Popcorn, Mon Amour

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popcorn cart

"Better make that a double; I'm going to see Die Hard: With a Vengeance."

I was sitting in a darkened theatre on Saturday, munching handfuls of popcorn, when suddenly the entire tradition of movie popcorn struck me as absurd. In Brooklyn, so much as whispering through a movie would probably get me punched in the face, but I am allowed to eat the loudest, smelliest snack possible a mere two feet from another patron’s head, and no one is allowed to say anything. I think this revelation was spurred mostly by the fact that we were watching the dismal and quiet French film Amour (spoiler alert: unhappy beginning, unhappy middle, unhappy ending, followed by me extacting a sworn statement from Jason that he would never smother me with a pillow, diapers or no), but even so, I couldn’t help but consider the weirdly powerful love affair between celluloid and popcorn. After all, potato chips and corn chips and pretzels have the same salty-oily-crunch factor, and though those snacks are more popular in virtually every other venue (including the realm of house cats), cinemas are the domain of popcorn alone.

Apparently, like any number of romantic pairings, the match between popcorn and movies began because both parties were in the right place at the right time. The portable popcorn popper and the nickelodeon were bright young things together in the late 19th century, and it didn’t take long for popcorn vendors to start parking their carts outside the theatres to take advantage of the crowds. Later, the popcorn moved inside to boost theatre profits during the depression. Not even war could tear the two asunder: sugar was rationed during World War II, so candy disappeared from concession stands, but the War Department gave the official go-ahead to theatres to continue to serve popcorn. Continue reading →

What Will Oscar Eat?: Discriminating Palate Edition

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The Tomato Slayer has, in defiance of all that I have known of him up until this point, begun to show a bit of discrimination.

Those of you who read PitchKnives regularly or know us personally are aware that Oscar is generally a cut-rate food whore, though one capable of strategy.  He’ll eat constantly and is beyond tubby, but also has the sense to wait patiently until our backs our turned to go cheerfully push Bruce out of the way and go to town on his food.  He is in general our trash compactor: if there’s a crumb of kibble or a slight slick of canned food left uneaten in a bowl, Oscar is on the case.

 

Until Saturday, that is.  After going to see Amour (meh), we decided to bring home the remnants of our popcorn.  Surely Oscar would be partial to junk food above all other kinds.

Au contraire.  In a shocking display that turned conventional wisdom on its head, Oscar sniffed at the bag, only to turn away in favor of double checking that no scrap of breakfast remaining in his bowl had escaped his attention.  No amount of cajoling or enticement made a lick of difference.  Just look at Shannon.  She’s bereft!

Thankfully Dylan, the dimmest of the bunch and equally food-focused, was there to pick up Oscar’s slack. Continue reading →

Name that Noodle

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I still have pasta on the brain after last week’s post about Caputo’s. With over 400 shapes of pasta floating around out there, are you worthy enough to be a pasta insider? Prove yourself with this little puzzle. If you can name all the unusual shapes of pasta pictured below, you can share my marinara any time. Extra points if you can say what each name means in Italian! Hint: The answers appear in alphabetical order.

Don’t click this until you’re ready for the answers…

Continue reading →

Hidden Valley Shakin in its Pleather Boots: Jay’s Garlic-Dill 5 Minute Salad Dressing Recipe

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I’ve never been much for creamy salad dressings.  As revelator(ily) awesome as Cool Ranch Doritos were upon their debut in middle school, the taste of their dressing counterpart has always seemed to me merely gloppy, as if the gloop factor is the primary taste as well as texture.  Blue cheese dressing is yummy because blue cheese is yummy, but as an adult I’ve generally stayed away because of the fat and the general feeling that Hidden Valley and its mega cousins merely dump some cheese chunks in a vat of mayo and call it a day.  I’d rather gnaw on a hunk of good blue cheese when I’m in the kitchen alone.

But my creamy salad dressing, now that’s the cat’s pajamas.

I’ll see your cream factor and raise it a fistful of taste complexity and a hint of heat.

