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Wow. I just looked at my blog and realized that it's been more than six weeks since I posted an entry! I have sort of an excuse seeing that I was homeless for a few week, looking for a place to live and then a major move to East Hampton, but still, six weeks? LAME! So here I go. Rabbi Report 3.0 starts....NOW.

I seriously don't know what the next 11+ months is going to bring for me, but suffice to say, this isn't just the rebirth of the blog. Over the past 4-5 years I've lost both parents (insert Importance of Being Earnest ref. here) lived in LA, New York and now East Hampton, worked in a variety of positions, including film festivals, freelance writing, blogging for an award-winning ad campaign and I've been a character in an ARG. And now....country squire? We'll see. For now, I am busy planting a vegetable garden, buying bird feeders and keeping the neighbor's cat away from my birds and bunnies. That and whipping the house into shape with, I am relieved to say, a little help from my friends! God knows what it would look like if I was left to my own devices.

At any rate, I'm back. There's likely to be a lot more about food and cooking, here from now on. I won't be skimping on other things, but my nine week trip through the south this Spring inspired me as a cook, as a writer and as someone who is concerned with what we're eating and drinking as a nation. I was introduced to the work of some outstanding chefs and food luminaries in my travels, including "eater/writer/educator" John T. Edge and chef John Currence in Oxford, MS; chefs Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski in New Orleans; chef Frank Stitt in Birmingham, AL and chefs Sean Brock & Mike Lata in South Carolina. All of whom you'll be reading about, along with many more in the coming days and weeks, complete with mouth-watering pics from their establishments and maybe even some examples of my own experiments with Southern-infused Long Island cooking. Stay tuned!

Until next time, here are a few pix of my new (rented) house (after the jump) in East Hampton and a couple of yummy goodness!

Yours from Northwest Woods,

Mark

NB: My apologies for the lack of posts, recently. My computer died and was in the shop for a while. Now, on with the Great Southern Road Trip!

If you haven't already figured it out, a big part of this trip and my life is food. I love to cook for people, introduce them to new things and I love to try new things myself. In fact, I was very close to trying baby eel at Chez Phillippe in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis until I read that they were overfished, often counterfeited and $30 in addition to the already steep prix fixe menu... Anyway, way back near the beginning of the trip were the SXSW Film, Interactive and Music Festivals and Conferences, from which I have a lot of pix and video to come soon. But first, meat!

That's right. On this, my 3rd visit to SXSW, I finally made it out to Lockhart, Texas and Smitty's Market. SXSW Film Conference & Production Manager Jarod Neece was kind enough to put together a little outing of filmmakers, press and SXSW staffers on the last Friday of the fest and chuck us into a van for the 40 minute drive to the cradle of Texas Bar-B-Q. You see, Lockhart has not one, not two, not three but 4 "world-class" BBQ joints, or so they claim. I've only been to Smitty's, and about Smitty's I can swear that if there were a god, she'd eat there. There ain't, so I guess that makes my analogy useless, but whatever. It's some fan-fucking-tastic BBQ. Now, Texas is known for beef BBQ. if pork's your thing, I would suggest you head to Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, etc. I'll be writing plenty about the pork in those places, but for now, concentrate on the beef. Don't get me wrong, they have the pork, but in Texas it seems like the swine is a secondary food source much of the time. I beg to differ, but when in Rome....

After visiting Gill and August's Green Building, I hopped in the car and made the 385 mile drive to Memphis and my three day stay at the Peabody Hotel. Billed as the "South's Grand Hotel," the Peabody is all it's cracked up to be. The staff in unerringly friendly and remembered my name instantly and they were very helpful about the local area, even if one of the valets had never heard of Payne's. He must have been new.... While the Peabody is indeed a fancy joint (it boasts Memphis' most fancy fine dining restaurant in Chez Philippe) there are deals to be found online. My stay was only $140/night through Orbitz but unlike some other hotels, I received no "bargain shopper scorn" when checking in. The Peabody is all class and that might have something to do with hotel Duckmaster Jason Sensat who also oversees the customer relations employees in the hotel, including front desk personnel and concierges.

More on him and the ducks in a later post, complete with video!

