Eat Me: I ate a Jewboy at Shopsin's

After my long wrangle with Kenny Shopsin's fascinating and problematic Eat Me last fall, I could not come to New York without visiting his infamous diner. I was hard on the book, and I'm not going to recant. But I see it all a little differently having now enjoyed the full, strange Shopsin's experience.

The restaurant is crammed in the corner of the grimy Essex Market -- a place to come if you ever need pigeon peas or smoked pig tails -- on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Shopsin is notorious for shouting at customers and evicting them from his restaurant for talking on cell phones or if he doesn't like their looks. I'm sorry to report that nothing like this happened to me today, except of course I'm not sorry at all. I would have died of embarrassment.

One of Shopsin's sons seated us and while he used the word "fuckin'" three times in a single sentence, he did so in a friendly way. Kenny S. was hulking and frowning in the background, lumbering slowly between a chair and the kitchen, talking to various customers who appeared to be his friends. A grizzled and morose-looking mountain of a man in a dirty t-shirt and suspenders. I think I got as close to him as I needed. 

We ordered:

-a Jewboy sandwich consisting of beef, grilled onions, and cheese on a soft Kaiser roll

-fried pickles

-macaroni and cheese pancakes, which come with both hot sauce and maple syrup.

Everything was intensely delicious, the kind of food that you continue eating even after you've had to unbutton your skirt. The place itself is definitely funky, but also comfortable, personal, rather wonderful. The woman next to us pulled out a cell phone and talked for a few minutes which made crazy with anxiety, but no one seemed to care. 

Sadly, very little that I cooked from Shopsin's book was delicious; some of it was vile. And Shopsin's crabby descriptions often make his restaurant sound like a hostile little fiefdom, a place you visit at the risk of being publicly humiliated because you're wearing the wrong sweater. 

Several people disagreed with my negative assessment of Eat Me, but I realize now that all of them had actually been to the restaurant, which completely changes how you read the book. But shouldn't a book hold up on its own? I may have been wrong about Shopsin as a phenomenon, but I am more convinced than ever that I was right about his book.

Eat Me: The Earnest Summation

Entertaining, it certainly is. Also, cantankerous, funny, smart, and original. The "forget-all-rules" approach to cooking is right-on, and the brazenly ugly photography a relief in a world of gauzy food porn. I highly recommend Kenny Shopsin's Eat Me.

But when you spend hours and hours cooking from a book, you make some interesting discoveries. In the last couple of weeks I've found that I'm actively hostile to Shopsin, a dynamic that has made it hard for me to fully embrace either his food or his odd, brilliant book.

What went wrong between Shopsin and me? I offer two theories that probably say as much about me as they do about him.

1. Kenny Shopsin is skeevy. I'm not solidly behind this hypothesis, just throwing it out there as a possible subconscious influence. I don't really enjoy hearing about anyone's sex life, and Shopsin, who could play the father of a fat kid in a Judd Apatow movie, is no exception. Do I want to imagine him masturbating? God no, but he makes allusions. Do I want to think about his orgasms? No, but again. And then there's the raw sausage picture. If you have the book, you know what I'm talking about. Keep it out of my kitchen, dude! 

I thought the off-color stuff was thoroughly amusing when I first read Eat Me some months ago. But, as I've said, you develop a deeper relationship when you're cooking from a book night after night, and though I never consciously recoiled, I'm not sure I'm down with the looking-up-skirts remarks.

2. Kenny Shopsin is a jerk. While I admire candor and eccentricity, you can be candid and eccentric without being uncivil. And yes, I think it is uncivil to kick people out of your restaurant because you don't like the way they look. (Shopsin: "We can usually tell if someone is going to work out the minute he or she walks through the door -- or even sooner.") I have come to imagine Shopsin's diner as a grimy little fiefdom where he makes outlandish unwritten rules, yells at people who innocently break them, then smugly boasts about it.

