Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Courting Drinkers

I was slightly perplexed by the results of the Yadkin County vote, reported in the Sept. 10 Journal. Voters there rejected proposals to allow mixed beverage sales, beer sales and liquor stores.

The perplexing part is that Yadkinville—which in case you don’t know is in Yadkin County—had previously voted to allow liquor stores and beer and mixed-beverage sales. Also, the entire county had previously voted to allow wine sales, a vote of support to area wineries.

Now, I know these referendums got on the ballot because supporters want the economic development that comes from chain restaurants, etc. when they can get full ABC permits and basically have the freedom to run their business the way they see fit.

I understand that, and I don’t disagree with it.

The weird part is that anybody interested in economic development—or getting a drink—simply can flock to Yadkinville (or to nearby Elkin, in Surry County).

It’s seems either admirable or silly for towns like Jonesville to resist alcohol sales when the alcohol can be had just a few miles away. What am I missing here?

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

When Bad Service Goes Too Good

Perhaps it was extremely low blood sugar, on top of a cocktail-hour strong margarita at home. About two weeks ago, my senses left me - and I nearly dragged the Dinner Beau to a place we don’t frequent on our own time and dime, especially on a Friday night - a corporate, chain, very commercial restaurant on Hanes Mall Blvd.

See, when I reviewed Firebirds back earlier this year, I was unexpectedly taken with their salads. Huge and crisp, and served on snazzy, sleek white rectangular plates, I loved the jicama. I loved the light cilantro and lime vinaigrette, the way it lightly but persistently coated each leaf.

When Firebirds first opened, it was jammed tight. By now things have settled down and you can get a table right away at 9 p.m. on a Friday night - or at least we could on this night.

What proved harder was getting a waiter. Well, perhaps getting him, and then keeping him. We saw him once - he might have mumbled something about getting water - and then he went MIA for probably 30 minutes.

Now, I hate being jumped all over as soon as I get a table in a restaurant, but I do think there’s a certain amount of solicitation that good servers should do at the beginning of a meal (for one, give customers a chance to actually look at the wine list before they sit down).

Corporate chains are uncanny in their ability to train wait staff to conform to a certain company line (when your server asks you if “everything is delicious” as they nod their head, don’t you think they are trying to encourage a positive answer?). Apparently they do some similar training for emergency situations when they’ve been bad, too. My husband spotted our server when he had his aha moment, as in “Aha, I completely forgot about those people.“ Suddenly he couldn’t do enough for us. He offered a free appetizer, which was unfortunately all we were ordering on top of the salad.

“Another drink? Everything’s on the house now,“ he grinned, looking at us sideways and puncuating it with a thumbs up, like a politician hungry for our votes on Election Day. Then the bill came - $0.00, circled in dark ink.

By now, we were squirming in our seats. Maybe other people would have been better at exploiting the situation, but I just felt gross, like I was on a bad date with an over-eager puppy. A slobbery puppy.

A simple apology and perhaps taking one thing off the bill would have worked. And we wouldn’t have been so eager to leave. We might have even stayed around for one more drink.

I have to add, I seriously doubt I was recognized. I don’t exactly frequent Firebirds and they didn’t get a chance to see my debit card.

Sadly, the salads at Firebirds appear to have taken a nosedive. Everything that was supposed to be crisp and crunchy on our plate had reached a soggy state by the time we got it. Then again, maybe it had something to do with the waiter.

Friday, September 05, 2008

Of Corn and Barbecue

Back in July, I wrote a column about corn, in which I listed a lot of ways to use leftover cooked corn sheared off the cob.

Well, I just found another way.

Pulling leftovers out of the fridge this week, I found some corn, a piece of barbecue chicken, and some cut ends of red and green bell peppers.

At first, I thought I’d toss the corn with the peppers and add some chopped onion and a light vinaigrette. In other words, I’d make a salad to serve alongside the piece of chicken.

Then I thought, “Why dirty two dishes? Why not just throw cut-up pieces of the chicken into the corn salad?”

