Breaking two cardinal rules in my kitchen–versatility and real-world functionality–my favorite new toy is silly, beautiful, and fun. It can only do one thing: make cookies in the shape of an obscure cut of lamb. A while back, while checking out the display cases at the excellent little butcher shop, Avendano’s, my friends spotted a batch of hand-crafted, limited-edition, copper cookie cutters. For some reason, they thought of me.

The packaging was gorgeous. Each form is hand-stitched to a card painted with a watercolor depiction of the actual cut of meat. I am now blessed with a “Middle Cut Rib” of lamb, which, to be honest, does not resemble any overly trimmed product that I’ve seen at most meat counters. My favorite part is the tiny tag, hanging off the cookie cutter like some exclusive designer label and engraved–by hand, of course–with the maker’s phone number.

This past weekend, I finally had a chance to give it a try. Since royal icing is one of my least favorite foods, depicting meat with only cookie dough became the challenge. An old recipe (adapted from Vanilla Refrigerator Cookies in the 1976 edition of the Joy of Cooking) and a bit of red food coloring leftover from making velvet cake came to rescue. I debated incorporating demi-glace or bouillon for meaty flavor, but decided to stay simple for the test run. Next time.

Here are some photos and notes from my first stab at meat cookies:

The red-colored dough, with a bits of white dough aka fat marbling left from the mixing. The color will lighten with baking, so make it darker than the final shade you want.

While still warm and soft, shape the dough into a thick piece that roughly follows the contour of the cutter. Basically, you’re making a lamb loin, or the meat before the butcher saws it into steaks or chops. Make it slightly smaller than the outline of the cutter, though, to allow for the fat layer…

…with some reserved, uncolored dough, build up a thin (or thick—your preference) layer of “fat” around the lamb loin. I started off with an offset spatula, and then figured out it’s much easier just to flatten pieces of white dough between my palms and press then right into the red dough. Press down firmly on the dough to avoid air pockets, which will later become cracks and gaps. Any breaks later are easy to fix, though, with extra dough.

After chilling for a few hours, I sliced the loin thinly with a chef’s knife and transferred the cookies to a parchment lined sheet pan. Final shaping with the cutter happens right on the pan. (The two front cookies have been cut).

Sweet meat trimmings. I mushed them together into a log, chilled again, and then sliced into pretty, round, marbled cookies.

Be sure to cool the cookies completely on a wire rack before storing them in an airtight container.

Layered between parchment, the cookies traveled very well to a weekend picnic in the park. If there’s a meat-lover in your life who happens to like baking or who deserves a batch of meat cookies…well, I think there’s a gift out there waiting to be made.

Red Meat Refrigerator Cookies
Makes 12 large cookies, plus trimmings.

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon zest or 1/2 teaspoon lemon oil
• 1 teaspoon almond extract (optional)
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 2 – 4 teaspoons red food coloring

Preparation
1. Beat butter until creamy. Add sugar gradually and beat until pale and fluffy.
2. In a separate small bowl, lightly beat together the eggs, vanilla, lemon, and almond. Drizzle into the butter-sugar mixture and beat until smooth.
3. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder. Stir into the butter mixture.
4. Remove 1/4 of the dough to a separate bowl. Adding gradually, blend the red food coloring into the remaining dough. Leave the coloring slightly streaking, to keep the cookies tender and to mimic marbled meat.
5. Shape into logs or lamb loins. Chill thoroughly, or at least four hours.
6. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Working quickly, cut into 1/4-inch thick slices. Re-chill dough, if needed, to keep it firm. Arrange on parchment paper and bake just until lightly golden around edges, or 8-10 minutes. Transfer to a rack and let cool completely.

Ah, the impending new year is all about lists, isn’t it? Well, here’s yet another one.

Recent tragic events, human and animal alike, at the San Francisco Zoo has me doing several things:

1. I’m snatching up my very plump and extremely domesticated cats and kissing them all over, while demanding to know how their sister could behave so much like…well, a tiger.

