an important pig roast for a good cause

this past sunday, my pal, michael symon, hosted an s.o.s. (share our strength) benefit at lola that featured a bunch of the best chefs in the country who also happen to be female. to welcome them to cleveland and give everyone a chance to bond, mikey had a get-together for 40ish people the night before at his house. he called me to take care of the food for it, which was an honor, but a little scary too. cooking for some of the best chefs in the country? yikes! anyway, ben and i decided that a latino-style pig roast would fit the bill pretty nicely. you can see the star of the show at the right. anyway, we put together a pretty cool menu using all locally raised ingredients (except limes and avocados) and set about making our plans. besides the pig, we did a bluegill and roasted corn ceviche, shrimp, chantrelle, and l.e.c. bluma empanadas, jicama lettuce rolls, black beans, crawdads, and all sorts of other things. my partner, joan, set up a beautiful table and we spent the day smoking our little porcine friend and working on all of the prep for this special event. thanks to a borrowed smoker/grill/trailer, we were able to drive our piggy over to the east side still hot and finish him on site. the party went incredibly well and everyone seemed to enjoy the food...or at least managed to lie convincingly. Highlights of the event were michael and liz's dogs eating an entire wheel of manchego cheese off of the buffet and traci des jardins (sp? sorry!) pulling the delicious pig cheeks out with her hands. awesome! it was an all-around excellent event and i think mikey was happy too, which makes me happy. i met some new people and got to see a lot of friends from the business who don't usually get to make it out on a saturday night. i privately felt like someone was missing from the group, but that's another story for another time.

when is a vacation not a vacation?

so, i got to go to the hamptons last week. sounds pretty fun, right? well, it was fun, but not how you may think. my good friend, tim bando, is the chef at a restaurant in amagansett called the meeting house. this time of year, the hamptons are pretty busy and the quaint little restaurant that you see to your left is no exception. in fact, this place is incredibly busy...so busy that tim called a couple of weeks back looking for any help that he could get. being the swell guy that i am (and secretly hoping to get a little beach time in) i agreed to fly up for the week and loan him my sous chef ryan for the rest of july. we took off early on monday the sixth and landed by 10:30. a car service had us in amagansett by 11:30 and the week was officially begun. we had lunch, wandered around for awhile, i bought some long pants when tim informed me that i couldn't wear shorts to work, and got settled in. after lunch service, tim took me to his home...my home for most of the week...and we got changed and ready for work...and work we did. that night we got thrown into the mix with ryan working the grill and me on pantry, where i was trained by a fifteen year old who had only worked the station for a week. in spite of being greenhorns, i feel we performed admirably. the following days brought a lot more work, including some breakfast through dinner performances on my part. luckily, i did have a free evening to drive up to montauk and look around a little. i took a picture of the lighthouse, cleaned out tim's car, and bought a few souvenirs for the folks back home. next morning, i had my leisure until 2:00pm, so i made it to the beach for an hour or so. after that, it was all work (with some after-shift drinks on a couple of occassions). it's a funny place, amagansett. imagine an upscale new england version of mayberry peopled with some of the richest and most famous people in the world. chris martin from coldplay and julianne moore both ate at the restaurant while i was there and apparently the list gets longer from there. by the time sunday morning rolled around, i was really looking forward to heading back to cleveland. the car picked me up at 10:00 from the restaurant and dropped me at the airport a full two hours before my flight. evidently, you have to allow a lot of extra time for the trip as hamptons traffic can be terrible. with nothing to do and a generally relaxed frame of mind, i headed into the airport bar and managed to have a few to many vodka-sodas in the middle of the day. i slept like a baby until baltimore where we landed to drop off and refill the plane with more passengers (the southwest airlines way as i understand it). the plane filled and i prepared to again fall doze off, when the bad news came. a two hour delay. we were deplaned and what was estimated at two hours slowly became four. unfortunately, i was forced to again take shelter in an airport bar, this time a mexican place. i spent my time draining a few margaritas and talking to an amusing fellow traveler. in fact, i began enjoying myself so thoroughly that i nearly missed the plane leaving. i'll never know why they don't make those announcements in the bars, since that's where everyone who's stuck goes to wait...well, maybe not everyone. anyway, we finally took to the skies again and i dosed off until they announced that we were getting close to cleveland. bucking the rules of the sky, i decided to turn on my phone and take some pictures out of my window, as the day was clear and beautiful. there it was, our fair city by the lake. it was good to be home and i was happy to have helped an old friend and met some new ones. life is all about experiences, good and bad. some may shape us more than others, but it's always better to have done something than to have watched it on t.v.