Friday, September 5, 2008

Where Does the New Times Find These Losers????

http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/shortorder/2008/09/first_bites_danny_brody.php

In case you were wondering why this link is broken, the New Times removed the post, from both its Broward and Miami versions. I will only say that I am not in the newspaper publishing business, so I'm not sure why they would request that I submit a piece to them, publish it, and then remove it less than a day later (a coupla days later for the Broward edition-although it was subsequently reinstated http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/shortorder/2008/09/first_bites_danny_brody/133702/). For those of you who feel that I probably wrote some crazy, incendiary post, and got pulled for some fiery diatribe, here is the post in full. Incidentally, this was a freebie.


"Notorious blogger and culinary gadfly "Miami Danny" may strike fear and loathing into the hearts of local restaurant critics, but he never shrinks from jumping into the foodish fray -- pick a topic, he has an opinion. Here he shares his first food memory with Short Order:


My mother was a working mom, so often it would fall to my brothers and me to pick up our package from the butcher. “Pound-and-a-half of Kosher-made chop meat, please. For Mrs. Brody.” Our mother's instructions were always to tell either Sam or Mr. Katz, our butchers, the same thing. Even though we were pretty steady customers, almost daily, in fact. You couldn't get Kosher meat at the supermarket like you can today, and apparently my mom thought that our butchers would never remember who we were from day to day, or what we ordered. 'Chop meat' was ground beef, although I didn't start calling it that until I went away to college in Buffalo, NY, and no one seemed to know what 'chop meat' was. You learn fast that your East Coast big city ethnic charm can only go so far in the face of an exasperated 300-pound Polish butcher from Lackawanna.


The 'chop meat' was usually rolled into meatballs, which my mother would start doing as soon as she got her coat off. After hacking off a glob of margarine (does anyone still use margarine?), some chopped up pieces of carrot stick and an onion-half would go into the ancient, bent, 'meatball' pot. I say 'stick' because I never actually saw more than one carrot, or half-an-onion, at a time, in our jam-packed but somehow never-anything-to-eat-in-it refrigerator. Where did they come from? Was my mother actually buying carrots one stick at a time? Follow the vegetables with a cup or so of water, then the meatballs, and cook for about 45 minutes. I guess you could call them 'potted' meatballs, and they preceded almost every dinner of my childhood. My mother was very proud of her spice mix, which included 'garlic salt' and paprika that had turned to dust sometime in the late fifties. But if you complimented her on her delicious meatballs (which you did, because you were polite and famished), and asked her why they tasted so good tonight, she would often get this proud and mischievous glint in her eye. “Really? Thank you, boys. And do you know what I added to them tonight to make them taste so good?” she would ask us, waiting a beat before answering our curious looks. “Absolutely nothing!”

Recipe to follow (just kidding)."


**Danny Brody, aka Miami Danny, is the author of "The Gilded Palace of Sin," a book of poems published in 2008. He is also the founder of DailyCocaine.com, PressChops.com, and poemaday.com. He writes 'The Art of Hunger' for MAP Magazine, and writes 'Under Deconstruction' and 'Culinary Cage Match' for Miami.com. Along with his wife, he is the former proprietor of Stop Miami, a notorious watering hole in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Waiter, there's a "culinary gadfly" in my soup!
Nice story.
- Frod