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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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It’s not often that I get treated well. I’m a girl who cooks vegetables and it’s not that cool to know me in the food world. On top of that, my restaurant is tiny and I’m not the protege of a famous chef like Thomas Keller or Eric Ripert. There are people I’m friends with in the restaurant business, but it’s rare some stranger appears out of nowhere and does something nice for me. So I was super-happy to be invited uptown for dinner at one of Chef John Fraser’s Vegetarian Monday nights at his restaurant Dovetail.

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Dovetail: clearly this restaurant

could eat Dirt Candy and still have

room to eat my apartment for dessert.

It might even need a slice of pizza afterwards.

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Chef Fraser asked his publicists at Bullfrog & Baum to invite me, which was fun because a) it’s rare a chef is as shy as I am, and b) I love getting emails from Bullfrog & Baum because it always seems very important. B&B are sort of the Death Star of restaurant publicity: big, inevitable, capable of destroying entire planets when necessary. Anyways, I was invited and off my husband and I went in our fancy clothes, up to Dovetail on 77th and Columbus.

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The most important thing you should know about my meal is that it was free. I tried to pay but they wouldn’t let me (although my attempt to pay was partly a genuine attempt to pay and partly one of those gestures you make towards your wallet when you go out to eat with other people, hoping that they’ll say, “I got it,” before your hand actually touches your wallet). So take my comments with a grain of salt – after all, who can hate on a free meal? The deal for people who pay for their meal is that every Monday night, Chef Fraser is offering a three course dinner for $38/person. There’s a vegetarian menu with vegan options, a vegetable-focused menu (which has a fair amount of meat in it) and a limited version of the regular menu. It must drive his kitchen nuts to have to do so many different menus one night a week, but it’s neat to have the options.

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So how is it? It’s good! This is a far different experience than you’ll get at Dirt Candy. It’s the Upper West Side, for Pete’s sake. Swarms of waiters cater to your every whim, the plates are enormous, the food is impeccably plated, the room is hushed and there are very fancy touches. If you order the consommé they bring it out for you in a Mason jar so you can take a look at before they serve it, sort of like picking your pig at a BBQ place. All I could think of is that Antonio would go crazy if I made him wash more Mason jars than he already does now, but that’s why Dovetail’s got a big staff. There are plenty of vegan desserts and while vegan desserts are hard to get right, these were great. Of course, I’m a sucker for dessert. As long as it’s sweet and has chocolate in it, I’m happy.

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“Pick me! Pick me!”

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I haven’t seen much press about these Monday Night Vegetarians meals, but it should get more attention. There are very few high-end options for vegetarians in Manhattan and at $38/head you’re not going to break the bank. Let’s face it, most high end restaurants treat vegetables like an afterthought and while they’ll sometimes dash off a couple of vegetarian dishes they’re usually pretty unmemorable. Chef Fraser is taking the time and care to think through his menu, and it’s one of the best vegetarian meals I’ve had in a non-vegetarian, NYC restaurant.

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The vegetarian option at most

high-end, non-veggie restaurants. I

once paid $65 for a plate that looked

just like this.

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Full disclosure: even though my meal was free, no one asked me to post anything. The reason I’m writing this up is because I think folks who like Dirt Candy may want to check it out, and because Fraser’s trying something different. Monday nights are hard (I’m not even open on Monday) and there he is on the very conservative Upper West Side and he decides that what he’s going to do to bring in business is to go vegetarian one night a week and treat vegetables with some respect. It’s a cool step to take, so that’s the main reason I’m giving it a plug here. But also? When someone goes out of their way to be nice to me and Dirt Candy, I want to be nice back.

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(Read Serious Eats’s review of Dovetail’s Vegetarian Monday Nights)

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(Dovetail’s website)

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Vicki Larrieux is 22 years old and she has a problem.

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“I have always had an irrational fear of vegetables, even as a child I used to properly freak out if some carrots or a few peas were on my plate,” says this Portsmouth student, speaking to The Telegraph in her strange British way.

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Someone just told me that today, October 1, is World Vegetarian Day.

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Excited!

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Why am I always the last one to be told these things?

Vegetarians have a new hero: Quick Gun Murugan. A character invented for a series of MTV India shorts back in 1993, Quick Gun Murugan is a singing, dancing, vegetarian Indian cowboy who fights the “non-veg” McDosa corporation and he’s onscreen in New York City during the New York Asian Film Festival (June 19 – July 5). The festival will be showing 2008’s QUICK GUN MURUGAN feature film in which Murugan fights the non-veg McDosa Corp. and their evil boss, Rice Plate Reddy, who wants to make all Indians eat beef. Quick Gun gets killed (oh no!) and resurrected by God (yay!) just in time to stop Rice Plate’s quest for the final ingredient for his Automatic McDosa Machines: a mother’s love. Yes, mother love is what makes food prepared by mom so special and Rice Plate is kidnapping all of India’s mothers to use them as his Secret Ingredient and it’s up to Quick Gun to stop his evil non-veg scheming.

