On the Side: So much to eat, and only 365 days to eat it

The column agenda (2010 edition) is taking crude shape, rumpled business card by penciled note by reader e-mail from, well, here's one now from Joel Gardner from Cherry Hill:

"Don't know if you ever get over to the Jersey side of the Delaware, but on Route 38 in Pennsauken, what used to be Flower World is now a Vietnamese shopping center. . . . "

I'd written about the pork banh mi sandwiches (also know as "Vietnamese hoagies") at Sampan, the new modern Asian spot at 13th and Sansom.

So I'd been bracing myself. Write about a favorite pizza haunt or salute a crab cake or, now, even banh mi, and you tap something deep inside serious - sometimes too serious - eaters.

They'll denounce you. Or challenge you. Or in the case of encouraging souls on the order of Gardner, point out places you might want to check out. In this instance, it was the Century Cafe near the old Flower World.

Noted. And a tip o' the hat. It's on The List.

I've been saving an index card with a penciled message from the illustrator Dean Rohrer that he left on my porch one evening next to a jar of Long's hand-ground horseradish and an unlabeled bottle of pickle spears, their sweetness cut subtly with horseradish.

These wonders were procured, he said, at Lancaster's Central Market. I'm on the hunt! (Note to self: Make side trip to Hammond's, home of hand-twisted pretzels.)

Sometimes being on The List means just being on The List. This is the fourth year running that I haven't made it to a cozy fireside table at the Carversville Inn in one of the sweetest crossroads in upper Bucks County. Maybe it isn't meant to be. (It might have a hard time living up to my expectations at this point.)

Speaking of Carversville, I missed this year's October running (the 138th) of one of my favorite annual church suppers - the Carversville Christian Church's homey pork and oyster dinner, homemade and hand-served in the sprawling church basement.

Instead, at the urging of the preacher at Old Goshenhoppen Reformed United Church of Christ in Upper Salford Township, near Harleysville, my wife and I checked out its oyster picnic (est. 1877), a daylong, open-air version of the Carversville affair, with country music thrown in.

It was right up there, folks: Maybe I'll try to squeeze in both Carversville and Goshenhoppen this year, though I might have to attend one of them unaccompanied.

Speaking of my spouse, on the way home from a visit to her family near Cleveland, we stopped for lunch in Pittsburgh and had a knockout fried catfish sandwich in the Strip District, which isn't quite what you'd expect by the name.

What it is is exceedingly lively streets of produce wholesalers, mom-and-pop Italian bakeries, old-school coffee shops, sausage-makers, and soup vendors; a sort of hybrid of South Philly's rustic Ninth Street Market and the warrens of the Reading Terminal Market.

The Strip? Definitely on The List.

Speaking of the Italian Market, the fire barrels were roaring in the street over the holiday. No, the market ain't what it used to be. But there's plenty of life stirring: Basil DeLuca is about to open his (Villa di Roma) family's meatball and red gravy kitchen and take-out storefront. Finally.

Paesano's, the awesome Italian sandwich joint on Girard Avenue near the old Schmidt's Brewery, is opening up on the corner of Ninth and Christian. A new place is teed up for the vacant Shanks spot on 10th. And the Pronto space that the Di Bruno's clan is reimagining as a wine bar is chugging along.

It's only January, for goodness' sake, and The List is running on: There's a pilgrimage on tap to the fountainhead (in the Allentown/Kutztown/Topton triad) of birch beer. A reminder to check out the cassoulet at Bistrot La Minette. A mission to unearth the secret of the "Tripleta," a beauty of a Cuban sandwich at El Punto in North Philadelphia.

And so on - the house-made Sunday-brunch scrapple at Silk City Diner, the chopped rib tip sandwich on the late-night menu at Percy Street Barbecue, the new farm market at the Piazza at Schmidt's.

The List, routinely, gets longer as the year grows shorter. The odds of a candle-lit dinner at the Carversville Inn are looking, per usual, rather dim.

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