A Leslie Wong Blog

Dungeness crabs, $3.69/lb, Lucky Seafood Market #2, Oakland, CA.

Update: On 4 December 2011, the price is $3.29/lb
Update: On 5 December 2011, the price is $2.99/lb
Update: On 7 December 2011, the price is $1.99/lb
Update: On 8 December 2011, the price is $2.99/lb

I became interested in making chili when I read an article in the then new food section of the New York Times, maybe 25 or 35 years ago. It was about Francis X. Tolbert, Wick Fowler and the World Championship Chili Cook-Off in Terlingua, Texas.

Accompanying the article was Wick Fowler’s 2 Alarm Chili recipe. I have the clipping somewhere, but the gist of it was that he marinated the meat in beer (and in Lapland or somewhere he successfully used reindeer) and seared the meat in suet. He used a little cumin because it gave the chili a faint odor of sweat and he used oregano, but not too much, because, he said, you didn’t want to have too much of a spaghetti flavor. I think he also said that people who cooked their beans in their chili flunked chemistry.

Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili Kit is still available, though if you need a kit, you are still probably buying your 100 grams of chili pepper flakes for $9 from Whole Foods (and maybe you flunked chemistry too).

In addition to those ingredients, I throw in some mild chili powder for color, salt, chopped onions, fresh garlic and a can of crushed tomatoes.

The last thing I put in is the “heat” source – for me that is a hot chili pepper. I learned about the unit for measuring the heat in a chili pepper – Scoville units – from the gift subscription to Chili Pepper Magazine my friend Regina gave me 25 years ago. The type of chili pepper I use depends on how self-destructive I’m feeling (or, according to some people, how much of an endorphin rush you want – I think it’s just the fear of the heat). I used to start with about 10 generic dried hot chili peppers ground up in a blender with some water for two or three pounds of meat. When I saw fresh habanero chilis in the local grocery store, those went into the pot.

Lately, I found an African, Caribbean and Latin American grocer that has fresh Naga Jolokia peppers. The next stop after this is to borrow some pepper spray from the police (see Everett McGill in the Steven Seagal classic, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory).

I think the reality of making chili is it’s not some arcane process that the TV chili cook-offs show would have you think. You’re just throwing some meat in a pot. To me, the preferences for a particular winning chili recipe comes down to what you like; sort of like New York pizza – the best one is from the pizzeria where you always eat.

I have a peripheral interest in design and aesthetics. Who doesn’t like functional devices that look nice?

My sister gave me a membership to the Museum of Modern Art when I first moved to New York in the 70’s. Later, when I worked at ABC, I had the benefit of their corporate membership for admission. I used to walk to MOMA on 54th Street just to wonder at the things in the Architecture and Design Collection on the third floor.

The collection has a cast aluminum ice cream scoop that was designed by Sherman L. Kelly (American, 1869-1952) in 1935. The manufacturer, Zeroll, describes Kelly’s thinking:

“… As the story goes, Kelly was vacationing in West Palm Beach, Florida, when he observed a young woman dipping ice cream. Noticing the blisters on her hand from the constant use of the disher in the hard ice cream, he thought to himself, “there must be a better way to serve ice cream.” Kelly resolved to find it. In 1933, Sherman Kelly developed the design for the Zeroll® Ice Cream Dipper and received a patent. The dipper was a non-mechanical ice cream scoop, made of cast aluminum, with fluid inside the handle. Its unique design transferred heat from the user’s hand, warming the fluid, which in turn defrosted the ice cream dipper…”

I’ve wanted one of these since I saw it at MOMA. After the head broke off our last scoop, I bought a slightly updated version of the Zeroll Ice Cream Scoop for $18.

Spot Prawns are the largest shrimp on the west coast of North America. I stuck a ruler in the photograph at the left so you can see that these shrimp are no shrimps. They are over 8 inches (20 cm) long.

The Spot Prawn (Pandalus platyceros) have four white spots on the abdominal segments – you can see one of them in the photo near the top of the first segment. A few of these happen to have roe, also.

According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, “Spot prawns change sex as they grow. They spend the first part of their lives as males, then change into females.”

As with many of the aquatic species at the aquarium, they also make good eatin’.

16:40 PST.

Dubrow’s Cafeteria, 515 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY, circa 1983

On my drives from New York City to the Catskills to go fishing on the Beaverkill River, I always took Route 17, because it was a little more interesting.

Off the George Washington Bridge, I’d take Route 4 in New Jersey and then NJ 17 near the Garden State Plaza. Once I crossed back into New York near Suffern, the surroundings started to change from urban to rural.

On Route 17 in Southfields, New York, was The Red Apple Rest. I probably first went by there in the late 70′s. I took this photograph around 1979. The Red Apple Rest closed in 2006.

Josepth Berger at the NY Times wrote about the Red Apple Rest’s location: “What made the Red Apple so essential a summertime port of call was not so much its food as its location. Before the New York State Thruway opened in 1956, the ride up to the mountains along the old Route 17 could take four or five hours and the Red Apple Rest was almost exactly halfway. While there were three or four other pit stops, the Red Apple, watched over by its founder, Reuben Freed, became the place to go.”

I saw Tony Bourdain’s show where he was chowing down on soup dumplings at the Nanxiang Xiaolong Mantou Dian, a restaurant in Shanghai.

It made me hungry and reminded me of the time when my mom and I went to Shanghai.

My mom and my two aunts (her two sisters) made dumplings one night for twelve of us. It was a labor intensive process because there weren’t any dumpling wrappers from the store nor a Cuisinart to make the dough in 5 seconds. They kneaded the dough and then rolled it out into wrappers. The dumplings were perfect.

That’s what I thought of when I was walking by a freezer case at 99 Ranch and saw these Pork and Leek Mini Buns. My brain connected back to an event I could grasp. I also hoped these wouldn’t be dried out inside like the other ones I bought once. These were about one third the size of the ones my family made but they were juicy. I’d buy them again and not just for the memories.

There seem to be a lot of lame April Fools jokes on the internets today, but he Spaghetti Harvest story wasn’t, when it first came out in 1957. Things were different then.

I remember seeing the US rebroadcast of the story when it aired in 1957. It was originally produced by the BBC television series, Panorama; it seemed plausible at the time. The video is on YouTube now.