This Week at the Herdic House
On such a lovely Wednesday, the pleasures of scripting an email blast are dramatically outweighed by the delights of spring sunshine, so you’ll forgive our brevity this morning. But we’re still planning a delicious Blue Plate tonight! Korean-style fish tacos, with gochujang-broiled haddock, house-cured kimchi, sriracha aioli and pineapple salsa. It’s $18 at our House, and $20 to go, like always—but, per usual, our number of to-go orders will be very limited. We’ll hope to see you out tonight! And our soup this evening will be a curried crab, coconut and tomato bisque… Come join us for our Thursday happy hours at the bar, from 5-7 pm, with $1 off all beers and $2 off wines by the glass—or drink and dine on the patio in the lovely temperatures! Plus we’ll be serving our Thursday night feature that pretends to be healthy, all while loaded with the tangy umami of ranch dressing: house favorite Herdic Pittsburgh salad, this week served with grilled tenderloin tips, fresh-cut fries, grated cheddar and parmesan ranch. Plus, Hannah will be shaking up fresh mint juleps at the bar… Several members of our extended Herdic family spent a slightly sunburned and drunken weekend these past few days in warm, sunny and sculpted Washington D.C. The celebrations were three-fold—Liz turned the ripe, old age of 46; Benj and Dana (in the center of the photo above) bought a gorgeous new house in Columbia Heights and invited us to check it out; and, most importantly, Wilpo prodigal son Cutter Wood debuted his second book just yesterday, April 29, a marvelous tome titled Earthly Materials.
What kind of content does a book called Earthly Materials portend, you might ask? Some very Cutter-esque subject matter, as it turns out. Given his choice of subjects to examine, Cut chose the obvious: bodily effluvia of all sorts, from urine, to breath, to semen, to mucus and all sorts of excretions in between. (Did you know, for instance, that our bodies produce over 20 types of mucus? It wasn’t just a “you” problem after all…) In order to research this voluminous topic, Cutter has not only visited what he terms a “vomit cult” in Florida, among other adventures, but has also become a veritable encyclopedia of gross yet cool facts about these bodies we inhabit with equal (or not so equal) parts pride and revulsion.
So we raised perhaps a few too many glasses to the wonders of the human body this weekend and to your correspondent officially entering :ugh: her late 40s, and feasted on Vietnamese, Laotian and Lebanese foods, in between dragging the kids through all sorts of national landmarks. And now, dreadfully behind but definitely not hungover, your correspondent will wrap up this week’s missive by including a snapshot of Friday evening’s menu, below, and mentioning that fried chicken and deviled eggs will be making an appearance on Saturday evening this week, in honor of the Kentucky Derby…
- Cucumber-mint gimlets
- Spring chicken soup, with peas, fennel, spring garlic, scallions and wild rice
- Grilled herb-marinated chicken hearts, skewered with oyster mushrooms and served over lemon-dressed arugula
- Housemade spring onion, mascarpone and mustard green tortelli, served in a wild leek compound butter with creamed Tebbs’ corn and seared scallops
- Baked to order blueberry crostata served with housemade vanilla ice cream
And don’t forget to pick up your copy of Earthly Materials, of course! The inimitable Cutter Wood would be thrilled and puzzled to see a surge in orders from Central PA. This link will take you to Otto Bookstore’s website, if you prefer the online approach, but it’s much more sociable to stop on down to visit the lovely folks at Otto and pick up a copy in person. Make a request that they host a reading by the author while you’re there—it’d be lovely to finagle Cut back to Wilpo sometime soon…