Some words (and recipes) from the master, Jacques Pepin, in a long interview at Powells.com:

We had to go to school at that time until age fourteen to finish primary school. Certificate étude. I was doing fine in school. I’m saying that only in that I didn’t have to leave school. My brother didn’t, and he became an engineer. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to go into the kitchen and cook.

I liked the hustle, bustle, excitement, the sweating and yelling of the kitchen. I liked it very much; my brother didn’t. The other choice I would have had maybe was to become a cabinetmaker because my father was a cabinetmaker, doing fancy furniture, which we call ébéniste in France. And I still like to work wood. I was in Claudine’s house yesterday, looking at a table I did a few years ago. Pretty rough, but it’s still there.

I like to work with my hands, and I feel that anyone involved in food has to become a craftsman first. A technician. That doesn’t mean you have talent. It just means that you are able to move very fast and do things properly in an orderly manner, in a miserly manner. Certainly if you’re a jeweler or a carpenter or a surgeon, you first and foremost have to become a technician, to have the manual dexterity to dominate that trade. If you happen to have talent, now you have the know-how in your hand; you have the means to express this and bring it to a higher level.

If you look at the reverse: I know young chefs who have a lot of talent, but they’re technically very bad. The food doesn’t come out the way it should. I can do an analogy with my painting. I’ve been painting for thirty years. I do illustrations in my books. But I have never spent, like a professional painter, five hours every day in a studio, working, working, working, so I don’t really have much technique. I start a painting and sometimes it comes out halfway good, and I’m the first one astonished. Often I get disgusted because whatever I have in my head, my hand is not able to express it the way I want. I’m not good enough technically.

Still Life (Natural Morta), By Giorgio Morandi, 1953

‘Cause that’s how they roll in Texas…

Brucha, baby.

My favorite part of the Passover seder is when you get to eat the bitter herbs—horseradish on a piece on Matzoh. Sure to clear any congestion, if you do it right. Here’s two of my cousins and me last night, loading up:

And paying the price (notice me pouding the table):

Whoa, boy.

The King:

Roots:

Those in the know understand that I’m talking about gefilte fish. And no, I’m not even going to post an image of the brownish grey lump of mashed whatever, cause I’ve got a heart. What I love is how gefilte fish  is traditionally served with a piece of carrot on top, as if that would salvage it–never mind the gelatin (shudder).

As kids, my brother, sister and I were expected to eat what was on our plate. Jewish side of the family, Catholic side of the family: same rules. At home, but especially when we were guests. I became a master at putting a spoonful of creamed spinach, or in Belgium, steak tartare, in my mouth and then gulping it down with a big swig of water. Fun, it was not.

There were two things that we were spared, however: lobster and gefilte fish. The former because it was too expensive and too good to be wasted on the likes of us who didn’t care for it, and the latter because, well, I guess because our elders had compassion.

But hey, that’s just me. I know some perfectly reasonable people who love gefilte fish. As for me, bring on the matzoh ball soup.

Man, it’s nippy in New York today.

Kicking off a week of countrified beats, let’s go back to the old school:

Nude, by Amedeo Modigliani (1912)

Here is part two and three of Pat Jordan’s spring break piece for Deadspin (and here’s part one):

It was almost 2 a.m. now, and I decided to go back to the hotel to get some sleep so I’d be sharp for the wet t-shirt contest the following afternoon. I walked back toward the hotel and passed Molly Brown’s Ladies. I asked the guy at the door if they had any kids in there, figuring a strip club was too expensive a proposition for college kids. “Yeah, we got a lot,” he said. I smiled and said, “You got any age-appropriate chicks for me? Maybe 65, 68, but without aluminum walkers?” He did not laugh. I decided, what the hell, might as well go in, but he stopped me. “I don’t want you in here,” he said. I flashed him my Gawker/Deadspin letter, but it did no good. I let it drop and walked back toward my hotel, with two thoughts: No one will let me in anywhere, and kids on Spring Break today are different from the kids in Fort Lauderdale in the ’80s. The Lauderdale kids had no money and slept in their vans. These kids stay in hotels, go to strip clubs and nightclubs and bars that are expensive. The Lauderdale kids ate at McDonald’s, and if they were lucky enough to have the cash, they stayed 10 kids to a hotel room, which they destroyed. It’s the times. There’s no free lunch anymore. Only kids with cash and plastic get to play.

