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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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NBC’s food blog, Feast, does a feature called “Cash Wanted” where they ask people what they’d do with unlimited investment. To be honest, most of these are sort of snoozey. Sample answers:

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Open a rooftop farm

Open a farm to grow barley to make microbeer

Open an inn on a farm in Tuscany

Open a restaurant on a farm

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So they asked me to do the “Cash Wanted” interview today, and I told them my dream: open a farm where we train monkeys to clean. Seriously. Cleaning is the worst thing in the world and my staff would worship me forever if I could send them home at the end of the night and leave some monkeys behind to clean up and sleep in the restaurant. If they can teach a monkey to wait tables, they can teach a monkey to clean up Dirt Candy. I worry they might get in the liquor, but that’s okay. After a hard night of cleaning they deserve a drink or six. I know my staff does.

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Farm is also where sleepy monkeys learn

to seize the tools of revolution.

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My interview on “Cash Wanted”

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I’m going to be on Martha Stewart’s Sirius radio show tomorrow (Friday) morning. The show is called “Morning Living” and I’m going to be talking about the Dirt Candy beet pasta.

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Check it out if you can.

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A really nice interview went up today on Mind Body Green. Check it out if you’re totally bored and looking to kill some time today.

There’s a really nice piece about Dirt Candy up at one of my favorite blogs, Serious Eats, one of the few bigtime food blogs that’s 100% food and 0% gossip. I’ve read it for years and the people who run it are so sincere and honest in their devotion to food that they sometimes make me feel shallow and facile. Plus: how did they get those pictures? They snapped those pics in a few minutes at their tables while they ate and they look like the result of a five hour Vogue shoot around the pool at an Italian villa.

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Then NBC’s food site, Feast, rounds up reactions to the new Department of Health restaurant rating system. Previously, health inspections got a numerical grade, with points taken off for violations. Now they’re going to get a letter grade that have to be posted in the window. A lot of chefs are irritated by this, but to be honest it’s going to be hard not to get an A (I have obviously just jinxed Dirt Candy and ensured we receive an F). Not only do grades below an A get a one-month grace period to fix their problems followed by a re-inspection before the final grade is posted, but if you get below an A the second time you can appeal the decision and get another chance. If you’re still getting below an A after your second chance, then you might have some real problems.

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“Where’s the A+, young lady?”

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Of course, given my luck, the Health Department will show up on a day when some disaster has befallen us and I’ll get a C.

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Feast rounds up some reactions and most chefs seem pretty ambivalent about it but no one seems downright outraged. Most of them feel a bit like I do: another thing we have to post? I’m running out of room! I was surprised to see one chef repeat the common stereotype that Chinatown kitchens are dirtier than other kitchens (I’m not sure how many Chinatown restaurants even let outsiders into their kitchens to judge their cleanliness levels, anyways, but maybe this chef knows something I don’t). Another chef seems to think that everyone has iPhones – how elitist! Oh, wait, I have an iPhone….okay, not so elitist after all.

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In all my life I have only seen two restaurants

across the continent with less than an A.

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Finally, the folks at MindBodyGreen have a nice piece about vegetarian restaurants where vegans and carnivores can lie down together in peace and we’re included. Yay! Dirt Candy: where absolutely no one is allowed to eat vegans.

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Lots of people seem to enjoy posting reviews on Yelp! And so I just posted one about the low quality graffiti that appeared on the front of Dirt Candy recently. Seriously, I’m very disappointed in the level of this artist’s work.

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Here’s a link to my Yelp! review of this hackwork.

I keep forgetting to mention that the Market Finds blog posts I’m writing every other week for Saveur have been going up – and if a blog updates in the forest and no one reads it, did it really make a sound? Market Finds gives you ideas for what to do with odd vegetables and so far I’ve covered radishes, three different winter squashes, fresh cranberries and for New Year’s that South Carolina favorite, Hoppin John and Collard Greens. Writing for Saveur means you have to sort of sound like Saveur (sophisticated, food porn-y, lots of mentions of your grandmother’s kitchen) but hey! At least they’re letting me talk about Fraggles and slavery. It’s updated once a week, and my posts are every other week.

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Dirt Candy: putting the Fraggles

back into Saveur.

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If you recall, Dirt Candy had two top secret missions going on over the summer. One has finally (finally!) come to fruition and can be revealed: we’re blogging over at Saveur. Yes, Saveur, the ultimate food porn magazine. I remember shoplifting my first issue of Saveur and then sneaking it home inside my jacket and hiding in the bathroom reading it for hours (”Leave me alone, I’m brushing my hair!”), and then my mother found it and she got all angry and she and my dad sat me down and gave me “the talk” about urges I might be having about food and how they were perfectly natural but that magazines like Saveur were exploiting the food who appeared in the photographs and that it was unhealthy for me to look at those pictures too much and they might make me sick.

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Anyways, once every other week, I’ll be putting up a post over at Saveur about some vegetable or other: where to find it, what to do with it, whether or not it likes long walks on the beach. I’m trying to focus on vegetables that folks find at the farmer’s market, or just hanging around on street corners, that aren’t always the easiest ones to cook, giving a little guidance and maybe linking to some recipes that send you in a fruitful (get it? Fruitful?) direction with them. So let me know if there’s a vegetable that always flummoxes you that you want to hear analyzed (the best place to do that is on the DC Facebook page).

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Read the first post about radishes and Fraggle Rock!

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This week, Ed Levine at Serious Eats goes to review Dallas BBQ, one of NYC’s mini-chains that is always packed but rarely reviewed. His assessment: not as bad as I expected, super-cheap, fries are better than Shake Shack fries. Then Josh Ozersky over at The Feedbag gets annoyed that Levine paid any attention to this place at all and says it deserves to close and is awful. Now even the local food bloggers are picking up on the burgeoning conflict. Expect bloodshed soon.

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Last week in The Guardian, Tim Hayward put up a brief post about a librarian who had a book returned with a piece of bacon inside, apparently being used as a bookmark. He then writes one of the queasiest paragraphs I have ever read:

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“Most of us, curled in our favourite reading chair with a steamy mug of something reassuring will have come across a previous reader’s biscuit trail, crushed into the page gutter. There’s something lovely about the connection with others who have loved the same book…I can never resist tasting the crumbs.”

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.That sound you hear is one million readers gagging at the thought of picking off the dried bits of food you find stuck to the pages of a library book and eating them. He then asks his readers to join him in the comments section and tell the world what they do with food besides eating it. The horrifying results after the break.

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A teaser trailer is up for the new low budget horror movie from New York City horror guy, Larry Fessenden. It’s called BITTER FEAST and why do you care? Because it has chef Mario Batali in a role. Here’s the synopsis:

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Joe Maggio wrote and is directing the story starring James LeGros as a New York chef and TV personality who takes culinary revenge on a critic who savages his restaurant. Josh Leonard plays the critic and Batali will portray the restaurant owner.

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I’m sorry, but I find things like this really funny. And James Le Gros gets poster billing and Mario Batali doesn’t? What a world, what a world.
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(The teaser is here, not much to see, no Mario Batali)

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