Fat Guy

The important thing with daily specials is not to generalize about them. I know people who say "I never order the specials because it's the old stuff they're trying to get rid of" and I know people who say "I always order the specials because it's the freshest stuff and the chef cares about the specials the most." At some restaurants -- even at the same restaurant -- either of those can be true. You can derive some clues from the circumstantial evidence. For example, if the "daily specials" list looks like it was printed in 1976, the specials probably aren't anything special. If there are twenty specials, recited orally, that's probably just marketing hype. But, in the end, I think it comes back to getting advice from your server and, if the advice doesn't seem real, ignoring it.

I finally joined Ellen, Momo and PJ in the family sleeping quarters at around 4:45am. At 6:45am, PJ and Momo awoke simultaneously, as they often do when we’re in new places (at home they typically sleep until the much more civilized hour of 8am). I had a choice: go back to sleep or have a damn vacation. I opted for dragging my carcass out of bed, brushing my teeth and heading off to the beach for a family walk (you can park at the beach without a permit, but only until 9am). No, I’m not actually a beach person. But I went, okay? Breakfast consisted of a few bites of what was around on the kitchen counter: blondies (aka pan cookies) Ellen brought with us, and Smart Puffs (our nephews’ snack food of choice). Also some watermelon. Based on the recommendations on topic and via personal messenger, we decided to seek out Arnold’s for lunch. It’s about as easy to find as a restaurant can be, right on the main highway (Route 6) that runs the length of the Cape. It was fantastic, definitely one of the great seafood shacks on our shores. I ordered a fried assortment, which included just about every fried seafood item on the menu (clams, oysters, scallops, shrimp, calamari, cod), and also a side of onion rings. My nephew and brother-in-law (my sister and other nephew stayed home) both had fried clams – one had whole clams and the other had clam strips. Everything was first-rate, with special mention going to the clams, scallops and super-thin onion rings. We sat outside in the picnic area. I hate picnic tables – they are designed by sadists who hate fat people – but it was nice to be outside. We continued down the road to the Christmas Tree Shop in Orleans. The Christmas Tree Shops are a Cape tradition. They have locations elsewhere, but there are a whole heck of a lot of them all together on the Cape: you see one as soon as you cross the bridge at the beginning of Route 6, and there are several others as you go. The Christmas Tree Shops have a somewhat misleading name, in that they don’t specialize in Christmas trees or Christmas stuff. Rather, they’re big stores full of all sorts of cheap merchandise, from scrapbooking kits to acrylic photo frames to plastic kitchen gadgets. We picked up some one-dollar wine glasses, three-for-a-dollar bottled spring water and a three-to-two prong adapter (all the outlets in the house are two-prong and my computer needs three). Then we went over to Super Stop and Shop, which is right near the Christmas Tree Shop in Orleans. We needed eggs and a few other basic provisions. We could have bought all those things in Wellfleet, but the Stop and Shop is vastly superior (in terms of both price and quality) to the local markets in Wellfleet, unless you’re talking about specific items like fish (there are some good fish markets in Wellfleet). My sister had a few friends over for dinner, and the main meal consisted of lobster. There were four three-and-a-half pound lobsters, corn, steamers, oysters and a whole bunch of other stuff (some sushi rolls, some pizza, etc. – there were a lot of kids involved). I was off working on my computer at the time the meal was being finalized, and by the time I got to the table the collected guests were descending on the repast like a Mongol horde. So I grabbed a quick snapshot and then fought for my fair share. After dinner, rhe crew went out to the pier to get ice cream. In addition to being antisocial, I’m not really a dessert lover – if I had a sweet tooth I’d weigh a hundred pounds more than my already impressive weight – so I stayed behind for some quiet time. The ice cream on the pier is nothing special anyway. I want to be sure to say a big thank-you to all the people who have publicly and privately sent restaurant and other recommendations thus far. I’m really grateful, and touched. I’m sorry to say we won’t be able to get to a thousandth of the suggested places, because we’re only here three more days and we’re balancing a lot of competing obligations. But keep ‘em coming, please.