But now....Food! My first day in Memphis was a disappointment, since I drove out to Payne's and it was closed. A main goal of this trip is experiencing the finest BBQ known to man or beast and consistently listed on "Best of" lists and written up in any BBQ book worth its salt, Payne's (located at 1762 Lamar, Av.) was my #1 stop in Memphis. Alas, it was closed and my iPhone's map feature led me astray when I went looking for my other important stop on this trip, Cozy Corner BBQ. I ended up no where near where I was supposed to be, but instead wound up near another highly-rated joint, Central BBQ. There I made the mistake of choosing sauce on the side. Never choose sauce on the side. Let them sauce up your sandwich. I guess I'll have to go back, because it's supposed to be fantastic.

At any rate, that evening, through a suggestion from the hotel, I ate at McEwen's on Monroe and it was fantastic. I decided to try three small plates and was blown away by the Warm Hazelnut Crusted Goat Cheese Salad, the Shrimp & Grits (always a favorite) and the wholly original Red Tasmanian Sweet Crab Fritters. It was Americana with a southern bent, all prepared with care and excellent service. For dessert (I don't usually indulge, but....) the trio of sorbets was fantastic, see:

After my preamble trip to Hagerstown I had just enough energy to check my email when I arrived. It had been a rough day, considering I'd moved out of the family home I'd had for 30+ years, so when I pulled into the hotel just past 11, I didn't even care that I'd missed the cut-off time for beer at the hotel mini mart by only 5 minutes. I didn't even pitch a fit when the guy at the front desk told me that they were out of foam pillows. My allergies made me pay for that one.

At any rate, I was up at 8am and ready to go.... and after the mother of all time sucks, a visit to a local mall for some needed road supplies, I was on the road to Louisville and 534 miles awaited me. Were I driving with another person, 500+ miles wouldn't be a big deal but alone? It's drowsy time. Seriously, after about 375 miles or so I find myself chanting things like "badda badda bang ging gong bung ding badda ding big gong dang..." like some half-baked Bhangra singer with tertiary stage syphilis.

Last March at the end of South by Southwest then-SXSW Film Festival producer Matt Dentler drove indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks and myself out to a famous Austin-area restaurant called Hudson's on the Bend. A reported favorite of Lance Armstrong, the Hill Country eatery is famous for rather detailed (and fantastic) food with a heavy accent on game. Be it venison, elk, antelope, pheasant or yes, rattlesnake, Hudson's serves it, as well as lobster, trout, beef, rabbit, etc., etc., etc. and I'll say up front, it was one of the richest, most diverse carnivorous and delicious meals of my life and if you have a free night before, during or after SXSW, it's worth the 30 minute drive from downtown. I saved my write up until I started previewing SXSW 09 in order to make sure it's fresh in your minds and to whet my appetite for my return visit!

One mark of a restaurant that takes food service and the art of fine dining seriously is the amuse-bouche (I prefer to use amuse-gueule, but that's for another post...) that small palate starter that is not as common as it should be. This time it was a delicate pastry puff containing wild boar and Queso Chihuahua (No. It's NOT.)

Appetizers run the gamut from sushi grade Ahi tuna tartare with a wasabi avomole, pickled ginger pico and crispy lotus chips to pistachio-crusted diamondback rattlesnake cakes (pictured below) over a spicy chipotle cream to Maine lobster, butternut squash and chipotle lobster risotto topped with granny smith apple and pepitas. Other appies include escargots, oysters, duck confit, crab cakes and prosciutto-wrapped sc allops, among others. Are you sensing a theme, here? If you are a vegetarian, don't bother. There are some nice salads (one pictured below) and desserts, but otherwise, your food has a very delicious face.

If you like mushrooms (and who doesn't?) and if you like to cook you need to give Golden Gourmet Mushrooms a serious look-see. They've been around since 1987 but have only recently come to my attention after they formed a new distribution company, The Kinoko Company. Currently, they distribute four types of cultivated mushrooms imported from Japan and will soon distribute US-grown specialty mushrooms cultivated at a new facility in San Marcos, CA being built by the Japanese Hokto Kinoko Corporation. Grown in re-usable bottles, the 'shrooms are not grown in dirt and thus require no cleaning when you bring them home. Currently, GGM sells Maitake (aka Hen-of-the-Woods, Kumotake, and Dancing Butterfly Mushroom), Brown and White Beech, King Trumpet and Enoki mushrooms.

