Everything I Ate Yesterday

A Sunday at Per Se

2010-05-03T22:09:00.001-07:00

By way of simple exposition, I turn 30 this week and I have the most amazing girlfriend there is. She took me to Per Se for dinner at 11:30am on a Sunday. This is a highly recommendable time for a nine course dinner. You're brunch hungry, but when you leave three hours later, you still have the wherewithall to reflect.
She probably chose Per Se because of the mildly obnoxious man-crush I have on Thomas Keller.
The affinity starts with Thomas Keller's philosophy on food, an art of comfort and surprise, nostalgia and invention. I aspire to that kind of cooking, but what I really admire him for his attention to detail, and the lengths he and his staff go to for their customers. Sure, a personalized printing of the menu probably didn't take up too much of the staff's time, they print new ones every day. But, when you walk into one of the premiere restaurants in the world and they hand you a menu with your name on it, though, you feel kinda special.

I'd seen the salmon cone amuse bouche on the French Laundry episode of No Reservations, and I've been wanting to try one since. I'm not the biggest salmon lover, so I took the fava bean one and let my girlfriend have most of the salmon one. The cones are packed farther down with creme fraiche and chives. The recipe is in the French Laundry cookbook. I'm going to have to give it a try this summer.
These tiny wonders were just the start of the onslaught of food. Beyond the courses I go into in detail, they bring several rounds of bread, I had a dinner roll, a hoop of duck fat rye, a slice of walnut baguette, another of a rye baguette with currants, a salted butter from Vermont, an unsalted butter from California, these were just the options I indulged in. I'll not wax too poetical, though. I'm aware I'm starting to sound a bit much like Anthony Bourdain, and you likely want to look at more pretty pictures.

Another TK signature dish, "oysters and pearls." There's a savory tapioca under the sauce, and white sturgeon caviar next to the oysters. I'm not the biggest oyster fan either, but this was an amazing plate to start with. The oysters themselves were even better than the oysters I had fresh out of the ocean on Miyajima.

The first dish of the Tasting of Vegetables. "Bouquetiere de Legumes de Printemps Cuits et Crus"
Spring vegetable salad, with gelee of their vegetable stock and a pine nut coulis. Right off the bat they plate a ton of flavors in a very delicate balance. The spring onion blossoms were a great touch here and later in the beef course of the Chef's Tasting menu.

"'Gateau' of Hudson Valley Moulard Duck Foie Gras"
Most of the foie gras I've had comes off as meatloaf paste. Granted, I love meatloaf, and spreading it on crackers is pretty fantastic. This was many times more refined, like the difference between top shelf vodka and the Vladimir $6 a handle piss that comes out of Scobeyville, NJ. This looks like a cake, but the strawberries are pickled, and those whimsical translucent green twirls are celery. The top layer of the "cake" is a strawberry gelee, which was sweet, but just enough to balance the incredibly rich blend of foie gras and whipped yogurt that is the heart of this plate. The toast was also exceptional. How good can toast be? Well, this raised my bar. No butter, the bread is baked with enough fat already in it to promote the browning. It must have been toasted by a high heat applied directly to the surface of the bread. There's about an eighth of an inch of perfect tawny crispness on either side, with about a half inch of pillowy white delight inside. As if that wasn't great enough, when you get about half-way through this plate, they bring you a NEW plate of toast so that you have fresh warm toast for the second half. Details.

"Dover Sole 'Farci aux Olives Nicoise'"
Delicate pickled asparagus adds the bright notes to this hearty fish laden with olives over diced potatoes and an emulsion of egg and garlic.

"Garbanzo Bean 'Croquettes'"
When I saw this plate I thought, "Come on, it's falafel. Must we be so pretentious?" On one hand, I know Thomas Keller is being playful with his menu. On the other hand, even if he called them flalafel, they still wouldn't have been any less impressive. Each croquette is topped with a candied slice of meyer lemon set in a coriander gelee adding a spiciness and broadening the cultural setting of the mashed and fried chickpeas. Beyond highlighting how great something simple and familiar can be when done with the best ingredients and attention to detail, these guys were incredibly satisfying.

"Butter Poached Nova Scotia Lobster Mitts"
Despite the morel cream sauce over the lobster and split English peas, this was my least favorite plate. The few slices of morel in the sauce just put the lobster to shame for both richness and subtlety. Still, it made for a fantastic picture.

This was my girlfriend's least favorite, but the few bites I managed to steal were some of my favorite of the whole meal. "Coddled Squire Hill Farms' Ameraucana Hen Egg" with brioche soldiers, smoked onion white sauce and a black winter truffle puree. The yolk in the egg was cooked with a gradient from puddle through pudding to wet clay. Everything was just so intoxicatingly comforting. I could probably make it through six of these before reason kicked in and/or my heart just clogged to a standstill.

"Four Story Hill Farm's Suckling Pig 'Porchetta'"
The porchetta by itself was a bit cloying, but it played so nice with everything else on the plate, especially the pickled green tomatoes. I would have been thrilled with a plating of twice as much of the polenta "grits" and collard greens and just a hint of the porchetta.

"White Asparagus Amandine"
This compared to the porchetta plate was the second time the vegetable tasting flatly outdid the chef's tasting. This plate was a playful riot of satisfaction from start to finish. Green almonds, ever had them? Ever heard of them? TK is showing off a bit here, but it's the kind of grandstanding that's hard to hate on because it's so clearly validated by the end-product. The plating, while pyrotechnic in terms of composition, was also understated, deftly drawing attention away from the morels and the "ramp top subric" that are the passion and backbone of this plate. The subric here was a cake similar in consistency to the falafel, but dark green and full of rampy exuberance. This is the one that had me making my girlfriend's favorite enrapt faces of food fugue.

"Snake River Farms' "Calotte de Boeuf"
Thomas Keller takes what is typically a scrap cut of beef, the strip around the outside of a rib-eye, and turns it into one of his signature dishes, and one of the most amazing pieces of beef I've ever had. The spring onions were a great pairing, very subtle with tones of vanilla. The other things on the plate were less memorable compared to the heavily marbled and yet still seriously meaty "calotte."

"Marscapone Enriched Yukon Potato 'Agnolotti'"
A decent plate, and a great accompaniment to the calotte de boeuf.

"Soup and Sandwich"
Fantastic soup, but the sandwich was a bit heavy. The "minestrone" was a combination of pickled vegetables, ravioli and vegetable stock, lightening the palate after the beef course. The goat cheese sandwich played well with the tomato marmalade, but very greasy.

"Gorgonzola Cremificato"
At this point in the dinner, this course proved a little much for my girlfriend. The pickled green tomatoes lightened the gorgonzola and polenta cake beneath, but after six courses plus the breads and craft butters, well, the body can only take so much indulgence and we were still a course away from dessert.

"Mango Sorbet" over rice pudding with rice wafer and whipped jasmine tea. Just when I thought I was done making faces, they put this down in front of me. The mango sorbet was stunning, but the real winner here was the rice pudding. The jasmine tea was a nice touch and held up to the robust mango, but the rice pudding was best by itself as a subtle refrain between the outbursts of the burlier flavors.

Pineapple Sorbet with lime macarons, compressed golden pineapple, papaya and persian lime salt. What is compressed pineapple? It's that fin sticking out of the sorbet, half a vertical slice of pineapple pressed and dried. My girlfriend likened it to a very fancy fruit roll-up. The rest of the dish was an invigorating interplay of tart and salty.

"Swiss Roll"
Another of Thomas Keller's signature dishes, a play on the form of the swiss roll snack cake. The birthday candle was as adorable as it was tasteful. The plate was beautiful, and many of the details were superb, especially the pineapple foam and the glace a la creme fraiche, but the cake itself was a bit timid. How gorgeous is this plate, though?

"Trinity and Hearts"
Rhubarb Jam, a yogurt-based Bavarian cream, crystallized rose petals and rose-scented yogurt sherbet. I only managed a bite of this before my girlfriend housed it. It was very good. I'm not the most dedicated dessert fan, though, and even ended up giving up a great deal of the swiss roll.

This creme brulee came out as a bonus desert to the tasting of vegetables. It was exemplary of its kind and, at a modest three inches across, was a delightful dollop of indulgence to close the plated portion of dinner.

But wait, there's more. After dessert they brought out a second, tiny, yet incredible dessert. This was a honey-ginger pot au creme. Ginger-infused honey lurked beneath an exquisite stiffened cream in an adorable little piece of ceramic reminiscent of Winnie-the-Pooh's honey pots. Another fantastic bit of interplay, the spoon they give you fits perfectly around the curve inside of that tiny little pot, allowing you to attack even the very last lick of an incredible meal, not including the selection of seasonal chocolate truffles, (fennel and dark chocolate and olive oil in white chocolate were particularly stellar) chocolate covered hazelnuts, adorable little sugar candies, nougats, caramels and a selection of bonbons that they bring out as you brace yourself for the check.

A monday for new things.

2009-07-14T07:31:00.000-07:00

So many beautiful foods tick by without time to write. Today is that auspicious overlap of the venn circles for "Time to write a blog post" and "I ate something novel yesterday that I haven't written about yet."

This novel thing was not breakfast, however, which was the tried and true bacon egg and cheese on a croissant from a cart vendor. This one was from the cart on the north west corner of 62nd street and Broadway. Unlike a lot of carts which opt for the Muslim-friendly turkey bacon, these guys use real pig, and for that, they will eternally have my $3.50 for cart breakfast in the neighborhood.

Lunch was also typical of these posts, in that it was free. This wave of institutional windfall was catered by Dallas BBQ. I had a chicken breast with a wing still attached, a spinach salad with raisins, walnuts and a creamy mustard dressing, some corn bread and a giant pair of beef ribs that had everyone going through the line making Flintstones jokes. It wasn't BBQ to break your heart, but it sure filled me up. It almost shut down my desire to even think about food for the rest of the day, save for a spare chocolate covered pretzel or two.

I was so full of cornbread and char that I was debating skipping dinner, but the girl friend wanted to get out a bit, so we finally ate at Madiba, a South African joint near her apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. I've had African food before, but mostly Ethiopian, so I wasn't really sure if I knew what to expect. I tend to expect African food to consist mainly of curries, to be very bold without as much heat as Indian food, and to be very comforting and satisfying. While I realize the absurdity of lumping African food together, much like generalizing American cuisine is a misleading attempt to draw homogenous characteristics from a vast wealth of disparate regional cuisines, I found that in this case my assumptions were graciously upheld.

In the mood for a broad culinary adventure, we split an entree and several of their sides. Heading the spread was their Durban Bunny Chow, curry served in the hollowed-out end of a loaf of bread with a selection of three sambals, similar to Indian chutneys. We had the mutton curry, which reminded me of the curry in Japanese karepan, except that this meat was not mysterious balls of indescriminate spongy parts, but rather sizable chunks of stewed mutton. There was a very prominent note of corriander and another curry spice I cannot place by name outside of the similarity to karepan. The sambals, banana and coconut, cucumber mint and yogurt, and a mango chutney went from feverently addictive to satisfying to inedible in turn.
The banana and shredded coconut soaked in coconut milk was fantastic. We actually asked for seconds as the first dish went in the first five minutes of eating as we destroyed two amagwinya, a deep-fried flatbread that I would recommend as a "must-order" for anyone dining here, especially if you can get them to bring you some of the banana coconut sambal on the side. The mango chutney had that edge of basement that you find with some canned foods that makes me think that the can was not sealed tight enough or the food had just been in the can too long. Fortunately, it was very easy to just throw the cup of sugary basement paste to the side and forget about it.
There was plenty enough food. Of the other two sides we ordered, I would definitely recommend the chakalaka, a stewed blend of beans, carrots, tomatoes and onions that was rich, deeply satisfying and surprisingly tangy. Good but not gaga was the uputhu, boiled cornmeal topped with onions stewed in a tomato sauce. I could see this food being a staple of the Zulu diet, as the menu claims, but we had a large portion of the cornmeal, akin to grits or cream of wheat, left naked in the bottom of the bowl after we'd eaten down through the tomato-onion gravy in what I thought were reasonable proportions. Even after using the grits as an excuse to make our way through the second bowl of banana-coconut sambal, we still abandoned more of the unsalted and unseasoned white gloop than the untouched mold-tinged mango jelly. With a little salt in the grits and a higher gravy to cornmeal ratio, the uputhu could be a regular favorite of mine as well.

In terms of general restaurant review, the waitstaff were welcoming and attentive and the food was all very earnestly satisfying and, save for the cornmeal, very robustly flavored without taxing my girlfriend's limits of spiciness. Hopefully they buy a new jar of mango jelly before the next time we go, but we will definitely be back.

Monday is either free or over priced.

2009-06-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

Just when you start to take free food for granted, you are met with an unexpected boon of exceptional free food that really makes you feel fortunate to work for an institution of higher learning, as if being in the top economic percentile of the world population simply by virtue of being an American with a job wasn't fortune enough. Kind of makes you feel like an ass hole for spending time on a Tuesday afternoon to write pithy drivel about the things you ate on a Monday instead of working in a soup kitchen in Sarajevo. Can't really make it to Sarajevo on my lunch break, though...

It was one of those mornings where I skip breakfast, partly because I frequently get bored with eating and wait for real inspiration to eat (often only to fall prey to something mediocre but easy and/or free) partly because I realize that, as an American, I'm in the top percentile world wide for fatasstedness, and I could probably stand to skip a few mornings of bacon and eggs.

I was afraid the meeting to approve our collective bargaining agreement with the university would run long, though, and I didn't want to run out of blood-sugar while the union reps explained exactly how they dumped probation-term health benefits and paid leave incoming employees for the sake of securing 6 weeks of personal use vacation a year for those employees who have worked as university staff for 30+ years. I want to remember all the details I can use to taunt future rookies, assuming that the university ever rescinds its hiring freeze, not that I'll ever be on staff for 30 years, so I bought a pack of Grandma's brand "homemade style" oatmeal raisin cookies from the cafeteria vending machine. This cost me a dollar.

They weren't terrible, but the oil they use leaves this waxy sheen across the inside of your mouth. It was very unpleasant and obviously the result of machine-assisted baking that would never occur if they were in fact made in someone's actual home. Thanks to the goodies provided by my local union post-voting, I was able to hold these vendy cookies up to what I thought might be fair competition, but even the oatmeal raisin cookies produced by the university's in-house catering service in ridiculous amounts far outperformed "Grandma's" in flavor as well as mouthfeel. I also put down a 1" cube of carrot cake petifour and two chocolate covered cream puffs. It's important to eat a balanced breakfast.

I thought after the cookie binge I ought to get a salad, but free food tempted me again. At least for lunch I ate what some might call a healthy meal. To my surprise and for reasons I am still uncertain of, I managed to avail myself of the tail end of some luncheon in the faculty cafe. Pecan roasted chicken, fingerling potatoes, very thin asparagus with roasted peppadews, three-color tortellini with marinara sauce and mixed field greens rounded out what was probably the most well-ballanced meal I've eaten all month. The chicken was surprisingly good considering I was eating well after the buffet was originally served. The potatoes didn't fare as well, but there was plenty of butter on hand. I would have been happy with that meal had I paid $12 for it, but it was free. That's really a lot of free. It's like when this really cute girl you like asks YOU out before you can ask her. Maybe not, but it was rad.

Then dinner sucked. I am perhaps being unfair given the delightful freegan feasts from earlier in the day, but Habana Outpost in Ft. Greene does not deliver the quality or quantity to justify their price tags. if a "Catfish Burito" is going to run me over $8, it better be plated with an actual side item and contain more than one piece of catfish tucked in all the rice and lettuce. Not that the catfish itself was bad, although the chicken in one of my companion's chicken burrito was pretty dry and uninteresting. The guac and chips was decent, but only about $4 of decent, not $6 of decent. The corn and cotija cheese that is a staple at the Habana Eco-Eatery family of restaurants was reasonable at $2 an ear for city prices, but still more expensive than the same item at Cafe Habana, two for $3.75. Also, for the tail end of June, the corn was not particularly succulent or vibrant. If you need a place for 10+ people to drink margaritas outside in Ft. Greene, this might be your joint. If you want to actually enjoy eating, maybe not.

Consolation desert: Vosges brand Mo's Bacon Bar, bacon crumbles and smoked salt in milk chocolate, not bad, although bacon dipped in chocolate is generally better fresh. Also, some kind of foreign sandwich cookie with vanilla icing and a cookie textured like a more delicate vanilla wafer but chocolate flavored. Yuppie impulse buying at The Greene Grape. I also got a pack of lamb merguez sausages, dried chantrelles and some duck hotdogs, to be featured in future bloggings.

Wednesday from trashy to healthy and back again.

2009-06-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

Living with roommates puts an edge of uncertainty to stocking foodstuffs. My apartment operates under very lassez-faire rules in terms of what you can eat. Basically, if it's in the apartment, you can make use of it how you see fit. Before becoming roommates we were friends old and fast, so there's no bitterness over finishing a loaf of bread or snagging an ice cream sandwich. Occasionally, though, I find myself with ambitious culinary challenges when I forget to check if the gouda fell to a midnight snack attack or the left-over tuna casserole is not there to take to lunch tomorrow. It was in a convergence of these sorts of disappointments that "corn porklins" were born.

Without tortillas or bread in the house, I was forced to make some late-game compromises. I saw a box of Jiffy cornbread mix, thought of the taylor pork roll in the fridge and set about making some tricked out corn muffins. Pour the mix in a bowl, add an egg and 1/3 c. of...
Well, it should have been milk, but we were out of that too. I instead grabbed a carton of chicken stock out of the fridge, hoping it wouldn't be too savory for breakfast food. I also thought adding some mayonnaise to the mix might keep things moist and add a little more cohesion from the egg protein. I ladled out two big spoons of white goop into the mixing bowl before I realized I was shoveling out Miracle Whip, not mayonnaise. While most people's venn diagrams of the two don't leave a lot of room around the edges, they are drastically different in terms of food chemistry. At this point, though, there was nothing to do but plow forward; mix in the pork roll, add a chunk of Oaxacan cheese and throw them in the oven while I made myself decent for work.

about 20 minutes at 400F later, these crispy golden badboys popped out. All accidents asside, they came out beautifully. They taste like corn dogs made into muffins with a stringy mozarella bonus in the middle. Deferring to my girlfriend's greater aptitude at whimsical names of things, the "corn porklins" were born. If I ever start that white trash bakery, these will be a staple item.

Maybe it was just the name "corn porklins," but I felt inspired to do my colon some good over lunch. That inspired my run to the Whole Foods salad bar. It's a lot easier to stomach grazing for lunch if you can sneak two types each of tuna salad and curried chicken along the side. The tuna salad with apples and nuts mixed in was unexpectedly fantastic. My hopes for "Chuck's tuna salad" fell disappointingly short. Perhaps I should have known. The chicken korma was worlds better than the vindaloo, but this was perhaps because the thicker korma sauce stood up better on it's own without rice to deliver more of the sauce.
As for the actual salad bit, I mixed a little of every type of green they had, and then added carrots, cucumbers, red onions and a light sprinkling of blue chese crumbs before adding "Korean Kimchi" and "Real Blue Cheese" dressings. The combination conjured memories of hot wings and my favorite Korean BBQ joint in Osaka. Perhaps not the healthiest salad, but still a very good dose of roughage.

Eating any kind of actual dinner got delayed by the bounty provided by my office. This celebration was for the departing Dean Diller who was headed to be Dean of Cardozo Law School. You could tell he was dearly loved here from the fantastic spread I shall here describe via haiku

chicken satay sticks
coconut and sauce, nice touch
solid but still plain

who doesn't just love
shrimp cocktail and cocktail sauce
you cannot go wrong

salmon, cream cheese, toast
quality ingredients
topped witha pickle

nondescript quiche thing
I prefer not to wonder
what lies within you

prosciutto, melon
you guys are so good apart
please, keep it that way

red tomato dome
releases green seed goo drops
when bitten into

red onions, cheese, meat
I don't know the specifics
but devoured six

deserts, to have one
is to say yes to them all
or at least a few

So my actual dinner wasn't until much later, and exhausted from laughing lustily at Featherweight and a stellar performance by Crush at the Magnet last night, the girl friend and I opted for more comfort food to push back the impending dreary weather. So it was that I had to throw away a white Haines t-shirt after trying to stir oversized beefaroni the way Italian chefs toss a risotto. I caught all the beef and the roni, but a pretty significant splatter of sauce Pollock-ed my shirt and even got a splat on my brown dress pants. The pants are worth cleaning, but the shirt had already suffered an erruption of kombucha tea, and so I applied a liberal coup de grace of mustardy hand print for good measure before casting it in the trash.

Tuesday is your favorite, really.

2009-06-17T11:07:00.001-07:00

What better way to start the day than strawberry shortcake a la mode?
I woke up to a strange itching in my palms and soles of my feet. By the time I got to work, I was developing a rash on the insides of my elbows and wrists and the central features of my face had turned bright and puffy. I thought to myself, "If I'm going to suffer a mysterious allergic reaction before I even eat anything today, well, then I'm damn well going to pamper myself for breakfast."
In addition to the benadryl from Duane Reade that possibly saved my life, I also got a small tub of vanilla Hagen Daz Five. Five is a sub-brand of Hagen Daz that puts a very simple five ingredients together to provide for a very rewarding and honest flavor payoff. The vanilla was a great compliment to the strawberries and homemade shortcakes. Their mint¹ is, of itself, even better.
So I pandered to my inner six-year-old with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, some short cake and some strawberries in brown sugar to take my mind off the swelling and itching and whatnots.
Lunch was just leftovers, more of the chicken noodle kugel I made last week in an attempt to help my girlfriend ward off a cold. Comfort food with ridiculously high concentrations of garlic will cure just about anything but bad breath and body odor.
Kugel can really sit on you, and I didn't want to eat right before my improv class show because I was getting a bit jittery, but the gf and I tried out the very creatively named Pad Thai on 8th ave between 29th and 30th Streets. Their fried spring rolls were not bad, but I wouldn't go out of my way to order them again. I did like their Pad Cei Ew, although they spelled it Pad See Yu, but I'm no expert on cramming Thai phonetics into the ill-equipped roman alphabet. Point of the story is, I like pad see yu/cei ew just about everywhere I've had it, and this was more of the same. I wouldn't mind the noodles being a little more sopping with the sauce, and the chicken could have been a bit less done, but the chinese broccoli/chinese kale/kai-lan was done to perfection, still very alive in texture and yet yielding some cellular structure to the absorption of the sauce. Wherever you eat your Thai food, try the pad sea yew.

¹ It comes off very bright and very rich at the same time, without any conceit of leaving in big chunks of leaf to provide a false sense of wholesome purity. It is wholesome, but refined, even to the point of removing showmanship or conceit.

Monday eats last week's leftovers then makes more leftovers for next week.

2009-06-16T11:04:00.001-07:00

Strawberry shortcake is a classic part of American summertime and usually relegated to desert options, but homemade shortcakes without all the cream and syrup, make excellent morning starters. I had made the shortcakes for a BBQ on Sunday, and do to some crossed communications, so did two other guests. This afforded me the opportunity to fill one entire plate with various forms of strawberry shortcake, and also meant that I had plenty of shortcakes left when the smoke cleared.

Sharing a shortcake on the way to work will only get you so far into your day, however. It was more leftovers. There was a chicken breast, thigh, and leg from a chicken I'd roasted in a south western dry-rub, cornbread stuffing with sausage and roasted peppers, and a buttermilk spinach and corn succotash that came to me in a flash of inspiration as I was roasting the chicken last week. The method is worth repeating.

I started with about 2 tsp. of cumin seeds in hot canola oil, allowing them to sizzle and pop untill they started browning, then I threw in a box of frozen spinach and a box of frozen corn already thawed and drained. I also added 1/3 c. butter milk and some adobo seasoning with pepper. I let that simmer for a while so that the flavors could really get to know each other, and then I stirred in 2 tbsp of matzoh meal to soak up the moisture. I would highly recommend giving it a shot as a side to any south western or indian foods. It also kept and reheated extremely well as leftovers.

Despite having such a huge pile of leftovers for lunch, I set out to make a massive home-cooked meal for dinner as well. The cornbread stuffing made a return to round out a heaping plate of meat-n-taters fare.

It wasn't my best attempt at meatloaf, but it wasn't terrible. The worst of it was just the quality of the ground beef. I don't think I'll be using ground beef from Mi Bario Meatmarket again. There were a lot of small pieces of things that aren't exactly meat. It kind of breaks up the rhythm of blissed out shoveling when you have to pull chunks of cartelage out of your mouth. It was also kind of light on the loafiness, coming out more like an enormous sausageburger. I underestimated how much bread crumbs I had left in the kitchen, and didn't realize until too late that I had most of a cardboard can of matzoh meal left.

One fantastic triumph as a result of the greater meat to loaf proportions was that a tremendous amount of sausage fat rendered out of the loaf during cooking, and made a delectible confit bath for roasting red skinned potatoes and garlic in. Fat-tastic.
Continuing my experiments with frozen bricks of veggies, I made green beans with garlic in a dry vermouth bread sauce. I let garlic and olive oil over low heat for a long time as the meatloaf was roasting. Just as the garlic started to brown, I added a frozen brick of green beans, flipping frequently to get the frozen bits to melt. I added a shot or two of Dolan's dry vermouth and let it simmer as the spinach heated through. Add a pat of butter and matzoh meal to the pan juices till they resemble very wet gruel, and then stir everything together and allow about a minute for the bread sauce to lose a little water weight.

And that pretty much covers everything except the tuna kugel. It turns out I've been making kugels for years, but I've been mistakenly calling them "casseroles." Silly goy.

This was supposed to be tuna loaf, but again, not enough bread crumbs, so it ended up being much more delicate and creamy in texture. I made it in addition to the meatloaf so as to include my vegetarian roommate into the dinner feasting. It was actually quite fantastic and I found myself regretting the time and stomach space spent on the sub-par meatloaf. I couldn't be authoritatively explicit about what went into it now if you were willing to pay me substantially for rights to the recipe, but basically I mixed the following together, dusted the top with bread crumbs, and then laid pats of butter over the top: two cans of tuna, tablespoon of horseradish, half a cup of mayonaise, two eggs, 1/3 c. panko crumbs, fresh corn cut from the cob, vidalia onion, green pepper and Oaxacan cheese. Baked it at about 400F untill it was good and golden on the top.

I guess if that's recipe enough, I will gladly take your money.

Thursday staggers towards the good ol' days.

2009-01-09T23:43:00.000-08:00

Look, I"m gonna level with you. I'm in the middle of playing a lot of Soul Calibur 2 a la the Gamecube via our Wii. I'm in between rounds of team battle, and at the moment my roommates are clicking away as their sprites swing sharp objects at each other. I'm up to bat in a second, but I just thought I'd take the time to tell you about what I ate yesterday.
If you guessed that I had oatmeal for breakfast, you were right. If you guessed that I stewed a diced apple into a double version of the oatmeal recipe from Tuesday, well that's not guessing, that's stalking, and quite frankly, I'm, well, oddly flattered. All the same, please stop.
I just ran the boys for three rounds, and now I'm spent and it's cold in here so I'm shivering as I type. I could really use a nice bowl of soup like the Italian lentil soup I had for lunch on Thursday. I kept soaking pieces of a multigrain roll in there and then fishing them out all soggy with warm tomato goop.
And then there was the Japanese curry for dinner, also goopy, all coriander and pork fat blended into one of the most delightful, honest, satisfying food stuffs I have found. I added carrots, onions, potatoes, chicken and cabbage to this one, and then had it over rice like someone might have someone else over something in an experience they hopefully both find thoroughly enjoyable. Ok, I have no idea if my curry enjoyed being eaten, but it's a great image, just roll with it.

Wednesday sort of got used to moderation.

2009-01-08T06:03:00.000-08:00

The day started off with all good intentions of beginning a new day in my healthy lifestyle. What better way to start a heart-safe diet than with a bowl of oatmeal? 1 cup of oats, a dash of salt, a touch of vanilla, a tablespoon and a half of dark brown sugar and half a tablespoon of butter stewed in 1 3/4 cup of water. It was a very moderate amount of sugar and butter, I promise, and it came out very well. I might up the salt just a bit and perhaps more vanilla, but the end result was a very good bowl of oatmeal. Alright, cardiac success! I'm safe eating a square or two of organic chocolate, right? 86% cacao! nomnomnom.

My first lunch happened around noon, and it was at least modest in proportion if not fairly creamy. The night before I'd stopped into a new bakery in my neighborhood, just to check it out, and the owner was working the counter and was so welcoming that I had a hard time not buying anything, although the quiches leered at me like jilted lovers and layers of pastry seductively parted revealing lascivious peaks of icing. I saw a simple enough pastry on a bed of greens labeled "Chicken Pot Pie $3" and I went for it, figuring at least it was dinner-like, and there WAS a bed of lettuce on the bottom.

In my desperation to get away from the languorous eclairs pouting their sugary promises at me, I didn't stop to wonder why someone would put chicken pot pie on a bed of lettuce. When I got the pot pie home, I couldn't bring myself to eat it for dinner. I had a piece of the lettuce bedding and then put it in the fridge. In the morning, packing for work, though, I thought it would make for a reasonable lunch.

Well it wasn't much of a pie, although there was plenty of chicken. The sauce was more starchy than fatty, even, so I convinced myself it really wasn't that bad for me. For $3 I have to say the portion was a little on the modest side, especially considering that the only pastry involved was a few layers of filo dough over the top. It was on a bed of lettuce because where I assumed in the bakery there was more dough going under the chicken filling, there was nothing. This was particularly disappointing as, for my personal pot pie proclivities, I love the crust along the inside of the pie pan that tries to bake, but just stews in the juices inside making for this saturated pasty mess you have to dig out of the corners of the disposable aluminum pan that cradles most of the single-serving frozen incarnations of this classic.

