OK so this is the second old post I am re-posting. Yeah I’m a lazy ass bum, But, but but but, I feel morally obligated to disseminate some at least semi- authentic kimchi info across the tubes upon hearing of Bette Midler’s recently becoming a kimchi ambassador of sorts. A friend told me she saw Ms. Midler on the Today Show demonstrating how to make something she claimed was kimchi. It apparently involved stacked cabbage leaves with some seasoning in between. Mysteriously, the google cannot seem to locate any evidence of this incident. Anyway here’s a video of Better Midler preaching the kimchi gospel to Kelly Ripa. Pretty surreal shit, man:

Whoa. So anyway, I guess I can’t really complain about the motherland’s greatest gift to the world getting some press, but I dunno, it all just seems very, very wrong. Original post follows.

So I finally broke down and wrote a Citypaper piece about kimchi. It’s tantamount to, I dunno, someone from Iowa writing about corn. Actually that’s a terrible analogy, point is it just seems a bit cliche, but I know that’s irrational. In any case, in my defense it was under duress and I believe it to be interesting to Korea-philes if nothing else. Anyway the full text can be found here. Below are some hopefully helpful pics.

Korean cucumbers are a bit more irregularly shaped than hydroponic, pcikling, or slicer cukes, and also have small bumps and a yellowish cast. They can be found at most any Asian market, and are generally around $2/lb:

Cut into 2″ lengths – make sure to trim the ends, apparently there is an enzyme in the flower bud end that causes the cucumber to become mushy, so trim both to be safe:

Carefully bisect the sections lengthwise, leaving about a quarter inch intact – use the standard bagel slicing method:

Rotate and repeat so that you end up with a mostly quartered section:

Place the partially quartered sections into a bowl and salt thoroughly, making sure to salt the cut flesh. Allow to sit for at least two hours (sorry no pic). In the meantime, combine the seasonings to form a fairly thick paste:

After a couple of hours of salting, the sections should be a bit more pliable. Brush off any excess salt (do not rinse!) and discard any collected liquids. With a teaspoon, fill the sections generously with the seasoning paste:

You should end up with sections that look like this:

Pack as tightly as you can in the closest fitting containter you can find:

Rinse the bowl you used to mix the paste with a bit of fresh water, perhaps a 1/4 cup. This will be used to submerge the kimchi, and should taste quite salty – add salt if necessary:

Cover cucumber sections with brine and cover with plastic wrap, making sure they are packed down well. Use a weight (e.g. soup can, brick) if necessary:

Leave out overnight at room temperature and taste – if the kimchi still tastes too fresh, give it another few hours, up to 24 total. Then refrigerate. Final product:

Alternative preparation – my mom tells me that the following is actually the more proper way to make this kimchi. It consists merely of a diffierent cutting technique. The above semi-quartering method is more convenient and quicker, while the method below yields more attractive results. Instead of quartering the sections, make a deep score, about a third of the way through. Repeat 4-5 times evenly spaced around each section:

After salting, fill the scores with spicy paste and proceed as directed above. Final product:

Recipe:
Sue Hong’s Easy Oh-Ee Soh-Beh-Gee (Cucumber Kimchi)

Ingredients:

6-8 medium Korean cucumbers* OR
8-10 Kirby or pickling cucumbers OR
3-4 seedless hydroponic cucumbers
1/2 cup Korean red pepper powder
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup finely chopped scallion or chives
1/4 cup coarse sea salt, or slightly less to taste (table or kosher salt will yield mushier kimchi)
2 tbsp fish sauce (Three Crabs brand is very good)
1 tsp sugar

Cut the tips off both ends of cucumbers (this will ensure crunchiness), then cut into 2-3 inch segments

Quarter the segment lengthwise, cutting almost but not all the way through, leaving four spears attached at one end

In a bowl, salt the pieces thoroughly with sea salt, and allow to rest for 2 hours

In another bowl, combine all other ingredients and enough salt to make the mixture quite salty, but overpoweringly so; add just enough water to make a thick paste

After the salted cucumber has rested, wipe off any remaining salt and discard any collected liquid

For each segment, using a teaspoon, generously smear the spicy paste in between the cucumber spears (should still be attached, but a bit more flexible now)

