The importance of cooking for those that you love (or just like a whole bunch) is the basis for a feast. Planning, scheming, and turning out food for a large crowd is thrilling, vexing, exhausting and supremely satisfying. The latter half of 2009 started and ended with large scale feasts, one in Los Angeles and one in San Jose. This is the second of two posts covering these events in detail.

(photo by wm. christman)

"It's a New Braunfels Bandera offset smoker."

Many years ago, my friend Tom had been researching Texas Barbecue and landed upon this unit as a potential (holy) grail for home barbecue. Looking over at the matte black finished smoker with its squat firebox and tall chimney, I immediately wanted one. The problem was availability. New Braunfels was a small Texas company with growing pains that didn't allow them much in the way of left coast sales. But with 40+ phone calls and two months later, I located one. Two weeks later I had done my first smoking run with a few racks of St. Louis style cut pork ribs.

Every three or four years since then, my wife Janet and I put on a giant-sized Texas barbecue. We do it because it's fun and we love Texas-style barbecue (low and slow) and frankly, the same amount of wood is used whether or not the smoking chamber is filled with meat or not. Barbecue travels well and leftovers last a long time. Most importantly, our friends always have a good time. Billed as "Bill and Jan's Texas Barbecue Party", we have been upping our game every time out for the past 12 years. The first official one had about 20 people and maybe 40 pounds of meat. Second one was 43 people and 86 pounds of meat. With the 2009 version, we were out to set a personal record. Here's how it came together...

The importance of cooking for those that you love (or just like a whole bunch) is the perfect reason for a feast. Planning, scheming, and turning out food for a large crowd is thrilling, vexing, exhausting and supremely satisfying. The latter half of 2009 started and ended with large scale feasts, one in Los Angeles and one in San Jose. The next two posts will cover those events in detail.

(photo by wm. christman)

The usual modus operandi when I go to Los Angeles is to get together with Les, who is my one of my best friends down there, and proceed to spend two and a half days visiting as many interesting restaurants, food trucks, farmer's markets and bars as our stomachs can handle. Usual (dietary) caution is thrown to the wind as we exist for one thing during those times: feasting.

In June of 2009, as we were planning another weekend of sheer gluttony, we decided to take one of those days and cook for handful of our LA friends. Since it was in the middle of a sweltering LA summer, it seemed natural to do a Mediterranean-themed summer grill.

And as most of our feasts go, we over-planned with the expectation that we'd scale back anyway. The initial menu had items like fig and prosciutto flatbread and beer-can chicken but as we planned shopping and judged time those seemed to over-complicate the theme. So we settled on a majority of cold apps, some excellent locally baked bread from the Village Bakery in Silverlake, two or three different kinds of marinated and grilled beef and chicken with potatoes and herbed grilled vegetables. Wine, bread pudding, ice cream and fine bourbon rounded out the deal.

Mark K. of Kihei, Hawaii writes, "Are we going to hear anything about Indian food??"

Well Mark, yes and no. As it usually happens with good food, the actual item disappears before any pictures can be taken. And what is a ...but the devil... posting without a delicious looking photo to (hopefully) make you drool?

And so it happened on my current business trip to India with the carrot halwa at Chennai's Eden, a restaurant with a modern Indian bent started by some local hotel management graduates.

I got the chance to click a few photos of their carrot halwa before the table's still-hungry occupants licked the plate clean. This version is moderately dense and carrot-y sweet. The condensed milk pushes the richness over the top. In smallish spoonfuls it's really good...and you'll go on tilt if you slurped up the whole thing in one go. Not that I have ever done that.

You can see a recipe for carrot halwa here or just go ahead and Google "carrot halwa".

Say "barbecue" to just about anyone and you're likely to get "ribs" as a response. I have been doing barbecue, in various forms, for years. And while one could endlessly debate the different methods of barbecue meat prep, technique, rubs and sauces, I prefer my rack of ribs cut in a "St. Louis" style.

Janet and I recently hosted our "once-every-three-or-four-years" Texas Barbecue Party and as I was doing prep for the chicken and ribs, I grabbed the camera to document the technique that Tom Dowdy taught me many years ago.

