Cookin' Simple with Robbie & Jon: Dijon Chicken and Brie Open-Faced Sandwiches and a Succulent Hash

[the tools]

Welcome to a new interactive feature here at Whelan's Travels -- Cookin' Simple with Robbie and Jon! It's similar to earlier ventures of ours, like How to Play Piano Like a Blind Man or Playaz Goin' Places, in that you watch, look, listen and learn, and then you get to have a great time emulating us! Here's how it began: 

So last night I came home late from work with no dinner plans, and the house was empty, except for Jon, who was upstairs, shirtless of course, working on a grant proposal to go Burkina Faso or some other place that's hot and uncivilized, and it struck me that as winter descends, so does weather-induced depression. As the days get shorter, so does my desire to do anything productive, go on runs, do butterfly curls, shave my chest -- you know, the usual stuff we all do to stay positive. One of those things is eating well. And as we all know, our diets are windows to our souls. At least that's what Elizabeth Gilbert taught me, and she's a MILF. 

Anyway, Jon and I looked at our rations and decided to make a dinner that's easy and delicious. He's the one what mostly thunk it up, although the hash is a specialty of mine, but here's how with did it:

[toasty]

Slice some pumpernickel bread, put it in the oven with some brie on top of it. Toast that ass.

The lead picture above is of your toppings, so also slice some apples (I got mine at the farmer's market, and brought them home in my re-usable hemp Whole Foods shoulder bags -- Style Plus!!!) and grab one leafy green for each open-faced sandwich (lettuce came from my CSA -- Locavorianism Rules OMG!!!!). 

[sizzled]

Jon used butter (with my approval) to fry up two Trader Joe's chicken breasts (from one ofthose big bags), which he had sliced into long thin strips before hand, and spiced with a shitload of dijon mustard, with some added spicy brown and wasabi-raspberry mustard (we had three types of mustard in the fridge, but you can use whatever you want) and lots of black pepper. 

[misty]

I chopped one large sweet potato, one medium-sized regular potato, and half a medium-sized onion into 1/2-inch cubes, fried them in a skillet with olive oil, and spiced them with cumin, salt, pepper, cayenne, and cinnamon to make our succulent hash. Fry that shit for like 12-15 minutes until it's brown and tastes like the bomb and looks like this:

[crispy]

Then lay your leafy greens, then your apples (in rows) across your pumpernickel-brie toast, and then you best be sure to criss-cross the chicken with the apple rows, because that's just how it's done:

[criss-crossed]

The finished product (Jon has put on a shirt):

We then watched "The Office" and the Thursday night SNL special, and giggled together, our mouths full, our hearts fuller. What a night!

Keep it simple.

Chap's Charcoal

[how do you like your meat? rahhhhhhhhh]

This post is way overdue and the tastes may not be as fresh in my mind as deemed appropriate for other aspiring Robert Sietsemas and R.W. Apples of the world, but I felt I needed to say a word or two about Chap's Charcoal Restaurant, one of the three pit beef joints that occupy a particularly unattractive mile-long stretch of Pulaski Highway in (way) East Baltimore. I was there about two months ago, whilst reporting on a relatively recently-opened housing development, and when I see me some pit beef, I stop for some pit beef. 

Now to explain: Baltimore pit beef is, like crabs, a dish of some local note. There are ways of cooking and eating it and ways not to eat it. But to start, you could read this, or just take my word for it that pit beef is delicious, but certainly less complex or nuanced than Southern barbecue or other types of slow-cooked or smoked meats. It is crisped over charcoal, and the inside left very, very rare, which is 100% my thang, and served on a kaiser bun with (lots of) horseradish and pickles. For the longest time I had no idea that Baltimore had a sandwich other than the crab cake. But turns out that's because I had never been to Boog Powell's at Camden Yards -- or at least, if I had, when I was a kid and came with grandma a lot, I'd forgotten. 

Since eating at Chap's I've been to the original Boog's in Ocean City, on recommendation from the inimitable Danny "Security Firm Wins Insurance Coverage Dispute" Jacobs, and learned the true meaning of pit beef and boardwalk fries, consumed together with lemonade.

So not to get off track here -- Chaps was great, but not incredible. There was some flaky, carbonized crust mixed into my sandwich for texture's sake, but I felt like the meat had been off the grill for far too long. It was, I dunno, lukewarm. There is, however, something nice about inhaling diesel fumes offa Pulaski, being surrounded by nudie bars and trucker hangouts, and eating a dish that is as working class as it is local (who can afford crab cakes, with an economy like dis, huh?) that made it worth the drive. All I needed was some Thrashers to further coat my stomach. I had lemonade, though. 

Vidalia

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Get your own

So Washington, D.C. is where KB lives, so I go there a lot. She recently took me to a restaurant that was so frustratingly District in terms of decor (see their hotel basement, empty of people entirely marketing strategy on their web site), but so impressive, food-wise, that I'm now obliged to reconsider every jab, insult and curse I've ever fired off at the nation's capital. That restaurant was Vidalia, in Dupont Circle.

Chef Jeffrey Buben's mom is from North Carolina, and so's his wife (who cutely answers the phone to take reservations with her belle-ish accent), so the restaurant's Dixie cooking is roughly the chef's equivalent of "write what you know," except it's more like, write what the women in your life know. Maybe that's a better plan? Who knows. Whatever the story behind it, his cooking is outstanding.

We're talking about onions, here. Lots of onions. And maybe you think naming your restaurant after the chi-chi foodie word for "onion," and also making onions the main ingredient in most dishes is an off-putting idea -- hell, I did, at first -- but I assure you there's nothing to worry about, and nothing on the menu that isn't worth celebrating, as far as I could tell.

