I’ll be heading over to the Writers Group from Hell holiday party later this afternoon, to which even former members like me are invited, and since it’s a potluck, that meant I spent the last two days baking.

After flipping through my cookbooks in search of something new—wouldn’t want to bore my friends, after all—I settled on one recipe each from Paul Fehribach’s The Big Jones Cookbook and Bryan Voltaggio’s Home.

I’d already made two previous Fehribach dishes—Chicken with Dumplings and a Jelly Roll Cake—and one from Voltaggio—Blueberry Cake with Peanut Streusel. This time I decided to attempt Cheese Straws by the former and Lemon Cookies by the latter.

On Friday, I started with the Cheese Straws, because Fehribach indicated they’d improve with age, so serving them 48 hours later would be no problem.

I began with 10 ounces of sharp cheddar cheese and two ounces of blue cheese along with 1-3/4 cups of flour, so these cheese straws were sure to be … cheesy!

One thing they didn’t turn out be, however … was straws. (more…)

Henry David Thoreau admonished us to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” … but what about enterprises that require new cooking equipment? I suspect he would have dissed those as well.

But as I was determined to bake Paul Fehribach’s Jelly Roll Cake recipe in The Big Jones Cookbook (from the pages of which I’d previously cooked chicken and dumplings, circa 1920) for the annual 4th of July bash thrown by John Pomeranz and Kathi Overton, and had never before made a jelly roll, I was forced to buy a new pan and send Thoreau spinning in his grave.

And so, armed with a jelly roll pan, I got started. (more…)

So last night I had Chef Paul Fehribach over for dinner.

Sort of.

To be more precise—I was so impressed by my recent meal at Big Jones that I picked up a copy of Chef Paul Fehribach’s new cookbook before I left his restaurant. (I wasn’t the only one of us who did that.) And last night was my first attempt at turning one of his recipes into reality.

Before I used The Big Jones Cookbook that way for its intended purpose, I read it from cover to cover and found it the most interesting cookbook since James Beard’s American Cookery, which is perhaps the first I ever bought. Both are entertaining to read, and I even saw parallels in each chef’s defense of quality ingredients and sadness over the sorry state of what we have to put up with when it comes to food these days. And though 43 years separate the “these days” of Fehriback and Beard, I sensed a kinship between them. (more…)

Because I was certain the food served at the Nebula Awards banquet in Chicago Saturday night would be barely edible at best and not at all edible at worst, I was determined to at least have a decent—nay, superior!—lunch so not all my meals that day would feel wasted. And I found that superior lunch at Big Jones, which I discovered thanks to a post which ran two weeks ago over at Eater.

Chef Paul Fehribach (whose food I was so taken with that I bought a copy of his cookbook as soon as the meal was over and had him autograph it) has long been in love with Southern cooking, and has dedicated his life to tracking down historic recipes and presenting food as it originally was. No molecular gastronomy or deconstructed dishes here! Not that there’s anything wrong with those, as visitors to this blog know, but I love the idea of experiencing the cooking of early last century, and even the centuries before that.

So I took off from the Nebulas with Jaym Gates and Lee Whiteside and headed over to Big Jones, where we were joined by Chicago local Eden Robins, with whom I’ve been trying to share a meal for years. Well, it finally happened (as you can see above) and, as it turned out, in one of her favorite restaurants, too.

It took Big Jones to bring us together. (more…)