Image via Wikipedia

Well, I haven’t posted anything in quite some time due to the forces of the outside world draining all life force and time from me … but I do want to say goodbye to everyone whose path I’ve ever crossed here on TrueSlant. We’ve had some uproarious debates — mostly about food on my page — and many laughs. This site is also where I trudged through the most gut-wrenching writing I’ve ever attempted, and I will always remember and be grateful for that. 

The group of writers and readers here really are/were a part of something special.

Thank you to Lewis for being the man with the plan, and Coates for trying his best to keep me writing even when the universe wouldn’t permit me to.

I hope to bump into you all, virtually or not, very soon. And yes, pancakes still suck.

Mike Hess

Photo from: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/index.html

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Sam Sifton is the new New York Times food critic, and from the sound of it, a pig’s foot at one of Manhattan’s hottest new eateries kicked him straight in the colon.

It’s not often that while reading a restaurant review in the New York Times thoughts of the scatological nature occur. Maxim or even Esquire I could understand… but the Grey Lady?  So, you can understand why Sifton’s references to the gnarly aftermath of a pig’s foot at hip new April Bloomfield eatery The Breslin really got me intrigued. The explosive (heh) quotes after the jump!

“That said, there is the pig’s foot. Regardless of what it will do to you later, it is a non-negotiable one-time order for those who eat feet.”

Vague enough, but did a New York Times writer really just allude to an assplosion? For those who aren’t convinced, the bowel vagaries return later in Sifton’s (surprisingly glowing) 1 star review. While discussing that The Breslin is located inside the Ace Hotel and allows for room service delivery of certain items, Sifton scribbles about ordering the burger:

“It’s faster to sleep that way, for one thing, and since there’s no pig’s foot on the room-service menu, there actually will be sleep.”

So not only did it cause him some, uh, discomfort… it kept him churning all night? TMI, Mr. Sifton. TMI. Or, now that I think about it, perhaps this is just enough information and Sam should be awarded for his honesty and pain. If there’s anything that will allow a reader to trust a critic, it’s by taking his tips to avoid a diarrhea attack. Kudos (and feel better!), Sam.

Serious Eats commenter bks2010 points out, “I think we are so used to seeing larger people in the United States that we often don’t think of overweight people as overweight … Props to AB for switching to a healthier lifestyle.” Skinny people aren’t extinct or such a minority that getting a gander at one of them is an isolated incident, so that argument doesn’t have a whole lot of weight (sorry) to me.

For Alton and many others, lending yourself to a television network puts you in the forefront of America, and any bodily changes that you go through will be noticed and objectified by millions. I see it constantly with my day job at PopEater.com. And yes, weight loss — especially some of the faster forms of it — can make a person look different. And yes, because he’s a celebrity, people will opine (“Gotta say, not liking the new Alton. TOOO skinny for ANYTHING!!!” commenter Donnie says.) Yet jumping the gun and thinking “Hmmm, I’ll bet he has cancer” seems, well, cancerous to our society.

I tried reaching out to Alton for his thoughts on this matter, but haven’t heard back yet. Hit me up, AB!

On a less serious, more food-based tangent, Brown says a key to his weight loss is a seriously regimented diet that involves avocado and sardine sandwiches. Many of these same commenters think that’s just straight-up heinous. It’s actually fairly similar to a sandwich on ‘WichCraft’s menu that pairs anchovies with a poached egg and caramelized onions. Tiny oily fish + something fatty. It’s a brilliant combo, and while it’s obviously not for everyone’s palate, I dig it. I got to chat with Tom Colicchio once and told him that was the best sandwich on the Wichcraft menu. His eyes lit up like I just told him I bought him a puppy. “Nobody has ever said that to me,” he said, adding that the sandwich hardly sells, but he refuses to take it off of the menu because it’s his favorite. It was one of my prouder food moments. That is all.

So, seeing Mark Bittman’s New York Times piece today about French Pâté, essentially Frenchified chopped liver seasoned by a non-Jew — face it, there ain’t much punch in traditional Jewish food — and a breeze to make. Perfect, right?

Not so much.

The quandary I often find myself in is that the things I love as appetizers — chopped liver included — aren’t the easiest sells at cocktail parties. So, making it is generally a futile effort and I’m left with a pint of cholesterol-bomb for myself.