The de facto starter is a sweet onion-and-apple tatin in which you dip this pillowy onion bread that reminds you of those rolls you used to get in the lunch line in elementary school, only sweet (but just so) and foamy and delicate. Amazing. I quenched my inordinate, burning, desirous urges for booze with an honest-to-goodness Sazerac, which was cool and delicious, but a little puncy on the rye, if you know what I mean. The perfect apertif.

We got a rabbit starter as well, that I unfortunately don't have a picture of, but again, Damn.

The real coup, however, was the goat-n-garlic plate. Goat is a difficult meat to work with, like skirt steak or venison or something. You've got this gamey, disgusting animal, and you've got to make him tender, juicy, and delicious by dinner. For the goat plate, Bubes got out his grinder and served us up two very tender meatballs with a scallion cream sauce, and threw in two mini-slices of roasted goat and goat sausage, both in a tart barbecue-ish sauce for good measure. KB and I agreed that the roasted was great, but not the best thing on the plate. She liked the 'balls, I the sausage.

Then, scan your eyes to the center of the plate in the photo above, and you'll see the roasted full bulb of garlic. Now, I'd never had roasted garlic before, and I was afraid. What will this do to my breath? Is garlic complex enough that I can just eat the whole thing? Will this just be like spooning minced garlic into my mouth?

The answers are not much, yes, and no. When roasted, especially in broth like this one was, garlic because incredibly soft and juicy and takes on this robust flavor that you just can't stop eating. And the meaty parts of it just come right out of the flaky skin with each jab of the fork. Mmmm.

Mains included a juicy ribeye that was just on the mark, paired with a Malbec that was just dry enough, and far too expensive (was this a special occasion? I forget...), and dessert was so good that we ate it before I could take a photo. It was made of pecans, I think.

FOOD: A
You could tell this place spends a lot of time on their meat, which is just one of the ways it's very Southern in character, but putting the onion at the forefront of everything was just so new to me (even though this place has been open since at least the mid-90s) and worked so unexpectedly well. Admittedly, I'm a sucker for strange game (goat, rabbit, etc) but this was the best goat I've had since Mallorca, a Pittsburgh Spanish restaurant that makes a mean goat stew. Vidalia's pricey (we went during DC Restaurant Week -- probably no chance for their regular menu), but scrumptious.

AMBIENCE: C-
I'm 24. I'm not ready to resign myself to eating all the time at restaurants that look like they're in strip malls filled with couples who look like they met on "companionship" match-up sites. Y'know, give me a hipster bar with tater tots and a few scumbags who look like they met on Nerve.com, like, every once in a while? Vidalia's just very stuffy -- all done in beige nylon upholstery and mirrored walls and while tablecloths. It's like being sucked through a vacuum of drabness into the most colorless hole of the 1960s.

LIQUOR: B+
I've actually made a better Sazerac than the one I had here, but they get props for even putting it on the menu. Plus a lot of tasty South American reds on the list, which really gets my goat (tee hee).

Domino Sugar Plant, Mid-Day

Art/Whartscape 2008

I've been suffering from serious blog-block lately -- just not been finding the time to write, unless I'm on the clock and getting paid for it.

But I figured I'd jump back into it with a post about this past weekend, the best weekend in Baltimore music, the perennial face-fest that is Artscape, and more recently Whartscape. My photos (in my newly-minted slideshow format!) give a food impression of the bands I saw, and what I thought of 'em, but a few more observations.

1. What does it take, exactly, to get booked at Whartscape, the Wham City-hosted freakfest of concerts, art displays, etc, that is the warehouse-dwelling art kid's alternative to Artscape, the big city fair? What I've found is that you have to produce music that is completely unearnest, or that doesn't conform to any sort of musical form -- i.e., it's noise-based or involves a lot of screaming. Now, I'm not saying I don't like these sorts of bands. Ponytail, Double Dagger, Mae Shi -- they all gave killer performances -- but it was all just so weird. The only exceptions, I thought, were Parts & Labor and the Death Set, the former of which actually sang, melodically, over the noise, the the latter is pretty earnest (if spazzy) and has quite a bit of melody to them as well. When, and under what circumstances, might Wham City book a non-freaky act, that actually highlights traditional talents, and when would WC fans ever find time to appreciate such an act?

2. Standing (dancing) in the Saturday night crowd in front of the DJ stage at Artscape, watching Blaqstarr and Rye Rye, and then looking around myself and seeing people of all ages, and mostly African-American, with a healthy mixing of other-colored people as well, it occurred to me how different a "public festival" is in Baltimore than in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. There, you're likely to have some sort of benign, peace-and-happiness-promoting ethnic act on the main stage, so that the white people in the crowd feel educated or open-minded, I guess, while the minorities presumably appreciate what's going on onstage for what it's worth. In Baltimore, it's accepted that people like to party, and in particular, the black crowd likes to party to Bmore Club music, so why not book the best acts to do that, and not worry about being inoffensive or didactic or "inclusive"? I found this attitude, with local, popular, and somewhat unwholesome acts onstage at what is otherwise a family event, to be really refreshing. Also, I danced harder that I have in a long time. Bravo.

3. South Carolina BBQ's "minced barbecue" is not nearly as good as cracked up, and I make better pulled pork. Sorry guys.

4. How is it possible that Druid Hill Park pool would close its deep end on one of the hottest Sundays in the summer? Shaun rode the back of my 10-speed all the way there, and they wouldn't let us in, so we had to wash off in an opened fire hydrant in front of a million people down at Artscape. Major bummer, but a fun expedition to the pool in the first place.

5. Be careful at night near Park Ave. and North Ave. The kids over there are off the handle. They gave Macgregor Burns a beating, unprovoked, on Saturday night, involving a hubcap and a rock that sent him to Union Memorial for a few staples in his scalp. Rough.

Baltimore Media Roundup June 5th -- "Does Nurice have a react quote?..."

"i bet if we locked a bunch of monkeys in a room, chained to typewriters, we could come up with better crap than this..."