I don't enjoy being humiliated and I don't enjoy watching others humiliated, whether or not they deserve it. Borat, for instance, made my skin crawl. Shopsin comes off as a small-time tyrant who relishes power and humiliation then tries to pretend it's all about values. 

I could be completely wrong -- Shopsin might be a lovely guy -- but this is my impression based on the evidence I have to go on. 

Alright, now the food.

I made 26 recipes out of Eat Me:

Worth the price of the book -- 2 (lemon ricotta pancakes, egg cream)

Great: 4

Good: 10

So-so: 6

Flat-out bad 4

Impressive tally, given how negative some of my writeups were. Clearly, it's about so much more than food. Fascinating experience.

 

Eat Me: Shopsin Breakfasts

I know, I know, we're done with this whole dreary Shopsin's business already, but this one comes in under the wire. I almost forgot about all the Eat Me breakfasts I'd cooked. Nothing even borderline repulsive here, so carry on without fear. Sadly, we never got around to the mac n' cheese pancakes, though I have heard they are excellent.

1. Crepes. Or "crepes," as they're actually flour tortillas dipped in a mixture of egg, cream, and vanilla. Imagine tortilla french toast. Or maybe better not. Shopsin writes: "I have had several French customers tell me that mine are the best crepes they have had outside of France." I think those customers were just sucking up to the scary New York guy. You could easily convince people that these are real crepes, especially if you loaded them up with fillings, but served with just cinnamon sugar they have a distinct chewiness that brings to mind, I don't know, a flour tortilla.

2. Slutty cakes. Already written about these, though I was perhaps prematurely dismissive. Both Isabel and I found ourselves craving Shopsin's odd peanut butter/pumpkin hot cakes later that day. 

3. Ho Cakes. Why "ho cakes?" Just general Shopsin-style smutty humor? I know it's a play on hoecakes, but why? To make ho cakes you cut up caramel candies and put one piece in the soft side of the pancake as it cooks along with some pine nuts. Flip and cook until done. Made as directed we found the caramel too isolated in the middle of each hot cake and in subsequent batches scattered tinier bits of candy throughout. Better! Still, not worth buying a bag of caramels just to make.

4. Lemon Ricotta Pancakes. Here's Kenny: "My editor, Peter Gethers, insisted on only one thing when he asked me to write this book: that I include the recipe for these pancakes." Thank-you Peter Gethers. A moment of silence for the lemon ricotta pancakes, which are airy, tangy, delicate, and great.

5. Bread Pudding french toast. See photo at top. Cool way to use up stale baguette. Cut it into chunks, macerate in eggs and cream (or less fattening dairy product of choice) then dump the whole mess into a skillet of butter and fry until golden. Delicious.

6. Pumpkin pancakes. Bright orange batter that smells just like pie and is sitting in a bowl on the counter waiting for everyone else in my house to get up. 

Eat Me: Wrapping up

I have disastrous chemistry with Kenny Shopsin and the more time I spend with Eat Me, the more hostile I become. I don't collect cookbooks because I love to hate them, I collect cookbooks because I love them and I want to find more to love, not more to mock. So I'm done with my curious Shopsin antipathy project.

But before the final write-up, here's a different perspective from Melvil Dewey, who has had happier experiences cooking with Kenny. His triumphs include the so-called Auntie Scramble (photo above by Joseph T. Smoyer) as well as:

French Toast

I've always felt that French toast (or Freedom Toast, as I will continue to call it until January 20 out of deference to our commander-in-chief) is one of the things you can always safely order in a restaurant, no matter how bad the place may be. It's hard to ruin it, and even the worst version of it is pretty good. That said, Kenny Shopsin's version is superb. I was feeling guilty about tweaking his chili mac, so on this recipe I followed his instructions to the letter--even using a pizza cutter to halve the slices.

