Deep End Dining 2.0 (beta!)

Off Topic. Jenny Wins Emmy! Eddie Brags on Blog.

The paparazzi just won't leave us be! It's hard out there for a soap star and a food writer.

Only a few months on her first real job, playing the edgy Gwen Norbeck on the daytime drama As The World Turns, and my pal Jen Landon gets nominated for a Daytime Emmy in the "Outstanding Younger Actress In A Drama Series" category. That was more than enough reason for her family and friends to bust out the Hangar One and martini glasses. But when she actually won the Emmy, well, just booze wasn't going to cut it. What do you eat when you really want to show exuberance and celebrate? Greek food, of course! Opa!! So we got some from Malibu's famous Taverna Tony Greek Restaruant. Tony makes roast baby lamb that even Zeus would die for. (That is, if Immortals could actually die.)

It was a joyous celebration suitable for an Emmy winner. Congratulations, Jen! Your future is full of wonderful possibilities! Next, the Grammys and the Oscar!

Haute Cuisine: Celebrity Placenta. Only in Hollywood!

Tom, Me and Katie...and Katie's placenta.

Recently Tom Cruise gave us another reason to believe that he’s going off the deep end (pun intended-ish). Either that or he’s achieving the Scientology level of contacting the Mother Ship. Cruise mentioned in an interview with Diane Sawyer, perhaps glibly, that he planned on eating fiancée Katie Holmes’ postpartum placenta and umbilical cord. This bit of menu planning rocked the entire internet. However, we would later find out that Cruise was pulling our legs all along and that unreliable news sources reported the comment as fact and left out the jokey part.

For the record, I’m here to announce that I would’ve happily eaten Katie Holmes’ placenta and umbilical cord if cooked right. And, unlike her fiancé, I’m not joking. It’s not like it’s never been done before. Certain cultures do it once in a while. The practice of eating placenta is called placentophagy, and certain female wild animals do it immediately upon giving birth to their young and vulnerable ones. The animals do it partly to replenish vital nutrients after a major loss of blood and also to keep predators from getting too excited by the excess blood and guts.

If I were a betting man, I would bet the farm that my peoples, the Chinese, once again had this nasty niche of culinary craziness cornered. I would’ve lost the farm. Astonishingly, this placentophagy is largely advocated in America and Europe. In fact, these Western proponents believe that women who eat their placenta can prevent postpartum depression and other pregnancy complications.

Skeptical? Too good to be true, you say. I understand and I can help. What ailment really kills you? Migraines? Nothing has worked so far, you claim.

Here, eat this placenta. What? Migraine gone? Already? But you haven't even taken a bite.

There you have it. The Power of Placenta: Makes the blind see and the cripple walk again.

Had my offer to procure Ms. Holmes’ postpartum flotsam been accepted, I’m certain the offers from celebrity chefs to cook 'em up would be many. Truth be told, my two picks for the Iron Chef celebrity placenta battle would be Mario Batali vs. Fergus Henderson, the organ meat miracle workers. Unfortunately, this all lives in freaky food fantasyland now. Katie already gave birth to her tomkitten, Suri. By now Katie has moved on to yummy colostrum and baby spit-up. Her placenta and umbilical cord have long been disposed of or have been banked for cord blood. Or they were actually eaten by Tom and pal John Travolta. Or maybe the parts were frozen for a later meal. Or there never were postpartum placenta and umbilical cord. I mean, this was a highly secretive and silent birth. Does anyone remember the bizarre “How big (or small) will Katie’s belly be this week?” Can the belly really get smaller the further along the pregnant woman gets? Was she ever really preggers? Regardless, Katie’s placenta and umbi-cord have been 86’d from the menu.

It’s a shame. I even had a recipe ready: Katie’s Kung-Pao Placenta. It’s an easy stir-fry with lots of garlic, some peanuts, chestnuts, fiery chilis, soy sauce, sherry, and sesame oil. Mmmm, that sounds fragrant. There are many other ways of preparing placenta, but just keep in mind that it’s sort of a spongy organ meat like liver or heart so cook accordingly. And this meat, for a change, don’t taste like chicken. The flavor is more like beef.