The MAN:

Kalustyan’s:

Cheap it ain’t, but if you don’t feel like schlepping out to Queens, it’ll do the trick.

Morning Sun, By Edward Hopper (1952)

Okay, so it’s the late afternoon, not the morning; the sun is still out, and this picture still sings.

I got it figured out:

Mr. Jordan goes to Spring Break for Deadspin (Part One):

So, the boys at Deadspin had this idea. Brilliant, really. Hilarious. They were sitting around the office one night, throwing out story ideas, coming up with nothing, getting frustrated, or maybe there isn’t actually a Deadspin office, and they really are just a bunch of guys hunched over their computers in the darkened basements of their mother’s houses, surrounded by boxes of cold pizza crusts and empty beer cans, emailing each other with one idea after another when one of them came up with this truly brilliant idea after having seen Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart” too many times. “Let’s throw the Old Man at Spring Break!” The Old Man with his white beard, threadbare thrift-stop Hawaiian shirt with the pink flamingos, OP shorts, Publix flip-flops, looking like a Florida derelict wasting away in Margaritaville, smoking his cigar as he tries to chat up some co-eds from Ann Arbor and Iowa City in Froggy’s and Razzle’s and the 509 Lounge with some pitiful, dimly remembered barroom rap that used to work for him 40 years ago, the co-eds thinking he’s a harmless old man, at first, like their grandfathers, until, after enough questions, they begin to think, maybe not so harmless after all, maybe a dirty old pervert actually, and they glance around the bar for a bouncer or a cop, which is why the boys at Deadspin told me, “We’ll have a lawyer on call 24 hours a day in case you need one.”

But what the hell, I’ll do anything for a story, and a check, small as it may be. What did Voltaire say? A friend asked if he’d ever had a homosexual experience. He said, yes, once. The friend said, then you’re a pervert. Voltaire said, no, “Once, a philosopher, twice, a pervert.” Which is why I drove south out of Abbeville, S.C., where I live now, in the up country, on Secession Hill in the Land of Cotton, on March 12, driving over two-lane country roads through Ninety Six and Newberry until I hit I-26 and then I-95 and headed south toward Savannah, Jacksonville, and my Spring Break destination, Daytona Beach. I had rented a white cargo van, stripped of seats in back, like a cave, threw a pillow and mattress on the floor, threw a bottle of Jim Beam Black in my duffel bag, my notebooks, pens and tape recorder in my man bag along with a 9-millimeter CZ 85 semi-automatic pistol with 15 hollow points in the clip and one in the chamber because, as Christian Slater said in True Romance, “It’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.” What the hell! I was going to sleep in my van, unless I got rousted by the cops in a motel parking lot at 2 a.m., the cops checking out my CZ, my CWP, then running my ID through their cruiser’s computer, looking for outstanding warrants, priors, coming up with only one — a firearms charge at Fort Lauderdale Airport in the late ’80s, a chickenshit charge, really, but a long story, the third-degree felony knocked down to a misdemeanor, adjudication withheld — and me in the backseat of their cruiser at 2 a.m., my hands cuffed for only the second time in 68 years (OK, third, if you insist on counting that barmaid in my St. Louis hotel room in the ’70s), trying to remember the telephone number of that Deadspin lawyer.

I love coleslaw because its one of those salads that can be prepared in a seemingly endless variety of ways. I especially enjoy cabbage with caraway seeds or flipped with Asian spices and flavors. Or at a barbeque shack or a Jewish Deli. 

Oh man, I just dig me some coleslaw, period.

Nijinsky, by Franz Kline (1950)