Brandon Eats

Still Celebrating

Another reprint from the old version of the blog in celebration (again) of its first anniversary.  I promise, this is the final day!

I am a cookbook cook. I didn’t go to culinary school; I didn’t apprentice with a chef. In fact, I don’t, most of the time, have the confidence to just throw a few things together without measuring. I can, however, read a recipe. I can read a recipe in the same way a musician reads music--I can taste the dish in my head. This is really the only skill you need in order to cook, this ability to read with imagination.

That’s not to say that I don’t make adjustments as I go along because along with imagining a recipe, you also need to imagine improvements as well. Here’s where experience guides you, I suppose. After countless dishes and innumerable recipes tried or discarded, a sense of where a recipe might go wrong (or right) emerges. I have Christopher Kimball of Cook's Illustrated to thank for my obsession with measuring. His unrelenting exactitude and almost pathological precision in cooking produces recipe after recipe that not only reliably work but which are imbued with an air of scientific mission as well. How wonderful to be able to quantify and control the messy business of cooking! How amazing to predict a successful outcome each and every time if (and only if) Mr. Kimball’s detailed instructions are followed exactly! I am helpless in the face of such towering authority.

Yet I still stealthily make minor adjustments to the recipes I read and substitute what I have on hand for what I don’t have. Sometimes I read a recipe once and then can’t remember where I initially found it. So I recreate it as best I can and sometimes my recipe strays so far from the original once I find it again that suddenly it can be considered my original. Yet I still continue to measure (forgetting my somewhat arbitrary decision in the beginning to add a teaspoon here and a tablespoon there) and find myself now tied to a recipe that I’ve foolishly written down and therefore, must follow exactly from henceforth.

And, of course, that makes me feel like a complete nutcase.

Happy Anniversary to Brandon Eats!

Unbelievable--a whole year has passed since I began this project.  Below is a rerun of my very first post and mission statement March 30, 2005:

I love good food and I love to talk about good food. I eat out, I eat take-out--I cook for myself, my children, and my friends. Sometimes I diet, sometimes I don't, but I spend entirely too much time thinking about food when I'm not reading about it, cooking it, or, of course, eating it. I'll post my thoughts about what I'm eating, occasional recipes, and intermittent reviews of restaurants.

Little Thailand

Carytown seems to be irresistable to those who want to open Thai restaurants in Richmond.  To find out which I think is the best (disagreements welcome), see this week's Style Weekly.
 

Meyer Lemons

Ah, the disillusionment with Fresh Market is starting to set in.  Although I didn't expect an organic store as many others did (for that you'll have to wait for Whole Foods), I did want a better wine selection and organic beef.  Oh, well.

Nonetheless, Fresh Market did bring in Meyer lemons and for that I'm profoundly grateful.  Every now and then, you'll see some dessicated key limes in Ukrops but never the elusive, eagerly sought after Meyer lemon.  Sort of a cross between lemon and an orange, the Meyer is more than a sum of its parts; it elevates a dish with its sweetness while still getting the job of tartness done with panache in a way ordinary lemons can only dream about.  The Don Quixote of citrus fruit, this little lemon juices up your recipe's windmills and makes them spin.  Try them in their purest form and then squeeze the rest into a Lemon Drop--the drink, that is--to appreciate them in full.

Lemon Drops for a Lucky Two (or two for one--you decide)* revised

4 oz. vodka
1 oz. Cointreau or triple sec
juice of 2 (not one) Meyer lemons
2 t. sugar or simple sugar syrup**

Shake all the ingredients with ice and strain into martini glasses rimmed with sugar.  Drink and repeat.

*Some would argue that this is a recipe for three but it never works out that way in my house.

**Even the brain dead can make symple sugar syrup, and it keeps forever in the refrigerator.  Mix together one cup of sugar with one cup of water in a saucepan and bring to a boil.  Simmer until the sugar completely dissolves.  Cool.  Use in cocktails, iced tea, lemonade, etc., etc. The End.

Fresh Market

They're shaking in their khakis throughout Richmond, from Ellwood & Thompson Sts. all the way to Ukropsland.  The Fresh Market is here and they're already kicking some grocery ass.  Two grills cooking ribs--ribs for free as you walked in!--and a jazz band on opening day flanked the entrance of the large, gorgeously merchandized store roiling with crowds of Richmonders hungry for some of that gourmet food everyone is talking about.

The store was packed. In fact, for the first time, I saw more men in a grocery store, talking seriously with arms crossed or on cell phones, than I've ever seen on one of my bi- or tri-weekly trips to Ukrops or Kroger.  The Fresh Market top brass were there in full force, of course, but where did all the other seldom-seen men come from?  One at least came from Carytown; I saw Wade Carmichael of Ellwood Thompson buying a sandwich and cookies inside before he too started punching numbers into his cell. 

The produce (heirloom green zebra tomatoes!) and prepared food (muffaletta sandwiches!) is spectacular; the bakery extensive and the meat counter, well what can I say?  Not organic--more investigation will be needed--but 'humanely treated animals" are the watchwords here.  Butchers, however, are actually on staff to cut meat to your specifications.  The olive oil and vinegar section boasts plenty of middle of the road, moderately priced choices, but nothing really outstanding.  The cheese section is great and well-priced wine is just around the corner.  Don't expect too many stand-outs in the canned goods/dry goods section, although Coppola's (as in Francis Ford) Mammarella pasta made from antique pasta molds is intriguing.

Fresh Market instead excels in perishable goods.  Whether it's French butter or Swiss yogurt, aged beef or wild tilapia, this store has found a niche no one around here has been able so far adequately  to fill.  So get out your All-Clad, fire up the Aga and get ready to throw down some seriously good food.  Fresh Market, I predict, is here to stay.

Rowland Fine Dining

For my review of Rowland Fine Dining (in the old Stella's) on the fab new Style site, follow this link.