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November 2020 Newsletter

Welcome to Our Newsletter!

Hello friends! Over here at Booker and Dax, we decided it's time to create a newsletter. As you probably already know, we have a lot of weird stuff we'd like to share and we also have some exciting news from our team coming over the next few months. Expect the unexpected, and if you don't want another email in your inbox, please unsubscribe.

Here we go:

Booker and Dax Holiday Gift Boxes Available for PreOrder!

Dave and Nastassia are partnering with Ben to Table to offer your go-to holiday gift box for 2020. Whether you keep this gift to yourself or share with a loved one, bring the BDX Ben to Table box into the kitchen this holiday season.

Ben collaborated with Dave and Nastassia to come up with a hearty, cold weather mix of delicious items that will go well with whatever you have planned to cook with your Searzall over the holidays. Both kits include a limited edition cartoon booklet of the Booker and Dax Bionic Bird Cooking Technique hand drawn by Nastassia. Buy them here!

  • Searzall “All the Fixings” Limited Edition Holiday Box ($145): This box includes a brand new Searzall and a copy of the Booker and Dax Bionic Bird Cooking Technique booklet signed by both Dave and Nastassia.

  • Searzall “Seasoned Pro” Limited Edition Holiday Box ($85): This box is perfect for the Searzall enthusiasts—it offers replacement screens for those who want to up their Holiday game and the Booker and Dax Bionic Bird Cooking Technique booklet.

  • Both kits feature the following Ben to Table products:
    Rancho Gordo Beans, Geechie Boy Mill Heirloom Grits, Italian Culinary Mixed Herb Powder (perfect for holiday stuffing), and Villa Jerada’s Harissa No. 1


Be a Guest on the Cooking Issues Podcast in Los Angeles
In the LA area? Has it always been your dream to join the Cooking Issues podcast? Join cofounder Nastassia Lopez, Jackie Molecules, Phil Bravo and his ukulele (maybe), and Dave Arnold (via Zoom), at a secret location in LA for a live broadcast accompanied by Maury's Bagels. As a guest on Cooking Issues, you will be able to ask Dave and Nastassia questions on air and join in on the gang's usual high jinks. Do you have a new product or an idea you want feedback on? Feel free to bring it with you as a topic of discussion! This special episode of Cooking Issues is scheduled for December 1st, 2020. A portion of proceeds will be donated to No Us Without You.
More info about the auction here.

What's Dave Reading?
The Brick Bible: The Complete Set, by Brendan Powell Smith.
I was revisiting Smith’s book Assassination! and came across his Lego Picture Bible. Couldn’t resist.

The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, by David King.
King was one of the premier historians of Soviet era graphic art and design, and one of the foremost collectors of imaged that had been altered or purged during the reign of Stalin. Needed to flip back to my Bolshevik history now and again, but very topical in our current post truth times.

Curry, Curry, Curry: The Heart of Indian Cooking, by Ranjit Rai.
This is the first book by the author of Tandoor. Rai spent the majority of his life collecting, eating, and cooking different curries from all over the subcontinent and condensed his decades of experience into this slim volume. Historical curries, rare curries, favorites, old family recipes, new inventions –all are represented. Of “Brain Curry with Fenugreek and Dill Greens,” Rai writes, “This is an unusual curry. It is best made in season when fresh fenugreek and dill greens are available.” While there are a lot of vegetable curries be warned –Rai ate a lot of meat.

Testimony: The United States 1885-1915: Recitative, by Charles Reznikoff.
Poet Charles Reznikoff pored over the transcripts of court cases from the years 1885-1915. He selected, edited, and arranged chunks of that testimony into a horrific kaleidoscopic picture of the United States. He usually brings us in after the action has started, and leaves the scene before there is any resolution. We never know if there was a punishment, or if justice was done, or exactly what happened at all. He strips the commentary of emotion, context, and viewpoint. The spareness of his work is relentless, and the subject matter is punishingly bleak, so you should only read it in bursts –but it is beautiful.

Things Dave Loves
Bug-A-Salt 3.0
Hate flies? Course you do. This gun kills them with a shotgun blast of table salt. Kills flies from several feet away. Can take down a water bug from very close range (might need a double tap). In case you were wondering, no –the salt doesn’t make that much of a mess. I do have to keep telling the kids not to disintegrate flies over food prep areas though. The 3.0 is more powerful than the older versions, and has a safety that can be left off for rapid fire.

Send Cut Send
Need some flat shapes cut out of stainless, copper, aluminum, or a host of other materials? Want it fast and cheap? Send Cut Send.

Things Dave Love/Hates
Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer
As an actual kitchen item, shoot me. Hate. What I love is the Hutzler 571 has some of the best fake reviews ever. Think: Help! My banana curves the wrong way! Even if you have visited this listing before, maybe you missed the questions and answer section. Don’t.