Now here's the really cool part: Two of the four types are packaged in such a way as to stay fresh in your fridge for 30 days and in some cases, longer! How often have you bought some mushrooms at the store and forgotten about them, only to find their sludge 10 days later? Well, Golden Gourmet's Maitake and Beech (both brown and white) mushrooms come in what I would call super weird magic plastic packages, but what're actually called: "pillow packs." Gas-permeable polypropylene film. Me? I call it magic plastic. It almost rhymes.

Some of the things I made with the mushrooms are: buffalo and venison chili (Maitakes added a complex and earthy flavor to this dish described by Mike Tully as: "OH MY GOD YES."), various stir-frys and a particularly lovely buffalo steak, topped with wine-soaked brown beech mushrooms. Some pix and a sauté video, below..

I am hosting this month's edition of Speakeasy Cinema and y'all should come and join us! While I am forbidden from revealing the name of the film, from the hints below and if you know me, you might, just might, be able to guess.

So here's the info:

Monday, June 16, 2008
Time: 7:00pm - 10:00pm
Location: 279 Church Street, New York City - 3 blocks below Canal St- across from the Tribeca Grand

SPEAKEASY CINEMA provides an opportunity for the film community to watch movies and talk about them a la the Algonquin Roundtable. No one will know which film it is until the lights dim.

Be forewarned: I have chosen a film that fulfills one of the very important roles that Speakeasy Cinema can play: This classic is also a drinking game, and we'll be bringing extra alcohol so anyone who gets one can take a shot anytime the rules of the game demand it.

After the screening we chat about the film, movies in general and there's more drinking. NB: At this intimate event industry talk is verboten, but your libations are welcome (read: BYOB or wine and we will have the corkscrew).

You should bring: beer, whisky, and red wine.

And if you leave standing, you never arrived.

These are some pretty serious hints, but don't wrack your brains too hard. It's a nice, fun and brilliant surprise!

Admission is $5

Every year, when I was a child, my mother would throw lavish New Year's Day parties at our house in East Hampton. They had pretty much stopped by the time I was old enough to really enjoy them, but for a few years it was a tradition and all of our friends would come over for caviar, homemade blinis, champagne, martinis and I assume, a fair amount of Bloody Marys.

Well, my mother passed away on January 9th, 2005 and my father died this past November 16th and I miss them both very much. I will be selling the apartment they (and I) lived in for much of the past 30 years and in part to honor them and in part because I consider New Year's Day a much more interesting holiday than New Year's Eve, I am preparing to host my first ever New Year's Day party.

In typical fashion, I have let my ambition and natural hosting tendencies take control over the part of the brain that controls reason (the neocortex, I believe...erm...Wikipedia believes....) So, as a result, I am attempting to serve the following during the day...I'll let you know, with pix and hopefully testemony, on what I succeeded in preparing:

Morning:
Bagels and lox, coffee and juice.

Lunch/dinner:
Bonac Clam Pie
Smoked Sausage and Black Eyed Peas
Maine Shrimp Boil
Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie
Saucisson sec w/cornicons and truffle butter
Assorted cheeses, blue, stinky and others!
Sage beer cheese bread
Oysters Rattray (A family recipe from old family friends from East Hampton. Alas, sorrel was nowhere to be found, so I will have to make due with baby spinach and lemon juice to approximate the taste of the sorrel.)
Half a freshly smoked and glazed ham
And, if we have the energy tomorrow, cookies.

Here's a few shots of the prelims:

"Before" shots of my living room, kitchen and fridge:

The first chocolate bourbon pecan pie (the stuff around the edges is the sugary, chocolaty, pecany overflow. It's the stuff of gods):

I just finished the last of a fantastic bottle of white wine that I feel compelled to recommend to y'all. It was a gift from my friend and Rabbi Report contributor Adam Schartoff. It's a 2000 Tyrrell's Hunter Chardonnay Reserve from the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia. Apparently it's very hard to find the 2000 (Smokes-Spirits claims it's "coming soon," but I ain't holding my breath), but I'd be willing to try the other vintages and varietals from this producer based on this wine alone. Dry and crisp, it had none of the "cotton ball in the mouth" feel of those oakey California chards. It was slightly more full-bodied than a Sauvignon Blanc (with much less of the "cat's pee on a gooseberry bush" effect) but still quite dry. All in all, a very nice bottle!

