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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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We’re in the middle of a new dining trend, and no one even realized it. Carnival Food! New York City chefs are cooking just like the vendors at county fairs. And it’s not just New York. Some of the most popular shows on the Food Network and the Travel Channel (judging by the fact that they always seem to be on) are Diners, Drive-ins & Dives and Man vs Food – both of them odes to Carnival Food. And here in the wicked city I’ve got Fennel Funnel Cake on the menu (and even a fancy version of Cracker Jacks). So every time you hear about some new burger mutation, towering porcine gutbuster, bizarre dessert, or unlawful hybrid of savory and sweet at a classy restaurant, just remember that county fair vendors got there first.

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Chocolate-covered bacon!

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The Indianapolis State Fair offers Doughnut Burgers

and so does RUB BBQ right here in NYC.

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Or have your Doughnut Burger with bacon, egg and cheese!

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Fried Coke!

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Fried Twinkie Lattes!

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Pork Parfait!

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And last, but not least…Fried Butter!

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We eat our food out of trucks. We eat it while walking down the street. We eat it at ourdoor beer gardens. Just like we’re at a county fair!

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Poutine! Cone Pizza! The KFC Double Down! All Carnival Food!

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So let’s give credit where credit is due. The most influential chef in NYC cuisine right now might just be Dennis Reas.

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In the war against the hegemonic patriarchy, Dirt Candy has a new friend: Feminist Hulk.

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Hulk smash gender discrimination!

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Truly inspiring tweets from the world’s only truly feminist superhero.

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Sometimes you come across a website that hates something so specific, and hates it with such passion, that you have to step back in admiration. Train Pigs is such a site. Whoever put this site together is repulsed – scandalized! horrified! – by people who eat on the subway and so they’ve put together a gallery of photos of people sucking up food on the dirty, dirty NYC subway. But it’s not the photos that won me over, it’s the captions, which are little nuggets of molten bile, barely cool enough to read without burning your eyes. Sample: “Parents who are train pigs, have children who are train pigs.” and “Thanks for the daring shot of this man eating broccoli and garlic. What a vile, disgusting creature.”

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Go, go to TrainPigs and bask in the hate. It is truly refreshing, like a Finnish sauna for your soul!

For Christmas this year I received one of the coolest and most baffling presents I’ve ever gotten. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law (sort of, they’re not married but have been together forever, plus they’ve got a fire pit behind their house and do yoga and ceramics together so that’s like being married) go down to Costa Rica all the time. They’re the kind of people who, instead of having a retirement plan they buy a plot of cheap land in Costa Rica, plant 1,000 hard wood trees, hire a family to live on the land and take care of it and plan to cash it in about 20 years from now when they’re ready to retire and the trees are mature. They’re like hippies who are good with money.

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So while they were down putting in their tree farm this year, my brother-in-law bought this giant hunk of raw cacao paste.

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He gave it to me for Christmas. It came wrapped in leaves.

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It’s really awesome, but my question is: what do I do with it? It tastes bitter and dark and intense. I know what to do with it in general but I want to do something really fun with it. But what? I guess I could glue on two googly eyes and sleep with it like a teddy bear but I’d like to have a plan for it that involves cooking.

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Raw cacao, you complete me.

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Annnnd…we’re back. Dirt Candy re-opens tonight and resumes normal business hours.

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A Parisian door expresses the joy

I feel over my vacation ending.

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In case anyone’s interested, Paris was great (duh). One of the highlights was a meal at Shan Gout, a Sichuan restaurant that was totally empty when we showed up and stayed that way all night. The meal, however, was amazing. We basically ordered the entire menu and it was just the cleanest, freshest most intense flavors. An amuse of sliced green apples with basil was incredibly simple but unexpected and  truly great.

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I have a huge amount of respect for Michael Pollan and I think he’s a great thinker who has done an enormous amount to draw attention to some serious issues regarding America and how it eats. His basic rule about eating pretty much says it all:
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“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
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And I agree with almost every single one of his expanded eating rules.
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But his piece in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” left me cold. Pegged to the publicity campaign for the new movie, JULIE AND JULIA it read like a collection of received wisdom and talking points that added up to far less than the sum of its parts. It brought up more questions than it answered, and while that may be what he intended, I found that its relevance was ultimately undermined by the rose-tinted nostalgia that colored the entire piece.
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Julia Child has no time for nostalgia.

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The award goes to A380 in Taiwan. Opening in November, 2008 it’s an airplane-themed restaurant (named after the Airbus A380) that serves airplane food.

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You know what America doesn’t have enough of? Food movies. Sure there’re a few movies like BIG NIGHT and RATATOUILLE but to get the hard stuff you have to go to Asia. All over Asia there are food comic books (Iron Wok Jan, Kitchen Princess) and television series dealing with cooking because, well, I’m not quite sure but if I had to guess I’d say that a lot of Asian countries take food way more seriously than we do in the States. So here are three of the best food movies you’ll see in your life, after the break.

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The debate on organic food goes on. Is it worth the extra price? Will it make you healthier? Is it all just a marketing ploy? In these tough economic times these questions are so important that they can only be decided by a hamster.

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Cook’s Den ran an experiment on Hammy the Hamster, seeing whether he/she would choose between conventionally grown food or organic food in a series of tests. This being 2009, the experiment would have no value if it wasn’t posted on the internet as an adorable online video.

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Go to Cook’s Den for the results.

Sometimes in the midst of all the critical commentary about what “organic” really means, the goatee-stroking about the politics of eating locally, the hair-splitting over the proper way to prepare this or that dish, the plywood reports, the Deathwatching, the gossip, the cattiness, the pomposity, snark, sarcasm, industry insider-ism and general attitude some folks have when they write/talk/post about food, it’s easy to forget that first and foremost food should be fun.

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This picture’s swiped from BoingBoing. It’s the place that Mark Frauenfelder’s five-year-old daughter set for herself at dinner when he allowed her to set the table and it reminded me of how much fun food and dinner and eating and snacks and all that stuff was when I was a kid.

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So don’t be surprised if you show up at Dirt Candy for dinner and get three teacups with your meal.