I really like that last week’s chef, Marianne Sundquist, picked a chef who’s not a name— she’s a farmer in the summer and a line cook at Vie in the winter, Abra Berens. As a result, she has her own viewpoint on ingredients, not to mention uses ones she grew herself, in this week’s video. Read the piece (which covers a lot of what she talked about that I didn’t) here.

P.S. By the way, I made her asparagus-radish-pea shoot salad the other day— I even used Klug asparagus like she did, since I had just been to the Green City Market. It was really good, and everyone was interested to see that yes, you can eat raw asparagus:

P.P.S. And watch an outtake here.

This week’s Key Ingredient presents a chef I didn’t know about, Marianne Sundquist of Andersonville’s In Fine Spirits, making a ragu from pork cheeks. The article is here.

As if that were possible. First up, Cleetus Friedman is the chef in this week’s Key Ingredient, with housecured ham…

While over at Saveur.com, a piece of mine with photographer Huge Galdones is up taking you behind the scenes of the great west side Italian deli Riviera.

I especially like how the author bio line (the only part not by me) sounds…

Barry Sorkin of Smoque and a hot dog star in the newest Key Ingredient, read it here.

As close to the podium as I thought I was going to get.

Having been nominated in the “Multimedia Feature” category for the James Beard Foundation Awards, I went to New York with a firm conviction that I was not going to win. (And by “I,” I mean “we,” my fellow nominee Julia Thiel who writes Key Ingredient in the Chicago Reader and myself.) Partly this was a defense mechanism— if I actually thought we would win, I’d be nervous; being convinced we would not, I was nonchalant, kind of. But part of it was that I really thought Andrew Zimmern would win, being famous, or Katherine Shilcutt, the lady from the estimable food section of the Houston Chronicle, whose editor is Robb Walsh, famous in his own right for a barbecue book I clutched throughout several trips to Austin. Illustrious company to be nominated in, who the heck are we to really compete with them?

Anyway, so Friday evening comes, my family who traveled with me to New York is off to see a play and I stroll over to the event space in Hell’s Kitchen… and the first thing I see is that animal rights protesters have set up stuffed animals in cages to protest the cruelty of fine dining. I notice that they also have what looks like a spray bottle of fake blood— if you’re going to spray that, I think, it’s going to be on the dress clothes of someone better paid than me.

I check in and get a little badge which says Nominee, which serves as a great icebreaker— throughout, people come up to me, or I to them, and say, so what are you nominated for? I catch the eye of the distinguishedly sturdy fellow on the right with salt and pepper goatee and he introduces himself.

“Robb Walsh,” he says, thrusting a hand at me. I can only repeat, dorkily, “Robb Walsh!” In an instant I realize that the whole evening is going to be like this, meeting people whose names I know, but whose faces are professionally hidden most of the time. It’s an odd social situation, but I make the best of it I can, and I think this is my awkwardness low point, which he handles graciously, wishing me luck even as he acknowledges that he’ll have a grieving reporter on his hands if Katherine Shilcutt loses to us. (Besides being Shilcutt’s editor, Walsh is nominated with two others for a story on oysters which appeared in, of all things, Garden & Gun, whatever that is.)

I’m a little suaver when I spot and zero in on Andrew Zimmern, who has a crowd around him, as most of the recognizable TV celebrities here do. I push my hand forward and say, “Since I’m going to lose to you in about 90 minutes, I figured I should say hi.” That disarms him and we talk for a few minutes about his recent Chicago episode. He manages to combine down to earthness with a celebrity glow and high voltage persona that makes you instantly understand why someone thought he’d be a natural for TV.

We take our seats— Julia, myself, and Mara Shalhoup, the Reader’s new editor, right up front (though my best view of the event will be the projected image on a side wall). More celebrity glow is on hand when Ted Allen and Gail Simmons take the stage; on Top Chef, Gail may play the more approachable Mary Ann to Padma’s exotic fashionista-dominatrix Ginger, but she’s quite glamorous in real life, and that wasn’t a faraway observation since she sat at our table when she wasn’t needed on stage.

The chair of the awards committee comes out and explains the changes in the awards this year, which have greatly expanded the number of categories to reflect the much more varied and, importantly, online basis of the profession of food writing these days. This doesn’t actually affect our category, which has existed for a while (Mike Sula and I were nominated in it two years ago), and I’m sure Beard cynics like Anthony Bourdain would say it’s just to increase the number of people sending in their entry fees, but compared to the way many journalism awards are still hopelessly hidebound (the Pulitzers just gave their first prize for reporting to a purely online story, which to my mind is sort of like giving the first Oscar to a talkie in 1940), it seems to me progressive and smart. Likewise, where the Beards could be awards from New York publishing for New York publishing, the regional sweep of the awards, taking in everywhere from Minneapolis to Seattle, is admirable.

Many, many awards follow— nerve-wrackingly, ours doesn’t come till after the second course— but some particular hero-worship highlights for me included Jonathan Gold winning the M.F.K. Fisher award for distinguished writing. Gold was chronicling grungy taquerias in L.A. before Chowhound was a gleam in Jim Leff’s eye, he’s right up there with Calvin Trillin as far as I’m concerned for the guys who first turned attention from haute to hot-n-greasy cuisine.

