Moving

Hi. This blog is moving to http://eatingoutinharrisburg.wordpress.com/

Sheesh!

Harrisburg, Pa., is pretty much the end of the trend line. But we do get multiple versions of everything.

Currently, it’s shishkabob restaurants. Last year, none. This year, three on one street within six blocks of each other.

* Skewers is in the old Mezzaluna space in the 300 block of Second Street, near Ceoltas.
* Second Street Kabobs is at North street, where Mama Rosa Italian Cuisine was.
* La Kasbah has opened above Forster Street in midtown at 913 N. Second.

Skewers is the most inviting of the three, so I met a friend for lunch there.

The kabobs on the luncheon menu are served as wraps with soup for about $10. The lentil soup was deep and hearty, the tomato was creamy. (We swapped bowls.)

I ordered the shish kabob, which came as two wraps of minced lamb pungent with ginger and cilantro. I decided to have one and take one to go for my wife, but once I started I couldn’t stop eating.

Also, the service was great.

Ten bucks? I’ll go back.

Free Lunch

News from the Left Coast:

Our friend Heidi Cotler, a former Tower Books exec who migrated to restaurant supplies, has a son who made the pages of US News & World Report last week. His name is Nate Keller; he’s an executive chef at Google in Silicon Valley. Yeah, that Google. The one on your computer.

It's a trend story about large firms moving toward classy corporate cafeteria service. Google serves breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks to its employees.



At Google, there is free lunch – and breakfast and dinner
By Renuka Rayasam
US News & World Report

Talent for competition is fierce in Silicon Valley's high-technology industry. But Google remains the gold standard for employee perks that help lure the best and brightest to its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters and keep them working around the clock.

"We wanted to take away all the basic needs of Googlers," says Nate Keller, one of three Google executive chefs. Perks like on-site haircuts and oil changes "take away the worry of general life."

Food has been at the core of those perks from the start. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page used a cook-off to hire executive chef Charlie Ayers when the company reached 30 employees in 1999. Now Google has about 6,800 employees. Keller took over as an executive chef in 2005 when Ayers left to start his own restaurant.

Last year the company hired Jon Dickman for the new position of global food services manager, and it's his formidable job to expand the company's dining services from five cafeterias to 15 by the end of the year, more than doubling the cooking staff.

Google keeps its employee stomachs full with free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, not to mention fully stocked snack areas around every corner. The main dining cafeteria is a sprawling room of floor-to-ceiling glass, long communal tables, and a stage for company presentations.

The cafeteria "provides a comfortable atmosphere for people to sit together," says Dickman. There are tables set up for a "dine with a stranger program" to encourage people from different departments to mix. "You find engineers sitting with communications people, and they talk about the wildest of things," he adds. It inspires the sort of creativity that Google has become famous for. Brin and Page often mingle with employees when they are in town.

But it's the food, which rivals that of California's best eateries, that really hits the spot. While Keller has to stay within a cost-per-person range, he's otherwise given free reign over Google's edibles. The cafe is so popular in Silicon Valley that chefs prepare about 1.5 times the amount of food needed to feed local employees just to accommodate guests who routinely wangle employee invitations.

Chefs buy meat and produce daily from organic farmers and local sellers and write their own menus. Ethnic touches cater to the company's international staff, with Indian entrees and made-to-order sushi and burrito stations. A panini sandwich press, bountiful salad bar, and dessert stations make choosing what to eat at Google almost as challenging as programming a new application.

Tomato days

That wondrous annual avalanche of tomatoes from friends who have too many plants is the best gift of September. Librarian Barb Roth has blessed us with two batches from her Perry County garden. We don't know how to can, so I've spent a couple days making sauce and freezing it.

This is an easy recipe from NYT's Mark Bittman, with a puttanesca bias. I'm using a large red onion with 3 or 4 tomatoes, all else to taste.


Pasta Sauce

Red onion, chopped
Dried chile pepper flakes, handful
Mushrooms, sliced
Garlic, minced
Tomatoes, peeled
Capers
Black olives, pitted
Tomato puree (optional)

Saute onion and chile flakes in olive oil
Add mushrooms and garlic as onions soften
Crush tomatoes into pan
Add capers and olives
Cook at medium high for 10 minutes or so until tomatoes are saucy
Thicken with puree if needed

Serve over any long pasta with grated Parmesano Reggiano

Bayou

At last.

We thought we had a winner when The Quarter finally opened up downtown on Second Street after months of buildout, but the NOLA look was only a facade. No Cajun food, no Creole food, no beignets with cafe au lait.

Now then ... move on up the road to the 1500 block of Second Street, and Bayou will show you wheah y’at, darlin’. It was Chef Matthew Black’s summer entry in the city’s culinary contest.

Dee and I went for lunch with arts editor Arthi Subramaniam, who ordered the Pecan Fried Chicken. She passed some my way. It almost floated off the platter, it was so delicate. Dee had a fried oyster po boy — half the size of a New Orleans po boy, but with all the taste and a side of creole potato salad.

