The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  The Risotto Challenge, as we called it, took place in early April that year, in a crowded bar in Brooklyn. Eighteen amateur risotto chefs entered, inventing risottos that were more creative than I could have ever conceived: One had blueberries, another kimchee; one had white peaches and pancetta; others, artichoke or loads of herbs, and they were all uniquely tasty. As much fun as it was, the event required a hefty amount of organizational work for Karol and me, and because we didn’t want to charge anything at the door or ask contestants to pay for anything but their homemade risottos, we each lost a bit of money on incidental expenses. But a good time was had by all, and from our success, I could sense a growing fervor for the amateur cook-off in New York City.

  One of the annual cook-offs in the city was actually hosted by Kara from Ted and Amy’s Supper Club. It was called the Great Hot Dog Cook-Off, and in its past two years Kara had run it as a fund-raiser for a pet shelter in Brooklyn. This year, she asked me to join her in hosting the event in her backyard in July. I eagerly jumped on board. This time, though, in response to the growing prices of food and shortages of food donations across the city, we made it a benefit for the Food Bank of NYC, a hunger nonprofit. Again, the creativity from the amateur chefs was impressive, the event a huge success despite a lot of organizational work on our part, and through ticket sales from attendees, we raised our goal of $1,000 for the charity. I was amazed by the support. By doing something that we would have already loved to do in any case, we’d somehow managed to make money appear for the Food Bank. I vowed that any cook-off I hosted from that point on would be a fund-raiser for a nonprofit organization.

  Cooking competitions are hardly a thing spawned on New York City soil. Home-cooking pride has inspired cook-offs throughout the world, from humble potluck-like affairs to more organized competitions with venerable judging panels and often a charity fund-raising cause. There are some that are hosted by major food corporations, such as the Pillsbury Bake-Off, while others remain grassroots traditions like the innumerable chili and barbecue brawls of the South. The Chili Appreciation Society International moderates more than 550 cook-offs around the world annually, which raise more than $1 million for charity. Every October since 1967, another chili cook-off organization, the International Chili Society, has hosted the World’s Championship Chili Cook-Off in different locations throughout the States. It is the world’s largest cook-off event.

  It seemed that New York was only beginning to take part in a culinary phenomenon that had been captivating home cooks for half a century. That summer, I was beginning to see a community of us newbie fanatics forming. I’d invited many of the contestants from the Risotto Challenge to compete in the Great Hot Dog Cook-Off, and many of them entered. At the Chili Takedowns, there was a familiar batch of regular cooks, myself and Karol notwithstanding, and once word caught on about other cook-offs, the factions began to blend. There were occasional cook offs held by the Brook lyn Kitchen, and my friend and fellow food writer Emily Farris had hosted three annual Casserole Party cook-offs in the fall in Brooklyn. Other bars and restaurants, like the popular Williamsburg drinking hole Barcade, had their own annual chili cook-offs, too. There was nothing formal or restaurantlike about these events, but they brought in bigger and bigger crowds of avid eaters as well as competing home cooks as time went by.

  When I was growing up, the church my family went to held annual potluck dinners. Part of the fun of the night was a blind ballot: Everyone got to vote on their favorite dish. My dad made his signature pepperoni lasagna each time; some years he won with it, others he lost to more novel entries. But he brought the same dish each year; people at the church had grown to expect it, and my dad was happy to oblige.

  Perhaps it pleased him most of all to know that other people enjoyed his food enough to vote for it in a competitive arena. This is the draw for the cook-off fanatic. After attending, competing in, hosting, and judging so many, I’ve learned that recognition and admiration are often unfulfilled needs in the home-cooking sector. It’s not always so much about cooking what one wants to eat but impressing a large number of people, or the judges, enough to win. For instance, strangely enough, my dad never really made his pepperoni lasagna just for us to eat at home.

