Soft Crabs, Scallops and Friday Night Tornadoes

Our raw ingredients: sea scallops, soft crabs, cornmeal, Italian salt and black pepper.

It's soft shell crab season here in Maryland, which means it's time to feast!

The very first time I learned how to clean a soft shell crab, I was unnerved. While necessary, it's rather unpleasant work if you're someone, like me, who doesn't relish killing creatures - and the dispatching of a soft shell crab, while not horrific, doesn't seem like a pleasant experience.


Step 1: Cut off the face.

First, you start off by holding the crab in your hand and using kitchen shears to literally cut off the face of the crab. That part always makes me cringe. Just a big SNIP and you're done. Evidently, it's a merciful killing but I can't help think that it's got to be painful for the crab.


Step 2: Cut off the gills.

Next, you pull the shell up by the points and snip out the inedible gills on both sides of the crab. Turn it over, pull back the apron and snip that off as well. Once those four snips have been completed, you're done and the crab is ready for cooking.


Step 3: Cut off the apron and you're ready to go!

During my trip to Atlanta last April, we visited the Dekalb Farmers Market where I picked up a bag of J.T. Pollard Medium Ground White Corn Meal. I've been meaning to try it out and coating the crab seemed like a good idea. Salt and pepper the crab on the inside and out, dredge in the cornmeal and it's off the saute pan.


Cooking Philosophy #1: No knob of butter is ever "too big."

Once the pan is nice and hot, a little oil plus a knob of butter (for good measure) and we're off the races. Lay the crabs in the butter and let them cook away. Just a few minutes on each side to cook through then let rest on some paper towels to dry out.


Saute the soft shell crabs.

Meanwhile, I've seasoned some more day boat sea scallops from the local fishmonger and started searing them. Sear both sides in a butter oil mixture and you're good to go. Serve both with some hot Japanese style steamed rice and that's a dinner perfect for a Friday night heavy thunderstorm with threats of tornadoes.


A little Friday night seafood extravaganza.

ph: Morning Resumes

Bacon omelette with chili and cheese at the Cafe Hon.

There's lots of pain in running your own business, but one the more painful aspects is hiring new staff. With the impending arrival of project hampden it's time to start hiring baristas. Young, old, experienced or novices - I'm looking for great people who are excited about the prospect of working with people and serving customers. The basic Order Of The Day at The Spro is: We want our guests to leave feeling stoked that they visited us today. It's the essence of what we do and what we're about.

Some people confuse this with a crazed obsession on coffee and coffee quality but it's much more than that. It's about serving customers and anticipating their desires. It's about delivering the absolute best quality product that we possibly can while accommodating their needs, desires and requests. It's not about the traditional barista Third Wave "we know coffee better than you" attitude - in fact, that kind of approach has no place amongst our ranks. It's about enthusiastic service and great quality products.

I've placed ads on Craigslist Baltimore and I've got a literal mound of resumes to review, attempting to find the gems in pile, while trying to ensure that I don't miss out and pass over someone who might not look terribly great on paper but could be the exact person we're looking for.

At the risk of tipping our hat, project hampden is about taking the coffee experience to a level that's not widely seen in the industry, and certainly not in our hamlet of Baltimore. The standards are high and so are the expectations. The task at hand is pouring through all the resumes that are flooding my email box to find the right people to make it happen.

ph: Flooring It

The lab floor ready for treatment.

I once told a good friend of mine, several years ago, that I was done with building shops myself. That I would, from then forward, always contract the work out. Well, sometimes I'm wrong.

I think I'm a control freak. From the standards and quality that our baristas perform under to the crazy little details of whether or not that little splotch on the wall will be noticed by customers - even though it's soaring nine feet above their heads and behind where they will be sitting. Fact is, I know that splotch is there and no matter how nice the rest of the details are, that little splotch will shout at me every time I walk into the space for the next ten years. It's maddening.

