The Gathering @ Keswick Castle Tonight

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This blog has been somewhat critical of food trucks in the past. In fact, as much as we like to cook and eat, we’re not keen on foodie culture as a whole.

That’s still true. We still think that the food truck should belong to its working class provenance. Its modern reinvention by people too concerned with cute logos and novelty cuisine may play well with trend chasers and the downtown lunch set, but speaking as an actual working class man with a blue collar job it makes us quite uncomfortable. As we’ve said before, we might love food trucks if they actually came to where we are and were willing to hit the road longer than a 4 hour lunch shift. The main reason we’ve never eaten from a food truck until now is because we rarely see them in operation, especially when we’re hungry.

Today though, it’s going to be pretty hard for us to miss them. The Gathering, a semi-regular rally of Baltimore area food trucks will set up shop at the Castle on Keswick in Hampden tonight, and we’re going to go check it out. We’ll probably even (gasp!) eat a meal.

You see, the Republican lives so close to the castle that we’d pretty much be walking directly through the Gathering to get to her house anyway. At dinner time. Before we go out drinking. It’s almost as if the food trucks of Charm City have given us a personal engraved invitation.

When we told the Republican about it, she said “What the fuck is the Gathering?” which is part of the reason we like her so much. After we explained it, we had to explain that Yes. People actually get into their cars and drive them to the food trucks. No. It doesn’t make any sense to us either.

So we’re going to the Gathering tonight. We’re going to put their food where our mouth is, and from this point we’ll either double down on our cheap smugness, or eat a lot of crow. Probably crow in a waffle cone with an Old Bay remoulade, served from a bright glossy truck.

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The Castle is located at 3355 Keswick Road in Hampden. Tonight’s Gathering also features live music by the aptly named local band Greasy Hands.

Sun Tea on the Stoop: A Hallmark of Baltimore Summer

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If there’s one thing that both locals and outsiders seem to enjoy immensely it’s pointing out that as a Mid-Atlantic city Baltimore has always been “A little bit Northern, a little bit Southern.” One of the strangest and most subtle ways that this phenomenon has manifested itself in our own life is through tea.

Growing up we always had a pitcher of tea in the house, and it was almost always sweet enough to please even the pickiest southern sweet tooth. We were well nigh our teen years before we understood that people put lemon in tea as a matter of course. The stuff at our house wasn’t lemony, but basically tea flavored syrup, and when we’d go to a friend’s house or (God help us) a restaurant we’d inevitably be served tea that was either mildly or drastically disappointing.

sun tea brewing

As gourmet as it gets. Nothing fancy, just tea.

The twist here is that in the dead heat of Summer, like many houses in Baltimore we would often have a gallon jar of sun tea sitting out on the front stoop. Sun tea is an explicitly Southern tradition, but somehow when we’d make it we’d drink it dry, or yes, even sometimes with lemon. It just kind of made sense. It’s hard to get half a pound of sugar to dissolve without boiling it, and a July heatwave gets so sticky that syrupy tea is just less appealing.

Now that we’re all grown up with a house of our own, we still keep a large pitcher of tea in the fridge year round, and in the Summer months, still set a jar out on the stoop to heat up in the morning and ice it down and drink it in the afternoon. Today, we’re breaking out the sun tea jar. You should too.

HOW TO BREW SUN TEA:

You get yourself a jar. Any size jar you want, really. A gallon is best if you’ve got a handful of people in your house or if like us you drink tea all day and all night. Wash the shit out of it, because: bacteria. Fill it up with Baltimore City tap water, which is delicious and is the best possible water to use for making sun tea. Put in 5 or 6 tea bags for a gallon. Use regular-ass Lipton or Luzianne or whatever. Let it sit in the sun for 3-5 hours. Drink it.

Perhaps the thing we like most about sun tea is its absolute simplicity. In a Pinterest/Martha Stewart/foodie fetish culture it is absolutely impossible to improve on basic sun tea. Using fancy tea doesn’t turn out any better than simple black tea. Adding in exotic fruits or herbs is something people do, but we wouldn’t say it’s an improvement.

Even buying a fancy serving vessel from Williams Sonoma or getting in on the latest dumb trend of serving things in mason jars to impress fools is not an improvement. Any re-used (glass) jam jar or pickle jar or apple juice bottle is more authentic and down-home, and in a city like Baltimore they’re a lot less likely to get stolen right off your stoop.

How to Wear White Pants

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As much as we like shopping for clothes and talking about style, we have to admit that like most men we kind of hate shopping for pants. Unlike shoes which fit consistently by size or shirts and jackets which are easy to pop on at the rack, trying on pants involves going into a dressing room (and sometimes waiting in line for the privilege) taking off your shoes and pants, putting on new pants, putting on your shoes to see how they look, taking them off again, taking off the pants, and putting your own pants and shoes back on.

Multiply that by the number of pairs of pants you need to buy and it’s quite an ordeal. It’s easy to understand why most men would rather eat broken glass from a cereal bowl than shop for pants, and we’re no exception. We need pants though, so this week we’re looking for pants.

