GranDaddy/FryDaddy

 

GranDaddy/FryDaddy

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

 

This is the original Bob Bell. He’s 93, he dresses like a cool guy in his twenties, and he’s taken up frying recently. He lights a Yankee Candle when you arrive, offers you a breakfast beer, and tells you about his recent egg supply from his lazy chickens. Goats bleat in the backyard, Abby the blind dog bumps into your knees, smacks into the legs of the table. He’s a welder and bought a new snow plow last year, installing it without aid on his truck. He also just bought a brand new red car. Last week he mailed me a twenty dollar bill.

 

 

 

Nesting and Cooking

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

I’ve been holing up a bit since settling in Brooklyn. Not only because I spent all of my money in Europe in the last few months, but because it’s winter. It’s grey. And today, it’s even raining. I spend so much of my time working in the restaurant that in my time off, I’m so tired that my bones hurt. This results in those down days being spent wearing loose knits while tinkering in the kitchen.

Last week, for the first time, I made lamb chops. I’ve never much been a fan of lamb, or rather, it’s never excited me the way I see some people fawn over it. I figure, if it incites such love in some people, I’d better let them have it. However, I had a crazy experience a few years back where as my dinner partner finished their lamb chops, I was overwhelmed by a need to suck on the lamb bones. I know that sounds like an inappropriate share, but it must’ve been a deficiency of some sort in my own diet that caused it, and last week, I wanted those lamb bones again. I seared the chops with Herbs de Provence, fresh thyme, and grey sea salt. Paired with roasted purple carrots, beet greens, and fingerlings that I seasoned with whole garlic cloves still in their wraps, a bit of rosemary, olive oil and more sea salt, it was simple, comforting and delicious.

This morning I broke down the chicken I baked on Sunday, saving the bones and au jus to make a stock. It’s simmering now with carrots, onions, rosemary, thyme and celery, making a wonderful perfume for the apartment.

I’m working for a new website, writing about food and artisans. It seems promising. I’ll be researching artisanal sodas this week, made in my Brooklyn backyard, by people likely to be as excited as I am to be cooking and tinkering, making your life and career out of what makes you happiest.