Corduroy Orange

The Harris Grill, a Shadyside dining destination well known throughout Pittsburgh for its outdoor patio seating, quirky and extensive menu selections, and its weekly Bacon Night happy hour, perished in flames on Saturday evening, August 11.
The Post-Gazette account of the fire gives few details about the blaze, but according to Tom Mamaux, owner of the nearby Beechwood Garden Center, the fire is believed to have been started by one of the restaurant’s signature tiki torches. The torch was apparently blown over by a strong wind into a trash can that was resting below the restaurant’s wooden fire escape.

Diners and staff at the Harris Grill were unaware of the situation until patrons of the Elbow Room, located across the street from the Harris Grill, came over to let people in the restaurant know that the building was on fire. By that time, the flames had engulfed the fire escape and were working on the roof.

Cortney Higgins and Tom Murphy, who were both dining on the second floor of the restaurant at the time of the blaze, report that evacuation proceeded in an orderly manner. “Everyone was calm and it could have been a whole lot worse,” said Ms. Higgins. Mr. Murphy recalled that they could feel the warmth of the flames as they descended the stairs.

Outside, as firefighters battled the fire, Mr. Murphy and Ms. Higgins report that one of the waitresses was distraught and in tears. Meanwhile, the owner of the establishment tried to put a good face on things, saying that they would re-open for happy hour that evening. The three-alarm fire, however, caused extensive fire and smoke damage to the whole building, and the process of smothering the blaze resulted in extensive water damage. Currently, the gate to the restaurant’s patio is padlocked and it is unclear at this time whether the restaurant will re-open, and if it does, if it will still be at the same location.

For a photo of the fire in progress and a first-hand account of the event, visit Tom Murphy’s web page.

One of my favorite ways to cook is to go at it with barely a plan in mind: pull things out from the refrigerator and figure out how they go together; how to make them into a well-balanced meal. Such was the case tonight as I set out to make dinner for Aurora and me. Wednesday is CSA pick-up day, so we had lots of fresh produce available. Somewhat more importantly, though, we had a fair amount of produce from last week that needed to be used up.

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It’s hard to believe but today marks one year that I’ve been writing Corduroy Orange. During the past year, I’ve uploaded 210 posts (counting this one) and have received 132,583 page views from 36,417 unique IP addresses; since December, I’ve been averaging more than 10,000 page views a month. It’s a lot more attention than I expected I’d be getting—thank you for reading!

I think the portion of the content that I’m particularly fond of is the knife skills instructional section. I’ve said it hundreds of times, and I’ll say it thousands more: the knife is the most important tool in the kitchen. A good, sharp knife, and the knowledge of how to use it will cut your preparation time for every meal significantly. A good, sharp knife used incorrectly can sever a fingertip. It’s worth your time and attention to learn how to use your knives in a safe and efficient manner.

Not only that, but once you are to the point where you’re cutting your vegetables to consistent sizes, the quality of your cooking will go up as a result, because every piece in your pan will cook at an identical rate, as opposed to the small pieces burning while the larger pieces are still half-raw. So, if you haven’t already looked at it, check out my knife skills table of contents and follow the links for a step-by-step guide to using your knives in the best manner possible. Then, look at my vegetable cookery crib sheet to see what order you should put your well-cut vegetables into the pan so that the vegetables that take the longest to cook get the most time. If you’d like some further assistance learning better knife skills and cooking techniques, private instruction is available in the Pittsburgh area on a limited basis. Email me for more information.

As long as I’m giving plugs for the oldies-but-goodies that are stashed in the site’s vaults, I think it’s also worth mentioning my zucchini muffins, especially as we’re entering the time of year when zucchini abounds. They are the best zucchini muffins I’ve ever eaten. For a special treat, pair them with my sweet caramelized red onion marmalade, which is really quite good. I can see you making a face; it’s the same one my sister made when I told her we’d be having zucchini muffins and red onion marmalade. Know what she did? Asked for thirds. And fourths, if I remember correctly. The cooking technique of caramelizing the onions brings out their natural sweetness, which is then accentuated with the addition of liberal amounts of pure maple syrup and/or honey.