After almost two decades (really!), I finally made it to Pink's. LA's classic hot dog institution eluded me through the sublime and the ridiculous. The former being a nigh-on-cool spot to see and be seen in and the latter as fodder for the myriad of "gotta-eat-more-insanely-over-loaded-and-spiced-food-than-anyone-else-ever-could" reality sport-eating shows (paging Mr Richman, paging Adam Richman...white courtesy coronary bypass phone please...).

My best friend in LA, Les, chided me for not having ever gone. "But, but...I thought it was chili dogs as deep and as wide as your head...and I'm scared...", I whined. He shook his head then put his Freud hat on and told me that sometimes a chili dog is just a chili dog. And it just so happened that Pinks' version was pretty tasty.

So as part of my January 15th 50th birthday celebration (thanks Janet!), I finally went to Pink's. And it was very, very good. They source their own hot dogs and make their own chili. Even standing in line for 20 minutes was worth it. And I didn't walk away with any sort of bloat. In fact, I felt just shy of full. Perfect.

And as a native Californian, I hang my head in shame for not going sooner.

Though the passion for food remains constant, life remains seated squarely in the fast lane. When that happens, time just rolls on and on like you fell asleep and like all of a sudden, it's months later.

So, a belated Happy New Year to everyone who stops by ...but the devil sends the cooks. As before, this year will be full of challenges in grabbing enough time in the day to sit down and write about food, where it might be going and how it fits into life.

And it doesn't take the Amazing Kreskin to say that 2010 will also be a year of wild and somewhat unpredictable change. For the dedicated handful of folks who stop by, thanks for following along.

Tuesday October 27th, 1:13 pm, Tokyo Standard Time

My Special Ops agent, Katz M., called me up in the middle of my annual Tokyo shoe-buying frenzy.

"We need to talk", he said in a nervous voice. "Do you have a moment?"

Katz does reconnaissance for many of my missions in Tokyo which can be a little dicey and borderline dangerous at times.

"Katz, man...anything for you. You sound concerned. Do we have a blown cover problem?"

"No, no....um, I think I found what you were looking for", he said. "But this one is different. Really different."

"OK, give me the straight dirt, Katz. What'chu got for me?"

I heard him hesitate. "OK, the target is in Ginza. You know, rich beyond rich there...but it's not ultra-high end stuff..." His voice trailed off.

"Dish it, Katz!", I said impatiently. "I can take it."

Sometimes a restaurant hits upon a concept so brain-dead simple (in execution, at least) that it's both impressive and delicious.

Ebisu's Trattoria Il Boccalone features a parmesean risotto that is finished in a giant half-wheel of parmesean. That is, the risotto is cooked to just a moment before you would kill the heat and add cheese to finish it. Instead, Il Boccalone pours the semi-molten risotto into a small canoe-like well dug into a three foot half-wheel of parmesean. The risotto melts the cheese into itself as it is pushed around the cheesy well. Genius.

Il Boccalone may not be the first restaurant to do this but the whole spectacle is impressive. And even better, it was very delicious.

(Days three and four at the CIA)

There's nothing quite like mixing, fermenting, shaping and baking bread. Even when you're doing bread bakery numbers.

In the past two days, we have made:
- 18 9" diameter white sourdough boules
- 16 hand formed ciabatta
- 110 4" brioche
- 105 white dinner rolls
- 13 9" rosemary and green olive boules
- 12 7" rosemary batards
- 8 14" braided challah
- 6 5" diameter orange panatone
- 12 8" long sunflower seed bread

Phew....and that's only half of it...there's more below...

rosemary batard (photo by wm. christman)

- 16 10" diameter focaccia (with 5-6 different toppings)
- 40-50 pieces of fresh naan
- three large sheets of lavash
- about 36 lebanese thyme flatbread
- a pile of soft pretzels
- a pile of fresh pita bread

Two days of production (four hours each, so really just 8 working hours), lots of mixing, testing, stretching, forming, shaping, cutting...running back and forth between ovens and benches, ducking the steam vents in the deck oven when baking bread, or delivering most of what we produced to the lunch crew to put out for lunch (or breakfast the next day) and much more...it just goes on and on.