I'm going to have to concede that I'll have to start doing this column/blogfeature more often, or else it's going to get irrelevant, but work's been busy, with lots of ink required of me, plus a trip to Vegas, so I apologize for my dereliction of duty. Here are my thoughts of late on the great, glorious world of Smalltimore media.

This article in today's Sun, written by my colleague and acquaintance, the charming Ms. Lynn Anderson, caused me to have a Wire Season 5 moment. Remember that scene where Gus is looking at the City Council agenda and he recognizes the name of a drug dealer that the city is buying land from? That's the kind of institutional memory the Sun has that I don't. In the case of Lynn's article today, somebody at the city Board of Estimates meeting on Wednesday (at which I was present) recognized Gil Sapperstein, the notably corrupt Baltimore developer (he did time for stealing money from Baltimore's school system, of all places), by face, then figured out that the resident agent address for the company selling land to the city to build a supermarket in Liberty Heights (much needed, by the way), is the same as his home address in Baltimore County. I guess one leads to another -- recognizing Sapperstein, asking him why he's there, etc. -- but any way you slice it, it's a bit despicable that the city still does business with this bum, so kudos to Lynn and the Sun for spotting it.

Enough fawning over the legacy paper, already, and on to the next corruption story. Last week, when the feds raided state senator Ulysses S. Currie's home and the offices of Shopper's supermarket, two stories ran out of the Annapolis bureaus of both the Sun and the Washington Post that I think illustrate the differences in resources between these two papers.

Now, just to be clear, I know some of the people involved with the writing of the Sun piece on Currie, and would never disparage them -- they are talented reporters who normally do really exemplary work -- but in a side-by-side comparison of the two accounts, as breaking news stories, the Post blows the Sun out of the water.

Here's the Sun's version, here's the Post's.

At the end of the Sun article, here's what we know: Currie's house was raided by the FBI, and it has something to do with his work as an "outside consultant" for Shoppers, the grocery chain. We don't know why he is being investigated, and he, his lawyer, and other politicians are keeping quiet about it. In addition, Currie, as chairman of the senate budget and taxation committee, is very powerful, and he's not the first Maryland lawmaker to be probed by the fuzz. We learn that the Currie's are quiet, their house is shuttered, they driver American- and British-made cars, and we get some poetry about a rusty basketball hoop in the driveway. Then a highly informative neighbor called Mickey Bailey says to us, "This is a lot more interesting than today's 'Dr. Phil' episode"--OMG, obvi.

But see--it's not. Because the whole article fails to answer the fundamental question posed by the news item: Why is a powerful Maryland lawmaker being probed by the FBI? This is really effing serious! Who cares about some unemployed couch potato neighbor and the history of Maryland corruption? This is breaking news, people, not some sort of third-day reaction piece!

Enter the Post. They basically got the same answers from everyone ("No comment,") except for a more colourful quote from the lawmaker about how his lawyer told him not even to talk to his dog, but then they actually went and did some digging at a level so basic that it showed how much more solid their bureau chief is than the Sun's. They looked into state legislature ethics rules and found that if Currie makes money as a consultant--well shit, he's got to report it. And guess what? He didn't. And that seems to be the most likely reason he is getting fingered...

From the Post:

Currie did not report receiving income from Shoppers in any of his three most recent filings with the State Ethics Commission nor has he ever filed forms with the state indicating that he might face a conflict of interest with legislation dealing with the grocery chain. Under state ethics law, legislators are required to report sources of outside income, including income from consulting activities, and are expected to report even the appearance of a conflict of interest on pending legislation.

Meyer, the spokeswoman for Supervalu, said in response to a question about Currie's employment by the company that he was an "outside consultant." She said his responsibilities included "various consulting operations."

Asked later to confirm that he was paid, she said she could provide no additional information. She would not say how long Currie has been a consultant for the company nor what issues he has worked on.

The instructions for the State Ethics Commission financial disclosure, which lawmakers must file yearly, lists income earned from "individual consulting activities" as an example of compensation that should be disclosed.

Without confirmation of what the whole thing is about, the Sun caught up the next day, reporting, amid the same kinds of doors slamming in their faces, that Currie had failed to report his earnings from Shoppers, a company that has contributed to his campaigns in the past. A few days later, they added this nugget in follow-up story, which I think is very salient, well-oriented, locally, and good reportage:

The state has pledged $1.8 million to West Baltimore's Mondawmin Mall, where a Shoppers Food store opened in November. That money would go to the mall's owner, General Growth Properties, for renovation of the property and has not been appropriated, Glenn-Hood said.

But still, I contend that the two initial reports really demonstrate that the Post is better equipped to deal with breaking news (they did, incidentally, have 3 reporters on it, compared to the Sun's 2). And to add insult to injury, the Post demonstrated how little they give a shit about Maryland, by burying their superior article in the regional section of the website, well past the front page (I didn't see the print edition). *sigh*

In other news, the Examiner has gotten really over-the-top New York Post style lately, running covers like this one:



I thought the Sinai Hospital front-page ad, right below the super-bold headline was pretty hilarious, though. Have I just not been paying attention, or is this whole screaming headlines thing new for the Ex? Maybe they'll mount an even bigger shrine to old Rupert by referring to Hezbollah as "HEZ" and putting it in 60-pt on the front page -- "HEZ AIRSTRIKES KILL 3". That'd be sweet.

We Finished!

KB, my brother David, and I ran a half-marathon yesterday in Frederick, Maryland. All 13.1 miles of it. I finished in under 2 hours (which was my goal), and both David and KB express that they have "bug" for running, and want to run several more such ridiculous and tiring races. What have a I got myself into?

Josie says congratulations! (but to KB, only):

Baltimore Media Roundup 4/28: Rainy Day Music

"i bet if we locked a bunch of monkeys in a room, chained to typewriters, we could come up with better crap than this..."

