I didn’t make it to Attman’s Deli this visit home, but the corned beef came to me. My father stopped by “temple” on his way to a meeting. He’s known for sneaking Attman’s into locked cars, high-security offices of state, and hospital isolation units. It’s a little boring for him to just walk in the front door with a pound and a half and a loaf of rye, but he’s a sport that way.

We have roots on Lombard Street, East Baltimore’s Corned Beef Row. My grandfather Joe Sachs owned a wholesale grocery there, back when it was the Jewish heart of the city. Attman’s opened in 1915, and most of the menu’s the same: corned beef and pastrami, coddies and knishes, chopped liver, kugel, matzoh ball soup, pickled tomatoes and half-sours. Among customers, fewer cigars and fedoras and more track suits and Nike Dunks. Long slow line, a lot of yelling and boisterous laughing, gruff service (warm funny gruff.)

These are from last year’s pilgrimage–

My sister gave me a new book about the decline of Jewish delis in America. Journalist David Sax covers the last frontier of a faded culture and cuisine–abandoned inner cities, the passing of a generation, the rising price of brisket.  Despite the deli doom, though, it’s a fun read, and I’m down with Sax’ preservation mission. I have a few small kvetches with the book and one big one, though: he left the whole mid-Atlantic out of his “coast-to-coast” research.

David. Dude. I know you had to make it home in time for Passover. But you live in Brooklyn–you can lunch in Jersey, Philly’s a day trip, and all Jews have relatives in Maryland. You monkeyed around  in places like Salt Lake City. You were in smelling distance of Corned Beef Row when you declared D.C. a no-deli-man-land. You name-checked Attman’s in the book and the blog.  Baltimore’s got a great story and serious sandwiches.  Also your name is spelled wrong.

hot dog with grilled bologna is a Bmore specialty

Yup. Cringe with your corned beef?

oy, so ladylike

No one who lives in this corner of the world can complain about the produce.  You’ve heard me go on. For reals, this is the land of the jewel-bearing trees with silver trunks and emerald leaves and perfumed blossoms that drive men mad. And hills of golden vines and ruby fruit and birdsong that breaks the heart. But you know what else would be nice in paradise? Field peas. Purple hulls and zipper creams and lady peas and crowders and whippoorwills. They’re all over the South in great variety, and sorely missed by us transplants. They’re great nitrogen fixers, cheap to grow and buy (except for fresh lady peas) and heavenly with a ham hock. You can find them at all the farmers markets (at the old Memphis market I ran you couldn’t talk over the pea shellers) and always at the Pig and a bright orange bare-bones produce chain called Easy-Way. Fresh in the summer, frozen and canned the rest of the year. I don’t know the genealogy of the jeweled garden—something to do with Adam or Alexander or Aladdin—but I do know a few acres of pearly little field peas could fit in the planting schedule somewhere.

In the meantime, round is round, and the point of New Year’s field peas (really beans) is bringing the last year full circle and turning our hearts and hopes over to the next. The Russell Street crew rolled in an auspicious 2010 with big ol’ lucky dried California blackeyes from IGA and some even bigger luckier ones from a Middle Eastern market. And greens and cornbread and our friend Yves’ homemade wine. I know not everyone outside the South eats their lucky beans and greens, but these are so lucky that just looking at the pictures will confer their luck on you and yours.  So here you go—beans, greens, and fruit on fire.  (Bananas Foster is another holiday mandatory around here.) Many happy days (or at least happy hours) in the New Year, dearest y’all.

Hello from after a while. The swine didn’t get me. I’m healthy and here—back from once snowy, now melty Maryland— to close out another year.

Every December there’s a batch of Hanukkah debunking in the news. Reporters and rabbis deconstruct the Hoosiers version of the holiday in which the scrappy Hebrews overcome the Hellenic superstars and claim the nation-state title thanks to some magic oil. The real feud was internal– fundamentalist Maccabees against the worldly Jews who wanted to mix it up with the Greeks.  The mythbusters always mention the gym as a major perk of assimilation, but that’s just so they can drop the phrase “reverse circumcision.” The magic oil was added to the story a few centuries later for a softer temple takedown story. Continuing the revisionist tradition, we now honor the defeated pagans as well as Judah’s champs at our Hanukkah table:

uh oh, filter feeders in the fat

bet you didn't know about the oyster elf

Just half-Jew joshing. Cornmeal-crusted Chincoteague oysters are how the Sachs’ always do Christmas Eve. We properly kicked off the frying season with latkes a few weeks ago back in Winters.