My dressing will erase your student debt, enliven your sex life, and talk your way out of a speeding ticket.

It’ll clock Wayne LaPierre in the kisser and cause Eric Cantor to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

It will also, on a regular night when you’re wiped from work, provide in 5-minutes prep time a vastly superior alternative to the bottled dressing you’ve got in the fridge and a nice change of pace from the oil-&-balsamic routine. Continue reading →

The Secret to Fresh Pasta

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A recent haul from Caputo's

There are many reasons I like Roger. We often agree about books and movies and music. He was once the state Monopoly champion of Rhode Island. He knows all the best puppy videos on YouTube, and though he is my boss, often shows them to me while I’m on the clock. But I think that the reason I like him most of all is that he is the one who told me about Caputo’s.

The topic came up because we were talking about making pasta. Roger, a bit of a foodie, makes his own noodles from time to time, and though they are tasty, it’s a time-consuming enterprise. “Really,” he said, “for four bucks, why wouldn’t you just buy it at that little Italian place on Court Street?” He meant Caputo’s, and he sent me the address. Regular readers of this blog will already know that I believe there’s value in knowing the long way of doing something; making something from scratch is a pleasure in itself. But even I have my limits. The secret to fresh pasta is this: you buy it at Caputo’s.

Caputo's Fine FoodsCaputo’s has an unassuming storefront in Carroll Gardens. It is one of those places that looks old, in a good way, as though maybe it staked its claim when Brooklyn was still a forest and the neighborhood simply grew up around it. In addition to the refrigerator cases of fresh pasta and sauces and soups, there is an olive bar, a cheese case, bins of glistening homemade mozzarella, shelves of dry pasta and bread and tiny jarred wonders, and freezers of pizza dough and cannoli filling and always, always, more pasta. It is all heaven-help-me groan-worthy. My Caputo’s shopping trips end only because of the limits of my wallet and my refrigerator. I have always said that if I could choose only one cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Indian or Mexican, but now I need to add a caveat that I would choose Italian, provided that all of the ingredients came from Caputo’s.

But the food, glorious though it be, is not the only attraction. Continue reading →

LF & SN Forever!

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Good Beer is Born Here

After I took stock of my year’s best beers, I concluded that I am really infatuated with Sierra Nevada. When I admtted to myself what a crush I had on them I did what any mature adult would do and stalked them on the Internet. What follows is a selection of what makes this particular brewery so dreamy.

Sierra Nevada’s business plan is easily compatible with my life philosophy, something I can’t say for many other for-profit institutions. (I’m scared of making money.) For example, they believe in living sustainably and try to run a business that leaves as small a footprint on our planet as possible. Their brewery in Chico, California runs in part on solar energy collected from their land through one of the country’s largest privately-owned solar arrays. They also collect excess energy to reuse through heat recovery devices on brew kettles and boilers and even recycle the CO2 created during the brewing process.

The brewery also knows the importance of community. Though Sierra Nevada is one of the largest breweries still considered “craft,” they maintain a presence in the town of Chico. At their Taproom and Restaurant you can find meals cooked with vegetables from their farm and quaff an Estate Homegrown Ale brewed with the organic hops and barley harvested from their back 40. In 2000 they opened The Big Room, an auditorium that seats 350 live-music lovers. I’m thinking of moving to Chico. Continue reading →

Thrill of the Hunt: My Addiction to Menu Competition

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I admit that I can be a tad on the competitive side. Once, when Jason and I were first dating, we got onto long parallel escalators in a PATH station. When I saw Jason start to trot a few steps forward on his escalator, I thought we were racing and jumped forward like a runner off the block. When I got to the bottom, flushed and slightly sweaty, and looked back up at Jason, he was scowling. “I was just trying to catch up to you enough that we could hold hands across the banister,” he said. “Also, I think you might have a problem.” I, of course, denied that enjoying a friendly escalator contest should be magnified to a DSM-IV kind of issue. And yet, a dinner last week made me reconsider the charge.

