Welcome to the new Eat. Keep your eyes on this little column for short posts. The About page and the Recipe Index are coming back soon. Thanks, Nathan, for the fancy new software!

Café d’Alsace has a delicious, if overpriced, burger, smothered in French munster, simmered onions, and aioli. I couldn’t finish it at today’s brunch, and the fattiness of it made me nervous, but its oniony cheesiness was a thing to behold. Dinner tonight will be corn and tomatoes!

Le Pain Quotidien has found something to do with le pain they didn’t sell yesterday. [Leland adds, duh, they were doing that long before it got boinged and Nathan heard about it.]

We just polished off the end of an enormous block of divine McCadam cheddar that Mom brought down from upstate. Does anyone know if it’s for sale in the city?

My favorite one of Mark Bittman’s simple summer meals is the one where you brown a bunch of butter and pine nuts and toss it with pasta. I’ve made it five or six times, adding in whatever I have on hand once the butter is browned. Tonight, I made an especially delicious variation with tomatoes and garlic, and I used a farro pasta I picked up at Murray’s. Other times I’ve used spinach, basil, and onions.

It’s hard to believe that this is the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, that in fact he died before many reading this were
even born. While not a huge Presley fan, I appreciate what a great musician he was and how he brought rhythm & blues and gospel music to mainstream audiences. But what I was thinking about today is that he somehow legitimized Americans’ fondness for “white-trash” cooking, a sub-set of southern cooking, and all the Elvis Presley cookbooks and white trash cookbooks that have been published in the last couple of decades, containing such recipes as fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and Coca-Cola-basted ham. While I love greens, barbecue, sweet-potato pie, corn bread, and the like, a lot of recipes in those types of books are unbelievably unhealthy and shouldn’t be prepared for children.

The other culinary connection to the King’s death is that I was sitting on an overturned 5-gallon bucket in the kitchen of The Terrace Room, the restaurant in the Watergate Hotel, in the middle of my 3-11 PM shift, when one of the Vietnamese salad girls raced through the place with the news. At first I couldn’t understand her, not an uncommon occurrence for me in that kitchen, and then I couldn’t believe it.

For my Pittsburgh readers who know I’m always promoting McGinnis Sisters as a better alternative to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, not only did their buyer respond to my request to stock Watkin’s vanilla, but they have established a small section of the store entirely devoted to Watkins products, including some spice and herb blends and some flavored grapeseed oils. You may recall that I tried the Cuisine Perel citrus and cilantro oil awhile back when Consorzio discontinued their cilantro-infused olive oil. I confess that I lied in the last sentence of that post when I said the oil was delicious; it wasn’t. It tasted of nothing at all except grapeseed oil, not my favorite flavor. I assumed that since other Cuisine Perel products I had tried were so good that this one would be, too, and reported on it prior to tasting, very irresponsible! So I bought the Watkins citrus and cilantro grapeseed oil but can’t tell you how it is yet as I haven’t tried it. Stay tuned.

Our French friend who’s in town with us for a couple weeks made us an interesting dinner last night of julienned leeks, sautéed potatoes, crème fraîche, and goat cheese. He layered all of those together and broiled the lot of it. He was not impressed with that hideous and overpriced Coach Farm goat cheese, nor with his shopping experience in general at Garden of Cheatin’.

At Mom’s insistence, we went to Trader Joe’s this evening for peanut butter . That place is hell on earth. There weren’t even that many people in there, but every one of them had a cart, and the line snaked through the aisles all the way to the cheese section. It’s amateur hour compared to Whole Foods. Huge parts of the store are empty while the aisles on the east side of the store are packed and miserable. Every time I go in there I promise myself never to do so again. It’s the third world in that dump.