Some thoughts

After watching an episode of No Reservations and having researched five or six food related topics courtesy of google and wikipedia, I sit and curse myself for not being daring enough to throw this bullshit to the wind and don a chef's uniform somewhere warm and with greater culinary interest than central Connecticut. I mean, what a cool job. Sure, you have to start at the bottom of the ladder and the work is long and difficult, but hey, you get to cook great food and party with some interesting folks. I distinctly remember working at Boulder Creek in high school, where I learned to appreciate oven fired pizza and the grateful dead. For some reason, the image of Hootner and I writing the name of our favorite phish songs on the moisture soaked cling wrap that covered a stew we prepared has stuck in my head and is something that plays every time I order soup in a restaurant. He was always high as hell, but so was the rest of the kitchen staff. Bourdain himself has admitted to cooking on LSD, Cocaine and Heroin. I mean, maybe he's a little extreme, but I wouldn't even say that that type of behavior is out of the ordinary. At Fowler's, the trend continued. We all boozed on the job and coworkers often took suspicious breaks from work. Maybe we're required to wear uniforms to cover up the tattoos, hickeys and bruises. It's an interesting subculture, kept completely under wraps. You could say that a deep interest in the pleasure of food is symptomatic of a deeper draw to sensuality. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and... well, food. The scene in the Iceland episode of No Reservations where Bourdain goes out partying with all the Icelandic chefs in Reykjavik truly brought joy to my heart. There was a bar where all the food service employees in the city went to get hammered after work. Good food, good looking women and a lot of beer. What else do you need? But, its important to remember that part of being a true foodie is taking joy in what you do.

There may be hope in my desire to enter the culinary world. Michael Ruhlman, a fellow midwesterner and 1985 Duke graduate, is a successful culinary author who came from a similar background. If he can do it, so can I. I really like his blog, check it out at: http://blog.ruhlman.com/. He helped write The French Laundry cookbook with Thomas Keller as well as several other well-received culinary themed books. My entry will take some time. Right now I'm trying to figure out what to do with years of training in science and the problematic desire to help people. If medicine is the route I take, I plan to invest in restaurants as soon as the opportunity arises. Surely, there must be some way to use my training in science as a selling point in the food industry. I only need to drink enough wine to figure out how. For now, I'll focus on cooking and keeping my mind open while eating.

I've had a couple interesting culinary experiences lately: a huge pile of fruits de mer on ice at Max's oyster bar, fries at nyc's pommes frites, puttanesca and pastries in boston's north end, picking up some great basil at a farmer's market in Boston, making mac n cheese with chorizo, a huge serving of fried pork tenderloin with gravy at gray's brothers cafeteria in mooresville and breadsticks with the indy crew. Looking over that list I must say that my memories of the past month or so are tied up in those meals. Good times. I will comment on one experience, however. During a recent covert ops trip to NYC, I stopped by Pommes Frites on 2nd avenue. I saw this place on the food channel a couple weeks ago and, after my trip through europe this summer, I've been fiending for some authentic frites with european mayo. So I stopped in and was not disappointed. They had about 30 different frite sauces, including the ever elusive european style mayo. I love that shit. People always squak about how nasty it sounds to have mayo with fries. That's because fry connoisseurs aren't having them with miracle whip, dumbasses! European mayo, or simply frite sauce as they call it in Belgium, its more sweet and acidic and is delicious with fries. Pommes Frite's European Mayo was spot on and that made my day. I also had sweet mango sauce and rosemary garlic sauce. The sweet mango sauce tasted somewhat like a mangoy pimento spread, but in a good way. It was delicious. I also loved the rosemary garlic sauce. Rosemary is one my favorite spices, the name of my great aunt, and the name of Max Fisher's love in Rushmore. To me, that's reason enough to bestow that name upon an important female in my life. Ideally this would be a daughter, but as I'm not getting to that subject for about a decade and given historically my relationship with women, I should probably count on giving that name to a boat. A man can dream though. Anyway, to be very nitpicky, the fries were delicious but to be honest they weren't authentic. They were cut too thick which although it increases surface area for sauce dipping, it also changes the texture and taste of the food. To go completely overboard: the potatoes were also different. Belgian frites have a somewhat sweet taste, these potatoes had more of an earthy flavor. All in all the frites were great and I'll go back, but just watch out: they're not exact replicas. Culinary replication and Alice Waters style name dropping is a topic for another blog entry though. I'll save my tirade for later.

I will close with the reason why I love Belgian frites, or, specifically, the meal that smited me. After foolishly chasing the holy grail of beer into the deeply religious Belgian countryside on a religious holiday, I found myself stuck in the town of Poperinge on Ascension Day. Pretty much everywhere was closed except Hummelzak, a restaurant recommended by my girlfriend's and my host at the Talbot House, our inn and a World War I landmark. After watching cows for hours on the train ride to Poperinge, I decided I had to eat one of them covered in a brandy, mushroom and cream sauce. Sarah, with whom I shared this wonderful meal, had steak au poivre. With our meal we were served a large bowl of fries the way American restaurants serve bread. Accompanying the frites were ramekins of European mayo and sweetened ketchup (I think with pureed candied beets). To wash it all down we drank abbey style quadrupple ales. It was such a simple, cheap, and delicious meal. It was hearty in the way a home meal is cooked but at the same time executed with professional technique. I never really expected to eat that well in Flanders (and for that price) and that meal sort of broadsided me: I kept talking about it.. and apparently still talk about it.