Kitchen Wench

The first time I visited DC’s Chinatown, I thought I was going to cry. Or maybe puke. In either case, it was an adverse reaction. “Chinatown” is a joke–a bunch of chain stores and restaurants with Chinese characters tacked on their neon signage. Most of the translations are purely phonetic (Clyde’s Restaurant is “ke si lai”, etc.) and in traditional characters, probably because someone on a city planning committee thought it looked more “Chinese” than simplified characters. This, of course, does not bode well for the state of Chinese food in DC. This fact has been a source of major disappointment on multiple personal and gastronomic levels.

Commercialization aside, there are still a handful of Chinese restaurants in Chinatown, including the much fabled Eat First. For some reason, white people think “Eat First” is a funny or clever name. The cranky Sinophile in me would like to point out that it’s actually a very common thing to say in Chinese, a culture that is so food-centered that the common greeting is not “How are you?” but “Have you eaten yet?” But I digress. Last week, Lee and I decided to meet up after work to try Eat First, which has been consistently ranked on various best bargain and best ethnic restaurant lists around town. Read the rest of this entry �

One of the first things I ever baked myself was a deep-dish peach pie. I was probably 12 or so, and I think I got some help from my grandma. I was pretty disappointed with the outcome, not because it tasted bad, but because I hadn’t realized deep-dish meant no bottom crust. I know some people eat pie for the fruit, but I’m willing to wager that most of us put up with mushy and/or artificially gooey filling as a vehicle for flaky, buttery pastry crust. However, I blame my real fascination with pie crust on Martha Stewart.

For the past ten years, I have been holding on to a copy of Martha Stewart Living because it contained one of my favorite recipes for a pate brisee or all butter pie crust. In her Pie Crust 101 feature, Martha (or her team of magical food styling elves) crafted some of the most amazing crusts I had ever seen – purple mincemeat peeking through a hundred tiny little holes, apples steaming under a bed of carefully sculpted autumn leaves, and cherries topped with perfectly symmetrical lattice work. It was at that moment that I decided I wanted to be Martha. And, like Martha, I started making pate brisee pie crusts, by hand. Read the rest of this entry �