Since Tuesday of last week, I’ve been laid pretty low by a bout of food poisoning, so it might seem like a weird moment for me to be posting about food, but in my semi-delirious state it makes perfect sense to me. Oh, and it does seem that I am mostly over the food poisoning, which I blame on a bad shrimp (bad shrimp! bad! bad!). I spent a couple of days talking to Ralph on the big porcelain phone, but my only remaining symptoms are a bit of dizziness and lassitude, which, honestly, could describe my condition most days even without the Shellfish of Doom.
A sure sign that I have weathered the storm is that last night Our Intrepid Trio went to our favorite Vietnamese place for dinner and I consumed the contents of a bowl of pho.
Okay, I cheated a little bit by getting the smaller bowl, and I left some noodles in the bottom of the bowl, but I swear I could feel myself getting better with each mouthful of broth. Basic beef pho also features five or six different cuts of meat including tripe and tendon, which are not typically high on the list of things people like to eat. I have grown to adore the tendon pieces, though, for their silkiness, and eating tripe lets me feel all sanctimonious and superior to people who are afraid of “weird food”. But seriously, tripe is also the prime ingredient of a Mexican soup called “menudo”, which the Mexicans eat as a morning dish as a hangover cure.
So I would like to go find a nice authentic Mexican restaurant that makes its own menudo. Hey, no problem, say my SoCal friends, all of whom have more authentic Mexican restaurants than they can shake a stick at. Sadly, about the best we can do in the Boston area is some not-too-shabby burrito joints, one or two places that really are about Mexican cuisine, and then the range of crap “drown it in sauce and cheese and no one will notice” places. Oh, I know I could invest a day in making my own, but neither of the ladies of the house would go anywhere near something like that, and I just want to eat. Local readers who have insight into potential hidden gems are encouraged to SPEAK UP!
And every time I go to have a bowl of pho, it aggravates me that I can’t get banh mi anywhere near home. As it is, my pho hookup is almost half an hour from home, which is why I only eat there once every two or three weeks, and every time I go I think to myself “it would be AWESOME if these guys would add banh mi to the menu.” They do an enormous lunch business as it is, and I could see them making a killing on adding the sandwiches at lunchtime. Banh mi, if you’ve never had one, is the Vietnamese variation on your basic submarine sandwich, but using stuff like spicy pork pate, hot peppers, and pickled daikon instead of the run-of-the-mill Italian cold cuts. A good banh mi sandwich also comes on a particular type of baguette that the Vietnamese borrowed from the French.
At least in the case of banh mi, I know exactly where to go to find a good one: Dorchester. The majority of the Vietnamese immigrant community settled there after the war, and as you drive along Dot Ave there are banh mi shops every other block. It’s just waaay too far to drive for a sandwich without some other reason for going to Dorchester, and, honestly, I don’t have any reason to go there ever. But I’m going to have to make an effort to take a “road trip”, I can see that, especially if I wan’t a friggin’ sammich. Maybe I’ll go to the Franklin Park Zoo and see the new baby giraffe before they euthanize him (Okay, seriously, Zoo New England people, that was a REALLY slimy thing to say to get some money).
For reasons I cannot quite explain, I have started watching the Food Network again in small doses. There was a time when if there was nothing else worth watching on television, I always knew I could turn to the Food Network and see something good, but those days are long gone. Personally, I blame Rachael Ray, but I think it was inevitable given the slim margins of cable networks and the fickle tastes of viewers. But I think the pendulum might be swinging back to more shows about cooking and about cuisine, and less about cake dropping…er, decorating competitions. I also predict some big swing to old-fashioned cooking if the “Julie & Julia” movie does well, and it’s obvious that the Food Network is thinking the same.
Which does not explain why I spent an hour last night watching Jeff Corwin eat various bugs and grubs straight out of the Mexican desert, but does explain a show they’ve got called “The Best Thing I Ever Ate”. This gets to the heart of the matter — there’s a ton of bullshit about “passion for cooking” and “caring about food” that the chef-wannabe craze laid on top of a very difficult and demanding job which really all belongs in one place: on that table. If you don’t love to eat, how can you love to cook? I have always thought of cooking as a means to an end because when I am done in the kitchen I want to sit down and eat what I just made. So this show helps strip away a lot of that romanticism about cooking and lets people who do cook tell you what they like to EAT.
The last episode I saw was the one about barbecue, which is one of my favorite indulgences, and now this show has me hankering for a trip to New York to check out Daisy May’s Barbecue. This food blogger, who lives in NYC and is just a cab ride away, did in fact make a visit and came away a little bit disappointed, but I definitely have Daisy May’s on my list of places to eat for some future NYC trip.
Now, finally, here’s something I can have for lunch. Those in the know are aware that there are only a very few good barbecue places in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, but they do exist. The sleeper among them is a place just on the other side of town from where I live, right on the town line that divides Burlington and Billerica. It opened several years ago and struggled enormously in the beginning — the food wasn’t great, the ordering system sucked, and it just did not seem like it would last. However, because it’s the only barbecue place for miles and miles around, in a place where there are roving packs of hungry men seeking new lunch holes every day to escape the drudgery of their cubicular worklives, it hung on. Now, in my opinion, it’s even better than the well-regarded restaurant it was based on. The last couple of times I’ve had their brisket, it has excelled. Before this week is out, my friends, I will be lunching there.
Oh, and here’s another thing I want to look into the next time I visit New York: a butcher shop in Manhattan that sells American-grown Wagyu beef. Their original plan was to export the beef, which is produced in Oregon, to the Japanese market, but Japan doesn’t allow U.S. beef into the country due to our scandalously lax screening for BCE. So instead they are selling this ultra-premium quality meat direct to the only people in the world who can buy it by the pound: New Yorkers overburdened with too much money but perilously little common sense.
Actually, Wagyu beef must be tasted to be believed, and I have only had the opportunity to try it on two occasions. The marbling of the meat and fat makes the meat insanely tender, but without taking away from the central beef flavor. You probably would not really want to eat an entire steak, and at $50/pound you probably couldn’t afford to except as a rare treat, so the thing to do with it is to serve very small portions, typically simply seared. The butcher shop sells it sliced for shabu shabu, which is a Japanese style of fondue, and that would be just about perfect. On the list.
Finally, I keep thinking to myself that I’m going to go pay a visit to Wilson Farms but haven’t been able to get out of my way enough to do that. But I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do on Wednesday. The wet, cold summer we’re having has probably been hell for local tomatoes, but Wilson’s will undoubtedly have something of their own. I promised Charlotte we could make a real bolognese sauce, and I want local tomatoes if at all possible. Since I stopped doing any serious cooking, I haven’t gone produce shopping at Wilson’s for a long, long, long time, but it’s reassuring to feel the urge.
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