The Best Food Blog Ever Eats The Hottest Chile Pepper Ever from DDL on Vimeo.

Shortly after arriving on the exhibit floor of the Fancy Food Show at the Javits Convention Center, having progressed through Argentina and Mexico, we came upon the booth for Blair’s Death Sauces and Snacks.  It was festively decorated in the way that heavy black cloth, skulls, flames, and madness tend to liven up things.

As we passed in front of the booth, a woman extended a tray of spicy potato chips for my perusal.  I would have sampled a few, but my attention was immediately drawn to Blair Lazar, who had a ceramic knife in one hand and a wooden cutting board in the other, liberally coated with the dark crimson shards of a dried chile pepper.  With all of the flair of a carnival hawker who already knows the outcome of your gamble, Blair was offering tastes of his newest product, a smoked and dried Bhut Jolokia chile pepper.  His eyes locked on me, and he beckoned me forth with the tip of the knife waving in the air in front of him.  “Come try the Bhut Jolokia,” he shouted above the din, “the hottest chile pepper on the planet!”

We had only just arrived at the show, and I had forty-five aisles of samples yet to come.  I really wasn’t keen on trying the pepper, even though I’m a fan of spicy food, but when you have a food blog, a video camera, and Blair Lazar himself offers you a smoked Bhut Jolokia chile pepper, I realized that there’s really no other option other than to rise to the challenge.  Not familiar with the Bhut Jolokia?  Read on.

The Bhut Jolokia is native to India and is officially classified by scientific authorities and the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s hottest chile pepper.  It is also known as the Naga Jolokia and the Ghost Pepper – presumably because after eating one, your soul just vaporizes out of your pores, leaving you an empty, smoldering shell.

The standard measure of the spice level of a chile pepper is the Scoville Heat Unit (SHU).  A typical jalapeno pepper measures around 10,000 SHUs.  An orange habanero pepper, one of the hottest of that variety, clocks in at 357,729 SHUs, which would surely test the  tolerance of the most dedicated chile aficionado.  By comparison, the Bhut Jolokia pepper blows the curve completely, measuring at an astounding 1,001,304 units of heat.  Indian defense scientists are looking to use the Bhut Jolokia extract in grenades for riot control purposes.  In paste form, the Bhut Jolokia is used to repel elephants.  I am not joking.

We turned on the camcorder and started recording.  A small crowd had gathered in front of the booth, spectating in the same way that one would watch NASCAR for the fiery crashes.

Blair tipped the knife, and a small fragment of Bhut Jolokia cascaded into the palm of my hand.  I gave it a cursory examination, sniffed at it, then tucked it into a corner of my mouth like chewing tobacco.

As with most chile peppers, there’s a certain delay before the true onset of spice on the tongue.  Blair, ever the showman, narrated cheerfully as my Bhut Jolokia sample began to unravel its mysteries upon my palate.  I chewed the Bhut Jolokia once, twice…then everything in my world turned white-hot.  The Bhut Jolokia had opened up like an angry bronco unleashed from its pen.  The Bhut Jolokia is fury.

With most hot peppers, the burn begins as a tingle on your tongue that, for particularly spicy chiles, escalates to discomfort within a few seconds.  The Bhut Jolokia is unlike any other – the entire right side of my face flashed numb with pain just as soon as the burn hit, the heat radiating from the spot in my cheek, spreading across my face and down my neck.  While other peppers come on like an upward slope, the Bhut Jolokia takes off like a rocket, only this rocket incinerates the launch pad and every single living creature within five miles of it.  It’s a nuclear detonation inside of your mouth.

It was imperative that I refrain from panicking.  This is, of course, more easily said than done, because panic is your body’s first reaction to the incredible pain that visits upon your senses as you realize that this, truly, is the spiciest thing that you will have ever tasted in your lifetime.  Panic, thought, would only lead to breathing faster, possibly to the point of hyperventilation, which only causes more air to move across your tongue, which serves to magnify the burn even more.  I willed myself into a Zen state of calm, breathing as normally as I could muster as the oils from the Bhut Jolokia tormented my senses in an unbridled, full-on assault.  Beads of sweat began forming on my brow as I rode out the pain, every second bringing heretofore undiscovered levels of spice.

It’s also crucial, surprisingly, to avoid drinking any water for the duration of the burn, a critical error committed by many novice pepper eaters.  Oil and water don’t mix, so the only effect of downing a bottle of water would be to distribute the volatile oils throughout your mouth, spreading them around your tongue, your cheeks, and down your esophagus.  The only thing that defeats a Bhut Jolokia is time.  Actually, let me amend that – the only thing that defeats Bhut Jolokia is time and massive quantities of ripened soft cheeses.  It’s a very good thing that we were at the Fancy Food Show and surrounded on all sides by breads, cheese, and crackers.  After about fifteen minutes, and several samples of brie, the pain that had been so intense at the start had subsided to a gentle simmer, enough to allow me to continue my tour of the exhibit floor.

