Biggie Smalls & CatcherCrazyFace attempt to play with a balloon while fighting the sickness.

My poor kids.  Both have fevers and poor Lou is so sad.  My heart is breaking (as well as my back as I fell down the CMA steps yesterday).  The chef & I pulled an all nighter.  Biggie won’t eat, won’t sleep, won’t smile.  Damn you influenza!  Damn you!

*****UPDATE*****

After a grueling day of no sleep and very loud crying Lou has finally gone to sleep.  It is now 10pm and she had been awake for over 24 hrs.  The docor told us that not only is she cutting 2 more teeth, she also has a superbad ear infection.  I am now drinking a very LARGE glass of red wine (w/ ice…don’t tell the chef).

In the past few weeks I have had such an outpouring of support regarding this blog that I simply must let you all know how awesome it feels and how grateful I am for such a kick ass group of readers.

After this post, I received the most comments ever and I would have to say that 99% of them were positive.  Which is always nice.  Lord knows I have had my share of bleach blond nitwits who never have a nice (or intelligent) thing to say.  You guys were articulate and passionate about a city that has so much potential and so much talent.  I have something in the works regarding the lack of intelligent coverage of our food community.  More details to come soon.

Within moments of writing this I received countless emails regarding their own experiences with such an evil drug.  The letters were kind, thoughtful, and inspiring.  They brought me out of the funk I was deeply in.  It always helps one’s soul to know that there are normal people just like yourself going through (and getting through) something so devastating and heartbreaking.  Plus hearing all of the positive outcomes of being clean & sober really brings me hope.  And I need hope.  Cause all I have right now is hate.  And that is just unacceptable.

And the coolest thing ever.  Meeting some of my super rad readers at this chef studded event and out and about in Cleveland (Hey Joan, Nancy, and Natalie!).  I must say that meeting my readers is sometimes daunting to me.  I get nervous and second guess absolutely EVERY word I write.  But putting real human faces to people who support me, the chef, and this blog is superbad.  {As is awesome}

I am a lucky chiquita.  Sometimes I am a stressball.  And sometimes I say the f word.  But that’s ok because the support system I have from all my peeps makes it all worth it.  Thanks for rocking my world.

Impossibly awesome…not to mention badass (see above pic for proof).

Check out Mike & friends on Food Network tonight @ 11pm for the premier of Dinner Impossible (the show that my chef happens to appear on a few times).  Cheers!

“The Summer looks out from her brazen tower, Through the flashing bars of July”

Monday night brought out the bigwigs in the Cleveland culinary scene for the Slow Foods Bastille Day Celebration. We had chefs, an iron chef, the coolest kids ever, and a very nice jackass:

My Chef, Matt Harlan, Rocco Whalen, & Steve Schimoler

Steve Schimoler & Mike Symon (Mike, sorry about the pic, it was the only one and I couldn’t not include you:)

The Widow Family in all our golden glory.

Randoms + Ryan Dunn (of Jackass fame & fortune)

The food was on point and super yum and the entire event raised tons of cashola for the upcoming Terra Madre Conference in Turin, Italy.

Roasted Kid Goat w/ bacon & quail egg

Coppa

Events like the one on Monday should happen WAY more frequently in Cleveland. Getting all the cefs together in support of something shows such a camaraderie in a very important industry. Believing in each other as equals instead of competition is so important in this little city of ours. Cheers to you boys (& girls)!!

BTW

And to top a great event off, we celebrated the only way you can on Bastille Day!

w/ the Green Fairy!!!!!

AND IF YOU ARE FEELING XTRA LUCKY THERE ARE STILL RAFFLE TIX AVAILABLE TO WIN SOME BAD ASS PRIZES:

• Trip for two to Turin, Italy for the Slow Food Salone del Gusto
• Cooking class with the Iron Chef himself, Mr. Michael Symon
• Dinner cooked by the Terra Madre Chefs (including my man)
• & More!!!

Email hotcookLG@roadrunner.com for more info or to buy some tix!!!!!

This is my freezer.

It freezes.  It really really really freezes.

It freezes so much that it causes my refrigerator to shut down.

This happens everyday.

And everyday the chef or I have to remove all of the contents of our freezer (yes we really like hot dogs) and chip/& or bash the 3 inch thick ice that has frozen.