Things Dave Hates
Choice with no choice. My local Wegmans has an entire carrot section. Mini carrots? Several sizes. Carrot strips. Waffle-cut carrots. Organic carrots. Multi-colored carrot assortments. The carrot section is bigger than my apartment but it doesn’t contain a single loose carrot. Wegmans doesn’t even sell a small bag of plain old carrots. People. I want to make a stock, not eat so many carrots the whites of my eyes turn orange.

Classifieds
Booker and Dax is looking for a CAD/Prototype Specialist! Specifically, we need someone who is proficient with Solidworks and can help us run some 3D modeling simulations. Think you can help us out? Then send an email to jean@bookeranddax.com to continue the conversation.

Equipment Review
Have equipment you want us to review on the podcast or here in the newsletter? Shoot Jean an email jean@bookeranddax.com and he'll send a mailing address.

What's Nastassia Reading?

Scar Tissue, by Anthony Kiedis
A really good read. If you take this book to the bathroom, you can turn to any page and it's great. Also - it makes you think that if you had one "erasable day," heroin would be where it's at.

Sex and Rage, by Eve Babitz
I've been quarantining for 8 months and counting. 

Love, Gnosis and Other Suicide Attempts by Amir Sulaiman
This poet is the best poet I've ever seen live. He opened for Chappelle this summer in Ohio. I bought his book. Love.

Jean's Corner
Before working with Dave and Nastassia I was the curator at the Museum of Food and Drink, where I really enjoyed doing deep dives into culinary history. Whether it's the history of a dish, technique, or really any history of food, I'm into it and want to start sharing some of what I've been reading with you all:


Rebecca "The Boondoggler" Palkovics's Corner
If there's one lesson I've learned from traveling with Dave and Nastassia, it is this: Nastassia will always choose form over function for both housing and transportation. This can mean a vintage convertible with no working collapsible roof (we had to keep the car within eyesight at all times so that it wasn't stolen) or an incredible Airbnb in the Hollywood Hills where the owners continue to use the house as their own (we've stayed there four times now—the last time, their intern was living INSIDE the house with us the entire time). I'm at the point during COVID where I'm even nostalgic for this groundhog-day-style of inefficiency. In the meantime, I've been making Airbnb lists for the places I most wish to visit once that's a thing we can do. Here's an Airbnb hit list for Santa Fe  that strives to hit both form AND function.

Poem of the Month

I had sushi from a chef who developed a technique for aging fish. I got to try some of this, an amberjack (kanpachi)
- Steve Yun




Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009

December 2020 Newsletter

Eleven Christmases ago, Dave and I baked 3,678 chocolate chip cookies for the troops in Iraq. No one asked us to do this. I just showed up to work one day and Dave was baking cookies. He figured it would be a nice thing to do for the holidays. Wrong. After the cookies were baked, sorted, and vacuum packed, Dave and I took the subway and some cookies up to the USO, within the Port Authority. The USO didn’t know what to do with them, and scribbled me a list of other places that might want them (none in Iraq).

Since we were already in Midtown, we walked over to the Colbert Show studios in hopes that they would take them.  At the gate, Dave unzipped his winter coat and showed security his chef whites, to let them know he was the “real deal.” They turned us away.

Back at the French Culinary Institute, I called the list of places the USO gave me. Walter Reed would accept some cookies, but we had to keep them state-side. We can’t remember how many other places accepted the cookies, but it was definitely piece-meal, and involved a lot of labels.

Once we were ready to box and ship, the USPS on Canal Street would not give us more than 5 of those free priority mailing boxes. Why? Because people in the future might need the boxes for holiday shipping.“Aren’t you the post office? Can’t you mail yourself more free boxes?” said Dave.

We went around NYC gathering boxes from many, many post offices. The rest of the story is too long and involves broken elevators, a car service (no Uber back then) and the giant post office on 34th street.

Dave says that the moral of the story is, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Rebecca says that the moral is “don’t spend hours and hours of your lives making thousands of cookies without confirming where they are going.”

If you have any charities you would like Booker and Dax and the Cooking Issues crew to call out and show some love to on the radio show this holiday season, please email me nlopez@bookeranddax.com. 

-Nastassia

PS: that’s Fabian Von Hauske from Wildair/Contra second from the right (when he was an intern at the FCI).

 

PSA: SEARZALLS AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY IN OUR BEN TO TABLE HOLIDAY GIFT SET

Have you visited Amazon lately and typed SEARZALL into the search function to no avail? We are working to address this issue ASAP but in the meantime, grab one of the Ben to Table Searzall holiday gift boxes. These Searzalls are going fast! (we honestly think there are 20 left).