Talk about a meta-media whirlwind spanning decades.  First, Julia Child authors a cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which triggers a fundamental shift in the way that Americans view cooking, during an age that celebrated hot dogs and canned soup as viable kitchen ingredients.  Forty-one years later, a young woman named Julie Powell begins a blog, the Julie/Julia Project, which chronicles her journey to create every one of the recipes in Julia Child’s massive tome.  The blog is so successful, it gets converted into a book entitled Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen in 2005.  Four years later, that book has been turned into a film, Julie & Julia, which debuts in theaters on August 7.  And today, I’m happy to report that The Best Food Blog Ever is the featured Blog of the Day on the official Julie & Julia website.  Seriously!  It’s in the lower right hand corner!

So, you got all of that?  A book spawned a food blog which spawned a book which spawned a movie which is featuring a food blog on its website.  As I’ve said, it’s all very meta.  But enough about all of this new media stuff, let’s talk about Julia Child.

Julia Child was quite an inspiration for more than just the obvious reasons.  Yes, she taught generations of people to cook and explore and discover tastes that were beyond the periphery of their experiences, but what many folks may not know is that Julia Child didn’t start cooking until she was 32.  As someone who didn’t start writing about food until the age of 35, that fact commands a certain measure of respect from me.  What Julia Child introduced, and what Julie Powell reinforced with the Julie/Julia Project, was the proposition that everyone can learn to cook at any point in their lives, and that, as intimidating as cooking may be to the uninitiated, you can never fail so spectacularly in the kitchen as to permanently lose your license to turn on your stove.  On a larger scale, the lesson to be taken from Julia Childs’ life is, it’s never too late to start something new.

Above all else, though, Julia Child was a troublemaker, and for all of her troublemaking she has left the world a better place.  Who else would dare, at age 37 in 1950, to be one of the few women to train at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris?  Who else but Julia Child could possibly convey that cooking, even if it involved tackling the most daunting lists of ingredients, the most intimidating processes of classic French cuisine, could be fun, and that you could actually take the time to laugh in the kitchen?  Cooking is not supposed to be some mysterious and somber dark art, and Julia Child went a long way towards promoting the notion that there’s fun to be had in the kitchen.

Troublemaking was an essential ingredient to Child’s career as an author, for even after completing the manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she faced a constant struggle to find a publisher.  An editorial panel at Houghton Mifflin, all men, overruled the recommendation of a female editor and rejected the book.  It was their belief that women wanted recipes that were simple, preferably using mixes (and woe be unto all of us that we may be sliding backwards into that era today), so the complex mechanics of the recipes in Child’s manuscript wouldn’t find an audience.  It’s amazing to think how, if Julia Child was not as tenacious a troublemaker as she was, that such a classic may have languished at the bottom of a slush pile forever.  It wasn’t until the draft found its way to Judith Jones at Knopf that fortune finally began to favor it.  Since its first publication, Mastering the Art of French Cooking has seen many printings and been reissued twice.

Even by current standards, Julia Child’s approach to life would have placed her in the minority.  She was an advocate of moderation, a concept that is all but lost today, where everything is deep fried, supersized, and over-the-top.   A quote attributed to her stated that the secrets to happiness and good health were moderation, small helpings, and sampling “a little bit of everything”.  She never endorsed any commercial products, despite several lucrative offers.  She never advocated any kind of diet that required you to eat only this, or everything but that.

Julia Child used cream.

Julia Child used butter.

Julia Child drank gin and wine.

Julia Child lived to be 91 years old.

Thank you, Julia.  You got a lot of people cooking.

Imagine a place where you could sample the best, most perfectly ripened cheese you’ve ever had, followed by a bite of decadently rich chocolate, which is then even further enhanced by a shot of red wine, all finished off with a spoonful of the finest extra virgin olive oil to ever cross your lips.  Now imagine doing that every hundred feet or so, over and over, until even the notion of a single sea-salt encrusted artisanal paper thin wafer seems grossly unappealing to you.  That, in a nutshell, was our weekend at the 55th Summer Fancy Food Show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City.

To say that it’s possible to tour the entire Fancy Food Show in a single day is much like saying that one could see all of the artwork in the Louvre in an afternoon.  Sure, you could do it, but it would involve a lot of running through crowds, you would only catch a superficial glance of each piece, and you wouldn’t enjoy yourself in the least.  And, in perhaps the greatest of parallels, your feet and legs would hurt for days.