Pack tightly in a glass or stainless steel container, vertically if possible

Add fresh water to the bowl that contained the spice paste, swirl and rinse any remaining paste into the water, and pour over cucumbers, adding only enough to barely cover

Cover the container and allow to rest at room temperature overnight or about 8 hours, then taste for sharpness and acidity; if desired, leave out for a total of up to 12 hours before refrigerating for up to a week

*Note: Do not use the smooth, dark green “slicer” cucumbers, as their skin is too thick and seeds too hard. All ingredients listed above can be found at Hanareum or Lotte Asian supermarkets, both on Rte. 40

-Henry Hong

Prep time: 10 min
Cook Time: 25 min

Ingredients
diced onion
diced carrot
diced zucchini
green beans, trimmed and cut into thirds
small head or 1/2 med. head of Savoy cabbage, sliced
Parmigiano Reggiano rinds
1 can of cannelini or other white beans
1 can of diced tomatoes
good olive oil
stock, or in a pinch just water
salt
pepper

Directions
Prep: Make sure all ingredients are chopped and laid out before commencing. Vegetables should be diced to a fairly large size. Have extra stock or water on hand to add to the pot as you add more vegetables. Sweetie.

1. Heat a pot to medium-low, add some oil, then the onions and a little salt, and stir for about 1 minute. The onions should not brown.

2. Then add the carrot, salt and stir for another minute, and add the cabbage. Cook and stir for another minute.

3. Add stock or water and parm rinds and simmer on low for about 10 minutes, then add green beans and zucchini and simmer for another 5 minutes.

4. Add the canned beans and tomatoes, and adjust salt and pepper to taste. Simmer a few minutes more until the soup is heated through and boom! You is done.

Tips

-Also, some grated parmigiano reggiano while cooking and/or as a garnish is excellent, as is a drizzle of olive oil for richness and some parsley or chopped spinach for color

- This is one of those soups that is even better the next day

Kimchi, greens, broth, rice (duh), and yes, those lightly browned squares of pinkish processed pressed pork are indeed Spam. What is it with Asians and Spam? One day I’ll get to the bottom of that mysterious connection.

Had a craving for Singapore-style curry noodles today. There’s a carry out around the corner that makes a passable one, but the place is filthy, and then there’s PF Chang’s down the street, which would be like going to Taco Bell to get mole poblano. Solution: spur of the moment special today at Suzie’s Soba downtown – rice noodles, my personal blend curry powder, snow peas, bean sprouts, and well bunch of other stuff(please see pic below). If you’re downtown stop in, 7 N. Calvert St. It’s still experimental, so if you don’t like it I’ll…I dunno do some push-ups as penance.

“Easy as pie”. Ha. Whoever coined that little chestnut is a filthy liar. Anyone who’s actually tried their luck at homemade pie has almost certainly had their ass handed to them, at least the first several times.

The problem is the crust of course, because the flaky style of pastry we are accustomed to in the US is pretty tricky to master. There’re all sorts of tricks involving type of flour, type of fat, and of course keeping everything cold. I learned a relatively surefire way from an old acquaintance years ago, she being a sublimely rare combination that is award-winning pie maker (verified, I saw the ribbons) plus exotic dancer (umm, also verified). And her pie of choice, and the only kind she ever baked me – peach. Of course.

So when I came into a small bounty of the most beautiful white peaches I’ve had all year, I ate myself sick and still had a 1/2 dozen sitting around on the verge of going bad. Since cooking=life extension, first thought was pie. But 6 peaches is enough for about A pie, and making piecrust dough is a major time investment, and totally not worth it unless you make like 20 crusts. So I turned to pie’s more approachable, but just as fun (if slightly less attractive) cousin, cobbler. How this dish, which is simply fruit topped with a rudimentary pastry, is related to the construction of shoes, I do not know. And I’ve already hit my tangent limit, so recipe, if you can call it that, right now!