What was there was very competently done, but I found myself still hungry and finally, by 3pm I could not hold out any longer. While waiting for Duane Reade to fill my prescription for an acid blocker (which i'm not even sure is a good idea) I wandered into a slightly upscale grocery and ended up getting one of their sushi boxes.

Funny, that while waiting for prescription antacids, I end up buying the mixed spicy rolls: spicy salmon, spicy tuna and spicy shrimp. They really weren't that spicy, though. Neither were they very good, but for one brief second, walking back to Duane Reade with just the noise of traffic in my ears, looking down at my take-out sushi with my peripheral vision full of concrete and cars, I felt like I was back in Shinsaibashi. Sadly the feeling passed quickly, largely because even the convenience store sushi in Japan isn't this far off it's peak. Also very sadly, at $6 for the box it's fairly reasonable for sushi in the US, only about twice as much as the same grade of sushi in Japan, as opposed to three times as much, which seems to be about standard in the city. Stil, a far cry better than the sushi in SoHo.

Then, for dinner, I swear on my colon, I ate a salad. It was the asian chicken salad from Vynl. I know that there was more chicken than all the collected plant matter in the salad, but the chopped salad just sounded terrible, and the next healthiest salad was the greek, which I figured would be too rich. Besides being hard to actually get onto my fork, the asian chicken salad was pretty good. It's candy salad, covered in wontons, dressing and chicken, but there was some actual lettuce in there. Just like you should not come off of antidepressants suddenly, also one should not just start eating real salads. Your colon needs time to properly...

Oh who am I kidding? I could have ordered the chopped salad, but what I really wanted was the buttermilk fried chicken. Asian chicken salad was a compromise, but as much processed sugar as was in the dressing, I might have been better off with the meatloaf, and at least I wouldn't have this latent anxiety over not eating what I want to eat. As it was, I still had a minor swelling of the chest pains as dinner drew to a close. Maybe I ate too fast or I was laughing too hard, but I feel like I might as well have ordered a steak. I mean, I can imagine eating healthier and enjoying it, but everytime I look at my options I can't seem to find the right foods.

Thursday, I want to enjoy what I eat!

Tuesday I was forced to admit my own mortality.

2009-01-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

I have here chronicled many abuses of the stomach over the past months. I have reported both the glorious and the grotesque in garrulous gastronomical detail. I have tried to champion simple, sturdy foods, primarily those sporting lots of butter and heavy cream. The past two weeks have been full to bursting, as has your humble author, with all manner of culinary delight that I had hoped to share with you in thoroughly photo-documented detail. Those photos are still coming, but a grey cloud hangs over my memory of their heart-warming delight.

This might have more immediately to do with what I ate Monday night, rather than the two weeks prior, but my body has none the less made it fairly clear that a change is in order.

Yesterday morning, as I finished my daily hygiene routine, I was struck with a pang of pain in the center of my chest that soon developed into a dull, squeezing pain across the breadth of my chest. I laid down a minute, relaxed, and the pain subsided. I took stock of my internal signs and didn't seem to see any reason not to go to work, although I was quite a bit freaked out.

Later that morning, around 10:30 or so, the chest pains return and are more severe and prolonged. I am very worried at this point and manage to get myself to a cardiologist, who can find no fault with my EKG readings. She's not sure what's wrong, but many tests have been ordered and I was given a stern talking-to in regards to my lifestyle. In addition to my cardiologist, many of my friends and family who are familiar with the way I eat have also chimed in about what I should or should not be doing. It's made me a bit paranoid about what i should be doing about my possible heart condition or severe gastric distress that possibly led to the chest pains which at least were not a possible heart attack.

I left the cardiologist's office and stumbled past halal carts and fast food joints at a loss for ways to satisfy my heart and my stomach at the same time. In a daze at the possibility that the way I eat might lead to my untimely death, I stumbled through the Whole Foods salad bar, filling a small paper carton with spoonfuls of various grains and legumes and whatnots. I remember getting some of their quinoa salad with toasted almonds and dried blueberries, i love that stuff, then there was their orzo, some tortellini in a pesto, the thai peanut noodles, some chick peas, some black bean salad...
Looking back, it probably wasn't the healthiest of lunches. A lot of the things I ate were saturated with oils and/or cream. I was not off to a great start.

For dinner I was beside myself trying to figure out something I'd like to eat that wouldn't kill me. I snacked on a handful of goldfish crackers as I contemplated what I could make from the groceries of my former life. At the behest of a concerned friend I ate an apple, that was better than I expected it to be. I forgot that I like apples. then there was a piece of Dark German Wheat toast with a little natural peanut butter. I know the peanut butter has a lot of fat and sugar in it, but this was "organic" (shoot me now) and I didn't use very much of it. I just couldn't eat dry toast. I went to bed still quite a bit hungry, but at least there was hope for tomorro.

Sunday Exodus

2008-12-08T12:01:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday was spent fleeing the burning wreckage of my undergraduate theater company's 15th anniversary reunion. As I was the getaway driver, I was careful not to marinate my liver too thoroughly the night before. I woke up a lot less hung-over than I did on Saturday, but that didn't make Sheetz breakfast any less appropriate.
Smonster. How grotesque. How abusive. Two pillows of eggstuff, two sausage patties, two helpings of cheese, smooshed into one biscuit. I take mine with ketchup. They put your stomach where it needs to be to soak up unwanted juices and then slough the whole pile away on little greasy ice skates. I also had a chicken biscuit and a hash brown for good measure.

That swillpile held me up for the better part of the day. I didn't eat again till dinner, when I had the great fortune to have one of my oldest friends and his boyfriend over for dinner. Dinner was a bed of langostino risotto nestling a bread bowl of mushroom-potato soup.

The soup was very vegetarian and made from scratch. I'd made the soup stock last week and had some set asside for this particular soup. There were criminis, portabellas and black forrest mushrooms in the mix along with potatoes to lend weight to the broth. The breadbowl soaked most of the moisture out of the soup though, leaving it more of a herbed mushroom puree that was nonetheless very satisfying with our cold winter winds wipping around the windows. We finished the soup with a healthy splash of madeira to help ward off the chill.
The risotto was designed more to provide rich, long-lasting insulation rather than an immediate injection of boozy warmth. Though I did use a little barley sochu (a light Japanese grain alcohol) in the earlier stages of cooking the rice, the key feature here was the creamy finish layered with more floral herbs to match the langostinos' own natural perfumes.
Both dishes sported a fairly complex set of aromas while still qualifying as hearty winter fare. The supple curves of the langostino, simmered in the vegetable stock infused with dried chantrelles, danced lithely around a bright melody of taragon and oregano supported by the warm tones of creamy carrots and shallots. The soup was much more trim in terms of texture, owing much of it's character to the delicate flesh of stewed mushroom caps, but boasted an aroma like a deeply stained plank of walnut, woody and dark revealing layers with careful inspection. The black forrest mushrooms alone give off the most seductive musk that I pause everytime I use a few just to breathe in the soul of them as it insinuates it's way out of their plastic bag.
Both dishes, being balanced in and of themselves, still complimented each other very well. All they might have wanted for was a little bit of salt. A dash or two of adobo seasoning and there was no room left for desert, except, of course, for finishing the bottle of madeira.

Wednesday, i like you. I really, really like you.

2008-11-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

From the most humble beginnings can come the most thorough satisfaction. When we're talking about vanilla yogurt and Kashi 7 whole grain nuggets, that thorough satisfaction is similar to the satisfaction one gets from crawling through a rugby scrum.
With this rocky start (as in I ate a bowl of gravel and cream) I laid a foundation for some deep satiation.

Lunch was leftovers plus. I'd made a chicken stir-fry the night before with this chili paste I'd bought in Chinatown sometime in the spring. I marinated deboned, chopped chicken thighs in this paste along with sesame oil and lime juice. After sauteing the chicken lightly, I reserved it and sauteed onion and carrot slices on a very low heat until they started to soften, progressively adding red peppers, white wine, snow peas and then reintroducing the chicken. You know a dish's flavors are in the right proportion when even the soft lilt and squeaky edge of sponginess from snow peas and chicken subjected to microwaving still manage to drive your fork back to the bowl almost as soon as it unloads. I supplemented the leftovers with a quinoa salad with dried blueberries and toasted almonds and a Thai noodle salad with cashew and asparagus from the Whole Foods ready foods bar. If you're eating in at Whole Foods and you just take moderate portions in the re-usable bowls, the prices are very reasonable. I think both my side portions of about half a cup each were only $2.50 or so. Both were very good and provided just enough compliment to the leftovers that it didn't feel like a rehash at all.

Admittedly, though, most of the satisfaction from lunch probably came from all that chicken fat in the thighs. Nothing cuts through a windy November afternoon like warm chicken fat drizzling through your intestines.

I would say dinner was equally simple, but I guess most people don't consider quinoa simple. They also maybe wouldn't find a toasted turkey, apple and brie sandwich to be simple either, so yeah, equally as simple, just as satisfying. The only details missing from the above description are the mustard and the whole wheat bread we spread it on, "we" being this girl I really, really like. One caveat from a mistake we made: although you don't need to use butter to toast a sandwich if you have nice enough pans, you do have to use a very low heat. It takes a while for the brie to start to melt and the turkey and mustard to get their mojo on, and you don't want to scorch the bread before they're ready to go. I scorched the bread a little bit. All the same, the combination of brie and turkey next to the bread on either side, warming, starting to open their flavors, and the apples still crisp in the middle playing with the bite of the mustard all came together to build a sandwich I feel ought to be considered a classic if it isn't already on your short list by now. Even the over-toasted bread provided it's own layer to the harmonious melange.

A handful of the right ingredients in the right places, even though somewhere while making it you make a mistake or two, when the mix is right, simple satisfies.

almost two months...

2008-10-21T07:04:00.000-07:00

Last Updated on August 25, 2008
I am such a putz. But now, by incessant demand, I shall resume my quest to exhaustively chronicle my eats, from the inane to the insane.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Caloric intake for the day started with a Jeno's frozen pizza, which I had heated up the night before, eaten three bites out of, and then wrapped up in a ziploc sandwich bag. I had every intention of reheating it in our office's toaster oven, but when the time came to start feeding the genius machine, I just couldn't hold out for the toaster oven's slow-loving touch. I had that gibbus moon of sausage, pepperoni, "cheese," sauce and starch cold, soggy and folded in half. It was a terrible thing I did in the name of food, and I loved every bite of it.
Then came an amazingly decadent surprise. A co-worker brought in some indulgently decadent baked goods to share with the office. They were mini-loaves of ginger cake with a honey and cream cheese icing and sliced candied ginger on top. She'd gone for apple sauce instead of oil for the ginger cake which made them very dense and moist. Even for my butter-mad palate, the icing more than made up for any oil that might have been missing from the cake and the candied ginger was surpirsingly moist as well, making for a warm, creamy hug of a breakfast-ender.
Lunch time was time for leftovers, although with soup, really, the left-overs can be the main event. The soup du jour was actually the soup du last Thursday, an Italian wedding soup I made in the burgeoning throes of romance. Emotional context infused the layers of this eclectic take on the traditional Italian layers. The soup started with an onion, celery and green and red pepper "trinity" that soon folded around garlic, chantrelles, zucchini, and red, white and blue potatoes. The whole mess stewed in a blend of beef and chicken stock and then we finished the soup with green beans, frozen meat balls and whole wheat rotini. A little cheating in the name of expediency here and there, but the results were grandly satisfying, even days later.
I also snuck a piece or two of WholeFoods' brown rice salmon roll and a few bites of barley soup from my lunch partner, because, honestly, why else do you eat with other people if not to steal their food?
Then, as so often happens at my office, just when you get back from lunch, you are informed of a room full of leftovers from some faculty luncheon or another, and you make your way dutifully down to bond with your fellow scavengers. I had a grilled chicken wrap with roasted vegetables inside. The veggies were mushy, the chicken was, bite to bite, possibly very dry and uninviting, and yet somehow I ate all of it. I also availed myself of some tortelini antipasta and some macaroni salad, not to mention a handful of cookies, of course. The antipasta was good, but already very picked over when I got there so there wasn't much actual tortelini left in the bowl. The macaroni salad was tolerable, though cloying. Mayonaise dressings with a lot of sugar in them can be downright unsettling. The caterer would have done a lot better to cut back on the goop and add more fresh veggies to compete with the syrupy oversaturation of eggs, oil and geuh.
Free samples! In the ridiculously long line at Trader Joe's, thankfully accompanied by the most pleasant company I could think of, we threw back some jerk chicken. Mine was gone in two bites, seconds after we picked up our little pleated paper cups, prompting my companion to comment on the disparity between our portions. Not one to take credit for chivalry unintended, I didn't so much pass on the lion's share as I wolfed down the sizable portion I took for myself. As much as I can remember tasting it, it was pretty darn good.
Dinner, when it finally came, was an old stand-by come back to visit: Pork Gyoza, fried, then steamed, then fried again. I prepared a dipping bowl of ponzu (soy sauce and vinegar flavored with yuzu, a citrus similar to grapefruit) and chili oil, that about a dozen of the wrinkly little bags of awesome, fried a crispy brown on one side, slid through on their way into my welcoming gob. What iconic perfection. I managed to hold myself off at a dozen by suplementing the dinner with a large crisp corn tortilla as I was cooking and then a flour tortilla, fried and then smeared with goat cheese and wildflower honey as a desert. As awesome as you might think that desert might be, I have to admit that I did not have actual butter on hand in my kitchen (oh, the horror) and had to instead fry the tortilla smeared in SmartBalance. Geuh. Still, it wasn't a bad finish and there was no mistake in my stomach that caloric intake had reached a fitting end for the day.
It was time to wash it all down with several tall glasses of water and start thinking about breakfast...

A Sunday for Fatasses

2008-08-25T06:09:00.000-07:00

Well, it wasn't so fattening, but it wasn't so unfattening either, kna'mean?
First things first: a frozen Nutty Buddy a la Little Debbie. These things are just so great frozen. They take on an extra crispiness and the peanut butter makes this odd extra cold sensation on your tongue. It's not so much breakfast as the thing you eat to give you the energy you need to really make a decent Sunday brunch.
Scrambled eggs with green peppers and monterray jack cheese, black beans, chorizo gravy and a cilantro, onion, lime and tomato salsa fresca. Wrap it all in a tortilla, eat it after noon with a beer on the side, and you have a pretty mean brunch. I was afraid the gravy and the salsa fresca would fight, but they got along wonderfully, aside from the salsa fresca having a ton of water to it and causing unsightly green trails to creep out the back of the tortilla and down my arm. The two tortillas worth of awesome I put down had me pretty well set for the rest of the day, really. The rest of the day is just a blur of snacking on things I probably shouldn't have bothered to eat, since I never actually felt hungry.
The closest I came to lunch was a cold egg roll from the fridge. When my roommate ordered Chinese Saturday evening, I had him tack on a few egg rolls specifically with the intent of eating them later, cold. Alternately smudging on a little karashi (Japanese mustard) and La Yu chili oil, they just go down so easy on a hot afternoon.
From there I moved on to a seemingly endless parade of snacks: Generic brand "Golden Grahams" that I like better than actual Golden Grahams; Chips-a-Hoy white fudge super-chunk cookies; a few choice selections from Pepperidge Farms' Distinctive Cookie Sampler, I believe a chessmen cookie and a raspberry lace thing were involved; some twists of crunchy puffed and fried corn starch glazed with cinnamon and sugar, mostly sugar, that were intended to be something like Taco Bell's cinnamon twists; and, rice crispy treats that I made from scratch with a little cinnamon, almond extract and sesame oil mixed into the marshmallows before adding rice crispies and some of the genero-graham cereal. The sesame makes much more aroma than taste, and all my trickery made for an interesting deviation from the rice crispy treat norm, but I think a batch of the regular, no frills, traditional variety will have to happen shortly.

Marginally Related Side-Note:
Do you remember rice crispy treats cereal? It was just chunks of rice crispies glopped together by marshmallow, and then you eat them with milk and pretend your breakfast won't speed the onset of diabetes. I loved that stuff when I was a kid, sometime around being 22 or 23. Nowadays we have even worse cereal. As extra insult to the Crystal Skull injury levied against the Indiana Jones series of films, there is now an "Indiana Jones and the Legend of the Crystal Skull: the cereal" available for your tooth-rotting pleasure. This obnoxious mix of cocoa puffs with malformed marshmallows similar to lucky charms marshmallows (but these all in just yellow and white representations of crystal skulls and other ancient loot) does for breakfast cereal what the movie does for George Lucas' reputation as a cinematic auteur.

wednesday? really? what happened to tuesday? oh, that's right, i ate it.

2008-08-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

This will not be one of those entries wherein I go into detail about some great restaurant or meal I made at home. Yesterday was, to frame it properly, the day before payday, and my life and pay schedule conspired to put me in a position where my food budget for yesterday was $0.
In the morning I had spring rolls made from left-over mu shu pork wrapped in Vietnamese cold rice wrappers, the ones you use for fresh spring rolls. The mu shu was actually very good cold, but there was only enough left to make three rolls, each about 3 1/2 " long and about an inch wide.
This left me pretty hungry still, and so, when co-workers were headed to the re-opening of the Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner building after their summer vacation (the bakery was on vacation, not my co-workers) I decided I should dip into my laundry budget in the interest of bolstering my caloric intake for the day. Who needs clean underwear when you have Gold Bond, anyway? I suppose $2.75 for an almond croissant filled with raspberry jam is reasonable for Manhattan, especially on the corner of Central Park in the same building as a Whole Foods, Godiva Chocolate and numerous offices of various executives in assorted Time Warner fiefdoms. The croissant was quite good, although I don't know if I was in the right frame of mind to really enjoy splurging on decadent pastries. Though I didn't develop any unsightly chaffing or rashes as a result of delaying my laundry washing, the creeping fear of such consequences may have unfairly colored my experience. Also, as a fan of excellent coffee and the beneficiary of quite a bit of mediocre free coffee, spending any amount of money on their bland latte was a big mistake.
Somehow, after the croissant, I forgot to stop and eat lunch. It wasn't that I didn't have food for lunch, there was black bean and chorizo pasta in my fridge at work, but I was so hypnotised by the repetitive act of folding letters and stuffing them into envelopes that the afternoon just sort of faded away. The next thing I knew it was time for a co-worker's reception in honor of his years of service as he left our school to work somewheres else. This means that my lunch was not only late, but also comprised mostly of crackers, cheese and fruit. I know this isn't the most filling fare and wasn't really enough food to be lunch for a kindergarten student, but I did get my vegetables, carrots, red peppers, brocoli and cucumbers, all dipped in some kind of french onion/ranch hybrid. There was american cheese, brie, some kind of marbled brown-and-gouda-looking cheese, and a havarti dill. I also availed myself of the pineapple and blueberries, the latter of which cleaned my palate and complimented the complimentary Heineken very well. I guess if you gave a kindergarten student a Heineken his lunch would be pretty effectively over, so ok, it was a full enough lunch. It was too bad I had to clock another two hours of overtime after the party, because my liver steadily put an end to the free booze as I clicked away at my computer and my co-workers took the party to a nearby bar. By the time I was done I wasn't so much drunk or sober as just wiped out. Sorry, Dwayne. Raincheck!
Dinner was equally as unimpressive, left over thai curry with brown rice, that wasn't even my leftovers, but was the leftovers of a friend who left them in our fridge before leaving the country. Under British Naval Statutes, that makes the food fair plunder, so down below decks it went, a utilitarian end to a make-do day.

Sunday, so many days left behind

2008-08-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

Brunch with a friend leaving the country for a few weeks was a nice excuse to do something a little above the usual breakfast burrito and frozen pizza fare I subsist on. Instead, I tried to plate something a little more daring, an omelet. This was not your average bacon and cheese, no, not even a western omelet. This was green peppers and garlic with a blue cheese and blackberry ricotta filling. The textures were perfect. I timed the omelets just right so that they had just barely set and you could cut through them with a fork without displacing all the filling. The ricotta filling could have used a little salt, but otherwise the recipe was sound. I served them with a salad of mixed baby greens and Munster cheese in an apple cider vinegar and horseradish dressing an couscous drizzled with chili oil and honey.

Lunch and dinner were much more humble. I snuck one of my frozen bean burritos into the show at McCarren Park Pool and ate it during the Aesop Rock set once it had finally thawed. I was apprehensive about eating them without reheating them, since I imagined frozen baked beans would not be very appealing. This burrito was just refrigerator cold with no frozen bits left. It was quite good that way and I will probably eat the rest of them cold. The microwave just slows me down.

Dinner was just one single sweet plantain and pork pastry from the cuchifritos joint near my house. I am addicted to them now, but there are worse addictions, really. At least with this addiction I'm only spending $1.50 to be pretty thoroughly satisfied.

tuesday takes another chance at life

2008-08-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

A lot of old favorites took pretty hard swings at my colon yesterday. I'm happy to report I'm still processing food more or less normally, although I'm going to stay away from spicy food for a while, I think, well, outside of the small army of bean burritos I made Monday night and froze for easy eating at work the next few days. I two of those burritos for lunch, but I've gotten ahead of myself, haven't I. Save the burrito talk for later.
For breakfast I had burritos, breakfast burritos. This time round it was hot dog, green pepper and a cheddar and monterray jack chese blend. I wrapped them in a paper towel before wrapping them in saran wrap in an attempt to control the moisture of freshly cooked foods wrapped immediately in plastic. Instead of nice, moderately moist burritos, however, I discovered that paper towel and flour tortilla will begin to bond into a single, homogeneous given enough time and moisture. They seemed almost organically fused with each other, and it was more like peeling garlic or an onion than removing two previously separate surfaces from one another. It made me wonder if we couldn't grow burrito trees that produce bean burritos like fruit. They were such a pain to finally peel apart, though, that I abandoned the idea, thinking it was too much of a pain in the ass to really become popular in the modern food market.
Throughout the afternoon there was some peanut brittle, a Pepperidge Farm Soft Baked oatmeal cookie, and two very naughty looking Drakes cakes. It was a particularly weak day for snacking.
Then there were the bean burritos, refried beans, rice, green peppers, the monterray/cheddar blend from breakfast and some Kick Ass hot sauce, a very fiery habanero-based version of liquid pain that I find quite pleasant in moderate doses. Having premade the burritos while on the phone with my parents, some burritos are more moderate than others, and it's a bit of a crapshoot just how much eating one is going to hurt. One of the ones I had for lunch was spicier than most people find appealing.
The one I had with dinner was pretty tame, but maybe I was just getting used to them by then.
Along with my fifth burrito for the day, I had tomato coconut soup. This is a great idea that I stole from Honey's in Philadelphia. The basic recipe is a can of tomato soup, a can of coconut milk, and half a can of water, heated. I like to step it up a little, though. This time I heated about 2 Tbsp of my ginger/garlic paste in olive oil, then added a quarter cup of the spicy tomato soup from my uncle's greenhouse and about a quarter cup of brown rice. After letting them get to know each other for a bit, I added the coconut milk, and then, after about 5 min, I added the can of tomato soup and a can and a half of water. I covered this and cooked it on a very low boil until the rice was tender. Then I finished the top with a little dried basil and cumin powder.
The spice was a little fast up front, but stuck around with a nice, long, caring burn that didn't overpower the interplay between the coconut and tomato. My dinner guest and I really enjoyed it, and both finished heaping bowls, but between the burritos and the heat from the spicy tomato soup, well, lets say my colon was still a bit mad at me when I woke up today.

the turning tides of monday

2008-08-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

bacon, leaving fat
mushrooms and spinach take it
eggs, bleu cheese, om'let

an embrace of lips
somehow describes this parcel
chocolate, foil, flag

a year past the date
Campbell's chicken and stars soup
Here's hoping I live

Stolen, well, kind of
from a dish of "free" choc'late
milky way dark, twix

ah, soft-baked oatmeal
too large to be just a snack
mini-meal of my heart

sandwich as present
half a cuban, left over
motainai

someone else's gift
sweet edible souvenir
peanuts and brittle

a bowl of white rice
meditative, simple, pure
pepper topped finish

tastes of future food
stolen fresh from the hearth's heat
nicked from cutting boards

bottles of water
bottles and bottles of water
cold, warm, tepid, chugged

sunday sticks it in

2008-08-11T12:41:00.001-07:00

Sunday brunch, long part of the NYC mythos, has yet to appear in these blog pages. Well, here's my NYC brunch debut, which wasn't really anything to write home about.
We ate at Phoebe's in Brooklyn. The atmosphere was very relaxed, and I was immediately pleased to see cans of Genesee Cream Ale tucked into their refrigerated display case up front. The back yard sports a few tables that stayed mostly full our whole time there. All in all it seemed pretty popular, but I'm not exactly sure why.
The menu was fairly reasonable for brunch, but the food that came out was not worth my $8. We all had the steamed eggs, which are like scrambled eggs, but cooked via a cappuccino milk steamer. There were scallions, red peppers, mushrooms and tomatoes mixed in with the eggs, and while I'm sure some people appreciate the low-fat take on egg preparation, the technique did not live up to the culinary magic that eggs can and should be. What came out on two drooping leaves of lettuce, topped with some unoffensive white cheese with a salsa fresca on one side and roasted yams on the other, was a rubbery lump of 3 eggs worth of protein with under-prepared vegetables haplessly suspended, unable to make a break for more appetizing platings. Their 7-grain toast was quite good and the roasted yams were much better than I expected them to be, but for a signature dish they should really work on improving the technique of their appointed egg steamerists.

Later that day I had a lunch/dinner fusion meal, fusing more the time and function than any real menu differences. I mixed cucumbers, carrots, hot sausage, mushrooms fried in hot sausage grease, and bleu cheese into couscous drizzled with sesame and chili oils. It would have been a great power lunch or an easy, one-bowl dinner. I ate it late enough to be dinner, but considering I slept through most of the afternoon and I was up until after midnight, it felt more lunchy than anything.

That evening, in my friends' apartment in Red Hook I caught a few long tosses of Tostito's Hint of Lime tortilla chips. those things are seasoned perfectly for eating 4 or 5, so that's what I did. Any more and they become a bit overwhelming.

And that was it for the evening. Though I felt a little snacky, I decided a few big glasses of water before bed would be better than a raid on the crouton box.

Monday, make it work again.

2008-08-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

Like a train, I seem to be going through a regular schedule of starts and stops. Much like the NYC Metro and not the Japanese rail system, the slightest problem can lead to massive derailment and widespread system failure. Somehow, these past two weeks I have managed to establish a routine of writing for a month, and then falling off the face of the Earth for a while. There's nothing to do but dig your nails in where you are and start to crawl your way back up.

Monday was a bit out of sorts since I didn't have an opportunity to make breakfast as I was digging through beer bottles and watermelon rinds in an attempt to find my wallet. It ended up being in my book bag all along, which is often the way these things go. At least I did eventually have my wallet so that I could go to a sandwich cart and get the ubiquitous bacon, egg and cheese on a roll. I also found a bottle opener in the trash that we had inadvertently thrown away. Bonus!

The cart was on 60th Street between Columbus Ave. and Broadway. I don't recommend them unless you like cavorting with bacon's sad, soggy spin-off, turkey bacon. I respect other people's convictions that prevent them from eating pig bacon, or any food made on the same griddle as pig bacon, so long as they respect my right to avoid establishments that won't serve me Babe thinly sliced and fried till crispy.

And amazingly enough, that sandwich lasted me all day. I must have eaten a lot over the weekend. Since I haven't written about it yet, you don't know.

Dinner was bar food, but very good bar food. I was at Piano's on Ludlow south of Houston St. I had their chipotle buffalo wings and their calamari. The calamari came out just on the tail end of their perfect texture period, so I had to devour them before they started to rubberize. The wings were very large pieces for chicken parts, almost like turkey wings. The sauce was a very pleasant level of spicy that rang on the lips well after eating. Considering each plate was $5 during happy hour, it was a pretty good spread for the value, definitely enough to share.

Saturday across the city.

2008-07-28T03:12:00.001-07:00

Sunday at the pool.

2008-07-28T03:07:00.001-07:00

Friday, jeez.

2008-07-26T05:27:00.000-07:00

indian omelet

swilly chinese

Thursday, for now.

2008-07-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

Breakfast was mac n cheese with hot dog slices and some of the lentil curry. The fridge on my floor is one of those small fridges with the freezer box inside the main fridge compartment and my food always freezes, even when it's two shelves below the freezer. The freezing was good for the texture of the lentil curry, though, and they made a nice pair with my boxed mac n cheese.
I was in the mood for more substantial lunch fare, though, so when co-workers suggested the burger joint in Le Parker Meridien Hotel, I, of course, agreed. I had mine medium rare with the works and split a side of fries with one of my co-workers. I've had better burgers at dinner time. The lunch crowd was definitely more hectic than the evenings so maybe that contributed to the slip in quality. It's still a great burger, and at $7.50 for just the burger, it's still pricey for my lunch standards, but that doesn't keep me from going back about once a month.
Then there was pop corn at my new favorite bar, Rehab. They have an old-school popcorn machine, like you might have found in a 1950's movie house. It's a nice touch on a space that's already doing a brilliant job of straddling the line between decor and decrepitude.
And then, that evening, just for the ABA plot structure, it was mac n cheese with hot dogs round deux. When I get in the mood, I can eat pounds of the stuff.

Wednesday was not as nutritionally unsound as it could have otherwise been.