This isn’t the first time I contemplated placentophagy. When my wife Diane was in labor, I joked with her about eating her placenta. One of the registered nurses overheard me, and without missing a beat, she recommended stir-frying the placenta with garlic and soy sauce. Our RN was Chinese. Diane and I laughed and laughed. Then Diane’s contractions came quicker and it was back to the business of delivering a baby. But I was still curious and hungry.

Well, Katie, hopefully this won’t be your last baby. And if Tom won’t eat your placenta again next time, I will. I’m serious. We can work out the messy details when the time comes.

On the other hand, I may not have to wait for Katie. I mean, c’mon, this is Hollywood. This town is full of knocked-up stars in their third-trimester bursting at the seams. Angelina Jolie instantly comes to mind. I have a feeling she might even have a tastier placenta. Delicious and salacious.

Yum, yum, gimme some.

Ms. Jolie may be the Tomb Raider, but this Deep End Diner would happily be her womb raider. The garlic is chopped and ready.

(VOTE! Whose placenta would you eat? Katie's or Angelina's?)

It's Alive! Drunken Shrimp & Lobster Sashimi with Ben Adair on KPCC's "Pacific Drift". Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 8pm PST. 89.3 FM.

Some shrimp just can't seem to handle their liquor.

Most people know that you shouldn't get your dog high. Now, you'll learn why you probably shouldn't get your shrimp drunk. Or maybe you should.

Also, you think you've had really fresh lobster just because your waiter brought it out live to show you right before the chef cooked it? Think again. You probably never had lobster this fresh!

"Pacific Drift's" host, Ben Adair, and I dive into the Deep End once again. This time we chew and ruminate on really, really, really, and I mean, really fresh seafood: drunken shrimp and lobster sashimi.

In most of Southern California, tune in to "Pacific Drift" on KPCC 89.3 FM, Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 8pm Pacific Standard Time.

You can also listen via KPCC's website if you are not in Southern California. Once at the website, click the "listen live" button.

Or listen to an archived edition (when available).

Or podcast the show if you missed it. Thanks for listening!

There Are Others. The 7th Annual Weird Food Fest. Van Nuys, CA.

Vis-à-vis with dinner. Literally.

Back in the very lean ramen days of college, one of the most anticipated weeks in the new school term was the “Hello Lunch” week. This was the blessed week when free food was bountiful and flowing like the famous Thanksgiving cornucopia with its horn spilling forth fruit. Almost every club or organization with a semblance of a budget would at minimum offer a free cheese pizza slice and a cup of caffeinated drink. The more lavish Hello Lunch spreads rolled out gherkin garnished meat and cheese platters where you could build a custom sandwich, an exotic Greek salad (usually at Fraternity luncheons), a box of glazed donuts and Doritos. But, of course, as we all know well, there is no such thing as a free Hello Lunch. No way. You will pay. And the price is steep. Even before you get to cozy up to your plate of free calories, you’ll be accosted by one of the lunch’s hosts who will be your uninvited meal companion and very own club membership marketing assault machine.

The club’s objective at the Hello Lunch is to recruit and recoup; that is, to recruit lots of new members and to recoup the Hello Lunch expenses with new membership fees.

My objective was, however, exactly opposite: to eat, leave and not join. The old “dine and dash” routine without the law breaking. After all, there’s no contract between the club and the eater that states if the eater ingests any of the chow, then the eater must join the club. Don’t underestimate the Hello Lunch though. Its organizers are prepared for the likes of me. Whenever I went into a Hello Lunch I’d be greeted by many of the current members who, with fanged grins, encouraged me to partake in their bounty. At the same time they are assigning themselves a target to recruit. It’s a classic parasite and host relationship: They feed you and you help them to survive.