Ingredients

6 peaches

at least 1/2 stick of butter

flour, sugar (brown, white doesn’t matter), salt, baking powder

lemon juice and/or zest if you have it

Directions

Preheat oven to 450

Peel the peaches. The easiest way is to blanch them, slitting the skin all the way around first:

You can sorta see the slit in the above pic, but below you’ll see that after about 20 seconds of blanching, the skins split and slip off easily. Roll em around a bit to make sure they’re blanched on all sides. This time I didn’t cut all the way through when slitting the skin, but i don’t see a problem cutting down to the pit initially – it may actually save a step later, but the risk is having the peaches fall open in the water, and losing precious peachy fluids.

Rule 34?:

After the skins are of, just split and slice, saving the pits. The peaches look a little tired here, because I had to tend to customers in the middle of the process. Gotta make that money son:

Put the slices in a bowl, add sugar, lemon juice/peel, and salt to taste, and about 2 tsps of cornstarch, and gently toss. Bang, filling done, no need to precook:

OK quick detour…so if you crack open a peach pit, you get a nut that is basically an almond. The perfume of these things is amazing – like super clean, natural amaretto – but they are extremely bitter:

They’re not great for eating, but I love the scent, so I usually crush the nuts, simmer them, and add the strained liquid to the filling. I used water this time, but I’m thinking more of the volatile compounds could be dissolved in alcohol. Next the pastry dough. Add about 1/2 cup of flour and sugar, 1/2 stick of cold butter (I like to cut it into smallish chunks first), about a teaspoon of baking powder, and some salt into a bowl:

Now combine the ingredients, using your fingers to pinch and pull the butter into small, powder coated chunklets. They don’t have to be uniform, just try not to have a huge butter pieces:

We now come to a fork in the road. Some people stop here and use the current mixture as a topping. But in my view, this is more of a streusel than pastry. I like to moisten it with either beaten egg or, as in this case, just some water. Mix very gently until it’s the consistency of loose oatmeal. Add the fruit to a buttered dish, then pour the batter over the fruit:

Bake for 10-15 minutes or until nicely browned. Total prep and cook time is less than 30 minutes and the…how YOU doin!?

**NOTE**  this is an old post, but I finally got a hold of the archived mp3 for the Midday show I mention below.  Enjoy!

My upcoming appearance on Midday with Dan Rodricks Show has had a kinda surprising side effect. After kicking around some ideas with the producer, I realized that over at least the past several years, approaching a decade even, I haven’t cooked any Korean barbeque. Like, AT ALL. Whiskey tango foxtrot.

It’s not that I haven’t mixed up the grilling a bit, what with stuff like pizza and such, and after all that’s what Korean, and for that matter pretty much any other country’s barbeque is – grilled. So I’m gonna chalk it up to my fascination, nay obsession, with American style barbeque over the past several years. And American style is of course, smoked, or at least cooked slowly over low and/or indirect heat. And before you terminology zealots go grabbing ownership of the word (and admittedly, I was one of you not so long ago), please read this. Etymologically speaking, the word “barbeque” does in fact describe a method of cooking that is closer to what we today consider grilling. Moving on.

Korean barbeque comes in a few different forms – always meat, almost never seafood, sweet, spicy, and even unmarinated. At a restaurant you’d typically find sliced beef, beef short ribs, pork, pork belly, and occasionally chicken, thought it’s not really traditional. The beef will most likely be marinated in a sweetish manner, while the pork and chicken will probably be spicy, courtesy goh choo jahng, or spicy Korean miso. The meat is presented raw, cut into bite-sized pieces. Diners then go about cooking it on a tabletop gas grill or charcoal brazier, and sometimes, sadly, on a lil’ butane-powered hibachi stove. Which, as one might expect, does a crappy job.

Accompanying the meat will be an array of condiments, generally including sliced raw garlic, sliced hot peppers, slivered scallion, and some dwen jahng (Korean miso). Big leaves of usually red or green leaf lettuce are served as eating implements really – you tear off a hand-sized piece, stuff in it some meat, rice, and whatever condiments you like (all benching, or side dishes, on the table are fair game, btw), wrap it up into a package in eat it in one bite. Yes, one bite people. It’s a simple matter of practicality, since a half bitten-into ssam, as they’re called, will almost certainly lose structural integrity and spill its contents all over the place. Thus one quickly learns that managing the size of one’s ssam is of critical importance. My preferred packet consists of rice, meat, a shmear of dwen jahng, scallion, and some kimchi.