2. Swearing I will never go to another zoo to gawk at animals. They may be alive and safe from hunters’ rifles, but they are still miserable unless they happen to be lucky enough to secure roams in the spacious San Diego Wild Animal Park.

3. Thinking about primal urges for meat.

While I do live a fairly vegetarian, multi-grainal, or pescatarian lifestyle, it’s more from ease and quickness of prep and less of actual desire. I do love my fish and vegs, but I also love, crave, and need on a deep, dark, and primal level, meat.

When hit with a specific meat need, it’s usually for how a certain restaurant prepares it. Like, if I’m feeling porkish, it doesn’t follow that I’ll be satisfied with any old piece of pig.

My Top Meat Places in San Francisco

Pork: Late-night or middle of the day, nothing beats a burrito stuffed with thick, shaggy pieces of carnitas at El Farolito. Also, because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since Jen reminded me in her post, the shelling beans with Sofrito at SPQR and sweet and smoky Suppenkuche’s cured pork chop.

Beef: I haven’t yet found my designated “favorite steak” place in San Francisco, but the Slanted Door’s Shaking Beef still makes me very happy; I’m really sorry to see that it hasn’t yet made it onto the menu at Out the Door in the San Francisco Center. When it comes to the ground stuff, Burgermeister is the place I go back to again and again. That said, Zuni Cafe’s lunch-time burger is pretty spectacular, even if the ridiculously greasy focaccia bun has me wiping my hands down every three seconds.

Chicken: I’m sorry to be predictable, but I’m still not bored nor have I ever failed to reach complete nirvana with Zuni’s roast chicken. However, Ziryab Grill’s sumac chicken with velvety oyster mushrooms and Ton Kiang’s deceptively plain-looking salt-baked chicken run it a very close, very delicious second.

Duck: I’m very choosy about duck and I don’t order it every time I see it at the menu, but Paul K’s Syrian Spiced Duck with pomegranate molasses and Ton Kiang’s peking duck get my picky vote.

Lamb: This is my favorite meat, but I have yet to find a place that satisfies my need for tender, rare. Until I find it, I have to be satisfied with my own lamb chops: salt and pepper, broiled for 3-4 minutes on each side. Though I haven’t yet been, I have suspicions that Kokkari might scratch this particular itch, however I’m open to suggestions…

The documentary film, Chez Schwartz, enjoyed a quiet if savory U.S. premier at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center earlier this week. It has yet to be picked up for wider distribution, but keep an eye out for it. Or, if you can’t wait, order a DVD and see for yourself why this little “Charcuterie Hebraique” is the place to eat in Montréal.

Garry Beitel, a Montréal-based documentary filmmaker, recorded the day-to-day rhythms of Schwartz’s Deli over the course of an entire year. He managed to whittle his footage down to a poetic study of its workers. As one season melts into another, Beitel teases out the stories of the diverse men — from the dishwasher in the back of the house to the waiters in the front, from the general manager down to the gentlemanly panhandlers. They each describe their unique role in the extended family anchored by this tiny, 75-year-old restaurant. Through their stories, we see how years slip into decades and how one long-lived business adapts to a changing world.

Unusual in a film about ethnic food, there’s an “overcast” feel throughout the documentary. In the end we wonder what happens to individuals such as newly promoted Alex or sweet, ailing Ryan. (Anyone interested in degrees of separation and ground-breaking animation should watch this award-winning short about Ryan.) The power of Chez Schwartz lies in Beitel’s understated directing, Marc Gadoury’s intimate camera, André Boisvert’s amazingly natural sound, Robert Marcel Lepage’s music and — ultimately — the simple, direct oral history of the workers themselves.

At the head of the line, hungry pilgrims can catch glimpses of smoked meat, freshly sliced by hand and ready to go at the sandwich counter. Joao (Johnny) Gonçalves, meat cutter, prepares some without the usual bright yellow mustard.