I also had a couple of tablespoons of the sauce that I had put on the chicken. I hated the idea of throwing it out.  “What if,” I thought, “I throw in the sauce, too, and use it in place of the dressing?”

Well, even I had reservations about this. Frankly, I was afraid that the barbecue sauce would overwhelm everything.

It turns out that this actually works, provided you go easy on the barbecue sauce. I’d start with no more than 2 tablespoons of sauce to 1 cup of veggies plus ½ cup of chopped chicken. The raw crunchy vegetables — the bell peppers and red onion — help balance the intensity of the sauce.

My sauce was only slightly sweet, and fairly tangy. If you happen to have very sweet sauce, you probably will want to mix in a little vinegar or lemon juice to give it more of the tang associated with salad dressings.

So if you love barbecued chicken and corn, and you won’t mind the funny looks people will throw at you, give this a try.

Friday, August 29, 2008

A Sour View of Sweets

In case you missed it, Krispy Kreme got ragged on by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine earlier this month.

The PCRM’s ostensive mission is to promote preventive medicine. That pushes it o a role as a watchdog of nutrition policy, and the group typically has a lot to say about the food business in general.

A lot of people don’t like the PCRM. In fact, its members often are cast as the loud, annoying protesters making a stink outside the auditorium. Still, they have a role to play. In short, that role is just part of the checks and balances of a capitalist democratic society.

So I don’t quibble with PCRM’s report, which highlights the “five most fattening frozen drinks.”

In fact, I would argue that people need to know who makes the most fattening, the highest-calorie and the least nutritious foods.

Still, the report did make me wonder about how our society views food. And because of PCRM’s attention to government policy, I’m also wondering how much the government will end up reaching into our kitchens (kind of like the government telling you what you can or can’t do in the bedroom).

Is anybody, especially us folks in Winston-Salem, surprised that Krispy Kreme sells a fattening frozen drink?

It’s a doughnut shop, after all!

If any place should sell fattening frozen drinks, it seems that a doughnut shop is a good place for it.

Now it might be a leap to suggest that society as a whole is outraged by the idea of fattening frozen drinks.

But I do have to wonder if Krispy Kreme’s troubles in the last couple of years are partly related to the possibility that people are paying attention to nutrition and to what they eat.

Will we see a day, in my lifetime or after, where no one eats cake, doughnuts or ice cream?

You can read about the report at http://www.pcrm.org.

For the record, here are what the report called the five most fattening drinks:
1. Robeks P-Nut Power Shake: 1,125 calories, 48 g fat, 99 g sugar.
2. Krispy Kreme Berries & Kreme Chiller: 960 calories, 40 g fat, 115 g sugar.
3. Dunkin’ Donuts Strawberry Banana Smoothie: 700 calories, 40 g, 132 g sugar.
4. Starbucks Mint Mocha Chip Frappiccino: 590 calories, 22 g fat, 79 g sugar.
5. Steak ‘n Shake: Strawberry Breakfast Fruit Smoothies: 548 calories, 11 g fat, 83 g sugar.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Off the Menu

There’s nothing easy or glamorous about working in restaurants, but sometimes, there are unexpected perks.

Take staff meals. They’re the meals restaurants offer to their workers before, or sometimes after, their shift, fuel for the work ahead, or a pat on the back for another night on their feet. Often, staff meals are very different from the food the restaurant cooks for its customers. Staff meals are family food, pure and simple.

The September issue of Bon Appétit magazine reminded me of staff meals. The issue was the magazine’s annual restaurant issue, and it included some fun articles. There was a story about cooking fried chicken with the revered golden boy restaurateur Thomas Keller, an article on female chefs, and a collection of staff meal recipes taken from fine-dining restaurants around the country.