Some of your nicer places will include a bowl or dwen jahng jigae, or offer a special deal if you add a bowl of neng myun to your order of meat. Apparently everything I described above is not sufficent to comprise a proper meal for us Koreans. Also, most barbeque dishes are available at most Korean restaurants, even if they don’t specialize in barbeque and thus lack tabletop cooking equipment. The meat’ll just come out already cooked, but usually not grilled. Anyway, that’s a typical restaurant experience.

At home…well my family at least never ate this stuff at home. Meat is expensive, and grilling wasn’t widespread among Koreans at the time, making this sort of cooking pretty difficult. It was purely a special occasion food, indeed korean barbeque is indelibly associated with church picnics in my brain. And on such occasions there was rarely any of the trimmings you’d find when eating out, at best some lettuce for wrapping, but otherwise you’d be more than content with a paper plate of meat, rice and kimchee. Usually the meat would be either bulgogi or kalbi, cut “L.A. style”, which is to say rather thinly sliced across three short ribs to produce an oblong piece with three ovals of bone at the bottom. It’s actually a cut I’ve never seen anywhere other than at a gathering of Koreans. The bones make for convenient handles, and the meat has good flavor but is usually not the tenderest of cuts, as this style is generally made from lesser grades of meat:

The thin slicing and cross-grain cut are meant to minimze the toughness, whereas proper gahl bee is made from good quality, well-marbled beef, and will usually be cut into squat chunks. But now of course, grills are way more ubiquitous (I think?) and we’re right in that all-too-brief money zone between rainy and oppressively hot, so on to the recipes:

Warning: All measurements are total guesses, as it is all done to taste. Significant adjustment may be required.

Beef marinade

1/4 cup        soy sauce
1/4 cup        hot water
1/4 cup         sugar
1 tsp        minced garlic
1 tsp        minced ginger
1/2 tsp        black pepper
1/2 tsp        sesame oil
1/4 cup         sliced onion
1/4 cup        slivered scallions

Good cuts for bool gog ghee: thinly sliced ribeye, thinly sliced chuckAdvice for gahl bee: Some supermarkets will have short ribs, but almost always with the bone in. Usually it’ll be a section of rib a few inches long. Cut the meat off the bone and into 3/4″ cubes. use the bone for stock, or grill and gnaw, then give it to your dog if he/she has been especially good. Asian supermarkets usually have packaged cuts specifically for gahl bee.

This marinade can also be used for chicken, or any meat for that matter

1. My aunt taught me this trick, and I’m convinced it makes a difference – in a small bowl, dissolve the sugar in the hot water first, then add all other ingredients and combine.

2. Pour over your beef, and massage thoroughly. I like to make sure to crush the onion and scallion a bit. Let stand refrigerated for at least an hour, and up to a day or two.

3. Grill.

Spicy marinade (good for pork or chicken)

2 tbsp        goh choo jahng
1/2 cup     hot water
1/4 cup        sugar
1 tsp        minced garlic
1 tsp        minced ginger
1 tsp        salt
1/2 tsp        sesame oil
1/4 cup     sliced onion
1/4 cup        sliverd scallions
some chopped hot peppers if you want it to be more spicy

Good cuts for pork: sliced loin, sliced belly, but it will be *very* fatty, and, well sliced any “chop” type cut really…. at a supermarket, if there is a butcher present, and you’re very nice, they will usually agree to slice a cut very thinly for you. Otherwise, buy a roast or thick chop and slice it yourself

Good cuts for chicken: sliced breast of course, but boneless thighs work very well in this marinade…after grilling, slice the thighs into bite sized pieces

1. Dissolve sugar in hot water, then stir in the goh choo jahng, then the remaining ingredients.
2. Massage into pork thoroughly, let stand for at least an hour.
3. Grill.

Condiments

-Leaf lettuce, any type that has tender, supple leaves to facilitate wrapping

-Dwen jahng and/or goh choo jahng for shmearing

-Rice, duh

-Scallions, slivered and tossed with a little sesame oil, soy, and red pepper

-Sliced raw garlic – yup raw garlic, it adds a sharp, almost spicy bite

-Kimchi, standard cabbage kimchi is best, but cucumber kimchi is good too

Glossary

I’m going to spell out the terms phonetically, to aid in pronunciation in case any of the 3 or 4 people who will read this ever decide to use it to order at a Korean restaurant. Sigh.

