Big 'cue guys coming to Charlotte

I'm afraid to type anything involving the letters "B B Q" for a while. So I'll say this involves outdoor cooking. Call it what you will:

• Adam Perry Lang is a New York chef with bonafides (Le Cirque, Daniel) who got into outdoor cooking and the competition circuit a few years ago. His second book, "Charred and Scruffed," named for some of his innovative outdoor cooking techniques, is out this summer. Lang will be in Charlotte on June 9 to sign books and demonstrate some of those innovative outdoor cooking techniques. The event is being put on by Park Road Books, but it's happening at 2:30 p.m. in the parking lot next to Carpe Diem on Elizabeth Avenue. It's free and you don't need a reservation. Just show up.
• Bob Garner is the guy who wrote the book on North Carolina's traditions of, um, outdoor cooking, with the original guide, "North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored By Time," back in the 1990s. He has a new book out, "Bob Garner's Book of Barbecue: North Carolina's Favorite Food" (John F. Blair, $24.95). He'll sign copies of that at 7 p.m. June 12 at Park Road Books.

Barbecue Squabbles: Can't we all just get along?

"Charlotte, once again demonstrating its complete lack of barbecue relevance . . . "

"Fruit in barbecue sauces? It's official, we now live in South New York . . ."

"Slather sweet sauce over generic meat and call it barbecue . . . "

"Think of an out-of-towner coming across this story and thinking that this is what Carolina barbecue is all about . . ."

That last comment was the one that really made me start shaking my head. Seriously? It's actually a betrayal of our state to acknowledge the existence of anything beyond whole pig with vinegar mop?

Are we merely the sum of our Lexington and Eastern Carolina pigs parts?

I'm usually accustomed to the outbreak of hyperbole and hostility that passes for barbecue dialogue around here. I've written in newspapers, magazines, books and online for a couple of decades now and I know that simply typing (even thinking or saying) any word that involves the letters "B," "B" and "Q" is going to be trouble.

But I was still a little taken aback by the comments that broke out when we announced the winners of our barbecue sauce contest Wednesday. After all. we had been pretty clear that the contest was for homemade-sauce recipes. At the beginning and the end of the contest, we were specific that these sauces were for backyard cookouts, not for digging large pits and cooking whole pigs or shoulders.

Interestingly, despite the debate, most of the 30 or 40 recipes entered had some kind of sweet elements, often a jam, sugar or molasses. There were all kinds of styles of barbecue sauces, which is part of what made the contest fun. These are the things that people make when they're cooking at home, and it was pretty clear from the recipes that people make a huge variety of things.

Certainly, barbecue and grilling are not the same thing. I wrote a column on that subject very recently. But it's also true that when we are grilling, we do all kinds of things.

I love the tradition and the history that's represented by the classic barbecue restaurant of North and South Carolina. I've visited well over 30 of them.

But is it true that if we stand on Carolina soil, we're not allowed to rake anything else over the coals?

Sorry. As a cook and a writer and an avid backyard griller, I just can't agree with that.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/05/22/3259367/which-barbecue-sauce-is-the-winner.html#storylink=cpy

Great Read of the Day: Easy Bake Reverie

As a fellow Easy Bake traveler who had the turquoise version pictured, I understood Lisa Sorg of the Independent Weekly of Durham in her essay on the miracle of the Little Oven That Almost Couldn't.

The original headline: Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain.

By Lisa Sorg

The (Durham) Independent Weekly

Come here, kiddos, and sit on grandma’s knee. I’ll tell you about the hardscrabble times, the lean years, when we Toughskins-wearing moppets, our shoulders scabbed and oozing from our smallpox shots, not only used phones that were attached to the wall by a cord but also baked cakes in an oven using two measly light bulbs. And they weren’t even compact fluorescent!

I see you shaking your head. But these kinds of trials are what made our generation what it is today.

The Easy-Bake Oven debuted in 1963 in a shade of deep teal unseen in nature. In addition to the oven, the plastic appliance featured “burners” and came with a pint-size rolling pin and small aluminum pans in which to make cakes and cupcakes, pies and pizzas.

The cake flavors included artificial white, artificial chocolate and artificial devil’s food, while the pie filling was All-American artificial apple. Add (real) water to the mix, slide the pan in the oven and prepare to live your dream, embodied in the slogan “Bake your cake and eat it too!“

The eating part, yes, well, there was that. The heat of two 100-watt light bulbs – fully preheated, the oven reportedly could reach 375 degrees – was ostensibly sufficient to cause molecules to vibrate and to convert starch to sugar. In 4 to 16 minutes, voila! You had a dessert concoction that tasted of industrializated food systems: treacly, mealy and faintly chemical – and oh, so good.

The Easy-Bake Oven was made by Kenner (now it’s Hasbro), the company that also brought you the Spirograph. The appliance was marketed to girls to encourage them to be like their mom: unable to get a credit card in her name, sequestered in the kitchen fixing another drab green bean casserole with Campbell’s mushroom soup and fried onion rings, and by midafternoon, pounding her third Tom Collins (Easy Shaker, anyone?) and reading "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

There were knock-offs, of course: the Junior Chef Magic-Cool Oven, which resembled an incinerator; and the Suzy Homemaker, which one-upped the Easy-Bake by not only featuring an oven and stove, but also damn near a full kitchen, including a sink and dishwasher, perfect for scrubbing cake pans and rinsing Tom Collins glasses.

