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What is dirt candy? Vegetables, of course. When you eat a vegetable you’re eating little more than dirt that’s been transformed by plenty of sunshine and rain into something that’s full of flavor: Dirt Candy. It’s also the name of my restaurant, which opened in October, 2008.

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Okay, so I’m getting ready to start selling a Dirt Candy t-shirt, and I’ve realized that I can’t make people pay for a shirt that’s nothing more than a t-shirt with a Dirt Candy logo slapped on it. I’m turning to you guys, the fabulous designers, artists, and illustrators who are my customers (and even the ones who are not my customers) and asking for your help.

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I want you to design the Dirt Candy t-shirt. My one request is that it incorporates the logo…somehow.

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I’ll be taking submissions from now (right now!) until Thursday, May 24th. If you want a Photoshop copy of the logo to work with, just email me at info at dirtcandynyc dot com and I’ll send one over to you right away. And you can submit a jpg of your design to that same email address. If we pick you, we’ll email you for a more high resolution file.

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What do you get for designing this bold new look for Dirt Candy shirts? The winning design will get a free dinner for two at the restaurant, and you’ll be credited (or your company will be credited, or whatever name you want will be credited) as the designer of the shirt in the Dirt Candy online store (when it opens, which will hopefully be in July).

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Not what I had in mind.

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Small print section: the t-shirts I want to use are white women’s and men’s shirts, but if another color is crucial to your design, I’m open to it. Right now I’ve sourced Gildan SoftStyle Fitted T-Shirts with round necks, not with plunging neck lines that show chest hair. I really want the design to work for both men’s and women’s shirts, but if you come up with two gender-specific designs, I’m good with that, too.

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Most of all, I want you to mutate, mutilate, mayhem-ate, and make most awesome the Dirt Candy logo as you come up with the Best. T-Shirt. Design. Ever.

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This designer has a lot of heart!

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(Really funny designs may get an extra honorable mention prize.)

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I’m holding a Lady Chef Stampede! For the rest of the year, and maybe beyond, I’ll be posting about the dozens of women who changed the history of food. Whether they’re chefs, restauranteurs, or writers, these are the women on whose shoulders we’re all standing.

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Chu niang is not an person, it’s a whole class of professional female chefs who were the rock stars of China’s Song Dynasty (960 – 1279). Far more popular than male chefs, they charged more money for their services, were held in higher esteem, and cooked elaborate meals for nobility and scholars like hired guns who blew into a household to dazzle an important guest with a jaw-dropping meal, then disappeared in a puff of cash. They were so popular that there was actually a chu niang shortage at one point, which led to the founding of a women-only cooking school expressly opened to meet the demand.

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There’s a much repeated story online about Son San Niang, who was a famous chu niang. Hired by premier Wang Zeng, who had agreed to host a Thousand Guest Banquet, she arrived with her staff of 80 (made up mostly of women and a few men) and instantly set up the kitchen like a war room. She sat at one end of the room on a raised platform, flanked by female assistants who would run orders to the various stations.

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Her chefs set up their stations facing her, and Son San Niang communicated with them through a complicated series of signals made with colored flags. There were blue, red, yellow, purple, and white flags and each one was matched to the color of the uniforms of chefs at certain stations. The flags would signal for the relevant chef to start steaming, to double-boil, deep fry, stop cooking, start plating. Son sat on her platform and oversaw the meal prep like a general directing her troops.

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Before chu niang, Chinese women cooked, but they cooked at home. Many of them were required to take professional cooking lessons before marriage, and a housewife who was in charge of her own kitchen was called a zhongkui. But chu niang weren’t just excellent home cooks. They were paid for their work, and valued for their skills, not their baby-making potential. They weren’t cooking for their husband and children, they were cooking for important and influential men. Chefs were wildly powerful in China. The country’s first documented chef, Yi Yin, was also a Shang Dynasty prime minister, known as “God of the Kitchen” due to the massive influence he had on the policies of the Shang king.

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Chu niang were cooking food during the Song Dynasty and practicing the most elevated and refined style of Chinese cuisine. The Song was an innovative era in Chinese history that saw the invention of gunpowder and the production of the world’s first paper banknotes. It was a time when learning, literature, and art hit new heights, and right there with them, the chu niang were pushing Chinese cuisine to a higher level and protecting the traditions of the past. For 300 years, chu niang were Chinese food. For that alone, they deserve some respect.

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I know that a lot of people wish Dirt Candy took more walk-ins and I know that it’s frustrating when you come down here and the restaurant is full and I can’t seat you, but that’s no reason to just barge into Dirt Candy and seat yourself. And I wish someone would tell this to the squirrels, because on Friday night, that’s exactly what one of them did.