Consider the numbers – 140,000 food products from lands both near and far, large and small.  Two floors of exhibit space, ranging from narrow booths hosted by small producers to immense, towering pavilions representing entire countries.  Over 2,300 exhibitors from 75 countries, all vying for the attention of over 24,000 visitors, each booth with its own selection of samples.  Given those numbers, and the vastness of the Javits Center itself, The Fancy Food Show is at all times exhilarating, exhausting, and overwhelming, yet I find myself already counting the days until its return to the East Coast next year.  The scope of the Fancy Food Show is so gloriously outlandish, I may never want or need to go to any other food convention.  Only next time, I’ll be much better at pacing myself.

This was my first trade show since launching The Best Food Blog Ever, and the difference between industry events such as the Fancy Food Show and public conventions can be summed up in a single word: Power.  At conventions that are open to the public, the audience attends for a leisurely experience, and the vendors pull in customers by selling products, giving away coupons, and increasing recognition of their brand.

At a trade show such as this, though, and especially in New York City, the stakes are exponentially higher.  I glimpsed badges for retail buyers, trade affiliates, manufacturers, and distributors, some of whom had the potential to make purchasing decisions worth millions of dollars.  In some booths, men dressed in somber gray and black business suits sat in plastic folding chairs, hunched over paperwork, hashing out details of deals in progress, the intimacy of their discussions in stark contrast to the cacophony of the crowded exhibit floor.  Whenever we walked up to a vendor, you could catch the subtle downward glance at our badges – are we buyers for a major supermarket chain?  Restaurateurs looking for the next brilliant ingredient?  A guy with one of those whatchamacallits…a “blog”?  Compared to these movers and shakers, I barely registered a quiver.

We arrived at the Javits Center about a half hour after the show opened on Sunday morning.  After receiving our badges, we entered the exhibit hall armed with the same strategy that has consistently worked for us in many other conventions – start at one end of the hall and work our way up and down the aisles.  Only this time, as we neared the end of the third aisle, having tackled Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Germany, Morocco, Turkey, and half of France, we checked the time to discover that nearly two hours had passed, and we still had thirty aisles left to explore on the upper level, representing the remainder of the international vendors.  Seventeen more aisles of domestic products from states such as Texas, Virginia, and New York awaited us on the lower level.  In the hours to come, we would only be able to cover about half of the show floor before the exhibit halls closed for the day.

But, oh, how those hours were filled with decadence.  The best vendors were eager to chat and share the stories behind their products.  Some booths were staffed with representatives who demonstrated a full command of every nuance of their wares, fully capable of explaining the differences between their cheeses, for example, and those of other producers.  Others tempered their enthusiasm when they saw that I was not representing a major buyer.  In any case, we were able to sample chocolates, baked goods, jams, cheeses, and all other manner of edible nirvana.  Whenever we came across a particularly outstanding product, we’d take some literature, or ask for a press kit.  As the afternoon wore on, our plastic handbag grew portly and strained against our fingers.

In all, we spent about nine hours over the course of two days at the Fancy Food Show, and boy, do we have stories to tell.  For now, those stories have yet to be written, and you’ll just have to be a patient for a little while longer – I expect to spend at least two weeks, if not more, on the New York Stories, recounting both the Fancy Food Show as well as other food adventures.  Just as the Fancy Food Show can’t be experienced in a single day, I can’t possibly do justice to the weekend in a single entry.

I can tell you this – I ate the world’s hottest chile pepper at the Fancy Food Show, and we caught the whole thing on video.  Maybe I’ll tell you that story first.

In site news, The Best Food Blog Ever has been selected as the Blog of the Day for July 6 on the official website for the Julia & Julia movie.  I’ll be interrupting the New York Stories series for an entry about Julia Child on that day.

“Steak frites, please.  Medium rare.”  The words tumbled out of my mouth with all the weight of a commandment, an incantation that would invoke the start of one of the most wonderful and highly anticipated meals of my life as a food writer so far.  Was it really that good?  Absolutely!  Should you go there for dinner?  Yes!  Go right now.  Take me with you.

Stephen Starr opened Parc on Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia nearly a year ago, on July 14, 2008 – Bastille Day.  Offering seating for close to 300 patrons, with additional space for 75 more at the sidewalk tables, Parc instantly evokes memories of its mainstay Parisian counterparts, the brasseries that remain crowded and brightly lit, stoves hot and ready to serve, well into the depths of the post-midnight hours.  Having fondly missed Paris almost every day since returning from our vacation five years ago, Parc has been cemented to the top of my to-do list for a very long time.

