are you ready for some football?

we've finally made it to that special time of year that clevelanders hold so near and dear to their hearts. that's right, it's football season! last night, i was lucky enough to score some pretty sweet seats almost right on the fifty yard line courtesy of my friend brendan over at northern haserot. what began as sort of a rainy night cleared up and turned into a perfect night for football. the brownies looked pretty good all and all, though the opinion of our kitchen staff is that they're holding out until the real season starts next week. i hope that's actually the case. anyway, it was a fun night with a couple of drinks and some familiar faces on w. 6th and a couple of beers and some hot dogs once inside. we lost in the end, but it was still good to be back in the stadium and i'm getting ready for more games to come this season...now if i could only get these seats again, that would be something to cheer about for sure. go browns!

another fig wine dinner, another low point...

it all began with a wine dinner at the flying fig about two years ago. ben and i, prior to joining forces in spice of life, thought it would be very nice if we planned a special night out at our favorite restaurant with friends and our significant others. the food at the fig is always fantastic and we're good friends with lots of the people who work there, so we figured it would be a blast. well, that first dinner sure was a blast and set the stage for many more to come. what began as a polite wine dinner quickly devolved, at our table, into a loud, somewhat irreverent party, featuring off-color joking, minor food fights, way more wine than we were allocated (like i said, we know people), and even a slow-clap for ben as he polished off the last piece of bread. after a few more like this, we noticed that we stopped hearing about the wine dinners for a while and ben and i began to joke that we'd been blacklisted. nothing lasts forever, though, and we've been back on the fig wine dinner circuit for a while now. last night, karen small and co. had an anniversary dinner with menu items from when the eatery opened back in 1999. the night featured four courses of awesome food for $19.99 and a selection of wines for $19.99 per bottle. the food was awesome as expected and we sampled five out of the six bottles. also, as if it could have happened otherwise, we had a food fight, drank too much, stuck plastic stars to our faces, and then, once we were assured it was a rental, started drawing on the tablecloth. a small portion of the art that i helped to inspire is shown here. as i've said so many times, i don't know why i'm wired this way, i just am. we all work really hard in this business, so it seems to me that nothing beats a little irreverent fun in the face of our daily f&b grind. i suppose i also need to maintain my reputation for being awfully puckish and poorly behaved for a chef, food writer, and business owner. the night finished off with a few survivors making it to jonathon sawyer's excellent bar cento in the o.c. and the flying monkey in tremont. another great night.

the last days of summer...?

my sister, tracy, her husband, and my little nephew are in town for the next week visiting from south carolina. after spending a couple of days with my folks, they moved over to a house that they'd rented in downtown geneva on the lake. if you've never been to geneva, not only is it home to some of ohio's finest wineries, but the downtown area is a sort of america's vacationland from the bygone era when people could only afford to vacation in their home state. this was the time of airstream campers, little cottages by lake erie, and mom and pop amusement parks, put-put courses, and eateries. anyway, my family has always had a special place in our hearts for this faded little slice of americana, even with the incredible number of bikers who invade the place all summer long. a good wine buzz cures all though. tracy really loves geneva, so it came as no surprise that she would want to spend some time there. i took the time to join the family yesterday and had a great day filled with some headache-inducing wine from the firehouse winery and two, count 'em, two trips to eddie's grill. eddie's is a real geneva institution serving burgers, dogs, fries, and rootbeer in a setting that makes you feel like some greasers or girls in bobby socks and poodle skirts could walk in at any time. it was great to be there with people who are so close to my heart and, most of whom, i don't get to see as often as i would like. moreso, i loved the day, and especially my trips to eddie's, because it's just the sort of thing that makes me feel happier about the world. i like knowing that places like geneva and eddie's still exist...that everything hasn't succumbed to the seemingly endless wave of mcdonald's, applebees, and other chain places that have taken over so much of the dining landscape. admittedly, speaking of chains, i even found myself getting a little teary when the juke box played "unchained melody" by the righteous brothers...a song that i've heard a thousand times and that the movie "ghost" had almost ruined entirely. it finally seemed to have the impact on me that it had on so many kids back in the days of penny loafers, pat boone, and unbridled optmism about living and being in love in america. incidentally, since we were planning on having too much wine, there was also a sleepover at the rental house with the family involved. i'm including this picture of the sleeping quarters, just because i haven't had the opporunity to sleep in a red, metal matchbox car-themed bunk bed in, oh, i'd say, thirty years. sometimes it takes a few wierd things to really add up to the recipe for fun.

