Lamb Flatbread

My sister Leah visited last week from Albuquerque, and we spent an evening we wandering up and down the length of the Greenway and along the waterfront path. Boston looked beautiful, especially compared to the elevated highway that the gardens replaced. Then we joined family for dinner at Trade.

Bon Appetit mag just named Trade one of the best new restaurants in the US. When I first ate lunch at a pre-opening tasting, I remember wondering a little about Trade. With its eclectic small plates menu and its coolly urban vibe and high-decibel noise level, Trade didn’t call to me the same way Rialto, Jody Adams’s flagship restaurant, does. And the food was tasty, but a little all over the place, I thought.  Another early visit still left me slightly unc.

But all good restaurants need a little time to grow into themselves, even when the guiding chef is as genius as Jody Adams. And last week’s visit won me over. Trade and its food have gone from coltish and a little awkward to sleek, smooth and pretty marvelous.

Gazing out Trade’s floor-to-ceiling windows while eating fantastic roasted clams with tiny slices of  pickled okra and chunks of cornbread, lamb flatbread with eggplant and Manchego, and a truly delicious cold corn soup with shreds of smoked bluefish, well, all this and more made the evening more magical. (I didn’t get to taste the burger because my son wasn’t sharing). The young chef Andrew Hebert came out to say hello, looking tired, and the place was jumping — lots of tables of businesspeople, couples, young and old, a well-dressed and lively crowd. They were happy to be there, and so was I. The Bon App award was no surprise.

Julia Child in Cambridge kitchen

On what would have been her 100th birthday, Julia Child is remembered for her remarkable mastery of cooking, her bravery, her wit. But what I remember about her is her unfailing curiosity.

By the time I met Julia, her TV days were past, and she was feted as a legend, a sort of culinary fairy godmother. Though I had helped cover her 80th birthday party and had been to her house in Cambridge, I wasn’t  in her inner circle. But after her 9oth birthday, when Julia was moving back to California for the last time, packing up her Cambridge kitchen for the Smithsonian, Sheryl Julian, my editor at the Boston Globe,  invited me along on a last lunch with Julia.

The food at that lunch was unremarkable, though I do recall Julia’s pointed, if polite, comment when iced tea in a can was placed before her . “What, you don’t brew it here?” she asked with slightly raised eyebrows. And I also remember the conversation. Julia asked me all about my growing up, as intently interested in my rural, almost communal, upbringing in Kansas as I was fascinated about her storied career. She was engaged, funny, and observant. One couldn’t have had a better dining companion.

No wonder everyone loved her, I remember thinking. Yes, Julia irrevocably changed Americans’ idea of food. But her way of connecting vibrantly with almost everyone she met  made her a star.

I have to get out to see these fields — more beautiful than tended suburban plots,

Williams Sonoma sells farming

A trend emerges and Williams-Sonoma is right on its heels.  Now farming comes in a box, cute, neat, and callus-free. (Leather gardening gloves, of course). To make it better, or at least fancier, it’s called “Agarian.” Probably the chickens even smell sweet.

But no one from Boston — or even New England. Oh, yes, William Kovel (Catalyst) got a Regional People’s Choice, which is nice but not quite star status. Neither he, nor Jason Bond (Bondir), or a half-dozen more I could name rated the big-time. Even Jamie Bissonnette,(Coppa, Toro) who was last year’s People Choice and is on the James Beard finalist list for New England region, made it.

Boston is enjoying a raging hot restaurant scene and the depth of talent is strong. Why no love from the national stage? Maybe traveling to Boston to sample is not as exciting as Portland — or Dallas? Or even Nashville? Was this really a thorough vetting of the nation’s best, or somewhat more random?

And because you take the warhorses for granted, you never expect the disloyalty, the slap in the face, when they fail. Making tortellini for Christmas dinner last December, I realized that the dial controlling the rollers on my pasta maker was stuck. It had long been touchy, but now it wouldn’t budge. Then, again, I got it in the first months I moved to Boston and fell in love with the North End, so I sighed and chalked it up to age. Then, I started to sew a hem, and my old Viking stalled — irrevocably it turned out — refusing another stitch of service. My PC is pretty much dead, although it lasted much longer than a computer is supposed to.

So then how do you explain — and I hesitate, fearing I’m going to jinx this– the Kitchen Aid mixer than my late mother-in-law gave me at least 25 years ago. Every week, it faithfully churns up bread dough and kneads it. In between, it’s been known to make chocolate cakes, whip cream, and fashion Italian meringue all in one morning. It’s not glamorous, and its only bell and whistle is a sausage stuffer attachment I rarely use, but it seems to be indestructible. Once, many years ago, while kneading a stiff dough, it bounced off the counter onto the floor. I unplugged it, picked it up, put it back on the counter, turned it on, and finished the bread making. It’s the Maggie Smith of mixers. Long may she live!!!