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“Squirrel, party of one.
Coming through.”

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I’m holding a Lady Chef Stampede! For the rest of the year, and maybe beyond, I’ll be posting about the dozens of women who changed the history of food. Whether they’re chefs, restauranteurs, or writers, these are the women on whose shoulders we’re all standing.

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Edna Lewis

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The granddaughter of slaves, Edna Lewis was born on April 13, 1916 in Virginia. She left home at 16, after her father died, and wound up in New York City where she ironed in an industrial laundry, worked for the Daily Worker, and campaigned for FDR. In 1948, she and antiques dealer, John Nicholson, opened her restaurant, Café Nicholson on 323 East 58th Street (right between First and Second Avenue). It was filled with people like Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Marlene Dietrich, and Richard Avedon. She cooked there until the late 1950′s, and then in the 1960′s she broke her leg so badly she had to stop cooking professionally for a time. Since then, her cookbooks, chefing stints at Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn, her classes, and guest cooking jobs across the country have made her famous and influential.

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Judith Jones, who edited Julia Child at Knopf, encouraged Lewis to write cookbooks and she wrote four, the first two of which, The Edna Lewis Cookbook and The Taste of Country Cooking, got rave reviews and were extremely influential. Edna Lewis died in her sleep on February 13, 2006, but between being born in Virginia, and passing away in Georgia, she changed cooking in New York City and across the country, and she earned Southern cuisine a hell of a lot of respect.

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(A review and potted history of Cafe Nicholson from the New York Times)

(Edna Lewis on Wikipedia)

(A long  bio of Edna Lewis)

(A short documentary on Edna Lewis)

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Jesus left Dirt Candy over a year ago, but he was my sous chef and my friend, and part of him will always be a part of Dirt Candy. We have a handle that we use to open up the basement hatch which we all have to do about 100 times each day. It was always getting lost, so one night Jesus braided together this rope for the handle out of plastic wrap, just like a kid at summer camp making lanyards.

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It wore out recently, and so I had to throw it away. It was the last thing that Jesus did that was still here. So from now on, while he’ll always be a part of Dirt Candy, it’ll only be in spirit.

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I’ve been experimenting over the past few weeks with a tomato appetizer to welcome summer. I think I’m getting close. Technically, this is turning out to be the most complex dish on the menu.

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We don’t have much room to store cases of wine, so rather than offering people the same old list of Syrahs, Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Grigios and the rest of the usual suspects we thought we’d make up a wine list of the strangest and most unusual wines we could find, sort of like a wine zoo for exotic animals.

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I serve a lot of wine at Dirt Candy and all of it comes with a story. But A Touch of Classe is the most personal wine I serve.

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Sure, it’s organic. Sure, it’s natural. But there’s more to it than that.

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What vegetable is less popular than cabbage? Just the name conjures images of depressing tenements where the sulphurous stink of boiled cabbage has permanently stained the wallpaper. It’s the wino of the vegetable world: smelly, unloved, and looking at it makes you feel sad. A cabbage salad sounds even worse. Cabbage that’s…raw? It’s sounds like a plated suicide note. That’s why I’m really, really excited about the Cabbage Salad with Sichuan Walnuts and Cabbage Wontons that I just put on the menu a month ago.

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Because it’s pretty.

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Last week, the dance non-profit, Groove With Me, asked me to be one of the chefs at their Taps n’Tapas fundraiser. There were only a few other restaurants participating so I figured, “Why not?” While at the event, a few things became clear:

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Thing #1: the candy I use to decorate my table is having babies. That’s a sealed package of the peppermint, and that central peppermint is unbroken, so where did those two pieces come from? And it’s not just in one package:

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There’s another one. What is going on here?

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Thing #2: April Bloomfield is a very nice person. I asked her a lot of stuff about her cookbook since it just came out and mine’s on the way and her input was much appreciated.

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Also, that sunset is gorgeous!

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Thing #3: New York City’s event rooms have some of the best views in the city. Here I am with Justyna, soaking it in.

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Thing #4: my prep chef, Nin, takes the best photos of my food that I’ve ever seen. She did this one-handed with her iPhone. I am shamed.

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Just look at that! Here’s another one!

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It’s hard to believe that in 2010 I signed a deal to write a cookbook, but today the cover went up online and it’s out on August 21, so now I start meeting with my publisher’s marketing and publicity people to figure out the best way to promote it. In the meantime, here’s the cover:

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You can find more info over on Amazon.