Yep, it's cursed

If you've lived in D.C. long enough, you know the story of 1801 Columbia Road. In what should be a good location to open a business, right at the top of the 18th Street corridor on the way to the Metro, the large storefront cycles through businesses every few years, with each owner chastened by the experience, proclaiming the truth of the curse rumors.

As the legend has it, there was nothing wrong with 1801 until the early 1970s, when the storefront was occupied by a pizzaria. A killer worked there, tossing dough in the air when he wasn't terrorizing Greater Adams-Morgan. Ever since the pizza place closed, no business has ever been able to succeed, perhaps due to the ghosts of the pizza man's victims.

Strange things happened to businesses in 1801. During a short-lived turn as a tapas joint, I went in for sangria, lured by the big sign advertising a special on sangria. There were out of sangria on a Wednesday night.

Right now, 1801 is occupied by a Starbucks, which has survived longer than the average business, probably due to support from the head office, which does not have a history of shutting down branches. No matter how much money they lose, Starbucks is not going to shut this place down.

The ghosts have other plans.

Yesterday morning, I went into the cursed Starbucks and ordered a venti coffee. Shouldn't be a problem, right? If they can make an iced quadruple-venti soy nonfat caramel white mocha with whipped cream, they can fix me a cuppa joe.

"We're sorry, but the coffee machine hasn't been working all day. We don't know why and we're still trying to fix it."

It isn't an urban legend if it's true, you know.

Hong Kong Holidays

Greetings from Honk Hong where they take their Christmas shopping more seriously than any Macy's ever did. So when you've been salivating over Prada and Versace, all day, stop in at Isobar overlooking Victoria
Harbor for a

Candy Cane Martini

One shot Sky Vanilla Vodka
One shot peppermint Schnapps
Shake with ice, serve with a cherry and a sprig of mint .

Rum-Infused Pecan Pie

Pecan pie is one of my favorite things, and so, when it came time to assign dishes for this years Christmukkah dinner, that’s what I decided to make. Needless to say, I could not just follow a recipe - I had to try a few new twists! The first thing that came to mind was to soak the pecans in rum before baking, from which I hoped to get a richer flavor (and more of it, as the rum would then also be pecan-infused).

The second addition I made was impromptu – while mixing up the filling, I decided that what it needed was citrus. So, I convinced my dad to eat an orange so that I could use the zest.



What I did was this:

9-inch unbaked pie shell (frozen is OK)
3 eggs (you can use egg beaters)
1 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon salt
Dark rum (I used Meyers)
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 cup shelled pecans (halves are fine)
½ teaspoon fresh orange zest
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon sugar

About a day before baking, I put the pecans in a ceramic dish, poured rum over then (covering about 2/3), and covered the dish with a lid. It got stirred every few hours when people were awake and thought about it.

Then, I started baking as follows.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

- Beat eggs in a medium-size bowl until they are light-colored and fluffy, and good peaks form. (Use an electric mixer. If you do it with the standard egg-beater, you will have a sore arm by the time you are finished.)
- Add the brown sugar, corn syrup, salt, zest, and three tablespoons of the pecan-infused rum and stir by hand with a spoon until the sugar is dissolved and the ingredients are thoroughly mixed.
- Stir in the butter and pecans (drain them before adding, but keep the rum!). Pour into the pie shell and bake for 40 minutes or until a knife inserted in the filling comes out clean. Let cool.

Serve with whipped cream, to which you have added the remaining infused rum and the tablespoon of sugar.

I think the results of this pie were mixed. It tasted good, but I think there’s some refinement left to do on the recipe. First of all, I think it would have been good to have more orange zest – maybe a whole teaspoonful.

Then, the pecans. There should be more of them, and some should not be marinated – maybe 1 cup rum-infused and a half-cup plain, to add some crunch. Alternatively, it might work to marinate them more in advance, and then pre-roast them so they are dry and crunchy, but still have the rum flavor. Reserving some (wet) rum-infused pecans and adding them to the top of the pie (halfway through baking, so they don’t sink) would be really good - they would caramelize a bit and make a nice top-coat thing.

And that’s what I did on Christmukkah.

Happy Holidays from DCFUD

Happy Holidays from the DCFUD family! We hope that your Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, Solstice, Winter Holiday and/or Generic Celebration (or Anti-Celebration) dinner consists of fantastic food and even better company.

Chicken with marmalade

This is a favorite dish of mine that really hits the spot on a winter’s eve. I’ve been meaning to experiment with this a bit, perhaps leaving the skin on the chicken, substituting duck for chicken, or stuffing the chicken breasts with the fruits instead of topping them. If you feel similarly inclined, let us know how it turns out!

This is a family recipe, and no one has ever written down any measures: use as many skinless, boneless chicken breasts as you like, topped with as much of the other stuff as you like.

-Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
-Quarter the chicken breasts.
-Put chicken in an appropriately-sized oven-safe dish that has a cover – I use the ceramic kind with glass lid.
-Dab a bit of orange marmalade on top of each piece.
-Add black and green olives.
-Add currants and dried apricots (cut in half).
-Pour over with apple cider – half way up is good, don’t overfill!
-Cover and cook 20 minutes.
-Remove from oven, baste, and replace in oven, uncovered, for another 10-15 minutes.