And a long time it has certainly been.  I have made seven unsuccessful attempts to have dinner at Parc – that’s how many times we’ve found ourselves in Philadelphia and somehow managed to eat somewhere else, either due to convenience of location or at the behest of the people we were visiting.  Our busy schedules keep us from driving down to the city “just because”, so whenever we’re in town, we’re in town for a reason.

You can imagine my excitement, then, when I saw a spontaneous window of opportunity open up on Saturday, with just myself and my wife, plus the addition of the inimitable Amy Shields from the profoundly fabulous superband Mojo and the Helper Monkeys.  We were hungry, we were downtown, and we had nowhere else to be – so I seized the day like an obscure 80s movie reference..  “Parc! Parc! Parc!” I shouted as we navigated the narrow streets of the City of Brotherly Love.  I think I may even have made up a song about Parc along the way.  I was quivering with excitement, or maybe low blood sugar – either way, we were going, at long last, to have dinner at Parc!

We arrived early enough to have the fortune of being seated immediately.  As we were led through the massive space, I was impressed at how authentic Parc felt – the layout, tiled floors, dark woods, and zinc bar were all reminiscent of classic bistros in Paris.  We placed our drink orders, and, as I have practiced over and over in my head since first previewing the menu online, I ordered the steak frites.  Listed on the menu as “seared hangar steak, maitre d’ butter”, the description is deceptively plain for a dish that, to be honest, requires a certain elevated measure of talent to pull off correctly.  I’ve seen other restaurants offer steak frites, but compromise on the true interpretation by offering ribeye, or strip steak, or some other cut of beef that is more forgiving than hangar.  If you’ve ever worked with it, you know that hangar steak is a naturally tough piece of meat, and if prepared inartfully, can turn a dining experience into an event only slightly better than chewing on a wallet.

While we were waiting for our food to arrive, our server brought a basket filled with an assortment of bread – French baguettes, hearty wheat slices, and raisin bread, all accompanied by a crock of softened butter.  The bread, baked on the premises, presents a nice array of varied textures and flavors – the crusty, chewy baguette, the thick, grainy slabs of dark bread, and the sweetness of raisins tucked into a loaf that just yearns to see you return for breakfast.

The moment of truth arrived as my steak frites platter was placed in front of me.  True to form, it was unmistakably hangar steak – no other cut of beef has that same muscular, fibrous quality, a look that makes you wonder if you should eat the steak or wear it as a vest.  Brushed liberally with melted butter, parsley, a touch of garlic, and salt, the steak needed nothing else to become transformed into classic steak frites.  I wielded my steak knife, held my fork firm, and was reassured to feel the knife glide effortlessly through the meat.  Placing the first bite into my mouth, an act that I had looked forward to for close to a year, yielded an astounding burst of gamey flavor and a tenderness that approached filet mignon in its delicacy, but with the characteristic chew that can only come from true hangar steak.  I’ve had steak frites in Paris; this was no mere replication of that dish, no homage – this was truly a genuine steak frites in every sense.  The fries, slender, golden, dusted with sea salt, were served with an aioli for dipping.  The plate oozed with decadence, each bite as rewarding, flavorful, and satisfying as the first.  And, just like that, it was gone.

Other dishes proved just as skillfully executed and true to form.  A Trout Amandine presented perfectly cooked, delicate white flesh, adorned with slivers of almond toasted in butter and a splash of lemon.  Unapologetically French, there is little on the menu at Parc that would classify as light fare – even a Salade Lyonnaise comes draped with a poached egg.  But the poached egg is not alone, as it’s paired with lardons, that wonderful gift of salty, smokey pork fat.  It’s bacon taken to the next level and beyond.

As is typical with any outstanding restaurant experience, I’ve already assembled a mental hit list of menu items that I need to try on my next visit.  As the last dish that I enjoyed before leaving Paris, it is imperative that I sample the escargot, if only to have an opportunity to relive that memory again.  A charcuterie platter was a generous pile of cured meats, accompanied by pate and chicken liver mousse, presented on a wooden cutting board.  The onion soup gratinee, along with a glass of wine, would make for a wonderful midday lunch.  And was that steak tartare that I spied on an adjoining table?

Some time last year, I purchased a food grinder attachment for our KitchenAid stand mixer, with visions of homemade sausage and burger patties dancing in my head.  Soon after it arrived, we threw a grilling party and invited some friends over to try out some freshly ground burgers.  This was probably the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in the kitchen as I had violated the cardinal rule of cooking for guests: never serve anything you haven’t successfully made before.