Well, almost to the letter: I couldn't find Fox's vanilla syrup in the grocery store, so I substituted Torani syrup. Shopsin's version of French toast varies from others I've made in that it doesn't include any cinnamon, and the ratio of eggs to milk (or cream) is much higher in Shopsin's. I've been using Mark Bittman's recipe for the past 10 years or so, and it calls for two eggs to one cup of milk; Shopsin calls for six eggs to a quarter-cup of cream. So, as you would guess, the "batter" for Shopsin's French toast is much, much thicker and more eggy. The two children who tried it loved it, and demanded (somewhat politely) that I make it again today. In fact, since we had a double sleepover last night, we ended up with five little kids eating breakfast, and ALL of them liked it. A miracle.

Patsy's Cashew Chicken (a second opinion)

It has come to this: Kenny Shopsin is like a third person in the Dewey marriage these days, and all culinary sins are laid at his feet. For example: Today I made a quick macaroni and cheese from scratch for Michael's lunch. Having no crackers or bread crumbs, and feeling a bit more free-wheeling in the kitchen since reading Shopsin's cookbook, I instead crushed up some parmesan Goldfish crackers and put those on the dish. Michael was displeased and complained to his mother, who said, "Oh, it's because Daddy's obsessed with making Kenny Shopsin's recipes." I had to clear Shopsin of any involvement.

Tipsy Baker's review of Patsy's Cashew Chicken from Eat Me made me nervous, but I had already bought the ingredients. So I decided to make a half-recipe of Shopsin's and a half-recipe of Nancie McDermott's "Chicken with Cashews" from her Quick and Easy Chinese. Dueling cashew chickens. Everyone loved both, but in the voting Shopsin's was the top choice of three diners (me, Ms. Dewey, and Henry), while Joseph and Michael chose McDermott's. The salient differences between the two dishes: Shopsin's chicken is dredged in flour and gets only soy sauce, lemon juice, scallions, and chicken broth as additions; McDermott's dish includes celery, garlic, and ginger, as well as a sauce of sherry, soy sauce, sugar, and corn starch. I thought both were delicious, and Ms. Dewey exclaimed, "Let's have this for Thanksgiving!" But the ideal dish would combine the two: the flour coating from Shopsin with the sauce from McDermott, and maybe some additional sugar. I'm convinced that the secret ingredient in most of the Chinese dishes I like (as interpreted in the U.S.)--Kung Pao chicken, crispy beef, sesame noodles-- is an assload of sugar, and neither of these dishes has enough.

Crazy talk on that cashew chicken, Melvil. Are you serious? A recipe tally tomorrow, then it's a wrap.

Eat Me: Kicked out of Shopsin's

I'd been feeling sheepish about harshing on Kenny Shopsin's more disgusting recipes. No longer. 

Here's Calvin Trillin's "isn't New York full of hilarious eccentrics" take on Shopsin's. And here's an email a friend sent over the weekend after he heard I was interested in the restaurant: 

When a friend moved to L.A. for three months, he asked me to housesit his place in the West Village. Or, rather, he allowed me to house-sit because I actually didn't have a place to live that year. I had bounced around cat-sitting here for a few months, cat-sitting there for a few months. 

He lived on Carmine Street, right next to Shopsin's. I literally had to walk downstairs, take a left, and walk 10 feet. So, one day, my father decided to drop by and take me out to brunch. It's not something he normally did, but he had a son who lived in the Village, so he clamped down and did it. 

We agreed on Shopsin's. I told him while we waited in the line that always appeared on weekends that Shopsin's was a special place. They had a very large menu. They didn't abide talking on cell phones and the wait staff was pretty ornery. He seemed -- seemed -- to understand this. 

The two of us are finally allowed entrance. I say it this way because the waiters would lock the door between letting people in. The restaurant was full. A table would get up to go. A new table would be seated, and the door would be locked. My father and I get in and we're seated at this one table away from the main dining room. I didn't mind because I was starving. But for some reason my father thought it wasn't good enough for him. So he asked, nicely, "Hey, is there a way we could get a table over there?"

The waiter turned to him and said, "Hey, listen, you see that line of people out there? They all want to eat in here. So if you don't want to sit here, then get the fuck out and I'll let one of them take the table. 