seriously?

is it always darkest before the dawn? boy, i hope so. due to various factors, i haven't been having the greatest time all of the time over the last few months, though there certainly have been some really great things, too. that said, i've had a particularly crappy and challenging couple of days this week. just when i was starting to feel better, i came out of work yesterday to find this. i'm not sure how familiar you are with the toyota fj cruiser, but you should be looking at a rear-mounted spare tire on a big, shiny 17" aluminum rim. that's right. between 1:00 and 5:00 yesterday, in broad daylight, with people coming and going from our offices, someone actually stole the spare right off of the back of my truck. to add insult to injury, i'd just had a flat on friday that couldn't be fixed, so there was a brand-new $180.00 tire on the now-missing rim. sometimes i have no idea what's wrong with people. between the new tire and the full replacement of everything, i'm looking at around a grand for all of this fun. really? i'm hoping that this is the final sign before my universe begins to right itself again. cross your fingers for me, folks.

ben's revenge

the smiling, cheeky bastard that you see to your left is my partner in spice of life catering co., ben, who has certainly appeared elsewhere in this blog. last night before leaving work, i decided to cover ben's desk with silly string, because, well, i had silly string and ben has a desk. for those of you who've never had the pleasure of working in a kitchen, it's important to know that practical joking is to a cook's life what furry hand-cuffs are to the s&m crowd: fun, somewhat irritating, and ultimately, inescapable. the problem with kitchen pranking, though, is it tends to escalate pretty quickly with a mixture of amusing and horrifying results...ie. mussels or blue cheese hidden in people's cars, freezing guys' street clothes in fish water, etc. i came into the office this morning to find that, in retaliation for the silly string, ben had resorted to one of the cook's oldest weapons: large scale plastic wrapping. in my days, i've seen cars, work stations, and even people end up wrapped in the stuff. today it was apparently my desk's turn, as well as my chair which ben wrapped onto one of the posts in the office's hallway. i think the high point of the event, though, was that i had about twenty minutes in between meetings to catch up on e-mails and take care of a few other office duties. i can't say that this didn't slow things up a bit. now, one question remains: to retaliate or not to retaliate. in case my special friend reads this entry, i believe i'd rather keep my answer to myself for now. see how fun an office setting can be when you put non-office type people into the mix?

only on a monday...

it was about ten o'clock this morning when our dishwashers beckoned me outside and told me to take a look in our grease barrels. not generally being much of a morning person, i sort of drowsily wandered out to see what was amusing them so greatly. peering into the first, i saw nothing, but woke right up when the second barrel contained a seriously trapped and irritable racoon, staring back at me and growling. so, obviously, we couldn't leave the thing in there, both because we're good-hearted people and the idea of getting it out promised some fun early monday chaos. to address the problem, i gathered up ben and ryan, my ministers of mayhem and they set to work attempting to solve the problem. retrieval was solved by utilizing a combination of a giant prop chinoise (you can see the handle sticking out of the green barrel in the background) and a trash can containing a good amount of dawn dishwashing liquid, as ben figured the little guy would be badly in need of a bath. as the bravest of our staff looked on, ben scooped the angry racoon out of his greasy predicament and ryan caught him in the trash can, as shown here. we added some warm water to the dawn detergent in hopes of helping to get off some of the grease, swished him around a bit, and then set him free with one more bucket tossed over him for good measure. hopefully, he'll be able to clean himself up from there and his little racoon friends won't make too much fun of the way he smells. i'm still not sure what sort of omen this must be for the week to come, but i'm sure we'll find out. best of luck out there little buddy and i hope this has taught you to look before you leap.

what a thoughtful boy i have

hello everyone. this is pierre. sometime back, my son henry, when visiting me at my house, became somewhat attached to a sock monkey named garvin, an attachment that seems to have given rise to an ever-expanding sock monkey collection. it helps that i've always been pretty accomplished when it comes to inventing amusing voices and personalities for inanimate objects, his various toys being no exceptions...i think i can do almost all of the star wars characters by now, as well as sponge bob, patrick, and an array of more comic voices that work well for things like, well, sock monkeys. henry found pierre on ebay and used some of his allowance to buy him for me as a congratulations gift for my appearances on dinner:impossible. i can't begin to say how touched i was by the gesture. he's a wonderful and very considerate boy and i'm blessed to have him as my son. needless to say, pierre is already developing his own distinct personality and strange high-pitched french accent, laiden with comic condescension and insult, without the rage and irritability that you find so often in other, human french chefs. i've yet to see how his inherent flammability will effect the success of his chosen career. anyway, thank you, buddy, you're the best boy in the world.