The temptation to post Dave's photo, or one I have of Matt Seeber's incredibly elaborate "toolkit," is almost irresistible, but I respect you all too much to joke about such a serious matter. We tend not to travel with a ton of cooking gear. I try to bring just a few critical items on vacations like this one: a 10” Calphalon Commercial Nonstick skillet is good for a million things and, because it’s made from thick anodized aluminum it’s very good at evening out hot spots on inferior stoves. A pair of tongs, a silicone flat spoon/spatula thing, one good knife (the santoku is versatile – you can carve a watermelon with it one minute and defend hearth and home the next – and this one is good but cheap enough that I won’t mind if it gets lost, or damaged because somebody else picks it up and uses it to saw wood) and a few pieces of cocktail-making equipment (Boston shaker, strainer, shot glass). Plus a good kitchen towel. I have an issue with using inferior towels. This is called "Still life with kitchen equipment on bathmat on car seat where Momo usually sits."

Ah, but you do you make the requisite straw 'worms' for him?!? ← Yes. We're working up to egg-carton caterpillars.

Here's a typical instance of PJ feeding Momo, from last night.

Exactly infinity times as much. Momo went for about five years without ever getting a single scrap from the table. Then one day a month or so ago PJ looked over at Momo, looked at a piece of food in his hand, and a lightbulb went off in his head. He extended his arm and made a one-syllable quack-like noise, Momo came over, PJ stuck his arm deep into Momo's jaws of death to deposit a piece of food, Momo politely waited until PJ extracted his arm before swallowing the food, and Momo has never left PJ's side since.

PJ is baby number two. He's human baby number one, but overall baby number one is the canine.

You want to talk about insane? When PJ was six weeks old, we took him to Alain Ducasse at the Essex House -- they were kind enough to give us use of the "aquarium" private dining room. That's definitely one for the scrapbook. We also took him, when he was only a couple of months old, on book tour for several weeks, to ten cities -- maybe more. We had some really wacky restaurant experiences on that trip, given that it was a restaurant book. Among other things, I think we went to all of Jose Andres's restaurants in DC on that trip. Looking back, I don't know how we survived it all. We've been through phases where it has been harder and easier to deal with PJ in restaurants. When he's in a bad phase, we bring him out less often (and therefore go out less often). Right now he's in a great phase because, at one-year old, we've been giving him wheat products like bagels and other hard breads. For now, a half a stale bagel holds his attention for about half an hour. It's awesome.

We may have an issue of definitions here. A sippy cup, in my lexicon, is a child's cup with a special opening that looks kind of like a small volcano. There's a mechanism in there to keep it from spilling if it gets knocked over. However, there are also very good portable cups that use straws and don't spill very much at all if knocked over. We prefer those. There's some alleged developmental reason for favoring straws over sippy cups, but don't ask me what it is.

I don't hear that every day.

Doc, the Sally's clam pie is just not good. The clam pie is a Pepe's signature, and Pepe's commits an inordinate amount of labor and a lot of resources to getting fresh top necks, shucking them in house and maintaining the excellence of that one product. The clam pie isn't even part of the Sally's repertoire. People come in to Sallys or Pepe's, because the average restaurant consumer doesn't care which is which and just wants the shortest line, and they order whatever they remember from either menu. So Sally's will make you a clam pie, but it's an afterthought: canned clams, no special procedure or resources. Pretty much everything else at Sally's is wonderful, and the most important thing is to ask about seasonal specials. At various times during the year they have fresh tomato bianca, something called "summer special" (green and yellow squash), broccoli rabe, potato, etc.

It stands for Peter Julius. Peter was my father's name. My father passed away on 17 August 1995 and PJ was born on 17 August 2005, exactly 10 years later. Julius is an amalgam. We wanted a J name because of a friend who died in college, and also because Ellen's father's name starts with J. And we wanted to invoke the three great historical Julius figures: Julius Caesar, Julius Erving, and Orange Julius.