The Edible Communities group of publications won a special award for pioneering their model of hyperlocal coverage.

While Wylie Dufresne gave a thoughtful appreciation of a book that has had enormous influence on his generation of molecular gastronomists: Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. McGee in turn said that he hears all the time from young chefs in culinary school who can’t find out what they want to know from their traditionally-trained teachers, so they go direct to the source— him.

Somewhere in there our batch of awards comes up. At some point Julia and I realize there is actually a nonzero chance that we might wind up on stage— we don’t know what to make of the fact that we seem to have been seated quite close to it, for no good reason we can see— and we talk about what we might say if we do. It’ll be short, we agree on that much. Ted announces our category and I start recording video as the computer system slightly botches a clip from our very first Key Ingredient, starring Grant Achatz:

The moment I hear “Mi—” I mutter “oh my god” and flip the camera off. Julia and I look at each other with a bit of shock and she leads the way. There are, thankfully, two medals for us (they got that right in the multimedia category), and Ted Allen, who used to be at the Tribune, warmly says “Welcome, fellow Chicagoans” as he puts them around our necks.

Julia takes the microphone and offers both thanks and a memory of the late Cliff Doerksen, who won a Beard award last year and died a few months later. I’m not expecting this but it’s absolutely the right thing for her to do and she does it beautifully. There’s not a lot more for me to say, so I just make a quip to the effect of “Thank you for supporting regional work from small obscure places like Chicago,” which gets a mood-lightening laugh (but does represent my genuine appreciation that the Beards look beyond New York for great work), and we exit to go have our portraits taken in front of the obligatory wall of logos.

We return to our seats, but two or three times later we will turn to each other and say some variation on the theme of, “Holy shit, we won a Beard award.”

And the awards continue. Ruth Bourdain wins the first one to go to a Twitter account, or to a nonexistent person, leading everyone to immediately start murmuring— will we finally see who Ruth Bourdain is? No such luck, a Beard committee member accepts it (though since it was nominated, it does mean that the person behind it broke character long enough to actually enter it him/herself). Another hero of mine, Southern food writer James Villas, wins for his fine cookbook Pig and says one of the night’s most memorable soundbites: “To quote Dorothy Parker when she received an award late in life, it’s about goddamn time.” The applause indicates general agreement with the sentiment.

Grace Young, author of Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge, gives maybe the night’s best speech. As she explained, before her book of family Chinese recipes and lore was published, her father (its inspiration) died, her editor left after 20 years, her agent quit the business, her publicist quit… but she stuck to it and had her reward, in what struck many as a surprise win over Diana Kennedy. (If they put the full video up, you should definitely watch her speech, and Dufresne and Harold McGee.)

A few minutes later, part of the reason for the surprise win over Diana Kennedy was revealed— the committee had decided to create an award honoring one cookbook as best of the year, clearly (given the way it was presented) with an eye toward giving a boost to important, but not entirely commercial, projects. And the inaugural winner was Kennedy’s Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy, which even after her pioneering role in all the Baylessian Mexican food that has followed, couldn’t find a commercial publisher and was ultimately put out by the University of Texas.

And so the awards wrap up. Monica Eng, the only other Chicago journalism nominee this year (who totally should have won last year for her series about going to see slaughter), comes by and congratulates us. Julia calls her the Mindy Segal of journalism, in reference to the great Hot Chocolate pastry chef’s perennial also-ran status, but I prefer to think of her as being our Deborah Kerr, eight Oscar nominations, no wins, but always a class act.

Emboldened by the big piece o’ bling hanging around my neck, I decide to go say hi to a couple more of my heroes. Villas is nowhere to be seen, alas, but I do find Jonathan Gold and introduce myself. Looking at my Sky Full of Bacon business card, he says “Oh, I know this blog. I like this blog,” and immediately we go into a discussion of Alinea, where he just ate… and how he wished he’d been off sampling Chicago’s Mexican or Indian food at several points during it. (Let’s just say that he thinks that there’s no injustice in Noma being several rungs above Alinea on the San Pellegrino list.) When I make a witty observation about Alinea from one of my shoots, he says “Oh, I’m so stealing that,” which I can only beam at.

That in turn leads to a discussion of the food scene in Chicago. “Chicago has a great food community, there’s that, what is it, HRM Forum or whatever,” he says. “There’s nothing like that anywhere else.” But the rise of amateur online foodies has made his job harder: “There are so many people who have it in for me now, who’ve drilled so deep into something like Thai food or ramen and they go around saying I don’t know anything.” He just kind of shrugs amusedly at this— after all, he won the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing award, not just the Distinguished Discovery of Strip-Mall Carnitas award— but of course I know exactly who the Thai food reference is in regards to. “You mean like Erik M.?” He smiles and nods and asks me about him.

As we’re talking Andrew Zimmern comes over and congratulates me very graciously; he goes home 0-for-2 tonight (though he won last year). And that’s sort of the perfect moment that encapsulates this great journey from early days posting at Chowhound and then helping start LTHForum to this night— Andrew Zimmern congratulating me while I talk with Jonathan Gold about Erik M.