My father's a correction officer. A prison guard. He worked on Riker's Island for 20 years, so he's not used to taking shit. Of course, then, he responded, "What the fuck? I was just asking a question. You don't have to be an asshole. 

I literally -- literally -- pulled my hat down over my eyes and tried to calm the situation down. It didn't work. 

"Did you just call me an asshole."

"Yeah, you're being an asshole. If you can't seat us over there, that's fine. I was just asking a question.

"You know what, fuck you."

"Fuck me? Fuck you! This is how you treat your customers, motherfucker?

And on and on. The waiter had the last word. "Get the fuck out of my place now. Get the FUCK out." He unlocked the door. I slunk out. My father strutted out, and we ended up going to some shitty breakfast place down the block. He was stunned that I was angry at him, that I wasn't defending him against the asshole waiter. All I could say was, "Dad, I told you the staff was pretty ornery. . ."

Over the next few months, I only went one other time. I was afraid they'd recognize me and kick me out again. So I waited until I had a good amount of facial hair, until I was so flu-ridden that I was sweaty and dumpy and not looking at all like myself. Then I went back. And the food was delicious. 

I fucking hate the Shopsin family.

Eat Me: Gloppy Joe

Couldn't do it, couldn't subject you to a picture of Kenny Shopsin's ignoble chili burrito which, however tasty in its thrown-together way, was not a proper burrito. Plus, hideous, at least as executed by me. 

Instead I bring you this handsome photograph of La Taqueria where they make world-beating burritos and know how to wrap them. If you are ever in San Francisco: 2889 Mission Street. Order the carnitas and a cantaloupe drink. 

I'm not sure I have the mental stamina this morning for an essay on culinary integrity, and I realize I'm reversing myself, because while I'm fine with Shopsin dumping sugar in his marinara and omitting chili powder from his chili, I'm deeply offended by his burrito.  

So take this for the personal bete noir that it is: While I admire and enjoy Kenny S., he has no business with burritos, which he uses as a vehicle for his leftover black bean soup and (some would argue) fake chili. He instructs us to "plop" leftovers in a pan with some pre-shredded cheese, heat, then mix with a spatula until "homogeneous." After this: "Pick up half of the glop and lay it down in a line down the center of one of the tortillas."

Glop it is.

Eat Me: Without Chili Powder is it Chili?

Man, that's a beautiful picture. How does she do it.

Melvil Dewey and I both recently made Kenny Shopsin's Chili Mac. Here's Melvil's report: 

Shopsin's recipe for chili is one of the simplest I've ever seen. It's essentially chopped up beef with marinara and, interestingly, some coffee. But I found it, cooked as written, a little bland and overly dominated by the marinara. The recipe notably omits chili powder which I would have thought was as fundamental to the dish as meat is to meatballs (The Joy of Cooking's recipe for chili con carne, for example, is about the same size as Shopsin's and calls for a half cup of chili powder.) Shopsin admits in the headnote, "My chili changes from day to day." I took this as license to add a couple tablespoons of chili powder, as well as some of Shopsin's GA Barbecue Sauce, and the result was much more pleasing. One of my children really wished he could have his chili straight up, without the macaroni, but the other two seemed to enjoy the combination, as did I. I served it with shredded cheddar cheese, avocado slices in lime juice, cilantro, chopped sweet onions, and sour cream as optional additions. Really yummy, and a dish that will be making a return appearance in the Dewey family meal rotation.

Like Melvil, I was shocked by the lack of chili powder. But unlike Melvil, I LOVED the chili exactly the way it was -- sweet, rich, orange, a little oily. Much like the zero-alarm chili my grandmother made. Not sure what the coffee added, though it's fun to imagine it supplied a certain je ne sais quoi.

Melvil, did you make Shopsin's marinara recipe, or use something from a jar? I made his marinara, added the full 2 tablespoons of sugar, and though Marcella would have a stroke, thought it was swell. Why does everything have to be austere and authentic?