  A Chili Takedown had been scheduled for that August, after a couple of months’ hiatus. Matt Timms had chosen to move the event to a popular bar in Brooklyn called Union Pool and had teamed up with our mutual friend Scott Gold to host the competition. They asked me to be one of their “esteemed” judges, along with a couple of local food luminaries, including chef Camille Becerra and butcher Tom Mylan. I was looking forward to seeing whether all the cook-off excitement I’d seen building recently would amount to something big.

  But before that, I had another cooking task to tackle. My friends Darin and Greg, twin brothers who deejayed by the name Finger on the Pulse, introduced a series of parties with barbecue food at a club in Brooklyn called Studio B. They were calling the parties Studio BBQ. For each party, they pulled together a different group of chefs to serve their food to the masses, for a cheap $5 a plate. I went to the first one in June, which had garnered so much hype that it was nearly impossible to move through the outdoor patio where the party was held, let alone dance, and the line for food snaked around the entire place. Fortunately, the space cleared up by the late night, and my friends and I lingered, dancing and for a brief while splashing around in the patio’s decorative wading pools. I think Matt and I were two of the last people to leave.

  For their next Studio BBQ at the end of July, Darin and Greg decided to round up a team of “underground” chefs. Despite my behavior at the last barbecue, they asked me to be one of them and got Mark from Whisk and Ladle and our friend Michael from A Razor, A Shiny Knife on the case, too. I had cooked at Michael’s supper club a couple of times by then, and so had Mark, so the three of us knew one another and had cooked together before. This would be our biggest undertaking as a team, though. Instead of making a dinner for twenty to thirty people at a supper club, or even cooking enough chili for one hundred cook-off attendees, Darin and Greg asked us to prepare enough food for four hundred prospective attendees at the next Studio BBQ. The menu was up to us to figure out. Somehow, all of it would be prepared at our homes and brought to the space merely to reheat and serve.

  We had a lot of work ahead of us. But something happened shortly into our planning that knocked me off my food-obsessed course for a while, if only in spirit. On the Fourth of July, I went to a backyard barbecue at David and Shana’s place with all of my best friends. We moved on to another friend’s rooftop nearby to catch a clear view of the fireworks just across the East River. At the third party we’d migrated to, our group began to dissolve. We were down to just Jordan and her friend Dan by the time I took off. As I strapped on my bike helmet to ride home, I can remember Dan asking me, firmly, at least twice, whether I was sure I’d be all right biking home.

  “Psshhh.” I’d shrugged him off. “Of course I’ll be fine.”

  I was completely fine, as it turned out. Dan and Jordan, however, were not. They’d gone to another bar in the area a little while after I left and were hit by a car when crossing the street on their way home. According to witnesses they were both tossed from the impact almost halfway down the block.

  Jordan broke her pelvis in three places and spent the next month recovering at her parents’ home outside Philadelphia. Dan fared slightly better, with a leg injury and lots of bumps and bruises. My first reaction to the news, after talking to Jordan on the phone, was to bake something tasty and send it to her. Fresh blueberries were in season, so with a little improvisation, I managed to mold pastry into four heart-shaped tarts and filled the centers with blueberries. When they were baked and ready to eat, I packaged up the tarts in a box and shipped them out to her parents’ house the same day.

  The rest of my friends were naturally just as shocked as I was by the accident. We decided to do something more for Jordan. Her hip and the bruises across her en
tire body were slowly healing, according to her doctors. She was expected to make a full recovery, but it would be several weeks, maybe even months, before she could walk again. In the meantime, despite the everyday obstacles of using a wheelchair and coping with the pain, Jordan was extremely bored. What’s more, while she was in the emergency room in Brooklyn, her wallet, cell phone, and iPod had all been stolen.

  Karol suggested we all go in on a new iPod for Jordan. Over e-mail the first week of the accident, we rounded up a number of Jordan’s friends who were happy to pitch in for the cause. We decided to get the iPod engraved, and deliberated over just the right message to put on the back of the device. It should be something lighthearted but sincere. Miraculously, Jordan was keeping her chin up and was dying to get better fast so she come could back to New York and continue her life as soon as possible. DJ finally nailed the inscription: “Takes a lickin‘, but keeps on tickin’.” The newly engraved iPod was in Jordan’s hands in a few days.