I'm confused. Why was this article in the Sun today? I've read it, and re-read it, and not only is it incomplete, but what's the time peg? Let me explain.

This article, which is about 3,000 words at my best guestimate, is a sort of L.A. Confidential-meets-Catch Me If You Can- style detective chase story about a con woman named Cynthia McKay who has stolen some un-tallied, but no doubt huge amount of money from a bunch of local non-profits, churches, and individuals. She's a creepy-looking, "seductive," identity thief. But according to the article, most of it happened in 2002/2003. Then, weirdly, I looked at the photo slideshow online, and it said something about McKay's arrest, along with her son, for the murder, in February 2006, of some guy who isn't even mentioned in the article.

A good read, but what's the deal? I feel like at least a page of explanation, where they finally explain to me why I'm reading an article about a con-woman who was caught in 2003, and who is suspected to have murdered her cop husband, 5 years later, except that maybe a year ago she was accused of another murder. And I think sun.com removed the comments thread on the article, making things even more unclear.

The other day, City Paper got all snarky on the Examiner, calling them out for just having discovered the internet, like, a few days ago. And they're right, the Ex is basically running for the brewpub-patronizing, Macbook-owning, yuppy-populated hills ever since b started chewing into its advertising portfolio (which was, admittedly, just a response to when the Ex started chewing into the Sun's advertising portfolio), but they didn't discuss the content of the blogs at all.

So we decided to take a look at a few of the new blogs and see what's to be seen.

* Cara Ober's take on art in the city is more like a listing, with a few photos, of art-related events. Not much substance yet, but she's a pretty accomplished writer, so I'm not worried about it. She's also kinda cute, from the look of her pic.
* Some guy called Mark Burlet, who claims to be a "drunken intellectual" and who allegedly enjoys drinking "not in a 'get me another Pabst and a shot of Jack, woman, and where the hell is my dinner' kinda way, but more in a 'let's come together with friends to celebrate the beautiful weather and/or special occasion' kinda way," is writing about alcohol in another blog. So okay, Mark, we get it, you're safe, and you're not going to make me your subservient wife, but what about the writing? He describes Brewer's Art Proletary Ale, which I enjoyed last night, actually, twice, as such: "The 'beer of the people', so they say... dark and mouth-watering, like Baltimore in April. (What does that even mean?)" Indeed, Mark, what does it mean?
* Phil Macek, Home and Garden Examiner, peddles a very gay backyard fire-pit, and offers nuggets of enthusiastic wisdom like, "Enjoy your home, your garden, and your friends!" Thanks Phil!
* Nina Guise-Gerrity, a famous "ethicist," apparently, posed this scintillating question on April 22: "Should households receive tax credits for taking conservation measure that lower electric bills, water usage, and meet state compliance measures to make their houses ‘greener’?". Then she didn't answer it, just sort of let it sit for the last week, with no explanatory links, comments, or follow-ups. We like to think that Nina Guise-Gerrity is like 90 years old and fell asleep on her keyboard, woke up disoriented to find that the notion of "computer" and "internet," like the rest of the stone-age Examiner staff, had disappeared down the winding, Alzheimers-riddled toilet pipe of her mind.
* Brenda Carl's media blog is the best we saw today, but only if you consider "media" limited to TV and radio. Who listens to non-public radio, anyway? What's that you say? Real people? Like, people outside of my college-educated, elitist, gun-fearing, Obama-loving social circle? Okay, maybe you're right, but Brenda also pointed me towards Marc Steiner's new Center for Emerging Media website, which I had been meaning to check out, and on which you can listen to archived stories of crack-heads gibbering about life in the gutter, on his show "Just Words," which won that lovable commie a Peabody award this year.
* Andy Belt, the Ex's "music man through and through," who is also an "insider," despite the fact that he doesn't get out of Towson much, seems to have just discovered "today’s world of high speed internet, fast food, fast cars and other indicia of instant gratification," in which "local musicians now can enter a recording studio and leave in a few hours with a finished demo burned on CD" WOW! THAT FAST?? THEY CAN RECORD A WHOLE DEMO IN A FEW HOURS?? SIGN ME UP OMG!!!. Then again, he's only posted 3 times. Maybe the insider tips are coming.
* And our favorite discovery of the day, is that Greg Smith, who used to be a reporter for the Northeast Booster and sat across from us when we were a reporter at Patuxent's north Bomo County weekly, the North County News, is now blogging about the Eastern Shore and its many coming crafts fairs (He says: "While brighter weather amplifies the anticipation of summer for all beach business owners and beach residents alike there are some upcoming events in the surrounding Delmarva area that may make the waiting period less like pulling teeth." What?). Smith was a pretty nice guy, but he had a big crush on Luke Broadwater and his muscles, and under his shirt, curious enough, Greg had a tattoo of the Examiner's logo, in the middle of his chest, as an homage to the publication that printed his first intern clips. So I'm guessing Greg is somewhere in the third ring of heaven, right now, writer for his alma mater. Or maybe he's just on the Eastern Shore.

In other, non-Ex related news, Lorraine Mirabella has been collecting some really good string, it seems, and she beat me to this trend story, which is really good. Just a good primer for what is going on in Baltimore development right now, and the projects that really matter. Kudos to her.

WJZ has an exclusive (I think?) on WDS moving into a fogies' home (which I wrote about a little while back, see here).

Aaaaaaand Coconut Lime has a delicious recipe for turkey with mole (who woulda thought?) that I will never have the time, nor access to fancy chiles, to make. But a person can dream, right?

