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Well, it happened. I sold out.

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Like Dionne Warwick and the Psychic Friends Network, like Mary J. Blige and Burger King’s crispy chicken wrap, or Claire Danes and the Latisse Eyelash Prescription Treatment System, I am endorsing a product. Which appeals deeply to my childhood self. I mean, I grew up seeing Bill Cosby eat Jell-o Pudding Pops and Michael J. Fox drink Pepsi, so joining their ranks (in some small way) kind of makes me want to jump through time and high-five my eleven-year-old self. The product?

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From now until infinity you will not be able to use a Wusthof knife without thinking of me.

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Do not attempt this at home unless you want to cut off your nose.

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You can see the entire campaign over on their Edge site.

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When they asked me to endorse them they sent me a nice chef’s knife in the mail, as well as a letter inviting me to be one of their spokespeople as well as a bunch of material outlining the campaign they were planning. I opened the package, took the knife (“Cool,” I remember thinking. “They sent me a knife because I’m a chef.”), glanced at the rest and thought, “Junk mail,” and tossed it in the trash. A week later someone from the agency putting the campaign together called.

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“Did you get the knife?” she asked.

Oh, great. Now she was going to try to sell me something. Well, ha, ha, sucker. I’ve got my knife and I don’t have to give it back.

“Yep, thanks. It’s nice.”

Now, just try to sell me more knives so I can refuse you.

“What did you think about it?”

What did I think about the knife? Well, it’s sharp and it cuts things? What does she mean? What is she talking about?

“Um…”

“You know, the proposal?”

The trash was long gone. What had I done? I tried to fake it.

“You know,” I said, “I thought it looked good, but why don’t you refresh me…”

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It’s amazing I’ve survived this long around so many sharp knives and so much fire, to be honest. But, ultimately the joke’s on Wusthof. What they don’t realize is that they didn’t need to pay me to endorse them. I was doing it a long time ago for free. Way back in 2004 I did my first ever interview as a chef. Ted Lee (of the Lee Bros. cookbook out now!) needed some chefs to talk about knives for a piece he was writing for the New York Times. He figured that I worked with vegetables so I’d have a different take on it. He’d talked to lots of chefs about their fancy Japanese knives, their hand forged custom steel, their ceramic knives built by robots. Me? I used a Wusthof.

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Amanda Cohen, a sous-chef at Pure Food and Wine in Manhattan, bought her less exalted Wüsthof chef’s knife at a Bed Bath & Beyond store in Manhattan. But she is every bit as sanguine as Mr. Heflin about its form and function.

“My knife fits my hand so perfectly,” Ms. Cohen said. “Every time I pick it up, it’s like, `Hello, old friend!’ “

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I’ve always used whatever knife I had lying around. I usually go for a Wusthof if I’m buying one, because I take my knives to hell and back and really beat the tar out of them so $900 knives that require constant maintenance are wasted on me. Later in the NY Times piece:

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“As long as you get the job done on time, a knife is a knife,” said Ms. Cohen, the sous-chef at Pure Food and Wine. “I see all these guys with their knives in fancy carrying cases, and I always want to ask them, `Does that make the food taste better?’”

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I’ve got a Wusthof tossed in my bag and that’s kind of all I need. Just the 6″ chef’s knife. From now until I go off a cliff, I’m Thelma and this is my Louise.

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2 gether 4 ever.

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So thanks, Wusthof, for putting a price tag on a relationship you didn’t even know already existed. And the campaign’s not just about me. Marc Vetri of Vetri in Philadelphia and Katherine Clapner the pastry chef who owns Dude, Sweet Chocolate in Dallas are both part of their campaign as well this year, so I’m in good company.

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And I got a free knife!

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It’s hard to remember the big restaurants from last year, let alone from a couple of decades ago, but I recently came across Life Magazine’s Picture Cookbook. They do a round-up of “the best” restaurants in the world (circa 1958) and I thought it’d be info-taining to reproduce the New York section, both pictures and text, to remember the forgotten restaurants of 50 years ago.

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Le Pavillion. Owned by Henri Soule, a great restauranteur, Le Pavillon rates as the finest French restaurant in America. In the copper dish are quenelles de brochet Pavillon, egg-shaped mousses of sieved pike poached and served with lobster sauce. On the serving platter at right is mousse de sole Pavillon which is served, as in foreground, half covered with lobster sauce and half covered with champagne sauce.

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Brussels. Born of the 1939 – 1940 World’s Fair where its managers operated the Belgian Pavilion restaurant, the Brussels has become one of the city’s finest restaurants. Here Maître d’hôtel Leon Lievens lifts a chateaubriand en papillote from the paper in which it was cooked. On a side table are the asparagus with sauce mousseline of hollandaise and whipped cream, and pommes soufflées to go with it.

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The Forum. A restaurant with an off-beat touch is The Forum of the Twelve Caesars. In foreground is alpine snow hare stewed in wine and served with maize and lingonberries. At left is an appetizer of clams, oysters, crab meat, lobster, shrimp. Ramekin holds pike mousse. Menu goes in for Latin (eggs Benedictus) and flaming foods — “fiddler crab lump a la Nero.”