Last Friday a certain savior’s birthday was marked with Kentucky’s finest (non-liquid category)–a Newsom’s country ham.  Jesus was actually born in the spring but they had to do a rewrite because of—same old story—a battle for the soul. Again the heroes had an unholy rival, a local cult that celebrated their Sun God’s birthday on the 25^th. The Christians tried to outrock the party with their own, but well, solemn mass or pagan feast? What would Colonel Newsom do?

year-old country ham from Princeton, KY

after 6 hours + pineapple/brown sugar glaze---moist and swalty

ham needs a home

Hope everyone has been eating well and napping long in the dimming days of ‘09. Although the days are actually now lengthening, praise be the Sun God.  Happy New Year, may 2010 be full of love and light.

Hello from H1:N1 Land, where I’ve been visiting the last 72 hours. It’s hotter than Vietnam here, about 103 last I checked. I just wish it were as easy to get out as a $20 bribe at Customs.  (The agent had to say the amount three times before we could understand him behind the face mask.) In any case, I’d like to thank my trip sponsor, the Winters Library, for making years worth of food magazines free for the taking during its relocation. They must have known it would be just me and print media because it hurts to type. But all that food porn reminds me I did upload some of our travel pix, heavy on the not-Gourmet-caliber food shots. Ah, food, I remember it well.

(Links to five albums, but you can get to any of them from my main site by clicking my name in the upper right corner:)

Ho Chi Minh City
Vinh Long and Mekong River
Chau Doc
Phu Quoc
Hue and Hoi An

If you’d like to avoid the sensation that you jumped off a cliff and then lay under a lava slide, you could get the vaccine. Active ingredients include: pig blood, horse blood, rabbit brain, dog kidney, monkey kidney, chick embryo, chicken egg, duck egg, calf serum, fetal bovine serum, human diploid cells (originating from human aborted fetal tissue), a “continuous line of monkey kidney cells,” and my favorite, washed sheep red blood. I’m glad it’s not unwashed sheep red blood, although I’m pretty sure they had both kinds in the Chau Doc market.

call to conversion

A belated post from Phou Quoc–we flew to Hue this morning but I’m still on island time…

The last week has been a jumble of salt and blood and feathers and fruit, street kids and silent staring babies, women working hatchets and hacksaws (and men working hammocks) and chaotic capitalism thundering in dusty river towns along the Mekong Delta. Mostly seen from minivans with missing floors or hanging on a sweaty xe om driver, but also from hired boats and rented bicycles. Some unsettling/hilarious/frustrating moments on the transportation side, mainly involving imaginary bus lines and invisible taxis and virtual ferries and bridges that were built last year and also will be built next year. And lots of traffic stops for things like measuring the road and the driver needing a bahn mi or a power nap.

Fun, also sad, and definitely too much sensory/emotional experience to distill, especially in my current state, which involves a bikini and a lounge chair and a cold Saigon. I’ll post a link to some more pix soon, but here’s a few highlights from our wild ride through the Delta. We’re resting up and counting our blessings on the island paradise of Phou Quoc for a few days, before heading over to the east-central coast or the central highlands, depending on the weather. Chào for now.

floating the Co Chien river

Cai be floating market

mountains of shrimp paste in Chau doc market

water hyacinth--tasty erosion control

in a land of delicious things, this was not delicious

but for every jellied headcheese candy cube, there's thousands of savory sea creatures swimming in lemongrass, chili and tamarind

As the business of tourism grows in Vietnam grows, so do ways to “handle” would-be indie travelers trying to get around the tour bus/day boat routine. Yesterday was a wet stretch of dubious promises and mystery maps and rough negotiations with drivers of overstuffed minivans that got us, finally, to Vinh Long, our entry point into the Mekong Delta.  I was mesmerized by the sandal-clad motorbikers threading through highway traffic in driving rain and ankle-high muddy water. Ponchos covered their cargo from the spray–inkjet printers and flat-screen TVs, tanks of swimming eels and crates of crabs, yards of lumber and giant coils of pipe and wire, human-sized arrangements of pink wedding flowers, stacks of garbage bags filled with bread, and most likely, a grandma or little dumpling squeezed in the middle.

It was sweet relief to be on foot and out in the open air again when we reached Vinh Long, with the rain settling into a mist, the dank smell of the Co Chien river, and dim lights coming on in the market stalls.  (And grilled sausage bahn mi and fish hot pot…)

r

shaking off the Xanax and 20 hours on planes at Ben Tranh market

because plunging into the city’s tidal wave of masked motorbikers is not for the jet-lagged,

It's like a really loud Davis, with noxious fumes and no traffic laws.

but that’s how you get to the banh xeo.

BRRRRRR

Oh fall, so beautiful and so full of reckoning. Sunsets here are like stage lights, upside-down funnels streaming gold on the fields, lavender on the hills, and that pink grapefruit color in the evening sky. The chickens huddle up earlier each night and the eggs are slowing down. Fennel is molting–she’s looking plucked and puny– but Paprika just grew back her fluffy coat and healthy appetite.