When I passed the chunks of beef through the grinder, some fat and gristle hit the grinder blade and clogged up the works.  The meat that did make it through the grinder into the bowl was devoid of fat and flavor, which resulted in horribly compact, dried out pucks of grilled meat.  I was not pleased, and I expressed my great displeasure by banishing the grinder attachment to the dark recesses of our kitchen cabinet, never to be used again.  Having missed a routine fly ball, was I blaming the glove?  In hindsight, yes.

Time, as the saying goes, heals all wounds.  So, like finding an old college buddy on Facebook, the craving to explore uncharted waters made me reconnect with my grinder attachment after nearly a year of exile.  The mission: homemade sausage.  The unavoidable challenge – I would have to try my hand at grinding meat again.  I was hoping that my grinder would not turn out to be the Kobayashi Maru of meat.

I had been considering making my own sausage for several months, but out of the universe of food, sausage is one of those items with a greater  potential ick factor.  It’s not so much the grinding of the meat, really, than the average person’s unfamiliarity with sausage casings.  Having never worked with casings before, I had this nightmarish vision of cracking open a tub of tubes, getting hit full-on in the face with an odor that would confirm that, yes, these are organic casings that were once piggy parts, then losing my nerve to make sausage forevermore.  Sure, I could just form the loose sausage mixture into patties and fry them, but that’s not REAL sausage.  Real sausage comes in links.  Real sausage is measured using the length of your arm.

To my great and welcome surprise, and as a reassurance to all of you, there was no odor at all, and working with the casings is actually quite easy.  They come packed in coarse salt to keep them dry, and prepping them is as easy as dumping the whole lot into a pot of cool water, using your fingers to separate them, then running cool water through them.  While I initially regarded $7 as a bit on the pricey side for casings, I didn’t realize that the plastic tub contains quite a few casings, and you’re only going to need one or two per batch of sausages.  In other words, so long as you repack your leftover casings in salt and keep them in the fridge, you shouldn’t need to buy more casings for quite a while.

The sausage turned out unexpectedly well, and the grinding went without a hitch, thanks to a few very critical tips that I did not have the benefit of knowing the first time around.

First, it’s important to keep everything as cold as possible – that means freezing your cubes of meat and fat until they are slightly firm, and refrigerating the various parts of your grinder attachment.  The semi-frozen fat, when it hits the grinder blade, will be ground up and passed through to the bowl because it is too firm to melt, smear, and clog the disk.

Secondly, you must always maintain a fairly high ratio of fat to meat in your grind mixture.  If you think about this, we already take this into account when we buy ground beef from the market – we know that the 80/20 mixture makes the tastiest burgers because a full fifth of the weight of that package is fat.  The reason why my first attempt at grinding meat for burgers was such a miserable failure is because I had not ground enough fat into the mix.

Those two rules of thumb are really all that separates success from failure when it comes to making your own sausage.  Because of the abundance of sage in the garden this year, I decided that my inaugural attempt at sausagemaking would be the Sage and Red Wine Sausage recipe in Fine Cooking magazine.

All sausage recipes follow the same basic pattern.  You grind the meat, mix in your seasonings, and then allow the mixture to cure in your refrigerator for a little bit, so that the flavors will meld.  After at least an hour, or preferably the next day, you stuff the mixture into casings, and you’re done.  The whole process took far less time than I anticipated.

Following the recipe, I cut about four pounds of pork shoulder and one pound of fatback into small cubes, then froze them on a cookie sheet for about an hour.  While waiting for the meat to firm up, I picked about 30 sage leaves from the garden (which, by the way, didn’t make a dent in the plant at all) and chopped those finely, along with about four times the amount of garlic that the recipe requires.

The moment of truth came quickly – I assembled the grinder attachment, powered up the KitchenAid, and started feeding the chunks of meat and fat into the hopper.  Immediately, I was struck at how different this grinding session felt from my first one, how the fat extruded itself in neat spaghetti-like strands like a Play-Doh barber shop set.  Compared to the stop, start, stop process of my first grinding attempt, this time everything went smoothly, and within fifteen minutes all of the meat and fat had been ground.  I sifted my fingers through the pile a bit to evenly distribute the fat, but had to switch to a spoon when my fingers grew too cold.  I tossed in the sage, garlic, some salt and pepper, then added the 1/2 cup of red wine from a previously-opened bottle that we keep on the kitchen counter.  A small test patty was incredibly flavorful, so I was hopeful for a good outcome.