Now that most of the paint work has been completed, it's time to start working on the floors. Luckily, the early 20th Century hardwood floors are in good condition and only in need of a light screening and reapplication of oil-based polyurethane.


A little sand, a little urethane.

My problem is that I actually kinda enjoy the work and the labor. There's something oddly satisfying about seeing that gouge in the wall disappear under layers of spackle, sanding and paint. And seeing the floor glistening with new polyurethane gets my blood boiling (not to mention the slight high from the non-environmentally-friendly chemicals in the urethane).

Next up: laying down vinyl flooring in the food prep area.


Early 20th Century hardwood gets a refinish.

Balance Due: $100,121.99

"all accounts are in good standing."

Came across Bernie Madoff's American Express bill online today. The amount spent on the account was staggering. To be fair, there were 14 people on the account all charging to their hearts' desire because Bernie was paying the bill.

And while $100,121.99 is a lot of money to spend in one month, look at the previous months' balance: $160,283.45!

A world where your preset line of credit is two hundred thousand dollars and you can pay that off with one check. That would be something...

ph: Pondering Paints

The Wall quotes Chuck D Science.

Choosing paints for project hampden has been like drilling my skull. Sure, the general idea of the colors is easy, it's the choosing of the exact hues and tones that drives me bonkers. I want to farm it out to someone else, but then I know I won't be happy - and I'm the one who has to live with these colors for the next 25 years (I hope).

Happily, the crew at the Timonium Sherwin-Williams store (and the one guy in the Home Depot paint department) have been my friends. They've put up with a barrage of questions on primer, paint, floor prep, wall prep, brushes, roller nap and general tips on how to paint. A twenty-two dollar brush? Really? Okay, I'll take it.


So many schemes, but only one seems close (it's the one labeled "contemporary."

Buying painting tools is like buying anything else, you get what you pay for and the nicer the tool, the greater the pleasure. Who knew that one could derive so much pleasure from a Purdy wood handled brush or quick-release roller holder? Then there's the screens. Amazing. Screen sand paper that doesn't clog, meaning you can sand to your hearts' content and never clog your paper - who knew? With my trusty 3M respirator, I can spackle and sand all day and all night.

Truth be told, I haven't painted a shop since the original Jays Shave Ice shack in Timonium. When we did the second Timonium location, I had a crew come in and do the work. And I was planning on having a crew do project hampden and then I decided that I might as well make myself useful and tackle the job myself. Good thing Dad has been on hand to handle the detailed trim work. It's the reason I was never a very good graphic artist, my hands aren't surgeon steady - and luckily, Dad trained as a surgeon.


The Baditude Basement is painted and ready for the DJ.

Elements of Mangalitsa

Allie and Amaya.

For the past two years or so, I've been following the Wooly Pigs Blog, the repository for all things Mangalitsa in the United States. Widely known for its' famous fat content, the Mangalitsa is a Hungarian breed of pig that has a lot of hair in addition to it's tasty fat and succulent meat. In the United States, there are something like 1,000 Mangalitsas and 60,000 worldwide (with 50,000 of them still in Hungary).

The problem is that the Mangalitsa is non-existent in the Mid-Atlantic, so I've spent the past two years merely reading about the wooly pig instead of eating them. Until now.

Happily, an intrepid farmer in Sussex County, New Jersey has taken on the raising of the Mangalitsa and when Alex and Aki announced on their Ideas In Food website that they were partnering with Scott Anderson to produce a multi-course Mangalitsa tasting dinner, I was immediately on the phone with Beth at Elements Restaurant in Princeton to secure myself a table.

Whatever the cost, whatever the distance, if the Mangalitsa was on the menu, I was going to be there. Last Monday, Spike, Isaiah, Allie and myself drove up to Princeton to see what all the fuss was about.