Cendrillon

[the girl, the legend, the phillipino burrito]

Yesterday I was in New York and I had the time to squeeze in a quick lunch with my friend Janki, before rushing over to the Waldorf-Astoria to interview real estate tycoon William P. Carey. We needed somewhere close to her SoHo office, so we chose Cendrillon, a Phillipino place that J. said she enjoys. That is she, above modeling the fresh lumpia, which is sort of like a Phillipino spring roll. This one was, well, lumpi. The Napa cabbage, mushrooms, jicama, and leeks all melded into a mushy, boiled, mash, all inside a purple yam wrapper (Phillipinos are wild about yams) and it could have been a bit more savory. It was bland.

I've been intrigued by vegetarian cooking lately. Not because I'm considering going fruity, but because I've had a lot of it lately that has struck me as very adventurous, and surprisingly, pretty filling. So I wanted to order something Asian and veggie, but there were only two veg items on the menu, and one of them looked gross, so J. got the mixed noodle bowl, with shiitakes, scallions, and an eggplant fritter that looked like a petrified duck:


[wading in the scallion sea]

And I got the "Phillipino fried chicken," with a potato salad made with (what else?) yams:


[old-fashioned, down-South Pacific soul food]

The noodle bowl was rather tasteless, I have to say. I was starting to see a trend of blandness, here. It kind of reminded me of when Indian people, when I was living in Bombay, would refer to any food that wasn't picante as "bland," which I objected to because I think "bland" means without taste, and not not-spicy. This was both tasteless and not spicy. It seems that Phillipino food is mostly about pork (like their Spanish colonial wardens) and sausage, and we didn't get any of that.

The potato-yam salad was just terrible. Undercooked, flavorless, boring.

The absolute salvation of the meal was this:


[babymomma coconut]

That's baby coconut cream pie with vanilla bean ice cream and a raspberry demi-glace. It was impossible not to eat quickly, and the baby coconut meat came in thick, fleshy strands. Very creative, very delicious.

Here are my grades, overall:

FOOD: C
Both entrees, and to a lesser extent, the lumpia, were incredibly bland. Very well presented, but essentially a flavorless waste of good vegetables. That pie, though -- damn.

AMBIENCE: A
We sat in the back under a beautiful skylight, and the place was mostly empty during lunch. A well-decorated, Asian-modern ambience with good lighting.

SERVICE: B+
Friendly server who was the only one on staff at lunch. She took a long time coming back to us at one point, but otherwise, was entirely satisfactory.

Oyster Flitters at the Wine Market

[front to back: wild mushroom fricassee, corn-meal battered oysters, fried green tomatoes]

"Such concoctions as panned and scalloped oysters have never been eaten in my time by connoisseurs, and oyster fritters (always called flitters in Baltimore) are to be had only at free-for-all oyster roasts and among the wharves."

- H.L. Mencken

Apparently it's been around for a few years, but KB and I went to the Wine Market in Locust Point for the first time last night. I had heard about it from someone I met through work, and apparently it's the pride of Locust Pointillists -- an upscale wine store with an attached restaurant serving delicious, inventive food. That's what it was, and it was really, really, tasty, but it was not a perfect dining experience. Before I get into that, thought, I have to explain that I was roped in because I read on their menu that they serve fried, corn-meal battered oysters, which are the closest things to oyster flitters I've seen on a menu in Baltimore. A bit more literary context from Mencken's essay "Baltimore of the Eighties" (that's the 1880s):

Oysters were not too much esteemed in the Baltimore of my youth, nor are they in the Baltimore of today. They were eaten, of course, but not often, for serving them raw at the table was beyond the usual domestic technic of the time, and it was difficult to cook them in any fashion that made them consonant with contemporary ideas of elegance. Fried, they were fit only to be devoured at church oyster-suppers, or gobbled in oyster-bays by drunks wandering home from scenes of revelry. The most celebrated oyster-houses of Baltimore—for example, Kelly’s in Eutaw Street—were patronized largely by such lamentable characters. It was their playful customer to challenge foolish-looking strangers to wash down a dozen raw Chincoteagues with a half-tumbler of Maryland rye: the town belief was that this combination was so deleterious as to be equal to the kick of a mule. If the stranger survived, they tried to inveigle him into eating another dozen with sugar sprinkled on them: this dose was supposed to be almost certainly fatal. I grew up believing that the only man in history who had ever actually swallowed it an lived was John L. Sullivan.

The Wine Market's oysters were deep-fried, not pan-fried, which KB was able to ascertain on her first bite (I had to ask the waitress), but they were dee-lish, all the same. Just a very murky, salty, savory seafood flavor underneath the batter, and they made you want to eat them in one bite, the way you slurp a raw one right out of the shell. I think I would have been more impressed if they had been battered then pan-fried, but KB had some theory about how doing that would make them limp, or something.

The mushroom fricassee ("just well-seasoned and well-cooked," KB pithily quipped upon tasting them) and the fried green tomatoes with a goat-cheese aioli -- our other two appetizers -- were excellent. Not the type of starters you can eat for a full meal, but substantial, tart, and food that wakes you up with riotous flavors.

We were drinking an Argentine Mendoza, because I thought it might go well with my next course (and because the only other cheap wine that looked was called a "Super-Tuscan," but was, inexplicably, from Umbria), this ribeye, which came with herbed compound butter (served on the side, when it should have been on top of the steak) and mini-Yukon Gold potato pancakes and hash browns and grilled beats, all in a thick jus.

[oh, gaaaawwwd]

This was a great steak, although it came out much redder than the medium-rare I ordered it, so I sent it back. But this thing I liked best about this entree was that it lined up a progression of flavors so complimentary, that I couldn't stop eating it -- I just had to have it, in that same order (steak-herb butter-salty potato-sweet beet-red wine) over and over again. I'm pretty sure I ate more than my share of half the plate before passing it on to KB and trading it for...


[mmmm....]