I have, in the not so distant past, been accused of being a bit of a stickler when it comes to the "proper" way to do certain things, be they cooking, dressing or behaving. While I'm not a total bastard about it (I think the "no red wine with fish" rule is largely pointless and have been known to wear white after labor day), there are indeed certain rules that are important, some more than others, of course. They help society get along at a small, personal and individual level. One of these rules is the naming of foods or dishes on a menu. It's important, I think, for the diner to know what he or she is getting when ordering. For example, a martini is gin (as opposed to a vodka martini) and if you order penne puttanesca, you should be comfortable in assuming it won't contain cream or meat...or shoe leather, for that matter.

The same goes for one of the all-time classic sandwiches and one of my favorite guilty pleasures, The Club. Without a doubt a guilty pleasure due to the presence of both mayonnaise and bacon, but a pleasure, nonetheless. The Club has endured since the late 19th century, the origin in dispute, with a tried and true recipe, one with very little room for interpretation. The classic Club is: a regular or triple decker (there is question on this point) creation of turkey or chicken (roasted, not smoked), crispy bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise on toasted white bread, cut diagonally into quarters. Acceptable deviations include chicken instead of turkey and if you twist my arm, avocado (maybe a "California Club"?). That's not to say adding lobster or cheese might not taste damn good, but it would NOT be a Club.

The following sandwich on offer at the café at the Arclight cinemas (home to AFI Fest) and billed as a Club is most decidedly, NOT: Roast beef, bacon, turkey, tomato, provolone, mozzarella and garlic aoli on toasted bread. Yes, it contains turkey, bacon and tomato, but so would a liverwurst, sea urchin, limburger, mustard, turkey, bacon and tomato sandwich, but I wouldn't call that one a Club, either.

Here endeth the rant.

About a year ago I blogged about a post I had stubled across about the "ultimate bacon sandwich." It was disgusting in a woderfully bacon-y way. Now along comes Mahalo.com with....deep fried bacon!

Yummm!

Another day, another festival. Or is it another beer? Well, same difference, sometimes. At any rate, it is another film festival, my umpteenth + 4, I think. This time it's the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF, often pronounced, awkwardly: "K'viff") in the Czech spa town of the same name. I am currently in the lobby of my hotel, the Thermal, drinking a wonderful Pilsner Urquell at the extortionate hotel price of $1.50. Yup, you heard right. The thing is, they're 85 cents on the street, so $1.50 is rather a steep markup!

This being my first trip to the Czech Republic (or to any former Eastern Bloc country for that matter) since 1974, there is a certain amount of adjustment to be made. First of all, unlike the rest of Europe, smoking cigarettes in public places is still a national sport, here and that, combined with the lack of anything resembling dry cleaning in my hotel may prove to be a problem. I also forgot my razor, but the Czechs do shave, so I assume at least that won't be a problem. Then there's the language. While I consider myself lingustically adept, I am finding this one rather difficult to learn, but then again, I've only been in country a little over 30 hours, much of that spent either asleep or in a jet-lag/beer induced stupor.

Now about the alcohol. Cheap beer abounds and does a peculiar spirit called Becherovka. It's akin to Jägermeister, in that it's made with oodles of herbs and packs a wallop, but is significantly less viscous and purports to aid in digestion. Considering the preponderance of meat on Czech menus, I might be making copious use of it. It is usually served cold as a shot or on the rocks, but you can also have it with tonic, in which case it's called a "beton," which oddly means "concrete" in Czech. It's actually pretty tasty. To the left is a pic of a wedge of lime seemingly hovering above the surface of BAM curator Florence Almozini's beton.

So I had to take these pix. I was just kinda transfixed by the array of fish on offer at the KaDeWe's seafood department and these three were so very pissed off. I suppose I would be too, if I were....ugly as sin, dead and on ice in Berlin.
So...fish:

And the angriest of them all, the Monk Fish:

Yikes.

So last night my friend Piper and I had an excellent dinner at Cookshop, a restaurant on 10th avenue at 20th st., here in Manhattan. She had the Montauk Point striped bass and I had the whole Atlantic Porgy, which means that for dinner we had...Porgy & Bass.

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal and don't forget to tip your waiter.