scott hutcheson

Remembering Summer Break

Today is the last day of classes at Purdue. Finals are next week and then summer break. You can sense the anticipation among the students. I can vividly remember that feeling - long summer days ahead, no schoolwork, some blow-off summer job. Fast forward 20 years. Now the summer is pretty much like every other season. The daily grind never stops. I just have to get my suits dry cleaned more often.

I think my most memorable college summer was 1986, between my junior and senior years. I'm going to sound like a total pig here, but I was stringing along three different girls, I had a mindless job but was making really good money, I was thin (the only time in my life!), had a full head of hair, and several good friends to hang out with. Also, I was anticipating returning to school as the Student Body Vice President. That was a fun summer.

That fall I met Lisa. Obviously, the three girlfriends had to go. That school year (86/87) is when I really grew up. Looking back I can begin to see the man I have become. I started the summer as kid and a year later I was a man. Funny how that happens.

What about you? Does this time of year evoke any memories you choose to share?

The Sisterhood of the Salad

I had an article in a women's magazine called, Sage. It includes a recipe for a Spring Salad with New Peas and Baby Carrots. You can see a copy here.

Will Video Kill the Food Blog Star (Wannabe)?

You may recall that I did a TV show recently for WNIT in South Bend Indiana. You can click here for the video clip. I made an Crostini with Indiana Chevre, Black Fig Marmalade, and Caramelized Onions and paired it with a wine from Madison Vineyards in Madison, Indiana. You can get the recipe here and more information about the wine here. The cheese was from Capriole Farms in Rockville, Indiana. A special thanks to Larry Parman for digitizing the video for me.

Cha..Cha..Cha..Changes

There has been a significant lack of posts to this blog over the last few days, for good reason. Most of my blog-time has been spent building the soon-to-launch Hungry Hoosier blog. You can get a preview here but it is a work in progress so please don't judge too harshly. Also, please don't link to the site yet. I'll let you know when it is ready for the masses. What I've done is to clone most of the Indiana-related posts from this blog to the new blog with the intent to then post Indiana-centric posts only to the Hungry Hoosier site from here on out. I am also re-indexing the posts so that they can be pulled up by location (city/town and county) and by type (restaurant, product, etc.).

The Hungry Hoosier is not meant to be a comprehensive inventory but rather a growing collection of my ramblings about what I've come across while "traveling Indiana in search of food, family, and community." There will be photos, scanned menus, and other information about Indiana restaurants, farm-to-consumer operations, Indiana-made products, other food enterprises, and maybe some Podcasts. I'm pretty sure nothing else exists quite like it on the web. Some cover the Indianapolis food scene but no one is covering the state.

Thanks also for input on the new logo. I went with the one pictured, green and blue. I like the round design because it does look like a dinner plate. As for the colors, I was driving the other day on one of these gorgeous days we've had lately and I was struck by the green grass of a rolling meadow and crystal blue of the cloudless sky. To me, that tableau looked like Indiana and the colors in this version of the logo remind me of that scene.

Speaking of the logo, I am getting window decals of the new logo. I'll be sending to all the places I've written about one of these asking them to display the decal.I'm also aggressively marketing my weekly column to other newspapers in the state. The idea is to make The Hungry Hoosier a recognized brand for interesting Indiana food enterprises. I'm also working on a couple of revenue models.

This blog will focus much more on my family and non-Indiana related food stuff. So, if that is what you come here for, I hope you continue. If it is the Indiana food information you seek, stay tuned for the new site to be fully operational. Also, if you have great places that I need to put on my "Must Visit" list, email me at scott@hungryhoosier.com.   

"Bueller...Bueller...Bueller"

Hopefully this won't happen to me. Beginning in May, I will be teaching a Food Writing workshop as part of Second Helping's Culinary Job-Training Program. First a word about the program - This is a ten-week professional culinary job-training program designed to provide the skills necessary to start a career in the food service industry. Second Helpings has successfully placed over 70% of their graduates in positions upon their completion of the program and 72% remain employed after six months. Full-time culinary instructor, Sam Brown, teaches the classes and guest instructors incorporate hands-on kitchen work, lectures, videos, classroom activities and field trips. Graduates are also eligible to receive 3 credits from the culinary program at Ivy Tech Community College.