Having overcome my fear of grinding, I then faced a new moment of truth when it came time to place the sausage into casings.  I assembled the sausage stuffer (a small conical tube with a silly price of $9) onto the KitchenAid, then fumbled around with a sausage casing, trying not to let the slippery string tumble down into the garbage disposal.  Eventually, I was able to wrestle an open end of the casing onto the stuffer attachment, working the rest of it onto the cone in an accordian-like bunch, with about five inches left to hang.  I tied a knot into the free end, retrieved the sausage mix from the refrigerator, and set to work.

It’s important to work as quickly as you can when stuffing sausage, because the risk of bacterial contamination increases as your sausage mix gets warmer.  I used a rubber spatula to load the hopper with sausage, then a food pusher to shove it down into the grinder, maintaining one hand on the feeder cone to regulate the casing as it filled.  There’s no getting around the fact that this step can become extremely messy, so it’s a good idea to line the area underneath your KitchenAid with foil or parchment.  By tightening and loosening my grip on the casing, I could control the thickness of the end product.  Occasionally, I would have to stop and reload the hopper, or take a toothpick to burst the pockets of air that would become trapped in the casing.  When I was done, I twisted the sausage into links, managing to only break two because I twisted one way when I should have twisted the other.

Ultimately, this recipe produced nearly four feet of sausage at a cost of $7 for the casings (enough for several batches, though), $8 for the pork shoulder, and about $4 for the fatback.  Presuming you store the remainder of the casings for future use, each subsequent batch of sausage would run around $12, which is an incredible savings over the typical $5 per pound that most markets charge for premade sausages.  As an added bonus, the sausages freeze extremely well, making for even more options when you need quick dinner ideas.

I built my first garden box two years ago, which coincided with the onset of the first summer in our new home. Having settled in September, there was little that we could do with the property save for putting down a thin layer of mushroom soil and reseeding with better-than-contractor quality grass seed. When the warm weather finally returned, I was itching to test my newfound freedom to plant, grow, and harvest to my heart’s desire.

There was only one small problem – I had never tried my hand at gardening before. Having grown up in the inner city, where the only grass in sight was either contained in a small park, or growing between cracks in the sidewalk, I never had the opportunity to put spade to soil when I was young. When we were young, poor, married, and renting, I once planted one of those hydroponic basil plants from the grocery store in a pot on our front porch – and, to my surprise, it grew as high as my hip, bestowing upon us a wealth of pesto that summer. That gave me the reassurance that yes, I could grow things successfully, if only I had the space and resources.

So, when it came time for us to become older, slightly less poor, married homeowners, it was an imperative that I at least try my hand at gardening. I didn’t want to rip up large tracts of our backyard, though, which is already quite modest. Then, one day, I came across a copy of the book Square Foot Gardening, and it showed me the light.

Square Foot Gardening is a great solution when space is at a premium. Using inexpensive materials, you build a box, fill it with soil, then plant a different crop in each square foot. The first year I did this, I learned quite a few useful lessons about seed spacing, soil amendments, pest management, and growth rates. The thyme, sage, and chives that we planted two years ago have survived through two winters – so much so that the sage plant, once a resident of a single square foot of territory, now has grown to tower over five neighboring square feet. The chives, well-behaved at the beginning of spring, now bend under their own weight. These crops are performing too well for me to consider the risk of moving them, so this year I decided to build a second square foot garden, which, as a side benefit, gives me the opportunity to document the details here.

Ingredients

4 planks of cheap wood, 4 feet long
Screws
Weed blanket

Helpful: A drill

2 big bags of organic garden soil
1 bag of manure/humus (not hummus)
1 bale/bag of sphaghum peat moss
Maybe some more soil

I’ll begin with the raw materials. I started with four planks of wood, bought from the local big box hardware chain, which will run you about $5 per piece (you don’t need to get the good stuff). I chose 4 foot long pieces, which will yield a 16 square foot garden. Since I couldn’t remember where I put the screws that I had used two years ago, I had to pick up a box of deck screws for $7. The third and last piece of this puzzle is a weed blanket, which is a roll of dark fabric which will cost $15 to $25 depending on how much you buy.

Using three screws per corner, and preferably with the aid of a power drill fitted with a Phillips head screwdriver bit, join the four planks of wood together to form a square.

Take your square out to the site of your future garden (or, if it’s a nice day, just do your screwing, um, outside). Cut enough weed fabric to act as a “floor” for your square foot garden, and place the wooden frame over it. Alternatively, you can also put the frame down first, then tuck the weed blanket under the edges and corners. It’s okay if you need to cut more squares and overlap them. The purpose of the weed blanket is to serve as a barrier between your good soil and crops and the various grasses and weeds that are presently growing in your yard.