plush life

i took this picture at the harbor inn (my favorite dive bar in cleveland) on saturday as we all sat around soaking wet after spice of life's all-day gig at burning river fest. it was a good day and i think ben learned alot about festival planning. the raft of severe storms that rolled through at night, however, sort of turned the evening portion into a bust. we ran two concessions stands (pizza and pulled pork nachos) and ended up with a lot of food left over, as the band didn't end up playing until three hours late and most of the crowd had dispersed. anyway, it was still a bunch of fun and i was once again lucky enough to get to be around some of my favorite people in the world, with whom i'm also lucky enough to work. the plush animals in the picture are courtesy of jess andjeski, spice of life's event planner extraordinaire. apparently, jess possesses the splendidly useless, but endlessly entertaining ability to conquer big choice games...you know, the ones with the little crain that you control to pick up toys and gifts out of a glass box. she wins almost every time and once even emptied out an entire machine just to see if she could. at any rate, for less than a couple of dollars she won all of the little friends that you see in the picture. clearly they were thirsty after spending all of that time trapped in an arcade game. personally, i think the world becomes a better place when filled with people who have awesome, amusing skills with no real-world applications. yay jess!!!! by the way, the title of this post is an allusion to "lush life", the great jazz vocal standard about lost love, a wasted life, and too much drinking written by billy strayhorn when he was only eighteen and, apparently, wise well beyond his years. the polychromatic mouse that you see finishing off my vodka and soda threw up only moments after this shot was taken and then borrowed my phone to drunk-dial the stuffed monkey that he'd been dating prior to being trapped in the game. we think that the dragon and the yellow rabbit left together, but no one can be sure.

house of cards.

i was lucky enough to get to see radiohead put on one of the best shows that i've ever seen last night. a big part of the summer for me has always been attending as many concerts as possible by the bands that i love with the people that i love the most. this summer has been different, but certainly no exception. it was an incredibly powerful show and one that i'll probably always remember. blossom is one of my favorite venues and holds so many great memories for me..and not just because of all of the shows i've seen there. i worked for the f&b company for five years, from the time i was sixteen, moving kegs and moving my way up through the ranks. it's where i got my first taste of this business that would eventually become my accidental, but much-loved career. i also met a lot of great friends and perfected my beer-drinking and flirting skills. ha! anyway, the show was fantastic, the evening almost perfect, and the music a fitting soundtrack to a night that i'll always hold near to my heart. bye.

ohio wine fest and farm animals!

this past saturday, i was lucky enough to have a good friend invite me to wine fest in kirtland, ohio. i'd never been before and the idea of throwing down a few cups of ohio's finest viticultural products seemed like a pretty appealing curative for a weekend that had started on an incredibly strong down note. after spending the afternoon at the beach, we got cleaned up and headed over to kirtland, which, unbeknownst to me, is apparently the eastern hub of the mormon empire. i wonder how fond they are of having such a bacchanalian event happening within site of their town. who knows. anyway, it was a beautiful evening and, once i learned that you could avoid the long tasting lines by simply ponying up $5 to buy a full glass of wine, the night just got better and more relaxing. we ate some cheese, drank too much wine, and wandered down to the farm park part of the premises to look at some of the farm animals. the goat you see in the picture has three horns and looked pretty much like something from the cover of a death-metal album. unfortunately, it didn't photograph very well. still, a strong wine buzz plus good company plus farm animals is an almost surefire recipe for fun. the sun set while we sat by the pond, finished off another couple of glasses, and the fest closed up shop. on the way out, a little stand was selling local blueberries which were delicious and reminded me of how great locally grown produce really is. unfortunately, given my level of maturity, they also reminded me of how much fun throwing blueberries and, anything really, can be. the traffic was bad and i tend to be impatient, so we passed the time trying to throw blueberries into a wine glass on the hood of the truck (and at the occassional car...sorry if i hit yours) until the exit arteries began flowing normally again. the night ended with a trip to a crazy italian restaurant called dino's. attached to a days inn in mentor, it certainly gives a certain faded 70s/e coli outbreak vibe, but the food turned out to be some of the best old-fashioned italian that i've had since eating at a similar place in wildwood, n.j. before the dinner:impossible shoot that just aired a couple of weeks back. overall, it was one of the best nights that i've had in a long time and ended up stretching into a really great weekend where i hadn't expected one. it's funny what you miss when you're looking somewhere else.