I’m sure many people would like it — love it, even — if the word liver wasn’t in there. The minute “liver” is uttered, you stand to lose 80% of the general eating public. So, my thought is that the national chicken liver association or whatever board there might be out there needs a new marketing plan, a la “sweetbreads.” Mmmm, sweetbreads — that delicious thing that chefs and foodies love … which is really thymus glands. At the core, it’s a brilliant job at masking what they really are and getting people to feel less squirmy about chowing down on their offal-y scrumptiousness.

So let’s pick a new name for chicken liver in the hopes that people will be a bit more flexible with it. What do we say? If thymus glands can be “sweetbreads,” should chicken livers be something like “funcakes” or “cuteloafs”?

Let’s do this, people.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I knew as soon as I saw Lil Wayne on the front page of Wednesday’s New York Times Arts section that there was going to be something wrong with the article. That’s just how it is. When someone as counterculture, erratic and just plain weird as Wayne is profiled, a paper like the Times — no matter how good a job they’re doing at not being old, stodgy hermits anymore — is bound to completely miss the point. Little did I know, writer Jon Caramanica (who I’ll give credit to as a good music journalist) would shoot himself in the foot all by himself.

Take the article’s intro graf:

For someone who made ubiquity his art form, Lil Wayne has done a stupendous job of disappearing this year. Sure, he was on tour and at the Grammys, but the stream of mixtapes and freestyles on which he built his reputation slowed to a drip. While he was taking a breather, others — in particular, Gucci Mane, and Lil Wayne’s protégé Drake — took his template and ran with it.

Upon seeing this, my first thought was: “Hmmmm, Lil Wayne has been on countless hit songs this year, and just released ‘No Ceilings,’ one of the best rap albums of the year. Silly New York Times is out of touch yet again.”

Funny enough, Caramanica thought exactly the same thing… about 500 words later.

Even if they have the permanence and legitimacy that a bar code affords, they’re not more important than, say, the far superior “No Ceilings,” the mixtape Lil Wayne put out in October, and one of this year’s best rap releases.

So let me get this straight … Wayne has been absent this year — specifically on the mixtape circuit, which you notably point out to readers — yet two months ago he released … wait for it … a mixtape that is one of the premier rap efforts of 2009. Got that? So the peg of the article is Wayne is slacking and not releasing mixtapes — aside from the one that was released two months ago and is fantastic. Mmm-hmmm.

Another moment in the article that crosses a fine line is when Caramanica discusses Wayne’s involvement in mixtapes of his proteges:

On many songs Lil Wayne is present primarily in the form of an Auto-Tuned hook, leaving room for his squad but also implicitly removing himself from direct competition. It’s a benevolent form of arrogance.

Wayne is promoting people, essentially lending his name to them in order to boost interest (Quentin Tarantino Presents ‘Hero,’ anyone?), yet he’s somehow slighting them with arrogance by letting them do their own thing instead of outshining them — which he’d certainly do? Shenanigans, Caramanica! Shenanigans!

Hopefully over the holiday break you can kick back, research … and listen to that stellar  ‘No Ceilings’ mixtape released by that guy who didn’t release any mixtapes this year. (If you haven’t already, you should download ‘No Ceilings’ here … it’s free because it’s priceless, to paraphrase Mr. Carter)

Either way, it’s time to get back to what I love doing, and that’s talking about food with you awesome people. Your kind words and thoughts both commented and emailed meant quite a bit to me. So, to start things off, I think this video is the perfect blend of reflection, information and plain-old meaty wizardry that is even more near and dear to my heart now. So, enjoy the video for now … and rest assured, there’s a kick-ass Christmas Eve fish cookery post coming in a few days.

I wouldn’t ever think of trying to work harder, do more or be as honorable as he — Jeffrey Hess — was. Even before he died so unexpectedly this week, I often thought to myself that maybe he laughed at what I did for a living… sitting at a desk or on my couch, typing pointless and mostly useless musings about entertainment and food. For his entire life, he toiled and trudged and bled for hours upon end with his butcher shop and wholesale business, working 15+ hours a day for pretty much my entire life. Manual labor to me is when I have to do laundry or paint a room. Manual labor to him was life. He did it so that I could sit on my ass at a keyboard.