I was curious what Winston-Salem restaurant staff might be eating after or before hours, so I e-mailed Chris Fulk, the owner of Christopher’s on Brookstown Ave. He serves a regular staff meal after the restaurant closes, feeding his staff with a simple pasta dish, or leftovers. As a treat, he says he’ll make some things off the menu for the staff, like lobster mac and cheese or grill a few rib-eyes, then serve them with mashed potatoes and vegetables.

“A recent staff meal was angel hair pasta with zucchini, arugula, and capers in a lemon dill cream sauce,“ Fulk wrote. “I know many restaurants do staff meal at the beginning of the shift but we have always done it at the end. I don’t know why we do it at the end. Maybe it is a kind of thank you for their work that night or maybe it is a type of benefit, since being a small independent business I can’t afford benefits like health insurance.

“Sometimes if it has been a really hectic, busy night and I’m tired of cooking, I will actually have pizza delivered,“ he added. Fair enough. That’s what people do at home when the going gets rough.

All this staff meal talk also reminded me of a great recipe in one of my cookbooks called, amazingly, Staff Meals from Chanterelle. Chanterelle is a well-known New York restaurant, and its chef, David Waltuck, apparently feeds his employees really well. Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic is nothing new, but I’ve been using this recipe since dinner parties in college. It can feed a lot of people, and leaving them full and happy - and that’s what staff meals are for. I want to eat it now - it’s perfect food for a rainy day.

Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic
adapted from Staff Meals at Chanterelle

serves 8 to 10 - you can easily make this recipe with just one bird, which is what I do.

2 chickens (3 to 3 1/2 pounds each)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste (about 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper for each chicken)
6 heads garlic, peeled
2 cups dry white wine
2 cups chicken stock
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces

Preheat oven to 450F.

Rinse the chickens, inside and out, under cold running water, removing any excess fat. Pat dry with paper towels.

Rub the chickens all over with the fat or butter and sprinkle inside and out with salt and pepper. Place the bird in a flameproof roasting pan that can hold them with a little room to spare. Roast for 30 minutes, basting from time to time with pan drippings.

Add the garlic to the roasting pan, then reduce the oven temperature to 400F and continue roasting for 15 to 20 minutes more, basting and stirring up the garlic cloves occasionally. Add the wine to the roasting pan and continue roasting the chickens about 15 to 20 minutes more until they’re just done (prick a thigh with a fork, and clear juices will run out if the bird’s done). Transfer the chickens to a platter and keep warm by covering them loosely with aluminum foil.

To make the sauce, put the roasting pan containing the garlic and the cooking liquid on top of the stove over two burners (but make sure you have a pan that will allow you to do this - I wouldn’t do it with a Pyrex pan, for example - it could crack and make things exciting, er, dangerous). Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil over medium heat, scraping the delicious browned bits off the bottom of the pan. Cook until the liquid is reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Add the lemon juice and swirl in the butter until melted and incorporated. The sauce should thicken enough to coast the back of a spoon. Taste it, and add more lemon juice if you wish. Remove from heat and season to taste with salt and pepper.

To serve, carve the chicken and pour the sauce and garlic cloves over it. Great with a great salad, and some crusty bread (trying smearing the garlic cloves on it, like butter).

Friday, August 22, 2008

All A-Boil

In my Notes from the Beach earlier this week, I mentioned making a seafood boil. In this case, it was a shrimp boil, with superfresh local shrimp at the coast.

Boy, was it good.

I wrote about this in the Winston-Salem Journal last year. A shrimp or seafood boil has become a tradition of my family beach vacations.

You may know this dish as Frogmore stew. Basically, it’s seafood, potatoes, corn and sausage boiled all in one pot. It’s messy finger-eating food best suited to outdoor eating, but it’s a fine summer feast if there ever was one.

I complicate the dish a bit, in that I like to make a shrimp broth before I actually start cooking the main ingredients. I do this whenever I have head-on shrimp, as I did last week, because the shrimp heads contain a wealth of flavor.

A good rule of thumb is that 1 gallon of water, 4 tablespoons of seasoning, 1 to 2 pounds of smoked sausage, 8 to 12 new potatoes, 6 ears of corn and 2 pounds of shrimp will feed four people.