2008-07-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

Some days you eat a bowl of oatmeal, some yogurt, a light salad, reasonable dinner, you feel so energized and full of life.
Yesterday I woke up tired and a touch hung-over after about four hours of sleep. I was not in the mood for oatmeal.
Breakfast was two, yes, two Jeno's frozen supreme pizzas. I knew that I'd need more push to keep the engine running today and more calories for all the caffeine to bounce off of and not tear holes in my stomach.
To that end, I gladly accepted a sugar cookie from my office-mate. She likes to dust them with cinnamon.
Even with two pizzas under my belt, well, suspended just above my belt, really, I needed to eat an early lunch and slammed a bowl of ramen while working on a project at work.
But that's not all I ate at work! Thanks to some sort of summer seminar, there was a wealth of free Indian food in the atrium in the afternoon. There was channa saag (spinach and chickpeas), chicken korma (spicy, creamy red sauce) and some kind of lentil curry as well as naan, rice, raita (sour yogurt with vegetables) and even the cilantro and tamarind chutneys. the saag and the korma were very good, although there was not much chicken left in the chicken korma by the time I went down. The lentil curry had some strange texture to the sauce. It felt a little plastic.
I went up for a pretty hefty second helping of the channa saag. I also had two helpings of the desert, which seemed to me to have more in common with Midwest family reunions than it did with Indian buffet, but it was so good, I really can't complain. It was an orange pudding, possibly butterscotch, mixed with fruit salad and a meringue-like topping. The combination of the heavy, creamy dessert and the light, fluffy desert just piled instant satisfaction into your face.
There was so much curry left over that was going to be thrown away, I got the tupperware I used for ramen and filled it up with some of each of the curries. I was so full I didn't eat dinner that evening either, although I did have a bite of mac n cheese with hot dogs that I made for Thursday. Sorry for the spoiler. I know how my fans are such purists.

Tuesday, I ate burritos.

2008-07-23T05:59:00.000-07:00

I did, it's true, and nothing but.
Breakfast was two of the bacon and eggs variety accented with a tidy little wedge of Monterrey jack cheese, one with a smattering of horseradish, the other with a spritzing of McIlheny's chipotle Tabasco sauce.
Then, in the afternoon were leftover bean burritos from yesterday. I stored the beans and the tortillas separately the night before, so I wrapped them fresh in the morning with their own wedges of Monterrey jack cheese before going to work. I ate one at about 2:30PM and the other one around 6:30, and then that was it for the day.
And I thought Monday was simple...

Monday because the hits don't stop

2008-07-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

I just keep on eating, but my life provides much more time to eat than it does time to write.

Monday was a throwback to earlier eating habits starting with a frozen Jeno's supreme pizza for breakfast.

Then there were a few Chips Ahoy cookies left over from last Wednesday and some left-overs from last Thursday's lunch, which was itself left over from two other days in the last two weeks. Surprisingly, the mash of papa rellena, enchilada and meat from the chicken wings melded into a very tasty, if not very attractive lunch.

Back at home, there was the semi-traditional (at least when available) celery and peanut butter.

And finally, rounding out what must be one of my all-time simplest days of food, were burritos stuffed with black beans, red beans, green peppers, cubanelle peppers and hot Italian sausage.

I guess I really dropped the ball there, only using one kind of sausage. I also used only one kind of onion, white, one kind of garlic, the kind that comes pre-peeled in a jar, one kind of tortilla, flour, one kind of cream, sour, one kind of cheese, monterray jack, and one kind of hot sauce, McIlheny's chipotle. There was also a little crushed cumin, fresh black pepper, chili powder, mace and fresh thyme and a ton of fresh cilantro. I had two of them for dinner with quite a few cold ones.

I know, you totally should have come over.

Friday kicked it in Wildwood, NJ

2008-07-20T13:57:00.000-07:00

This weekend was almost too big for words. If I gave this my regular treatment, the post would be even more abusively long than usual, so I've stocked up on pictures and I took my succinct writing pill.

Taylor pork roll, two eggs and Cooper sharp cheddar on toasted white bread. This is what I would eat for breakfast four days a week if it wouldn't lead to a heart attack in few months. If you're not familiar with Taylor pork roll, imagine salt-cured bacon made into bologna. It can get crispy if you want, but mostly it's an extremely salty and succulent way to induce heart failure.

I feel buffalo chicken "pizza" is almost always a bad idea. My friend decided to take the gamble and much like you can't not look at the decapitated corpse in the flaming wreckage on the side of the highway, I took a bite of this pizza. The sauce was mostly vinegar and cayenne, which doesn't leave a lot of room for a subtle balance of flavors. A healthy dose of bleu cheese dressing would have been very welcome here.

Back at the house it was snack time: Reduced fat potato chips, cherries, salted pistachios and Cooper sharp. Much like Pringles, "reduced fat" and "lite" potato chips usually compensate by putting on a lot more salt. I'm pretty happy with that. The salty foods danced well with the first beer of the afternoon, and the cherries and cheese danced pretty well around each other.

Entenmann's chocolate donut holes with sprinkles vs Tastykake's plain/powdered/cinnamon powdered donut assortment: if you're going for irresistibility, Entenmann's has the edge. I had three or four over the course of the day. Owing a lot to their small size and, I feel, a more home-made texture, the donut holes were just a lot easier to pop. I did have a piece of a cinnamon donut later in the day, as well as one of the plain donuts for desert after dinner.

Speaking of which, here are the sides: a variation of my simple spinach salad featuring the Cooper sharp cheese and hot dog buns soaked in olive oil and lamb juices and then grilled and cut into croûtons and corn on the cob, grilled in the husk.

And the main event was roasted lamb tenderloins with a nice layer of fat on one side. The lamb was from Elysian Fields farm in Western Pennsylvania. Their lambs have been served in the French Laundry and their quality was very apparent here, even after freezing and shipping. Grilled to a juicy medium-rare while allowing time for the fat to char a bit, this might have been the best lamb I've ever eaten. I've had Elysian Fields lamb as a roast in the past, but freshly grilled and still very rare on the inside, the meat managed to balance delicacy with richness.

It was so good I used a plain Tastykake donut to sop up the juices on the plate. Mmm, meat desert.

Third desert was a chocolate covered strawberry. Second desert, not pictured here, was a swiss roll. They could have made a nice desert together, but the chocolate shell on the strawberry would not have stood up to slicing of any kind. I tried to take a small bite, but had to slam the entire thing as chocolate chunks started to drop into my lap.

Then, later on the boardwalk again, I decided it was time for a corn dog. This one was a little under done. I can eat cold hot dogs, and the gooey edge to the inner-most batter was actually pretty good, but all in all, I would have preferred my corn dog was at least genuinely warm on the inside. The batter was very light and smooth, more corn starch than corn meal, so it took on a very brisk crunchiness (where not still verging on raw) as opposed to cakier versions I have had elsewhere.

And of course this weekend had to feature boardwalk fries somewhere. These were from a Stewart's Rootbeer restaurant/stand. Excellent cheese-to-fry ratio: enough for each fry while leaving the occaisional dry spot that maintained crunchiness and let you eat with your fingers amongst friends without having to lick your fingers clean between rounds. UNSANITARY!

Later, back at the house again, there were Canadian Tommies, a twist on the Texas Tommy with Canadian bacon instead of strip bacon. My friend and I each had two, one with some packet of hot sauce from a Chinese restaurant that was left over in the beach house fridge, and the other with a squirt of mayo. I think we managed to out-swill the boardwalk, and that takes some effort, ingenuity and a dangerous disregard for the safety of your colon. The Chinese hot sauce caught me off guard as much spicier than I expected. I had to slog the first bite down with a chase of beer. The mayo CT was fantastic, though. Nothing gets me ready for bed like abusive ingestion of cholesterol.

But first, just to clean off the ol' palate before bed, a freezer pop. How much does your inner child just scream in delight just looking at this glorious orange rod of icy awesome? There was a whole bag left in the freezer, and if this weren't already the fourteenth course of food for the day I would not have been able to hold myself to just one. I'm going to have to stock up on these for the rest of summer.

Thursday dove into the wild.

2008-07-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

I'm on the road, trekking into the heart of darkness in search of classic summer victuals for your vicarious enjoyment. While there are no photos yet, they are coming. For now, a bit of a teaser.
oatmeal +
leftover lunch
dippin' dots
hot dog
softserve
chips
pretzels
gourmet leftovers
dosidos and milk
and last but not least
pop rocks and beer.

wednesday, wtf.

2008-07-16T23:37:00.001-07:00

Tuesday brings more oatmeal titlation.

2008-07-16T05:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Oatmeal Revolution marched on. Here we see my black sesame oatmeal. Black sesame seeds are a very common food additive in Japan. You can even get black sesame spread for toast or anything else upon which you may want to spread peanut butter or icing. I won't deign to attempt an exhaustive list.

The black sesame seeds gave a flavor similar to peanut butter, but a little lighter. I also added sesame oil, brown sugar, salt and a dash of mirin to the oatmeal as it boiled. The result was a markedly different cultural perspective on oatmeal. I love black sesame seeds, so this is likely to be a repeat offender in the breakfast line up.
Todays yogurt was a Stonyfield Farm lowfat vanilla. It's my favorite of their flavors, although some days I prefer the cream-on-top version. With a steamy summer swelter brewing outside, though, the more refreshing bite of lowfat is definitely preferable.
And just because of the staunch nutritionists in the audience, I made sure to eat my chocolate-covered nutrition waffle twins.

Then, randomly on the street, I was offered a handful of salted almonds. Yeah, I ate them. What? I'm a gonzo food journalist, after all.

The street eventually led a co-worker and myself to Gray's Papaya Dog on 72nd St. and Broadway. Gray's is a chain of hot dog joints that have spawned a few imitators around the city. Collectively, the garish yellow store-fronts and the rows of franks slowly crisping on sheets of aluminum foil are often cited as a food-tourist must if you visit Manhattan.

I had the "recession special" "with everything" with a pina colada "juice."
To translate, that's two dogs and a drink for $3.50, not bad. "With everything" here doesn't include chili or cheese, although some other Papaya locations do cater more to the chilicheeseonionmustardkrautpile that true colonic masochists come to expect from a dog with "everything." At the Gray's Papaya, though, "with everything" is a healthy lading of sauerkraut with onions stewed in a red sauce ladled over top. I like to squirt a little brown mustard on the top of that. And as for "juice," well, there are discernible bits of what I hope was actually coconut in the pina colada, so I guess we'll let that one go.

Since I was working till 8 last night, I had to have a snack a little after 6PM. I packed the leftover chalupa and some of the honey ginger chicken wings for the occasion. As far as leftovers go, the chicken fared better than the chalupa. The fresh vegetables were too much of a pain to remove before reheating in the microwave, but didn't really fare well. All the water that released from the veggies made the shell very soft. It started to fall apart on me, still delicious, but a pain to handle.

And then, when I got home, it was leftover couscous with a much more profound helping of the yogurt sauce. This was a much more pleasant leftover experience, although still not as good as leftover saag paneer. Since everything had been sitting in the fridge it was all cold which made the vegetables all the more brighter. That and a few cold ones and I barely noticed how disgustingly hot a 5th floor Manhattan apartment can get in July.

Monday begins the March of the Oatmeals

2008-07-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

But first, let's take a look at another fine breakfast tradition, the Nutty Buddy. I think this is a food item that deserves more serious consideration from nutritionists. It looks like a waffle, so that makes it a good breakfast. It also has peanut butter in it. I ate this one, well, this pair, on the way from the 72nd street 2 stop to the Lincoln Center. Also, at $1.39 per box of 8, they are a fantastic nutritional value.

Ok, now for the Oatmeal Revolution! You think it's boring. You think it's too hot for oatmeal. You think Wilfred Brimley should have shaved the mustache. YOU ARE WRONG!

This is your standard classic oatmeal with just a few bells and whistles. As a rule, I don't cook food with fewer than 7 ingredients. When I make eggs I find small, chemically inert objects to put in the pan and take out later.
So, in keeping with this grand ideal, in addition to the oats and water, this breakfast contained salt, brown sugar, a tablespoon of butter and a dash of cinnamon. That's seven ingredients if you count the BS about me only ever cooking with at least 7 ingredients as an ingredient itself. Mmmmm, bull shit. My favorite.
From cold water to oatmeal takes maybe 10 minutes, tops. As soon as it has taken up all the water, I pour it into my Tupperware and throw it into my bag. By the time I get to work, it has cooled to a very pleasant temperature for summer eating.
This wasn't just breakfast. I ate the oatmeal in bites as I worked through the morning and didn't finish the bowl till about 2PM. There was the vanilla yogurt on the side, but the slow eating over the course of 5 hours was very good for me. Even as the oatmeal cooled, it still remained engaging. It also led me to realize that as the food cooled, my desire for sugar decreased and my desire for salt increased. Fascinating, huh?
Expect a new oatmeal every day this week. I plan on pushing past the grey, cardboard walls of what you thought you knew about oatmeal and take this old favorite in some new directions.

Not a preview shot of upcoming oatmeal, This is a closeup of the base couscous and vegetables I made for dinner. After finishing my oatmeal around 2, I managed to make it to dinner with two handfuls of microwave pop corn, a pineapple lifesaver and
A stick of celery with peanut butter. How glorious does that look? How triumphant? Truly, this is the food of kings.

But back to dinner. I was aiming for light summer fare without too much heat involved in the cooking. Couscous is great for that, because given enough time, you don't even have to boil the water. I did, just to speed the process, though it didn't boil for very long. I also dropped a tablespoon of butter and a shot of adobo to the water as it boiled. After the water was boiling and the butter had melted, I poured the hot water into dry couscous in a glass bowl and then mixed in some snow peas.

This gave them just the lightest edge of steaming without overdoing them. After it cooled for about 5 minutes, I fluffed it and added diced red onions, red peppers, carrots, tomato and a very liberal amount of cilantro.

Meanwhile, in a small frying pan, I fried a slice of bacon and about a half inch worth of a chorizo link till their fat rendered, and then reserved the meat on the side while I fried shrimp and scallops in the fat.

The scallops were dusted with adobo and allowed to soak up the saltiness for about 15 minutes. The shrimp had a similar marinade time in fresh lime juice and a light dash of adobo. I fried the shrimp first, adding the scallops second, adding a shot of beer to the pan to prevent the bits stuck to the bottom of the pan from burning. The great thing about shrimp and scallops is they take almost no time to finish cooking, so there was not a long process of slaving over a hot stove.

By way of a dressing, I ground whole cumin, taragon, oregano, chili powder and a few black peppercorns in my mortar and added them to a cup of whole milk yogurt.

Then I plated the couscous over a cucumber dill salad. The cucumbers were sliced and salted with adobo when I started cooking and allowed to set in the fridge. Right before I started frying the sea food, I tossed in a dash of vegetable oil, a liberal slopping of balsamic vinegar and a very generous heap of fresh dill.

I poured a few tablespoons of the yogurt sauce over the top of the couscous, arranged the seafood in a little flower spread on top of the yogurt, and then, to finish, I sprinkled on the bacon and chorizo pieces that I used for fat to fry the seafood in.

It was very light and filling summer fare, perhaps too light for me. I could have stood to have been a lot more liberal with the yogurt sauce. Crunchy health food types would probably prefer this version, maybe minus the bacon-fried sea food, but I refuse to live in fear of fat. Here's a nice fence-straddler dish between indulgence and calorie counting.

Speaking of calorie counting, I would be remiss if I did not also mention my ice cream sandwich for desert/temperature control. Just a generic black rectangular cookie with white ice cream in the center. I don't even know if fancy descriptions like "chocolate" and "vanilla" are appropriate. They're just good freezer swill.

Extra Weekend Friday #2

2008-07-14T05:23:00.001-07:00

Donnie Darko made me breakfast!

Feeling fancy on a Friday morning off, I made some strange food choices. Here's oven roasted red skin potatoes, shallots, apples and wedges of everything bagel topped with melted havarti.

This was an avocado and kiwi salad with a dressing made from Lindt's coconut white chocolate tempered in bacon fat and mixed with black raspberry jam with crumbles of said bacon in the salad. I knew when I was making this that I'd regret not having a lemon to brighten the avocado. Still highly edible for how experimental it was. Next time... using lemon... going to be awesome.

Two egg omelet dusted with paprika. I'm working on that perfect roll of controlled chemical change that haunts tested chefs like the high school girl friend you thought you were going to marry that still sends you Christmas cards featuring her beautiful children. I, too, am still haunted by the elusive perfect omelet. It is, however, the journey and not the goal and this step along the way was delightfully delicate but still a touch too wet inside and seconds too dry on the outside.

And this was bacon. Kinda looks like a rabbit head. Wish I would have planned that...

Then, much later, dinner, even, was a platano con carnitas from one of my neighborhood favorites. Plantains and spiced meat wrapped in a hearty pastry and deep fried. I love living in Spanish Harlem.

sunday, lazy sunday

2008-07-14T04:46:00.000-07:00

too lazy for capital letters. too lazy, even, to figure out why this is underlined and change it.

sunday was spent watching a season and a half of "entourage." in order to fuel such a feat of mental endurance, my roommate decided that eggs were in order, fried, over easy. and so it came to pass that sunday morning breakfast was a tidy, no-nonsense affair.

Well, almost no nonsense. You can see here my homefries, my 12-grain toast, my two eggs over easy. Also, there are what appear to be sausage links trying to crawl off my plate. You can credit the inch-worm facade to the fact that they are two halves of a hot Italian sausage. I cut the full link in half and fried them, starting with the break in the casing pinched closed and face down in the pan. The inch-worming started when I rolled them over.
But aside from that deviation from the standard bacon, eggs and potatoes, this was as normal a breakfast as it gets, just good, honest, high-calorie fare to keep the farm hands working through the morning. I didn't have the privilege of plowing anything this Sunday, though, just wearing a deeper groove in our adjustable recliner. It can get quite hot on the recliner, though, so of course there was an ice cream sandwich for dessert.

No, this is not the ice cream sandwich. This is a platano con carnitas from Chuchifritos on 116th street between Lexington and Third Aves. This was a bit of late lunch a little before dinner. We had rustled ourselves from the "Entourage" onslaught inspired by a sudden desire to down a few cans of Sparks. When our quest to find this hipster mead in El Barrio didn't pan out, I settled on this deepfried gloryball as a consolation prize. The insides are mashed plantains and spiced pork wrapped in a thin, doughy pastry and deep fried. They are simply amazing. I can't eat enough of these things. The secret ingredient is likely crack.

Then dinner arrived. Best darn delivery Mexican I've ever had: roasted pork chalupas, which are not like the Taco Bell food item, but more like the oysters on a half shell version of tacos. The chalupa shell, worlds different from the Taco Bell version, is a crispy, shallow dish made from corn meal, pressed into shape on a mold and then deep fried. They are sloppy to eat at first, and, much like training pit bulls, take a firm and steady hand from the start.
Everything about them was fantastic. The pork was expertly roasted, still succulent, even after having been delivered to my apartment door. The fixin's on top were all fresh, lettuce, peppers, a wealth of fresh cilantro, sour cream, and a crumbly white cheese (that the menu claimed was Parmesan, although I think that was an attempt to simplify the menu for gringos unfamiliar with the wealth of cheeses not produced in the U.S. or Europe) and their salsa roja added a great kick to the whole package.

Here you can see the mountain of pork cradled in the chalupa shell. This one I drizzled with the salsa verde, also very good, although I preferred the smoky edge of their salsa roja.

They come in sets of three, but two was well more than enough, especially with the platano con carnitas still working it's way through my stomach, so I still have one of these bad boys sitting in my fridge, waiting for a guest appearance on the lunch menu later this week.

Saturday, another weekend, another cookout.

2008-07-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

Sometime Saturday morning, I decided to clean out the fridge. We had a lot of produce that was no longer safe for human consumption that needed to get thrown out. I also had some of my mother's cabbage rolls left, but I was reluctant to throw them out. I decided to give them one last hurrah, even though they'd been in my fridge for over a month now. There were only three left, but a great deal of cabbage and juices, so I reheated them in my everyday pan, allowing lots of time for the water to boil back into the rice. I also through a little fettuccine into the mix just to see how it would come out.
It came out pretty much how you'd expect pasta boiled in the juice of sauerkraut and tomato paste to come out, maybe even better if you don't expect that sort of thing to be edible. The cabbage rolls had seen better days, but still tasted edible. I did start to feel a bit off after a while, though and started to worry that I'd be too sick to attend my friend's birthday barbecue. Never underestimate the powers of a good Saturday nap-and-rally, though.

Birthday cookout at a friend's apt. In this city there isn't a lot of bbq space to go around. I was expecting a circular grill around 18" wide up on an unfinished roof. I love that sort of affair, especially for parties under 6 people. You get the most wonderful sense of isolation and retreat, the sort of thing that's very hard to come by in Manhattan.
This was not that kind of affair, although it was a delightful retreat from the city bustle. My friends' apartment building had the most amazing space in the back yard. "Yard" is actually a pretty poor label for the space. "Terrace" is a little more apt. Imagine a tierd series of decks sporting stone walkways and overhanging trellis running along a meandering country river. The river in question was the edge of where they dug Manhattan away from the basement floor to allow them terrace space of their own. Then spreading up and back a space almost as big as the building out front is a connected series of walkways and tables cradled in ivy-covered fences. It was at the peak of these terraces, in a full-sized grill, that my friend threw down on burgers stuffed with onions and cheddar cheese and some assorted sausages and red hots.
I put down two of the burgers. I also sampled the red hots and a spicy lamb sausage from Whole Foods. There was a whole rainbow of meat that I couldn't even get into since I was saving room for beer and salad.
"SALAD???!?!?!?!" you say? Well, all of this meat and the birthday girl was a vegan, go figure. I wanted to show my appreciation in culinary form, but I had a hard time planning a plate for a barbecue without any meat or cheese. I decided to go for salads, and picked up some interesting and/or versatile things at Trader Joe's on the way down to the barbecue. When I got there, the birthday girl's sister was already planning a salad, so we teamed up to put out a nice pair of salads.
First up was another variation of my Santa Fe meets Korea salad. This time the romaine hearts were dusted with cayenne pepper, adobo, cane sugar and a touch of ancho chile before being doused in lime juice and then tossed with black beans and pan seared sweet peppers. I need to thicken the dressing just a bit and back the lime up with a bit more earnest acidity. I wish I could find wheat vinegar here in the States. I found it in a specialty import shop in Osaka and it led to a fantastically delicate Philipino pork adobo, a story for another day.
The second salad was based more off the designs of the birthday girl's sister. She was planning a spinach salad with strawberries and blueberries. I had some raspberries with me and pecan pieces. We dusted the spinach with adobo seasoning and rubbed sage, then tossed in the berries. Foraging in a kitchen that did not belong to either of us, we managed to put together a dressing of balsamic vinegar, olive oil and grand marnier. Finally, we finished the salad with the pecan pieces after toasting them in a frying pan.
Both salads sat outside for a while without being touched. At first I thought I had made a terrible bbq faux pas, but then I realized that we just had no plates or forks with which to eat the salads. Rather than get forks, though, I incited a bout of salad drinking. The spinach salad worked much better than the Koreanesque salad in this regard. The romaine pieces were just to wide and springy to be effectively dumped into your open mouth from a cup. The spinach and berries seemed to slide down more effectively.
The birthday girl's sister's fiancée also made dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) stuffed with rice, pine nuts and rasins. They helped to polarize the palate of dinner into the strictly carnivorous and strictly vegan, making this one of the most conflicted, although very satisfying barbecues I've ever been to.

After packing in as much meat and salad as I could, I thought I was set for the evening, but the heat managed to change my mind. Later that night I found myself compelled to put down a Hulk popsicle. With summer in the city enveloping me in a haze of my own perspiration trying desperately to escape my body, the prospect of lowering my core temperature with direct application of ice was just too appealing. There is no shame in a grown man eating popsicles inspired by super heroes. None.

Monday

2008-07-12T11:47:00.001-07:00

sunday

2008-07-06T19:05:00.001-07:00

Another Saturday in Boston.

2008-07-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

Having been out until just before getting on a bus to Boston, breakfast on Saturday came from one of those fast-food joints. Bacon, egg and cheese on a croissant and hash browns. There are worse ways to start your day. Also, because partying until well after dawn takes a lot out of you, my beverage of choice with this meal was water, and continued to be water for many hours to come.

Once in Boston I met a friend for lunch at a Shabu Shabu restaurant. This is a Japanese style of cooking where you are brought plates of raw meat, here I went with pork, on the right, and lamb, on the left.

Thinly sliced pork and beef, and cuts of chicken are very common in Japanese shabu shabu restaurants, but this restaurant also had lamb and ostrich. As tempted as I was to try the ostrich, the pork and lamb were available at a very reasonable combination price.
You cook this meat yourself in boiling broth right at your table. This sort of cooking at the table is popular in several versions in Japan. This particular restaurant was more of a combination of shabu shabu, usually cooked in a pot resembling a bundt pan with an over-extended central cone, with nabe, a Japanese winter specialty usually cooked in an earthenware pot.
Aside from the cookware, the primary difference here is technique. Shabu shabu is an active cooking experience where you hold the meat in the boiling broth until it's cooked to your liking, and then eat it immediately with an option of sauces or other additions. Nabe is more of a stew. Ingredients are added at different times according to the necessary cooking times to bring everything together at the perfect moment. After all of the larger pieces of meat and vegetable have been eaten, partially cooked rice is added to finish in the broth and form a fried rice finishing course.

This shabu shabu is nabe-esque in that there was a very large selection of broths available beyond the standard mild, salty fish broth. Here you can see a kimchi based broth on the left and a very rich broth made from pork bones on the right called tonkotsu. To the side are standard additions you can add to the broth or directly to the meat after cooking: green onion, garlic, chili paste and hoisin sauce. Also next to my plate is a dare (dah-ray) made from soy sauce, vinegar and a little ginger. The meal also comes with quite a bit of equipment, although none of it is really necessary. The wire scoop did prove useful when cooking vegetables, and the bowl and spoon proved handy for making the most out of the cooking broths, but I preferred to use chopsticks for most of the shabuing and I never used the fondue fork.

This was not an all meat affair. There were lots of vegetables to be boiled and eaten too. There was spinach, watercress greens, sliced daikon, cabbage, shitake mushrooms and corn. Also, on the vegetarian platter in the background you can see cellophane noodles, fried blocks of tofu and bundles of tofu skin. Also, each lunch order came with your choice of noodles to be shabued. We both went with udon.

The meal progressed as a playful experiment, seeing what would match which broth better and what were ideal cooking times. The lamb was extremely good, especially when cooked in a bundle in the tonkotsu just to the point the pink was gone from the outside, but still had traces on the inside. The corn took forever to cook and wasn't really worth the wait in the end. However, the very bold broths and the great selection of meats made this possibly the best shabu shabu I've ever had.

And, since I was already on a Japan kick, why not go sushi for dinner. Boston boasted some very good Japanese fare, and at about 60% of the cost of similar food in Manhattan, so I intended to make the most of it.

On the far left of the plate, the nigiri (sushi over a rice block) shown is a piece of hotate (ho-ta-tay, scallop) which is a delightfully subtle and succulent texture experience that really comes alive with a little drizzle of lemon juice. Together with hokigai (red clam), large shellfish are my favorite type of nigiri. They boast the most amazing textures and delicate flavors that don't usually overwhelm the palate but come across like secrets whispered while walking on the beach at dusk. Be very careful not to bury their sublime characters with soy sauce and wasabi.
The foremost maki (rolled sushi) was a shrimp tempura roll. This was easy to pack in, more of an American version of Japanese food than a traditional favorite, but I'm not a sushi purist and these were just plain good.
Center stage went to an "Alaska roll" which, if you couldn't tell by the name, is also not a traditional Japanese maki. "Alaska rolls" can also vary greatly by restaurant. I didn't ask what was in this one, but there seemed to be salmon and another lighter-textured fish along with avocado. This was also on the more subtle side of sushi although I did abuse a piece or two with a heavy dose of wasabi and soy sauce because this was my least favorite of our options and I had to get a shot or two of wasabi in there somewhere.
All the way in the back is a California roll that I did not take part in because I have had problems with crab, fake or otherwise, and just avoid it across the board. My apologies if you wanted to read about my impressions on this California roll in particular.
And not pictured was eel nigiri. I've had some terrible eel experiences in the U.S. but my friend is a big fan and I didn't want to rain on any parades, so onward through the fishy valley we pressed. Much to my surprise, this eel was quite fresh. There were no signs of storage abuse where the eel is allowed to go gamey and the fish stink is allowed to take over what is otherwise a distinct yet delicate piece of fish. These were cooked with care to preserve the moisture of the fish and presented very tidily. It's too bad we ate them before I thought to take a picture.

I also decided to expose my friends to one of my Japanese favorites, age dashi dofu (ah-gay da-shee do-fu), a block of soft tofu fried in a delicate batter, topped with shredded daikon and green onion and served in a salty fish stock. Maybe because this is a personal favorite and I have had it prepared to perfection on a regular basis in an izakaya (tavern) around the corner from my apartment in Juso (just north of Osaka) but this was a disappointment. The tofu itself was treated well, but there was only about 3 tablespoons of soup to go with 4 blocks of tofu. If you'd never had it before, you wouldn't know what was missing, but I came away missing the old neighborhood.

I also snuck a bite of some tempura from my friend's bento. This was sweet potato tempura, I believe. Sweet potato is actually very popular in Japan in forms as diverse as tempura, roasted french-fry-like snacks, kit-kat bars and ice cream.

And speaking of all those sweets, we had desert back at home, iced molasses cookies and Magic Hat #9, an apricot-flavored lager from Magic Hat brewery. Beer and cookies, maybe not the best mix, but better than beer and milk and cookies.

Friday was soaked in patriotism.

