The Doctor's Saveur Turkey, oven-roasted
Thanksgiving is obviously my favorite holiday, and that of my friends, who dutifully heed the call of a nationally-sanctioned day of feasting. With all the fun that goes into sharing a great meal with friends and family, my East Coast friends have long been having annual Trial Thanksgivings as a precursor to the real deal. This year, some bay area friends decided to host a pre-Thanksgiving potluck before we all scattered away to our respective roosts for the Holiday. It promised to be a delicious extravaganza so I answered the cattle call and hopped on a Southwest flight for a traditional Thanksgiving with all the trimmings.
Season 6 of Top Chef hasn’t finished airing yet and I’m impatiently waiting for them to cast out the garnishes and get to the top 4 (Kevin, Jen, the Vs) so the show can really get started. Even though the champion has yet to be crowned, the cheftestants are already feeling the effects of fame and the fans that come with it. This is why AT and I found ourselves at the tail end of a receiving line worthy of a wedding reception last Friday at The Dining Room of the Langham Hotel in Pasadena. Except there was no wedding, no bride and groom, and we were standing in the midst of a busy kitchen trying to put out the last plates of the evening. At the head of the receiving line was a friendly and gracious Michael Voltaggio greeting a group of adoring Breeders.
Baeckeoffe
Normally, watching reality food shows doesn’t make me want to pick up the frying so much as it just makes me think about cooking. But when Hubert Keller waxed nostalgic about his favorite dish from his childhood in the Alsace region of France and prepared it for the finale of Top Chef Masters this summer, Les was compelled to action and I was drafted into service as her sous chef. Not only did Keller tempt us with the holy trinity of beef, pork, and lamb, he brought in the ultimate cool factor of sealing something with pastry dough, tugging at the heartstrings of everyone who had more than a passing attachment to Play-Doh in kindergarten.
With one flick of the TV remote, the Baeckeoffe was on.
I can’t quite pinpoint the exact moment when the gag reflex kicked in but I can trace my dislike of scallions as far back as fourth grade and the last time we had a dark brown carpet. And it was also the last time my parents forced me to eat scallions. Until the day they discovered lumps of desiccated scallions wedded to the twisted strands of carpet underneath the dining room table, I was always instructed to eat everything on my plate no matter how much it made me want to regurgitate the contents of my meal.
Scallions courtesy of nelag on flickr
Back then, the number one enemy was the soft, cloying, disgusting taste and texture of green onions that presented themselves in every dish at every meal. The unpleasantly squishy texture of the white bulb along with the off-putting taste induced an involuntary gag reflex that any bulimic would kill to have. When faced with a dish teeming with those things, I would either swallow the offenders whole to avoid acknowledging tasting or biting them, or I would surreptitiously dispose of them on the carpet below me.
I have lived most of my life in Orange County, the place made into a one-dimensional caricature by shows such as The OC and The Real Housewives. The real Orange County is a giant fondue of different peoples, languages, and cultures. It is also home to the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. You can’t drive through the city of Westminster without seeing retail signs in Vietnamese on every corner and the ubiquitous Pho restaurant gracing every strip mall, all evidence of a thriving immigrant population in an area known as Little Saigon.
But the Vietnamese presence wasn’t always so visible. When I first became acquainted with Vietnamese food twenty years ago, Bolsa Avenue (a main thoroughfare in Westminster) only had a smattering of Vietnamese stores and the main grocery stores were the 99 Ranch Market and the now closed Mah Wah Supermarket, both of which catered to a mainly Chinese clientele, including my family. We used to shop there for our groceries because Bolsa Avenue was closer than Los Angeles, and Irvine was still dotted with orange trees. Back then, foods such as pho and banh mi were not yet part of the common vernacular.
I just finished feeding each of my eight employees (or my “minions” as I like to call them) a generic looking sandwich so they can get back to work slinging out plates of spaghetti carbonara and pumpkin soup to the customers streaming into my restaurant. I was loathe to fork over $200 dollars for each measly sandwich but that’s the price I have to pay to keep my restaurant humming. As I take a break from running the joint to read up on the latest MLB playoff news, I get an SMS from Les.
New Baby here!! Yay!! Trade water with me.