As for the workshop, the following is from the course description I submitted...The workshop will define what “food writing is” and provide an overview of the three basic functions of food writing: (1) Recipe Documentation, (2) Menu-Item Description, and (3) Longer-Form Writing (restaurant reviews, food essays, etc.). Learners will spend most of the workshop time discussing and practicing Menu Item Description. The workshop will also help learners understand that a love of food and very basic writing skills are the only prerequisites for effective food writing.

I plan to incorporate lots of examples of menu item descriptions, especially those that utilize creative and effective use of traditionally non-food language, like location of ingredient origin (i.e., Indiana Chevre), nostalgia (i.e., Aunt Betty's Homemade Apple Pie), color, texture, etc. If anyone has good examples to share, please send them my way. 

Joe's Butcher Shop and Fish Market

I'm not sure if they have a baker or candlestick maker, but the people of Carmel, Indiana have one heck of a butcher. In January of this year, Joe Lazzara dropped out of the corporate rat race to open this throw-back meat and fish shop, in Carmel's Arts and Design District. Joe enlisted the help of Fritz Albright, a butcher veteran who for 30 years had a successful shop near Fort Wayne.  Joe, his wife Kathy, and Fritz have done a great job mixing the traditional with the contemporary. Joe's is, without a doubt, the only place in central Indiana where you can get both a top-notch T-bone and sashimi-grade ahi tuna.

The Hungry Hoosier side of me feels a special simpatico sort of thing with Joe and company because many of their products are produced in Indiana. Their chicken, for instance, is raised in Northern Indiana on Amish and Mennonite farms, where the birds are fed special vegetable feeds without hormone or chemical additives and shipped fresh within the day after Joe orders it. The pork also comes from Northern Indiana farms. Joe also sells pre-breaded pork tenderloins that are ready to fry up. The beef is raised on natural farms in Nebraska. And the fish is shipped in fresh daily from the waters around Florida and Hawaii. On my visit I picked up a whole chicken($1.65 per pound), two tenderloins ($1.49 each), a chuck roast ($3.49 per pound), and a bone-in ribeye ($11.99 per pound).

I had the ribeye tonight and it was top-of-the-line. In fact, I can confidently say that it was the best non-steakhouse ribeye I have ever had. The only thing I did was to hit both sides with Kosher salt, fresh-cracked pepper, and garlic powder. Even though it took all the fatherly love I could muster, I shared the steak with the boys. Today may have been my first visit to Joe's but it will certainly not be the last.

Joe's is located at 111 West Main Street, #110 in Carmel and their phone number is 317-846-8877. They are open Monday - Friday 9 am to 7 pm, Saturday 8 am to 7 pm, and Sunday 11 am to 4 pm. They also have a website.

I'm Ready for My Close-Up

Originally published in the Lebanon Reporter on April 6, 2006

For a baseball fan, playing an inning with a favorite team might be the ultimate fantasy. If you are a Karaoke queen, maybe belting out a tune on the stage at Carnegie Hall is what you daydream about as you while away the day in your cubicle. For me, it has always, been, for as long as I can remember, doing a cooking show.

Julia Child and Graham Kerr (The Galloping Gourmet) were among my favorites. This was when all the cooking shows were on PBS, long before the days of the Food Network. At about 10 years old, when my parents would occasionally leave me home alone for a couple of hours at a time, I would pretend to host my own TV using a window between the kitchen and the living room as the pretend television screen.

My repertoire included such classics as cereal, peanut better and jelly, and bologna sandwiches - all prepared with meticulous detail and a verbal explanation, to my pretend audience, of each ingredient and preparation step. Fortunately, this was a relatively short-lived pastime and sports and girls soon occupied my thoughts.

My interest in TV chefs reemerged about 20 years ago when I started to cook for myself and others. There still were no superstar chefs like we have today and many of the same TV personalities from my childhood were still on TV. Early in our marriage, my wife got me a very thoughtful gift for my birthday. She wrote to Jeff Smith (The Frugal Gourmet) to tell him I was a big fan of his show and books and to ask him for an autographed photo. He sent one which now hangs framed in my kitchen along with autographed photos of Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, David Rosengarten, and The Two Fat Ladies (photo here).