Protip: Korean is all syllables, and the syllables are short and abrupt, kinda like German maybe. Try not to elongate vowel sounds, particularly “oh” and “oo”, and keep them pure, sorta like a Minnesota accent, except much briefer (and thus less annoying – sorry Minnesotans!).

Bool go ghee – bool=fire and goh ghee=meat…this is probably the most popular barbeque dish, thinly sliced beef, usually ribeye but sometimes lesser cuts. It’s very user-friendly because of its fast cook time and tenderness. Protip: do not pronounce it “bool goh JEE”, because then it will sorta rhyme with the Korean word for vagina.

Gahl bee – Beef short ribs. They come in a few different forms, the default being in long-ish strips cut off the bone, usually tableside by the server. Then there is “joomoolook”, which are cut into cubes and I think may be slightly choicer in quality than regular gahl bee, and then there is the aforementioned L.A. style, which I don’t think is very common in restaurants. This cut takes a bit longer to cook, and is a bit more toothsome, but imo has the best flavor. I always get joomoolook gahl bee when I go out.

Jeh yook goo ee – Sliced pork that’s been marinated in gochujahng, slightly sweet but significantly spicy. I don’t think there’s a standard cut for this dish, I’ve had it made with very lean pork at some places, and with pretty fatty pork at others. Good for when you’ve been drinking, but word of warning, eating this before bed makes you have really weird dreams.

Sahm gyup sahl – Sliced pork belly. This is where bacon comes from, so expect the characteristic striations of fat and meat. This cut is often served unmarinated, and is good to eat WHILE drinking, since pork fat is thought to stave off drunkenness, and thus enable longer drinking sessions. Koreans know how to throw down man!

Dwen Jahng (Protip: barely pronounce the “w”) – fermented soybean paste… it’s kinda like miso, only stronger tasting and way stinkierGoh choo jahng – basically dwen jahng, except spicy, used as the base for soups, bibimbahp sauce, and as a condiment for barbeque…here’s a pic:

Dwen jahng jjee geh – a dwen jahng based soup usually containing squash, tofu, and sometimes meat

Goh choo jahng – Korean spicy miso paste, here’s a pic:

Mek joo ha na joo seh yo – “May I please have a beer”

Hello all, long time no, uh.. nothin. I’m sure I’ve used that exact phrase here before, but it has yet again been a too-long hiatus since my last post. Sorry! Anyway, today I spent another fun ass hour with my homey Dan Rodricks, a rare Tuesday appearance on the second hour of his show on WYPR. The subject was Thanksgiving dishes in general, but Dan was pretty taken by the dessert I brought along, essentially pumpkin pie, with my EZ crumb crust, and with acorn squash instead of pumpkin (in the above photo, it’s on the right, the more yellow one).

I’d experimented last year for citypaper with butternut, but it didn’t turn out so well. The important advantage of acorn over pumpkin is that it’s readily available year-round, and it seems to work better in sweet applications better than the more savory butternut. Indeed, I just made a batch of hobak jook (recipe will be posted shortly), which is really just squash puree, but in Korea it’s made with something called dan hobak (literal transalation: “sweet squash”). Anyway dan hobak looks almost exactly like acorn squash we find here, and though the Korean vegetable is naturally much sweeter and orange-er, acorn squash is an excellent stand-in with the help of some added sugar. So enough yappin, here’s the recipe, or you could also just go here for my more in-depth pumpkin pie recipe from last year’s citypaper article, except of course substitute acorn squash for pumpkin. Duh.

Food Nerd’s Acorn Squash Bars

(btw the name was Dan’s idea)

Ingredients:

2 acorn squash

2 eggs

1/2 can condensed milk

a bit of milk or water to moisten

1/2 tsp sweet paprika

1/4 tsp ground black cardamom

a few drops of orange essential oil

1/4 stick butter

maybe 10 gingersnaps (non-iced)

some chopped pecans

salt and sugar to taste

Directions

1. Halve the squash lengthwise and scoop out seeds, then halve again to form quarters

2. Roast on a sheet or shallow pan in a 375 degree oven for about 20 minutes or until squash is tender

3. While waiting, pulverize the gingersnaps into a pretty fine powder. Gingersnaps are really freakin durable, so you’ll need a tool, food processor is best but mortar and pestle or even strong paper bag and a mallet will work. Combine with pecans in a mixing bowl.

