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First, a quick personal introduction. I'm an unremarkable eGulleteer: pretty good skills around the kitchen, adventurous palate, opinionated as all get-out. I've got me a swell life here, what with a great partner, two great daughters, a great dog, a great house, and a great job; you'll see those folks and things at different moments during the week (though, unfortunately, not the preschoolers in my care due to security concerns).
I should say right off the bat that my main hope this week is to interact with y'all as much as you'll allow. Ask questions about what you see and read here; I'll do the same, so that the foodblog can have a sense of dialogue to it. Also, feel free to bump me in directions you find interesting. While I hope to hit a few particular meals, I also feel pretty flexible, and would be happy to try to go where you want me to go!
I do, however, have an overall theme. When Stash asked me for a title and image to announce my foodblog, I realized that my interests weren't only centered on sharing my week's eating and cooking with y'all. Of course, they are a little. Well, ok, a lot. Might as well cop to the narcissism required for foodblogging right out of the box, you know?
Like many around the eGullet Society, I'm a big fan of the food scene in my home town, particularly concerning purveyors and cheap to moderate eats. But unlike folks living in NYC, Nice, NOLA, or Napa, Providence RI seems not to rate very highly for out-of-towners, particularly now that our ex-mayor, Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci, Jr., is making license plates in a NJ jail instead of marinara in City Hall.
I'm here to tell you that it's a damned shame, because Providence is a remarkable food town. So, in addition to showing you a slice of my own food life, I will also be trying to set the place of Providence for you, dear reader. I take this challenge with the extreme optimism of someone who lives in a town where, as Mad Peck knows, most of us live off -- or in my case, work on -- Hope.
To start, I offer you an initial structuring analogy, complete with paper plate: a fantasy Providence meal, one that you can't get in its entirety anywhere in town but that represents the odd correspondences among some of the cuisines from which so many of us make our meals. It's a delicious combination of immigrant and working-class foods, chosen from a few dozen possibilities, that makes Providence stomachs growl in delight:
First, for an app, we have nime chow, a.k.a. goi cuon, a.k.a. fresh spring roll. This is a staple item at the many pan-Southeast-Asian restaurants found throughout the Providence area, and the familiarity of the dish is an indication of the wide dissemination of Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, and Hmong cuisine over the last few decades. I ordered this particular one at HON's (House of Noodles, a great pho joint just over the Cranston line on Rt 2, a.k.a. Reservoir Ave) by requesting "goi cuon" as written in the Vietnamese menu, but the hostess made sure to confirm that I wanted "nime chow," using the more familiar Cambodian word for a fresh spring roll. Like last week's bloggers, Susan and Kristin, I'm hoping to make a southeast Asian meal this week.
We're pretty flexible about names, as you can also tell from the main course, the NY System weiner. Many would tell you that this short dog, topped with mustard, minced onion, chili sauce, and celery salt, sitting in a center-split bun, is the official food of Providence. Its origins have been traced to Coney Island, but that's probably apocryphal; it's more likely that a canny weiner vendor several decades ago thought he could sell more franks to hard-working folks if he gave 'em the NYC seal of approval. I bought this one at the Olneyville NY System shop down the road from Hon's on Rt 2, the closest source to my house for good weiners; you'll likely see one of these making its way toward my mouth sooner rather than later!
For dessert? Why, the longer-than-it-is-wide dessert of choice among the fine folks who turned Providence into a foodie haven in the mid-20th century: the cannoli. I have yet to find a perfect cannoli in Providence -- if you know a contender, please post here -- but, given its central place of Federal Hill in the establishment of the city's culinary credibility, leaving Italian-American food off my little paper plate would have been a travesty. This baby is from Scialo Bakery, nearly 100 years old and still in fine art deco form.
Like all food, these three items say more about Providence folks than we probably realize. I'm hoping that, in the coming days, I'll be able to figure out what a few of those things are -- with your help, of course! -- during this glimpse into my odd little food world.
In the meanwhile, I've got a week of shopping, cooking, and eating to do (and I'm already nervous about the prep work for that -- there oughta be a special brand of foodblog Maalox!
) not to mention full days of actual wage-earning work. And the dog needs a walk! It's time to get crackin'!But first, on this fifth rainy day in a row (again, see the Mad Peck Providence poster for details on the rain situation here in Providence), since some foodblog conventions are worth keepin': coffee!