My dad was a butcher. He was a butcher long before it was the hip thing to do. He was a butcher because his father and grandfather (and possibly even deeper into the Hess tree) were. That’s what pretty much what piqued the foundation of my love and curiosity of food and cooking.

From when I was 6 or 7 years old, I went to work with my dad whenever I could. Somehow he’d drag me out of bed at 3:30 in the morning and we’d be on our way to the meat markets at Hunts Point in the Bronx. For some incredible reason, all I can think of right now is how I’d be freezing in the pre-twilight morning darkness, and my dad would always have Little Debbie oatmeal cream cookies in his van. The first thing he did when I got into the truck was to hand me one before even starting the engine. It’s random and pretty goddamn brilliant how tiny little details like that stand out when all is said and done — a mediocre cookie sandwich is now one of my most cherished childhood memories when it comes to my father.

Post-cookie, my dad and I would then go to the meat markets to pick up sides of massive hunks of dead animal for him to take back to his store to break down and sell. There are so many memory triggers and things that I remember about the market: The smell (Oh, the mineral-y goodness of a frigid room packed with dry-aged beef and nasty bits), the massive hunks of flesh that my dad would convince someone to let me punch like ‘Rocky,’ … and most of all, how everyone there knew and loved my dad. Any and all of the vendors we hit up to buy the day’s wares, we were met with a “Jeff! How are you!” and unfathomable kindness toward me. Everyone was amazed to see “Little Jeff,” which to this day I know I can never be. I know now that these gestures weren’t because I was cute, it was due to the surplus of respect that my father had accrued with these blood-spattered fellows at the market and anyone else he’d spent time with in his life.

Even in middle and high school, I worked with my dad at his shop. At that point, he’d sold his shop in the Bronx and opened one up in New Jersey to be closer to home… you know, because rather than working 15 hours a day, now he could work 14 because his commute was shorter. It was a this point that I was slowly becoming obsessed with food. At the shop, my dad let me help with everything, and the sensory part of what goes down in a butcher shop is something I’ll forever cherish. The gruesome and curious sound of making fresh sausage, how I hated having to inject hams and turkeys with a brine gun during the holidays because my hands would get so cold (possibly the reason I hate ham now), the shrill scream of the bandsaw that on several occasions necessitated an urgent call home and a trip to the emergency room for my dad, picking tightly-packed wads of sawdust and fat out of my shoes after a day at the shop. Also, the vibrating hum of cold cut slicer that I used to make turkey sandwiches on, shaving the turkey so thin it would cause fowl shrapnel to pepper the entire device, leading to a more intensive clean-up than my dad would have preferred — a topic that didn’t go unspoken, trust me.

Somehow, during this time at the shop, I managed to convince my dad that he should sell hot lunches to the local businesses in town. Even more ridiculous is that I convinced him to let me cook the food. I wonder if the people in the nearby stores knew that a 14-year-old punk was the one who made their Reuben sandwich or fish and chips platter? Either way, the response was great and the lunch specials started flying out of the door … until the inspectors came in one day and told us that apparently one has to have fire extinguishing devices installed above deep fryers and grills that are inside storefronts. Who knew?!

So, my first cooking gig was shut down by the man, but the spark was lit.

Another incident that stands tantamount in my memory of my dad during those years is perhaps the lowest moment of my teen years. For some reason, one day I decided that I wanted to go buy some baseball cards, so I took $5 out of the register. Had I asked my dad for the money, I’m sure he would have gladly given it to me, but for some ridiculous and irresponsible reason, I just snagged it thinking my dad wasn’t looking. Turns out, he was, and rather than say anything to me, he stopped me before I could leave the store, pulled it out of my pocket, and gave me a stare that I’ll never forget. It said: You’ve let me down, son. You’ve betrayed my trust. “Druggies steal from their parents,” he told me. To this day, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve replayed this moment in my mind and felt like the asshole I was.

For weeks, there was an unspoken tension between me and my dad, yet he still drove me where I needed to be driven, still came to my baseball games … all the while, I knew I had broken a bond between us. That was the best characteristic of my dad. No matter what you did, how much you may have upset him on Tuesday, he was always still just as honorable, dedicated and loving on Wednesday.