And all throughout, the slightly tangy smell of fermenting bread, long and wide bread benches scattered with flour and ingredients, white coated chefs-in-training scurrying in and around the work areas, multiple sheet pans of shaped and resting loaves, the roasted smells of freshly finished bread cooling on racks...and unless you see it first-hand, there's nothing like this.

And for me, this is heaven.

Well, the trip to Tokyo was a smashing success but work and other tasks got in the way of posting anything. Yes, the stories of risotto finished in a giant wheel of parmesan, the night of two, back-to-back salaryman-stylee dinners, and Nagoya's Yabaton with it's unique take on tonkatsu and an equally cool sumo wrestler pig logo will all be posted here in the next few weeks. Promise.

But there's something a bit more urgent going on now though. Today, I found myself an actual "enrolled" student (more on that in a minute) at the CIA (the Culinary Institute of America) at Greystone in St. Helena up in California's wine country.

I have been coming to Japan every year for the past seven or eight years. Before that it was a few times per year on business. Friends and colleagues still ask why I like coming here. Unfortunately, there's no real one word or phrase answer to that question.

...but the devil... has been busy posting as fast as humanly possible given all the stimulus here, food-wise but today, as I exited a train on the Yamanote line in Meijiro, I stopped and looked around. I decided that it is time to attempt to answer this nagging question.

There is just something magical about Japan, and Tokyo especially, that transcends any stereotype of geisha, all-sushi-all-the-time, people being jammed into trains, or Asian mysticism. If you look really, really hard, you will see proud people everywhere, going about their business in a (mostly) quiet way, enjoying some pretty simple pleasures.

Food is a big part of that but so is the way people socialize, their attitudes about subtly but definitively expressing themselves (the picture above is but one example I found today), how they dress (it seems like everyone you see is dressed to kill), and how they treat one another (with kindness and definite respect). So I can attempt to answer the question by saying that when I'm here, I feel so much more like I am part of something that cannot be duplicated in the US.

Wanting and being wanted is a big part of being in love. You feel both elated in the moment and a bit scared that it might somehow go away in an instant. I've got it bad for Tokyo (and the rest of Japan) and it is now time to put the love affair into long-distance mode. And like a far-away lover, I'm already yearning to come back and resume the romance. I don't know if it will be next year or in a few years but right now, the future doesn't matter but spending my last 24 hours intensely loving this city does.

(We have many more posts in the works about these two food-laden weeks in Tokyo and those will resume after we return to the US next week...thanks to all my friends here that provide invaluable input and discoveries, thanks to you for staying tuned and for all of the kind compliments about ...but the devil sends the cooks..

The staggering number of noodle restaurants, joints and hangouts in Tokyo means that your noodle cravings will never become a problem. A fair number of them also make their own noodles by hand and those are the shops that are worth searching out.

Hegisoba Kon (へぎそば昆) is one that takes great pride in their handmade noodles. So much so that they stay up real late to indulge their patrons with large flat trays of cooked to perfection soba. And that's after a healthy set of izakaya dishes. Or as a friend told me, "you might think that you cannot eat another bite but once you taste their soba, you get hungry all over again".

It's not often that we post scenery here at ...but the devil... but if Tokyo is all hustle-bustle then the countryside of the Kiyasato area is a serene oasis.

(photo by wm. christman)

There's lots of great food out here as well (as the yakiniku above demonstrates) and a fine place to spend the weekend.

(Kiyosato is about 2 hours by car almost due west of Tokyo.)

Tokyo changes as fast as it stays the same. In some areas, five years ago looks completely different than today. Other remain the same year after year or even decade after decade.

Manshuri Saikan (満州里菜館) has been around since the early 1950's and turns out an impressive number of Chinese dishes. But the one I'm the most familiar with and fond of is their roasted garlic gyoza (niniku gyoza).

Nicely seared steaks with all the trimmings. Not a rarity in Tokyo by any stretch but Meat Yazawa does it for a reasonable price and they do it well. And it's way too much fun to imitate gravelly voiced, serious Japanese samurai movies stars saying "mee-to yazawa" (ミート矢澤).