"Traditionally, Chili Mac is made without cheese because it is a poor man's dish. . . " Shopsin writes. Screw that. I covered the casserole with shredded cheese, baked until bubbly. Served with salad. 

Verdicts, condensed:

Isabel, picking off cheese: "It's not that flavorful."

Mark: "Elementary school cafeteria food. Mediocre."

Tipsy: Silence. Intently eating.

Owen: Silence. Intently eating.

I asked Owen this morning if Chili Mac is now his favorite dinner. He hesitated, then said no, he prefers steak.

The boy's going to have a shock when we really do start topping everything with breadcrumbs.

Eat Me: Enchiladas

Kenny Shopsin's wife, Eve, died in 2002 and he dedicated Eat Me to her. Here's how Kenny introduces his recipe for pecan chicken wild rice enchiladas:

"This was Eve's favorite dish at Shopsin's. . . . Eve liked to recommend it to her customers so she could eat whatever they left on their plates." (Tipsy emphasis.)

I made these enchiladas last night and they were good. But holy hell, not THAT good. Shopsin is eccentric in ways that can not be faked and apparently Eve was too, though to be fair, she's not here to defend herself. Even if she did eat leftover scraps off customers' plates, would she appreciate Kenny writing about it in his book? Thoughts?

I just asked Isabel to help me describe the enchiladas:

Tipsy: So what did you think of those enchiladas last night?

Isabel: They were fine. 

Tipsy: What did you like about them or not like about them?

Isabel (shrugging): I don't know. 

Here's what they were like: Creamy, a little crunchy, super-rich.

 I also made hamburgers for the kids. Stella polished off her own hamburger and then ate what Owen left on his plate. 

Eat Me: Indefensible Food

There are recipes in Kenny Shopsin's Eat Me that I'm convinced he only included to show off how contrarian and bohemian he is, how unconcerned with all our prissy, bourgeois rules of diet and tastefulness. Go for it, Kenny! I'm never going to make your chicken-fried hamburger, but I admire the spirit.

That said, last night I cooked something only marginally less horrifying: Shopsin's taco fried chicken, which sounded like an exotic twist on chicken fingers, the favorite food of my younger child.

Here's how you make taco fried chicken: Take chicken breast fillets, dip them in a mixture of heavy cream and eggs. Roll them in crushed tortilla chips then deep fry in peanut oil. Serve with a sauce made of equal parts Tabasco and melted butter.

Got that? Poultry dipped in dairy fat, coated in crispy fat, fried in liquid fat, doused in spicy fat. 

Quite tasty, but I hold crass junk food to a higher standard of deliciousness than I do steamed broccoli. I have tried calculating the calories in taco fried chicken and am stumped by how to account for the oil absorbed in frying. Supposedly it is less than one might think, but who knows. So I'm going with the intuition of one who has been dieting since Herman Tarnower recommended dry toast and lamb chops. My guess: A serving of taco-fried chicken is roughly equivalent to one-and-a-half amusement park corn dogs.

Corn dogs are better.

Eat Me: Slutty Cakes

This morning we made "slutties" -- one of the Shopsin family's more amusing pancake fantasias.

"Slutty cakes were my daughter Melinda's idea," Shopsin writes in Eat Me. "She wanted to achieve that dry, crumbly consistency of the peanut butter in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup inside a pancake, and she discovered, surprisingly, that she could get close by mixing canned pumpkin with peanut butter."

Did she? I didn't experience that "dry, crumbly consistency" from my "slutty." What I experienced was a nice pancake with a moist blob of pumpkin-flavored peanut butter in the middle. Or was it peanut butter-flavored pumpkin? 

Eat Me: Tortilla Soup

Just when I thought I had my take on Kenny Shopsin -- admire his philosophy but his recipes are kind of disgusting -- last night I made his chicken tortilla avocado soup.

Shopsin writes at length in Eat Me about his contrarian soup-making technique. He doesn't believe in long-cooking to meld flavors. In brief: "My soups are actually sautes floating in broth." 