This time, I'm not going to go into too much verbage about the evening. Just know that the air conditioning wasn't running at optimal power, we were hot, the bathrooms' air was ice cold, cocktails were flowing and the Mangalitsa was hot, hot, hot. Some of the highlights of the evening were the headcheese, the uni, the lardo, the fat and the bacon & eggs dessert. Just an amazing dinner that you'll see below.


Fried Green Tomato



Smoked Mangalitsa Whiskey



Pulled Pork on Cracklings.



Fried Clams with a very tasty thousand island-ish dipping sauce.



Lardo stuffed radish.



Smoked Fat on Toast: Sin.



A Charcuterie Wet Dream: succulent headcheese, cured ham, pate, sausage and a pastrami-like preparation with pickles, mustard and breads. Served family style, everyone tore into this offering and were suddenly hit with the realization that there was still an evening of eating ahead of us. Some of us might not make it.



Sliced Melon for the Charcuterie.



The Bread Offerings.



All good creatures deserve large helpings of Lardo...



Sea Urchin and Peaches.



Mangalitsa Salad.



Pork Belly.



Chile Relleno Mangalitsa.



Pasta with Mangalitsa Bacon, cream sauce and sous vide egg yolk.



Salsa Verde and a Cucumber Shrimp Slaw.



Mushrooms



Ratatouille.



Sweet Corn



Mangalitsa Loin and Mangalitsa Leg.



Bacon & Eggs



Playing Egg Jenga.



Towers will fall...



Honey Glazed Ham Ice Cream with compressed pineapple topped with maraschino cherry juice and a sugar glazed crackling. This dessert was way out there - and I mean waaaay out there. I liked it because it really pushed the limits of what we think dessert is all about. Extreme. While I liked the idea of pushing the limits, the flavors were beyond my own limits. While I'm excited by the execution and sheer audacity and daring of the dessert, it's not one that I would choose to order. But I did love being able to taste it and be challenged by the flavors.


Elements Restaurant
163 Bayard Lane
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
609.924.0078
www.elementsprinceton.com

Egregious Consumerism

ph: Saturday Soundtrack

Just a little sample of today's project hampden soundtrack (still brought to you via cassette tape, mixed on January 1, 1988 with Dolby C noise reduction):

Nitro Deluxe - Let's Get Brutal
2 Live Crew - Hey We Want Some Pussy
Public Enemy - Rebel Without A Pause
L.L. Cool J - I Can't Live Without My Radio
RUN D.M.C. - Jam Master Jay
Schooly D - Parkside 5-2
Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh - La-Di-Da-Di
Mr. X & Mr. Z - Mr.X & Mr. Z Drink Old Gold
Erik B. & Rakim - I Know You Got Soul
Boogie Boys - A Fly Girl

Pouting Over PourOver

Flight of the Beehouse at Spro.

There's a whole cabal out there that thinks I'm some sort of hot aired, blowhard stalwart and while I won't say that they're 100 percent wrong, I do, from time to time, rethink my stance and make a course change.

I'm a fallible human with my own set of whacked preferences. I like grass fed steaks, younger women and I really haven't been paying attention to decaf coffee. Decaf coffee really has been like that scratch in the middle of your back that you just can't reach - an irritation that must be dealt with. At The Spro, we might serve four decaf coffees in a day. FOUR, I'm not kidding.

Because of this, it really hasn't been a high priority for me, even though it's probably the one coffee that we're losing the most money on. Pots of decaf are brewed only to be thrown away. It's the ultimate in waste and it's time to stop.

Okay, I'll be honest. The diaphragm on the decaf airpot finally broke and since I'm too cheap to replace it, it was time to make a change...


Drip, dripping away.

Readers of this blog will know that I haven't been the biggest fan of pourovers, mainly because I think all the hoopla about it being the "next thing" is just lame bullshit - especially since those cats at Royal Coffee in Berkeley had been doing it for years when Dismas Smith, Sandy Hon and myself stopped there in January 2005 for a cup. But there's a new enthusiasm for pourover, as well as some new consciousness about it and some new engineering.