By the mid-1970s, the oven’s color scheme had taken on the drab tones of the Nixon/Ford era: burnt umber and avocado. The 1983 model appeared to have been designed by the band Men Without Hats: radioactive yellow and square with an instrument panel that could have powered the space shuttle. By then, Easy-Bake technology had progressed to the point that the oven needed only one 100-watt bulb.

In the last 20 years, the mystique of the Easy-Bake Oven has declined. Blame the drive-thru. Blame the avalanche of snacks in school vending machines, which give kids immediate access to their sugar fixes. Me? I blame the microwave. Easy-Bake had a microwave model, but why would a third-grader accept a substitute when she already knows how to use the real microwave to make dinner?

Here’s the real bummer, the proof that most of today’s toys suck: The 21st-century version, the Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven, comes with games, videos and downloads, but it requires no light bulbs. That’s right, no light bulbs. What’s an Easy-Bake Oven without light bulbs? Well, since it has a heating element similar to a conventional oven, it’s really just a miniature oven.

“Why wouldn’t I just use a real oven?” reads one of the online Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven FAQs.

“The Easy-Bake brand is a fashionable fun food brand that inspires tween girls to bake, share and show their creativity and expertise through an immersive brand experience.”

Now I get it. You can fake your cake and eat it too.

What's so great about farmer's markets?

CNN's Susan Hendricks gives a 1-minute report on the advantages of farmers's markets, including economic:




And if you haven't gotten back into the Saturday morning farmer's market habit, how is definitely the time. With spring (and summer) coming so early this year, the markets are loaded with food.

Need to find a market? Here's our searchable map of markets all over our region: Market List.

One Great . . . salad dressing

We're coming into the season when salads get really great. Great lettuce, great cucumbers, great radishes, and great tomatoes getting closer.

So why glop it up with bottled salad dressings? If you're going for something creamy, it's easier and it tastes better to make your own. There are a reason classics like Green Goddess have been classics for decades. They have so much flavor, you don't need to use very much.

Green Goddess, for instance, isn't just incredible when you toss it with salad ingredients, you can do things like use it as a base for chicken or seafood salads. Try it with leftover grilled salmon.

I've tweaked this version a little over the years, particularly swapping convenient anchovy paste for anchovy fillets. Don't skip it, though -- a little bit packs a major hit of flavor that balances out the herbs and mayonnaise.

Green Goddess Dressing

1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley (mostly leaves but a few stems are OK)
1/4 cup minced fresh chives
2 tablespoons green onion tops, diced
1 1/2 teaspoons anchovy paste
1 teaspoon vinegar, preferably white wine or sherry
1/4 teaspoon minced garlic (about 1 small clove)

Place all the ingredients in a food processor. Puree until smooth, stopping to scrape down the sides with a rubber spatula. Refrigerate in an airtight container for up to 4 days. If it's too thick to toss with a salad, thin it with a little lemon juice or water if you like.

Yield: About 2 cups.

Summer reading list: Food edition

The committee that runs the James Beard Foundation's book awards just released a new list, "Fourteen Great Reads for Food Lovers," a collection that focuses on food writing. Following the committee's earlier lists of great books, including 2010's Baker's Dozen, 13 great cookbooks on baking, this one covers memoirs, essays and fiction.

The books were picked by the current committee, including Andrea Weigl of the Raleigh News & Observer; authors Naomi Duguid, Grace Young and Martha Holmberg; food writers Carol Mighton Haddix and Irene Sax; book sellers Matt Sartwell and Ellen Rose; and wine writer Tara Q. Thomas.

The list:
1. "The Art of Eating," M.F.K. Fisher (John Wiley & Sons).
2. "Between Meals: An Appetit for Paris, by A.J. Liebling (North Point Press).
3. "Blood, Bones & Butter," by Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House).
4. "Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War," by Annia Ciezadlo (Free Press).
5. "A Debt to Pleasure," by John Lanchester (Picador).
6. "An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace," by Tamara Adler (Scribner).
7. "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food," by Jennifer 8. Lee (Twelve).
8. "Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany," by Bill Buford (Vintage).
9. "Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen," by Laurie Colwin (Vintage).
10. "The Man Who Ate Everything," by Jeffrey Steingarten (Vintage).
11. "Oranges," by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
12. "The Oysters of Locmariaquer," by Eleanor Clark (Ecco Press).
13. "Simple Cooking," by John Thorne (North Point Press).
14. "The Tummy Trilogy," by Calvin Trillin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). (Of course, that last one actually counts as three books -- it's really three of Trillin's earlier books, "Alice, Let's Eat," "American Fried" and "Third Helpings.")


What do you think? It's there a book of great food writing that they left off the list?

Matthews market adds Tuesday night hours

Need more fresh fruits and vegetables? Of course you do -- and we all know Saturday mornings get kind of busy.

So the Matthews Community Farmers' Market is adding a Tuesday Night Twilight Market from 6:30-8:30 p.m., starting this week.

The plan is for the Tuesday night market to run through July 24. Expect live music and chef's demos along with the usual fresh produce, grassfed beef, pastured chicken, prepared entrees, baked goods, flowers, crafts and goat cheese.

Of course, the Matthews market will continue its regular hours as well, from 7:15 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, at 105 N. Trade St. in Matthews. Details: www.matthewsfarmersmarket.com.