Now, a little strategy.

One way to discourage Hello Lunch harassment is to simply chew with your mouth open and speak with your mouth full. This technique works 90 per cent of the time. For the other ten percent I quote Groucho Marx who famously said “I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” I say this as clearly as possible with my mouth full. I then get up from my seat, grab a slice of pizza to go and look for the next free lunch to say “hello” to.

Since those years, I’ve not been interested in any clubs other than the kind that makes me wait in a long line out in the freezing cold while a clipboard wielding jerk clad in the latest D&G handpicks those worthy to enter. Oddly, I want in on a club that probably doesn’t want me.

But then there’s this other group. It’s a sort of kinky culinary collective who call themselves the “Weird Food Fest.” Once a year, a relatively intimate group of about seven get together to eat. Their gathering may be small but their passion for food is big. To be specific, this group is really into food that is exotic, weird, uncommon, an acquired taste, extremely foreign or highly indigenous. Whatever label you want to place on it, it’s food that you won’t soon forget.

On the buffet, silkworm pupae...

...laver bread...

...thousand year-old egg...

...fermented papaya.

Scott Levi Ahlberg, one of the principals of this gathering, explains, “We loosely define weird food as anything that the typical American would likely find odd or disgusting, but that someone somewhere on this planet would eat and consider normal. So of course it's subjective. Personally I think some of the processed food found at the average supermarket is pretty weird and disgusting but that's just my subjective bias.”

Again, this gathering may be small but its ambitions are not; to wit this annual get-together calls itself the “Weird Food Fest”. A true festival it is far from but the bones are there. This accidental freaky feast began in December 1999 at the house of one of Ahlberg’s friends. The first ever Weird Food Fest was a humble affair which had its participants sample ketchup flavored chips, Limburger cheese and Indian pickled mango.

If you attended the most recent 7th Annual Weird Food Fest, you would’ve found yourself at a typical San Fernando Valley condominium in one of the many impersonal, stuccoed citadels on the Valley floor. There is perhaps nothing less exotic. But inside this non-descript domicile you may be transported by your palate to distant locales like Wales, Seoul, Stockholm, Shanghai and even Yerevan, Armenia - as delectably far from Van Nuys as possible.

The Breakfast Club this isn’t. Here you’d avail your appetite to foods such as fermented papaya, surströmming, silkworm pupae, lamb’s testicles, pork bung and many others. Some of the choices are more daunting than delicious. All of them are not typical of your standard American potluck. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, this event is a potluck. Everyone is expected to bring edible exotica. That’s what makes this gathering unpredictable and fun, maybe frightening. If you’ll indulge me, it also reveals each participants degree of Deep End Dining. For example, the attorney might bring shark’s fin soup. The soccer coach dishes up pig’s trotters. The grad student offers durian ice-cream for dessert. There is no pre-fixed anything here. Just show up, bring something interesting and taste everything.

What’s this?

Beef pizzle.

Fo’ shizzle?

Yep. Take a bite.

Mm-mmm, what exactly is pizzle?

Bull penis. My bad.

Beef pizzle aka bull penis.

Relax. It’s not going to kill you. Nothing at the Weird Food Fest will kill you. And, as everyone knows, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. Especially if you eat lamb’s testicles. Make you strong. Make you love long time.

Lots of heart.

There’s nothing deadly at the Fest only because nobody has introduced live octopus or fugu to this funky bunch yet. But I have a feeling that it’s only a matter of time before somebody does. Maybe I will.

GQ’s restaurant critic Alan Richman has been trying desperately to find a place that serves assholes. The “Weird Food Fest” might be just what he’s looking for. And I mean that in a good way. Even a delicious way.

"Do you serve assholes here?" Pork bung.

It looks like I may have actually found the perfect group for me. They’re local. They’re interesting people. They enjoy exploring the edge of the gastronomic world. Now if only they’d refuse to have me as a member, I may just find them irresistible.