2008-07-06T17:18:00.001-07:00

Well, when a weekend runs away from you, it really runs away from you. I've had a much more interesting than usual diet this weekend so it's taking me some time just to process it all. First up to bat on Friday was sort of a repeater, though. I reheated the last of the leftovers from the co-worker's birthday party, chicken wings and a little rotini.

Everything reheated very well in the oven while I whipped up an appetizer to take to a 4th of July barbecue. It was a pretty standard bean dip. Garlic sauteed in butter till soft, add the beans, some red pepper, some chili powder and some cinnamon, then dump in a shot of tequila or vodka, stir vigorously, and then serve. I added a layer of avocado to the top of the bean dip, then heavily salted the avocado with Adobo and sprinkled it heavily with lime juice.

At the party I served the dip with tortilla chips. Not a stunning blow of creative culination, i know, but it got the job done. The picture here shows it's mostly devoured state.

Then, of course I ate burgers and hot dogs.

The weather prevented us from grilling outside, so we settled for grill-pan burgers and foreman grill hot dogs.

That orangy sauce is "Gold Rush Barbecue Sauce," as created by my friend while working at his parent's restaurant in New Jersey. I doused my burger in it, slathered it on my hot dog and had to muster up a lot of restraint not to start taking hits from the bottle. There is probably some crack-cocaine mixed up in there. You can also see a squirt of tartar sauce running the length of the dog under the lettuce and onion. This is very advanced condiment pairing and is not advised for the faint of gut.

Yeah, a few of these↑ , a shot of this↓,

Not really a pair I'd recommend, but an entertaining diversion from the meat pile. Mmmm... meat...

And then, what better way to celebrate being American than a nice big slice of home-made apple pie. Looking at this photo of the pie, you might assume people started eating it with their bare hands in a lusty frenzy to revel in the glory of America's do-it-yourself grit, home-made wholesomeness and can-do attitude, and then added the spoon later in photoshop to hide the signs of their gluttony. This is only partly true.

A Thursday like an extra extra Saturday

2008-07-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

Breakfast? Movie snacks? Not a lot of difference there today as I was not awake very long at all before tucking into an early matinée of "The Incredible Hulk." This might not be the most nutritional spread, but I was planning on eating right after the movie, so I didn't want to dig into a very hefty breakfast. I got my potassium and my b-vitamins and my pb-vitamins, though.

And lunch more than made up for it. Walking through Little India, we stumbled upon a restaurant offering a $6.95 all-you-can-eat experience, which in Manhattan is impossible to pass up. Turns out that the chicken option is another $2, which we didn't realize till the check came.
As far as the curries go, I could have easily done without the chicken masala in favor of another vegetarian option. The chana masala and the spinach curry were both worlds better than the masala. The spinach curry in particular came with a cinnamon stick stewing in it. It was very complex while still being very inviting.

The one benefit of our unwitting $2 upgrade was the kebab. Glazed in coconut, lime and cardamom seeds and grilled to perfection. The chicken melted like butter and the marinade was perfect. The tart and creamy lime and coconut sauce complimented the texture of the chicken, creating this barbecue confection punctuated by the explosions of the cardamom seeds across the palate.
Other than offering the $2 upgrade without explaining the price difference, the service was fantastic. They were very friendly and the table service all-you-can-eat was much more pleasant than your standard buffet set-up. The naan was great, also all-you-can-eat, and included in the price of lunch. I will definitely be back, if only to find out the name of the place.
As far as we were concerned, when we walked in it was called "$6.95 All-You-Can-Eat Curry." I forgot to take a picture of the front of the restaurant, but it's on the east side of Lexington Ave between 27th and 28th St. They have a big sandwich board out front declaring their lunch specials and you can see the curries cooking just inside the window. Even at $8.95 per, it was a great culinary bang for the buck, and neither my friend nor I ate anything else the rest of the day. That might not have been all because of the Indian food, though. 62 oz. of Private Stock can really fill you up too.

Wednesday whispers, but if you listen...

2008-07-03T05:34:00.000-07:00

Breakfast? 1 banana, $0.35 off the street fruit vendor just outside of the 116th Street stop on the 2/3. Maybe there's a market force pushing up the $0.25 standard.
The main food event of the day was lunch. A co-worker's birthday prompted his family, most of whom also work for the University, to throw him a "surprise" birthday party. I can't argue with someone else's mother's cooking. This had me set all day. I even had leftovers for dinner.
The taste of Guyana is really growing on me. The fried rice and tofu vegetables were my favorite, especially playing off each other. In addition to the larger roasted chicken was a very charismatic jerk chicken. It comes up to say hello, and you find it's conversation very engaging.
You were suprised at the vegetable and tofu's handle on Charles Baudelaire. The chicken seemed to always care about your opinions. The fried rice was so easy to talk to and the rotini was just what you hadn't yet realized you wanted.

Then there was desert. Three deserts. They're like children. You can't let one desert think you like the others any better, bad scene. I love tarts. This custard and fruit tart did her job well. The strawberry shortcake cake was very polite and yet out going and the Orange cake came deservedly recommended by a fellow party goer.

Yes, I could go for another piece of that Orange cake. Sadly, I didn't have desert leftovers. I was all too happy to dig into the rotini and rice when I got home. I saved the chicken wings for a time when I had more time to reheat food, but the rice sprang back nicely with a quick fry and I didn't even give the rotini a chance to reheat. I devoured it cold.

Tuesday, my tragic twin

2008-07-02T04:34:00.000-07:00

OATMEAL! Stewed with cinnamon, sage, pomegranate juice and honey with a kiss of butter and sprinkled with brown sugar. The pomegranate and sage pushed tart and savory boundaries I haven't toyed with in oatmeal before. This was inspired in large part by my coworker's rosemary medley muffin tops. The results were astoundingly good. If you're sick of the oatmeal grind, I really recommend playing with a shot of pomegranate juice in the water as it cooks. It's much brighter than using apple juice and together with a pinch of sage creates a very profound diversion from your standard puddle of oats.

Lunch was leftovers from Sunday night's dinner, and there are not a lot of foods that make better leftovers than chana masala and saag paneer. There's not a lot of detail to go into there, though.

There was one other food item from the afternoon that I should disclose. Through the intricate surprises of Manhattan life, I came into a number of charred cicadas. These were cicadas from just before they do their "climb a tree and leave creepy exoskeletons everywhere" adventure. They were lightly seasoned in salt and oil before being grilled to put a nice char on them. They have all the aroma and charm of the char on grilled vegetables. They would be perfect additives to a summer salad, especially for vegetarians to add that hint of the grill without eating meat. I had two over the course of the day, trying to prove to my co-workers they were safe to eat. I got four people to actually try them, all of whom agreed they were highly edible and that it was only the physical sight of them that was repulsive. Eat more bugs, it's good for your carbon foot print.

No, those aren't bugs, just black sesame seeds on my dinner, tantanmen. Tantanmen is a type of ramen with a broth enriched with ground sesame seeds that is usually served topped with some steamed bok choy and spicy ground pork similar to taco meat. Here I skipped trying to recreate the bok choy experience and used finely diced chorizo for the meat. It wasn't as good as the noodle shop in the Ecole Rose shopping center in Kongo-Higashi that I frequented on a weekly basis while teaching English in Japan, but for ramen out of an envelope, it wasn't bad.

Then for desert I did terrible things to pretzels. Inspired by Anthony Bourdain's experience at The French Laundry, I decided to engage in a little maverick foodbending of my own. I broke off chunks of hard pretzel, placed them in shot glasses and then allowed them to soak in various blends of the items you see above. The pomegranate juice was about what you would expect, very tart. As much as this is possible, I managed to find the perfect moment of the pretzel's insides becoming soft and saturated with the tart juice while the outside retained it's hard shell where the juices did not have time to penetrate.
Then there was the Japanese condiment abuse that will likely take some explaining. First up was ponzu, a mixture of soy sauce, vinegar and flavoring from yuzu, a very sour fruit similar to grapefruit. Then there was yakisoba sauce, a kitchen staple in Japan, always on hand for making yakisoba, fried noodles. The sauce is brown. It tastes sweet, a little sour, and dark, dark brown. It's also very watery and soaked into the pretzel fairly readily while coating the outside slightly. Over all of that was a drizzling of sesame oil.
I really enjoyed both of these and made a larger go of the pomegranate version. I made shot-glass portions for my roommate and he said they were both terrible and to please never ask him to eat pretzels soaked in pomegranate juice ever again. Not to disparage his palate, but he also declined to eat the cicadas so he maybe just didn't have his "food adventurer" hat on.

A Monday to forever change my life.

2008-07-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

And I can't even give you all the juicy details until September when the related documentary airs on Animal Planet. I can say it was over 9 courses of gastric exotica. I can say I went from pleasantly surprised to thoroughly amazed. I can't say exactly what I ate or show you any of the photos from the event yet. My apologies.

By contrast to what will likely forever be one of the most memorable culinary experiences of my life, I can tell you that the rest of the day was pretty fair shakes as far as breakfast goes. I skipped lunch out of general laziness, and wanting to spend my lunch time bs'ing with co-workers in another building, which makes this, sadly, a pretty easy Monday to cover, since 84% of the food for the day can't be talked about for another 3 months.

It was a burrito day, bacon and chorizo. I also threw a little sliced cubanelles in there. The meats and the peppers make such a full palate for me, I didn't even use cheese. This is a big step from my breakfast roots, where a breakfast sandwich or wrap must have eggs, bacon, ketchup and cheese in it. After a time horseradish mayo replaced the ketchup and the cheese grew from yellow American to the wonderful rainbow of cheeses at my disposal living in a major American city, but always, the cheese, even in the chana masala egg wraps. I must be growing up.

If those had been my only breakfast, I would have been pretty happy with washing it down with a Vitamin Water and a mandarin orange herbal tea from the brew machine in the back of the office. This was not to be the whole of the story, though, for fate struck in the form of a co-worker bearing gifts.

"What is this, a cookie?"
"No."
"Yeah right, it's a cookie...

...you're right. It's not a cookie"
"I know."

Just unwrapping it, I was smacked in the face with rosemary. The texture was the real "not-a-cookie" give away, though. This was a muffin top, deceptively shaped like a cookie, but with that tell-tale muffin fluffiness. Beyond the rosemary was a whole wheat muffin dough that cradled raisins, cranberries, pecans and pumpkin seeds. If I saw this on a menu, I'd pass. If I saw one at some hippy-happy coffee shop I would not be surprised, but I would not dig in either. This was a gift, though, and I couldn't just not eat it, and besides, it seemed like promising material.

Somehow, the rosemary wasn't overwhelming. The whole wheat brought enough to the table and all the other things in the mix held their own well enough that it managed to be very different without being overbearing or feeling like over-contrived health-food fare. Any other day this month it would have had a chance of being the stand out food item of the day. Sadly, here it was up against that which cannot be named, and though it was a really good muffin top, maybe the best muffin top I've ever had, it was not over 9 courses of delights I have never eaten before and likely never will.

This is going to be a long 3 months.

Sunday was a crime against good food.

2008-06-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

If I were writing a menu that served the food I ate this Sunday, there would be "Hashbrowns," simple enough, and "Apple Cider Failcakes," which might need more of a small text explanation.

I meant to make crepes, the easy kind you make in a blender. They're not perfect, but they're easy and good enough for getting some kicks in the "flat things covered in syrup" category (of kicks). I thought I'd be economical and use the food processor instead, since I already had it down to effortlessly shred my potatoes for the hash browns. Here, economical refers to me not wasting energy to get the blender out from under the counter, pretty much exactly where I was standing. This was my first bad idea. The blade for the food processor didn't really mix the way the blender did and I ended up with a lot of dry flour stuck to the sides and bottom of the processing chamber that I had to mix in with a fork.

My second mistake was starting to make crepes without checking to see if we had milk. We didn't. At times like these, either you go shopping or you improvise. I improvised: 2 parts pomegranate apple cider, 1 part sour cream, blended thoroughly with a fork and measured out to match the recommended volume of milk. I don't know if that was a mistake, per se, but I did not end up with crepes. They were too sturdy for crepes, but very delicate for pancakes. Even though I'm calling them "Failcakes" I think I'd make them again. They'd need a touch more salt to balance the cider, but otherwise, they were very edible, if not exactly what I was going for when I started cooking.

There was no lunch for Sunday. I needed to shake off the bad kitchen mojo from the morning before digging in to cooking for dinner. I had a few friends over for Indian. This was a bad idea for dinner at the end of June, but I persevered through the perspiration to come out with a great chana masala and a passable saag "paneer."

I made fresh garlic/ginger paste in the food processor at about a 1:1 ratio. A generous tablespoon of this in some hot oil is a good way to start off most curries. You may also want to add chili paste, although with these dishes I didn't use any chilis for the chana and I blended the chilis directly into the spinach for the saag. As the paste starts to give off its juices to the oil, you want to add your spices to the oil to let the flavors break out and grow. Chana masala works primarily off the magic of whole cumin seeds and the onions that you brown in the oil before adding the chick peas. With saag, I like to build with a lot of chili powder and coriander supported with cinnamon and mace.

Before tossing the spinach in, though, you should brown your paneer and your potatoes if you're using them, then reserving them to give the spinach some quality time in the pan with the oils all by themselves, to get real cozy and get a nice fry on. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, if you're having trouble tracking down actual Indian paneer, queso fresca makes a very good substitute. It may be cheaper than paneer, depending on your supermarket options, and it has the same sturdy texture that allows you to fry it in blocks for the saag.

Once the onions are browning for the chana and the spinach has started to break down from shredded leaves to green, buttery gravy, you're going to add your chickpeas to the chana and the potatoes and some onion cut into wedges into the saag. You're also going to want to add a tomato or two to each, depending on the size of your tomatoes and how much you really like tomatoes in the first place. If you don't want tomato skins floating around your curry, you can get the skins off very easily by setting the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute and then allowing them to cool. the skins will slide right off. I usually cut the tomatoes into wedges before adding them to either curry.

The longer you let the chana go on a low heat, the better. The whole cumin seeds and the chickpeas need time to really start to play well with others. With the saag you don't want to put your "paneer" in too soon as stirring the curry has a high potential to break the slices into crumbles. At the low-heat stage you may also want to finish with whole fat yogurt, buttermilk, or just a ton of butter. This time around I went with the later option supplemented with some whole milk I got when I finally worked up the motivation to get to the store. I also added a nice shot of my grandmother's spicy tomato soup, which, isn't really soup at all, more like a mason jar of culinary napalm.

Made a little rice in the rice cooker and we were all set to tear in to quality comfort food and a spread of red wines. Great dinner in November, bad idea in June. I may have to put a moratorium on cooking Indian food until October. I worked up as much of a sweat cooking dinner as I do riding my bike to work. Also, even the delightful rioja that highlighted the wine list was not the best hot weather choice of beverage. The rest of the summer, my kitchen's house wine is Haffenreffer's Private Stock. When company comes calling, wow them with the imported taste!

Saturday in Little Guyana

2008-06-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

The day started off rough. Staying up till dawn tends to put a fuzzy edge to when you wake up, maybe not technically in the morning anymore. I did get up before noon, though, and really needed some swill to push the poisons out. To that end, very little makes me happier than eggs, starch and lots of butter. I made two burritos, making sure to butter the tortillas before heating them in the griddle to get them brown and crispy. Inside was just eggs, no meats, no cheeses, but a wonderful blend of sage, tarragon and adobo. I threw more butter than I needed into the pan when I cooked them and took them off the heat just at that magic moment that the protein bonds start to consolidate their forces, but before that sad stage where their partnerships lead to stagnant bickering and in-fighting. They were wonderful, and then I passed out again.

When I came to again, I had to hurry off to meet a friend for a 5:20PM screening of "Happiness." This is not the 90's indie flick with Philip Seymour Hoffman doing nasty things to postcards. This was a newer Korean film about terminally ill patients at a health farm falling in love; much less disturbing than the earlier film, much more gut wrenchingly depressing. The gut wrenching was made all the more real by my stomach's very painful protests of the slice of pizza I'd snagged before leaving the apartment. Most weekends my roommate will order this terrible pizza delivery and go through the large pie over the course of several "meals." I'd had it before and I didn't like it then. I have no idea why he would choose to order this pizza repeatedly. There have to be better delivery options, even in El Barrio. I needed simple food fast, though so I decided to give it a shot. Bad idea. I had to run into the bathroom before the film and try to sort things out. Luckily it passed without much more fervor than your average demonic possession.

After the movie we went to Reservoir, a few blocks south of Union Square on University Pl. The food was decent, and in the $7-10 range for most of their entrees. The beer selection wasn't expansive but had a pretty broad selection of US/UK crowd-pleasers from Budwiser to Bass to Killian's to Magner's. I had the fish and chips sandwich. The waffle fries were great, and the fish itself was up to par, if not a bit small for the enormous roll it was served on. As it was a sandwich and in the absence of any cold mashed peas, I think "Fish Sandwich" would have been a more honest menu title than "Fish and Chips." If you put the chips on the sandwich with the cole slaw and the tartar sauce and a liberal squeeze of lemon, more to soften the roll than anything, you had yourself a pretty sturdy heaping of bar food.

I thought I'd be done eating for the day, but after an epic subway and bus adventure deep into Queens, I arrived at a club in Little Guyana for a friend's graduation party. I was not expecting food, but I got it anyway.

Here you can see the chicken wings and a piece of jerk chicken. I wasn't planning on eating at first, so I took this photo after most of it had been destroyed. The jerk chicken was fantastic, very spicy and the chicken was timed very well. The chicken wings were in some kind of wet sauce, not so much hot wings as stewed wings. They weren't bad, but they certainly weren't the main event. That title goes to:

Shark bites! No, not the chewy fruit snack of my childhood, these were "popper" sized cuts of shark, breaded and deep fried. You can see on the side the ketchup, lime and hot sauce provided as condiments. I really wish I'd been hungrier and not actively dancing, because I would have eaten a lot more of these little gems. You couldn't really call them "poppers," though, because, like so much other West Indies cooking, they like to leave the "bones" in. Aside from navigating the occasional chunk of cartilage, it was very easy to put these away. If you're not familiar with shark, these had a fishy edge similar to catfish but with a much more dense, juicy texture. They were an unexpected yet very welcome capstone to a day of culinary meandering.

Friday is forever.

2008-06-28T21:05:00.000-07:00

Nothing is more rapacious, scandalous and swindling than a college dining commons, save possibly the black market kidney trade.
One banana and one yogurt cup, your standard yoplait mixed berry pre-mixed yogurt, not some froufrou parfait. How much should this cost? Well, it should come in under $2, even in Manhattan. Maybe being irate about spending $2.67 for a banana and some yogurt seems to be over-reacting to you. Well, i shall continue to be indignant, as the banana was price gouged up to almost 400% the street price. Going rate for bananas on the street is $0.25 per. You can get them cheaper by the pound at a grocer, but even in the Upper East Side this quarter standard seems to hold true. $1.69 for a yoplait yogurt cup, obnoxious, but only by about 200%. I think you feel my ire now too. Let's go protest the caf'.

Lunch was free because my mother gave it to me. Granted, this was about a month ago, so I really should factor in the cost of refrigeration over that month and the potential risk cost of hospital time for food poisoning from eating month-old cabbage rolls, but undaunted I dove into one of my favorite lunches of late, cabbage rolls and frozen French fries. When making the fries in a microwave soaking in the cabbage roll juice they reach this magical place somewhere between mashed potatoes and fresh carrots. It's enough to induce run-on sentences.

Later that evening I had a pity dog with a friend. This is your standard hot dog, here from Gray's Papaya in the Village, bought and given to someone out of pity. I was buying because she'd just been notified that the record label she was working for was terminating her position in order to open a new position with different qualifications she wasn't qualified for. She had hers with sauerkraut, I had the same but with mustard also. They were great and cost less than my breakfast.

And at the very end of a gigantic day, about to pass out from dragging myself home from a midnight screening of Tokyo Gore Police, I just couldn't resist the lure of my local Chuchifritos, all deep-fried, all the time. They were out of their papas relenas, so I opted for an empanada. The extra wide edges of fried dough on this joint's empanadas are perfect for the late night "i shouldn't be eating this" meal. They are also great for breakfast.

And if you are upset that I didn't have any pictures for today, you can sink your teeth into this:

Thursday

2008-06-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

I tried to set a goal for myself, to get these posts under 800 words a day. That's mostly because internet attention spans are deplorable. I don't expect for this to get syndicated, but at the same time, writing 3,000+ word entries are punishing, even just to write them
But, as a possible side effect, I just haven't been eating very much worth talking about for most of my caloric intake, and then basking in one great investment of energy a day.

This Thursday, for example, I had my Jeno's for breakfast, and a bag of pop corn for lunch. My officemate asked, when I brought the pop corn into the office, if that was all I was eating for lunch. "No." I said. I didn't think I was lying at the time, I just got lazy and filled up on pop corn. Around 4PM I had one of those ice cream sandwiches made from chocolate chip cookies with chocolate chips embedded in the ice cream around the edges. Very healthy, lots of calcium, and corn is a vegetable, right?

Ah, but the main event. I starved myself into creativity. There was another variation on the Korean salad and a great lentil soup that I made up as I went.

For the salad this time I played with the dressing elements. I used soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, sesame oil and mirin this time. As for dry spices, I kept it simple with chili powder and the sesame seeds. For greens I used romaine hearts and I added some red peppers on there mostly because i thought it would look good. I was right.

The lentil soup started out like your basic curry. In hot olive oil with a little butter I sautéed ginger paste, garlic, a dash of Grammy's Spicy Tomato Soup and spices, here chili powder, some cumin seed, a little mace and a very liberal dose of Adobo. I then added red skin potatoes and put a nice brown on one side. After flipping them and getting the other side started to brown, I added an onion, halved and then sliced.

I added a drizzle of sesame oil as the onions cooked, and once they started to take on a little brown themselves, I added the beans, juices and all, as well as a few sprigs from my lemon basil plant.

It was one of those dishes that feel like shoveling satisfaction into your gaping mouth.
This is one I'll be coming back to, but maybe not till the weather cools off a little.

Wednesday, the sleeper cell awakens.

2008-06-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

Most of what I ate this Wednesday was just plain sad, if not downright disgusting. Jeno's pizza for breakfast, blueberry muffin from that massive chain coffee shop for lunch. Neither of which sparked much excitement in my life, so I imagine you've already clicked to the next blog and are reading about some mid-west soccer-mom's azaleas. For those of you still with me, though, you are going to get two excellent pieces of advice on eating out in Manhattan.
#1, Azuri Cafe,
51st St. between 9th Ave and 10th Ave. It's just a little falafel joint. They do the spread from shwarma to baba ganoush. I had a falafel sandwich, and it was so amazing, you're lucky I managed to stop and take the photo. Honestly, the best falafel I've ever had. The guy building the sandwiches stood in front of an array of 20 different sauces and condiments and with each pita, he appeared to be painting a very exacting portrait of the taste-scape he had in mind from a diverse and yet complimentary palate. There was no part of my sandwich where I felt like the main event was over and I was just cleaning up the plate. It was everything you'd ever wanted falafel to be with the addition of a subtle dance of extras you never knew you were missing. If you eat falafel and you are ever near there, you owe it to yourself to go. Icing on the cake, it was the first time in a while that I had excellent service in the city. The guys working there were happy to make you a kick-ass falafel sandwich and they wanted you to know they enjoyed your satisfaction as much as you did.

#2, Do not, DO NOT ever by the roasted redskin potatoes from SuperFresh's deli department.

They sucked so bad, I don't even mind typing out the phrase "sucked so bad." If the falafel re-instated my faith in food as a soul-nourishing necessity of life, then these potatoes would be the opposite. The rosemary came across like soap and the texture of the potatoes themselves were very distressing. The buffalo wings weren't as bad, and I could bring myself to eat those again if I were in a pinch for something to pour beer on top of.

That falafel made the whole day worth it, though. I'm just itching for another excuse to go back.

Tuesday, there is not food enough to fill your void.

2008-06-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

The Ice Cream Sandwich Challenge:

Some days before work, I try to throw an ice cream sandwich in my bag and then bike to work fast enough to eat it while it's still solid enough to peel the wrapper and eat it (as opposed to kind of drinking it). You can see that this attempt was not a great success.

Stress and depression are two very different emotions. I know this because my body has very different reactions to each. When I am stressed, my appetite is suppressed. When I am depressed, I eat to fill the empty aching of my soul. I know these reactions very well, but I'm not exactly sure where yesterday falls.
Breakfast would seem to indicate moderate depression, or possibly just my normal state of affairs. It was a two-burrito day. I spiced up the eggs with a little chorizo, a slice of bacon, some cubanelle peppers and monterrey jack cheese. The cubanelles went in just before the eggs, so they were still very crisp when I ate the burritos, They provided this wonderful texture and brightness, like spicy lettuce. Fantastic.

Then, for lunch, I made a series of progressive mistakes: a banana, Odwalla Bluberry B-Monster and a prepackaged pretzel-chip and hummus combo.

The banana wasn't that bad of an idea, the problem was really where I bought it from, the cafeteria. Overpriced fruit, slightly overpriced B-Monster, way over-priced hummus pack. I ended up with these choices by trying not to spend a lot of money and not really finding any of the easy cold options at the caf appealing.

I ended up spending $8.05 for only minimal soul satisfaction.

There was way too much hummus for the amount of pretzel chips I had. I had to scoop tremendous amounts of hummus onto each chip in order to get enough hummus into me to fulfill my caloric needs while still engaging in food in a way i found palatable. The hummus tasted fine, but the texture was so creamy and over-processed that it made me kind of queasy in large amounts. The B-Monster was a solid nutritional decision, at least, especially considering that b-vitamins are very helpful in dealing with both stress and depression. They also make your urine markedly yellow, which provides some small wonder at the chemical processes of the human body with every squirt.

Dinner was dismal. I didn't have time to cook, but there was nothing very easy and tempting in the apartment. I ate the rest of the tortilla chips in the fridge and still felt very empty. Rummaging through the freezer I found three frozen dim sum leek buns. They were wrapped in one of those sandwich bags that just fold over, no zip lock, and the bag had of course fell open, leaving the delicate rice dough to catch a nasty case of freezer burn. I don't know if I felt sorry for them or if they just resonated with some sense of flaw and ruin in my life, but I knew that the time to eat these buns had come.

As you can see in the photos, I have a very simple steaming set up. Actually, I should preface this section by saying that this is not the part of the blog where I explain some great kitchen secret that is going to take your own epicurean endeavors up a notch. No, this is more like me going to culinary confessional and attempting to expatiate the terrible sins I have committed against decent cookware and other kitchen accouterments.

My initial set up was three shot glasses, right-side-up,

in a small pan that's a little too wide for my 100 yen steamer basket.

The water boiled, none of the glass broke, but all of the steam poured out the edges instead of through the basket. Stupid physics. Stupid steam. I will bend you to my will, you gaseous devil!

So I refilled the water in the pot and then wrapped the whole thing in a kitchen towel to force the steam through the steaming basket.

This actually worked. I even thought to lower the heat on the pot to lower the chances of setting the towel on fire. Way to go, foresight! I managed this amazing feat of kitchen buffoonery and didn't loose a single piece of equipment or food to the fickle gods of the hearth. Calamity, my dark destiny, you will have to wait another day!

Despite this great triumph, though, a handful of 3-day-old tortilla chips and three dim sum leek buns do not a quality dinner make. That's all there was for Tuesday, though. Chalk it up to stress. At this rate, I might actually make my WiiFit weight loss goal. Shigeru Miyamoto thinks I'm overweight.

Monday, not going to win a Webby Award.

2008-06-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

Breakfast? Jeno's combination pizza and a raspberry Yoplait yogurt.
Lunch? Left over Thai curry from Friday. Massaman, maybe? I forget the name of it. Cashews, red skin potatoes and imitation vegetarian duck in a rosy orange curry sauce. The duck was possibly the best vegetarian meat substitute I've ever had. I'm not that familiar with meat-substitution beyond tofu and Morningstar Farms, but I think this was a version of wheat gluten that was pressed out in layers to mimic duck breast. The texture gave like meat between my teeth and had a very rich, earthy character to it that would fit most duck recipes well.
Dinner, a great heaping mess of garbage. I wasn't in the mood to cook. I was in the mood to lay on my floor and stare at the ceiling. From the depths of such ennui came a swill tour de force.
For starters, there was a bag of tortilla chips sitting in the fridge. Fresh tortilla chips from delivery Mexican my roommate had ordered on Sunday. They were nested in a greasy paper bag that had been torn open down the length of the bag, and then sort of crumpled into a ball back around the chips. Amazingly, they were still quite good, possibly even better than they were on Sunday.
Below those in the fridge was a tub of guacamole from the same delivery. After scraping the top 1/4" to the side, there was still a lot of good guac left. It's a very well-balanced guacamole The taste of the avocado was very prominent with a spice that built up over a few bites.
Then there was a can of Chef Boyardee Overstuffed Ravioli. Overstuffed, not worth paying more than the regular stuffed ravioli. Don't buy into the overstuffed hype.
And just to keep up my nutritional values, there was a "The Hulk" popsicle from some superhero-color themed popsicle mix box. It was green and purple and the ugly color that comes from mixing green and purple fluids and then freezing them.
The three of us, roommates, all sat around the living room, eating "The Hulk" popsicles, talking about how grown up we were.

Thursday. Ok. Thursday.

2008-06-19T10:21:00.000-07:00

Back to my old tricks again. Jeno's frozen pizzas were on sale for $0.97 per, so I just had to stock up. Thursday's breakfast was a combination pizza and two cookies (oatmeal raisin and chocolate mint) saved from Wednesday's free lunch.