Monday was a grueling travel day, starting early in New York and ending around 2am in Wellfleet, with stops in and around New Haven to visit various units of the family. All that, with a baby and a dog in tow, makes for a long day. For breakfast, we had watermelon in the car. We eat a lot of watermelon when it’s in season. I mean, an alarming amount of watermelon. Over the course of our drive we ate through three containers like this one, for a total of about three quarters of the flesh of an entire large watermelon. I mentioned before that we wouldn’t be able to go to Sally’s pizza today, because it’s closed on Mondays. My inlaws, however, had been to Sally’s for dinner on Sunday night and got two extra pizzas to go so we could have Sally’s for lunch on Monday! This is my favorite of all the pizzas they serve at Sally’s, called tomato bianca (fresh tomatoes, no sauce). It’s only served in season, though the season is pretty long – but right now you get the best tomatoes of the year so it’s amazing. We ate it room temperature, which works better than reheating it. PJ thoroughly enjoyed a few bites of pizza (and then fed the rest to Momo). After lunch we went and picked up PJ’s birthday cake at Claire’s Corner Copia, a New Haven institution close by to Yale. One of Claire’s claims to fame is a wonderful Lithuanian Coffee Cake. Ellen’s mother ordered one the day before, which we picked up today and ate throughout the day, the evening and beyond. The bounty of Ellen’s family’s garden – basil, tomatoes and a few other things coming in – formed the backbone of dinner. Dinner consisted of a tomato-and-mozzarella salad with basil, a tossed green salad, and whole-wheat tomato-and-cheese ravioli with two different pestos (one basil and the other arugula). Some folks find it endlessly amusing to watch PJ drink through a straw (we don’t do bottles or sippy cups), so here’s a photo of that feat. Finally, here’s the van all loaded and ready to go for the drive from New Haven to Cape Cod. We travel light.

I once lived across the street and apparently belonged to the same minority. What made you loyal to Sally's? ← Ellen's family developed the loyalty long before I came into the picture! I do think the pizza at Sally's is better than the pizza at Pepe's, though, with the exception of Pepe's clam pie which is definitive.

It's awful. The other day we were at Sarabeth's, one of the better restaurants within a block of my house, and we were all having a conversation when suddenly we realized that half the restaurant was waving at PJ. He had managed to engage the population of an entire wall of banquettes.

Come on, admit it. I do. It's a really stupid idea, huh? When was the last time you set fire to a shopping bag that way?

Toasted cumin, lime juice and extra virgin olive oil. There may be more, but those are the main flavors. There's a Tabla cookbook coming out in October, so we can get a more detailed recipe then. Yes.

Not a problem at all. We do stuff like that all the time using a small disposable (though we've re-used it about 50 times) cooler that came with a Lobel's order awhile back. A couple of weeks ago we had a piece of frozen meat in that thing for 14 hours, about 7 of them with the car parked in the hot sun, and it came out hard as a rock. The four important things to do are 1- resist the temptation to open the cooler before you reach your destination, 2- use a lot of freezer packs, as many as you can cram in there so as to avoid having a lot of air space in the cooler (if you don't have enough freezer packs, fill a few sandwich-size Zip-Loc bags with water and freeze them), 3- be sure to put the freezer packs on TOP of the items you want to keep cold, and 4- don't mix frozen and refrigerated items in the same cooler because the refrigerated items will thaw the frozen ones.

There will likely be no pizza pilgrimage. Sally's is closed on Mondays (we could go to Pepe's or Modern, but that would be taking a foodblog-as-reality-TV approach, where we do something we wouldn't normally do but pretend we're really like that), as are a couple of our other favorite New Haven restaurants. We'll likely have dinner at Ellen's family's home.

Don't get the Europeans started on this. They are totally contemptuous of American ice-consuming habits. They say things like "Americans are born with refrigerators in their mouths!" I even had one French lady lecture me on why ice is the reason we're all so fat. I'd definitely lay off this subject. You won't get anywhere with it. It's just one of those intractable cultural divides.

