Brandon Eats

The Pleasures of Pizza

That's a photo of a pizza I made once. I thought it was pretty good until I had the amazing good fortune to taste the real thing fresh from the wood-burning (!), backyard oven of the Backyard Boulangerie.  Authentic, wood-fired pizza is a completely different kind of experience than the pies Mary Angela's (or Piccola's or, lordy, Domino's) tosses down by the dozens (hundreds?) every day.  The BackBou's pizza has a thin, thin crust that within seconds of hitting the baking stone, and back-lit by a small but vigorous fire, puffs up dramatically and begins to turn golden.  In about 3-4 minutes, out it comes, redolent of caramelized onions and blue cheese, or marinara and basil, or pungent pesto and pine nuts or . . .whatever the vast imagination of the BackBou has come up with that night. 

Edible Garden

For my thoughts about Edible Garden way, way out in Goochland, follow this link or pick up a copy of today's Style Weekly.

Decrepit Calphalon: Old Beyond Its Years

What is happening to my Calphalon pans?  Never abused, treated gently, hung deliberately on a pot rack, they are falling apart before my very eyes.  Fortunately, they have a lifetime guarantee, and I plan on sending these frickin' ingrates back immediately.  In fact, this will be the second time I've done this and frankly, I think I'm going to head over to the hardware store and pick up another cast-iron skillet or two.  The 10-inch we've had for years and years is the only truly non-stick pan we have.  The pans above are only about five years old and look at them!  Time for the trash heap of discarded pans and broken promises.

Of course, I've been uneasily wondering about all of the Teflon (updated link) we must have been ingesting in our dimly lit old kitchen and shudder at my bravado in posts past (here's a link).  I am now truly humbled and hope the Teflon won't actually be the end of me--literally.

For those contemplating the switch to non-non-stick, here's a link to a great article on that very subject written by Marion Burros of the New York Times.

Spinach . . .

And here's a link to another take on the spinach controversy from Salon.

Sadly, No Spinach

That's lettuce up there in the photo.  The spinach controversy doesn't look like it's going to end any time soon, but for a well-informed (and different) perspective, follow this link to Chez Pim, where California farmer and guest blogger, Andy Griffin, shares his thoughts.  " Andy," writes Pim," was the original owner of Riverside Farms, a pioneer in the bagged baby greens market.  Ten years ago he sold Riverside Farms to the company which later became Natural Selections, the company at the very center of the current fiasco."

Christopher's Runaway Gourmay

The lovely Ann Chamblin and her even more adorable son.

For an exalted few with unlimited expense accounts—like Style restaurant critics—downtown is a veritable bounty of fabulous lunchtime choices of culinary delight: the food is paramount and money is no object, nor is time—but wait a minute, I think I might be confusing Gourmet magazine editor and former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl’s life with my own (a common mistake).  For me (and you too as well, no doubt), time is limited and money, well, let’s just say the only thing growing on the trees in my backyard are leaves.  And they’re beginning to fall off.

So I set out this summer to eat at all of the food carts downtown.  And discovered in doing so, Christopher's Runaway Gourmay is the only one worth bothering with. Here's a link to my review in this week's Style.