People hate Padma Lakshmi. I learned this researching her after watching her Hulu food show, "Taste the Nation." I highly recommend it. Padma travels across the nation to focus on specific cultures and the food they eat. Sure, she goes to El Paso for Mexican, in an episode entitled "Burritos at the Border," but she gives context to the location and...did you really know about the Gullah Geechee in South Carolina? Or that Paterson, New Jersey is a hotbed of Peruvian cuisine? There are ten episodes, you can see the locations and cuisines here: bit.ly/3xUqes6
Now I don't remember the last time I watched cable, whether it be network, basic or pay cable. I only watch streaming shows. Therefore, I had no idea who Padma Lakshmi was. But I found out she was the star of another cooking show and she'd been married to Salman Rushdie, who'd gone on record that she was a narcissistic self-promoter who needed to be in the public eye, who needed to be famous. So if I wrote about Lakshmi, I'd probably hear from the haters, and they're everywhere, complaining she's posting cooking photos to Instagram sans bra and the rest of my readers, like myself previously, would have no idea who she was.
Then again, I didn't write when I was hot, when I was excited, before I did all my research. You see there's a moment when you feel it, and then it passes. You're watching something, into it, and you want to tell everybody, and then you're over it and on to the next thing.
Which in my case was cooking shows on Netflix.
I watched a bit of "The Chef Show," because who doesn't like Jon Favreau? But the stories were too belabored, I couldn't get into them.
And then there was all this hype about "High on the Hog," so I checked it out and it was utterly fascinating going to Africa, not only seeing the roots of the food, but that the nations are not as backward as we perceive. But venerated writer Stephen Satterfield had absolutely no on screen charisma, I mean this is television, Satterfield seemed nice, but he was boring and not dynamic, I couldn't continue.
And then I found "Fresh, Fried & Crispy."
Fried food. Does anything taste better? My friend Jeff e-mailed me about Dave's Hot Chicken, told me I had to go, and if you look at the picture, you'll get an impression: www.daveshotchicken.com Golden brown chicken, fries, artery cloggers. I lived on this stuff growing up. But now? Now I know better, I know I'm not gonna live forever, and I might as well give myself good odds, so I eat fried food very rarely, but I still love it, my mouth still waters, ah, for some nice fried oysters or clams.
So I'm watching "Fresh, Fried & Crispy" and I've never heard of the host, Daym. I figured his name was like "Damn, that's good," but in truth it's short for "Daymon." In the middle of the first episode, he tells his story. Daym started out as a YouTube food blogger. He'd review fast food while eating it in his car. He said he had one clip with ten million views, I decided to look it up. And then I realized Daym's secret to success, his reactions! Daym wasn't analyzing the food as much as ENJOYING IT! His reactions were infectious. And he ended up with a TV show on the Travel Channel and now he's got a Netflix show. Once again, I'd never heard of this guy. But I know how long a road it is to TV stardom, to getting a Netflix series. Hell, Seth Rogen's a bona fide movie star and he says it takes six to seven years for him to put up a movie.
So Daym's in St. Louis. Why? I don't know. And he's eating fried ravioli. Now that sounds good, doesn't it? Turns out it's a St. Louis specialty.
And then Daym goes to a vegan restaurant, he's anything but a vegan, he's a beefy Black guy, but the chef/owner of the establishment, also a person of color, tells how she makes this food and damn if it didn't look good, especially the fake chicken.
But then Daym drove out to the hinterlands. It seemed like a farm. But I couldn't understand the connection. You had a family, two generations, the parents and the son and his wife, and...was this just gonna be a home-cooked meal?
But it turned out the son had a restaurant in town. And he also had a very good-looking wife. Live in L.A. long enough and you think everybody outside the metropolis is backward and obese, but this is not true.
Anyway, the son, Rick Lewis, has this restaurant Grace Meat + Three, which is a southern thing, if you've ever been to Nashville, and his specialty is fried bologna.
Does anybody even admit to eating bologna?
Certainly not that Oscar Mayer prepackaged dreck. You'll eat that when you're in your single digits, when they think you'll eat anything, but you reach a certain age and you say NO MORE! As far as Spam...we never had it in our house, but I heard the bad words.
But bologna was not a bad word in our house growing up. Funny, it was supplanted by salami by time I hit my teens. Why is that, is bologna for kids and salami for adults? And I've eaten plenty of salami over the past decades, but bologna?
But when I was five, fried bologna was a treat.
We lived in a split-level, with the tiniest of kitchens. Eventually, in 1962, we added an addition, a large room which included a dining table, couch, piano and TV set, but as for the kitchen? It was till tiny. But when I was growing up, it was even worse, because included in this kitchen was a dining area! Kind of like a booth at a diner.