...head-on jumbo shrimp and grilled peaches served over some very cheesy (almost rissotto-like), very tasty grits. We were on the fence about this one -- KB wanted the seafood stew with fish and mussels, but I talked her out of it because I thought the side, olive crackers, sounded lackluster. And oh how right I was! This dish was brilliant, not only taste-wise, but conceptually. The shrimp-grits pairing gave it a very Southern, almost Cajun-style feel
to the dish. Enjoyed thoroughly.

Here are my grades, overall:

FOOD: A-
Fried green tomatoes are usually solid, and TWM was no exception. The mushrooms were nothing special -- just "well-seasoned, well-cooked," but delicious nonetheless. Oysters weren't mind-blowing, but damn good for the only place in town I know of to get flitters. Steak initially undercooked, but came back on the flipside. Shrimp and grits very creative, very good.

AMBIENCE: B-
We thought this place was going to be a big wine store with a cozy, charming little cafe tucked in the back. It was the opposite. A too-large dining room behind a surprisingly small wine shop. KB thought it was too loud and hard to have an intimate conversation, and the decor was bare-bones artsy-industrial, which I'm not that into because it feels too yuppy (it's why Tapas Teatro is more comfortable a restaurant than Pazo).

SERVICE: B
Both hostess and server were pretty stiff and awkward. Also, the waitress failed the "Which dish is better?" test by failing to steer us towards either of the seafood dishes we were conflicted about, claiming they were both equally good, and not helping at all on that one. I tested her again, asshole that I am, by asking her if the chef had put my whole dish, and not just the meat, back in the oven when I sent it back for more cookin', and she was not as obliging as I thought she'd be.

Baltimore Media Roundup 4/16: Taxes Paid

"i bet if we locked a bunch of monkeys in a room, chained to typewriters, we could come up with better crap than this..."

** So I've decided to include, on the blog, some semi-regular thoughts about local media outlets, because in this age of oh-no-newspapers-are-about-to-die, and nick-denton-is-selling-off-all-his-good-blogs, and why-are-americans-so-stupid-and-ignorant-of-current events, Baltimore actually has a pretty vibrant media scene, and it's one that's worth observing.

Is it just me, or is the Examiner's coverage getting better? First of all, they've re-done their website, although it takes an extra click to the "today's paper" page to actually see their local coverage, rather than sifting through dozens of crap links to stories from MSN and (bewilderingly) papers that they compete with. But I was impressed today with the following stories, at least for a tab that specializes in making up gruesome serial murders:

* The local NAACP takes on an attack of the fiendish, racist BLOB!
* Aaron Cahall, my development coverage counterpart at the E, clocks in rather late on TrendWatch 2008, but at least it's real news.
* And this article about the Columbia-India axis of entrepreneurship is great.

The print edition third issue of the Sun's new tabloid b continues the weirdness with its extensive, abrasive coverage of death, murder, rape, and prostitution, mostly in the form of syndicated Sun news briefs that lack the brilliance that can come with some of the Sun's better reporting, like this exciting play-by-play of a cop shooting in West Baltimore that happened yesterday. Damn, that article really put me in the moment.

But the most interesting thing about b is its main "columnist," Lori Barrett, who is apparently a "blogger," not a reporter, but I guess her work appears in print every day too? So like, I'm reading a printed column, on a piece of low-grade recycled paper, in a printed tabloid product, but just because it's called a "blog," it's supposed to be cooler to me? Because I'm of the internet generation and I don't have time for real columns -- just columns that are called blogs? Is that the idea?

Anyway, she got a lot of crap the other day for calling the Sun's crime reporting inadequate, with nasty comments from an anonymous forum-reader called "Sun crime reporter," and the ever-hilarious taotechuck, from Baltimore Crime, all of whom quite elegantly pointed out what I was getting at in a previous post about b -- that the Tribune company has so little respect for its employees that it fires the experienced, well-paid ones, and replaces them with cut-rate (literally) writers with little to no expertise, who actually rag on the reporters who are left over. It's nuts, I tell ya.

The other weird thing about b is the "heard" page (b doesn't do capital letters), which is usually somewhere around page 14, and includes "what you're writing"-style reader columns, and my personal fav, the "RANTS: READERS SOUND OFF" info-graphic, in which readers send 140 characters or less text messages about what they don't like about life, the city, people, their moms, whatever. Here's an example from today's paper:

"People who feel like they are entitled to things and get bossy and mean about them."

The thing that I'm confused about is, what is the question that prompts these sorts of responses? Is it like, "What kind of people bother you?" or "What do you think there should be a law against?" Because what kind of person is just feeling so damn mad at bossy, entitled people, that they feel compelled to text b about it? It kind of feels like they make up these "rants," the same way they make up the letters to the editor at Blender (and probably other music) magazines. Those magazines have 2.5 month lead times, and they go to print more than a month before they come out. Ever wonder how they got readers to read the previous month's issue and respond to its articles in time for the next issue? That's one of the valuable media lessons I learned while interning there. Hell, I even wrote some of those letters. It was fun.

That's all for now. I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Laurel, in between reporting assignments at Fort Meade and South Baltimore. PEEEEEEEEEEACE.

b-What?

Today is day #2 of existence for the Baltimore Sun's new daily tab, which is succinctly called "b," and has been appearing in orange boxes and the hands of orange-clad hawkers all over downtown. Yesterday and today both, I took copies of b from these folks and read them on my walk to work, which is probably sorta dangerous, but I've come out of it unscathed. I usually do the same thing on Wednesdays, walking to the Board of Estimates meeting at City Hall, with the newest copy of City Paper.

A little background about b. A couple of months ago I wrote an article about the Sun's latest round of buyouts (which you can read on my google pages), in which I reported the launch of b as basically just part of the Tribune Co.'s ongoing efforts to break the union at every one of their papers, especially the Sun. I got in a small bit of trouble over it, though, because the source of my reporting was the fact that b tried to hire me, at a significant pay cut, to write copy for them, and there were some questions about whether what was said to me about the job and the publication was said in confidence. Long story short, I beat the Sun to the chase, using what some considered to be shaky sources, in telling their own employees about b, and the union got mad, gave the business office hell, and they no longer will return my calls seeking comment.