I remember the first time I bit into smoked meat at Schwartz’s. Everyone does. In the film, two women gasp in rapture while sharing their first sandwich right there at the counter, and another diner is struck speechless while remembering his own first taste as a teenager. It may seem strange, perhaps even laughable to the uninitiated. But like any religion, only the converted truly understand.

During my year of exile in Vermont, I drove across the border every month to eat in Montréal. While dinner restaurants varied — rilettes at l’Express with my own jar of cornichons or maybe noodles in Chinatown — I always started with an early lunch at Schwartz’s.

The neighborhood surrounding the deli draws immigrants from around the world. Historically the heart of Montréal’s Jewish community, the road on which the deli sits has also been the symbolic division between the city’s east and west streets, its French and English languages.

After five years as the busboy, Alexandre “007″ Lebel gets promoted to waiter. To help with the stress of a fast-paced deli, he composes poems on clean paper place mats during precious down time.

If you arrive at 3895 Boulevard St. Laurent anywhere near the middle of the day, you’ll stand in line on the sidewalk with a couple of dozen other meat lovers, separated by mere glass from stacks and stacks of brisket still warm from the massive steamer. You’ll be able to smell the smoky, salt-tinged meat and listen to the same order over and over again in two different languages: a “medium” with fries, cole slaw, fresh pickle and black cherry soda. Around 400 to 500 other diners a day will order a steak from Peter at the grill; it arrives accompanied by a slice of calf liver and two diminutive sausages. The grill is a relic of the past: open flame right in the dining room, arm’s length from innocent diners.

Grill man Peter Christianis (left) has been searing steaks and calf livers at the same station for 40 years, while waiter Mike Nelli has been a member of the Chez Schwartz family going on 7 years now.

Upstairs in the marinating bins and inside the smoker in the back are where the magic happens. The very secret recipe results in über-meat that’s juicy and tender, savory and smoky, fatty and flavorful. It’s not quite pastrami (there’s a dry rather than wet cure) and it’s way beyond corned beef (behold that spice-flocked, smoke-lacquered exterior). So everyone just calls it for what it is: smoked meat.

Frank Silva, general manager, knows the business inside and out. He’s hefted and sliced so many briskets during his twenty years at the deli that his arm is starting to give out.

Schwartz’s sandwiches have no need to rise to Carnegie heights nor does the owner, Hy Diamond, feel pressure to expand the menu beyond one type of meat sandwich, a steak and a few sides. As Peter Levitt and Karen Adelman, co-owners of Saul’s Deli in Berkeley know well, this is a rare and precious thing.

After the film’s screening on Thursday night, the two moderated an enlightening discussion about the future of Jewish delicatessens in the U.S. How does a meat-centered restaurant survive in a health-conscious, politically aware, option-filled world? How does Saul’s modest amount of Niman Ranch beef compete with super-stacked, industrially raised pastrami from tourist-driven, New York delis? And how does a younger generation begin transforming a cuisine frozen in time into a meaningful, relevant, profitable business?

It’s not about the size: Saul’s uses “clean meat” from Niman Ranch in its pastrami sandwiches.

Anyone who hangs around chefs knows that, generally, they survive on the razor’s edge of profit margins and see the cloud behind every silver lining. Peter and Karen were refreshingly honest about the challenges of running the deli, from the need to cater to the economics of not smoking your own meat to the impossibility of guaranteeing a kosher establishment. (People want milk with their coffee, after all, and don’t even think about getting rid of the Reuben!)

They named their own favorite delis: Langer’s in LA, Katz’s in NYC, and Manny’s in Chicago all made the short list. Most intriguing, though, were hints of a possible “Jewish bistro” in their future. The two hope to reinterpret and reinvent the vernacular of Jewish food with dishes from around the world using local, seasonal, organic ingredients.