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Voisin. Quiet and elegant, Voisin has for 45 years been famed for its desserts. Below is an assortment: a chocolate soufflé (top), served with vanilla sauce (in sauceboat), a gâteau St. Honore (at left), two chocolate boxes of spongecake and chocolate butter cream flanking a strawberry strip, eclairs, strawberry tarts and a vanilla pot de crème.

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Just for fun I thought I’d include a Chicago restaurant, The Pump Room because, well, having this guy in your restaurant probably wouldn’t go over real well today, but in 1958 it was the height of class. Also, flaming swords of food!

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Pump Room. Famed for flaming swords that carry speared sustenance ranging from shashlik to Alaska crab, the Pump Room in the Ambassador East Hotel is one of America’s most spectacular dining rooms. Bright-coated waiters march back and forth bearing the sizzling swords to the tables while (at night, not at lunch) the lights grow dim. In this picture, the array of hot swords from left carry shashlik, deep sea scallops, broiled lamb chops, whole chicken livers, milk-fed chickens, crab meat rolled in bacon, and filet mignon. Presiding is the coffee boy.

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That’s coffee MAN to you, buddy. Mr. Coffee Man.

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There’s something so hopefully romantic about this cookbook photo. Maybe it’s the two glasses of champagne, one flat and the other suspiciously foamy? Maybe it’s the pink roses peeking in from the right? Maybe it’s the idea of attracting a woman by feeding her a store bought pie crust oozing with pink Cool Whip? Whatever it is, I bet the person who made this ate it alone.

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One thing I love about Japan are its food characters. Everyone has encountered Anpanman, the superhero made of bread, at some point.

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But right now I’m loving the Tofu Oyako brought out by the Devilrobot design group. Described as “cute but toxic” he’s a tiny little guy with a block of tofu for a head.

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Why don’t we have these ultra-cute food characters over here? Why must I go to Japan to fully anthropomorphize my tofu? It’s a crime, is what it is.

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I wasn’t aware of Kristin Tercek’s art before, but now I’m kind of hooked. Apparently she made plush dolls under the Cuddly Rigor Mortis banner but these days she’s doing gruesomely adorable paintings of living, rotting, dying, hard-partying vegetables. And candy!

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You can see a lot more of her art (both vegetable and non) over on her website.

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Home cooks, do yourself a favor: buy a silpat. Seriously. Most of the things that make a restaurant kitchen better than a home kitchen are things that just can’t be replicated: a deep fat fryer, a cleaning staff, a professional dishwasher (the person, not the machine), infinite quantities of plates, bulk ingredients. But a silpat is one of those bits of restaurant kitchen equipment that you can buy and it’ll make your life so much easier.

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Read the rest of this entry »

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Just came across this photo that illustrated a Playboy story from 1986 called “What The Chefs Are Cooking for Christmas.” Apparently, whatever it is, they’re cooking it in baggy, garish, highly-flammable sweaters.

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A couple of months ago, New York Comic Con descended on the West Side of Manhattan like the spearhead of an invasion of happy fans from another universe where life is more colorful and a whole lot more fun. One of my proudest moments came when I got a text from Ryan Dunlavey (the artist on the cookbook) showing me a commission someone had just paid him to draw. The drawing?

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Normally, commissions are things like Wonder Woman and Aquaman giving an erotic massage to a dolphin with a mink glove, but in this case it was me…fighting MODOK. Who is MODOK? Why, only the original Mobile Organism Designed Only for Killing.

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The big-headed bully has become a comedy icon recently.

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In no small part thanks to our very own Ryan…

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And now I’m a comic book character. I can only hope that fetish commissions  of me in compromising positions with a mushroom are next!

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Although my husband’s hometown of Charleston, SC now features so many breweries that on a recent trip we found growlers and taps in a very sketchy mini-mart in a lousy part of town, the first of these is Palmetto Brewery. Who are they? Let them tell it in their own words:

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“Palmetto Brewery first served Charleston’s thirst in the 1850′s. Brewed through the ‘War of Northern Aggression,’ the earthquake of 886, a major hurricane, and into the turn of the century, but failed to survive prohibition. We revived the tradition in 1993, becoming the first brewery to operate in South Carolina since Prohibition. Our beer is truly handcrafted in small batches in the historic city of Charleston.”

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Unavailable outside of South Carolina, you’ll find it all over the place when you’re in Charleston. Fortunately for me, one of the founders of the brewery is a fan of Dirt Candy and a really good friend and Palmetto gave me a ton of their beer for the cookbook signing in Charleston.

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Before.

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After.

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A couple of weeks ago I catered the Racked Awards out at Westway, and the inimitable Ryan Dunlavey (artist on Dirt Candy: A Cookbook, and friend to all children) did tray cards for the food. Here’s what he drew:

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Collect them all!

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In action!

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Yes, “shepherd” is spelled wrong. But it’s still a great piece of art!

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