The pants look great. That hat on the other hand is highly questionable.

Now that Memorial Day has come and gone, we are officially officially into white pants season. It may come as a surprise that we are very much in favor of white pants. We’d like to see more of them around Baltimore, and that’s going to begin with us. Although we’ve avoided white pants in the past, we’re going to be embracing them this Summer.

They’re not the easiest to pull off, and with good reason. Every time you see white pants in fashion they look really dumb on some affected preppy model. Either that, or they look really gay. No, really. We mean they look super duper shout-it-to-the-back-row gay.

It doesn’t have to be that way though. As John Lennon displays here, white pants can convey a timeless, effortless cool. Now that we’re doing things like wearing colorful socks and soccer jerseys and playing golf and drinking outdoors all the time, ownership of white pants has become an absolute necessity. We’ll be wearing them regularly from now until Labor Day, and we encourage the men of Baltimore to do the same.

The Friend Collector Cocktail Recipe

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Typically on this blog we only feature cocktail recipes we’ve come up with on our own. Today though we’re going to do something a little different, and feature a drink that was introduced to us by a friend this weekend. How could we not feature it? It’s so simple, and so delicious that after the first sip we had the distinct feeling that we’d be drinking these all Summer long.

A visual approximation of the Friend Collector.

The friend who introduced it to us said that it didn’t have a name, although it’s really nothing more than a small tweak of a classic drink, the Whiskey Smash. We’re going to go ahead and name it the Friend Collector, after the band of the same name. It’s a very appropriate appellation- if you decide to buy or make this drink for people around you, you’re bound to start collecting friends pretty quickly.

The Friend Collector

  • 2 oz. Bourbon
  • 6 oz. San Pellegrino Limonata
  • 3-4 fresh mint leaves
  • 1/2 oz simple syrup

    • Muddle mint leaves in syrup, then add Bourbon and ice and stir. Add Limonata and stir a bit more. That’s it.

    The tweak is using Italian Limonata as opposed to fresh lemon juice and any other combination of bitters, water, etc. We’ve always held that one of the main problems with the “craft cocktail renaissance” or whatever going on right now is that it’s a lot of fucking work. We don’t want to brew our own bitters and plant a pomegranate tree in the yard and cut lemon twists with surgical precision… we just want to pour good drinks and drink them.

    This is one of those ideas that we probably should have come up with on our own. We’ve used fancy high-end lemonades before to good effect (usually with rum) and God knows we drink enough whiskey and lemonade during the Summer, but until now it’s just been cans of Country Time.

    No matter though. It’s such a simple recipe we’ll never forget it, and such a delicious drink you might want to go ahead and mix up a whole pitcher while you’re at it.

    It’s under 100° Today! Who Needs Window Units???

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    As we’ve noted before on several occasions, Baltimore has long been a city dedicated to the value of thrift. Whether it’s shopping in thrift stores or picking things up off the street, most Baltimoreans will go to great lengths to save a couple of dollars.

    Baltimore is also a city famous for its distinctive antique rowhouses, all of which were built without central air conditioning. A Baltimore rowhouse can steam up hotter than a hammam in the middle of Summer, and thus was born the tradition of stoop sitting. Most outsiders don’t understand that some people sit on their stoops so long and so often because it’s simply too hot to exist inside their houses.

    In Baltimore, this is a prefectly acceptable alternative to using air conditioning.

    Nowadays, retrofitted central air is de rigeur in gentrified neighborhoods, but in many middle and working class rowhouse neighborhoods people rely on window units for relief from the heat. With the arrival of Memorial Day weekend, we’re at the peak of one of Baltimore’s most popular but least-discussed competitive sports: the delay of window unit installation.

    It’s never fun to install a window unit, especially if yours are particularly old and heavy or if your windows are oddly sized or your unit needs repair. In Baltimore though, forestalling the installation of A/C goes beyond all that. Many people will place units in their windows and refuse to turn them on as long as possible. The Chop’s own parents used to do this back in the day, and even now we encounter many people in our own generation who grew up hardwired to thriftiness, and won’t run the air conditioning until it becomes absolutely crucially necessary. If there’s one thing in Charm City that’s universal, it’s a bitter hatred for BG&E. A refusal to pay for any more energy than necessary is a small moral victory.

    Some people have a fixation on a magic number and won’t turn A/C on until the first 90° or 95° day. For others, they do all they can to hold out to a specific date. Some refuse air conditioning until the end of May. Some push for Fathers’ day. The hardiest and most foolish try to make it all the way to July 1 in a test of willpower, and even then turn it on only at night.

    This local sport is peculiar and amusing, although it’s not one in which we’ll ever participate again. Bills be damned. We make a good living and power isn’t that expensive. for a buck or a day or whatever it costs we’d much rather be cool and comfortable for four solid months. We’ve had our bedroom A/C running for a month already, and we’re pleased to report that the window unit/ceiling fan combination we’re running in our living room works even better than we thought it would. It’s downright chilly in there now, and it’s going to stay that way all Summer.