I looked up at the specials board and saw a softshell crab etouffee, but I gasped at the price: $27. For lunch. It’s just not soft shell season on the Susquehanna. A guy at the next table named Big Mike saw my consternation and mentioned he’d just had the dish, and it was worth the price.

It probably was, but part of my love for New Orleans food is that it’s not expensive. Oh, there’s an Emeril’s or two, but you don't have to go there to eat well.

So I went for BBQ Shrimp with Dirty Rice and a Black Pepper Biscuit.

The shrimp were wonderfully juicy, the rice tangy, the biscuit took me back to buttery breakfasts on the bay.

Yeah, baby.

Bayou

Hilton Harrisburg's Cigar Dinner

"The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle."

-- George Sand

The first Hilton cigar night was soft and cool, with Steve Rudolph on the jazz keyboard.

(Name everyone in the Mike Fernandez photo above and win a Don Lino cigar at RAE's Tobacco ... on me.)

Executive chef John Reis organized hors d'oeuvres at the Outdoor Grill as kitchen staff put together the appetizer of grilled chicken, shrimp and scallops in an adjoining tent. Al Baker of RAE's Tobacco sold Africas and Auroras at a side table. Paul Flores of Miami Cigar Company rolled cigars with the Cuban pigtail, by hand.

Grilled New York strip steak was the main plat, served with a booming Plaisir de Merle Cabernet Sauvignon.

" When I'm sitting with a cigar smoker, face to face, I can have a good long conversation."

-- Ginny Roth, PPOS

A Meal In Minutes

We couldn’t figure out what this place was – or why we’d want to spend time bagging up ingredients someone else had chopped and poured.

But when Sue Gleiter Food Writer invited us to a demo night, we decided to go. As with so many things, once you add friends and a bottle of red wine it gets better.

And the demo food was tasty. After we put together our Grilled Herb Chicken, we ate Roxane Morgan’s version of Ratatouille Provencal with Cheesy Chicken Fries. Odd combo but good eating, good enough to lure us into making a reservation for a Saturday afternoon of meal prep work.

Roxane opened A Meal In Minutes after at least one meal assembly franchise on the East Shore went belly up. AMIM is not a franchise, and it’s very well done: stainless tables, fresh ingredients, simple directions, convenient wash-up and a cooler to store finished meal packages while you go on to the next station.

On our Saturday, we went to meet Cate Barron and her personal chef, Bob Vucic, along with Pauline and John Clea, who are hard at work in the photo above. We opened a bottle of Red Bicyclette, washed our hands, put on the annoying saran-wrap glove thingies and stepped up to the prep table.

For my wife and I, it was a test. We split a 12-dish meal plan with the Cleas for about $60, just to see if we’d enjoy it. We made:

* Black Bean and Cheese Burritos with Colby Jack and Cotija cheese;
* Bourbon-Molasses Pork Tenderloin, spiced with lemon juice, crushed red pepper and unspecified herbs.;
* Ginger Glazed Salmon, with ginger, pineapple and soy sauce. The marinade becomes the sauce;
* Grilled Herb Chicken, boneless, skinless breasts in a Dijon, lemon juice and fresh herb marinade, ready for the grill;
* Pan-Seared Tilapia with Chile-Lime Butter
* Cajun Smoothered Pork Chops with jalapenos and onions.

So far we’ve had the salmon and the chicken, both grilled. Very good. And - did I mention the easy part? Nice and easy, with a salad and corn on the cob.

A Meal in Minutes

Where to start?

“To make a start
out of particulars ...”

If I could go back in time, I might be able to tell you the day my taste for cooking began. I had a great job when I was a kid. All through high school, I worked in the kitchen at Holy Spirit Hospital. My friend Tom Scheffey and I washed dishes, helped the ladies at garde manger and worked the service line.

The service line, that was intense. Especially at breakfast.

The head dietician was a nun, Sister Georgia, and her morning service line was a conveyor belt about 15 yards long. Every tray on it had a checklist of salad, soup and main plate and those plates were put on by the salad ladies and our chef, Mr. Paulie, as the tray moved toward Sister Georgia at the end of the line. There, just before the tray entered the dumbwaiter, she would snatch up the checklist and snap out, “coffee ... cream ... sugar ... butter ... jelly ... salt and pepper ...” and I would just get the coffee poured into the small stainless carafe and be grabbing for the creamers when she started on the next checklist, “tea ... extra cream ... salt substitute ...”

At that age, I’d never seen Lucille Ball’s conveyor belt skit.

Unless someone knocked a tray askew and it crashed to the floor, the belt did not stop. The food was hot. It had to get to the aides on the floors upstairs and they had to get it to the patients. Absent a crisis, the belt didn’t stop. If you weren’t working fast enough, you worked faster and better – or you got replaced on the line.

It’s more fun as a memory than it was as an experience, but it gave me a taste for decent food presented professionally ... even in an institution.