Anyhoo, what I find interesting about the new tab's coverage is that I thought it was going to be a youth-marketed arts & entertainment publication meant to tout Baltimore as a place to live and work while exploring the news here. Instead, today's issue leads with a 2/3-page color photo of police searching for weapons in the weeds behind a rowhouse in Patterson Park, paired with the 42-pt bold headline, "Girl, 14, fatally shot," over a 250-word brief about a recent murder, with a heavily-featured pull-quote from a construction worker who was near the scene, that reads, "I'm done with Baltimore. I've seen more violence here than in New York, and I was there seven years."

WTF?

And it only gets worse. The next 8 or so stories in the first 4 or 5 pages of b are as follows:
* A bizarre "blog" entry by columnist Lori Barrett that veers wildly between details on her experiences working for the wasteful federal government, the ambiguity of Baltimore neighborhood designations, and the proclivity of crime news in local media outlets.
* A two-page cover feature written by Jordan Bartel, who is a nice enough guy and a friend of a friend who I've met a few times, back when he used to be arts ed at the Carroll County Times, about acts of violence posted on YouTube, and how they're just an extension of Jerry Springer style voyeur violence culture.
* The "60 seconds" news brief section, in which 3 out of 4 stories are on rape and murder.
* An AP wire item about tensions in the crabbing industry.
* A Sun short news item about a Parkville gun store that is responsible for selling lots of guns to bad guys who commit murders.
* Another Sun report about a shooting murder in Columbia.
* A Sun short item about last week's fatal West Baltimore crash that killed a 3-year old toddler.

WTF??

Is b obsessed with violence? Why do they think that young people really want to read about murder, rape, and death only? What about the pope's visit today to DC? What about the food shortages? Why do they bury all the A&E stuff (which is all metromix.com wires from Tribune affiliates, anyway) in the back? Is b piggybacking on the popularity of City Paper's "Murder Ink" column, or the snarky blog Baltimore Crime?

Does anybody have a clue about the editorial mission of this tabloid?

Painted Ladies

The neighborhood where I lived throughout college was called Charles Village, and some may even note that I have a sweet Charles Village neighborhoodie that KB got me for my birthday in 2005.

These two pictures are of the 3000 block of Abell Avenue in CV, home to some of the best painted ladies in Baltimore. I took these photos as samples for a book proposal I wrote two weeks ago for a tourguide book to Baltimore. Didn't get the job, but I like these photos.

Look for a bigger post tomorrow about West Baltimore's Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, and some writing I've been doing about it.

King's Legacy, King's Boulevard

"Today we celebrate a win-win-win situation. It's a win for our country, and a win for Baltimore city, and a win for the people who are going to live and work here...I remember when I used to serve on the Poppleton Board back in 1979. Back then the biggest fear was that the University of Maryland would come across Martin Luther King. But then there came some visionaries. And some of them are sitting right behind me. There are visionaries on both sides of MLK."

- U.S. Congressman Elijah Cummings, March 31, 2008

"If you find yourself on 'Martin Luther King Boulevard', run!...I don't care where you live in America, if you're on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there's some violence going on."

- Chris Rock

Last Monday, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had a big, swanky catered event, complete with cheesy jazz-pop band and pesto-mozzarella finger sandwiches, to celebrate two things: the opening of Building II, and the groundbreaking of Building III at their new west side BioPark.


[breaking ground: mayor sheila dixon, elijah cummings, gov. martin o'malley, sen. ben cardin, and UMB president david j. ramsay]

I've been writing about these developments for the Daily Record, and you can see some of those articles here. But what I wanted to talk about here, on the blog, is a more abstract idea about city planning, and specifically, about physical barriers between people of different race and class, their intent, their development, and their meaning.

Specifically, I'm talking about Martin Luther King Jr., Blvd, a 2-mile, six lane artery that snakes its way downtown from the Mt. Royal cultural district, near the Lyric Opera House and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, all the way to the area near M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens play, and where MLK blends into I-395 South and lulls you into a sense of false security and purposefulness as you drive towards the cesspool that is Washington, D.C.

To the east of this road lie a number of neighborhoods: Mt. Vernon, Westside, Downtown, Ridgely's Delight. To the west lies the vast tract of rowhouses and mostly-African-American neighborhoods known as West Baltimore (too many individual neighborhoods to name). It's the setting for HBO's The Wire. It's the neighborhood H.L. Mencken grew up in. It's where Baltimore's black cultural district once thrived along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The significance of the University of Maryland's hopping across MLK Blvd is that ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years ago (basically, any time since Brown v. Board of Education and white flight), such a thing would never have happened. West Baltimore is black, poor, abandoned, run-down, ghettoized, and full of crime and drugs (ever watch the Wire, anyone?). And MLK Blvd, according to Marxist historian and former Johns Hopkins professor David Harvey, "creates an easily patrolled line of defense between the mass of downtown buildings and low-income and largely African-American communities of West Baltimore.")


[west baltimore rowhouses]

One important piece of Baltimore history that allowed for the UMB BioPark project to go forward was the demolition of the Murphy Homes, a notoriously dangerous high-rise housing project near MLK Jr. Blvd and Franklin Street, which around there becomes MD-40 west, a road that goes through many of West Baltimore's trouble spots (Edmonson Village, Woodlawn) and continues out past the beltway on the Frederick.

Throughout the 1990s, the Murphy Homes were a total hotbed of criminal activity. I read a really interesting story about 'Itchy Man' in the Baltimore Sun, an alleged murderer and drug dealer who once scaled an outer wall of the 14-story project while running from the cops, then hid in a garbage chute for hours while more that 50 cops and FBI agents searched for him, unsuccessfully. But then again, that article was written by Jim Haner, who my boss here at TDR says was the basis for F. Scott Templeton, the fabulist reporter from season 5 of the Wire, which means that it can't entirely be trusted.