Here’s how I make it.

Michael’s Shrimp Boil
1 gallon water
2 large onions, cut into wedges
4 tablespoons Old Bay or similar seasoning
Heads from 2 pounds shrimp
2 tablespoons salt
8 to 12 medium red potatoes, scrubbed
1 to 2 pounds smoked sausage, cut into large chunks, 2 to 3 inches long
6 ears fresh corn, shucked and cut in half
2 pounds unpeeled large shrimp

1. Bring water, onions, seasoning salt and shrimp heads to a soft boil in a large stockpot. Reduce the heat and gently simmer 30 minutes.
2. Strain the broth, discarding the solids and return broth to pot. (If shrimp heads are not available, simply combine water, onions, seasoning and salt in a large pot.)
3. Bring liquid in pot to a boil. Add potatoes and sausage. Reduce heat and simmer 20 to 30 minutes, or until potatoes are just barely fork tender.
4. Add corn and simmer 2 minutes.
5. Add shrimp, turn off heat and let pot sit about 5 minutes, or just until shrimp have turned color.
6. Drain the pot, discarding the liquid. Place the strained contents on a platter and serve with plenty of butter and paper towels.
Makes 4 generous servings.

(Photo courtesy of Old Bay)

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Road Food

One of my husband’s co-workers passed on a little book published this summer by Our State magazine. It’s the second edition of “Interstate Eateries,” and it’s organized by the road, not region or cuisine, starting with Interstate 26 (from East Tennessee through Asheville and down to the South Carolina state line) and ending with Interstate 95. Though we’re as a whole spending less time on the road, it’s still a good idea. Just as good road food a rare breed, there’s nothing worse than pulling up to another fast food window. And I’m now recalling a particularly wretched meal at the Cracker Barrel one year on our way north for Thanksgiving. I was trying to forget those chicken and dumplings. I think I’m still digesting them, four years later.
The book’s written by D.G. Martin, who hosts N.C. Bookwatch on UNC-TV. His recommendations run from traditional Southern meat-and-threes to Margaret’s, a Mexican cantina that’s been around forever in Chapel Hill just off Interstate 40.

In Dobson, he suggests the Lantern Restaurant, and the Basin Creek Country Store in Elkin for cheeseburgers. In Kernersville, he likes the Plaza Restaurant and of course Keaton’s BBQ (chicken) in Cleveland (off 40’s exit 162).

A little heavy on country cooking and barbecue (we’re more diverse than that, now), “Interstate Eateries” is still a nice reference.

A great website to plot your trip by food stops is roadfood.com. Jane and Michael Stern write the Road Food column for Gourmet and are on the Splendid Table on WFDD every week.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Notes from the Beach

During a week at the beach, I got a lot of sun, swam a lot in the ocean and ate a whole lot of mediocre restaurant food.

OK, so I did have a couple of good dishes, and I did have great seafood boil that I cooked myself.

But once again I found beach restaurants underwhelming, to put it tactfully.

Here are a few observations:

I do not at all mind the proliferation of shrimp and grits on every menu of seafood restaurants. I think it’s a great dish.
It’s also a very simple dish, but, as with any simple dish, the devil is in the details.
Please, chefs and cooks, make the best grits you can, the creamy (but creamless) slow-cooked kind.
And please do not put cheese in the grits or on the shrimp.
And do not make a sauce, especially a cream sauce, to go over the shrimp and grits.
Cream and cheese are too heavy for the dish.
This dish should be lightly sauteed shrimp with a select ingredients, such as scallions, garlic, mushrooms and maybe bacon. The juices and butter from the sauteing make plenty of sauce to pool on and around the grits.

Most every restaurant steams seafood well.  You usually can’t go wrong with steamed clams, shrimp or the like.

Do not serve steamed seafood with either melted margarine or clarified butter. Whole melted butter is by far the better choice. Oh, and don’t forget a wedge of fresh lemon.

