Hey Brother Dyson,
Can I borrow $90,000?
Brotherly Love,
Brother Mark
P.S. I’ll also take $85,000. You’ll always eat for free at Brother Mark’s Barbecue Trailer. Your dad can eat for free too, but not your sister.
Check out this Hunts Point institution on the electronic auction block.
You’re probably thinking, “I haven’t seen a new episode of Brother Mark in a while. Did he fall victim to the beef heart?” Don’t worry. Brother Mark is doing mighty fine. He and Brother Jay have been busy brewing delicious beer in Brother Mark’s test kitchen. A behind the scenes, Two True Brew Crew video exclusive will premiere soon, as well as a top secret tour de culinary force where Brother Mark battles the kings of barbecue in Sheepshead Bay. Spoiler alert: team Brother Mark’s Barbecue does not bring the barbecue laurels home.
Brother Jay and I brewed an oatmeal stout and a pale ale and we’ll mix them together for a brotherly black and tan. Brother Kieran helped us design and print our own beer labels. Here’s the good word from Brother Kieran:
Ever dream of sharing the barbecue pit with Brother Mark? Do you fancy smacking a wet one on the cheek of Brother Jay? Maybe you’d like to go Irish and chug a beer alongside Brother Kieran? Come on down to Sheepshead Bay on Saturday, March 27 and watch Brother Mark compete at Grillin’ On The Bay! It’s a barbecue contest and democratic Brooklyn Chili Smack Down in one. This serves as an open invitation for all fanatics of Brother Mark, from the seed savers to the locavores, to join the everyday Brethren. Pick up a spatula! Cheer for smoked meats! Drink a beer or three!
6:00am – Brother Mark arrives
12:00pm – Barbecue Competition Begins
1:00pm – Brooklyn Chili Smack Down
$10 All the Chili you can eat – until it runs out!
4:30pm – Barbecue Laurels Awarded
BBQ, Beer, non-alcoholic beverages and other food stuff available for purchase!
For more information, visit Grillin’ on the Bay.
Screams of “I want seeds!” echo through cyberspace. Don’t worry, we’re conditioning the soil for Brother Mark’s Seed Saving Combat Loneliness Project on the Internet. The seeds will arrive in your mailbox very soon! Meanwhile, get ready for next Valentine’s Day. You only have 361 days!
Adapted from the Incas and translated from the original Quechua
1/4 cup ají panca paste (recipe below)
garlic cloves (as many as your heart desires), smashed
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
a pinch of orégano (Mexican oregano or lippia graveolens) ground in hand
salt
pepper
cumin
1 cow heart
On Valentine’s Day, Brother Mark cooks up romance Peruvian-style: anticuchos de corazón and ensalada pallares. A downpour won’t imprison him in the kitchen. Love and barbecue beat too strongly in his heart. Learn how to save some cabbage by grilling a feast at home. Your sweetheart (and brothers) will love you for it. Happy Valentine’s Day from Brother Mark.
At the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, Arizona jaguars are fed horse meat and beef heart twice daily, plus a midday meat snack. Jealous? I am. Everyone thinks beef heart is only for jaguars. Brother Mark cooks it for Valentine’s Day. Tomorrow, watch me teach my brothers how to prepare a heart-warming feast on V Day. Listen to NPR’s Morning Edition for the full story on the possible extinction of the wild jaguar in the American southwest. Now, if we could only liberalize America’s draconian laws against horse slaughter.
At first, I thought that it would be fun to write a post about a recent case of food poisoning. On the one hand, there is a buffet of synonyms available for the act (puking, yakking, hurling, blowing chunks, up-chucking, barfing…), and there are pounds of potential fun in employing all of them and inventing more (I spewed more times than I can think of words to describe it).
Nevermind that nobody wants to hear about the bad part of food poisoning. And think not about the two day recovery, the eviscerating experience of trying to remember what could have caused the illness, or the surprisingly diverse advice people were willing to serve to help speed my stomach’s ease (eat whole grapefruits; don’t eat anything, just drink pedialyte). This could be fun.
And it was in that mindset that I spoke to a friend who asked what had happened, and why was I ill.
I told him, “food poisoning” without much energy but with enthusiasm that this might afford me the chance to practice some of my stories and get a few laughs in between long stretches of fatigue.
I made this for dinner on Thursday
I love cooking whole fish at home. It’s relatively quick and easy, and Kate and I can start eating dinner before ten o’clock. I can plate two fish on one platter and abandon my fork halfway through the meal without any strangers giving me weird looks.
I buy tilapia live in my neighborhood at No. 1 Fei Long Market Inc. on the corner of 45th Street and 8th Avenue. (Not to be confused with New Fei Long Market, Inc. further down 8th Avenue where officers from the DEC seized illegal blood clams from China. Yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if No. 1 Fei Long Market Inc. sold illegal seafood all the time.) The fishmongers there move awkwardly like men who have been maimed in dangerous, low-paying professions. My fishmonger pulls two 1.5 lb fish from a tank and kills them with a rubber mallet. I tell him that I want the head kept in tact. He trims too much of the fin and eviscerates the fish with scissors before scaling. The two cleaned fish in a plastic bag total $10.10.
Baked Tilapia with Farro Perlato and Roasted Tomatoes
2 – 1.5 lb whole tilapia, cleaned and rinsed under cold water
3 purple onions, sliced
6 cloves garlic, chopped
2 T butter
2 T extra virgin olive oil
4 sprigs thyme, chopped
1 T whole orégano (Lippia graveolens), crushed in palm with fist
salt and pepper
1 T mirin
12 cherry tomatoes, halved
A couple of years ago, when Mark and I were perhaps even more marginally employed than we are today and living in a poorly insulated two-bedroom in Sunset Park where turning a burner on in the summer instituted apartment-wide climate change, I sidled up to Mark, who was perched over dual pots of steaming Goya blackbeans and brown rice, and asked: “How much longer?”
It was nearly 4 PM, two hours into the cooking process, and Mark, completely naked but for a pair of blue boxers and mocassins, turned and said to me: “The problem with restaurants is that 9 times out of 10, I feel like I can make what they make for a fraction of the cost.” I gave him the once-over and nodded agreeably careful not to betray my skepticism. I twisted the sweat out of the pits of my T-Shirt. “Twenty-five minutes,” he told me.
Determined not to let this time pass as unproductively as I had the previous 7 hours of awake-time, I went into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and removed a pair of scissors. I lopped off an inch and a half of hair and threw it onto the floor mat. “I will beat this heat,” I rhymed to myself. In the kitchen, Mark moaned as a spoon fell onto the floor. “Fucking Jonathan Schwartz,” he growled at the radio. I clipped off my cowlick.
I’m enjoying this. Seems there’s a movement afoot that tries to replicate how cavemen lived. It goes like this: eat meat, and then fast. For exercise, run. Brave the elements. Try to get as close to the lifestyle of ancient man as possible.
As James Durant puts it in an article for the Nova Scotia Chronicle-Herald:
The caveman lifestyle, in Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors f aced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were un available before the invention of agriculture. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenni ums of bad habits.