Sautes floating in broth. 

Scraps floating in dishwater?

I don't know. I did not find this concept appealing.

I made fresh chicken stock to give Shopsin's soup the best possible start in life. (And I really, really hate making chicken stock, an aversion bordering on repulsion.) 

Then I grilled a couple of chicken breasts, cut them into strips, and added them to a pan in which I'd fried some cabbage, onion, and peppers. Put in some black beans, cilantro and the broth, simmered for a couple of minutes and poured over a bowl of tortilla chips. Adorned with avocado. 

Sensationally delicious. 

Here's Shopsin: "I stole the idea for this soup from the Mexican restaurant at Epcot Center. Surprisingly, the food there was pretty good. I guess you could say that is my specialty: taking pretty good food and stealing it under the assumption that if I were to do a few things differently, it could be really good." 

It is.

Ugly, though.

Eat Me: Why should I?

That's Patsy's cashew chicken from Kenny Shopsin's Eat Me, the most ornery, odd, charming, and disarming cookbook I've read in ages. I love the curmudgeonly voice; I love the unglamorous and unflattering food photography. Most cookbooks, aspirational by nature if not definition, take pains to show us how we should be living and eating and cooking and what darling vintage china we might consider keeping on hand for serving our grass-fed Angus tenderloin with organic Blenheim apricot beurre blanc. 

None of that in Shopsin's book. Again and again, he tells us, with words and pictures: I'm schlubby and slobbish and eccentric and lazy and I favor Aunt Jemimah pancake batter and pre-shredded cheddar cheese and plastic dishes I bought on eBay. Take it or leave it. Now, go figure out how YOU like to live and eat and cook, and do that. 

Excellent advice. 

The recipes? 

There are two ways a recipe can be awful.

1. A recipe can contain an obvious mistake, in which case it is truly a "bad" recipe. Examples: Shopsin's tragically oversalted coleslaw, or the failure to account for the potato in the huevos rancheros, per Melvil Dewey's writeup. 

2. A recipe can make an awful dish. In which case it's technically a "good" recipe for something that one does not want to eat.

 

Patsy's cashew chicken, for instance is the crudest interpretation of a Chinese stir fry I've ever encountered. Chicken + soy sauce + cashews =  stir fry. I'm all for shortcuts, but eating this was like trying to ingest a plate of Kikkoman. 

But I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Patsy's cashew chicken is supposed to taste like. And I believe Shopsin enjoys eating it. Good recipe for what is, in my humble opinion, a crappy dish.

I'm okay with that. Shopsin and I may disagree, but at least we're communicating. 

Eat Me: Huevos Rancheros

Melvil Dewey and his wife have also been working their way through Kenny Shopsin's Eat Me, and Melvil sent this report:

There is an emerging consensus among the adults in our house that while Kenny Shopsin's cookbook is immensely entertaining, his recipes could stand to be more detailed and more carefully vetted. I have to assume one of the problems is that it's challenging to scale recipes down to normal family size when you've been making everything in restaurant size batches for years. Fortunately, Shopsin, like Mark Bittman, gives his readers the freedom to tinker with the recipes as much as they wish, so one can use the recipes in the book as a template or starting point.

First example of the problem (and the solution):

Huevos Rancheros. The end-product of this recipe was delicious (and maybe that's all that should really matter), but the production process (for my wife, who made this dish) was fraught. First, the list of ingredients calls for a diced potato, but the text of the recipe doesn't mention the potato. One can fairly easily figure out what to do with the potato, but this kind of ingredient discontinuity can be disorienting (and occasionally disastrous.) 

Second, the recipe calls for no seasoning at all - not even the obligatory "salt and pepper to taste." I have to assume Shopsin himself would add salt and pepper to the dish. 