4. Grease a 9 x 9 baking dish (or if you’d rather call it pie, a 9″ pie plate) with the 1/4 stick of butter, then put butter into a small saucepan over low heat. When butter has melted, add paprika, cook for 15 seconds,  then add to gingersnap mixture.

5. Combine butter and gingersnap crumbs thoroughly, then press into baking dish or pie pan to form a crust.

6. When squash is done, remove to a bowl and allow to cool, covered. Leave the oven at 375.

7. While waiting for squash to cool, par-bake the crust – place baking dish in oven and cook for about 10 minutes or until you start to smell it, then remove and allow to cool.

8. When squash is cool, peel carefully with a sharp knife, and place in a food processor with eggs, condensed milk, cardomom, and orange oil. Begin pureeing, adding milk/water a tiny bit at a time, until it just begins to liquefy. Add sugar ad salt to taste, and continue to pure until smooth.

9. Pour mixture into the baking dish, wiggle and tap a bit to even out mixture, and place into the oven (should still be at 375). Cook for about 30 minutes, but start checking on it at 25 minutes. When a toothpick inserted into the center pulls out dry, it’s done.

Notes

-Pureeing the squash in a blender seems to whip in too much air and makes the pie too loose imo. If you don’t have a fodd processor, I guess you could mash it thoroughly by hand but I fear this will leave too many of the long fibers intact. Mortar and pestle might work too.

-You’ll notice I don’t use the usual pumpkin spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, nor do I even add vanilla. This is just me protesting against the overly spiced so called “pumpkin” flavored stuff they sell in stores. This way you really taste the sweet squashiness more. Either way I’m sure is good.

-You can also boil the squash, which is in fact faster, but it seems like roasting noticeably enhances flavor, what with the Maillard reactions and all.

A few weeks ago, I’d been running around craving pizza ALL FRIGGIN DAY, but the thought of an overloaded pie with an underdone crust disgusted me more than usual, enough to defeat my sloth even. Solution? Grill it up son! I started doing this last year, after grilling flat bread and using that as a crust. Pretty good, but not actual pizza, per se.Homemade pizza dough is just too much trouble for the payoff, except for those few souls who are absolutely committed to perfecting it. I eventually found that some pizza places are willing to sell you balls of their pizza dough, which makes the process a whole lot simpler. My go-to spot is Angelo’s in Hampden, where a large dough ball is $3.50 (they also make a very good [UPDATE: The quality of Angelo's cheeseteaks has taken a brutal nosedive! Dry meat and not a lot of it... So bad I thought it must have been anomolous just a few days ago, but conversations with other fans confirm that for now, Angelo's has officially fallen off, as the kids used to say], if not very Philly-esque, cheesesteak). [UPDATE: Frozen dough balls are less than 2 bucks, work just as well, and can be found at most area Italian delis and many plain old supermarkets]

This size ball is good for two large thin-crust pizzas, and the dough keeps incredibly well, more than a week no problem:

After starting your charcoal get the toppings ready – we used some dry salami, arugula, fresh mozzarella, smoked mushrooms, roasted pepper, and a can of chopped tomatoes:

To roast the pepper, place it directly on the coals, wait til the down side chars, and turn. I generally use hardwood, not briquettes for grilling, but this was spur of the moment. Was that a douchebaggy thing to say? :

While this is happening, get some smoke into the mushrooms and soften the onion [UPDATE: It's a much better idea to saute some moisture out of the onions and mushrooms first. This seems to help smoke absorption while mor importantly preventing excess moisture from making the crust soggy.]