So, thanks for stopping by on occasion to kill some time and learn about cooking. Remember to support your local farmers. If you’re not sure who they are, you can search for them by zip code at www.localharvest.org. Once you’ve found them, call them up, visit them, buy their food… they’ll be glad to meet you and tell you all about what they do. Learn your knife skills! And save the liver!

Have you noticed how food is often more than just nourishment?

It is, of course, always nourishment, and we need it to survive. But were it simply calories and nutrients, we would be like my cat Schlitz, who every morning is excited to hear the sound of food pellets entering his empty dish. Yet even Schlitz enjoys the ritual of a can of tuna, knowing that the smell of it opening signifies the imminence of a special treat: a small dish of the water the fish was packed in. He sits at my feet, meowing loudly and batting at my ankles, saying, “Come on mister, give it here, and I mean now!”

But that’s just an every once in a while thing for him. Whereas for us (and by us, I think I speak for most), there are a million little rituals surrounding our food and how it is obtained, prepared, served, and shared. These rituals are as old as time itself and materialize themselves even in religion, whether in breaking the challah, blessing the communion wafer, or taking the thigh bone of the just-slaughtered beast, wrapping it in fat, and burning it as an offering to Zeus or grey-eyed Athena. People have always thanked God for their food.

That is, in part, because food equals life. But also, food equals friends and family. Feasts are used to mark celebrations; the celebrations themselves are often inseparable from the food that is served. Holidays of all types fit this mold, whether Thanksgiving, Christmas, Passover, Eid ul-Fitr, or even the serving of cake and ice cream at a birthday party.

My family has some of its own celebrations that are unique to being a Sharrard. One of my favorites was always the summer shish-kabob. My grandfather, who was a professional tinkerer and who also didn’t get dressed in the morning without enacting a private ritual, created huge skewers specifically for the feast, by which I mean that he turned the handles on his lathe, sharpened the rods on his grinder, and built the set of three-foot skewers entirely in his basement workshop.

Our family would spend the morning skewering the lamb, bacon, and vegetables, including my personal favorite—tomatoes straight from our garden. As part of the skewering process, someone would be assigned the tearful task of drilling holes through onions because my grandfather, in his painstaking exactitude, had hit upon this step as the oddly logical, though not quite obvious, solution to the dilemma of how to skewer the bulb without breaking it to pieces.

In the early afternoon, my grandfather would build the fire in the fire pit he had dug to match the size of the skewers. I was quite young when most of the shish-kabobs happened, so I don’t remember the process in exact detail, but by mid-afternoon the flames had subsided and there was a glowing pit of coals ready to roast meat over. The skewers would be trotted out on trays and lined up over the pit and slowly turned and rotated so that no single skewer was over the same part of the fire for any longer than it was over any other. Then, as the meat approached ideal doneness (still pink in the center, moist, and quite flavorful), my favorite portion of the day would begin: standing fireside with a saucepan at the ready to catch the tomatoes as they dropped from the skewers, roasted through. This was a game that was eliminated in later years by making skewers of just tomatoes so that they could be removed when they were cooked, so no one would have to save them from the coals.

This was also the part of the day when everyone would arrive. And by everyone, I mean everyone. That was the whole point of my grandfather having built the skewers—everyone could share in the feasting: family from out of town, friends from church, business associates, my parents’ friends, neighbors. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had been invited to join us on the merit of walking past the house as food was being served.

Being young at the time, I thought that all families had rituals as elaborate as ours. I wasn’t quite right, this ritual being much more elaborate than most, but every family has some sort of pageant that they enact on a regular basis, be it standing around the grill with a beer in hand, waiting for the steaks to char ,or making flapjacks in the kitchen on Saturday mornings. These are the things that make us feel like family. These are the things that make us know we belong and we are loved. These are the ways that food sustains us by more than just its nutrients, but also by building within us a sense of community to which we can aspire.

Photo credit: James Sharrard