Hasen-what-the-f-ing-pfeffer?

You never know where you might pick up some culinary knowledge. While waiting for water to boil recently, I read an R.W. Apple Jr. essay aloud in the kitchen from The New York Times' Eat, Memory column. 

Me (reading): "...Or maybe my German-American grandmother, who had more talent than money, and her ha...sen....fffffff.....

Jamie (interrupting): Hasenpfeffer...It's rabbit.

Me: How did you know that?

Jamie (looking at me as if I'd just flown in from Mars): Bugs Bunny cartoons. 

And so here you have it -- a lesson in rabbit stew and the cuisine of Germany courtesy of Yosemite Sam and company. 

Find a real recipe for Hasenpfeffer from epicurious.com here. 

Tomato Art Fest

Okay so maybe it's not quite La Tomitina, but Tomato Art Fest in East Nashville is my favorite little party in the city. Yep, I'm still a homer for my 'hood despite stolen lawn mowers and muggings.

Check out the work of Shelia B., a featured artist at the festival. Meanwhile, here's a poster from the old-fashioned letterpressers Hatch Show Print.

My friend Jaime won the Bloody Mary competition. She wouldn't divulge her recipe (and I totally don't blame her), but I suspect lime, cilantro and cucumber were involved?

She could have also won the cutest-thing-ever-in-an-apron-contest had there been one.

The 3 Crow Bar also served Bloody Mary's and clearly went all out on their sign.

Barman and guitar picker Jacob Jones made the 3 Crow version as follows:

Ice
About 1/2 a glass of vodka (no joke)
About 1/2 a glass of mix
Scoop of horseradish
Sprinkle of Tabasco
Dash of pepper

Not bad. And I don't really like Bloody Mary's.

Manning the booth.

In my personal celebration of the tomato, I made some bruschetta at home.

It’s a simple version, but here goes…
6 to 8 tomatoes, roughly chopped
about a tablespoon of olive oil
a couple healthy splashes of balsamic vinegar
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
a handful or so of chopped fresh basil
salt and pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients. Let stand or chill for an hour or so to marry flavors.

I served it over slices of Bohemian Three Seed bread from Twin Forks Farm in Primm Springs. The Sancerre went well with acidity of the tomatoes.

Dinner music: A couple of (many) fine East Nashville representatives...K.S. Rhoads and Jacob Jones.

Take the toothpaste, leave the cannoli

Overheard on the plane from Houston to Nashville while waiting to push back from the gate...A mom and her daughter are checking out the safety instruction card.

Little girl: What's that?

Mom: That's an oxygen mask. 

Little girl: What's an oxygen mask?

Mom: Well, sometimes the plane doesn't have any oxygen and the oxygen mask will pop out of the ceiling and you have to breathe into it. 

(pause)

Little girl: Mommy, what does this say? 

Mom: That's a bracing position...And that says when you have an emergency you can't take your bag -- you have to get off as fast as possible. 

Little girl: Mommy, what about my toothpaste?

Mom: Well, that's just in an emergency situation.

Snacks on a Plane

While waiting for our connection at Starbucks in the Houston airport, I eavesdropped on a man who had a handlebar mustache and a baggage handler's uniform stretched over his gut. 

"I heard if Continental took two peanuts out of every bag it'd save 'em $200,000," he announced to a table of men in fluorescent orange vests. 

Dude. I'm so sure. 

What I do know is that those little bags of honey roasted peanuts have corn in them! Yep, I checked the ingredient list and found maltodextrin, the weird sci-fi binding starch made with the Midwest's finest. 

The trouble is I'm finally getting around to reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I just finished the section where Pollan talks about how everyone in the United States is basically a big fat glob of high fructose corn syrup-covered corn balls. 

Now, I see corn everywhere. 

A woman next to me was having a McDonald's breakfast. I marveled at the corn! Corn-fed pork in strips of bacon, pancakes made with corn and drenched in corn syrup. I could go on about how this is bad for our bodies, the environment, the farmers, the economy, the animals etc., but you should really just read Pollan's version if you haven't already. 

Welcome back to America...Care for some corn?

McDonald's quality statement: 

Listening to: Hurricane by Mindy Smith b/c riding through clouds sometimes calls for melancholy songs.

Say hello to my little friend

Does this look like a drug mule to you? 

We casually mentioned to our server at the hotel one morning, that we hoped to find some good Dulce de Leche to take back to the States. The next day, she turned up at our table with a container. We tried to pay her, but she flatly refused. "I brought it from home. I have lots because I am a very fat girl," she said patting her flat-as-a-tortilla, size 0, Argentinean belly. 

We gushed with thanks, wrapped it in plastic, and stuck into a corner of our luggage for smuggling past U.S. customs. 

A day later when we were standing in the Buenos Aires airport, we noticed a line forming at a station where travelers were paying to have their luggage shrink-wrapped. We had already checked our bags -- shrink-wrap-free. 

"Oh that's just so people can't get into your bags to steal, say, an iPod," said the Continental attendant. 

"Or put anything IN your bags...like drugs," Jamie whispered to me as we walked away. But then his face went pale. "Maybe we should have done that."

(I wasn't buying it...He pressed on.)

"Didn't you see the documentary about that chick who's spending the rest of her life in an Indonesian prison because somebody put drugs in her bag?"