I also had this odd jittery feeling like my heart was just a bit too fast. Funny, when I had a little coffee it went away. Maybe the rest of me just caught up.

Lunch was leftovers from dinner Monday night. Chorizo and black beans over Spanish rice with ancho chili powder. The chili powder was a lot spicier than I thought, so the rice ended up being spicier than the beans. It was an odd defiance of your standard expectation in those kinds of situations.

That evening, when I got home, I just wasn't hungry. My mind felt too full to put anything into my stomach. I had an ice cream sandwich around 8PM because I felt I should have some kind of calories, but that's all it ended up being, calories.

I had set a chicken breast to thaw in the fridge the day before, and I was leaving town for the weekend, so I felt I had to do something with it, but I didn't know what. I realized that I had coffee left over in my French press from that morning, though. I decided to make a coffee marinade.

Going in, I was pretty sure this was one of my worst food ideas ever. The coffee had been sitting out all day and I'd never tried anything like it before. I did a combination of a dry rub and then marinade to make sure the spices got into contact with the chicken first and the coffee was a supporting character. I massaged Adobo, chipotle, brown sugar, and ancho chili powder into the chicken breast, then worked a tiny amount of sesame oil over the rub before letting it marinate in the coffee. It got to soak for about three hours while I debated if I really wanted to eat or not, and what I might want to eat in particular.

I ended up making a variation of a Korean salad I'd had at a yakiniku (Korean BBQ in Japan) bar that I would frequent in Mikuni Ga Oka, about twenty minutes south of downtown Osaka. The owner's wife made it and I loved it so much I eventually got her to teach me the ingredients:Lettuce, cayenne pepper, sesame seeds, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar and sugar. She wouldn't divulge her ratios, though. I don't know if it was a matter of her not wanting to deal with translation, especially with ambiguous directions that she now does almost automatically without measuring, or if she really wanted to protect some secret of her recipe, but she left it up to me to refine my technique until I was happy with the end product.

I took some pretty drastic liberties with my salad here. It's not really fair to call it Korean. I don't really know what you would call it, but we're not going to use the "f-word" here so lets just skip classifying the cultural roots here and I'll tell you what it was made out of.

I started with a romaine heart and cut it into thin strips, about 1/2 inch wide. I then dusted the lettuce with crushed sesame seeds, chipotle powder, and a dash of ancho chili powder. The ancho chili powder had a fishy edge to it that didn't come out in the chicken later, but put an odd spin to the salad that I wasn't a big fan of, but my vegetarian roommate really enjoyed. I then hit the salad with the juice from 1 lime and a little less than a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt and mixed thoroughly.

That was the basic salad. To that I added diced avocado and grilled onions and red peppers that I'd grilled on a George Foreman grill without any doctoring beyond slicing. The salad was audacious and triumphant. My roommate and I both devoured it quickly as tang and spice collided with the subtle creaminess of the avocado and the rich sweetness of the grilled vegetables. I topped mine with slices of the chicken breast, also grilled on the Foreman. The coffee wasn't overbearing at all, and, combined with the chili powder, lent the chicken the most amazing rosy earth color.

The entire cooking process really helped me to get my head straight and I felt worlds better just for having cooked, let alone having eaten what was a very satisfying end result to the wanton indulgence of my creativity. I still had one more ice cream sandwich before bed, though.

Wednesday is for vegetarianism and more fun with crappy service.

2008-06-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was inadvertently a vegetarian day. I had every intention of having a deli sandwich for lunch as I scavenged the leftovers of some faculty function, but sadly there was only roasted vegetable sandwiches and lox with cucumber sandwiches left. I took the lox and cucumber sandwich because I thought it was some sort of tomato/fresh garden thing. It's fair to say I didn't look very closely. If you were wondering if it was a good sandwich, it wasn't. The salmon was atrocious and I ended up spitting out the bite I tried to eat. In defense of the caterers' judgment, it had been sitting out all afternoon, so it wasn't exactly shower fresh.

The hummus and couscous salad were pretty good, but there wasn't much of that left. There was a potato salad that rivaled the day before's Indian food. (If you didn't read the post, it sucked.) The coleslaw was very good, especially considering the source was a giant catering kitchen. There was also caesar salad with actual anchovies on the salad. That was a nice step above, but made me think about how good the cold cut sandwiches might have been. I also had some thin slices of a thin baguette with mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and basil on them. Not a bad spread, though I do wish I wasted less plate space on that salmon atrocity.
Desert was a stack of 4 cookies, chocolate chip, chocolate with mint chocolate chips and two oatmeal raisin cookies. I also had a cup of fruit, which was the biggest portion size out of anything else I ate for lunch or breakfast. That's healthy, right? A nice blend of watermelon, pineapple, grapes, blueberries and raspberries ended lunch on a nice high note, despite the heavy thud of the salmon sandwich hitting the bottom of my otherwise empty trash can.

Did someone mention breakfast? It was a banana, a cup of Stonyfield Farms Cream on Top Vanilla and a handful of peanuts. It kept me from being irritable until 3PM when the scavenging started.

Dinner you say? Well fuck you too, New York Wraps. We ordered the Jerusalem (#46) and the Mediterranean (#48) wraps and an order of seasoned fries. They were both falafel based, mine was the Jerusalem, falafel, tomato, cucumber, lettuce and tahini. That's not important, though, because they bollocksed up my order. My friend got his #48, but I got the #45, "Zorba the Greek" aka "A lettuce salad with a belittlingly sparse sprinkling of things that weren't lettuce, like feta cheese, oil and vinegar dressing, or tomatoes."

When I called back to try to explain, I was quickly and thoroughly reminded about how much customer service sucks in Manhattan. I know Manhattan has a few exemplary ass holes out there that have probably made this guy's job a lot harder than it has to be, but it seems like restaurants adopt this super-aggressive customer service policy apparently aimed at making their customers feel stupid for having decided to give them business. I wasn't caustic at first, but the conversation ended with me saying "You know, it's not worth me arguing with you any more, I just won't ever order from your fucking store ever again. Thank you."

It's a shame the fries were so good.

On the bright side of things, the salad wrapped in a paper towel is probably better for me than the fried falafel would have been. Seeing as how I put down 4 1/2 pints of Guiness, Smithwicks and Magner's, cutting a few calories was an acceptable side-effect of what seems to be a regrettable trend in $7-15/person restaurants in Manhattan.

This Tuesday was easy, and yet I am still late.

2008-06-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

And lets not even talk about the weekend, which was good for food, but the details have been lost to the muddy sands in the river of time. Did you know today was International Butcher Your Metaphors Day? Now you do.

Tuesday is so easy to write about because I barely ate. I had a banana for breakfast, but that was all I really felt like eating. I had a lot on my mind, and it didn't make for a big appetite.

Not eating anything but a banana and a handful of peanuts a little later has a way of wearing on your insides, though. My frequent lunch friend suggested Indian and I thought maybe a good gorge would help assuage my tormented brainparts. Some how we didn't let the $12 price tag deter us from an all-you-can eat lunch. If I would have really thought about the gastro-intestinal consequences at the time, though, I would have opted for the ramen joint on the ground floor.

It wasn't great Indian, but I would not be deterred from eating more than I should. I skipped breakfast, sort of, so how bad could two platefuls of food and a bowl of desert with two pieces of naan really be?

Well, the food was bland, especially for Indian standards. Their samosas were pretty good and the cilantro chutney was also up to par. I'm not spending $12 for all-you-can-eat samosas, though. I want my channa masala, my saag paneer, something that says aloo in it, maybe a chicken curry or a lamb curry, and some biryani rice would be nice, but the standard white stuff is very welcome too and of course there should be a piece of tandoori chicken in the mix the way every Chinese buffet in America has to have something named after General Tso and usually featuring chicken. The thing is, they had all of these things, they were just very poor versions of each. The spice level was set for geriatric Japanese nun, you might compare it to the spiciness of milk, or perhaps a manila envelope. The tandoori chicken was decent, actually, although it's not really my favorite Indian food. Before I had their chicken curry, it might even have been my least favorite Indian chicken dish. The lamb curry, saag, chana and aloo curries were all about as exciting as a Newheart marathon. This is probably for the best, since it held me to only one rather modest return plate instead of an all out binge.

The rice pudding was above average, though not by much. If I had it to do all over again, I would have had 8 samosoas or so, with a little biryani rice with a modest portion of the chicken curry and a few bowls (they were very small) of the rice pudding, maybe a piece of naan. This still wouldn't have been worth $12, but would have mitigated a lot of my disappointment. I guess this is what I get for trying to externalize my satisfaction.

That afternoon proved fairly difficult to get through. My blood sugar spiked and fell and I almost went into a food coma, and I also felt uneasy and threw up a little bit in my mouth at one point. Yeah, I know you wanted to know. This is why this posting is so easy, though. I didn't eat anything else all day. there was just no room for it. I drank a bottle of B-Relaxed Vitamin water when I got home from work, but the other stresses in my life combined with the Indian overload to put me down for the night before 9PM even.

At least maybe only eating one meal for the day might help the slimming process along. Not really a good diet meal though...

Classics Wednesday.

2008-06-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

Do I plan out my food for the day to fit some kind of theme as though there were an editorial board trying to push some zany new spin into my columns?
No. Not very often, anyway.
Today, things just happened to go that way. Sometimes I do plan a meal days or weeks in advance, but this was also not the case for Wednesday. I guess I was just in the mood for some comfort foods.

The breakfast comfort came from breakfast burritos. Two today, to help hold up the cup of coffee I expected to drink later in the morning. Two slices of bacon, two eggs worth of scrambly goodness, and two kinds of shredded cheese (jack and cheddar) wrapped in two tortillas. When you find something that works for you, just go with it.

For lunch I thought I'd mix up an old classic, but it turns out that it was a bad idea. Even though two foods might be great on their own, it doesn't mean the flavors necessarily blend well. For as much as you sometimes get great surprises of flavor matches that seem to thwart your intuition, often things that seem safe enough together turn oddly caustic or upsetting when actually eaten together. In this case it was cabbage rolls and morel-infused mashed potatoes.

I'd roasted some of the morels so that they'd dry out for use in soups and sauces later. Unfortunately they got a little more brown than is ideal, but it accented their nutty flavors very well. I dropped a few in the water that I boiled the potatoes in, and let the water cook off as I mashed the potatoes so that they preserved the character of the morels. They have a nutty character that might go really well with some pork chops or roasted squash drizzled in truffle oil. They don't really go with the sour tomato and cabbage juice of the cabbage rolls.

Something about having the dill and sauerkraut on my palate just made the potatoes seem out of place and the rich tones of the mushrooms were ever so slightly triggering my gag reflex and making a really unpleasant feeling in my stomach. I couldn't quite pinpoint the problem. The potatoes themselves tasted fine, but so much of them were saturated with the juices and sauce from the cabbage rolls, they weren't really worth eating. Such a shame for those morels to have gone to waste like that, but at least I have the knowledge now and can pass it on to you.

Thankfully, my lunch buddy for the day got a wrap from Burrito Box and didn't eat his chips, so I had fresh tortilla chips and salsa to round out my lunch after a third of it proved to be inedible.

For dinner I had a newer classic in my life, although it's been a classic Japanese food item for quite some time. Most westerners are not familiar with Japanese curry, which is similar to its Indian counterparts almost in texture only, although Japanese curries do tend to feature coriander. Japanese curries have more in common with a beef stew or a heavily spiced pork gravy than with Indian curry.

This picture shows the traditional plating method of rice to one side, curry to the other, with the pork cutlet balancing between. GoGo Curry on 38th St. between 7th and 8th Ave. doesn't plate their curry like this. They put the rice in a mound in the bottom of the bowl with the curry over the entire thing and then the katsu (fried pork cutlet) on top. This actually left less room for gravy and didn't allow for as much fine control of the rice-to-curry ratio as you were eating. GoGo Curry, please fix this.

The curry sauce itself was pretty good. I still crave the curry from CoCo Ichiban Curry House in Japan, but as far as my options go in Manhattan this is definitely good curry and worth the trip, especially if you've never tried Japanese Curry before. Unlike CoCoIchi's, which I would eat as often as I eat breakfast burritos here in the states, will be back to GoGo Curry, but maybe only once a month.

Then, as if I hadn't eaten enough yet today, there was some late-night vittles for the heavily relaxing crowd that was hanging out at my apt. In order to help them stabilize after all their relaxing, I whipped up some bacon and scrambled eggs before everyone trotted off home. I didn't eat any of the bacon myself, and just enough of the eggs to gauge how well I did in making them. I didn't have time for home fries and no bread for toast, so I just fried some tortillas cut into triangles in the bacon fat. Remember, kids: DON'T WASTE BACON FAT!!!! IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!!!! Unless you are vegetarian or Jewish or Muslim, in which case I'd recommend just avoiding bacon altogether. You're better off not knowing.

Also, there was the quaint but disappointing final appearance of morels for a while. I went to make floured and fried morels, but when I opened the bag of fresh ones, only two had managed to escape the clutches of mold. Sadly, I had to throw the rest out, and having cut the two survivors in half, I managed to make four small, unattractive, utterly delectable appetizers to the breakfast-at-11 fried-food free-for-all.

Man, irresponsible use of hyphens is almost as fun as rampant run-on sentences.

Tuesday? Hot.

2008-06-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

Most people who make yogurt for a living will tell you that yogurt is so good for you that you should eat it once or twice a day. This is because those people have a vested interest in increasing their market base. This doesn't mean they are wrong.

I had a yogurt similar to the one pictured above as part of my breakfast. The other part was a sandwich of two Trader Joe's banana waffles with margarine and honey. Something about the gluten-free dough for the banana waffles is so dense and starchy, it hurts my tongue to eat them. These are still from that first box from April and there's still one left in the freezer, waiting for my next moment of extreme desperation for an easy breakfast, having forgotten or buried the shame of the last time.

When I opened the yogurt, I realized I had neither a spoon, nor the desire to get up and get one from the coffee room, so I tilted the cup back and drank the yogurt, very slowly, very very slowly. When the weight of the yogurt sticking to the edges of the cup was no longer enough to pull the yogurt down into my waiting mouth, I poured water into the cup, shook it vigorously like I was making a martini, and drank the resultant yogurt-foam-water.

Lunch was leftover morel pasta with a tomato and mozzarella sandwich from the moz and tomatoes I set to marinate on Monday night. The sandwich was great, but the pasta had frozen during it's stay over the weekend in my work fridge. I guess the temperature was set very low, but the freezing wasn't very good for the cream sauce, the pasta or the morels. Aside from texture issues, it still tasted basically the same. It was just a little disappointing compared to how great it was on Thursday night. The portion was also very light, even for my new attempt at revising my portion expectations, so I had to supplement my lunch with a few handfuls of roasted peanuts I've been keeping in my desk for just such an occasion.

Then for dinner was the glorious return of the chilled zucchini and tomato pasta from Monday night. This time the weather was just as hot, but the pasta was even colder. It helped the zucchini come across very bold and the whole sauce was very exuberant, thanks largely to the very sweet nature of my uncle's tomatoes.
I tried to keep it to a modest portion, but my tummy wanted things to play with, so I had another cup of yogurt (raspberry La Yogurt) to quiet it down. This was an excellent choice because it did not involve the stove at all. Sadly, after a few minutes my tummy was feeling rambunctious again and I had no more good cold food on hand. I broke down and turned on one burner from the stove for about 3 minutes. In that time I cooked a hot dog and warmed up a tortilla in the same pan to avoid having to do more dishes. I could have eaten them cold, but the last time I ate cold hot dog, I think I was decked out in underoos and oshkosh b'gosh overalls, so it's been a year or two.

Monday, don't eat at Teriyaki Boy. Every day, don't eat at Teriyaki Boy

2008-06-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

Pretend there was no weekend because it's hard for me to write on the weekend. I have no established routine, and I'm usually way to busy hanging out with friends and/or getting over having just hung out with friends perhaps a little too thoroughly.

This weekend featured an afternoon in the Astoria Beer Garden as part of a friend's visit up from Baltimore, so yeah, lots of recovery needed.

But this is not "Everything I Drank Yesterday" and, actually, I leave a lot of the things I drink out of the picture, mostly because these posts are really long already and if something is going to go, it sure isn't going to be the run-on sentences.

Alright, fine, breakfast, sheesh. Yogurt, Yoplait vanilla yogurt, not the best yogurt I've ever had, but a nice way to start the morning. Last week my local grocer had a sale on various brands of yogurts and I got to thinking about just how different $2 worth of yogurt could be. During the sale, the Yoplait were 3 for $2, and the La Yogurt were 5 for $2. I compared the relative value of these with the high-water mark of Stonyfield Farms whole-milk cream-on-top, which come in at $1.19 per 6oz. single serving cup. For an everyday yogurt with breakfast, the La Yogurt is a much better value without being any notably better or worse than the Yoplait. The Stonyfield Farms is a marked improvement over both if you're the sort of person to splurge on yogurt. If you're not, you're probably wondering why you are still reading this blog.

Also up to bat for breakfast was a pepperoni roll and an oatmeal cream pie, both of which had been crushed by a week or more of floating in my bag. In the case of the pepperoni roll, this made the grease-soaked portions of the bread that much more prominent as the big puffy bread on top got compressed. The oatmeal cream pie went through this strange transformation and came out more like oatmeal taffy than anything that "cream" or "pie" might bring to mind. It must have gotten hot in my bag and the icing must have melted into the rest of the sandwich a bit. Looked like hell, tasted fine.

Lunch was served by a rather rude Teriyaki Boy cashier who was not Japanese. I don't want to disparage any cultures in particular, but if this was a bento chain in Japan, I would have been treated a lot better.

I ordered the teriyaki chicken and shrimp shu mai combo. The cashier told me the combo came with soda or miso soup. Seeing as it was well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I opted for soda. She took my money. I got change. Then I stepped aside to wait for my food and complimentary soda.
As she did with me, when indicating the free soda, she gestured to her left, my right, most directly to this line of bottled waters and teas sitting above the sushi cooler. These were obviously tepid, though, and none of them were soda. As one's eyes continued left, one saw the cooler full of these bottles and also cans of soda. I wasn't sure if she gave me the soda, or if I just took the soda. I tried to ask, but she was too busy with the line and didn't show any interest in taking my question, although other patrons in line did notice me trying to ask. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went to the cooler and got a brand of green tea that I enjoyed in Japan. I took my food to a corner of the tiny box that is the restaurant and sat down to eat with a Korean friend of mine.

We were about half-way through our meal when I hear "Hey you! You get tea!"

"Huh? Yeah, out of the-"

"Tea not soda. You get tea."

"Oh, my bad. What's the difference."

"The tea is $2.50."

"No, I mean, how much more is the tea than the soda? Can I just pay the difference?"

"Soda is free. Tea is $2.50."

Perhaps in reading this you think I am being unfair about her mastery of the English language. I have spent a lot of time teaching English as a second language and making close friends with non-native speakers. This woman was just excessively rude. Beyond the business self-sabotage of gouging customers over a simple mistake, her tone of voice, as well as that of the manager that came forward, was highly combative. Just because I wear a button-down and a tie to work doesn't make me some rich asshole who doesn't care about an extra $2.50 added onto my lunch budget. My own tone became a bit combative, I'm sure. I debated walking out of the restaurant, leaving the rest of my lunch and the tea, but I didn't feel like starting a big ordeal, deciding instead to pay my $2.50 rather unceremoniously and then bad mouth them on my blog.

I know New Yorker's can be ass holes, and I know white guys in ties can be really big ass holes, but the treatment I got as a customer was completely uncalled for. I wasn't being hostile. If they had said "I'm sorry for the understanding, but you did open the tea. I apologize but I can't ring up the tea with a discount. You do need to pay for the tea." I would have been in a much better mood about it, and would be a lot more likely to eat there again. Some time around the manager insisting that the soda was "free" and could not be deducted from the cost of the tea, both my friend and I, and likely several other patrons, decided not to return to this place of business again.

I know my review of the food may seem unfairly tarnished in light of my mood so allow me to simply equate it to mall food court "Japanese" food to give a slightly more objective frame of reference. At over $7 for the lunch combo, and at almost $10 dollars after this tea debacle, the lunch was a big disappointment for me. The service certainly did not remind me of the bento chains I know and love from Japan. That neither the cashier nor the manager seemed to have any interest in my feelings as a customer, and that deducting the cost of a soda from my purchase of the tea was an absolutely unreasonable request on my part, speak volumes against the character of the Teriyaki Boy chain, or at least the branch on 9th Ave between 57th and 58th Streets.

OK, I'm over it. I'll just have to make my own bento from now on. I've been looking for an excuse to try to make some tsukemono anyway. I just hope my roommates can stand the smell.

For dinner I made one of those dishes I make that I don't have a name for except for cobbling together a bunch of other food names into some unworkable lump that really doesn't give a good indication of what it is I actually made. This was a vegetarian provincial gazpacho pasta casserole. Your mouth probably isn't watering yet.

I took about 7 cloves of garlic, cut them into 1/8" thick slices and fried them in olive oil on a medium heat until they started to brown. Then I added two medium sized (about 7") zucchini, partially peeled, quartered lengthwise and then cut into chunks about 1/2" thick. I let the zucchini sautée with the garlic, dusting it with a little Adobo seasoning, and turned up the heat a bit to promote browning as I diced two of my Uncle's very large beefsteak tomatoes.
After I added the tomatoes, I seasoned the sauce with dried dill, oregano, sage, white and black pepper and a touch of cinnamon. I let the sauce simmer until the tomatoes and zucchini started to break down a bit. Then I added plain bread crumbs just until any loose moisture seemed to be soaked up.

While that was going on I made some bucatini, a hollow pasta just big enough for spaghetti to wear as a jacket. When that was done, I gave it a good rinse in cold water so that I could toss it with my hands, and so it would stop steaming, since the humidity was already over 60%. When it was just warm, I mixed in two tablespoons of butter and some black pepper. I layed the bucatini on top of the sauce and set the whole pan of it to chill in the fridge.

I also set alternating slices of another one of my uncle's tomatoes and a ball of fresh mozzarella to marinate in some balsamic vinegar.

Once the pasta was nice and cold, I cut a wedge out of the pan and flipped it out onto a plate so that the sauce was on top. I cut about 6" off an Italian baguette and made a sandwich with the marinated tomato and moz and "Voilla!" 20 minutes of actual cooking time for a great summer dinner. I'm sure you could eat it hot, but it was extremely unpleasant already. Just taking my new fan out of it's box had me dripping with sweat. This was great cold and really took the edge off the heat as well as being a very hearty vegetarian dinner.

Alright, I'm starting to sound like Rachel Ray again. I'm gonna go do a few more hours of aversion therapy. Try that pasta dish, srsly, it has a flavor.

Thursday? Free food? It sure does feel good to be back.

2008-06-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

This job rules. This is the kind of temping assignment other temps will shiv you for in the temp repository and wear your face as a mask in a ruthless bid for power.

I had a feeling it was going to be a free food day today. It was, after all, Thursday, named after Thurstarski, Norse god of fertility and tax write-offs. My contracted employer being a Jesuit institution, it, of course, upholds these time-honored Pagan practices.

All the same I have some pride in being able to provide for myself, and free food for us serfs doesn't kick in till the nobility have their fill, which means waiting till 2 or 3 for lunch. Free coffee + late lunch = cranky serfs, so I packed a few things for the slow crawl to 3pm that you could kind of call breakfast. Over the course of the morning I had a cup of vanilla yogurt, two pepperoni rolls, and some peanuts. Eaten periodically over the morning this kept me going. I didn't have time to mess around in the kitchen and make any kind of impressive breakfast and there was still some of my heavy dinner right before bed on Wednesday knocking around in my system.

Free lunch was a little upscale yesterday as it was some sort of sponsors meeting. Still sandwiches and salad, but nicer than the spread I was used to. I had half an herbed chicken breast sandwich with roasted red peppers and some caesar salad. You could actually taste the anchovies in the caesar dressing and it was all quality cuts of romaine lettuce. The chicken breast was not particularly inspired, but it was actual breast fillet, not over-preserved slices of lunch meat.

There were cookies, but not like the cookie parades of Thursdays gone by. The dessert selection was actually a little depressing, considering the apparent attempt to impress. I had an oatmeal raisin cookie and half of some white-chocolate-chip-in-chocolate-cookie-lookin-kind-of-cookie. It wasn't bad, I just only wanted half.

I also ate quite a bit of pineapple, several strawberries and a blackberry. Fruits are good for you and take on a nice sparkle when you soak them in ginger ale.

In addition to the soda and water, there were two bottles each of chardonnay and pinot noir. I don't remember the vineyard; it wasn't anything I recognized from Trader Joe's wine selection, anyway. I only had a splash of the pinot noir because reds tend to give me migraines. I had a glass of the chardonnay because it was there and it was already after 3 on a kind of slow Thursday afternoon. Both of them were palatable, but I am fairly deficient in describing wines beyond "ugh, bad!" or "WOOOOOOOOOOOO! I'm rather plastered." I think often the people that write those wine descriptions just make them up, anyway. "Tones of apple and mahogony with an edge of cut grass and whisps of the dreams tulips have in April." Complete B.S.

And then dinner, well, let's just say that dinner left me hung over for work on Friday. Well, let's say a little more so that my mother doesn't think all I had for dinner was two 22oz. bottles of Private Stock and a Budwiser pounder. I also had one modest black bean and chorizo burrito, well, more of a soft taco, anyway. Beer has lots of calories so I didn't need to eat so much food, right? I think I also had a handful of "Hint of Lime" tortilla chips and some salsa.

Lots of vitamins in salsa, there is.

There is, however, little wonder as to why I woke up with quite a headache on Friday.

The yesterday that was Wednesday, the fourth day of June.

2008-06-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

Reading this, you might think I'm a chubbywubkins. Well, I am, kind of. I'm fat for a Japanese guy. I'm about 20 lbs. heavier than I was in Japan, actually. I think that has a lot to do with portion sizing. It's disheartening to see how quickly I fell back into the gluttonous American meal-metering after developing much healthier habits in Japan.

So without being too blunt about it, I'm gonna try to rein in the gorge machine. To that end, the morning's breakfast burritos lost the "s" at the end, and dropped down to just one slice of bacon. If you cut the bacon into pieces and fry everything in the grease, you get a pretty thorough penetration of baconosity. I'm going to fry everything in the grease anyway, mottainai yo, don't waste shit, but this cuts the baconborne fat by half on average.

I also stuffed the whole egg mess into one tortilla. I am not advocating that anti-carb garbage, but it does significantly reduce the cost and carbon footprint per breakfast. Packaging can change our world, waistline and bottom line.

Why do I sound like Rachel Ray? Needs me an MRI or a Haffenreffer or something.

The great thing about breakfast was also the great thing about dinner and probably about lunch on Thursday. Morels. I came back from West PA with quite a haul. As I was frying the bacon, I threw in some of the smaller ones, cut into rings and a thin spear of asparagus cut into lil' slices. I would have liked to have had a more buttery, subtle cheese, but all I had to work with was a pre-shredded Monterrey jack and cheddar mix. I used it sparingly so as not to bury the subtle nutty edges of the morels. This was just to whet my morel appetite, though. I would be digging into them in earnest that evening.

But first, a reasonable lunch. The benefit of the pepperoni rolls made from sandwich roll dough is that they develop a large cavity inside and give very easily for further stuffing. I had two pepperoni rolls stuffed with lettuce, red onion and a hefty wedge of one of Uncle Jack's tomatoes, dusted with some Adobo seasoning. The tomatoes are huge, though, and after stuffing the pepperoni rolls, I still had 2/3rds of the half I had cut for the purpose. I ate the rest of the half as a side, and that was a full lunch. The other half had a different fate decided not by myself, but by my vegetarian roommate before dinner.

And it was a great dinner. I started with a recipe for fettuccine with asparagus and morels in cream sauce. Not a bad recipe, but I had to dance around the chicken stock. I wanted to use fresh morels, but that wouldn't provide me with water infused with the morel flavor to use as the extra fluid in the recipe. Instead, I boiled the fettuccine in just a little more water than was needed to cover, about 4 cups, and added a few of the dried morels, about 5, a tsp of Adobo seasoning, half a very small onion and about a Tbsp. of garlic juice from the jar of pre-diced garlic in the back of the fridge. After reserving the fettuccine, I used this "stock" for the extra fluid in the sauce.

The results were thoroughly satisfying and completely vegetarian. Who needs that pesky chicken stock anyway? I'm just supposed to keep the stuff laying around on the off chance that some wacky recipe requires it? Are they going to provide me with some convenient means of storage for this presumably ubiquitous kitchen need?

Damn the man!

Reduce your carbon foot print!

Boycott Rachel Ray!

I also had a slice of 3-cheese Texas toast.

Special Bargainnaisseur Recommendation

2008-06-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

Haffenreffer's Private Stock Malt Liquor.

Seriously. So affordable. So drinkable. It has liberated me from the Budwiser-induced cheap-beer doldrums. The events upon which I stumbled into this bodega gem are rather auspicious as well, moving this delightful quaff from simple bargain boozing into what is likely to be a life-long love affair.

This all started the second week of May, during the blog's dark period. I was in a friend's final project for her playwriting program at Columbia University and I was playing an adaptation of Falstaff as the imaginary friend of a not-so young anymore Hank Cinq interested in trading up for a better model of imaginary friend, sniveling, flax-nosed, ungrateful, malmsy jackanape.