For the time being, I’ll continue enjoying my favorites at Saul’s. From personal experience, I can vouch for the chopped liver (on both rye and matzo with plenty of mustard), the chicken soup and the pastrami sandwich. I also enjoyed more than my fair share of half-sour pickles and, of course, a bottle of Cel-Ray to wash everything down.

SAUL’S RESTAURANT & DELICATESSEN
1475 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 848-3354

Coming back to Missouri — the state of my childhood — always means returning to a double life.

While I’ve come to terms with my family’s hyphenated existence here in the Heartland, I’m only just beginning to figure out how to balance the relentless abundance of my mother’s kitchen with the city’s smoky, seductive barbecue.

Asian moms take it personally when you don’t eat their food, even when they make more than you can humanly consume. Leaving Kansas City without eating barbecue, though, is culinary sacrilege. I’ve learned how to fit five full meals into one day, and still I can’t fulfill both my familial responsibilities and the extensive research (”eating”) that my work demands.

The first thing greeting me at my parents’ home: a basket of vegetables pulled and proudly displayed just for me. If you think that CSA box is bad, try throwing away a potato your mother dug up with her own hands.

My mother doesn’t have a computer, so I can confess here: I’ve been known to compost whole, uncooked vegetables and dump pots of soup quickly and quietly. When she asks, I make sure to say, while checking for BBQ sauce on my shirt or under my nails, how delicious everything was.

Fortunately for me, during this visit, my parents left on a trip of their own. Yesterday, I waved good-bye to my mom at the airport and then immediately called my sister for her advice: Jack Stack’s? or Oklahoma Joe’s?

It’s a tough call. Each place has strengths and weaknesses, and only a local can offer proper guidance. Back in my day, as they say, it was mainly Arthur Bryant (for the meat) or Gates (for the sauce). This was before national attention turned each of these KC institutions into overrated marketing machines still running on fumes. Before competition cooking turned pro. Before the Kansas City Barbecue Society was around to offer not just barbecue cooking classes but barbecue judging classes.

My sister, whose ZIP code still falls inside ‘cue territory, said I had to try both. But I only had time for one expedition! Back and forth we went. Did I want burnt ends or ribs? Good fries or kick-ass coleslaw? Pulled pork from heaven or beef with integrity? I couldn’t decide — I wanted it all. But when she mentioned that Oklahoma Joe’s was inside a working gas station…well, that tipped the scale. I’d cross the state line for that.

A small neon pig is the only clue that beyond the gas pumps lies a working smoke pit.

Imagine a largish convenience store in which the Icee machines have been ripped out and replaced with spare tables, a few booths, a high counter for cutting meat, and a chalkboard menu.

Of the four salads offered, one actually comes without meat. Lettuce with warm pulled pork sprinkled on top impressed even this jaded pig lover.

The ribs in all their dry rub glory.

I always get long ends. Always. For those who’ve never ordered ribs in Kansas City, we like to divide our ribs into long ends and short ends, and maybe, if you’re lucky, rib tips. The long ends are from the thin, lean, bony front part of the rack (think about the area beneath your pecs); the short ends are from the thick, meaty, fatty half (think love handles). Rib tips are the burnt edges trimmed off the racks and served to those of us who love smoky, charred, crisp bits of meat. Menus will list different prices for long and short ends, as most people are willing to pay a couple of bucks more for the short ends. As someone who loves gnawing on bones, I’m happy to pay less for my favorite cut.

The thinly sliced brisket was amazingly tender.

This time, I was tempted by assurances from my sister’s husband that the beef was dream-worthy. I usually don’t order brisket when I’m out — too many disappointments and a girl learns — but brother-in-laws are the natural experts of barbecue, so I went with a combo plate of ribs and brisket. My sister, thankfully, ordered the pork sandwich; I’d get to taste some of that, too.

Around here, pulled pork isn’t topped with cole slaw. Their spicy slaw, though, is a must-try from the sides menu. I was also lovin’ the fries: moist and fluffy inside, crisp and dry outside.