  These things were all we could do to feel a little bit better about the situation, shower our friend with gifts. But the accident disconcerted me more, long afterward. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had been with Jordan and Dan shortly before it happened—it could just as easily have been me, riding my bike through the busy streets of Williamsburg, getting pummeled by a car. I thought about all the things I’d focused my summer on, the food events, cook offs, and cooking in general that I’d been obsessing over. It all seemed a little bit silly, suddenly, and indulgent.

  But there were still commitments to honor and meals to make. No sooner had the hot dog cook-off ended than I found myself in the midst of preparations for Studio BBQ. Michael, Mark, and I debated the menu, and how many dishes to serve. We decided on three barbecued main-course options: brisket, pulled pork, and braised duck. For sides, we would serve everyone two of the following four options: black-eyed pea succotash, coleslaw, braised collard greens, and a cold sesame noodle salad. Finally, everyone would get the same dessert, a slice of coconut banana cornbread with peach compote. We didn’t want to serve anything that had to be cooked on location, like the hamburgers at the last Studio BBQ, which created waits and long lines. Plus, Mark and Michael didn’t want grilling to be confused with barbecue. In the traditional sense of the word, barbecue was slow-cooked meat, like beef brisket or pulled pork butt. So all of our courses would be premade and scooped out of chafing dishes at the club. The only thing that would be grilled was the vegetarian main course option, a grilled peach half stuffed with spiced goat cheese and caramelized shallots.

  Because Mark lived closest to the venue, we decided to do most of the cooking at his apartment. Between the two of these guys, I couldn’t have had more interesting cooking partners. Over the past month, I’d gotten to know them fairly well. Mark, originally from upstate New York, was a math and English tutor when not planning supper-club dinners. Tall and athletic, he was a fervent runner and health-food fanatic. Michael was a consultant for luxury real estate deals on Long Island, and in part to impress his well-to-do clients, he sported a thick black mustache and had a straight-shooting sort of attitude that drew him comparisons to the title character of the 1970s gangster film Serpico. But his real passion was for food—sensational, delicious food—and for making it by innovative means. One of the first things I helped cook at a dinner by A Razor, A Shiny Knife was smoked avocado slices in Michael’s backyard smoker, to go inside a crabmeat ravioli filling for beet-stained pasta sheets; there was always an immersion circulator holding a vacuum-packed bag of meat going for a slow, moisture-sealed cook, or perhaps speckled quail eggs bobbing about as they poached.

  Michael’s culinary heroes included Ferran Adrià, Grant Achatz, and Wylie Dufresne, all chefs who used “molecular gastronomy” heavily in their cooking. In fact, all of us were curious about these novel cooking techniques; a couple of weeks before the Studio BBQ, Michael, Mark, a couple of other friends, and I took a six-hour food-science class taught by a fellow gastronomical geek, Alex Talbot, who writes a blog called “Ideas in Food.” I left with several pages of scribbled notes on chemical additives like methocellulose, hydrocolloids, ratios, and temperatures, and a bellyful of pectin-glued, vacuum-compressed fruit, among other oddities. I wasn’t really sure how much food science was going to measure into my own home cooking—I’d gone along just for fun. But Michael and the rest of the guys were soaking up every word, eager to try out the procedures with new ingredients at home.

  At nine o’clock the morning of the barbecue, I arrived at Mark’s apartment to start cooking. There was only one oven, and we’d need to somehow bake enough trays of cornbread for three hundred servings. I was completely making up the recipe for the coconut and banana cornbread that morning. Neither of the guys enjoyed baking much, nor claimed to know anything about it. But we all agreed the dish sounded simple enough to wing on the fly. I got started on a small dish that would be my test batch, mashing up one banana and mixing it with a cup of coconut milk and some eggs. The cornbread that came out of the oven, about thirty minutes later, was soft, dense, and sweet, with its note of tropical flavors. It was perfect, I thought. Plus, we planned to top the finished squares of cornbread with a warm peach compote, to compliment the fruitiness. I set myself on re-creating the exact same proportions from my cornbread test batch, baking tray after baking tray.

