THE DISH: UPCOMING EVENTS FEATURING TRISH AND FOOD

RESTAURANT OF THE MONTH: Mandola’s Italian Market, Lamar @ 47^th, 512.419.9700

ROCK STAR CHEF OF THE MONTH: Stewart Scruggs (Wink, Zoot)

GROCERY STORE OF THE MONTH: HEB’s kosher dept. at Far West Blvd., Austin

ORGANIC THINGY OF THE MONTH: Kombucha Wonder Drink

VICE OF THE MONTH: Salt

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Canned veggies

COOKBOOK OF THE MONTH: Slow and Difficult Soups by David Ansel, the Soup Peddler

April has been an incredible mind-expanding food month. It all kind of started with the Hill Country Food and Wine Festival here in Austin. I’d been itching to get my foot in the door as a food presenter for a couple of years, and 2006 finally got me the magic word. The festival’s Texas Farm to Texas Table expo allowed me to partner with a grower I’d met earlier in the year while performing at a house concert down in Gonzales; Kitchen Pride Farms donated more than ten dozen mushrooms for the recipe I created especially for the event. Austin Community College’s stunning Culinary Department donated supervised student labor for the Farm to Market chefs. All recipes were prepared exclusively with locally-available produce, cheeses, meats and other ingredients. I did double duty as both chef and live music for the afternoon, and I thought I was going to faint with joy. Or the heat. I met master growers (Susan Cashin), wine makers, chocolate makers (Tom Pedersen, Kakawa Chocolates), cheese makers, chefs, aspiring chefs and specialty farmers. I ate between sets. I gave interviews. I rhapsodized about food. I got a sunburn.

I also landed some more cooking gigs. Watch the schedule at Gina’s Kitchen for an upcoming hands-on class! Gina’s offer was followed closely by an e-mail from Austin’s famous Soup Peddler, David Ansel, who was also a chef at the Festival event. I’ll be the first musician-guest chef to partner with the Soup Peddler kitchen on a featured menu item for a week in May. It’s great to make these connections in a city that has a hard time getting any greater.

All the Stuff of the Month is part of the weave of the mind expansion going on in the world of food. Austin welcomed Mandola’s Italian Market to mid-town, a sorely needed shot of old-school urban soul from the wildly successful Houston family of chef-brothers. Having served my regulation two years in the restaurant biz with Vincent Mandola, I can tell you there’s no flim-flam of any kind going on in their food. The spiffy brand-new storefront with awnings and old-fashioned signage is the first clue. Inside, the combination corner deli/market, bakery, gelateria and kitchen bustles every day with the hungry, the curious, and the culinary serious, who can dash in for any Sicilian table staple from glass-jarred Mediterranean tuna filets to imported specialty cheeses distinct to the region. The menu is surprisingly extensive for a kitchen meant to be nimble and quick, but the offerings are threaded together by the southern-Italian/immigrant groove of food you feel lucky to find outside of a Telephone Road kitchen. The portions are huge, the tomato sauces are from scratch and categorized by words like “Sunday,” which if you’re Italian you know means it cooked at a bare simmer for the better part of an entire day. Che bello.

I’ve been co-writing songs lately with an old friend from Houston, David Rice (www.davidricemusic.com), who recently moved back to Texas from L.A. with his wife and little boy. David and Lisa are the kind of people who’ve evolved enough to pay way closer attention to what goes into their bodies than I do with mine. Maybe it’s a west-coast thing. Anyway, it’s a life style that always grabs my attention when I visit their kitchen. They’ve turned me on to stevia, raw foods, rice milk, Yerba Mate tea, and this latest organic brew called kombucha, a fermented beverage which tastes pretty much vinegar with a fat splash of soda. What the hell is it?? Is it tea? Is it or is it not a mushroom? We debated about it and finally decided it must be kind of like sourdough-bread starter --- some sort of mysterious perpetuation of a Petri dish of live enzymes, cleansing to the blood and liver, that raise the body’s pH. I’m a pretty equal-opportunity eater, and drinker, so I sucked down two glasses of it. It’s also rumored to stave off aterosclerosis and high cholesterol, two conditions which will probably kill me someday, since they run in my family. Guess we all gotta go somehow.

Speaking of life-taking health issues, I’ve finally decided that this year the Salt Party may finally need to be over for me. I’ve started weaning myself off of it in small ways, like trading in fistfuls of salty chips with my sandwiches for fresh fruit, not salting my popcorn, and finding creative ways to reduce the amount of salt in my cooking (like salting the potato on the outside while it bakes, then eating the insides plain). I’m a notorious salt craver, so maybe it hasn’t caught up with me yet, but so far it’s been surprisingly painless. The hardest part has been forfeiting my guilty little pleasure of snacking on canned veggies. I adore them, cooked to insipid mushiness and loaded with yummy salt. I eat them right out of the can like French fries, or with some olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. Dang. I have, however, admitted I am powerless over chips and salsa, though, and have asked my Higher Power to intervene. They’ll probably get me before the cholesterol does.
 

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