Guerrilla Food

I’ll never forget the summer that Max & Me transitioned from its rented retail space to a new catering only location. The lease expired before the remodel was complete and we had several major jobs in the interim. Max set up his home as kitchen central with a reefer truck (bummer of a misnomer BTW) and a small event tent in the side yard as a satellite outpost. I was stationed to the outpost with my favorite collaborateur – a wildcard artist with a Dutch palindrome for a name. We were charged with making a bouillabaisse. The first step was to manually dismember live lobsters, poach their favored appendages, and toss their still twitching cephalothoraxes into smoking hot olive oil to roast for rendering into an über-savory stock. The spattery, smoky, marine life/burning hair like aroma coupled with the dynamism of watching these animals die while their protinaceous exoskeleton denatured from mottled blue-green to cliché red is my fondest memory of geurilla cooking. You see – what we were doing was patently non-compliant, and like roasting a whole lamb, so wholly visceral and engaging as to be native to us, instinctual. Cuisine au natural. It’s hard to believe, over 10 years later, that the place or the man ever recovered.

The guerrilla kitchen as we came to call it was transitional and soon the new and present home of Max Hansen Catering was opened. Life returned from organized chaos to just abnormal. Those eventful weeks were during July and August of 1998 and they harken of the even more outdated summer kitchen’s of yore. Have you ever considered the divine irony in canning season? The year’s greatest glut arrives with the year’s most intense heat and somehow this is the condition that is supposed to inspire us to say “ Yes! Let’s fire up the whole stove so we can simmer, and boil, and steam great vats of produce and sterile jars!” Suddenly, the idea of having a kitchen located outside, vented by the breeze, sanitized by the sun, and equipped with the modern advances of running water and portable fuel, appears as a vision of loveliness to those inclined towards a kitchencentric life. It is in this vein that we are opening up the CSK and its many resources, including a soon to be constructed patio, to the public. We have giant grills and giant pots. We own a beast of a pressure canner and a commercial range plus a couple of portable propane side burners. We have a giant colander, bus tubs, three chest freezers, a pasta maker….basically, a lot of stuff that makes summer processing easier, plus know how to offer the neophyte. 

Please Join Us! On August 21, bring your own produce and containers to our home and join us in making the most of our resources to make the most of the season.  All people Welcome, the more the merrier, though we will be limiting numbers due to space. For More Details click the Kitchencentric Life Tab at the top and to reserve a spot email: foodnanny(at)gmail(dot)com