(OK...I got onboard.)

"Oh shit," I said. "The Dulce de Leche. She wouldn't let us pay. What if there are drugs in there." 

We continued with this crazy-ass paranoid talk until we were both convinced that hotel employees had stashed 14 kilos of cocaine in our bags, and that we'd never see our families again. What is it about airports that can guilt you into thinking you're a drug runner or full-blown terrorist? It's sort of like waiting for the results of an employee-mandated drug test. Suddenly you're convinced that the poppy seed dressing from a salad you ate six weeks ago is gonna keep you from getting the job. 

Turns out the Dulce de Leche was clean. Or at least the German Shepherd greeting us at Bush International in Houston didn't get a whiff as we skulked past him. But sadly, that container of Dulce de Leche in the refrigerator? Never been opened.

Hometowns and honky tonks

Hey, look! It's a honky tonk in Buenos Aires. We have lots of those in Nashville. 

Turns out this was a shoe store, but still, I felt right at home. 

Speaking of hometowns, we overhead an American couple chatting up an American man in the hotel restaurant over breakfast with lots of fake cocktail-party-laughter...and this...

Poseur #1 (to single guy): Where you from? 

Poseur #2: New York. Where are you guys from? 

Poseur #1: Jersey, but we tell people New York. HAHAhahahah....

Poseur #2: HAhaha...Oh yeah? I'm actually from Jersey too!...HAHAhahahahahha

We were kinda hoping they'd ask us where we were from. We were gonna say..."Oh, we're from Nashville...but we usually say New York...HAHAHHahahaha."

Listening to: Close Up the Honky Tonks by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Bros

You know how you have that friend who's kind of a hippy and she throws really great dinner parties because she invites fascinating people and has great art on the walls and you get the feeling she just smoked a big bowl of weed because her house smells like patchouli and it might even be kind of dirty and the food's not really that great but you would totally go back because it's so damn interesting? 

That's exactly what it feel like having dinner at Trattoria Il Ballo de Mattone in Buenos Aires. It wasn't the best food I had on the trip, but I absolutely loved the vibe. 

Dinner music: 54-46 by Toots and the Maytals.

Happy graffiti

Not-so-happy graffiti

Le Bar

The New York Times recommended this place. The hotel staff did not. Why did we listen to The Times? Because the photography was good, that's why. 

Here's a hazy -- non-NYTimes shot -- of tapas and cocktails.

Dinner music (courtesy of Le Bar DJ): Scooby Snacks by Fun Lovin' Criminals and Roadhouse Blues by The Doors.

Gardel and guitars

Tango. Obviously a big deal in Buenos Aires. Yet I arrived unprepared for the magnitude of Carlos Gardel, a tango musician during the first part of the 20th century. Apparently when he died in a plane crash in 1935 at least two women from NYC and Havana respectively -- who had NEVER MET THE MAN BEFORE -- were so grief-stricken by his departure from this earth that they tried to take their own lives......!

Portenos even have an expression about him: "Soy como Gardel con guitarra electrica," which basically means "I'm so cool I'm Gardel with an electric guitar."

Granted, I read the latter factoid in a guidebook. So it's quite possible that it's no longer cool to proclaim yourself as cool as Gardel with a Flying V. But still. Dude clearly had some game. 

Listening to: Volver by Carlos Gardel

Knit, knit, purl, purl

And I thought I could knit.

These ladies were tearing it up at the market in San Telmo.

L'heure bleue en Buenos Aires

Named by the French for the innocent hour between daylight and dark. The blue hour. My favorite. 

Listening to: When the Blue Hour Comes by Joan Osborne

Follow that pot

When we set out for lunch at Providencia in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood of Buenos Aires, the hotel staff warned us that the cafe had unpredictable hours. And there isn't really a sign -- just a big orange door that's sometimes painted green. (It was orange the day we went.) So I knocked...hard (following directions)...and a squaty woman wearing an apron opened the door speaking in urgent Spanish. She was holding a big steel pot. I tried to communicate that I'd like to eat something...por favor. She gestured for me to follow her, which I did, as we crossed the street -- pot in tow -- and headed down the road. She took us to another building, where inside it looked like we might be in a miniature restaurant with Alice in Wonderland chairs...or maybe just someone's apartment. 

Before we could speak, a woman delivered two cups of brown broth to our table. In a thriller film, this would be the part where we drink the random liquid, begin to feel drowsy, and wake up hours later in a bathtub of blood with our kidneys missing. Turns out these people were nice though. And their brown liquid was rich with cumin and coriander. When I tried to ask about the other spices, our server said, "Oh! Lots!" Clearly, I need to improve my Spanish. 

They also brought us warm brown bread and a ramekin of celery in a sweetened hot chili oil. I ordered El Potaje, literally The Soup with uneven hunks of sweet potato and zucchini and butter beans the size of chestnuts (adding to the Mad Hatter vibe) and a melty mound of queso nestled in the bottom of the bowl sort of like a topsy-turvy French onion soup. 

The staff -- if you could call them that because they seemed way too happy to be working -- chopped and stirred behind the counter and serenaded us in an ironic-bay-at-the-moon kind of way to Argentinean folk music. 

I couldn't tell you about Providencia, but Arevalito? My favorite meal in the city. 

Dinner music: Nada Mas by Atahualpa Yupanqui