Of all the seafood offered at N.C. beach communities, the shrimp is mostly likely to be freshest because it’s most likely to be local.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Salmon, Bathed in a Buttery Sea of Verbiage

Menus fascinate me. Once upon a time, when I worked in Pennsylvania, there was a restaurant (far too expensive for me to ever really eat there) that actually had gilded verbs like “bathed” on it. Yes, they were describing food, not writing a romance novel. An editor has gotten to their menu, though - I looked online, and my, have things become more restrained.

Here, Noble’s Grille’s newish menu takes things the opposite direction; here, much of the menu’s built on the a la carte concept, and you’re given a chance to assemble your own meal from proteins, vegetables, starches and the like. The description is so spare - “scallops” - that I’ve heard confused diners turn to their waiters because they had no idea how those things were prepared. Like me, some people make their dining decisions based on the trimmings - interesting sauces and techniques, or sides.

A few weeks ago, I noticed Milner’s lunch menu. This time it’s the categories that caught my eye. Sandwiches have become simply “hand,“ while salads are “cold,“ appetizers “table” and soups are “spoon.“ It’s clever, but almost too self-consciously so. As I read the menu, I’m thinking more about those categories than the food, and I don’t think any chef wants that.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Go USA, Go Chicken Wings

After three nights in a row of watching, oh, about six hours of Olympics coverage, my eyes are getting a little tired. I can’t explain my addiction to the Olympics. Maybe it’s that song…anyway, all I know is that once every four years I can’t stop watching sports I usually never care about…like beach volleyball.

Generally speaking I restrict my sports watching to college basketball, the Triple Crown and sometimes the Super Bowl commercials. I even worked out an extra 20 minutes last night so I could watch the end of individual eventing show jumping finals without leaving the gym, and the other night I had the TV tuned to women’s gymnastics as I watched live streaming of eventing on my computer. Help me!

On Friday, we had a few friends over for an Olympics opening ceremonies party. I considered making some homemade spring rolls or dumplings or steamed pork buns, but then I came to my senses and remembered that I’m a total novice at Chinese cooking. I made some spicy roasted hazelnuts and peanuts with five spice powder, star anise and cloves instead, washed down by cocktails that I made up on the fly with vodka and lemongrass and basil infused simple syrup.

Some guests brought Tsing Tao. The unexpected hit was these savory chicken wings that my dear husband made. We gobbled them up fast, hours before the torch lighting, before I could get a photo, licking our fingers as we critiqued Scandinavian countries’ outfits. These wings may not be totally authentic, but they are easy to make and baked, which makes them healthier. They are also totally delicious with a cold beer, salty, gingery and garlicky all at same time. Doesn’t watching Michael Phelps do all that swimming and winning make you hungry, anyway? He’d probably like these, even if their color is more bronze.

Dad’s Chinese Chicken Wings
Adapted from A Spoonful of Ginger by Nina Simonds

Yield: 6 servings

Marinade:
1 1/4 cups soy sauce
1 1/4 cups rice wine or sake
1 cup water
12 whole scallions, ends trimmed, smashed with the flat side of a knife
10 cloves garlic, smashed with the flat side of a knife
3-1/2 inch chunk fresh ginger, peeled, then cut into 10 slices about the size of a quarter, each smashed with the flat side of a knife

3 1/2 to 4 pounds chicken wings (about 20), rinsed and drained

Stir the marinade ingredients in a saucepan and heat until boiling. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes. Let the marinade cool slightly.

With a sharp knife separate the drumettes from the wingtips at the joint. Place all the pieces in a bowl or a deep pan and add the still-warm marinade. Stir to coat, cover with plastic wrap, and let the wings marinate overnight in the refrigerator.

Preheat the oven to 500 F. Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and arrange the wings on the cookie sheets. Brush liberally with the marinade. Roast for about 40 minutes, turning once, until the wings are cooked and crispy brown at the edges. Serve hot, at room temperature, or cold.