bar.
Crab cake, not freshly cooked. And oddly seemed deep fried. But nice big lumps of crab in there.
Oysters—I have decided definitively after oyster eating binges lately, my favorite oysters are Malpeques.
Spare ribs, shrimp wonton soup at N.Y. Noodle Town.
Proscuitto, Arugula pizza at Graziella’s.
On another note—the lovely Aretha (this review says she was recovering from a cold in Boston) has lost some of her Aretha range. And her show was something like a Vegas-act with old jazz standards sung in between some Aretha-classics. But she’s still the queen. Seeing her live, though, a bit sad these days.
But I have faith that she will be singing the national anthem at one of the Tigers' World Series games!!!
Go Tigers!

Sending Props to the Ghetto Chicken Shack

Once, while treading up a low hill near Lake Michigan in Chicago, a bird shat on my mother’s shoulder. We were headed up to meet some of my friends for brunch and as my mother huffed and puffed her way up this little hill, a gray blob dropped from the sky and landed on the shoulder of her St. John suit.
She looked over at her broad shoulder and, in Italian said, “la mia fortuna.”
But is there such a thing as bad luck? Or black clouds or even mercury in retrograde?
Last night, I experienced a series of bad luck moments. Or what could be construed as bad luck moments.
A behemoth of a vehicle keeps breaking down on me. And I have no control over it. My presta valves on my beloved bicycles keep breaking off, leaving me with eventual flat tires. I am constantly changing tubes.
Finally, on a bicycle ride over to see a friend and to have some much needed drinks after a series of bad luck moments throughout the day, all the songs on my ipod mysteriously vanished. No more songs on my iPod. No more soothing Aretha, crazy Mariah, depressing Smiths. Nada. Nothing.
So, after sitting through trivia night at a Brooklyn bar, I headed to Crown Chicken for an 8 piece order of chicken nuggets and fries at midnight.
Crown Chicken’s nuggets are surprisingly tasty, all white meat and all 8 of them were surprisingly void of strange cartilage and/or rough bits. And the batter was salty and sweet. The fries were thin and crisp. Thank god for the corner, greasy chicken joint in the ghetto. People do not take them seriously. But, Crown Chicken is now my go to spot for after the bar and after a series of bad luck or just down days.
Everyone else who came in while I waited for my box of nuggets ordered Gyros (pronounced Jie-Rose). So, maybe I am missing out on something else at the Crown Chicken. But I am going to stick to their specialty. Thank god for Crown Chicken.

On an unrelated note--heads up to everyone on one of my favorite enlightening time wasters--Elisabeth Vincentelli's lovely blog here.

Give Me a Donut and a Cop, Pronto!

“Can I interest you in some pastry items?”
This was the opening line of the community police meetings in Park Slope that I attended as a youngish reporter. Never failed. Once everyone was seated in their pews, a chubby cop with a tight shirt and small, fat hands would offer up the “pastry items.” And every time it made me smile because the pastry items were just a bunch of donuts in a box. Not even Dunkin Donuts. No, these were bought at the local grocery store.
The meetings were at times stultifying and revelatory. Mostly, the complaints dealt with noise. And it being Park Slope other less stultifying complaints dealt with racism and crime. And I would have to then go back to the offices of the papers I worked for, where I barely made any money and got absolutely no respect. I then stayed up late and wrote at least two stories from these meetings and eventually I got fired. But that's another story for another time.
Back to the noise...The noise complaints used to make me cringe. It’s New York City, I thought. So what if a truck rolls by once in a while and makes your brownstone shake? What do you expect? A new bar opens on your street, there will be noise, you crazy old people. Construction down the road? Live with it! Or move to the ‘burbs. Or move in with your children who you say are so wonderful. Go away.