Having only a week to prepare this production and being a bit out of practice with the intricacies of building a character's physicality, I decided to seek pharmacological help in developing the persona of an inveterate drunkard. Perusing the selection at my local bodega, I of course gravitated towards the malt liquor, just to take away any pretense of legitimacy to the affair. I wanted a troubled, desperate drunk full of self-importance and airs of grandeur, self-aware of the charade of life and dedicated to easing the dolor and tension of or mortal contrivances with bombastic investment in our baser instincts. Where amongst the bottom-dollar brews was the shining star, Sir John's quality quaff of choice? Old English, too obvious an appeal to the Bard and I never really took to the stuff. St. Ides? Of all the things Sir John might do to a sorority girl hell-bent on self-destructive debauchery, championing her inebriatory proclivities is not on that list, not on the short list of things he'd do while not actively bedding said bacchannette anyway.

Thus it was that, tempted by imperial green glass and regal gold foil label proudly proclaiming distinction in script and heraldic seal, I brought home two 24 oz. bottles of Haffenreffer Private Stock Malt Liquor and a fifth of White Horse whiskey just to rinse away any hope of a pleasant, respectable drunk.

That was all a little too much booze for one man on a Wednesday night, though. I had expected the roommates to lend a liver to the cause, but neither were interested in getting shitcanned. Drinking alone never seemed to deter Falstaff, though, so undaunted by my lack of confederates, I plowed on through one of the Private Stocks and more of the White Horse than I really should have before ceding that Everyday Shooter does not mix well with advanced inebriation unless your goal is to explore several shades of futility and despair. Fortunately this did work to inform my character's emotional climax.

It wasn't till after the production had run it's course, later into the following week, that one of my roommates offhandedly declared how surprisingly good the Private Stock was. I had left one in the fridge and gone to Philly for the weekend. We're very open about the nature of booze in the apartment, which is highly volatile and prone to spontaneous potation, regardless of how it came into our happy home. There in that moment was our realization of the thing before us, some sublime new convergence of potability, price and punch.

Ever since that day, it's been my bodega buzz of choice. The 24oz. bottles are the perfect size for the weeknight wind-down and two will get you pretty much as drunk as you want to be depending on your pacing. At $1.50 per, there's really no contest. But really, how does it taste? Up front it's about as unassuming as a beverage that tries to be like beer but fails to legally qualify can really claim to be. It stands far above Colt 45 and Old English 800, and is worlds better than any hoposhu the Nipponese put out. I'm thankfully not too familiar with any other near-beers of the world, but I defy my readership to find a better pretender to the throne than good old Haffy. There's a piquant bite as it rushes back that adds a refreshing quality to the belches that sizable quaffing is bound to stimulate. Even as it starts to warm up, it's still well better than many actual beers in a similar price range.

But why the whole story about the play and all that bs Shakespearean vocabulary conflation? Well, as I humbly sought to fact-check my spelling of this grand beverage, I stumbled upon the history of this most humbly blessid of inebriants. Originally brewed in Boston, MA by one Rudolph Haffenreffer, Sr., the brand was eventually bought by and is currently distributed by none other than Falstaff Brewing. Yessiree, John. Seems like the spirit of the merry mirthmaker reached through the aether to guide my quest to know him better. I would say that my mind processed the word "Falstaff" on the label in an extremely sneaky subversion of my illusory intuition, but the label never carries the word "Falstaff," instead billing Narragansett Brewing Co., the current brew house, as the place of origin.

Ok, maybe not the eeriest of convergences. It's no soviet radioactive monster mystery, but it gave me pause this afternoon. Theater tends to put one in a superstitious frame of mind, though.

Long to short: Drink Private Stock. It's good for you. Kind of.

The Haffenreffer to Falstaff Story
Reviews of Private Stock

So happy to oblige you, mr. colon.

2008-06-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Breakfast yesterday, perhaps not so impressive, but personally rewarding just because of the rarity of this food item in my life, two pepperoni rolls. If you're not familiar with pepperoni rolls, the name is pretty self-explanatory. It's bread wrapped around pepperoni and then baked. There are lots of versions of this around the world, or at least around the parts of the world where pepperoni and bread are common enough. My favorite iteration were the pepperoni rolls from a now defunct supermarket chain in my home town that used pepperoni cut into sticks about 3/8" wide and 3' long with a dough that featured corn flour, making for a sweet, crumbly roll that became very crispy on the bottom as the pepperoni oils released into the baking pan.

The best my hometown currently has to offer is about 5 slices of pepperoni cut in sturdy slices from a roll that is about 3" across wrapped up in a swirl of dough that might otherwise end up as a hot dog bun or sandwich roll. The roll is entirely closed so all of the pepperoni juices stay in the roll and saturate the surrounding bread, but the bread itself isn't very interesting. Still, two of them provided a solid enough breakfast without pushing my insides too far after yesterday's strange dyspepsia.

Lunch was another dietary rarity of note that I only get when I go back to my home town, cabbage rolls. I have a stronger emotional attachment to these rolls than the ones I ate for breakfast because this is my soul food. My mother makes these Eastern European specialties when I manage to beg her enough. They are no small feat, since they require hours of preparation, so we usually make them by the dozens, usually for big family events, but this time they were mainly for me to take several Tupperware containers full of them back to Manhattan. (Run-on running gag, how would I explain myself without you?)
The cabbage rolls were done when I got home Friday night, but there was no shortage of food all weekend and it was my goal to not gain 5 lbs. while home for the weekend. As you may have guessed by my choice of blogspiration, my family's main form of recreation, communication, consolation, celebration and affirmation is food. We are not a thin family, but not as hefty as you might think. Through the family breakfasts, 50th birthday parties, Stanley Cup Finals noshing, more family breakfasts and Sunday night grill-fests I didn't get a chance to dive into my cabbage roll stockpile until lunch today.
I threw a few frozen french fries on top of two cabbage rolls with a healthy dollop of the excess cabbage, sauerkraut, dill and tomato juice that they are roasted in. I like to eat the cabbage rolls with mashed potatoes, but I didn't really have time to make mashed potatoes before work. They were uncooked, standard-cut seasoned fries. I nuked them for a minute before microwaving the whole thing for about 3 minutes with occasional stirring, and in all the simmering in juices and whatnots they came out pretty close to mashed potatoes anyway. They were a great lunch, anyway. I have about 18 more where those came from and I am looking forward to making a big pile of mashed potatoes and tucking in to some serious Slovak sustenance some supper soon.

But not in this posting. Dinner was a Thai curry done up from scratch. My local grocer doesn't have Thai curry paste readily available and I haven't made it a priority to pick any up as I wander the city's myriad fooderies so last night I broke out the food processor and set to work.

I didn't have a recipe on hand, but I was adapting my Indian curry starter to the occasion. I'd read up on Thai curries one afternoon about four years ago, so I wouldn't take this as authoritative, but the results were highly edible so you can take this basic outline as a springboard for your own exploration.

I started with 7 cloves of garlic, a 2"x1" piece of ginger, as much of my lemon basil plant as I could cut back in good conscience (two stems about 3" long and the resulting leaves, admittedly not that much) and two tablespoons of the spicy tomato soup from my uncle's greenhouse operation. This initial paste could have benefited from more ginger, more basil, and some lemongrass or kaffir lime leaves, if I would have had any on hand. The food processor also makes a very chunky paste. Real scratch enthusiasts will encourage you to grind the ingredients together, but I just didn't have the audacious ambition to pour an hour of my life into my mortar and pestle.

Toss the paste into a pan with a little oil. I used olive oil with a kiss of sesame oil because that was what was easiest to reach out of my pantry. I fried cubed potatoes in the paste until they started to brown, then I added some carrots and onions till the onions started to soften and I doused the whole thing off with two cans of coconut milk.

I transfered about a cup of this mixture to a small pot on the side, added a cup of water and used this to stew a chicken leg/thigh. The separate cooking method was out of deference to my roommate's vegetarianism. The curry didn't really need meat but the chicken had been in the freezer for quite some time and was in need of being eaten. It was just begging for it. I obliged.

As the main curry was getting on, I added a cubanelle pepper and about 20 whole basil leaves, also begging to be eaten before their prime was lost to the entropy of the produce drawer. The stems to the basil I added to the pot with the chicken. Then I added about two teaspoons of chili powder and a similar amount of dried ginger to compensate for the lack of ginger in the initial paste. Then I finished the curry with a dash of Adobo seasoning and the juice of one lime, tossing the juiced lime rinds into the chicken's pot. All of this stewed a bit as we waited for the rice cooker to finish it's job. I started the jasmine rice a bit late. Then I spent about half an hour on the phone with an old friend from home before pulling the chicken meat and devouring a big bowl of spicy, creamy, tart curryliciousness.

As an epilogue, the vegetarian roommate never did come back for dinner. I can only infer that he came home as his door was firmly shut when I woke up this morning. He must have been out late, getting drunk, chasing tail. Ah, cosplay, how you do lead manboys to ruin.
That's probably not as true as either of us want it to be, but why do we have roommates if not to fictionalize their lives for our own amusement?

Monday on the road, in gastric distress.

2008-06-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

I don't want to blame it on Sheetz, but that was the last thing I ate that felt normal yesterday.

I had a Meltz with sausage, egg, American cheese, ketchup an black pepper. I describe it with such exacting ordered detail because that's how I ordered it. If you've never ordered from the Sheetz MTO touchscreen menus, you're missing out on the opportunity to order a hot dog with cheddar cheese, chili, baked beans, onions, mustard, sauerkraut, pickles, banana peppers and bacon without ever having to face the looks of horror, disgust and envy that placing such orders out loud tends to elicit from cashiers and passers by. In such dire moments of swill abuse no one will know your shame besides yourself and the shlave in the back who will wrap your colon's worst night mare in an nondescript opaque wrapper and hand it to the cashier to scan and never question.

It being 8am, not 3am, and me being about to drive across four states with my girlfriend, not about to make a very poor decision under the influence of the drunk hungries, I avoided my usual Sheetz fare in favor of something a little more like breakfast.

That brings us to Meltz, which should be called Shmeltz, in keeping with Schmuffinz, Schmagelz, Shmiscuitz and the Shmonster. Unfortunately, Sheetz appears to have some standards of self-respect, albeit piteously low standards that only seem to make earlier corn-ball marketing schemes seem that much more desperate.

And while you may have some vague inkling what a Schmuffin is, just from the name, what, pray tell, is a (Sh)Melt? It's a sandwich on a fat pretzel that is twisted in such a way as to create a bun without any holes, think kaiser roll, but made from pretzel dough. This is actually a pretty good idea, and if the pretzel buns were toasted instead of microwaved they might actually verge on great. As is, they become very chewy as they cool, forcing you to eat too fast or risk ejecting the sausage and ketchup out the back of the sandwich as you try to grind through it's tough, shiny hide. Add to this a hash brown so greasy that it dripped grease through the little hash brown baggie into the well below the emergency brake and you've got yourself quite a wholesome little breakfast for the road.

At the time of eating, there was no indication that I was ill. About three and a half hours and a bottle of Energy VitaminWater later, though I found myself having a hard time getting down a pepperoni roll. By rights it should have been lunch time, but my stomach just felt so off. After I finished the pepperoni roll, I couldn't eat anything else and I kept burping what tasted like cheerios soaking in milk left out in the sun for a few hours.

If you were wondering, this was not pleasant and it persisted for hours. My hunger didn't return till after 9pm, and even then all I had was one piece of 3-cheese texas toast. I brought so much great food back with me from my hometown and all I could manage to eat was a toasted piece of freezer-swill.

I hope my next entry proves more substantial or I'll have to start planning a book tour with Jared of Subway commercial fame. "I had a Shmagel and I never ate again!"

Touch and go Thursday

2008-05-16T08:06:00.001-07:00

My output of late is depressing. I apologize. The only thing more sorry than this meager epistemoblogical offering is the nutritional value of the crap I ate yesterday. Not to give a way to much of a spoiler but when most of the actual nutrition value of your day comes from a bottle and a half of VitaminWater, you're probably not balancing your pyramid too well.

Starting, naturally enough, with breakfast, I managed to leave my breakfast sitting out on the oven where I set it to cool. It was a Jeno's combination frozen pizza. Much like you, my dear reader, are not surprised by this choice of breakfast, my roommate was not surprised that I left it sitting out as I rushed off to work. At least I turned the oven off. He was kind enough to wrap it in foil and put it in the fridge for me, after our cat, addled by drugs and one of those "don't lick yourself" cones as she recovers from being spayed, jumped off the top of our kitchen cabinet squarely into the middle of the pizza. That probably was not intentional on the part of the cat. Probably.

I did remember my coffee, though: Oren's Roast Sumatran brewed in my French press. It was a black coffee day, although some calories would have been nice. Skipping any real breakfast and drinking coffee, my guts were screaming for something to beat up on besides themselves. I had a little plastic baggie with some peanut butter Cap'n Crunch and a butterscotch pudding cup in my bag that I had intended to be snacks. They didn't do much by way of sustenance, but eating them slowly, I managed to make it through to lunch without noticeable ulcer development.

I thought I might go to a ramen joint in the area of my assignment, but on my way out of the office I caught a whiff of someone's deli sandwich and a pickle and my mind was made up. It was the pickle that did it more than the sandwich, so when I got to the deli, I ordered their cheeseburger deluxe special: one cheeseburger, grilled fresh, about 7" across with lettuce and tomato, french fries and a pickle on the side for $5.50. That's a good food value for buying lunch out in Manhattan. The cheeseburger was so big, I didn't really feel like eating anything the rest of the day.

That may have also been due to nerves. Last night was my first time performing on stage in over 5 years. It was my friend's final writing piece of the semester at Columbia University and she was directing it herself in a writers' showcase. It was about as low-pressure as theater gets, but I still got very nervous beforehand, and as showtime got nearer, my insides got smaller. I had a Charge VitaminWater and half of an Energy VW, trying to stock up on B-vitamins to help with stress response. I only had half of the Energy because, as my castmate pointed out, they contain caffeine, which does not tend to lower stress levels. It wasn't so much that I was afraid of stressing and having a heart attack, as much as the fact that I had to play a drunkard, and I was afraid me hopped up on caffeine and the thrill of an audience after so long without would play more as a crackhead than a drunkard. Even when I acted on a regular basis, speeding through lines was always a problem of mine.

In an attempt to build some sort of nutritional support without inducing pre-show nausea, I had a cup of Whole milk yogurt, some triscuits, and a lot of water. I also had a piece of a castmate's hazelnut banana bread. My wired must have been really crossed, though, because when I first stuffed it in my mouth, it tasted like sashimi. No one else who tried the bread could corroborate my fishy impression, though, so I think I was just going crazy.

The show went off very well. We made a great mess of the stage area, as was our goal. Afterward I could manage to finally put things other than water in my stomach in any considerable volume.
I had a bottle of Odwalla Superfood while watching the rest of the performances in the showcase, then I went home to polish off that pizza that had been waiting patiently, wrapped in foil, perched atop the egg carton and sour cream. It struck me that it was possibly the first time I'd ever had a Jeno's pizza cold before; not tepid from being left to sit on the counter while you took a shower, got dressed, watched some anime on youtube, went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and then realized you'd made a pizza, but cold from being refrigerated all day. Besides being the first time, though, it was pretty unremarkable; not something I plan on doing again any time soon or possibly ever on purpose.

And just to make sure I covered all of my food groups, I knocked back a 22 oz. bottle of Preferred Stock Malt Liquor and some cheese curls as I watched the second disk of Battlestar Galactica, Season 2. At least 70% of that combination comes highly recommended as a great way to spend a Thursday night.

Saturday in Boston, er, well, Davis

2008-05-11T05:02:00.000-07:00

This weekend I decided to take advantage of BoltBus's ridiculous prices and wifi-laden busses and abscond to Boston to visit a friend and hopefully force some productivity out of myself while trapped in a tin can for four hours on either end of the trip. I am actually writing this post on the return journey. For those of you in major cities on the east coast, you should check out www.boltbus.com I don't have ad banners for them or anything, but they let me change my departure times twice and I've been very happy with the whole experience so far.

But this is about food, and I ate somethings yesterday that I am obligated by law to describe to you in writing.

You may think that when traveling to Boston one is obligated to eat beans, cream pies, and the fists of Red Socks fans who can smell the dust of Shea Stadium on your sneakers. I am all to happy to disappoint you, dear reader. I did not eat any of these things this weekend.

The morning started with a bowl of Golden Grahams and a few cups of coffee. I'm not much of a cereal guy, but in the ridiculous debacle that was the night before, we failed to procure fixin's for biscuits and gravy. We managed to stifle the disappointment enough to enjoy our coffee and beat down any lingering shadows of hangover.

The coffee was a Kona bean from Oren's Roast in Station Square Market. The beans were roasted on Wednesday and we ground them fresh just before brewing the coffee in a French press. As much as I love my French press, my friend is a bit obsessive about his brewing process, even controlling the temperature of the water at infusion to make sure his brew timing is as consistent as possible. I often forget that I've started my press brewing and come back after 15 minutes to depress the plunger. I'm not such a connaisieur as much as I just like interesting coffee that doesn't taste like urine steeped with burnt cardboard, or at least doesn't have a flavor that makes me imagine urine steeped with burnt cardboard, not that I've ever actually tried such things. This was good coffee, even black, although I did take my second cup with a liberal splash of heavy cream and a touch of sugar.

Then we went shopping for lunch fixin's. The coffee really had my digestive system going, though and so before we even got home to prepare lunch I had eaten a fried chicken thigh and a stick of celery with peanut butter while walking home with our groceries. This involved digging directly from the peanut butter jar with an unwashed stick of celery while also carrying a bag of groceries, but it was worth it. Seriously, try it, eat it everyday.

Lunch was two bowls of a sausage and cannellini soup that we made. I stared by browning a pound of sweet Italian sausage in the bottom of the pot. Then I reserved the sausage and added 5 cloves of sliced garlic and half a Vidalia onion, finely diced to the rendered juices with a little olive oil. Next came 3 stalks of celery and 2 carrots, all sliced. I seasoned it with about 2 tsp. each of thyme and dill, 1 tsp oregano and a touch of basil, then I covered it and let everybody get to know each other better.

After a few minutes I introduced a dash of balsamic vinegar, two big cans of cannellini and a big can of chicken broth. I don't know the actual measurements, but if you try this at home, add as many beans as you want and enough chicken broth to cover plus an inch or two over the top. I brought this to a boil, reduced it to a simmer, then added the sausage, now sliced into 1/2" pieces and a green and a red pepper, chopped. We let the whole thing simmer while we made a sculpture of my friend's right hand out of plastic wrap and packing tape as part of a larger project to create a full-sized sculpture of himself with plastic wrap and packing tape.

Over the course of the afternoon I also had three Reese's peanut butter cups and a snack-sized Butterfinger bar. You leave these things around and I'm going to eat them. I could have restrained myself, but why bother, really?

Dinner was thoroughly satisfying as only a pulled pork sandwich and a pint of beer can be. I had these things at Redbones, a barbecue joint in Davis, the town north of Boston that cradles the Tuft's campus. The pulled pork was one of the best I've ever had. It was almost impossible to pick up for all the grease and barbecue sauce the bread was sopping up. I ate it much faster than I thought I would, since I was only slightly hungry, but the structural integrity of the sandwich demanded decisive action with every bite. A liberal piling of onions, slaw and pickles right in the sandwich were a perfect touch. Great barbecue, especially considering it's in a preppy suburb of Boston.

The beer for the night was originally going to be Six-Point Brewery's Rye Ale, but the sample glass I had proved a little too sweet for my first drink of the night so I went instead with Offshore's Amber Ale, which provided a simple yet sturdy solvent for the pork grease. My first beer also proved to be my last as the prior evening's liver damage and sleep deprivation started to catch up with me very quickly. I had few sips of Sam Adam's unremarkable summer ale just to say that it was indeed unremarkable with some modicum of authentic judgment, but otherwise it was off to crash on my friend's couch in anticipation of my early morning rise to get on my bus in downtown Boston before 7:30 the next morning.

Ah, yes, fear not. The gap in my writing for this blog, I have not forgotten how to churn out unwieldy run-on sentences.

Picking up, moving on.

2008-05-11T04:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes your life just gets away with you. As someone endeavoring to pursue creative, er, endeavors, you might think I am a fickle creature of whimsy that rides ethereal currents of inspiration as flowers bloom where I poo.

As a wee'un, that's how I assumed the life of creative professionals must be. This whole blog project is an attempt to get my chops back for an altogether different process, that of actual ongoing creative production. The key aspects of this, for me, seem to be stability and routine. In this case, not having to spend time job hunting and actively seeking assignments provided me with an excellent opportunity to start working on this rather ambitious blog, humble in these infant stages though it may be.

Writing about everything one eats one day after the fact is more challenging than you might think, than I originally thought it would be when I started. I mean, I eat a lot, and I have some sort of obligation to make this at least moderately entertaining if I'm bothering to invite you, the reader, to come along.

Also, in a very real lesson to myself on the practicality of daily journalism, I found out how small problems tend to snowball when you let production lapse. As I worked to get back on schedule, I was still eating things. As I tried to get through a very food heavy weekend, I found that I was eating myself into a hole from which I wasn't likely to escape. The things I have eaten and have not written about are to the point that things will be lost. I'm sure the course of human history will march on unscathed, and so must this blog. Before I get too overwhelmed trying to explain to you my exploits on my birthday or on a visit to an Old Country Buffet, let me start again fresh, from yesterday...

Long Overdue: Everything I Ate Since Last Thursday, pt.2, Saturday

2008-05-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

Not surprisingly, I woke up Saturday with a bit of a hangover. As my glands tried to suggest possible remedies by sending secret coded symbols that my subconscious tried franticaly to translate into reason, I became overwhelmed with a desire for sausage, greasy, swilly sausage delivered via some nice starchy sponge that would be transformed into ambrosia as it soaked up all those swilly fluids the sausage would release. Yes, I hadn't even put on my boxers but the truth was plain to me. Sausage grease would set me free.

Some people, when they get a hang over, they go to McDonalds or they have someone else prepare their fatty starchy gutbomb for them. Maybe because this hangover wasn't too severe, and maybe because I'm just that kind of guy, but this probably more involved than most people's hangover meals.

I started with a few links of spicy Italian sausage that I browned over a medium heat in my everyday pan. I then reserved the links and added about 7 cloves of garlic, sliced about 1/8" thick and a few tablespoons of olive oil, reducing the heat to low and making sure to get all the juicies and sausage gunk up from the pan and interacting with the garlic.

At the same time I cooked some tortiglione pasta. This kind of looks like your common elbow macaroni extended into a spiral shape about an inch and a half to two inches long. These are pretty sturdy pasta that can take a lot of tossing and can also trap a fair amount of sauce and whatnots.

Into the garlic and oil I added some baby spinach and red peppers, then let that take on the oil a little bit before adding some diced tomatoes and the sausage cut into 1/2" thick pieces. I made sure to scrape all the oil that escaped from cutting the sausages back into the pan as well.

Once the pasta was starting to pass for au dente, I drained it and added it to the everyday pan and stirred it in with everything else. I then added adobo seasoning, dried basil, dried oregano, parmesean cheese, goat cheese and enough milk that the whole thing would stir. I tossed this while still cooking at a medium high heat to thicken a little bit. I had a huge bowl with some adobo garlic toast and then promptly crawled back in bed for a nap. It was exactly what my glands had been clamoring for.

That evening for dinner I went to dinner with the girlfriend's family in a Portuguese restaurant in Newark, NJ. The dinner was served in several big courses. Somehow I never really got near the salad, if there was one, but I did dig in to the appetizers. There was a bowl of shrimp in garlic and olive oil, sliced Portuguese choriço, and an assortment of some traditional Portuguese deep-fried delights.

Most recognizable to those unfamiliar with Portuguese cuisine would be the lules, m.c.k.a. calamari, or fried squid. That was two days in a row that I was eating squid and it definitely marks my highest post-Japan squid intake.

In another Japanese-Portuguese food connection, there were also beef croquettes in the fried Portuguese sampler platter. These were not quite the same as the ones I ate regularly in Japan. In Japan, the croquette, or "koroke," is more of a patty of mashed potatoes covered in panko bread crumbs and then deep fried. In the case of "beef koroke" it's usually the case that the mashed potatoes were flavored with beef stock with very little actual beef involved. The Portuguese versions, in contrast, were much smaller, about the size of mini-egg rolls, and they definitely had a good amount of finely shredded beef mixed in with the potatoes. The texture was much drier than the Japanese version and somewhat off-putting. This would have been a great time for some kind of sauce or gravy. The calamari would have also benefited from having something to dip them in. I experimented with a few liberal spoonfuls of choriço oil and shrimp-and-garlic-infused olive oil, but I didn't want the gf's family to realize what a fat junky I am just yet.

The pasteis de bacalhau ("pastry of codfish," sort of a deep-fried codfish meatball, but more bread than fish) were a little less dry than the beef coroquettes, but not by much, and not nearly as good as my gf's mother's so I only had a enough to show my general acceptance of codfish as food.

And the last of the appetizers, and my favorite, although again, not as good as my gf's mother's, were the rissois de camarão, small empanada-esque pastry pockets filled with shrimp. I could easily eat two dozen of these in a sitting, but I think I managed to contain myself to three or four.

The entree was a sirloin steak with fries. I'd ordered mine medium rare. My girlfriend asked for hers well done. There was absolutely no perceptible difference between the two. It's hard to argue with a waiter over the quality of a free steak, though. It's not like I didn't eat the entire thing and most of my girlfriends, especially all that charred fat and gristle I love so much.

Then, deserts; this shouldn't take too much longer than appetizers did...

Let's see, stuff you're likely to recognize by name: a slice of chocolate cake shaped like an Eagles football helmet, rice pudding, slices of pineapple and flan.

The cake was a swirl of chocolate and white cake. I don't know if the white bit qualified as vanilla per se, so I won't make any such audacious assumptions. It was cake. You've had it before and my description here probably won't be worth reading.

The rice pudding was also very simply good, no big tricks like raisins or shavings of chocolate truffle, just a dusting of cinnamon over the top. The consistency was perfect, though. The rice wasn't too hard and obtrusive, the pudding itself was very sturdy and creamy. It was a nice transitional desert course.

The flan I didn't finish. Flan is one of those things, like horchata, macaroni and cheese or meatloaf, where the vast majority of it commercially available is mediocre at best if not an insult to the homemade versions so near and dear to true fans of the stuff. This flan was crap. As my girlfriend repeated several times, her aunt's flan is so much better. The flan itself tasted empty and the caramel sauce was noxiously cloying where it wasn't bitingly chemical. Blech.

As far as things you probably don't recognize the name of unless you are or are dating someone who is Portuguese there was serradura and pasteis de nata, both fantastic.

Serradura is somewhere between meringue and custard, with crumbled Maria cookies over the top. It manages to be creamy as well as fluffy and hits all the sweet and rich desert buttons you have.

Pasteis de nata are also very rich. To call them a heavy desert can be taken fairly literally. For their size these 3" custard cups do weigh your hand down. You could probably throw one across a football field and still hit someone rather solidly in the head. The crust is a dense layering of flaky pastry dough filled with a very rich egg custard. I am a big fan of the variety where the custard is tinged with lemon, though there are also your standard plain custard versions available. These were the lemon, and sadly there just was not room for two of them inside of me. I managed to hold myself to one and let that tangy custard hang on my palate as I sat trying to
soak up Portuguese phonetics and smile and nod when everyone else was smiling and nodding.

I should also mention that through the course of dinner ran a pleasant stream of a white wine with a pleasant subtle sparkling edge. Describing this wine would be a lot easier if you knew what "vinho verde" was. Literally, the name means "green wine," but they are most usually actually white in color. The "green" part refers instead to the exuberant, youthful character of the wine and its short life in the bottle. They are not a "sparkling wine" as defined by the International Cartel of Wine Fascists, but they do have enough disolved CO2 to have a noticeable fizz or, as the VFCI calls it, pétillance. They are a regional wine, coming from the Minho region of northern Portugal. They are intended to be enjoyed within a year of bottling. There, that's more than you will likely ever need to know about vinho verde and you probably still can't pronounce it properly. ("veenu vairday," but with faster vowels, not like you're from Georgia)

This was not a true vinho verde, as it was produced in a more southerly region of Portugal, but it was still a nice dinner wine. It was maybe a little too sweet to be carried through all courses of a meal, but I made do. Red wine would have left me with an even worse hangover than the one I woke up to today. This wine was very light on alcohol and as such it was very easy to find and maintain that sweet spot of muscle relaxation that allows the stomach to comfortably distend that extra inch without stirring up any real retaliation from my body's chemical defense systems.

It was a very welcome compliment to the meal and language barrier, and since everyone else was drinking mostly the red, I drank more than 2/3rds of the bottle.

This entry took me over two weeks to nail down. It's gigantic and way longer than your average internet attention span. I apologize. I'll try to make the Old Country Buffet entry a little easier to digest. BAHAHAHAHAha-a. Yeah, nm. sorry.

Long Overdue: Everything I Ate Since Last Thursday, pt.1, Friday

2008-05-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

I am staring down the barrel of this entry and the longer I put it off, the more it's going to suck, so here goes my afternoon. Since my last post, almost a week ago, I have eaten about 2.3 weeks worth of food. I'll try not to bury you in the weight of it all, but you may want to get a fresh beer and open a new SlimJim for this one.

Well, we go way back to Friday, April 25, 2008. Sadly, I have no notes, but it was a pretty memorable food day, so I think this should be fairly accurate, plus or minus a tortilla chip or two.

Breakfast was one of my favorite things in the world, leftover Indian food and eggs. I love making omelets with chana masala and munster or a pub cheese. This morning it was chana masala and keema kurma with scrambled eggs and munster cheese as a burrito. I ended up making way too much stuff for the insides and had to make 4 burritos to fit it all. I ate two of them myself and gave one away to an office mate. The other lady in my office wasn't feeling so adventurous, though, so it ended up getting thrown away. Most days I would have just eaten it or saved it in the fridge, but today was a day apart.