Things Dave Loves

The BelOMO 10x Loupe

If you are going to get into trees and plants, you are going to need a 10x loupe, and almost everyone agrees the Belomo out of Belarus is a good choice. I’ve kept one in my EDC kit for over a decade. Speaking of EDC…

Knipex Pliers Wrenches

These are without a doubt—the hand tools that bring me the most joy. They are quite pricey, but their design provides incredible grip, range of grip, and ability to apply non-marring, parallel force whenever you need it. You know how with many pliers you need to squeeze super-hard? With the Pliers-Wrench the clamping force is augmented by the rotation of the tool. Almost no squeeze force is required! I use three sizes. The tiny 125mm one I carry with me in my EDC kit wherever I go. Unfortunately it is just a hair too small to use on CGA320 tank nuts, but it is small enough to be TSA legal (note—even so I have had a pair confiscated.  Carry on at your own risk). The 180mm version is the one that gets the most use at my house. You can get both here.

You are also going to want a bigger one, and the 250mm, which can fit over a 46mm (1.8 inch) nut (!!) is as big as I’ve ever needed, and you can find it here.These suckers are guaranteed for life and are strong strong strong.

Klein Bottles

I’ve always been fascinated by Mobius Strips—the single sided, single edged objects you probably made as a kid. Even cooler is the Mobius’s higher dimensional buddy,the Klein Bottle. The Klein Bottle has no inside, no outside, no edges, and contains no volume. It is made from joining 2 Mobius strips together and really lives in 4 spatial dimensions. Cliff Stoll has made it his life’s work to get as close as you can get to making a real Klein bottle in our “puny” 3 dimension universe, a universe he actually calls a low-quality universe for that reason. At any one time he has over 1000 hand-blown glass Klein bottles in the crawl space of his house ranging from earring-sized to almost human sized that he will retrieve with his home-made mini forklift robot and personally mail to your house. Klein bottle knit caps with a matching Mobius scarf? Of course. Klein-bottle steins? Uh...Yeah.  If this is striking any chord at all, you should peruse his site. He definitely likes puns and engineering/physics jokes.

Things Nastassia Loves

Canyon Gourmet

If you’re ever in the canyons of Malibu, go here. Every single product they sell is something you would want to eat, I promise.

Pete Davidson is doing a virtual table-read of It’s A Wonderful Life this Sunday 

It combines two of my favorite things: my favorite movie, and SNL. I don’t want to hear that Pete is no Jimmy Stewart. I like him and proceeds go to a good cause.  

Any of Howard Stern's Quarantine Interviews

Tom Brady, Colin Jost, Machine Gun Kelly, and (!!) Billy Corgan, last week. For some reason, it seems like everyone is willing to give up more dirt to Howard when they’re recording from within their own homes. 

Things We Hate

We hate that we’re out of Searzalls. We’re working on it, and we apologize for being out of stock during the holidays.

Cooking Issues

December 7: We had Melissa Weller on to discuss her new book, A Good Bake: The Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and Breads at Home: A Cookbook, listen to it wherever you get your podcasts from!

December 15: Joey Skladany will be on to talk about his new book, Basic Bitchen: 100+ Everyday Recipes―from Nacho Average Nachos to Gossip-Worthy Sunday Pancakes―for the Basic Bitch in Your Life.

What's Nastassia Reading?

“Me” by Elton John. Oh it’s just so good! If you’re looking for a stocking stuffer, please buy this. We all know the songs. He has so many incredible stories and he’s very funny. I also cried at the end.

(To the left is a photo of a Jerusalem artichoke in a manger. My friends made it for me and it has lasted 8 years without molding.)

Jean's Corner

I’ve been getting some food reading done in advance of the holidays, and particularly like the shrooms and reindeer history.

Rebecca "The Boondoggler" Palkovics's Corner

Nastassia and I LOVE the holidays. As soon as we start to feel a chill in the air, we begin our Sisyphean attempt to bring back the one that got away: Wine Santa. We’ve spent years hauling animatronic Santa parts through the streets of New York City. We even forced Mike (my now fiancé, not sure how that happened after this) to drive a minivan around midtown during peak holiday season while we hopped out every few minutes to stage scenes with Wine Santa at iconic locations.

This was pre-COVID so think throngs of people at Rockefeller Center, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bryant Park Skating Rink, and more. After almost getting a ticket and Mike looking more flustered than usual, we called it a day but it was totally worth it to capture this work of art above. 

While Wine Santa may look like a million bucks, his insides are currently more of the dollar store variety. I'll be forever scarred from the night we took him to Wildair and he proceeded to spill natural wine all over the floor for about an hour. I have a feeling Jeremiah and the whole team there feel similarly. We’ve put him on hold the past two holiday seasons but would love to bring him back!

We need to get his insides and outsides working in tip top shape so we can make Wine Santa a reality for those who love him as much as we do. We're looking for an imagineer who can help us transform Wine Santa from a passion project into a fully working piece of living art. Is that you? If so, email us at winesanta@gmail.com.

Poem of the Month

There once was a farm in Nantucket
Who's corn was so long, none could shuck it
The farmer said with a grin, it was grown on a whim!
The seed from each ear fills a bucket
 
-Tom Spies

Equipment Review

Have equipment you want us to review on the podcast or here in the newsletter? Shoot Jean an email (jean@bookeranddax.com) and he'll send a mailing address.

 

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