We were eating at a restaurant about which I had heard quite a lot in advance. It’s the sort of small-joint-makes-a-reputation-for-itself that I usually love, so the fact that I was disappointed in my meal was all the more crushing. But worse still was the fact that Jason’s choice of entrée was truly fantastic. I had to listen to him making happy sounds of enjoyment the entire meal while I pushed my gloppy sauce around on my plate. The reason we were there in the first place was that I was taking him out for his birthday, so I tried to reason that it was only fair that he liked his meal more. But the truth was glaring: he had won. I can’t help it; I love it when we’re eating out and we taste each other’s meals and Jason says something like, “Mmm, mine is good, but yours is great.” It makes me feel like I have accomplished something, however small. It makes me feel like I have managed to raise the act of ordering off a menu to an art worthy of competition. Maybe I do have a problem. Continue reading →

Sunday Beer Ramble: Biscotti Break Stout, AC/DC, and the Legacy of Good Chief Powhatan

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I am currently drinking something called Evil Twin Imperial Biscotti Break at our local after writing Christmas Thank You Notes to family, a habit that I have contentedly allowed to fall to the wayside along with a raft of other Proper Southern Manners, but which I have now had cause to take back up after marrying Shannon, a Midwesterner.

Midwestern Manners are not all that different from Southern Manners, I now realize.  They share an emphasis on maintaining the propriety of presentation even, perhaps especially, if the meat & potatoes of a situation, interaction, etc. is spoiled and everyone would truly be happiest if that situation, interaction, etc. were just pulled out of the crisper, bagged up, and tossed in the can.  Midwestern Manners, however, are far more stubborn.  Midwesterners are going to send their Christmas Thank You Notes even if the cow has died and the tobacco crop had caught worms and the four youngest caught chills on the prairie and died in January but couldn’t be buried until the land thawed in March. Continue reading →

Wanted: Columnists

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thoughtbubbleHave you ever been browsing through PitchKnives & Butter Forks and thought to yourself, “I could do that”? Well, you probably could. In fact, now’s your chance to prove it. We are currently seeking new writers willing to commit to a regular monthly or bi-weekly column. Aspiring columnists should have a theme and an idea of how to sustain that theme over numerous posts, though topics could fall anywhere within the larger categories of food, drink, cooking or gardening. We cannot provide payment, but we do provide access to an instant audience of foodies.

If you’d like to see an excellent example of format and style, click on the Just Add Beer button to the right and check out the posts by our resident beer maven Llalan Fowler.

For application details, please contact us at submissions@pitchknives.com.

Potato Weather

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potato head

Hark! I have come to save Europe!

It was around the same time that the wind turned nastily sharp that Jason and I decided that there weren’t enough baked potatoes in our lives. Surely, the main reason that potatoes are a central component in cold-weather cuisines is that they grow best in places with relatively cool springs and summers. But it seems to me that potatoes warm the eater, too, their starchiness bolstering us through harsh winters. I once had a history professor, an elderly, tweed-jacket-and-leather-elbow-patches sort of fellow, who passionately preached the glory of potatoes, claiming they were “the crop that saved Europe.” (His point, as I recall, had to do with the fact that all those fiefs could survive a long time on potatoes alone because of their carbohydrates and abundant vitamins, far longer than if they were eating only, say, barley.) Anyway, if they’re good enough to save Europe, they’re good enough for me.

They’re also a breeze to make: a little oil, a little salt and pepper, a couple jabs with a fork and they’re ready to go in the oven. While they bake for about an hour, you can dream up fun things to put on top, like broccoli or chili or leftover Indian takeout.

But if you want to mix it up a little, here’s a potato recipe that I always begin to crave at around this time of year. We call them Brad’s Potatoes because…well, because my cousin Brad likes them. (This is standard naming procedure in my family. We also have Bobbie Kay’s Pasta Salad, Marilyn’s Cookies, Louise’s Potato Candy, and on and on.) Believe me, they’re far tastier than French fries and maybe even a little better for you. Continue reading →