It was my last day on that assignment, and happened to coincide with the annual departmental staff luncheon. We were all going to a paid lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant that afternoon and I wanted to keep space open for some fancier coal in the chemical furnace that fuels my life.

Speaking of fuel, I do believe I accelerated the burn a bit with an additive known as "Green Mountain Coffee's Sumatran." I couldn't point at Sumatra on a map, but man, do I love the coffee that comes out of that place. I guess that qualifies me for a probationary Typical Yuppie Scum membership card. I've got to head this off at the pass. I'll donate to NPR, support local farming and what's that? It's only getting worse. Well then I guess I'll just have to give in a buy that French press, burr grinder and Ethically Sound Business Practice Coffees of the World of the Month Club membership. (now available on weekly and bi-weekly plans)

Then there was Italian food with a pleasant side of drinking with your boss. It was all a little bittersweet, since I really enjoyed working here. The bosses in question were great to work for and the other people who worked in the office were also a lot of fun. It was a nice send off, although they would have been doing it disirregardless of my ever having worked there.

Apetizers galore came pouring out first. I ate enough calamari to fill a pair of crew socks. That is a lot of calamari when you think about it. Calamari is one of those special foods that defies politeness and dainty portions ettiquette. You have to bite while the squidflesh is hot or it turns into this sad rubbery mass of self-loathing, resenting it's former glory as its proteins continue to bind and the fat coagulates until there is nothing but jaw-thwarting piteous disappointment. To prevent this sad fate, Calamari must be eaten while still succulent and tender in that halcyon moment between too hot to taste and too cold to chew.

There were also battered, deep-fried wedges of mozarella on a bed of battered and deep-fried vegetables. I can't be sure what all was battered and deep fried, but I believe zuchini, carrots and parsnips were the chief culprits. The batter was a delightful light texture while also being incredibly bold with garlic and herbs I couldn't quite pinpoint. It provided an amazing counterpoint to the moz and veggies that just broke my heart. If there were enough of that to fill three pair of crew socks I would have eagerly devoured it all, defying the probable heart attack to take me swiftly in my grease-addled euphoria.

Of lesser note was an antipasta plate that was still very good. The center-piece was a bowl made from fried parmesian full of cubes of parmesean. There was an assortment of meats around the edges, two different cuts of prosciuto, capicola ham, beef carpaccio and salami. The olives were not so good, but the meats provided some nice options to play with the bread and ubiquitous plate of mozarella, tomato and basil.

My entre was the saddest part of the whole affair. I ordered veal medalions topped with prosciuto and parmesean on a bed of spinach with a wine reduction sauce. The veal was only passing fair and the greens were terrible. I was so full after the appetizers, I could hardly bring myself to wrestle with finishing the veal and left all of the spinach on my plate. That was a sad end to a great meal, and the last thing I ate till well after midnight.

In the interim were a few glasses of wine during lunch at the Italian place, and then many, many beers. I had a nice pint of Bass around 6pm. Then, later in the evening I had quite a bit of Budwiser because we were playing beer pong at a bar and that was the cheapest beer they had. After beer pong came a trip to PAPAYA DOG! (emphasis added by author, Ed.)

If you have never lived in NYC, you may very well have no idea what I'm talking about. They are chain restaurants that specialize in hot dogs. The standard hotdog is cooked for a good long time on a metal griddle. They have a great crispy texture to the outsides similar to Rutt's Hut's deep-fried hotdogs. Papaya dogs can also be pretty cheap which is why they are so special. I had a chili-cheese dog with mustard and onions and a corn dog with mustard. Both felt exceptionally amazing sloshing around in all of the cheap beer I'd "won" at the pong table. I finished the night off on what should have been a nice pint at O'Hanalan's Irish Pub with their house ale, the dark, but it was so malty and heavy and I was already so full of cheap beer and swill that it took me the better part of 45 minutes just to get through the one pint. It is quite possible that it's just not a good beer, but I'm withholding judgement until I can give it a more fair tasting.

Whew. Ok. Friday down. Satursunmontueswedthursfriday to go...

What's going on?

2008-04-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

I didn't mean to black out on you guys, but the job that provided me with all my much-appreciated writing time has ended. This has thrown my writing life into a bit of a shambles, but rest assured, the days that have passed will be covered. They happen to be quite full of food which makes making up for not having written them all the harder. Soon enough you will know what I have been eating since last Thursday.

Addendum to Thursday

2008-04-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

A brief description of the Indian food I weaseled out of explaining:
My roommate and I decided that stuffing ourselves with swill, drinking beer and ganking some n00bs on Halo3 would be a great way to celebrate my Japan check finally coming in. To this end, we collectively ordered a great deal food from our favorite, more-or-less local, Indian delivery joint.

Up first were a few samosas. We get the vegetarian samosas because it makes the vegetarian roommate happy and because they're just plain better than the chicken ones. The delivery joint was nice enough to give us two cups of each of the chutneys, so there was no need to be shy while slathering the deep-fried dumplings with spicy green cilantro goodness or heaping up the very odorous and spicy onions in the mysterious red sauce.

For those of you not familiar with Indian food, I am deeply sorry. I would recommend doing an internet search for the closest Indian restaurant and then going there right away. Ideally you will find a buffet and be free to explore things you will not know the name of nor be able to explain their deliciousness to your other sheltered friends. If you cannot find a buffet, order vegetable pakora, vegetable samosas, several naan, chana masala, saag paneer, lamb vindaloo, chicken korma, some basmati rice and a lassi to drink plus gulab jamon for desert. You may want to take the forementioned sheltered friends because that is enough food for 5 or 6 people. Go on, git. It's ok, I'll wait.

During your recent epic dinner experience, you probably noticed the three sauces they brought to your table. There was a brown one, a red one and a green one. The brown one that tastes like rasins is tamarind chutney. This used to be my favorite condoment in the world for about 4 months in college. I am now over it, but occaisional use on naan or pakora is still very rewarding. The red one is very obviously onion chutney. It is sometimes the spiciest of the three, although the green cilantro chutney can be very spicy, and sometimes there is a white coconut chutney that can be deceptively spicy to our Western sensibilites where white things are usually bland like white bread, milk and Al Gore.

As for our actual order, we had: vegetable pakora, a mix of vegetables battered and fried in oddly-shaped lumps, perfect for chutney abuse; naan, a soft, fluffy yogurt-based bread that is traditionally used like an eddible shovel while consuming curries; chapathi, another indian bread similar to naan but unleavened so it makes for a denser yet more pliable shovel; papadam, sort of like a giant tortilla chip made from chick pea flour; poori, yet another Indian bread, this one deep-fried (Imagine a chalupa shell inflated like a balloon into this eddible football/frisbee hybrid sport food. I apologize if your imagination just broke.); chana masala, chickpeas with onion, tomato and a lot of cumin; keema kurma, ground lamb in a creamy almond sauce; chicken vindaloo, a very spicy curry with an amazingly convoluted cultural history that you can learn about here; and some chick pea soup that comes complimentary every time we order from this restaurant which happens to be quite good but which I don't know the name of because I never actually order it.

I don't know if that counts as a run-on sentence, per se, but I'm gonna leave it there. It was a great dinner.

Thursday in the great outdoors

2008-04-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

I didn't eat breakfast this morning due to prolonged exposure to snuggles, so my coffee, Flavia espresso roast with the French vanilla creamers, hit an empty stomach. As a reslult, by the time lunch rolled around I felt VERY HUNGRY.

That just made finally eating those tuna wraps from Tuesday that much better. Having lunch in the park also put a nice sparkle on what would otherwise have been pretty average lunch fare. Not too bad considering they sat in the fridge for two days. I also had half a bag of potato chips before I got bored of them and stuffed them back in my bag.

The real highlight of lunch was desert. I decided to splurge after lunch and hit up one of the Central Park ice cream carts. I had a strawberry crunch bar and my partner in park lunch had a mango fruit bar. The strawberry crunch bar gave me some serious flashbacks to middle school, the last time I ate strawberry crunch bars on a regular basis.

Dinner came in stages, or more like waves. First, there was the lonely scallop trying to get along with two shrimp in a sad little plastic bag in my fridge. I didn't want them to sit there any longer, so together with some leftover refried beans, they combined powers to form a seafood burrito.

Then i ate a lot of Indian food. the end.

The Wednesday after

2008-04-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

I've been so productive writing that I've felt kind of lazy in the mornings, hence another Jeno's frozen pizza for breakfast. Today's selection was sausage.

The one problem with Jeno's pizzas is that 1 in 10 of the ones I get from my local grocer don't have much cheese at all. My usual fix for this is shaking a liberal amount of parmesean cheese onto the top. You should be careful to leave space at the edges, though, because the parmesean has a high spread factor when it melts.

Wednesday was Administrative Assistant Appreciation Day or something like that. It used to be Secretary's Day, but we don't use that word any more because it's too kinky. It's much harder to fantasize about an "administrative assistant," unless, of course, you have a fetish for asonance or words with lots of sylables.

My workplace being such a delightful place, the faculty all donated towards a special brunch for the admin asst dept. I'm going to do my best at remembering all of the stuff I ate, but I really just gorged on what may well be my last cookie parade for a while. Sadly this assignment ends on Friday and I doubt any other assignment will provide me with such a bountiful supply of cookies.

There was a really good rye bread. I cut a thick slice, spread on some spicy brown mustard and layered some great pastrami on top. It was the sort of great you get with a simple confluence of quality ingredients.

I passed on the bagels and lox because I'd just listened to an NPR report about global fishing practices and environmental and food safety experts pretty much decry farmed salmon as one of the most terrible fish a human could consume. Since there wasn't much chance of it being free-range Alaskan, I thought it best just to pass.

I ate 3 of these delightful mini cinamon rolls with cream cheese on one of them, about 7 ginger snaps, a "black and white" cookie (a soft sugar cookie with black chocolate icing and white orange icing), some butter cookie, an amoretti and a bagel with a slice of summer sausage. I feel like there were more cookies and pastries involved, but I don't remember the details. The whole thing was in the faculty lounge, too, so I had a Green Mountain Sumatran roast for my morning coffee.

It was enough food that I didn't eat lunch, although I did take the bag of ginger snaps with me and snack on them the rest of the day.

Dinner was another bit of simplistic glory: BST sandwiches, bacon, spinach and tomato. On wheat toast I spread a little Miracle whip, layed out a nice bed of baby spinach, some sliced vine-ripened tomatoes, bacon and cheese. The girlfriend opted for munster. I tried the longhorn cheddar because it had more bite up front and would stand out more against the bacon. I'm sure the munster with it's creamy tones and late bite finish was just as good.

Never one to let bacon be the only thing I fry in my bacon fat, I cut a potato as thin as I could manage and made some bistro fries, or whatever less pretentious name you might want to call them. I seasoned these with a little salt and pepper.

The whole thing danced very nicely around a bottle of Yeungling lager. The donut I had for desert didn't go so well with the beer, though. It was a bad donut to begin with, $1.69 for an 8-pack of glazed donuts was a risky wager from the start, but I think there's a good reason why most people have their donuts with coffee or tea, and not beer.

Don't try this at home kids.

A Tuesday without cookies

2008-04-23T09:12:00.001-07:00

Sad though it may be, there was no cookie parade this Tuesday. It seems as though the whole world is in disarray. I haven't been particularly hungry and my circadian rhythms are still messed up. This, to me, is apparently my whole world.

I woke up this morning a little before 6AM and I wasn't sleepy at all. There wasn't even any point to laying in bed and trying to go back to sleep. I wanted to get up and be productive. It was a disturbing feeling. I shot right to the kitchen to throw a Jeno's combination

Breakfast was a combination Jeno's pizza and a pair of Nutty Bars. I opted for easy breakfast to take some time on lunch. I made a nice tuna salad with carrots, celery, miracle whip and ground horseradish. Even if you're not a fan of the heavy horseradish burn, just a dash in anything you use canned tuna in brightens up the dish and mitigates the "fish from a can" funk. I made three tuna wraps with the tuna salad, munster cheese and the dregs of the TJ Spring Salad Mix.

I didn't eat them, though. In fact, they're still in the fridge in this office. Sometime after coffee (Green Mountain's Sumatran) one of the other administrative assistants came down with a bagged lunch from some event upstairs. It was, funily enough, a tuna sandwich, partnered with an apple and a bag of potato chips. I had half of the sandwich, but it was the high-grade light tuna that still kind of looks like fish and is really dry. I'm more of a "chunk light in water" kind of guy. I used a whole packet of Helman's mayo on just half of the sandwich and added the other half to my growing tuna collection in the fridge.

The apple was also a bit of an odd coincidence since I'd just been chastised over the weekend by a concerned reader about the lack of fruit in my diet outside of the berries that mix into the cookie parade. He said, "Apples bla bla good for you bla bla dietary fiber by volume bla bla bla," or something. I can tell you the bean burritos really provided all the fiber my colon needed, but I thought it would be wasteful not to eat the apple. Mottai nai yo! It was a golden delicious and I actually really enjoyed it. Never once did I think of dipping it in caramel or sauteing it in butter and cinnamon. It was very filling too so I suppose my friend was right with the "bla bla fiber bla" bit.

Besides all the water I have to drink because of riding my bike in this glorious weather. There wasn't too much else to the day. When I got home, I wasn't very hungry. It must have been a magic apple. Yep, probably a magic apple.

Sometime around 9PM I figured I should eat just in case I was hungry, so I had a bowl of spicy ramen that was actually labeled "udong noodle soup" in the "English" on the package. I suppose the noodles were a little thicker than your standard ramen, but they definitely weren't udon noodles. They were from China, though, and my understanding of kanji in Chinese usage is not so hot that I know what they were actually intended to be if not "ramen."

They were a nice step above Maruchan. They had the packet of dried sea weed, corn starch puffs and pepper flakes that most U.S. distributers don't bother to add. The packet was labeled "frying soup base" for some reason that I couldn't discern. It was nice and spicy and went very well with issues 4-10 of All-Star Superman and a Yeungling. It's nice to see Grant growing up a bit

Monday goes back to the grind.

2008-04-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

Let's see, where to start? Usually it's breakfast. Today it takes a little bit of lawyering and etymology to really see what's going on here.

I had a slice of banana bread with margarine as "before-bike-snack." Now, technically I have here "broken my fast" of some 8+ hours, but I haven't had any substantial kind of nourishment yet, and would eat a more substantial "breakfast" in about 30 minutes, so was this my breakfast? I think that this maybe falls into the hobbit hierarchy of meals somewhere, but I'm not so well versed in the difference between first and second breakfast. Perhaps my readership can enlighten me as to the subtleties involved.

After riding to work I had a banana waffle sandwich with peanut butter, margarine and syrup. I made sure to really put the waffles through the figurative wringer. Here the figurative wringer is a litteral toaster, but "through the toaster" is not such a compelling idiom. I wrung the waffles through my toaster twice at a high setting and the pale side actually started to brown a little.

One good thing about this resiliency to burning is that you never really get that desicated, empty feeling that you might get with other frozen waffles when you toast them so much that even the membrane between the ridges begins to brown. Some people might like their waffles like this. Some people also like flacid bacon. You will not find me anywhere near that venn diagram.

Then I had my coffee, of course. It was the Flavia French roast with two French vanilla Coffeemate creamers, nothing special, nothing terrible I haven't already bemoaned in previous entries.

Lunch was a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. I couldn't resist the temptation of just throwing it in my bag and not take the time to make myself lunch before leaving for work in the morning. I did bother to spread margarine on two pieces of wheat bread. If you were unaware, this is the official side item of Chef Boyardee's asssorted fare. Failure to comply with these regulations may warrant UN sanctions depending on the degree and necessity of deviance.

Over the course of the afternoon I started eating a tootsie pop. This was due largely to the fact that I was given a tootsie pop by one of the professors here. I'm not a big fan of candy, and tootsie pops are pretty near the bottom of my "comprehensive ranking of world candy according to my own personal preference." I didn't want to be impolite, though, so I took it and thanked him for it. Later, because I had it, I decided to give tootsie pops another shot. It was red raspberry and the candy itself was pretty good. By the end of work I hadn't even gotten to the point where the candy shell wears thin and you can start to taste the chocolate fudgewax inside. I thought it might prove dangerous to ride my bike and eat a lollipop at the same time, and I had pushed my sugar tollerance well beyond it's usual bounds, so I wrapped it back up and set it neatly on my desk in case I wanted it later, which I still don't.

When I got home I had a celery stick with peanut butter for first dinner, and then bean burritos for second dinner with crispy tortilla and salsa as a transitional course.

I have a bit of an addiction to Taco Bell bean burritos. When finances allow, I often have them add sour cream, nacho cheese and/or guacamole. There is something so appealing about all of that goey satisfaction barely reined in by a tortilla that is quickly becoming less sturdy as it soaks up goo from the inside. It's quite possibly one of the most perfect swill delivery systems known to man. If only they still had the chilitos and I could add a squirt of that chilimeat paste, a slice of bacon, and maybe a squirt of the baja sauce to the mix...

But Taco Bell won't cater to my dreams like I would like, and so I must take matters into my own hands. Buying a can of Taco Bell brand refried beans costs about the same than a bean burrito, and usually ends up making about 5-6 burritos for me. The one thing I cannot buy nor find or make a comparable substitute for is their red sauce. I can make lots of other sauces that might test better to most audiences, but it's just not quite the same. I can buy crapy yellow cheese. I can get all kinds of onions. I just cannot get their red sauce.

I compensate by making the beans themselves more interesting. Yesterday I started with a Tbsp. each of olive oil and butter in a frying pan on low heat. Then I added about 3 cloves of garlic and let it cook until it started to soften. Then I added diced onion(1/2 a small one), green pepper (1/3 a big one), red pepper(1/3 a medium one) and jalapeno (1/2 a pretty average one). I let the juices release a little bit into the oil, then I added the can of refried beans, a dash of bourbon and a few Tbsp of water.

The water just helps you actually stir the refried beans, but you don't want to over-do it or you'll lose some of the complexity of the vegetables when you have to cook down the water before it's a good thickness for serving. It doesn't take much bourbon, maybe a teaspoon. Sometimes I use tequila. It just adds a nice warm edge to the beans. If I had a kitschy restaurant, these would probably be called "Borracho Bean Burritos," although they don't really have enough booze to get you drunk. I had three burritos and a Yeungling and put the rest of the beans away in a filing cabinet, I mean my refridgerator.

The burritos were topped off with a little of the TJ's Spring greens mix, which just had to be used up ASAP before it all turned to swamp slime, some diced tomatoes, a dash or three of McIlhenny's chipotle tabasco sauce and a mix of munster and longhorn cheeses. Letting the garlic and the jalapenos cook in the oil before adding the beans really lets their flavors permeate the whole thing with a very sturdy broad palate to which the onions and peppers lend a bright sweetness. If only I'd had some sour cream on hand, they would have been just about perfect, save for the guacamole, bacon, nacho cheese and chilito measte (meat+paste, Ed.) , of course.

Later, for desert I had a Little Debbie's Nutty Bar. Actually, I had two bars, since they come in a twin pack, and who eats just one of those things anyway? They're so light and crispy, there's really not much to them anyway. More than adding calories to my evening, what they did accomplish is instilling in me a desire to drink a tall, cold glass of milk.

For as much as I cook with (and occaisionally chug) heavy cream, I almost never drink milk. I used to have problems with dairy products. I couldn't live without cheese, but cheeses never bothered me the way straight milk does. Even when I don't get stomach cramps, my body just makes so much mucus that the metabolic aftermath is a sufficient deterent to dunking cookies or eating much cold cereal for breakfast. This thirst for milk has not abated yet though, and it appears as if more drastic action is necessary.

Maybe I'm turning into a were-cow. I do enjoy salads a lot more than I used to...

Sunday was all over the place.

2008-04-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

For starters there was a B-Relaxed Vitamin water on the train ride down to Jersey. Then when I finally got there I had a padinha with some butter and a handful of these coconut and cocoa cookies that my girlfriend's mother had made. They were a little overwhelmingly sweet but otherwise really good. Japan has just pushed my chocolate preferences way towards the bitter end of the spectrum. Eating milk chocolate for me is how I imagine an 18th century farm hand might feel if you gave him a glass of skim milk. Ah, imagining...

Breakfast was just a quick snack, really. We had bigger plans for the day. There is a park near my girlfriend's house that has cherry trees along a winding river bank so we set out for a nice hanami picnic.

"Hanami" litterally means "seeing flowers" in Japanese and is a very popular excuse for early barbecues and getting drunk in large groups of your co-workers in public spaces. As the cherry blossom trees start to bloom, everyone starts talking incessantly about hanami plans and the plane fares skyrocket. It is an amazing time of year, though, and visiting Himeji Castle during "sakura" (cherry blossom) season is still one of my most vivid memories of Japan.

This year, the girlfriend and I set out to pay tribute to the Japanese style of celbrating western holidays while observing this Japanese tradition in New Jersey. We bought a box of thighs and biscuits with some mashed potatoes and gravy on the side from Popeye's and had ourselves a fried chicken picnic under the cherry blossoms.

In Japan, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, thanks to some kink in the cultural appropriation system, there is a huge spike in the consumption of fried chicken. KFC's take orders weeks before hand and some locations may not be open for anything but picking up pre-orders. Convenience stores open tables in front of their stores selling fried chicken to lines of customers so that bewildered foreigners can still find their way back to the beer cooler and instant ramen aisle without being walled in by the throngs of people eager to buy fried chicken.

I believe this is due in part to turkey being very expensive and not very popular in Japan. Most Japanese people I discussed the issue with had never had turkey before. I imagine this is due to a confluence of the difficulties of importing meat and the relative lack of iconic hype that turkey has in comparison to fried chicken. Fried chicken has an infamy in the Japanese image of American cuisine rivaled only by the mighty cheeseburger.

So, in the absence of a bento box and affordable sake worth drinking, we remisappropriated (Ed. sorry, I try but...) fried chicken as the official food of celebrating Japanese holidays in America. It was great, and made all the more awesome by my girlfriend's habit of peeling the thick layer of skin off the chicken thighs. I took these discarded sheets of awesome, loaded them with mashed potatoes and made these sort of comfort food cannolis. For those of you worried about my cardiovascular health, I also put in over 60 miles on my bike this weekend, so a little gorging on gratuitous amounts of fried chicken skin isn't going to be too detrimental to the big picture, I hope.

After all that awesome, I really wasn't in a mood to cook much of a dinner when I got home, but I did really want to try the dim sum items I'd gotten in Chinatown this week, so I busted out the wicker dim sum steamer cage and steamed a pork bun, a leek bun and some pork and black mushroom gyoza. The pork bun was the Chinese split-top variety stuffed with the sweet barbecue pork. These are a favorite of mine and for frozen pork buns that come in a six-pack for $1.50 they were surprisingly passable.

The leek buns were much better, though. There was a much broader complexity to the flavors at work and they were actually a lot juicier and more succulent than the pork buns. My roommate and I both ate them with liberal amounts of this Chinese chili oil I found that has peanuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, cashews and walnuts soaking in the oil along with the dried chili flakes. It's not very spicy but has a lot of flavors going on that lend complexity to the oil itself while also providing for lots of different pockets of flavor as different chunks of nut pass over your pallet. If you don't find "chunks of nut" to be an appealing description of food stuffs, this is not an appropriate condiment for you.

Later in the evening I had a slice of left-over pizza which I reheated in the oven as I preheated the oven for banana bread. I followed the following recipe using 4 bananas: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001465banana_bread.php The banana bread came out very soft, almost too soft as I couldn't really cut it into slices. It could have used a little more salt, to my tastes, as well, but would have worked wonderfully as muffins instead of bread, since the texture lent so well to tearing and not slicing. I had a nice thick slice of the banana bread while it was still warm slathered in margarine as a bed time snack.

And not to back track after that nice Norman Rockwell moment, but I thought I should take a minute to illustrate how my food preparation compulsion plays out with the fairly inoccuous act of eating leftover pizza. Most people, I am led to believe, will simply take the cold pizza and begin eating it while it still holds the chill of the fridge, if they bothered to refridgerate it at all. Many people even claim to enjoy that cold, coagulated cheese and grease texture as a nice breakfast treat. I am not one of these people. While I understand expedience and can eat pizza cold when forced, I don't see how you could honestly prefer it to it's reheated form.

I took the pizza and threw it on a sheet of foil, then sprinkled dried oregano, red pepper, dill and Adobo seasoning on it before allowing it to reheat in the oven as it pre-heated to 350F. My banana bread didn't taste like pizza and my pizza didn't taste like cold butt. Everybody wins. No, it's not just the temperature, it's really more texture. If I had to microwave it, I would have just eaten something else.

And yeah, if it's a plain cheese pie, it's definitely going to get doctored up. At least I'm past my "corriander and tumeric on everything" phase and my "truffle oil and allspice on everything" phase. You should also consider yourself lucky if I never made you food during my "thai fish sauce and/or amaretto extract on everything" phase. I have no idea what I was thinking. Sometimes that stuff pans out, though, like vanilla and sage or honey and cilantro. So parents, when your son mixes every spice in the cabinet with vinegar and water, then freezes it for a week, then tries to convince you to eat it and give him feedback, be supportive. He's not autistic, just ambitious.

the bones of friday

2008-04-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

Usually, before I write these things, I make an outline of the food I ate for the day. This is the outline I made for this post, and then half forgot, half neglected to flesh out at all. It's already Tuesday and my window for reasonable excuses has expired, so I'm just going to post it as-is for your edification. In my defense, it didn't really eat that much, and nothing of note that doesn't cast just as effective a shadow of mystery in its current blank verse form.

din't eat breakfast.
gasp.
had coffee, felt funny
had a salty nut bar
japanese curry left overs for lunch
lots of water
pineapple lifesaver with an odd mint tang
bowl of rice with spicy chinese nut sauce
empanadas, beef, 2
tortilla chips
vimin water 1, Focus

Did I eat on Saturday?

2008-04-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

Well, only sort of.
This weekend I got all of my nerd-rocks off in a furious bout of geekery I've not seen the likes of since my days of all-night AD&D sessions after band bonfire parties. Ah, high school, what wanton thomasfoolery I did partake in when I was a wee nipper.

This Saturday in particular, if we start at midnight, we will find me sitting in a boxing gym, sipping on an Energy VitaminWater, filling out my registration sheet for a Magic: The Gathering pre-release tournament. Yes, I was up until 5AM for the chance to play other cardnerds with a new set of cards that wouldn't be officially released for another week. While I thought the midnight tournament would draw out the real ubergeeks and I would have to suffer through hours of "humor" based on minutae of dorklore that I wasn't sophisticated enough to appreciate, I actually found myself mostly interacting with more of the bad boy, rock star, James Dean Osheroff types.(James Dean + Douglas Dean Osheroff=terrible joke, Ed.)

And then after all of that amazery, I caught a scant 3 hours of sleep before my biorhythms jolted me awake at 8:30 as my hypothalmus freaked out that I would be late for the work I didn't have to go to because it was SATURDAY. Stupid hypothalmus, Saturday doesn't need circadian rhythms.

Then I remembered that I DID have to go to work, kind of, because I was helping my friend host the performance stage at the New York Comicon all day. Ok, you get a freebie this weekend, hypothalamus, but I better get to sleep in next Saturday.

My rude awakening coincided with my roommate and his visiting brother crawling out of their hangover coccoons in search of greasy starchy things to soak up the poisons and fuel their early morning recovery efforts, so we trundled off to that obnoxious fast food restaurant with the clown mascott that was much better in Japan. I had a McSkillet burrito, which, as my roommate's brother quite rightly observed, never touched a skillet at all. I also put down a hashbrown, only redeeming food item on the breakfast menu since Americans don't seem to like fish sandwiches for breakfast, and their reconstituted orange juice.

If you've never had a fish sandwich for breakfast, it is actually amazing. While in Japan I was eating a lot of McGriddles just to get my fix of American breakfast sausage. It is nigh on impossible to get any kind of sausage in Japan that isn't actually a deceptively marketed hot dog.

Then, as I waded through Jedi and Bleach characters, I downed a Focus VitaminWater in the morning and had a Red Bull as I started to fade in the afternoon. I also had some celery sticks with peanut butter for lunch and scored a free mini Butterfinger at one of the artists booths. It wasn't much food, but I didn't feel very hungry. By 5PM I'd pretty much had it with people in general, though and I had to get out of the convention center or risk getting surly with the next high schooler in a black kimono that poked me with his model Zangetsu while oggling some equally as adolescent 30+year old in a Princess Leia costume of questionable anatomical suitability.

When I finally got home and showered I wanted to go straight to sleep, but sleep did not come. I guess 7PM was not a suitable bedtime for my power-tripping hypothalmus, so I turned to chemical inducements. I had a big starchy bowl of beef ramen with some tofu, green onions, green peppers, an egg and some bar-b-que Frito's Twists in it along with a Yuengling and then a Magic Hat #9.

It had been quite a while since I'd had a decent beer out of a cold bottle and it was a great feeling. I almost couldn't finish the #9 because the chemical inducement was proving very effective. I slept 12 hours Saturday into Sunday. That was also a great feeling.

Thursday always doubles down on the cookie parade

2008-04-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

This was my first encounter with the Trader Joe's frozen banana waffles. I noticed with mild apprehension as I pulled the box out of the fridge that this was a gluten free product. I was rightfully suspicious of the texture, which, while not entirely offensive, was not exactly what you expect from a waffle, anyway.

You expect waffles to be light and spongy on the inside. This was more like a plantain fritter that happened to have been grilled in a waffle maker because Aunt Inez needs a new prescription. The flavor was also only mildly banana-like. If you had not told me they were banana waffles, I might have eaten a whole one before I noticed the hint of banana flavor.

