The Diva That Ate New York // My life in food

Thanksgiving 2009 Jax put the pots on!

Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday! I’m so excited about Thanksgiving (read: since I don’t have my chocolate cafe weighing on me like it has the last four years) this year that I’m having it twice! For the family on Thursday and on the Friday for my friends who have to work in restaurants on Thanksgiving with a sprinkling of who were otherwise occupied on Thursday. Here is the menu as it stands now. I use a combination of dishes that that are traditional with dishes I make up to use up stuff I have too much of (read: chocolate, nuts, toffee) and a couple of things that are new and fun in the starter section.  Until I actually make dinner, there are no pictures. I will do my best to get some shots on the day!

Regarding My life in food

Is it only a little creepy to me that I wrote this is in the third person? Don’t know what I was thinking then, but there’s not time for rewrites now!!!

The birthplace of eatertainment

In Australia, Jackie made great strides with her singing and performing through her wonderful friend and mentor, Paulene Terry-Beitz. An incredible actor, director and writer, she took Jackie under her wing, and together they devised Jackie’s first one-woman show, “Black Pearls and Strange Fruit.”

Making it divalicious

Jackie reinvented the dinner show.

“I decided if people wanted a ‘dinner show,’ I would give them one. And the critical difference between my show, and the dinner shows and dinner theater I’d been to in the past was the food. It was not going to be the churned out, mediocre slop masquerading as food that you get more often than not at this type of show.”

No singing at the dinner table!

Yes, for a time that was a rule in the Gordon household, but it never stuck. All the Gordons displayed some form of musicality (singing, guitar, piano, drumming, the spoons, etc.) and chose to share it at whim.

Throw another turkey on the barby

Jackie did her bit to dispel the bad rap that American food gets globally.

“Australia is inundated with American fast-food chains. Their concept of American food is totally corrupted. But they love great food, so I decided to do what I could to teach them about our cuisine.”

Let ’em eat bagels

Flourishing in the land of Oz, Jackie worked singing in bands, but she couldn’t keep her hands out of the kitchen. She opened the first café, book and music store in Melbourne and turned the locals on to bagels and wonderful American desserts.

The hunger down under

Arriving in Australia, Jackie decided she’d come to a quasi-paradise.

“I was frightened a bit in the early days. I originally arrived in Far North Queensland. Rain forests. The Great Barrier Reef. Visually stunning, but the ‘sticks’ food-wise.”

Soothing the savage beasts

Pre-Guliani New York was rough and Jackie used singing as an anti-mugging strategy… “Family, friends, they were not allowed to hear me sing, but the scum of New York I could perform for.