A Martha Stewart-style chicken

NEWS FLASH: Chickens are the pet of the decade. Boston suburban officials who a few years ago could not have imagined allowing homeowners to keep chickens in the backyard are finding the debate a hot topic at town meetings and in city halls. City dwellers who are generations away from even touching dirt, not to mention tending barnyard animals, are checking out whether Rhode Island Reds or those cute little hens that lay blue eggs would fit better into their lifestyles. And the public murmuring about the beauty of an egg laid yards away from the frying pan has become a roar.

Martha Stewart started it, of course, with her designer hens. And it’s always hens that are coveted — the noisy roosters seem to be beloved only by those hens. Author Susan Orleans pushed it along with her tale of being so besmitten by her flock that she found herself in the veterinarian’s office holding an ailing feathered friend on her lap. Now it’s so fashionable that not having a flock is becoming a social embarrassment.

It’s time for full disclosure. I grew up around chickens. My grandmother who lived next door kept a flock, and most of her neighbors did, too. Everyone had relatives a few miles out of our tiny village who brought in eggs. I gathered eggs when I visited my cousin Susan at her farm. Chickens regularly had their necks wrung for Sunday dinner, an event that modern hen owners would find ghastly. But I wasn’t fond of poultry. Maybe it was my grandmother’s rooster that chased me across the yards when I was barely a toddler. He seemed enormous, and had talons and a beak that kept even the largest house cats at bay. I remember feeling sure that some day that rooster would catch me.

But I’m thinking that I might have to reconsider my hen-phobia, or give up my foodie credentials. Can a childhood fear of feathers and beaks be overcome? Can I learn to love the clucks as well as the eggs? Can I, figuratively, cross the road to meet the chickens?

Charlie Trotter

Charlie Trotter has just announced that his 25-year-old testament to obsessive restaurateurship is closing next August.  In recent years, even he admitted business was off a little, but  his reasons are to pursue other interests — a philosophy degree among them. His decision makes one remember both how very famous he was (and is) and what it means to be a chef.

In an era of quickly-minted TV reality show “celebrity chefs,” it can be hard to recall that chefs used to really cook — and to remember that cooking is doing the same movements, the same recipes, the same preparation and clean-up over and over and over. It’s not winning a contest or being the loudest in the room,  but instead perserverance, and as he once told me “just showing up.”

I looked up a piece I wrote on Trotter for The Boston Globe in 1999, when Charlie Trotter’s was a slip of 12 years old, and  the chef came to Boston for a cookbook event (remember when cookbook publishing was important?). He agreed to talk to me, but it had to be at 11 p.m. because he was cooking with Rene Michelena who had worked for him, in La Bettola, a tiny South End restaurant where Petit Robert Columbus is now. That meant that Chef Trotter, then one of the two or three best-known chefs in the US, was hoisting pans and cutting garnishes in a kitchen the size of a closet.

When we talked in the basement office, Trotter’s first words were about the valet service at the restaurant the night before. No one greeted him when he got out of the car, and he thought that was disgraceful. We talked for over an hour, and despite the lateness and the fact that Trotter had been cooking all evening, and would leave for Chicago early the next morning, he could not have been more engaged, thoughtful, and passionate. He’ll take those attributes into his next career. And his example, if not his style of restaurant, should be the plan to follow for the chefs of tomorrow.

Americans are obsessed with using food as an indulgence, as something to get away with. And it’s not just junk food. From the current foodie craze of gourmet calorie-laden hamburgers to Big Mac’s double cheeseburgers, from sugar-laden classic cocktails to Red Bull as a breakfast substitute, from poutine (a Canadian dish of French fries, cheese curds and brown gravy) at the trendy gastro pubs to boxes of Dunkin Donuts at the soccer match to iced mocha blueberry lattes with whipped cream flooding the land, we’re cheerfully adding calories onto calories, from gourmet land to trailer park.  Some of us may have more restraint — or more access to the gym — but it’s not just the cola-dependent poor who need to rethink their relationships with food.

I say tax sodas, fries and whatever else (Bittman was a little murky about exactly what might earn taxes) fat-laden can be added. But until a bowl of perfect green beans minutes out of the garden are as tempting as bacon-laced chocolate ice cream, we’re going to have trouble turning the tide. Who has some ideas on how to rock those beets for the common man?