What it Means to Cook Food Well

Months late, I decided to enter Tony Bourdain's in-my-wildest-dreams writing contest. In short, he asked his dorky foodie readers to write an essay about what it means to "cook food well." There's a voting component--and almost 2000 entries--but I waited until less than 24 hours before the deadline to submit. So, I'm mostly SOL, but it was such a pleasure to write. When I was a kid, I used to say I wrote "for myself." Now I know what that means.

My ears clog when the weather changes, and family members die in the fall. The vision's pretty much gone by the time I'm 30. In a few more years, I'll replace the caramelized shallots on my hot dog with raw Spanish onion. It's here that people usually write, “it's been that way since as long as I can remember.” But for me it hasn't been—these eerily consistent, repetitive trends among me, my dad, that weird divorcee of some distant blood relative in Canada who kept sending Caramilk bars years after she stopped being invited to weddings. I've been tied to certain things, passions and likes that I thought I'd boiled up for myself. It's been that way since I was six, specifically since 11:40 first-session lunch on my first day of school when I got a nurse's summons followed by an afternoon of detention for vomiting my milk all over the lunchroom table.... >

08 Brick House, Pinot Noir Ribbon Ridge Select

I left the wine business because we used to pull vines off the side of my house. Nobody'd asked. But we were bored, they went up three stories, and our 85-pound primary school bodies could pull them clean off. Twenty-five feet of solid vine. Like a fucking beanstalk. And vine after vine, all summer long, I have no idea which neighbor I was with. There was the Filipino one, five years older, probably a loser in school, who blew off his ring finger holding an M-80 that he'd asked me hold. There was the first black guy I met. There was an ugly girl who probably just placed fifth in America's Next Top Model. There wasn't an internet. And it took me three weeks to beat Zelda. Vines and busted fire hydrants, car alarms and Lemonheads were all we had. It's not just that that's how simple and pure and nostalgic this Brick House pinot is. It's that there was a smell to those vines against the chalky, red brick of my parents' first home and the bitter dandelion snow beneath us. I've been reading about how 2008 in Oregon might be one of "those" vintages. But I haven't been writing about it. Because that, of course, is the easy way out. To be honest with you, I have three vintages of Brick House in my cooler, and randomly grabbed this one without looking at the label. It's just as well. The way I thought maybe those vines would carry long into the sky, this pinot noir is a magical stalk to be climbed with hush and wonder. I wasn't landscaping for my allowance--I was pulling vines. And so I wasn't selling wines, I was trying to share some time with you. It's a classically Burgundian wine, meaning balanced and nuanced to the point of lineage. Its light, slightly sharp aroma gives to a wispy palate of black cherry skins, fennel gastrique, allspice, mukhwas, watermelon, tea, and white button mushrooms. All metaphor and history and lyricism aside, this is tremendously elegant, moving wine. I wish I were younger so it could be one of my first and help shape what I think about pinot noir. In that way, I consider it seminal, or at least elemental, built from the very roots of what it means--not to be "great" wine, but to be part of those precious few degrees of separation in Oregon, where the most humble of people make the most proud of wines. This is one of those wines. Not just a bottle, but a dot on the map. Spotted in ink. Bold and, we can hope, bleeding off onto its sides.


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NV Maurice Vesselle, Champagne Bouzy Grand Cru Rose

Gizmodo ran an interview today about the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest and highest-energy particle accelerator. And, in case you don't dabble in particle acceleration, it's not as though the one before this one was just a few feet long. No, to be the world's largest means being 17 miles around buried in the ground under Geneva. The fear? Well, maybe someone didn't check all the pipes. Maybe there's a chink. And the chink could swallow the entire world--or at least every crepe and peace treaty known to man. But that's not what Gizmodo asked about. Gizmodo asked the very practical question: What would happen if you stuck your hand in it? (That's what she said.) And instead of saying, "you die." Or laughing the guy out of the room. Some of the UK's top physicists actually tried to answer this. They were stumped. What does happen, when you have two virtually non-existent forces coming together at close to the speed of light, and a hand gets in the way? Which brings me to this wine. Collisions are common in Champagne, what with all the drinking, Citroens, and Peugeot bicyclettes. They do their wine the same way, front-ending chardonnay with pinot noir and pinot meunier, assaulting it with rapacious yeast, and then leaving it to die in a basement until a family member comes looking in the cold for something lost. This Maurice Vesselle, like an unusual proportion of Bouzy wines, is a tremorous, atomic event of opposing forces. I'm literally shaking. There are countless wines that taste better. Countless more that smell better. And about four regular non-vintage bottlings that both taste and smell better. From the moment the cork is pulled to the seventh and final glass, what you see here is nothing short of most vintners tete de cuvee. It shows a heady, bready, and--OK, I'll say it--Krug-like aroma. By which I mean it's both fruity and nuanced, rich with underlying aromas of mushrooms. The smell, the smell. Let's not mess around. This is the smell of premier cru red burgundy. I want to stress that last point. It's not reminiscent of pinot noir. It's not a kinda-sorta situation. It smells like off-vintage Eyrie Reserve (yep, that's Oregon, but if you read this blog, you understand what a compliment that is to France from me.) The taste is full of wild strawberries coated with orange blossom honey. Your friend across the room is laughing, watching Amelie, and for some reason holding a bouquet of tarragon. Before you leave, someone slips you a simple plate of pasta with black truffle oil. That's how we come together. High speed, deep, under pressure. Our tongues pressed against a shooting force of unknowing. Whether buried beneath the Swiss, where the quest for great Champagne arguably cemented itself, or here in urban America inside an industrialized glass bottle. Stick your hand in there. Let the protons shoot straight through your palm, your tongue. And ask yourself, at the end of the day, did you explode? Did you feel any pain? Or did you just stand there, your mouth agape, your eye stricken with awe hoping, somebody save me, asking what could possibly happen next?