A Celebration of Chefs and Others

I always measure bliss in minutes. Our 220 minutes ticked away at the restaurant on Rue de Bac in Paris. We were meeting our friend, Nicolas outside of the closed restaurant on a Saturday afternoon where he worked. He was the ‘Chef of the moment’ in a city where that accolade can be very fleeting. We had made plans to have dim sum and afternoon tea with dessert at one of his favorite secret places. We would spend the afternoon walking and talking about food, like we often did.

When Nicholas met us he flung open the door of the closed restaurant. He was panicked. Perspiration dripped off his forehead, his scent equaled his stressed appearance. “Come in, I have a big problem” in an unusually loud voice. My sister and I immediately asked what was the problem and how could we help.

Being the chef of the moment, he had caught the attention of a wealthy Japanese investor who planned on opening a 3 star restaurant in Paris. The investor’s secretary called Nicolas and announced that he was to create a lunch for Mr. X and 5 other guests in two hours. This was his interview, death by fire or not. What can we do? “I need someone to serve and help me cook.” He was beginning to yell.

My friend Bobby is a really good cook. OK I know, we all have friends who are really good cooks but my friend is also really, really, REALLY brave. He doesn’t just cook for family and friends the way a lot of good cooks are happy to do, just leaving it at that. No Bobby cooks for famous food critics. Who does that? That’s like inviting Joan Didion or Richard Price to come read my stories. I’d be physically ill.

But Bobby invites Merrill Shindler, editor of the Zagat Los Angeles Survey, host of KABC’s radio show, Feed Your Face, author of several cookbooks including “American Dishes” and thousands upon thousands of restaurant reviews, and his wife over with a few other couples quite regularly. They are neighbors and as friendly neighbors they are prone to eating together. Yikes!!

Bob and his brother Peter Kaminsky, the noted food writer, are east coast guys who grew up loving to eat. Their grandparents owned and lived above a candy store in New Jersey. Bobby remembers his grandmother cooking brisket on the stove upstairs and running up and down to and from the store to brown it, with the candy store smelling like roasting meat and onions! After Peter graduated from Princeton, he used his degree to get a cabbie’s license so the brothers could drive all over Brooklyn searching for ethnic dives to eat in.

When Bobby graduated college he moved to Boston and worked at Joe’s Blues Bar as a bartender / bouncer / fill in guitar player. He’d often invite some of the out of town bands back to his place for home cooked meals. Calling food a “social lubricant” he’d get to hone his guitar skills with some of the best blues guys around while feeding them pasta with home cooked red sauce or his grandma’s brisket.

How do I love Nigella? Let me count the ways. Sometimes she’s bigger, and some times she’s smaller, but she’s always incredibly beautiful. She is incredible intelligent and well-educated, and has had some incredibly hard knocks (including the death of her first husband) and survived with consummate grace. She is a mother over 40 who oozes sex appeal, admits to cooking pasta for herself to eat in bed while watching television, and deep fries candy bars in batter. Most important, in an age of molecular gastronomy and foodie preciousness, she cooks food that is simple, sensuous and exactly what you were yearning for but couldn’t name until you saw the recipe.

From the Huffington Post

It is late Wednesday morning and Candy Sue Weaver is on the road again, barreling through Arkansas. Her iPod is pumping Henry Gross, Eagles, and Delbert McClinton through her radio and she is just as pumped. She can taste victory up the road. Weaver is a sportswoman, and she is on a 700 mile drive in her pickup, trailer in tow, towards a baseball diamond wedged between a cornfield and a soybean field in northwest Illinois. But Weaver is not a baseball player. She is competition barbecue cook.

Competitive barbecue may be the fastest growing sport in the nation with more than 500 cookoffs across the country. Many of the cooks at each event are locals, but a growing number are, like Weaver, part of a band of roving gypsies who drive for days and get fired up to go for gold and glory. Some hit the highway every weekend from May through October.

In July, that baseball field in tiny Shannon, IL, population 900, becomes the "Barbecue Field of Dreams" because Shannon is the home of the Illinois State BBQ Championship (ISBC) and the destination for a fleet of RVs and trailers loaded with meat and steel and some of the best barbecue cooks in the world. These are the real Iron Chefs towing torpedo shaped smokers the size of sportscars on their way to a throwdown Bobby Flay wants no part of.

Read article...