mary eats

Right before leaving for our couisin’s wedding in Italy (seriously like 3 hours before) I was notified by a crisp white 8×11 piece of paper that I had won our school’s food writing scholarship.

I applied for this scholarship last year, and thought I had it in the bag. Um hello! Blogger (with a spelling problem), paid restaurant critic, book contributer. And as you can guess I did not win. This year I dug a little deeper, pulled out the “hearts and flowers” (not the way I like to write), and as I turned my essay in I said, “If I do not win, please gently pull me aside and let me know that food writing is not in my future.”

Culinary and Writing are both ego fueled careers, and while I find pleasure in both, I’s be lying if I didn’t admit to also finding pleasure in the ego stroking. It feels good to have people recognize the work you’ve done, and the chorus of “ohhhhhs,” and “ahhhhhhhs,”  is better than a paycheck. (Ok, not really, the pay check is important too.)
Thanks to Erin, Lily, Carolyn and Shannon for reading through and editing.

Red Velvet

My father isn’t a hard man to please. A southern born military school graduate, he likes things done right, the first time. Simple pleasures such as sipping a cold can of Coca Cola after mowing the lawn on a hot summer afternoon, or a few autumn puffs on his pipe deeply satisfy him. In contrast to the ever-changing demands for sweets and entertainment, and full attention we placed on our mother, my father’s few and far between requests carried more weight. A man who valued quality over quantity and an evolving gastronome, his traditional but impeccable taste in food has proved to be a bedrock in my culinary journey.

Such was the case for his birthday cake. No ordinary cake would do. Sub-par sponge blanketed with garish pink buttercream roses plagued our local grocery store bakeries. My mother, partaking in a cherished family tradition from my father’s childhood would present to him a fully homemade red velvet cake.

Every January 31st following the long holiday baking season of pies, Christmas cookies, and fruitcake my mother would lug out her white Kitchen Aid standing mixer. And from her worn tin recipe box, she would pull a faded 3×5 card for red velvet cake penned in Grandmother Williams elegant, but illegible cursive.
Pulling a chair over from the kitchen table I would peer over the mixer, watching in silent awe. Crack! The eggs slid into the bowl. Ploom! A puff of flour escaping into the air. “This is daddy’s cake,” my mother would say to my sister Jamie and me as we waited patiently to lick the paddle attachment clean of its pink batter. “And when he was a boy, his mother would make it for him on his birthday.”
After dinner, it would appear. A cake dreams are made of, three tiers of sanguine sponge, swirls of frosting suggesting cascading silk theater curtains the color of fresh cold snow. With a long slicer she would slowly saw into the cake, removing a wedge to reveal a shade of dangerously exciting red. The dense, but moist cake tasted of pure milk chocolate, and the smooth, luxuriously rich cream cheese frosting sent me whirling into a pleasure coma, eyelids half-mast, a satisfied grin plastered across my young face. Had I known about the birds and the bees then, I surely would have sworn them off for a lifetime supply of red velvet cake.
After dinner the Kitchen Aid mixer would go back in the cabinet; the recipe card, further sepia-toned with a splash of vanilla, back into the tin recipe box. Like her fruitcake or chocolate dipped pretzels, I naively expected my father’s cake every year, but as our family schedule became more harried, tradition fell by the wayside. Leaving the dirty work to restaurants, my father’s birthday was celebrated with a meal out through high school and college.

Several years have past since my mother has made my father’s favorite cake, but there isn’t a January that goes by where my father and I don’t make a deal with God for just one more slice of red velvet.

I have received a couple of emails lately asking if I am still in school and that answer is yes.

I am halfway through my third quarter (two more to go). Here I am in the bakeshop piping a mushroom filling into pate choux.

This quarter (3rd quarter) is our intro to casual dining. We rotate through international menus (French, Italian, American, Asian), each having an opportunity to test drive stations in brigade style restaurant kitchen, pantry, grill, fry, sauté, sous chef, and chef. We also spend a week in the formal dining room, and a week in the bakeshop.

Myself, I’ve been out of the kitchen for the last two weeks, in the bake shop (as seen above) and in the dining room, while my fellow classmates have been putting out an Americana menu created by Chef Nick Musser of Seattle’s Icon Grill.

The shift between second quarter and third quarter is close to the difference between undergraduate and graduate studies. My first two quarters I was jamming the basics into my head, cooking temperatures, visual clues for doneness, sauces: all very important, but less than riveting. Now, we study the history of the country/region out menu comes from, the ingredients, chef’s of the region, or who are representing that culinary style elsewhere. As someone who reads McGee (On Food and Cooking) for fun, I am ecstatic, as most of my classmates are, to be probing at the heart of why we love to cook and why we are in culinary school.

After braving and trudging through 11 long weeks of quantity cooking, Chef Gregg Atkinson (yes, Seattleites, that Gregg Atkinson, previous head chef of Canilis, author of several cookbooks including Northwest Essentials, and West Coast Cooking, Host of many KCTS Cooking specials, and regular contributor to the Seattle Times, as a recent article in Bon Appetite), stands and a savior at the end of that long dark tunnel.

Ok, to get that tangent back on path, our Americana menu, was eye opening in the fact that if really forced me to come up with a definition of what American Cuisine is. Having distinct regional cuisines, taking in to account the succession of ingredients and techniques from out “melting pot” population, and out processed food culture that doesn’t appear to being going away anytime soon, coming up with a simple answer to “What is American Cuisine?” proved more difficult than I expected.

When you make a quick mental list of what American food is what do you come up with? Apple Pie? Hamburgers? Pot Roast? Mashed Potatoes? Comfort food? Bingo. Our menu we put out this turn was much the same, fried chicken salad, mac and cheese, steak with blue cheese sauce and horseradish potatoes (something I tried at home and will post about in a bit), chocolate sundae, and bbq chicken pizza.

To me Modern American cuisine is defined by comfort food. It is food of nostalgia, in a harried paced world, uncomplicated dishes food that sets you at ease and tastes as though they were made with love. It is a style of food that with the right ingredients and technique can transcend fine dining to truck stops. Since Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971, her restaurant manifesto has slowly infiltrated the way American Chefs cook. A commitment to quality ingredients, cooking seasonal, creating relationships with farmers, foragers, and artisans (did you read the farm to table story in the October issue of Bon Appetite?). This once revolutionary side of cooking is now at the forefront of American fine dining.

Earlier this week I got an email from NY Times writer Matt Gross asking for eating suggestions in Korea.

Hi Mary,

I’m a writer for the NY Times travel section who’s going to Seoul at the end of November, and I was hoping to get some advice from you, the expert. Basically, my story is simple—I’m supposed to eat my way through the city over the course of a week. I’ve consumed a lot of Korean food in the States, but am wondering what to expect—and what to track down—in Seoul. Are there dining trends to follow up on? New cuisines a-birthing? Local foodies I should invite out for dinner? (Ah, if only you weren’t in Seattle, I’d happily treat you!) And perhaps most important: If you wanted to do nothing but eat in Seoul, which neighborhood would you stay in?

Cheers,

I sent him a laundry list of suggestions, that you can find below, but what are yours? What would you tell Matt or anyone traveling to Seoul where and what to eat?

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