So, tonight we had PJ’s birthday dinner at Tabla. It’s not PJ’s actual birthday (that was Thursday) but this was the first time we could get together with my mother and her, um, well, I don’t know exactly what to label my mother’s friend/companion/partner Nick. We just call him Nick. Tomorrow night we’ll probably have another birthday dinner, with Ellen’s side of the family in Connecticut. We’ll definitely have cake, which is the important thing. Maybe dinner too. Tabla is divided into two restaurants. Upstairs is a fine-dining restaurant serving New American-influenced Indian cuisine (I try not to call it American Indian, because that confuses people). Downstairs is the more casual “Bread Bar,” so called because a lot of the dishes are organized around two tandoor ovens behind the bar. The food is much more along the lines of Indian home cooking, street food and the like, though the Bread Bar is quite elegant in its own right. The downstairs area is also just a lot more baby-appropriate than the upstairs, so that’s where we’ve mostly been eating over the past year (we go about once a month). Tabla is run by the same folks who run the famed Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, among others. Here we are riding down to Tabla in a taxi. I should note that, in the spirit of blogging, I’m taking the photographs this week using my inferior point-and-shoot digital. Ellen, who is an actual photographer and has a real camera – you know, the kind with different lenses and such – is taking the week off. So, the reason the photos are kind of going to suck this week is that I’m taking them with my unsteady hand, astigmatism and artistic cluelessness. There may be a few good ones interspersed, however, because on occasion Ellen will, disgusted, grab the camera from me and take matters into her own hands. This here architectural feature is called the “oculus” (which I guess is Latin for eye). When you sit downstairs in the Bread Bar, you can see the upstairs formal dining room through the oculus. When you’re upstairs, you can throw stuff down at the people below. Or, at least, you’ll be sorely tempted to do so. This is PJ’s dinner. Tonight he had, in addition to bits and pieces of the adult food at the table, some sweet potato, some avocado, some bits of watermelon, some chopped up bits of braised brisket of beef, some really horrible-tasting organic, unsweetened, nothing-added, mixed-grain cereal, and some even more awful organic faux-Cheerios (in the pill bottle on the left). This is a fairly typical meal for PJ. He has never had any baby food from a jar. He eats a lot better than I do, that’s for sure. This is the famed tamarind margarita served at the Bread Bar. It’s so good. I call this photo “out-of-focus tamarind margarita with overexposed lime (rocks no salt).” Here’s the first wave of actual food. That’s a couple of sourdough naan breads from the tandoor, the incredible, amazing Goan avocado salad (the brilliant Indian equivalent of guacamole), a dish of three condiments and some yogurt raita. This is a great salad of chunks of greenmarket heirloom tomatoes, right a the peak of ripeness. Here’s PJ thoroughly enjoying the cheese kulcha (basically naan stuffed with cheddar cheese). Corn is also in season right now, and this dish of roasted corn with a really nice Indian spice mixture took full advantage of the sweetness of our local corn. This dish of monkfish and potatoes was my least favorite item of the evening. It just didn’t have a ton of flavor, and it also wasn’t interesting in any sort of subtle way. Nice fish, nice potatoes, but not a terrific dish. There’s some simple jasmine rice next to it – delicious, like an order of magnitude better than rice usually is. This is Ellen’s favorite item on the Bread Bar menu, and it’s a very popular signature item (one of the only things they never take off the menu). It’s a pulled lamb sandwich (“naanini”) with mustard mashed potatoes and a yogurt dipping sauce. It’s quite filling. Most normal people can’t finish all three sections. I can, but it’s definitely a substantial dish. You can also see, in the background, the slow-roasted baby lamb, wrapped in a banana leaf. There was also some lovely baby spinach somewhere on the table. I guess I didn't get a photo of it. This is the kitchen, behind the bar. We ordered the Bread Bar doughnut holes for dessert, sort of the Bread Bar’s equivalent of beignets. They’re served on this elaborate contraption, on a tray, on a banana leaf, in a basket lined with paper, accompanied by three dipping sauces. And for PJ’s birthday dessert we got the vanilla bean kulfi, which is a milk-based frozen dessert that, through long reduction, comes out very much like ice cream. With a candle in it, of course. After dinner Ellen took PJ home and I went to Fairway, one of the world’s greatest supermarkets, on the Upper West Side right near where my mother and Nick live. I did some shopping for the Cape Cod trip – mostly non-perishable items that are hard to get in Wellfleet or even at the big Stop-and-Shop half an hour away in Orleans, stuff like good vinegar, the baby cereal PJ eats, the Sabra brand hummus that Ellen favors, etc. I’d love to be able to show you some photos of Fairway but they go completely psycho if you take photos in there. I guess they’re afraid people will steal the idea of a store that sells food.