It is a lot of fun.  And we go through a lot of food.  We need a new fridge.  However my husband, you know him as the chef, has an appliance issue.  First of all he hates most appliances.  Microwaves especially.  So much that he put our microwave on the curb when we moved to Brooklyn and told me the movers lost it.  They didn’t as I found out when I called bitching.

Back to the appliance issue.  Basically he is at a point in his life where he wants one thing (well 2 but we don’t talk about that here;).  Great kitchen appliances.

And when I say great, I don’t mean the most expensive fridge at Lowe’s.  I mean this or something like this.  I agree with him on this.  He works his ass off and deserves appliances that he believes in and would use in his own kitchen.  However our bank account is not yet able to support this kind of habit.

You would think being a chef one would have all kinds of hookup in the kitchen appliance world.  If we only knew someone sponsored by a major European appliance company…

is making mamma crazy. In the Night Kitchen is fantastically surreal (and apparently controversial) childrens book about a boy named Mickey.  Catcher got it for his birthday on Sunday and I swear to god, I have read it to him at least 10 times a day.  Our bedtime routine used to consist of me reading 10 different books, now I have to read him In The Night Kitchen over & over & over & over….I want to shoot myself.  But the kid loves it, so I’m game.

***It is a really cool book- I had never even heard of it before and you think I would have had the chef kid’s book market cornered.

I just got the following email:

Also - I wanted to let you know, since I know you love Ewan… that my husband works for hte American Motorcyclist Assoc. in Columbus and they just were working with Ewan b/c he and one of his buddies just completed this massive bike trek to South Africa. They were featured in the AMA magazine - I’ve asked my husband to work on getting a poster or book or something autographed for you… hopefully he can!

I peed myself.

I think that the Cleveland Plain Dealer forgot that human beings need to eat for survival. For the most part shoes & celebrity gossip do not give our bodies enough nutrients to make it past day three.

For some reason, I am sure gas prices will be blamed, the city’s newspaper has decided to combine the Style section with the Taste section. To make matters worse they have decided to suck even more than they did before. I have been thinking about this for a long while and I was never going to voice my opinion about it because I felt there was a conflict of interest. But when you review a fucking Dairy Queen I no longer am going to consider you a respectable source. So the glove’s are off.

I had never read ANY food section before the chef & I got back together.  He introduced my to this and I was forever hooked.  I even follow on Twitter.  When I came back to Cleveland the chef would buy a PD (cause I would never subscribe to the blatant propaganda and fear mongering) and a New York Times (cause I can’t afford to subscribe).  The differences in the two food sections shocked me.

I continued to read Taste section in the PD, well skim it really, and would focus on the Times for the real food stuff.  Articles about people cutting out the middleman & buying pieces of farms,  restaurant reviews about actual restaurants, and the classification of wines (a favortie of the chef) inspire and educated me on a weekly basis.

The PD became less and less relevant every week.  Articles about Bryers ice cream and reviews of Houlihan’s continued to turn me off until I completely stopped reading. 

I want to read it I really do. I want to support the local paper but I want the local paper to support me too.

I wish the PD to follow in the spirit of other food sections and keep it simple.  Have a formula and follow it every week.  For example, this could be our weekly food section.  Every week one of the following could appear:

• Restaurant Review (NON CHAIN), promote ALL areas, there are tons and mom & pop restaurants that are REALLY good throughout Northeast Ohio.
• Farm focus, as I recall there are some farms in Ohio?
• Weekly event Calender- There are MORE than enough culinary related events in this city to print a weekly calender.  You just have to look for them.  Or sign up for google alerts.  It does it all for you.
• Wine & Spirit Focus (real wine & spirits, not a story on Franzia’s new shapped box).
• Recipe from a LOCAL CHEF!!!!!  Not a book that the PD has had on a shelf for the past 20 years.  A chef!!!  A Chef!!!!  Promote your own!  Promote ALL of your own!!  There so many awesome fucking chefs in this city and one of them should be featured each week.

As long as the PD continues to promote chains, print forum rumors as fact, and publish blogger reviews as actual stories, the Taste section will suck.  And I guess I just have to come to terms with that fact. Or start my own goddamn newspaper.

Which I may very well do.