I recommend serving this one with baked sweet potato or brown rice.

Wines of the Barossa

It’s a tough life for a Groovy Grape tour leader. Every day he gets tourists really really drunk on Barossa wines, eats some Kangaroo, and then drives everyone home snoring in a big white van.

Actually, no joke- it probably is tough. A recent study showed that 50 % of Australians consider drinking till they pass out to be an indelible part of their national character, right up there with playing footy and beating up minorities. And the Barossa valley police, operating as they do in Australia’s most prolific wine growing region, rake in a steady stream of moolah from day-trippin’ drivers who’ve indulged in their patriotism.

This can’t be easy for a van-driving winery tour guide, but it’s great for us. A sizable chunk of the Australian wines that end up in the US start in this hilly area just outside of Adelaide on the Southern coast. Except for the wallaby roadkill it looks a lot like Provence: tiny stone villages, blue mountains in the distance, and carefully manicured vineyards. Quite a few of them are pruned by under-the-table backpacker labor, paid minimum wage and all the grapes they can steal.

On this particular day our long-suffering guide drove us from cellar door to cellar door until we loved everyone in the world. You’ll be surprised how many of these wines end up in Calvert-Woodley Liquors (and everywhere else too).

Richmond Grove actually owns vineyards in other Australia regions too, but its Barossa Shiraz is some tasty tasty stuff. The stone chateau would look great if everything else in the valley wasn’t made out of corrugated tin.

Jacobs Creek is Australia’s largest wine brand- if you’ve drunk a shiraz, you’ve probably drunk Jacobs creek. And hated it. Their touristy celler door is really a high tech “visitors center” reminiscent of that humorous scene in Sideways. Their wines are uniformly bitter and watery.

Vinecrest is famous for Its huge black dog that lazes around in front. The Semillons are sweet and fruity, the Shirazes are nifty (that’s a technical term).

Bethany wins for the prettiest view, and has really really tasty everything: Great fortified that don’t kick your rear with sugar,and big spicy shirazes and shiraz mixes. I think there was a good Semillon here too, but I was way to gone to tell exactly.

Kangaroo, coming sooner than you think!

In our "random postings to keep you coming back" series on DCFUD, Kangaroo may be coming to a store near you sooner than you think.

According to WFTV.com, a driver in Mauston, Wisconsin hit a 50 pound kangaroo with his car. No one has claimed responsibility for the marsupial, leading us here at DCFUD to hypothesize that there are covert farms in Wisconsin designed to slowly introduce kangaroo into the U.S. market.

Sort Of What The Doctor Ordered

No beans, garlic, onions, raw vegetables, dairy products or "spicy food" for at least three weeks.

It’s a foodie’s worst nightmare.

All right, that may be overstating the case. But I’m less than thrilled with this particular set of doctor’s orders. Though not such a problem when you’re cooking for one, try to find a restaurant which doesn’t prominently feature garlic, cheese or heat. It’s unfortunate when Applebee’s theoretically counts as a restaurant.

All complaining aside, I managed to find a dish which (kind of) fit my stringent requirements over at Tony Cheng’s Seafood Restaurant in Chinatown. All right, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some garlic hidden in my chicken with asparagus dish ($14.95). But it’s not a spicy offering, and there were no huge chunks of onion prominently featured, so I think I was safe. And man, was it tasty.

Tony Cheng’s a bit pricier than your typical Chinese fare, but it does a nice job with the basics, and has a classy atmosphere. They have a good selection of (mostly tropical-themed) drinks, with catchy names such as Virgin's Downfall (I enjoyed a coconut-flavored offering, the name of which escapes me, for around $6). Tea is well-brewed, won ton soup is salty and satisfying, and I hear the spicier dishes are first-rate. Not that I would know.

Tony Cheng's Seafood Restaurant
619 H St., NW
Washington , DC
202/371-8669

Next Flight to Kreme-y Goodness

I'm walking through the airport and what do I see?
A big fat doughnut staring back at me.

I turn around and look with a gleam;
Could it possibly be a Krispy Kreme?

Ignoring my bad attempt at poetry, Krispy Kreme has apparently landed in Australia. At the Sydney airport, in fact, in one of the terminals, there is a Krispy Kreme cart. And it sells semi-fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen.

To be fair, Krispy Kreme actually has more than a dozen locations in Australia, according to their store locator. It's just a very weird experience to be wandering down toward your gate at an airport in Australia and see a Krispy Kreme cart. I feel like someone has taken BWI, given all the staff accents, and just changed all the US Airways signs to Qantas.

So what do you do when you want a single Krispy Kreme doughnut, just to remind you of the incredible goodness that comes along with the incredible fatiness of the doughnuts back home? You buy a dozen, because you have no other options, and you start offering them to the Australian passengers in the waiting area with you, who look at you with that strange look in their eyes, and then slowly back away.

But it's worth it.