The Food N00bs

Just a Quickie

by Sorcha

This evening I went to Powells' satellite store on Hawthorne (the one that's focused on home and garden stuff, not the regular one two doors down), to find more books about making nommy cakes. While browsing there, I found a cookbook published by the Junior League of Hampton Roads, the area of Virginia I grew up in. It was published in the mid-90s, not too long after I moved to Portland. I think I even recognized the names of a couple girls I'd gone to school with.

I didn't buy it, because I'm really in a baking groove right now, and where the hell am I gonna find soft-shell blue crab 3000 miles from the Chesapeake Bay? But it was fun to wonder about how that little book had made its way all the way across the US to meet me in a bookstore in Oregon. Maybe I'll go back another time and see if it's still there. It may want to go home with a somewhat-familiar face.

(I didn't end up buying any cake books, but I did go two doors down and find a Kurt Vonnegut and an Agatha Christie I hadn't read, plus a book on crime scene processing and an H.P. Lovecraft/August Derleth collaboration - all used. I have Alton Brown's baking book on order and a couple of cake books on my Amazon wish list. So it was a mostly-productive trip.)

We are stardust, we are golden...

Today the N00bs went to the Wordstock festival. As well as having lots of writer-geek fun and scoring both free and cheap books (three Palahniuk novels for a buck fifty each, and it benefited the Portland library!), we attended the "Art of Food Writing" panel, which featured Nicole Mones, Kathleen Flinn, and best of all, Michael Ruhlman. The panel was fun and informative, and afterward, we were fortunate enough to get books signed by Michael (Elements of Cooking in Kal's case, Reach of a Chef in Sorcha's) and have a moment to chat. Despite dealing with a brutal travel schedule, Michael was just as friendly and personable as his writing makes him seem, and his passion for his subject is just as infectious on a stage as it is on the page.  Food chat and cheap books -- it's been a good day for the N00bs.
 

Once a n00b, redux

By Sorcha

There I was in my kitchen, half-awake, fixin' to make myself some coffee. I poured the beans in the grinder, closed it, plugged it in and pushed the switch...

...and nothing happened.

"Bwa?" said I. I tried again. Nothing. Took the grinder to a different outlet - our house is wired in some bizarre Escheresque configuration that means two outlets on the same wall are likely to be on different circuit breakers. Still nothing. Just as I was berating myself for having bought the cheap grinder and trying to figure out where I was going to get the money for a new one, I looked again...

...and realized the damn lid wasn't latched.

Yeah. Just call me Brainchild.

In other news, if you missed the Cleveland ep of No Reservations, it sucks to be you. It was awesome. Ruhlman and Bourdain are terrific together, as always, and the episode is gritty, fun, and even heart-warming.

I read The Bobby Gold Stories last night. Great read; Tony manages to put in cool cooking stuff without it being obtrusive, and Nikki is fucking awesome - the closest most of us will probably ever get to meeting the legendary Grill Bitch. This one is going on my private shelf, though. While we're pretty liberal with what we let Littlest watch/read/listen to, I just don't think he's ready to find out that sometimes grownups like to put their tongues in places that are normally considered to be, ahem, off limits to tongues. (Kind of like the time we were watching "Family Guy" and the word "sodomy" came up. He asked, "What's sodomy?" After thinking about it a while, I said, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you. It has to do with sex, and that's about all you're ready to hear.")

Parenting, Food N00b style. It's a never-ending odyssey of learning, laughter, and "What the everliving fuck?"

RIP, Kurt Vonnegut

by Sorcha

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.' "

We used that on the front of Littlest's birth announcement. Okay, we left out the "God damn it" after much deliberation, because grandmothers don't always handle shit like that well, and mine were both Southern Baptists, so, yeah.

The world has lost a great mind and a beautiful soul. I can only hope that somewhere in the afterlife, he's kicking Johnny Hart's ass right now. (Johnny Hart was the bizarre mind behind the "B.C." comic strip. Dude, Christian cavemen. What the fuck? I am Christian and that shit don't make any kind of sense to me.)

Food N00b on the loose at Borders

Kal: Faced with a little extra time between appointments today, I ducked into a Borders to browse their food literature.  I found the section in disarray, with a shelver and a floor manager conferring nearby on how best to organize the shelves.  Now, I used to work in bookstores, and I think I still have some kind of invisible sign that causes fellow book-slingers to recognize me as a suitable discussion partner.  "He's so mean to me!" the shelver said of her floor manager, clearly joking.  I joshed with the two of them for a while, and then the floor manager headed off to do whatever it is floor managers do.

I kept browsing, and at length the shelver said, "I think I have enough Barefoot Contessa and Rachael Ray."

I must confess, I got very excited at this.  Lo, someone who shared my opinions of the tendency to oversaturate the market with celebrity chefs!  "Man, I could not agree with you more," I said sincerely.

The shelver was strangely quiet.

I turned to see what had quieted her.  At the same time, she said, "There should be more cookbooks to your right."

She said this into her earpiece.

No, we had not been discussing the merits and demerits of fame and the celebrity-chef book mill.  She had simply been appraising her stockman that her shelves were adequately stocked with "Everyday Recipes You'll Make Over And Over Again" and "A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners."

Oh.

I spinelessly slunk off to the writer's reference section after that, although I didn't find anything that promised to keep authors from embarrassing themselves between the stacks...