In selecting a week for an eG Foodblog, I agonized over finding a normal week during which to blog. You know, a week during which I’d be at home living my normal life, eating the way I normally eat, etc. It was only after trying and failing so many times to schedule such a week that I had the realization: I don’t have any normal weeks. That’s the life my wife, Ellen, and I chose almost a decade ago when we got out of the corporate world (I was a lawyer at a big firm, she was a marketing manager at a big publishing company) and started careers as freelance journalists. Today, we both work at home or in whatever hotel, car or other person’s house we happen to find ourselves at any given time, and our schedules are quite flexible – some would say chaotic. At this point, with our baby only a year old, we’re not even bound by school schedules. We were planning to be at home for the coming week, but a few days ago my sister called and invited us to stay with her at a place she’s renting in Wellfleet, MA, which for those of you who aren’t New Englanders is a vacation destination on (in?) Cape Cod. The place she rented for the last couple of weeks of August comes with a little guesthouse, to which we’ve been granted the rights for the coming week, though we may also, we are told, opt to stay in the main house. We’ll see. So it looks like what we’ll be doing this week is a Cape Cod vacation blog. Then again, maybe not. We’ve got a situation with a very ill relative, and it’s possible that one day this eG Foodblog will just end without warning – if so, you’ll know what happened (or it could just be me having my much-anticipated nervous breakdown). Anyway. I’ve packed my trusty old pre-exploding-batteries Dell Inspiron 8100 notebook computer, my cheapo Canon A620 digital camera (sorry, I’ll be doing the photography this week – Ellen deserves the vacation) and my Motorola V325 cell phone (the place we’re staying doesn’t even have a phone, so I’ll be connecting via the Verizon NationalAccess network, which is, on a good day, somewhat faster than dialup but nothing close to broadband), along with clothes and such, in the family Honda Odyssey minivan, so we’re good to go first thing in the morning. The plan is, in rough outline, to depart for the Cape on Monday morning, stopping first in New Haven, CT, to visit the inlaws for the day and continuing the drive at night for a late arrival in Wellfleet. If all goes well, we’ll probably drive back on Friday night. Chances are, my main posts will come late at night each night, after everybody else goes to bed and I have time to write and upload photos. I’ll also try to check in each day a few times, when possible. The cast of characters: our family consists of me, my wife Ellen, our one-year-old son PJ and our bulldog Momo; my sister’s family consists of my sister, her husband, her two teenage boys and their cockapoo (poodle-cocker hybrid). I don’t know yet how much they want to be involved in the blogging effort – this is all very last-minute, so maybe you’ll hear more about them or maybe you won’t. I’m really not sure what we’ll be eating and doing. We’re going to bring some provisions with us, and maybe a few pieces of cooking equipment (vacation rental kitchens typically have awful equipment), but I don’t know if we’ll be dining out, cooking at home together, visiting other towns, staying close to our place or what. We’ll find out together during the coming week.

We've logged tens of thousands of miles of cross-country driving with our bulldog, in every extreme of temperature, and have always been able to make it work. It's really the sun that you're worried about, but the sun goes down at night and so does the ambient temperature. At that point, the weather, even in the South in the summer, is often cool enough for the dog to be just fine in the car, windows open, in the parking lot, in view of your table by the window of a restaurant. We use a car harness that attaches to the seatbelt, so there's no flight risk. Outdoor dining is another option, available at most barbecue places and lots of cafes as well. And I'll second the recommendation of dining in park-type areas, or even rest areas. Depending on how they're constructed, you may even find a McDonald's in a rest area that has nice outdoor shaded picnic tables as part of the complex. Of course, when you do your overnight stay you can leave the dog in an air-conditioned hotel room. In desperate situations, we have even been known to leave the car running with the A/C on. As long as you have two sets of keys and can see the car from your table this is not a big problem, unless you have one of those cars that explodes if you let it idle too long. Yes, it's horrible wasteful of gasoline, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

I'm still not the least bit convinced that adding some overpriced, industrial, ultrapasteurized, long-distance-shipped, vitamin A and D added, token pastured, organic milk to one's grocery cart is, as my friend Rick Bayless says, "a step in the right direction." By far the best-tasting milk that is widely available (as in, available in enough stores that you can get it if you want it) where I live (New York City) comes from Ronnybrook Farm Dairy in Ancramdale, New York. The milk is pasteurized at the lowest possible legal temperature and is not homogenized (the cream rises to the top). The herd is outside on grass for as much of the year as possible, and gets a mix of hay and grain in the colder months. There are no additives, and it comes from cows that are given no hormones or antibiotics. Ronnybrook milk is not, however, organic. As Kim Severson wrote of Ronnybrook in the New York Times, "It is a sustainable operation whose owners decided that the term 'organic' was becoming co-opted by large corporations, and that the extra cost of the federal organic label was not worth it." At the other end of the spectrum, Farmland Dairies claims to be the number one producer of milk and dairy products in the New York/New Jersey metro area. Certainly, I see Farmland milk in every supermarket, bodega and pharmacy I visit. But right on every carton of Farmland milk, it says Farmland milk is produced from cows not treated with hormones or antibiotics. Maybe it's not certified organic, but it's a local product that's not ultrapasteurized.

They are run as two entirely seperate organizations.