Another Sun article, from the day before the Murphy Homes were demolished in 1999, calls Baltimore's public housing "an idea for sheltering the poor born of utopian theories and segregation," citing Le Corbusier's idea of "the flattening of crime-ridden 'cities of horror' and replacing them with 'radiant cities' of high-rises with wide plazas and expressways between them."

MLK Jr. Blvd, and Route 40, for that matter, could definitely be thought of as one of those expressways.

David Harvey, in a discussion about MLK Jr. Blvd and its role as a "strong physical barrier between the University of Maryland medical campus and the tenements," dryly observed, "In a society that is officially against racial discrimination and for democracy, we're increasingly building isolated communities that are often racially discriminatory."

There are over 500 streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. in American cities, mostly in the South, and many of them go through predominantly black neighborhoods. Interesting factoid: Wal-Mart opposed the re-naming of MLK Jr. Blvd in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Another reason to hate Wal-Mart. If only their DVD players weren't so damn cheap...


[the site of BioPark building III, from a nearby parking garage]

What's going to happen, no doubt -- and I say this as a member of the real estate press corps, and it's based on a long period of monitoring housing prices in West Baltimore -- is that several neighborhoods around the UMB development will be gentrified. They include Hollins Market, Union Square, Poppleton, and Pigtown. It's already happening, and seems pretty inevitable, although in each of those neighborhoods there are barriers (bars of ill repute, open-air drug markets, bad schools) that need to be overcome first. The fate of the people who live their now is pretty up in the air. My personal, cynical view, is that it won't be the mixed-income paradise, white and black holding hands and planting community gardens in the medians, that the city wants. But it will likely be better, less violent, and cleaner.

But another issue to think about is the return of HOPE-VI housing, which I blogged about here. In the late 90s, Baltimore knocked down 4 large public housing projects using HUD money, with plans to rebuild them as the type of low-rise, mixed-income, old-fashioned housing personified by Heritage Crossing, the development that replaced Murphy Homes. If a democrat wins the presidency in November, it's likely that the HOPE-VI program will be revitalized, and this sort of thing will be happening more and more.

And so, a week after the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination -- What does it mean that the legacy of that great man's name is tied inextricably to an urban design technique that may, at one point, have been based on good intentions, but now is associated with segregation, ghettos, and poverty?

I don't really have the answer, but it's something I been pondering, y'all.

Cherryblossom Gals and Fluttering Kites

[jeffersonian.]


This past weekend was the optimal weekend to see the cherry blossoms that line the tidal basin in Washington, D.C.

It was, like, prime time to see them.

So lets call it Optimus Prime Weekend.



[blossomin']

It also happened that it was the 42nd annual Smithsonian Kite Festival and there were mad South Asians letting out string, staring at the sky, and generally having a South Asian good time.



[the answer is in the sky]

There were thousands of people swarming the Mall, but I must admit, the kites were not as spectacular as I expected. It did kind of remind me, though, of when we went to Jaipur, the pink city in Rajastan, where all the kids were flying kites from rooftops downtown. Except that wasn't a festival. That was all the time.




[kite sugarhigh]

A few of the kites were good, though.



[mask-kite]



[patriot kites]

And this old codger, who was engrossed, completely, in the Washington Post, while all the kiteness went on behind him.



[grimble grumble gramble]

From the kite thing, we headed over to the flowers, which were way too crowded, but definitely prettier than I remember last year.



[KB smirking]

There were even some very very glamorous people, with fancy cell phones and curled lips...



[ehhh....]

These young ladies, who were dressed like yellow bunnies, I guess? I don't know what they were up to. They passed by while KB and I were having some oat bread and havarti on a blanket by the water. Every dog that passed by wanted to try some of our bread.



[squeak, squeak, squeak...]

And a radiant Amy V-T



[blossom-eyed]

And the crew...



[in front of the ww2 memorial]

Death Set @ Lo-Fi Social Club

[stolenphoto]

Last Thursday night went with Joan, Jon (+1), Bagel, Matt, and L-Hill to the Lo-Fi Social Club, on Charles Street (near North) in Baltimore to see the Death Set play their last hometown show before they go on tour. Awesome, awesome show.

The band is three people (at least live), two of whom are from Syndey, Australia, who relocated some years back to NYC, and now Baltimore, where their style of hyperactive, sugar-rush punk have become a good example of how punk and dance music are becoming bosom buddies once again here in Charm City. The set began with a slow chanting, over a hip-hop beat, of the chorus from "Intermission," but a few moments in, they burst into "Impossible," one of their juvenile-sounding chant-rock songs, then the more hardcore and screamy, "Day in the Wife," and then a great version of "Intermission." They ended with two hit-and-run covers of Operation Ivy's "Bombshell" and Nirvana's "Territorial Pissings". The whole crowd was moving in one of those big sweaty masses of hipsterdom that you see at Floristree shows, or anywhere Dan Deacon or Double Dagger is playing. I was in that mass for a while. No one else had the guts to join me.

The highlight of the show, undoubtably, was the singalong version of "Negative Thinking," (Bagel and I are wild for this song. Wild for it!) and I'll leave you with the contrite, brilliant lyrics here. Check out the Death Set's forthcoming full-length, Worldwide, when it drops later this month....

If I felt cynicism,
I'd wrap it in a blanket of discontentment,
Fuck that!
I'd feel better knowing that I'd decided not to
When you were looking round
You veered to the right
Did you notice that?
And I feel better knowing
That I decided not to
In hindsight, I don't want
To be like the people I've liked.
Whoooo-oh-oh-ooooh....

MP3s of the whole show are here.