Thanks to the Reader for this great opportunity which I hope did them proud, thanks to Julia, my partner in chef-torment, and thanks to you, dear readers, some of whom I’ve known online or in person since those very first days to now.

More: Chicago Reader Chicago Tribune Eater Grub Street The Feast Crain’s

I always knew someone would pick Hot Doug, eventually, for Key Ingredient. And I knew it would be one of the funniest episodes ever. They did, and it is. The piece is here.

For nine days, I will be in the enviable position of being both a James Beard nominee and a Saveur Best Food Blogs nominee. (Then odds are I’ll be just the latter and Andrew Zimmern will have a Beard medal…) So if you’re coming here to find out what the heck this nominee Sky Full of Bacon is, well, I do food videos. The one up at the top of the page is the most recent, done in tandem with a print article in the Chicago Reader, but I’d really recommend checking out some of the independently-made ones such as Big Chef Small Farmer, about the chef-farmer relationship:

or The Last Days of Kugelis, the poignant story of the closing of the oldest Lithuanian restaurant in the world:

I also write stuff on this blog; scroll down to see a pair of posts on a recent trip to Detroit and to eat middle-eastern in Dearborn, Michigan.

Meanwhile, the Beard nom is for Key Ingredient, a series done for the Chicago Reader in which we challenge a chef with an oddball ingredient. Here’s the latest one, with Carlos Gaytan of Mexique (read the print piece here):

You can find the whole series here.

I’m with Michael McDonald, who posed this challenge– I’ve seen aloe vera at Whole Foods, but haven’t the foggiest idea what you do with it if you want to eat it. So Bill Kim found out for all of us; watch it and then read it here.

And if you haven’t seen them, check out the videos I made for Eater at Next and Aviary linked in the post below. There’s also this piece I did on the fly for Eater…

My favorite part of this week’s challenge was seeing where One Sixty Blue grows herbs and even some vegetables in the summer— its parking lot. It gave me an excuse to do black and white again (a parking lot in color is urban blight; a parking lot in black and white is the gritty romance of the big city). Otherwise, check out what chef Michael McDonald does with two colors of miso, here and in the print piece:

This being Key Ingredient #20, I’ll recap how the last ten dishes were, as I did after #10:

McLeod/Asafetida: very lush, I think I knew what the asafetida was contributing (a mouth-filling umami), a delicate and expertly made seafood dish
Pandel/Jujube: a little strong for a servable dish (maybe not at The Bristol, though!), but the citrus-bitter jujube balance was dead-on as a solution
Biggers/Beef tendon: I loved the smoked duck salad half, and the tendon soaked up lots of flavor even if I’m still not sure why you want to eat something like a rubber band
Van Camp/Red bean paste: with bacon and an egg on top, totally robust and comfy, like a Longman & Eagle dish (but that’s a different Jared)
Taylor/Fish eyeballs: Hard to say what the fish eyeballs added that oyster liquor, say, didn’t, but it was a good southern-style curry
Segal/Sorghum syrup: Not a carrot cake fan, but this was really a great dessert, and I really liked how sorghum was subtler than molasses in it
Steuer/Banana: good flavor, though rare duck wouldn’t be my choice for a jibarito, which to me wants greasy, slightly crispy meat. Also, banana softens up instead of stiffening like plantains.
Izard/Confectioners Sugar: Totally a Girl & The Goat dish, big hearty flavor with a lot of sweet and savory happening at once.
Zweiban/Tamarind: as I wrote at the time, the first one I’ve really thought of making. Simple roast chicken with a slightly bitter/orange marinade, what’s not to love?
McDonald/Miso: I liked the spring roll a lot, charred shrimp with a little Asian tinge, but I thought the dipping sauce was overkill.

Boy, you’d never know from this week that there were any other restaurants besides Grant Achatz’s hysteria-provoking Next— not even the one whose chef and last week’s Key Ingredient challengee just won a Food & Wine Best New Chefs thingy— but there are, and one of them is Province whose chef, Randy Zweiban, is up this week. As it turns out, tamarind wasn’t an unfamiliar ingredient for him, but this one is well worth watching because it’s probably the most accessible recipe yet, and it was damned good; if you were going to make one Key Ingredient dish yourself, I’d make this one (get the recipe and the full article here, no ISI canister required).

Meanwhile, sure enough, I wound up covering Next, too, with a video, but this was actually shot back when we shot the very first Key Ingredient (indeed you’ll notice that the last shot here is the first shot of that episode). Achatz was giving us a tour, and talking about how, if he could, he’d repaint the walls every night, change everything around. I asked if that was where the inspiration for Next, with its quarterly theme-changing, came from. He said no, and then he explained where it actually came from (sorry about what sounds like a burglar alarm ringing in the background; that was Alinea’s super-vacuum cleaner in operation as we went around):

UPDATE: And if you get the new issue of Time Out Kids, be sure to read page 36. Big thanks to Jenn Galdes and Karrie Leung for helping me set up two of the three kid-interviews.