Third, Shopsin's method for cooking the eggs separate from everything else in the dish did not turn out well. Ms. Dewey, who (unlike me) has made huevos rancheros before, much prefers the Cook's Illustrated method in which you just crack the eggs into the top of all the other stuff, cover the pan, and let the heat and steam from the other ingredients cook the eggs. After Shopsin's method resulted in a jumble of broken yolks and egg whites arc-welded to the bottom of the frying pan, Ms. Dewey defaulted to the Cook's technique, and everything turned out beautifully. As she summed it up afterwards, "I think Kenny Shopsin probably would benefit from a little Christopher Kimball, and maybe vice-versa."

Eat Me: Okay, I will

I hope you're reading this, Kenny Shopsin. Do you have a Google Alert set up with your name? Awesome. Your coleslaw recipe sucks. A full tablespoon of salt for half a head of cabbage? Are you fucking with us?

I'm not generally a profane person, but 

a. Kenny Shopsin is, and I spent three hours last night rereading his fantastically entertaining book.

b. He ruined my coleslaw.

I halfway rescued the coleslaw by adding more cabbage and gobs more mayonnaise, then moved on to the Gulf Pride sandwiches. (That picture up top? Intentionally ugly a la Eat Me, which is full of grubby snapshots, food-styling courtesy of a chimp. Which I kind of love.)

The Gulf Pride sandwiches involve cheesy garlic bread (incredibly delicious)

topped with spicy shrimp

plus chunks of avocado. Tasty, but not as tasty as my fried-green tomato sandwich. I'm just saying.

But here's the kicker. I had a few big glasses of red wine last night and what with the wine and the supersalty coleslaw, I woke up at midnight with a bit of a thirst.

So, I made one of Shopsin's egg creams. Drank it down. Made another. Worth the price of the book. 

Eat Me: An Introduction

This is one demented book. I mean that in the nicest way.

The notoriously irascible author, Kenny Shopsin, has for many years run an idiosyncratic downtown Manhattan restaurant that became widely famous after Calvin Trillin wrote about it in the New Yorker.

A lot of Shopsin's recipes (banana guacamole) and photographs (the naked butts of his children when they were small) are kind of unappetizing. Though I warmly reviewed this book on its "literary" merits a while back, I wasn't highly motivated to test-drive the recipes. 

The hyperarticulate Melvil Dewey persuaded me to give it a try. Here's a transcription of Melvil's recent email:

I'm into Kenny Shopsin's book up to my hips. And I love it. He combines Mark Bittman's relaxed attitude with a consistent preference for strong flavors, a very funny authorial presence, and an irreverent, sort of 'Fuck it!' attitude. And he clearly loves the food he makes, which is inspiring. The lack of an index notwithstanding, the book is so GENEROUS -- generous headnotes, generous helpings of photos, generous dispensing of lore and advice. I really wish now that I had talked to him when I went into his place in the summer of 2006, but based on reading Calvin Trillin's article I was scared shitless of him. But really, how would it go if I tried to talk to him?

Me: I just wanted to say I love your cookbook. My kids love your mac n' cheese pancakes. So do I.

Kenny: Get the fuck out of here, you little yuppie.

Me: But wait, I'm a big fan of Calvin Trillin! I like Chowhound too!

Kenny: Don't let the door hit you on the way out, dickweed.

So far I've made: 

1) The GA BBQ sauce, which is really just a very hot, yummy hot sauce. (Kenny Shopsin can call his sauces anything he wants to, but when you put two hot sauces together with an assload of ground pepper and a smidgen of cider vinegar, that's not a BBQ sauce -- that's an augmented hot sauce.)

2) An adulterated version of his egg guacamole (delish!)

3) The "Auntie" scramble: avocado, blue cheese, and spinach (related in its DNA to guacamole, I think)

4) The mac n' cheese pancakes, which are sublime. Joseph and I loved them. No one else would try them. Losers.

I hope Melvil will stand by his promise to contribute to the blog during the Kenny Shopsin phase. And I hope this "Joseph" person -- apparently the only non-loser in Melvil's orbit -- will weigh in as well. 

Yes?