Like many newer barbecue places, puns proliferate, T-shirts are for sale, and sauces come wrapped in gift boxes ready to be shipped anywhere in the world. But unlike many places old and new, at Oklahoma Joe’s both the meat and the sauce hold up to the test of taste.

Sauce on the table isn’t really necessary, Oklahoma Joe’s meat is that good, but you can add a squirt of their “Night of the Living Sauce” if you like some extra kick in your barbecue.

I couldn’t finish the ribs or the brisket, so I went back to the counter to ask for a to-go box. While I was standing there I managed to order half a chicken, a quart of smoky gumbo, some baked beans and another helping of that spicy slaw.

I’m planning to live it up while my parents were away.

Back at my parents’ house, onion blossoms remind me of the garden.

Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ
3002 West 47th
Kansas City, KS 66103
(913) 722-3366

At last week’s Maker Faire I ran into a few of my favorite food artisans. In place of single-estate chocolate or the minute’s freshest fruit, though, their ingredients were felt and yarn, circuit boards and LEDs.

What happens when you fold together San Francisco’s cult of craft with its love of all things sweet or savory? And what if you spice it up with a dash of Silicon Valley’s geeky, cheeky inventiveness and a generous dose of Burning Man bravado? You get a robot who mixes cocktails and you get the Dorkbake Challenge, where inventors present their original designs for working ovens heated with a 100-watt lightbulb.

It was a fun, unexpected reminder of how much our taste buds spark our creative cortex. Here are just a few highlights…

Cupcake Cars

Zipping around the San Mateo Fairgrounds were big, bright cupcakes. A double-take confirmed that they were, indeed, giant sweet confections rolling on wheels with one, sometimes two, human occupants. They were capable of turning on a dime and generating smiles wherever they appeared. Surely the best use of old, motorized wheelchairs and fuzzy fabric ever.

How to travel in sweet style.

There were a couple of muffin mobiles thrown in for good measure, but even the antioxidant-rich blueberries couldn’t compete with chocolate or pink frosting.

Don’t forget the extra frosting and sprinkles for protecting your noggin!

If you’ve been to Black Rock City in recent years, then you already know about Cupcake Corners. Solar-powered cupcake cars are certainly my own preferred mode of transport across desert (dessert?) flats.

SweetMeats SuperSavor

I’ve had my eye on this special meat purveyor for a long time, so I was glad to see their unique pillow cuts on display. Who knew meat could be so squeezable?

A big, plushy ham, bone still in and rind neatly scored.

Introduced in person to their new protein, I fell hard for a block of sesame-sprinkled tofu. Bean curd appears in my own fridge much more often than a full ham, so I was glad to see the veggie offering.

I was also lucky enough to snag the last shrinky-dink charm bracelet, complete with steak, ham AND pork chop.

Moveable Feast

At the Maker Workbench, the Exploratorium and London-based Cabaret Mechanical Theatre joined forces to give kids and kids-at-heart a chance to build edible automata. Learning how gears, levers and pulleys work becomes a lot easier when food is involved. (If only my high school physics teacher had appealed as successfully to my stomach as well as my brain!)

Cookies, pasta, pretzels, Twizzlers and, of course, a bagel become a starchy display of erupting lava.

NifNaks

Nifer Fahrion has gathered an entire family of cute, quirky “Shroommates.” Each little character, culled from real-world fungi, has a distinct personality that she’s conveyed impressively well with bits of felt, from the easily startled Morley Morel to red-topped Mr. Muscaria, who “likes to hang out with all the fairies that crowd in Dolores Park.” There are little ’shrooms for ear lobes or cell phones, bigger ones for sprouting on desktops or bookcases. Cherries, bees, acorn, and happy vanilla ice cream cones are also well represented.

Impish and mischievous, Shorty Shiitake hides out in the grass.