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The film is playing at the IFC Center on Tuesday June 23 at 5:10pm and Wednesday, July 1 at 5:30pm. Anyone coming to Dirt Candy with a ticket stub from one of these screenings gets a free glass of wine! Why? Because, we are like this only.

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(You can buy tickets here and watch the QUICK GUN MURUGAN trailer)

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Every now and then you eat something so strange that you spend days talking about it but can never properly convey to others just how odd it was. That happened to me last weekend when I went to have drinks at a Mexican restaurant, El Parador, and got an order of their jalapenos rellenos. According to the menu I could have them stuffed with anejo cheese or with “chunky peanut butter.” In disbelief I ordered them half with anejo and half with peanut butter, and sure enough they arrived and they were…fried jalapenos stuffed with chunky peanut butter. The chunky peanut butter even had some char on it from the grill.

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Is this some kind of strange and traditional dish that I’ve never heard of before? Is it popular? Do people in Mexico enjoy it on a regular basis? These are mysteries that I don’t think I will ever be able to solve.

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El Santo is confused by your snack.

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I recently came across the Encyclopedia Britannica vol. 11  which was published in 1911, and I looked up “vegetarianism” to see what it said. To my surprise there was a lengthy entry and apart from a few details, it could have been written yesterday. I’ve reproduced it below and, while there are a few inaccuracies, it’s a pretty amazing look at how little vegetarianism has changed in the past 98 years. Technically, I’m not a vegetarian myself, and I’m not advocating anything here, but a lot of people seem to think that vegetarianism, and the claims for its benefits, suddenly sprung into being out of thin air back in the 1960’s. But look back through the history of New York or any large city and you’ll find vegetarian restaurants and societies reaching back into the 19th century.

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In the first paragraph alone this 98-year-old Encyclopedia entry talks about raw foodists and frutarians and later you learn about the huge number of competing vegetarian publications (two of them dueling over the title of The Vegetarian), claims that a vegetarian diet can cure cancer, the frequently-made argument that  “…an acre of cultivable land under fruit and vegetable cultivation will produce from two to twenty times as much food as if the same land were utilized for feeding cattle…” and the skill shown by vegetarians in walking races. Not surprisingly, the entry is written by Josiah Oldfield, a Senior Physician of the Lady Margaret Fruitarian Hospital. Yes, in 1911 there were fruitarian hospitals.

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This Sunday the New York Times had a long piece on the Phuket Vegetarian Festival, a religious fest in Southern Thailand that follows a set of injunctions against certain behaviors during its nine-day course, including one against eating meat. Thailand has always had vegetarian restaurants and food, but this article takes mouth-watering food porn to new heights with passages like:

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“Salad dok mai was a mound of vibrant fried flowers: fuchsia bougainvilleas, little green buds and pink blossoms like crepe paper that carried a note of bitterness under a lush garlicky dressing. Khao Soi, a classic northern dish of egg noodles in yellow curry sauce, was spicy and rich. The crispy-soft noodles fell like elegant ribbons from the tips of my chopsticks. Pad pak good was a stir fry of fiddleheads, which I had never before encountered in Thailand. The unfurling fern leaves were crunchy and just slightly succulent, offset by delicate cubes of tofu and shiitake buttons. This artistry emboldened me to try Pun Pun’s gaang massaman. It was creamy and rich, just as it should be; tawny with cashews and angular cubes of potato jostling on my spoon with silky oyster mushrooms.”

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Food is serious business in Thailand with the recent Prime Minister, Samak Sundaravej, ostensibly being forced to resign because he continued to host the cooking shows “Chim Pai Bon Pai” (Tasting and Grumbling) and “Yok Khayong Hok Mong Chao” (All Set at 6AM) while in office – although there was general unhappiness with his administration beyond his cooking show duties.

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(Read the full NY Times article here)

(Some basic info on vegetarian food in Thailand, although ignore the writer’s blanket distaste for street vendors)

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I can’t remember why I stopped eating meat. I’d been an enthusiastic carnivore up until the age of 15 and then suddenly…nothing. No meat, no seafood, no chicken, no pork, nothing. It wasn’t because I cared about animals, in fact I’ve always given animals a wide berth. At an early age a goldfish had gotten out of its tank and chased me around the kitchen and ever since then I figured that if a goldfish wanted my blood then I wasn’t about to try my luck with anything that actually came equipped with fangs and sharp claws. So I’ve avoided animals both as friends and as food and hopefully, when they take over the planet and enslave humanity, they’ll remember that and cut me a break.

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