Now comes the fun part, adding the soil. Since the square foot garden is going to become a source of food, you want to select the best quality soil that’s available. I chose organic soil as my primary component, then added a bag of manure and a bag of sphagnum peat moss. The organic soil will serve as a home for your seeds and plants, but the manure will feed, fertilize and provide essential nitrogen to your growing plantlings, and the moss will help to retain moisture in your new garden so your fragile plants don’t dry out if you get a heat wave in the early days of your garden.

Empty all of the bags into your square foot garden frame, and use either your gloved hands or a spade to mix and fold until everything is evenly distributed. If you’re not planting or seeding immediately, this would be a good time to take a hose and spray down the box until the soil is saturated. If you’re a stickler for perfection, you can drill screws into your wooden box at one-foot intervals and tie twine or kitchen string to delineate each square foot plot.

Now comes the really fun part. Go to the nursery, buy some seeds and herb plants, and get down with your bad garden box building self. Take note of what you are planting – vegetables that need a lot of growing space, such as zucchini, won’t do well in a box environment. Pay close attention to seed spacing – you want to plant one (at most, two) seeds every inch in your chosen square foot plot. For my first square foot garden, I planted carrots, and did not heed the “one seed per hole” rule, and ended up with spindly carrots that looked like little orange mechanical pencil leads.

If this is your first garden box, here are some helpful hints. Plant things that you know that you’re going to welcome and use in the kitchen – so thyme, sage, basil, oregano, and rosemary are good “universal” herbs, and then branch out by choosing some seeds or plants that you’d like to try. Definitely include leafy greens, such as lettuce and spinach, which offer a sustainable crop of salad ingredients throughout the summer. Generally, it’s better just to buy herb plants at a nursery or garden center and replant them, since they’ve gotten a head start on growing in a greenhouse for a few weeks. The basil, especially, will be a source of pride for your green thumb, since the warm weather makes new growth on basil plants an almost daily occurrence.

And lastly, don’t ever, ever plant mint in your garden. Even though I thought I had pulled every inch of mint root from my first box, I’m still finding it cropping up in the strangest places, and nowhere near where I had initially planted it.

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It was the first truly nice evening of spring.  A two-day heat wave gave way to a dusk that was tinged with the smell of cut grass, the rhythmic chirps of insects awakening to their own dawn, and the longing of everyone who, bone-tired of a winter chill that had long overstayed its welcome, just wanted to sit outside with a cold drink and a nice meal.  As it so happens, that’s exactly what we found at the Four Dogs Tavern in West Chester.

There’s some history behind the stone walls and heavy wooden floors of this place.  Two centuries ago, The Four Dogs Tavern was a stable, an accompaniment to the neighboring stone edifice that is now known as the Marshalton Inn.  A few days earlier, we had made an attempt to come to the Four Dogs Tavern for dinner and drinks with our neighbors, but the weekend crowds had packed the establishment so thoroughly, it was impossible to even find a hostess to find out about the wait.  We left, frustrated, only to fall prey to a lackluster dinner at a nearby bar that, in hindsight, should have never even been considered as a second, third, or even fourth option.

Despite the initial impression, we made a second effort to hit Four Dogs a few days later.  Like a lot of things in life, it turns out that timing is key – having gotten there at around 5:15, we were seated immediately in the outdoor patio area.  By 6:00, though, a line of hungry patrons had started to form around the periphery of the patio, with various sets of eyes darting to and fro, looking for any signal of a dessert order, or a request for the check.  There would be no such satisfaction, though, at least not from our table – given the weather, the beer, and the excellent food, our early bird status had given us free license to linger and savor each moment.

We started with an order of the calamari, served on a long serving platter, crusted with parmesan, and dotted with remoulade and parsley pistou.  Far from being overwhelmingly chewy, a sure sign of poor quality pre-frozen ingredients, each of the tender rings was delicate and tender, lightly batter-coated and flash-fried until just barely done.  Despite the wispiness of the coating, the richness of the remoulade made for a deceptively heavy dish, at least when apportioned between two people.  Overall, the calamari is a pleasant departure from the traditional heavily breaded stalwart tubes that one always sees served with a cup of marinara.

What really made the meal, though, was the burger.  Described quite simply on the menu as an “8oz Black Angus Burger with Fries”, its unassuming title fails to convey the absolute perfection of what arrived at the table that evening. A pillowy bun, wrapped lovingly around a thick patty that was prepared precisely to order (an occurrence so rare in other establishments that I’m actually surprised when someone gets it right), with a burst of sizzling hot juices that run down your wrist on your first mouthful, and the crusty char that is characteristic of the best tavern burgers around.  This is why I would be a miserable failure of a vegetarian.  Some cultures worship cows as sacred beings; I worship cows because they are delicious.  Is this the best burger in Chester County?  It may very well be.