Anyway, when I was a kid I would eat sunny side up eggs. Now I won't touch eggs at all, in any form, forget it. I mean if you use it as an ingredient in something else, that's fine, but if it tastes like egg? No way! And I remember my mother making said eggs, and I also remember her making fried bologna.
I don't remember there being a cutting board, those seemed to arrive in the sixties, back in the fifties I think you just sliced on the kitchen counter, as if the linoleum or plastic or whatever it was was impenetrable, a breakthrough. Funny how we've gone backward. In the sixties the great leap forward was frozen vegetables in a ready to cook plastic bag, better than cans! You had this pouch of frozen vegetables you boiled in water and voila, you cut the bag and served it! This was when time-saving was of the essence, long before the cooking revolution, when the goal was still to do less work. Then again, I don't know how my mother put a meal on the table every night. Well, not every night. Saturday my parents went out and we got hot dogs and hamburgers from the stand, and Sunday we oftentimes went out, usually for Chinese or pizza, occasionally to the Pepper Mill in Westport, a steak place. And my mother never ever made breakfast. And certainly didn't make us lunch, we were forced to eat the food in the cafeteria, we begged her to make us sandwiches, but she never would, so the truth is she had to cook five nights a week. Then again, I still don't know how to cook!
And my most treasured food memory from those early years was sitting at the kids' table in the playroom watching "The Mickey Mouse Club" while eating noodles with butter, something that disappeared from the menu shortly thereafter, I think they only let little kids eat that.
And the fried bologna.
Now the truth is when I got my first apartment, in 1976, my mother sent me some kitchen stuff. And included was the pan she fried the bologna in. I got so nostalgic, I never ever used it, but I only threw it out two years ago, it was a connection to my youth. It was small, it could fit about four pieces of Hebrew National bologna at a time, and it certainly wasn't cast iron, we never had a cast iron frying pan at home, never ever!
So first Daym watches Rick make the bologna. It's kinda like those TV shows about the making of hot dogs, once you've seen it, you can't eat them. Unless they're skinless and all meat. Nothing worse than a bad hot dog. The Dodger Dog? Nearly inedible! But there's no accounting for the tastes of the hoi polloi. Then again, Daym is lifting people up from the bottom, he's meeting them where they live, in the fried food zone.
So Rick makes this giant bologna and then ages it and ultimately cuts off a giant slice to fry.
And as it sits in the pan starting to sizzle I can smell it, all the way sixty plus years back. My mother frying up that bologna. It would start to curl... Hell, we're Jewish, we overcook EVERYTHING! Then again, I like things just shy of burned, I mean a medium-rare ribeye with char on the outside? Then again, the char'll give you cancer. Then again, we did so much back then that we subsequently learned gave us cancer. WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING SUNTAN LOTION!
And I'm watching the TV screen mesmerized. And I almost jump up to write about it, but this was only the first episode of the series, did I really want to draw people's attention to it?
And then I did more research. Reviews were not that fantastic. Then again, it was the highbrows weighing in, and highbrows won't even eat fried food, they're the people who say they've never ever eaten at McDonald's, whereas I have so many times that I don't even have to buy the burger, I can just think about it and taste it.
And I'm wondering exactly what skill, what expertise Daym is bringing to the table. I mean Guy Fieri started out in restaurants, he can go on about the ingredients, the construction, whereas Daym worked at Wal-Mart and CarMax, not known for their culinary offerings. So why exactly was I hooked by this show?
Well, Daym is likable, but it's not like he's a gabber, he's not talking endlessly, it's not like he demonstrates endless personality. I ultimately realized...IT'S THE FOOD!
The truth is America is the land of fast food. It was invented here. And now, more than ever, people here eat it. Sure, there are fast casual outfits, but they're not fast enough! We want to get it, eat it, and be done!
And in the second episode Daym is eating freshly caught fried shrimp in a Po-Boy at Hudson's Seafood House, on the water in Hilton Head and...
The breakout feature in "Fresh, Fried & Crispy," the piece-de-resistance, is the immersive frying camera. Yes, instead of an underwater camera, they've got an under oil camera, so you can see the food cook, as they delineate the composition of the oil, the heat and the time cooked.
And then Daym goes to Treylor Park in Savannah. Unlike salt of the earth Katherine cooking at Hudson's, the proprietor of Treylor Park cooked in New York, and then came back home to create his specialty...the Treylor Park Pot Pie. Which is actually a chicken pot pie chimichanga! They fry that sucker up and... Well, first I'd like a Dark Shark fried peach for...a peach cobbler on a stick, sometimes dessert needs to come first. Or maybe I'll just settle for the grilled apple pie with chicken sandwich at Treylor's.
These are normal people taking pride in their efforts to reach the culinary limits of...fried food. You worry about the lifespan of all these people, not only Daym, but the rest of the beings who eat this food. Maybe this is a contributing factor to the ever-lowering age of death in the U.S. of A. Then again, what is life about?
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