His 63 years of life are something my pampered ass cannot fathom. He fought valiantly for his country in Vietnam, going AWOL shortly before being deployed to marry my mom.  I asked him twice about the war, but he refused to speak to me about it. “You don’t want to know about that stuff,” he said. He was trying to protect me. He’d always avoid my questions as a young kid of “Did you kill anyone?” He was a badass nonetheless.

After the war, he bled, hurt and deprived himself of sleep so that me and my two sisters could all do what we want. One time, I mentioned that perhaps I’d just take over his butcher shop at some point. I was quickly met with that classic Jeff stare that could bore a hole through an armored truck. “Never,” he said. He told me that he worked his ass off so that I didn’t have to work as tirelessly as he did, and that I was better and smarter than a butcher.

No, dad. I’m not. Nobody could be better than you … I just hope you’re proud of me. I love you, dad.

Catch of the day

This baby on my plate after the jump!

I admittedly didn’t do the best fillet job on Mr. Blackfish, and for that, I apologize to his fishy friends and the overall circle of life. One fillet came off clean, but the other just wasn’t cooperating and it came off in four, mostly symmetric chunks thanks to erratic bones and me being a dumbass. Either way, it was go-time.

Risotto, fish and peppers getting the Hess treatment.

Doing my best to stick to the whole no-waste policy, I had a pint of leftover butternut squash soup in the fridge. Needing to employ it within a day or two before the old and sad dump down the sink, I made the executive decision of lending it toward a butternut squash risotto. It is, October, after all. So, protein (cornmeal-crusted fish) and starch accounted for … now for the other elements of the plate. Walking thru the greenmarket, I found two things that I can rarely pass up if I see them on the table: Fresh brussels sprouts still on the stem, and gorgeously firm shishito peppers. Treated much like padron peppers in Spain, shishito peppers are best when quickly blistered and hit with some Maldon sea salt. They’re clean, peppery and only one in about 15 has any heat to it. Straight-up delicious. As for the brussels, I husked off as much of the leafy outer parts that I could… and that would be my veg. A quick, hot sear in a ripping hot pan with a quick hit of vinegar at the end would turn those leaves into a nutty, supple salad of wilted but firm green goodness. It was locavore to the max … eat your heart out, Alice Waters.

Blackfish surprise

Every year brings a new “it” food in the restaurant and cooking world. Generally, it’s something humble and common that gets elevated and exalted to newfound cult status. Burgers, meatballs and bacon have all had the honors, and now, fried chicken is the obsession of many. There’s even a gigantic NYT article on it today. So, it’s only right that I share tales about the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten.

Was I at some storied shack in the South? No. Momofuku Ssam Bar and their impossible-to-reserve fried chicken feast? Nay. I was at a deli in eastern Long Island. Seriously. Stay with me.

Salamander’s General Store is a place that you’ll probably never find yourself at. It’s seriously a deli — a high-end one, albeit — and a grocer of sorts that has a kitchen in the back that just so happens to churn out the juiciest, crunchiest and most masterful fried bird to ever enter my gullet. (Many agree, see reviews here)

Located in Greenport, NY near the end of Long Island’s North Fork (and wine country), Salamander’s is a gem among pebbles in a town you really have to search (or drop a load of cash) to find a righteous meal. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of going to Long Island’s North Fork, it’s best described as this: Napa meets Long Island, minus the faux-tans, popped collars and spiky hair. Dozens of vineyards (of varying qualities, naturally) line two main roads, flecked with farmstands, cheese shops and other country-ish staples. At just 90 minutes from Manhattan, it’s a brilliant and refreshing getaway. Add in the deliciousness that is Salamander’s chicken, and now there’s even more reason to trek out there.

Sadly, my inquiry to Salamander’s to get some inside information was met with the sad update that the owner/chef is in the hospital, and hence unable to talk about her perfect fowl (best wishes and a speedy recovery!). My guess would be a salty brine has much to do with the moisture level of the meat, but I have a feeling there’s more than just flour to the impeccably snappy and mostly greasless crust — a sign of skilled, proper frying. Should I get in touch with the owner/chef, I’ll be sure to update you on just what makes their bird so magical. Hopefully the enlarged photo below will do it visual justice for the time being.