Season up the greens and shrooms, I used oil, lemon juice, and salt:

When the toppings are ready, prepare the dough by cutting the ball in half, and gently stretching the dough over a cutting board 11/17:

Brush with olive oil and add and pepper:

Carefully transfer to your hot grill, oiled-side down, then salt, pepper and oil the up side. When bubbles appear, it’s time to flip:

Then add toppings:

Add a small chunk of wood and close the lid. [UPDATE: Protip- move the pizza off  of directheat after about 3 minutes. Then inspect the bottom and rotate underdone areas back onto direct heat as necessary, closing the lid between adustments] 8 minutes later, dinner time. Easy as pie, no? (Disclaimer: pie is NOT in fact, easy). Note to be more careful than when removing your pizza from the grill:

Our favorite (i.e. only) guest blogger Brian insisted on ranting publicly about the erstwhile genteel-sounding Mt. Vernon Flower Mart.  Frankly though, I’m not a fan simply because it occurs on weekdays, further choking traffic in mid-town where drivers tend to be even shittier than your run-of-the-mill Baltimore non-driving stupid motherf…but I digress. Enjoy.

It’s the time of year that every sensible city dweller dreads. Spring kicks off various festivals and glorified flea markets that bring hordes of slack-jawed county folks pouring into the city to wander aimlessly, endanger pedestrians, and look the other way as their filthy spawn gleefully trash some poor bastard’s sidewalk garden. The only good thing about these nuisance events? The food of course! There’s something special about being able to walk a block from your apartment and enjoy a gyro, a waffle cake, and a beer or two while standing on the sidelines and checking out the jailbait as they shamelessly flaunt themselves about.

Flower Mart, Mount Vernon’s first spring event, happened this weekend and I experienced something truly saddening. Each year the festival foods seem to get at least a dollar more expensive, that’s a given, but this year there was a noticeable decline in the quality of said treats.

Friday, the first day of the Flower Mart, I navigated my way through the crowd, lightly buzzed from a short happy hour. I remembered, possibly erroneously, that a friend recommended the pit beef sandwiches offered at this particular festival. The biggest food stand happened to be the first one I came across. Biddle Street Catering offered pit beef, pit turkey, hot dogs, and various other standards. The line was sizeable but moved quickly, and after few minutes I handed over $6.50 for a foil-wrapped pit beef sandwich that the lovely young lady working the stand retrieved from a buffet warming tray. I didn’t feel like hanging around and listening to a band of 40-somethings bang out dubious covers of Motown hits, so I took my prize home. Practically salivating, I unwrapped the sandwich and found this:

“I paid $6.50 for this?!?”

This sorry-ass squashed little thing seemed to look back at me and shrug, “Hey man, what did you expect?” Hesitantly, I lifted the bun and examined the supermarket lunchmeat-quality slices of roast beef that sat unevenly on the bun, unappetizingly grey in color. That was it. No onions, no horseradish sauce, nothing. With a sigh, I slapped some mayo on the sandwich and ate without joy.

Undaunted, or perhaps just plain stupidly, I headed out on Saturday for another stab at carnival food contentment. With chicken souvlaki on the brain, I made my way to the “Quesadilla Hut,” or at least I think that’s what it was called. When I got within eyeshot of the menu I balked: $8.00 for a chicken souvlaki? The hell with that. Still wary from the pit beef, and not wanting to get burned to the tune of eight bills for another failure, I changed my mind and ordered the old standby – a nice $5.00 Italian sausage with peppers and onions. The lady handed it over, in foil but partially unwrapped, and what I could see of the Italian sausage did not fill me with confidence. Things looked awfully skimpy in there. I was chased off once more by threatening rain clouds and a woman on stage with an acoustic guitar performing an extremely earnest version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” so I dodged the milling unwashed masses and went home. Safe in my kitchen, unwrapping the rest of the Italian sausage confirmed my fears.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!?”

The shriveled little sausage (there was one in there, I swear) didn’t even fill up the bun. I put some mustard on it and once again ate with a heavy heart.

Perhaps I managed to acquire the two sorriest excuses for food that the Flower Mart had to offer this weekend, but this seems to be the beginning of a disturbing trend. I assume that the vendors are pretty much the same from festival to festival. Intelligently commenting on the controversy of increasingly ridiculous food prices would require research that I don’t feel like doing right now, but I can say one thing: This lack of quality will not stand. If the vendors expect someone to blow upwards of twenty bucks for a meal as pathetic as the two I had the misfortune of “enjoying” at the Flower Mart, they have well and truly lost their minds. Time to step it up, folks. Artscape, I’m looking at you.