It’s been four years now since October meant a farm to get in shape for fall. Around this time, most flowers had long since succumbed to the August bug blitz. But the hot weather heroes–zinnias, gomphrena, centaurea–would still be in bloom, and the cooler temperatures would revive  snapdragons, scabiosa, and nigella for a final flush.  A few–amaranth,  statice–would keep their color if we hung them on the sunporch. We’d thread chiles on strings to dry beside them. Peppers always got off to a slow, stubborn start but they’d finally be reddening full blast. We’d smoke the bell peppers and anchos and bag them for the freezer.  The tomatoes were still coming on, but the fruit was misshapen and the vines were shriveled. Sweet corn, okra, and sunflowers would have left thick jungles of toppled and tangled stalks to level.  Herbs and spring-planted greens were parched, woody, or gone to seed.

It was hard to face clearing the summer beds, even to transplant cabbages and seed lettuce and beets and carrots again. I would look around and see everything that dried up, fed the cucumber beetles, or couldn’t outgrow the weeds. I’d think about how I meant to run drip tape out to the furthest rows of flowers, and hang shade cloth over some, and plant field peas in the clay-iest beds. I’d curse myself for letting another season go by without learning this or remembering that. I’d wonder how I could possibly want to do it all over again next spring. I’d sit down in the field and let another year’s worth of regrets roll in.

moral support and liquid courage

And then I’d get over it. If I could handle Kentucky winters, I can handle Winters winters, right? Especially without rows of dying plants to turn under. And with no T-tape to roll up, and no trellises to dismantle and no stakes to dig out. And no killing frost.

Plus, here there’s new olive oil and the freshest, butteriest, alpha-linoleic-iest walnuts. And we’re surrounded by walnut orchards, so there’s also an insanely loud tree-shaker thing and an insanely loud blower thing they use to harvest. Starting rather early in the morning for some people.

This year I’ll miss the beginning of that noisy/productive fall ritual. Even better, I’ll miss the dreary day they make you turn the clocks ahead.  I’ll be eating bún bò giò heo (spicy beef soup) and bahn xeo (rice flour crepes with shrimp and pork) in a balmier place. See you in a few weeks, on the other (colder, darker, nuttier) side.

A few from Burnt Ridge Road, circa 2004.

heavy mulch plus layered low tunnels of spun-bonded fabric and UV plastic can keep hardy veggies alive through a Kentucky winter

oops--the collards and arugula got a little too warm that afternoon

fall means sweeter carrots and beets

and redder lettuce, because there's more sunshine

and mustard with a softer bite

and tender salad greens

that would "cut and come again"

and heads that weren't milky

and hardly any cabbage loopers!

and flowers that snap back

in fiery fall colors

like a final spree

before a last goodbye

On J’s birthday, before feeding the towering ego that is Bob Dylan at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, we popped in Ryowa for steamy ramen.  (To ponder: why butter corn?  I tried to find out how such un-Japanese ingredients became a popular ramen broth, but all I learned is it’s a Kit Kat flavor too.)

I made a fall-ish fig tart to celebrate. Crème chibouste is pastry cream that has been lightened with meringue. This one’s amber-colored because I caramelized the sugar for the custard and steeped a cinnamon stick and a little nutmeg in it. It’s more common to see pastry cream mixed with whipping cream as a filler for tarts, eclairs, etc., but chibouste sets up more firmly. (Of course you can add gelatin to either.)  The texture is airier and spongier than the creamy kind—kind of like a soufflé—and it takes well to torching.

Chibouste is also called Crème St. Honoré, after a horrendous classic cake made of puff pastry piped with caramelized balls of cream puff dough, filled with a stupid amount of chibouste, and topped off with mounds of whipped cream. St. Honoré is the patron saint of pastry, and this monstrosity is still common to find in French bakeries. I saw it plenty in Italy too, and actually it went over well in East Memphis. (I worked with grads of Lenôtre, the grandpère of exquisitely formal, insanely complicated cake making.)

I like to think St. H would take a rustic fruit tart any day. Figs and raspberries are a killer combo, but you could give apples or pears the same treatment.

Saturday we joined a bunch of bike-minded Sacramentans for a traveling dinner party. We met up in North Oak Park for Bloody Marys and rode from home to home, stopping for drinks and bites and project demos (native plant garden, kitchen renovation,  foreclosure rescue) along the way. Our route took us past cozy 1920s houses and quirky yards in the old Sac neighborhoods of Oak Park, Land Park, and Curtis Park.  We got lots of happy waves and honks and a local bike activist/movie maker even came out to do a spot.  Windblown but warm from ridin’ and imbibin’, we ended our night with apple crumble and Persian tea by the fire in a secret Midtown garden.

I want to move to this pillow-strewn, Persian rug-lined reading chamber in a tree.