Sunday Brunch

I'm a fan of food from street fairs. Grilled meat on a stick, questionable egg rolls, pebble-textured sno cones--if it's overpriced and being sold where I'd usually be parking, I'm game. We're lucky enough to have a yearly street fair less than a block from our house. Right on the corner, the closest to our house of any of the booths, is a funnel cake stand.

Funnel cake had never registered for me before moving out to the east coast, but what could be better than batter poured through a funnel straight into a deep-fat fryer, the pourer swirling the stream of batter around inside a round guide to make a "cake" like a dozen doughnuts that have been blown apart and then stitched together into a plate-sized uber pastry! Sprinkled with powdered sugar (or topped with fruit, although I prefer my dough-and-sugar undiluted), it's a crispy, chewy, fatty tangle of sweet, heavenly goodness.

This year, I hit the stand after getting back from an hour-long indoor cycling class at the gym (the Fraulein's exercise obsession is mildly contagious), so I was filled with self-righteous fried-food-lust. I was the first customer of the day, and the oil in the fryer was crystal-clear: no floating little disturbingly-unidentifiable carbonized chunks or larger, disturbingly-identifiable soggy blobs. Just a perfect-frying-hot tub of artery-clogging goodness waiting for the pour. Of course, there's no actual funnel involved; it comes from a special pitcher with a narrow spout. But it's good all the same... the batter dribbles in, sizzling until it'll hold together enough for the guide to come out. Then the cook dips in with a pair of tongs to flip the cake for the agonizingly-long stretch of seconds it takes to get golden brown. Finally, the cake comes out, the tongs giving it a brief shake to knock off maybe one drop of oil (more than enough to justify thinking of it as a reduced-fat snack), then onto the paper plate for a dusting of powdered sugar. Thirty seconds later it's on my dining room table while I make a cappuccino, and two minutes after that I'm coughing up a big breath of powdered sugar from my first bite.

But I didn't lose any of the funnel cake.

Win some, lose some

It's always a risk trying to develop new dishes or flavor combinations. For instance, one of my long-standing recipes is salmon with lemon, cilantro, and garlic. With the advent of ginormous CostCo salmon filets, we've been eating this dish more often lately, so I've been tweaking the recipe into something I hope will be a bit more evocative: Mai Tai Salmon (not Salmon Mai Tai, which sounds like the worst happy hour frozen-drink special in Juneau). So the marinade has steadily gotten sweeter, boozier, and less cilantro-ey. I originally envisioned making two Mai Tais, then pouring one over the salmon filets and the other down my gullet. Turns out you need a bit of olive oil, I can't quite let go of the garlic yet, plus it's a little salty for a cocktail--the marinade's not really drinkable, but it reduces to a nice glaze.

Anyhow, Mai Tai Salmon is almost at the point of total success. A rather more serendipitious discovery came when I cut up a pear to snack on with the knife I'd used to mince some garlic--without washing the knife, of course. Garlic Pears? Not so good.