Mark Inman, guru of Taylor Maid Farms in Sebastopol, California has come out with the Tru Bru pourover system with Beehouse porcelain filter holders from Japan and made out of stainless steel. There are other makes on the market but they're tall an ugly. At least the Tru Bru is low-profile and rather handsome to boot. But the real selling point for me is that they make a two cup model, not just the four cup model that I see everywhere else and is a monster on your counter.

For a program like ours where pourover is not our primary brewing method, the two cup model fits the bill just right.


Brew samples and the french press control (second from left).

So I mock others and their pourovers only to find a really concentrated level of attention to get a nice brew out of the thing. I'm surprised to find that there really is a lot more to pourover than simply pouring the hot water over the coffee. Timing of the water stream is critical. If you dump it in and let it flow, it flows too fast and you get underextracted coffee.

We're just beginning our exploration with pourover, but the initial parameters we are starting from are as follows:

8z cup - 16 grams coffee
12z cup - 24 grams coffee
16z cup - 32 grams coffee

I've been playing around with the circle in the center pouring technique that Aaron Ultimo showed me and we're getting interesting results. So far, the coffee has been nice but lacking the qualities that I love in a French Pressed coffee, namely that rich body. We're getting similar flavor notes from the pourover but that body and complexity of pressed coffee is missing, but I think that's just part of the game.

If you come by The Spro in the coming weeks, you'll find the pourover working its' way into our lineup.

Dreaming of Red Roof

Revitalizing the Economy with $3.50 bottles of water.

Because I seem to travel so much, I have loyalty accounts with just about every hotel chain, but the truth is, I tend to prefer the Red Roof Inn. In essence, I'm cheap. I travel to a city, I go out and party, I stay out 'til late, sleep and then head out again in the morning. I'm almost never in the room I'm renting, so why go extravagant? Sure, the beds can be nicer, but if I'm only in the room for six hours, I'm not getting a decent nights' sleep anyway.

So my default choice for hotels is the Red Roof Inn. It's clean, it's comfortable and they have free Wi-Fi Internet access. Even the Motel 8 has free Internet access. In fact, many of these cheaper hotels have free Internet access. It's when you get to the nicer hotels that you start to pay for Internet access.

Take the Westin I stayed in last night. It cost me $179 per night, plus tax. Total: $205.00 - and I'm not even getting laid. Which brings me to another detail I should point out: when I travel alone, I'm cheap. When I travel with a "lady friend," I rent the nice room - even the Halekulani on Waikiki Beach.

But usually, I travel alone and the only time that I stay in "nice" hotels while traveling alone is if I get a deal on Priceline.com or if someone else is making the travel arrangements.


No late night calls to Mexico City at $4.50 plus 100% per minute.

The Westin is a Starwood property and it's a nice hotel. The staff is friendly and accommodating, the lobby is nice and the rooms are swanky. The sheets are pricey and they give you little bottles of shampoo and conditioner (something Red Roof doesn't do). It's fancy and I could be Big Poppa, but I'm still staying in the room alone and the only groove I would be getting on is with my hand, meaning that my Baller price tag for the room has gone to waste (my hand is happy with Red Roof).

The problem with the nice hotels is that they not only charge a lot more than Red Roof, they also nickel and dime you to death. The Westin has a couple of bottles of water to tempt your parched palate as you walk in from a day of travel - but they cost $3.50 each. Local phone calls are a dollar, and you have to pay for Internet access - what is this, 2001???

Really, all I want is a clean bed, some quiet and free Internet when I travel. As I lay myself to sleep in my fancy, balling room at the Westin, by myself, all I can think is how much cheaper it would have been to sleep at The Red Roof Inn.

ph: Dad Returns

Dad surveying the task at hand.


Attending to the stone work.


More colors to choose from.


Domo Kun and the Jack & Jill Ice Cream Sandwich watch over me.