  I was also in charge of the sesame noodle salad. Again, it would be a classic dish with a twist. For a more colorful, crisp salad, I wanted to add shredded red cabbage, cucumbers, and plenty of fresh scallions to the cold noodles in a sesame-based sauce. I’d made cold sesame noodles countless times throughout my life; it was one of the staple backyard barbecue sides in my household when I was growing up. In recent years, I’d noticed the dish was becoming more popular with the American mainstream—I’d read stories about it in newspapers and on websites. I thought that it would be a hit with the young folks at the barbecue, and Darin and Greg had agreed. I filled the largest pot I could find in Mark’s kitchen with water and brought it to a boil. I’d never dropped four pounds of spaghetti into a bubbling, cavernous pot before then. It was pretty fun. I began stirring it immediately, to prevent the strands from sticking together, and dumped all the contents into a colander just as soon as the noodles turned al dente. I looked at the counter. There were ten boxes left to cook. Then I needed to make all the sesame sauce, shred all the vegetables, and somehow—somehow—fold it into all those noodles.

  I was up to my elbows in noodles, squatting over a large, industrial-sized plastic tub, when Mark came back from an appointment. He’d had to work that day, so he’d done the brunt of his cooking the night before, roasting the pulled pork and simmering the collard greens. He hadn’t slept a wink. In one corner of the kitchen, I’d created a Jengalike stack of aluminum trays with fully baked banana-coconut cornbread. I had a system down, filling one greased tray and shoving it into the oven just as soon as one of the trays was ready to take out. I was half machine by then, fueled only by my sample batch of cornbread; nothing could stop me.

  Meanwhile, Michael was preparing the brisket, duck, and succotash from his home in Greenpoint. He’d called both of us several times since ten o’clock that morning, checking in on our progress, asking about any extra ingredients we might need. He made a last-minute run to the supermarket, picking up some cans of coconut milk for me. He came by Mark’s at around three, plopping boxes of groceries on the crowded floor of Mark’s apartment, his eyes darting around the kitchen.

  “How are we doing on the cornbread?”

  “Under control,” I said. I offered a taste of the sample batch.

  “What have we still got left?” Michael asked.

  “The coleslaw,” Mark said. “That can be done last though, so it’ll be fresh.”

  “Better start that now,” Michael said.

  “Yeah, I know—that’s what I’m about to do.”

  “What else are we missing?”

  “The peaches. We’ve gotta do those p
eaches,” I said, pointing to two bushels of fresh, fuzzy peaches lying on the floor in cardboard boxes.

  “Right—the vegetarian entree.” Michael snapped his fingers.

  “And the compote,” Mark added.

  “Hey, man—you busy?” Michael asked Nick, who was seated at a table in the living room (aka the Whisk and Ladle cocktail lounge). Nick was putting together a turkey sandwich and shrugged.

  “Nah—what can I do?” he replied.

  “Once you’re finished with lunch, wanna help peel and core all these peaches?” Michael asked him, pointing to a stack of cardboard boxes filled with fruit.

  “Sure,” Nick said. “I think I can handle that.”

  “Good.” Michael put his hand on Mark’s shoulder. “I’ve got an apartment full of duck grease. Gotta check on the brisket.”

  “See you in a few hours,” Mark said.

  Like Zorro, flinging a sack of onions over his shoulder instead of a cape, Michael was off.

  Somehow, we all managed to remain focused and stick with our individual tasks until everything was complete. I even relaxed a little, enjoying chatting with Mark and Nick as we worked. But by crunch time, six thirty, we were still stirring an enormous pot of bubbling peaches, trying to cook it down to something saucelike for the compote.

  “It’s so hot; how are we going to bring it there?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t think we have enough. Is that the only pot you have left?” I asked. The dented metal pot held about ten or twelve quarts, and I worried whether it was enough for the four hundred servings.