Finding Fennel, Finding Home

"Oh my gad! Oh my gad!"
From ten feet away I could hear the familiar nasal tones of a native Chicagoan and it brought me back. Well, to be more exact, the nearly mulleted, high-browed, eyeshadowed Midwesterner brought my own nasal tones back for a bit, at least. Like déjà vu the accent just kicked in as if there was a plump, nearly purple Traverse City bing cherry pressed up against the back of my nasal passage. All I could do was chime in, “Oh my gad.” And yes, a smile and not a smirkcame from the woman. We in the Midwest know the art of self-deprecation. Oooeee, shure we do!
This leads me to sausage. There's sausage and then there's my grandfather's sausage. There's the delicate use of spice and then there's the bold use of fennel. I prefer fennel seeds in my sausage. Not that overwhelming abundance that can repulse. Nah, a refreshing handful to just lend some texture and earthiness to the pork. And my granfather’s sausage was amazing with a slightly loose grind, a sweet pork flavor (even in his hotter sausage) and a nutty note of fennel along with just the right salt and pepper. But every time he got applause for his sausage, he brushed it off. Even though he was from the old country, he adopted that Michigan self-deprecation.
It’s hard to find and it’s hard to forget.
As happens many times, when people die, so do their recipes.
So my dead grandfather took his sausage recipe with him. So there I am on a Saturday at an Italian deli in Windsor Terrace picking up subpar sausage minus fennel. But then I picked up some amazing, fluffy light freshly made cheese ravioli and truffle oil, still an obsession.
So my Saturday night, pre—Oh My Gad! dinner—consisted of subpar sausage, cheese ravioli and mushrooms in truffle oil.
A bit too hearty to be light on your feet and talking smack with a nasal-toned, highlighted, high-waisted nurse from Skokie, but you can’t always have what you want. But you can try to get close to it.
Next up--homemade sausage experimenting.

An Ode to Tokyo Rose

A while ago, maybe a couple years now, I worked on a book that involved interviewing people about how food influenced, intersected in their life. At one time, I interviewed a woman I will call Amaya for now, at Superfine in Dumbo. She grew up in Chicago and had a story about Tokyo Rose, who died today.
Here's Amaya's story.

Amaya and Tokyo Rose

*Amaya* met Tokyo Rose when she was 15. On a quiet, cool Chicago fall night, this woman who had come into her parent’s restaurant regularly and who had become friends with her family, suddenly had a story, a legendary one. But Amaya couldn’t tell anyone about it. Her father forbade that. It wasn’t until she was flipping through a Lucky Magazine when she was 30, feeling a bit lost in life, that she was able to choke out the Tokyo Rose story to an unknowing Mac Cosmetics employee.
Amaya grew up in a restaurant family. She bussed tables, cleaned the kitchen, scooped out Udon and spent a lot of time alone and with babysitters at home while her parents were working. One of her earliest memories was pushing over the plates and linens underneath the counter of her parent’s restaurant on Division Street in Chicago and making a place to lie down and sleep.
Her father used to cook for the royal family in Japan. But when he emigrated to Chicago he struggled and worked at Benihana’s and finally opened his own Japanese restaurant on Division Street and served sushi and udon before the masses caught on. The restaurant was modeled on the ramen shops in Japan, casual and packed with intensely fresh ingredients. With fresh noodles made and hung along the kitchen daily to dry, the smell of the flour burrowed into her nostrils and Amaya set off to shop with her father at the markets. She can truthfully say that she has seen a chicken run around with his neck cut off at a butcher shop in Chicago’s Southside.
She did her homework under the counter of the restaurant, slept under the counter on a heaping pile of tablecloths and watched people come in from all over the city for what was then an exotic cuisine. Her mother made sure to pack her sandwiches after she had an embarrassing moment trying to explain her bento box at a privatge school on Chicago’s North Side.
Besides packs of men and women from the Southside coming into the restaurant for chicken wings (they were barbecued and tangy, sweet and sour, crunchy—better than anything they could find on the South side) so did the city’s Japanese community.
“They were so quiet and intense,” Amaya says.
One night she was finally struck by the oddity of growing up in a restaurant.