The fries are worth a mention, for the sole reason that they reminded me of the fries that they used to serve at Veterans Stadium – crisp, thin, and not at all greasy, and not at all like what is served today at Citizens Bank Park.

The quality of this meal went a long way towards convincing me that, one day soon, we need to book a reservation at the Marshalton Inn for dinner.  If the kitchen can be so artful in its execution of a simple grilled burger and fries, I’m intrigued by the possibilities presented by the higher end menu items that are served across the parking lot.  But, before that day comes, I suspect that I’ll be having quite a few more burgers at the Four Dogs Tavern.

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There’s something quite primal about cooking over fire – tossing something raw over smoldering coals, hearing the fat sizzle as it melts and drips into the flames, the smell of wood and meat and smoke comingling briefly before being carried off by the breeze of a slightly chilly spring evening.  Three years ago, one of the deciding factors in our electing to purchase our first home was our leasing company’s ludicrous prohibition on outdoor grilling – those were dark years, and I swore to never go that long without grilling ever again.

I now have my own deck, and on it sits a steel monstrosity forged in the very bowels of Amish country, three hundred pounds of black metal that serves as my mechanism for transforming meats into meals.  My name has become a grilling word.

I used to think that everyone knew how to grill, but now I’ve come to reconsider my presumption after having witnessed the embarrassingly cringe-worthy performance of someone who was unfamiliar with charcoal and afraid of fire.  I’ve never seen a situation where more food ended up under the grate, withering away on the coals, than on the grate where it belonged.

So, with that, I’m presenting a short primer on how to grill chicken -  specifically, chicken thighs.  For newcomers to the thrills of outdoor cooking, chicken thighs are fairly forgiving, because their uniform size and shape, combined with the amount of fat that is laden throughout the meat, means that there is a very low likelihood of ruining dinner.  And with the long Memorial Day weekend coming up, there’s a good chance that more than a few of you will be grilling for a crowd.

When you’re shopping for chicken thighs, try to select pieces of poultry that are roughly the same size, to ensure that they will all cook at the same rate.  When you get them home, rinse each piece under cool running water, then pat dry with a paper towel, season with salt and pepper, and transfer to a plate for transport to the grill.  Pick up a nice bottle of barbecue sauce, one that’s hopefully not too sweet and not packed with corn syrup, or make your own.

About an hour and a half before you plan on eating, start your coals, preferably in a chimney starter (which allows for the preparation of coals without the chemicals of a liquid starter – hover over the link for a picture).  I presume you are cooking with charcoal – if you aren’t, I can offer no guidance, since I’ve never used propane.  Once the coals have turned ashen, about 20 minutes, spread them in your grill, mounding slightly on one side, and set your grate into place.

Now comes the part of grilling that’s filled with fun and danger.  Using tongs, place your chicken thighs, skin down, on the grate over the higher portion of the charcoal mound.  Squeal with delight as the fat from the chicken skin drips into the fire, causing massive flareups!  Don’t panic – just take your tongs and move the chicken pieces that are over the flareups to the side of the grill that contains fewer pieces of charcoal, and wait for the flames to die down.  Every so often, move the chicken pieces around and flip them over – your goal is to achieve a nice char on both sides of each thigh.  Treat it like a big game – the fire wants to eat your chicken, and you have to play keep-away.

Once all of your chicken is browned, with a nice, crisp skin, move the thighs to the cooler part of the grill (skin up) and close the grill by setting the cover on it.  Open the vents slightly to let air through.  During this time, the grill will act as an oven, roasting each chicken thigh to doneness.  Since the thighs are dark meat, they will remain moist even if left in the grill for a few minutes longer than needed.

You’ll notice that I haven’t yet called for barbecue sauce.  A lot of novice grillers make the mistake of putting their barbecue sauce on their chicken/ribs/whatever too early, which only serves to insulate the chicken from browning properly.  It also guarantees that the high heat of grilling burns the sugars in the sauce, resulting in a carbonized, blackened mess.

After about 35 minutes, pour some barbecue sauce into a small bowl and equip yourself with either a large spoon or, preferably, a basting brush.  Take the lid off of the grill, flip each chicken thigh over, and splash a dollop of sauce on each piece, using either the spoon or brush to coat each chicken thigh evenly with sauce.  Flip each thigh over, so that the skin faces up, and repeat.  Replace the cover, cook for 10 to 15 minutes more, then serve.