Even though I’ve been writing about food for over a year now, it had never occurred to me that I might someday get an opportunity to do a real cooking show until the other day. The phone rang and on the other line was a producer from PBS in South Bend. She had read The Hungry Hoosier, been on my website, and wanted to know if I could come on a show called Open Studio to cook something. 

It only took me a fraction of a second to say yes. We discussed details and I learned that I would only have ten minutes and I suggested featuring a recipe that uses an Indiana ingredient and we also decided to pair the food with an Indiana wine.

A couple of days later I had assembled all my ingredients and cookware and made the trip up north to tape the show. The segment came and went in a blur. Ten minutes seemed more like ten seconds. The co-host was asking me questions as I was trying to cook and I found myself jumping back and forth between explaining what I was doing and answering the co-host’s questions about who in Indiana had the best tenderloins. All the while, the off-camera director is giving us hand signals worthy of a third-base coach - stretch, smile, wrap it up. The segment ended just as I plated my dish and the host took a bite. That was it. My 15 minutes of fame had only been ten. The recipe I prepared was a Crostini with Indiana Chevre (Goat Cheese), Fig Marmalade, and Caramelized Onions (recipe here). I paired it with a wine called Ba-Da Bing from Madison Vineyards.

So far, no talent scouts have called, I’ve not been asked to sign a three-book deal with a publishing company, and the prime-time network shows opposite of the Open Studio episode did not seem to take much of a hit in the Neilson ratings. So, I’m not ready to quite my day job, but it sure was fun. If you wander by my house on a day when Lisa and the boys are gone and the kitchen window is open, you might hear me practicing my co-host banter while I prepare a Crepe Suzette. You never know when the phone might ring again. If it does, I’ll be ready.

Hungry Hoosier Logo Poll

I'm having a logo designed for The Hungry Hoosier and I could use some help in deciding among four choices. Let me know if you have a favorite.Click on the images to get a larger version.

2002 Camelot Cabernet

A recent visit to the Grapevine Cottage yielded several under-$10 bottles of wine. The first to be opened was a 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon from Camelot Wines. The Wine Enthusiast gives this wine a rating of 85. That is a great rating for an $8 bottle of wine. Here is their review, "There's a lot of rich cherry, blackberry, and coffee fruit in this dry Cab. It is not too tannic, with just enough of a grip for balance. Very nice value." I picked this up because of the " not too tannic" part of the review. This proved to be true. I didn't, however, think it was as "balanced" as the review indicated. It seemed a bit one-dimensional. Spending, eight bucks, however, I am very forgiving. I don't think it would stand up to a great hunk of beef, but alone or with some not-to-sharp Cheddar, it is a good choice.

Porter, Coltrane, Armstrong, Parker, & Redding

It sounds like a standards-jazz-soul lover's answer to the question, "Who do you want to meet in heaven?" but it is actually the sandwich line-up at the Vienna Espresso Bar and Bakery. This place has been an institution in West Lafayette, Indiana for as long as I've been around the area, so at least ten or 11 years. The sandwich selections have been the same that whole time as well. The Cole Porter, the John Coltrane, the Louis Armstrong, the Charlie Parker, and the Otis Redding. They don't print a menu, so I snapped the photo of the whiteboard to give you an idea of what they have to offer. Besides the sandwiches, they've got a few salads, some great baked goods, and a full espresso menu.

They also offer free WiFi so it is a great place to semi-escape and still get some work done. On my last visit I took some work-related reading material and settled in with a lemon bar and a mug of java. This place is laid back and you can while away the hours with no pressure to vacate your seat. You'll see an eclectic mix of students and faculty of all ranges and seating is available at tables, couches, or outside.

Vienna is located at 208 South Street in West Lafayette, Indiana. They are open Monday - Friday from 8 am to 1 am and Saturday and Sunday from 8 am to 1 am. They can be reached by phone at 765-743-4446.