They also took quite a bit of toasting, and even after two dips on the higher end of the light/dark knob, one side of each waffle resisted browning regardless of my attempts at flipping and slot-switching. C'mon, TJ, fix yo' waffles, man. Shits is supposed to brown on BOTH sides, homey.

...

So I ate one waffle with just margarine and a little syrup to really engage the texture and nuances of this new food experience. That's when I first got the plantain punch. I toasted the other two until (one side) was quite brown and that seemed to mitigate some of the smooshy, starchy feeling.

The other two waffles I toasted I made into a sandwich with margarine, peanut butter and syrup. I put margarine on both, then spread peanut butter on one, poured a little syrup on the other, then made the peanut butter and the syrup make out like teenaged trailer trash at a summer concert festival. That means "pressed up against each other as much as planar geometry will allow" for those of you not fortunate enough to have been there.

The morning's coffee was Flavia's French roast with a French vanilla creamer. I drank it. It provided caffeination. Otherwise I couldn't really explain any of the nuances or subtleties that you might expect from classy food journalism such as this. I just don't know that the effort is worth it. Flavia coffees are similar to Japanese beer. Differentiation is damn near impossible except in the case of marked poor quality.

If you will permit me a flashback in the interest of illustration, I am reminded of a particularly balmy evening in Kyoto last summer. My friend and I were facing our pending return to America, land of the microbrewbow (like a rainbow, but with lots of... yeah, ok, fine.) and so had decided to trully put the Japanese beer available to us to a taste test before such experiential data were not so easily available to us.

We bought a can of each of the beers available to us at the top price tier available in FamilyMart as well as one can of hoposhu.

"What is hoposhu?" you might ask. Well, Japan doesn't really have a lot of hops farms, and importing the stuff gets kind of expensive so they've created this malt beverage that is kind of like beer, but instead of using actual hops they add chemicals in an attempt to capture that bitter, floral magic that makes beer something more than wet cheerios gone bad. As opposed to adding a digital clock to my shower cap, in this case Japanese ingenuity has not made the world a better place. They have created the most effective way to cause a hangover that I have ever experienced, though. The throbbing starts before I can even finish a can. The pain sets in faster than I can derail a linear narrative.

So we take all these cans of beer and some plasic cups back to his apartment and label them with numbers and make his girlfriend pour moderate amounts of each beer into two cups for each of us (4 cups per beer), take note of which beer was in which numbered cup and then randomize the arrangement of cups while we sat in the other room and listened to aliatoric compositions peppered with fantastical narrative. She's quite possibly the best girlfriend he's ever had.

Blindfolded, we'd taste a little of each beer and try to match the cups into pairs based on the beers that tasted the same. The blindfold wasn't trully necessary, the color variation was not significant, but we wanted to be as fair to the taste of each beer as possible. Through repeated itterations as the beer warmed, the only consistent pairing was the hoposhu.

Arguably, you could get similar results from Coors Light, Miller Light, Bud Light, and Natty Light. I haven't tried this yet so some more testing is in order. What is true about American beer that is not true in Japan is that options are readilly available. The import beer market in Japan is improving, but it's not cheap and the relatively low import volume agrivates the stresses on the beer from shipping and long storage on shelves awaiting savvy locals and desperate expats.

Enough about beer on a day when I didn't drink at all.

I had another lunch date with Tie-Fighter in Central Park. absolutely glorious. I got lamb kofta on a pita from a halal cart on 62nd and Broadway. It was pretty good, though not as good as the lamb shishkababs from the cart on 62nd and Madison. Comparing those succulent chunks of grilled lamb to kofta is a bit like comparing filet mignon to hot dogs. Even with great hot dogs, I'd rather take the steak for the same price, which they are. $4 for both sandwiches, but I didn't have time to ride all the way to Madison through the park and then down to our meeting place. C'est la vie. I hadn't had halal cart for over a month and the kofta pita is an old friend who is always welcome.

Upon returning from my delightful park time, I was invited up to the 4th floor to get rid of the usual overage from the weekly faculty luncheon. I wasn't too interested in the real food, though I had a pita chip with some hummus just because there was actually a little hummus left today. More prominently in my diet was a cup of tea and a cookie parade.

The parade had a lot of my standard favorites, but there were some new players I hadn't seen before. In blatant indifference to the nutrition involved, I consumed: some kind of rolled pastry filled with a nut and brown sugar streudel, a nut tart with cashews, macadamia nuts and other nuts I didn't bother to identify before I devoured it, 1.7 sq. in. of an apricot variation to the regular fruit bar, one of the blondie/brownie cheesecake hybrids, a chocolate biscotti with the mystery nuts, a chocolate covered biscotti, a chocolate covered walnut brownie, and 3 pieces of pineapple.

Then for dinner I made Japanese curry and rice with the girlfriend. I screwed up the recipe a bit, though because although I did read the ingredients and realize that there was no meat or vegetables in the curry sauce, I did not read the recipe or even open the box before boiling some carrots, potatoes, onions, bacon and tofu to go into the curry sauce. I expected it to be prepared curry sauce in one of the pouches that you just reheat. I was going to pour it over the veggies and, voilla, done.

The curry packs were, in fact, dried cakes of curry base. I realized this just after I'd discarded the water I'd used to cook all my veggies (and a lil bacon) so I lost all that wonderful flavor and nutritional value and had to reconstitute the sauce with just plain water before putting the vegetablacon back in the pot. This took a long time and although the end result was pretty good, our food joy was tempered by the long wait. Let that be a lesson for you kiddies: eat more oatmeal. Fiber is very important.

Wednesday of the D'Ubervilles

2008-04-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, lame title, sorry.

Breakfast was burritos, as my more loyal and/or attentive readers darn well already know. Eggs+bacon+green pepper+green onion+goat cheese = 7.1 out of 10. Not the best breakfast burritos ever, but better than the hot dog and green pepper ones. Are you all abusing the definition of burrito at home? I hope so.

And then there was coffee. That should have come before light in that Bible story, because a cup of coffee goes real nice with sunrise. It also goes nice with almond flour sugar cookies. It doesn't go so nice with Flavia Milky Way hot chocolate. Not even the Milky Way brand label could trick me into thinking there was any flavor at all in that crap. I tried to trick the machine into making a Milky Way/Espresso combination, but it didn't pan out and I just ended up with a small cup of Milky Way hot chocolate. I made myself a normal sized cup of coffee with the Espresso and titrated a little of the Milky Way mess into my coffee, carefull not to allow too much of the obnoxious chemical chocolate to overpower my obnoxious chemical coffee.

After I emptied my coffee mug, I refilled it with Chef Boyardee Ravioli. I had a nice lunch on the cafeteria patio while working on a new dramatic script. Now that I've stopped writing this one scene, though, it's proving difficult to pick back up. It's amazing how quickly and thoroughly your mental muscles will atrophy from disuse. Even the mental sit-ups of recounting my diet proove taxing at times. (hence me not posting this meager offering till Friday morning)

After eating such a classy lunch, I decided to have a really classy snack. There were still four cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches in my desk left over from the last time I posted about eating them. Yeah, it's been a while. They were mostly broken and crumbled and I had to drink a mouthful of orange chunk and powder to finish the bag. I think I hear Mark Sommers whimpering in the distance.

Since I had that canned pasta for lunch, I was in the mood for something different for dinner. I had pasta, spaghetti and tomato sauce with parmesean cheese on top. Only the sauce was canned; the spaghetti was dried, as per usual and the cheese was pregrated in one of those plastic shakers with the three holes on one side of the lid and the big smile on the other so that when you open both sides of the lid it looks like a wierd hybrid of Oscar the Grouch and the Trasmetropolitan smiley-face. I made some whole wheat "garlic bread" by toasting some $2 loaf wheat bread, "buttering" it with "I can't believe it's not butter" spread and seasoning it with Adobo seasoning.

Despite the gigantic portion of spaghetti I made, I just did not feel full afterwards. so I took a celery stalk and filled the main groove with crunchy peanut butter. I just cannot get over how good that is, seriously. Have you tried it? It's the best thing since graham crackers and butter. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll explain it later, and you'll either be the happiest you've ever been about food since you were six or you'll throw up in the back of your mouth a little bit and worry about my cardiac health.

tuesday cookie parade

2008-04-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

After that miserable showing Monday night, I had to get myself back into actually eating, so I made sure to wake up with enough time to cook breakfast. Burritos with egg, bacon, green pepper and goat chese.

Yes, they were fantastic. No I won't bring you some. Obviously, I've already eaten them as I've written this the day after as per the title of my blog. You'll have to make your own.

They weren't quite as good as the burritos from Friday, though, so if you're going to go through the trouble of cooking things based on reading this blog, you should probably make those instead. I've just finished more burritos today, not to ruin the surprise for tomorrow, but they're mere shadows of the Aristotelian ideal form of breakfast burrito which I ate on Friday.

I also made something for lunch that I feel must be confessed here. I'm affraid I've angered the gods of vegetarianism. I don't even believe they exist, and yet I've tasted their ire over a sin against their chosen one, tofu. I'm a reformed vegetarian, and I'm not about to jump back on the wagon because of this incident, but I do feel I should apologize to tofu for the terrible thing I did to it.

I cut a hefty slab of Trader Joe's extra firm tofu and cut it into six pieces about 0.5"x0.5"x3" and I fried them in the bacon fat that had rendered as I was making bacon for the burritos. As I was flipping the tofu to get nice and golden on the opposite side as well, a glob of tofu juice and bacon fat shot out of the pan and hit me square in the right eye. Thankfully, I can still see, but I think the message was clear. Tofu no likey bacon bath.

The insults weren't over, though, because the fried tofu then resisted any attempts to season with soy sauce, sesame oil or mirin. I made a wrap with the tofu and some of the TJ's Spring Greens, and all of the seasonings just ended up soaking into the tortilla leaving this spongy bland mess in the middle.

The real lesson here, season your tofu before frying. It responds very well to marinades. Also, tofu has a lot of moisture, so make sure to seal the evil tofu sprites into your cauldron with a lid when flying or else, much like in other folk wisdoms, you will go blind.

I didn't end up eating the wrap for lunch, though, because free lunch reared it's gracious head and I went to throw out my folding chair for the cookie parade. Besides a ham & brie sandwich and a cup (there were no plates left) of salad greens, ravioli, feta cubes and cucumbers, I did my best to keep the cookie tray from going to waste. In no particular order, the following marched into my face: 2 chocolate covered biscotti, 1 choconut biscotti, 1 peppermint creme brownie, 1 cappucino brownie, 1 blueberry, 1 blackberry, 1/2 strawberry, 2.3 sq. in. of fruit bar, and 1 cheesecake blondie/brownie. I threw a few pita chips with humus in there along the way too.

And then there was the day's coffee. I went for Green Mountain again, this time trying a blend called "Dark Magic" or some equally as sappy play on the word "dark." It wasn't that dark, but not as bad as I expected. As far as consistent quality across various "flavors," Green Mountain is definitely better than the Flavia.

The bacofu wrap I ate later at UCB Harolds Night along with a chocolate covered biscotti and a sugar cookie that I'd saved from the cookie parade. The wrap was not the worst thing I've ever eaten, but maybe the worst food I've ever blogged about. That recipe definitely needs some thorough revision, or perhaps bacofu will proove to be plainly taboo. Either way I enjoy a good food challenge.

A monday without fanfare

2008-04-15T06:06:00.001-07:00

I think I burned out on food over the weekend. The things I ate yesterday are barely worth mentioning. When I have a really good meal, I get this feeling for a few days where, if I'm not eating something amazing, I'd just rather not eat all all. Microvaved hot dogs in tortillas just will not cut it. It's got to be flame-grilled brats with mustard and kraut on long deli rolls or I'd rather just be hungry. This is what I get for growing up in a family of cooks; I get spoiled.

So yesterday my appetite was being a brat, but I managed to force breakfast down. I woke up at 8AM and had to nudge the chronological Venn diagram of "Making Breakfast:Taking a Shower" so far over each other that you could use the slivers of single-value space to floss with, figuratively, not literally. There was no time to actually floss. I just had to toss a Jeno's in the oven while I showered and try to get wet, soapy, not soapy and then dry fast enough to take the pizza out of the oven before it was charred beyond my means to digest it.

I pretty much succeeded at this, and even managed to get dressed with a tie and everything and get to work on time, pizza, banana and chocolate cup cake in tow. I did not manage to pack anything for lunch, though. I decided I'd buy something in the area if I had to, but my workplace has a daily average 60% chance of free food, so I wasn't too worried about it.

And aren't ties great? I chose to wear it largely because it was already tied and hanging on the same hangar as the first dress shirt I grabbed out of my closet. I thought, "I'm going to rush to work and probably look a mess when I get there, so I might as well look a professional mess instead of a slacker mess."

It did help aleviate some feelings of shame as I went into the faculty lounge to sneak a cup of coffee. Looking more like faculty than students, I didn't worry about stirring up any vitriol over coffee machine clearance.

You see, there are two coffee machines I can use for free here. One of them is a Flavia and one is a Green Mountain Coffee Co. Both are instant coffee in little pouches that get infused and squirted into your cup with no real brewing involved for the last few months of it's life. Maybe it's just because Flavia machines are everywhere and I've had all of their "coffee" "flavors" at least twice and find most of them appalling, but I prefer the Green Mountain coffee. This machine, however, is in a locked faculty lounge, as opposed to just open on the 4th floor like the Flavia machine. Also, the Flavia machine requires that I get these quarter-sized drink tokens from other full-time employees in the department, so I feel a bit like an itinerant beggar. With the Green Mountain coffee I have access to a key to that room as part of my job. My supervisor has told me I'm allowed to drink whatever coffee I want. Why should I feel guilty drinking the Green Mountain Coffee? Probably because I was raised Catholic. It may also be in part due to the way the other people in my department refer to the Green Mountain Coffee machine. I get the feeling there is some departmental animosity over the inception of that machine that has since been spackled and painted over. You wouldn't know it from a casual viewing of the living room, but from the occaisional eye-tick towards that uneven part of the wall, you notice the spot where daddy punched through the wall after mommy and you went to grandma's for a few months.

So yesterday I had a cup of the Green Mountain Columbian with two creamers. It wasn't bad for coffee that had been sand just seconds before.

Over the course of the morning I had the Jeno's pizza, a combination pizza since the local was out of supreme. It was a touch dark but still very edible. Then I had a banana and tried to eat the cupcake. This proved difficult, though. You'd think I'd have learned not to put cupcakes in my bag, especially with the bike lock rumbling around in there on the way to work. I would not be put off, though. The smell of chocolate cupcake and banana had been driving me crazy all morning. I could get to the banana easily enough, but attempts to remove the cupcake from it's ziplock bag resulted in covering my hand in icing past the knuckles without getting ahold of much cupcake. I went to the cafeteria and got a spoon. Upon my return to my cubicle, my tongue errupted in a fanfare of triumph as the cupcake mournfully resigned to it's Alamo-like fate. It did a valiant job of putting up a pretty effective icing screen, but once I got the paper wrapper out, it was all but over. I don't know how much of my enjoyment came from the actual cupcake and how much came from the problem-solving involved in getting as much of the icing as possible out of the bag and into my mouth, but man, that was a good cupcake. Many thanks to my friend from Philadelphia who brought me the cupcake as left-overs from her niece's 1st birthday party.
It's rather odd that I've now written about cupcakes twice in three weeks, as I feel like I never really eat cupcakes. Before the last one in my blog, I think the last cupcake I ate was last September during the Austin City Limits festival. I'm not really a cupcake kind of guy. I'll eat the occaisional muffin, but even then I'm more of a croissant or bagel person.

I think what I'm saying is: please don't mail me cupcakes. I mean, I'll eat them if you do, and then I guess I'll have to write about them here, but if you really want to get mentioned on my blog for your 15 minutes of unfamy, I would prefer that you mailed me a fruit roll-up. I have not eaten a fruit roll-up in over ten years and I am not sure if they even still make them, but go ahead and mail me a fruit roll-up. I dare you.

Lunch was indeed free, much to the chagrin of Robert A. Heinlein. Well, I am working here so I suppose that I worked for it, but really, I could be working somewhere else, probably working harder than I do here, and they would not provide me with free lunch or even treat me with any sort of respect or dignity. Setting pizzas on a counter with plates and sodas and being told please and thank you is a small price to pay for two slices of pizza.

The pizzas weren't bad, but for the price we ordered them for, it was a bit ridiculous. It sparked my officemate to get into a rant about the falling quality of pizza in the city. I really am not qualified to give an opinion on quality over time, but based on quality versus hype, the pies in this town are not all they're cracked up to be. I'm open to attempts to change my mind, though.

After I finished the pizza I really didn't eat much of anything else yesterday. When I got home I didn't feel like eating right away, and then before very long it was after 9PM and I hadn't eaten more than a handful of potato chips. I didn't want to eat anything too big and then go right to sleep, but nothing small was appealing, so I had a few tortilla chips with some tomatillo/cilantro salsa just to have eaten something possibly providing nutritional value.

I pretty much skipped dinner, though, and it was very strange to not feel like eating. It felt almost as strange as writing a whole blog without a run-on sentence that lasts more than four clauses.

Sunday is for fleeing Manhattan

2008-04-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

Ah, Chuchifritos, you make the Barrio complete.
About a block from my apartment is this great restaurant that is open all the time and sells pretty much only fried food. I took my friend from Philadelphia on her way to her bus home. My favorite grease ball (quite literally) is the papas rellenas, a deep-fried ball of mashed potatoes stuffed with seasoned beef much as you might find in tacos. One of those and a "beef patty" made for a greasy, heart-clogging, deeply satisfying breakfast. The beef patty is similar to an empanada, but their dough is a little flakier and extends well past the pocket of seasoned beef so that the end result is about twice as tall as an empanada, with all that extra height providing a flaky wonderland of heart failure. I try not to eat there too often, but the appeal of a brightly lit buffet sporting a plethora of fried food is hard to resist. It doesn't help that the food is so cheap, filling and gratifies my deepest, darkest grease-yearnings. We're talking deep fried pork ribs with the layer of fat still on the meat. Even if your religious views don't condem consuming swine, these probably qualify as pretty damning. They were a bit much for breakfast, though, so I'll wait for a later blog to elaborate.

I washed all that fried crap down with a Energy VitaminWater because I like B vitamins. I'm not really sure what the deal with guarana is, but I have this image in my mind of tribal shamans wrestling panthers on a bed of orchids, and then pressing the orchids to collect the panther sweat and orchid tears, allowing it to ferment for a few months, then distilling it, drinking it and screaming out long run-on sentences, actually a form of prayer as well as their leading literary tradition. That probably doesn't have much to do with guarana at all, but Grant Morisson is writing my cultural speculation for the week, so that's what I got.

Then I headed down to New Jersey to check in on my girlfriend on the mend. Her mother made us a great dinner. I'd never had Portugese food before dating her, but now it's one of my favorite foods ever. It has a lot of the rich, meaty qualities of provincial French cooking with a slightly bolder palate at times verging on Mediterranean.

I don't know how terribly I'm butchering these accounts, having watched the first 30 minutes of Mirrormask instead of watching the food being prepared. I really should help in the kitchen more, though, because I'd really like to put some of these recipes together myself. I apologize in advance for butchering these recipes with inaccuracy.

There was a stewed pork chop in a tomato sauce that I have had at their house very often. It's very simple but one of my favorite things. The pork gets very soft and tears apart, similar to the texture of corned beef or the Philipino dish Adobo Pork.

Then there was a chicken breast that had been broiled, I believe, with vinegar and diced peppers. The texture was perfect and the bright flavors played very well with the somber tones of the marinated portabello mushrooms on the side. There was also a rice pilaf and oven fries which helped to balance the vinegar in the rest of the dinner. All in all it was a very hearty, satisfying dinner.

Afterward my girlfriend and I went for a walk and ended up stumbling upon a small fair near her house. Though we were very tempted by the prospect of deep-fried oreos, we decided to pass on the carnival fare. We ended up meandering through a K-Mart and I got a slurpee on my way out. I hadn't had one in a long time. I layered squirts of cola with squirts of the red flavor that has nothing to do with the fruit they slandered when time came to market it. I topped it off with a little root beer to raise the fluid to ice ratio and away I slurped. It proved to be a little too syrupy for my grown-up palate, though, and I tossed the last third when we got back to her house.
I had a very crispy flaky cookie that looked like a butterfly wing that I can't remember the name of, although I've seen bigger versions of similar cookies called "elephant ears." This box probably said "butterfly cookies" and I only retained that information as a descriptive memory, not a categorical definition. My brain is like that.

Much later, when I got home, I had a few potato chips just because they were there, and then crawled into bed and fell asleep in the middle of still digging chip-mush out of my molars with my tongue.

Saturday starts slow, but once you get it going…

2008-04-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

Off on a pretty good roll from Friday, I set out on an early morning (11:30AM) grocery run down to the Trader Joe’s at Union Square. I took my bike and dropped it off at a nearby bike shop to have the rear tire replaced while I shopped. I love Trader Joe’s. Everything is so cheap, but still good quality. Even the wine is cheap and they carry Pacific Rim Riesling, a favorite of mine, for about $7 a bottle, cheaper than buying a bottle of Miller Light in some bars in this town.

Their free sample was some Oat’n’Honey kind of cereal. It wasn’t bad, but it was just the shot of it and I didn’t bother to put any milk on it, just tossed it down.

The bike ride back was magnificent. The weather was gorgeous and I hadn’t had a good ride in over a week, so it felt like being able to walk again. You don’t realize how slow walking is till you ride a bike on a regular basis. It’s like ascending to a minor tier of divinity. Even on only a shot of cereal at 2PM I felt absolutely great.

The dinner menu was big, so I didn’t want to eat too much during the day, but I did have an egg roll and three vegetarian dumplings from a new Chinese delivery joint in the area. I also had a handful of “chili peanuts” that one of the roommates got while out shopping for fruit to make booze smoothies. The chili peanuts were saturated with the same kind of vinegar powder that they use to make salt and vinegar chips, but these were way stronger. It was not an experience I enjoyed, because it wasn’t spicy as much as it was just uncomfortable. There were also a handful of potato chips tossed into the afternoon mix as I prepped for dinner.

And I haven’t rescinded my boozeban entirely, but I did have a few drinks in the afternoon and evening. It started with the booze smoothies as we made desert and set it aside to stand. Then there were a few bottles of white wine passed around. I was too busy cooking to notice what they all were, but I did notice a green monkey on one of the corks, if that means anything to you wine aficionados out there.

“So what was this dinner that was the only thing you really ate all day and yet alluded to being so great in the title of this posting?” Well, dear reader, it went a little something like this.

First course was a simple greens salad idea I’d been tossing around. I took a French Baguette and sliced off two 3/8” slices per plate of salad, then toasted them lightly so that the brown just started to encroach from the edges into the center. Then I laid the toast as a bed and set mixed greens on top. I was using Trader Joe’s “Spring Mix” which features arugula, various baby greens and the odd leaf of radicchio. Then I cut a small, flat hole in a tube of goat cheese and used it like a pastry gun to drop a few curls of goat cheese on each salad. Next was a drizzling of Balsamic vinegar and olive oil followed by a dusting of fresh ground black pepper and toasted almond flour.

The next course, and all the following courses, were stolen from an issue of Gourmet magazine. I believe it was March 2008. It has been my bathroom reading for a while and I’ve been looking for an excuse to make some of the recipes for a while, so when a friend from Philadelphia said she was coming to visit I thought I would go ahead and give said recipes a toss with the inevitable variations and that come when you hand me a written recipe thereby giving me an excuse for an unwieldy run-on sentence.

So after salad came seared scallops and shrimp finished in a beure-blanc sauce with shallots. This was very cheap and easy compared to how fancy it sounds and how good it was. The seafood was Trader Joe’s frozen goods, so I didn’t even have to clean them. After thawing, I patted them dry, then seasoned the scallops with a little salt and pepper. Then I seared the scallops at a medium high heat in two batches. Next came the shrimp.

After searing and reserving the seafood I added two cloves of diced shallots to the pan, and as they clarified I added a cup of the Pacific Rim Riesling to the pan to deglaze. Then I added the juices that had rendered out of the scallops onto their plate back into the pan and melted 7 Tbsp. of butter into the pan at a medium heat in 1Tbsp pats, about 3 at a time until just melted. I plated them as two scallops with a shrimp curled on top between them, all covered with the sauce.

The main course was an Alsatian coq au vin variation that used Riesling instead of a red wine. I bought a halal chicken because they are much cheaper than the Purdue cyborg chickens available at my local grocer and seem to be a much better quality of chicken too. It was a bit difficult to explain the way I wanted to have the chicken cut, though. I made a sketch and showed it to the butcher, and he got pretty close to a French style. The thighs and legs were cut at a slightly odd angle that made the legs big, but the thighs a strange shape, and the breasts were not so much halved crosswise as two-third/one-thirded crosswise, but it all fit in my everyday pan, so no worries.

The chicken was also prepped with a simple salt and pepper dusting, then browned in butter and olive oil and reserved. Then I added diced shallots and green onions to the pan and afterward deglazed with Riesling similar to the scallops. Then I added a half a cup of heavy cream before reintroducing the chicken and it’s juices, then adding some mushrooms and asparagus, covering the pan, and then putting it in a 350F oven for 20 min. while I made the aforedescribed sea food dish. At the same time, in water spiked with a little chicken broth, salt and Riesling, I stewed some potato, carrots and whole green onion bulbs with about 2 inches of stem. The chicken was plated with the vegetables to the side and covered with the cream sauce from the chicken.

Then we had to back off eating for a while, so we had a wine course while I plated the desert and let it heat a bit in the oven. Desert was a crepe cake. This entails piling crepes with layers of whipped cream in between. We don’t have a mixer, so a good stiff whipped cream was sort of out of the question, so I made a raspberry-vanilla yogurt sauce that was a brilliant shade of pink to go between the layers. We set it to stand in the fridge so that the yogurt didn’t run too much, and then I plated it in pie slices drizzled in condensed milk and dusted with the rest of the toasted almond flour and some dried, rubbed sage before throwing it in the oven till the condensed milk on the plate started to steep the almond flour into a picturesque blonde cream color and the sage started to give off a little extra aroma.

The whole thing was very well received although I wasn’t that happy with some of my plating, as usual, and the timing for serving several courses to my friends while still being sociable and eating myself. I would have liked to have served the scallops a little quicker after being seared. Although the flavor and texture were there, they would have really exploded across the palate if I hadn’t had to mess with some of the salad preparation while cooking them. I had my friend help me with the desert, but my kitchen really doesn’t leave room for someone else to work at the same time, so the rest of the courses became a juggling trial. For first runs of all the recipes, though, I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s the best meal I’ve made so far this year, anyway.

Later that evening we decided to go out for a bit of dancing. I had a cup of coffee and a Energy VitaminWater on the way down to Astor Place on the 6. Then we went to Rififi’s and had a round of PBR, and then a round of Bass Ale while gradually deciding that the DJ sucked. We got home just in time to watch “30 Days of Night” with my roommates, after which I decided to watch “Lelo & Stitch” as a bit of a mental sorbet course.

It was great to have a few beers after three weeks of dry living. I should have definitely stayed off the coffee, though, because I was up until 5AM trying to wind down. Watching a 6-year-old vampire get her head chopped off with an ax probably didn’t help, either.

Sowwy!

2008-04-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

Posting over the weekend got a little out of whack thanks to some internet difficulties. The posts for the weekend should be up by Monday evening. Sorry, guys.

Friday stands for ossim.

2008-04-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

Friday is always a good day to really push for indulgence. In the case that you over-do it, you have two days to get over it before necessity rears its ugly head, and if you manage to engage fully yet responsibly, you get a good rev on your engine before firing on all cylinders on Saturday. This week, I went for the later.

To fuel the big push into the weekend, I revisited the awesome sandwich that started my work week. Unfortunately, I was out of the padinhas so I had to turn up the ossim knob with the contents. I started with the bacon in the pan just like Monday, but threw in some diced garlic, then some onions, mushrooms and asparagus, adding the eggs just as the onions started to soften. The garlic started to brown a little from being in the pan with just the bacon as it was crisping, emboldening it to a front row player in the mélange. I went with Munster cheese and wrapped the mess into two flour tortillas.
Then I had my daily banana on the walk to work as the burritos cured in my bag, radiating heat through to my lower back as I watched the darkened walls of the 2 flicker by.

I thought I’d try walking through that same tent tunnel and see if my iPod would enhance my breakfast experience yet again. I did get a nice picture of the scene, but the music was a little muddled: Andrew Bird’s “I” into Kanye West’s “Home” which did pump me up for the morning anyway.

Then I thought I’d take advantage of the Green Mountain coffee machine in the lounge on the 1st floor. Today I went for their Sumatran blend with just the regular half and half. It was really putting a beautiful sheen on Friday morning and by 10:30 I thought I’d done enough work to put me close to lunch.

We were still very far from lunch, though. First I had to get through one of the more awkward experiences in temping, the department planning meeting with the department you’ll only be a part of for the next two weeks. It factored into my blournalism, though, because I had a small carton of apple juice. It was packed in one of the short milk-cartons that I most readily associate with a field trip to the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Natural History when I was in 2nd grade. I remember a brown paper bag with a peanut butter and jelly and a small carton of orange juice only partially reconstituted from concentrate and still more like humming bird food than juice. I have such a vivid memory of the way the paper of the carton played into the “flavor” of the “juice.” The two are inseparable facets of that singular potent recall.

When lunch finally did come it was not very impressive, but very comforting. I had Chef Boyardee’s beef ravioli and two slices of white bread with butter. There’s not a lot of room to get poetic with Chef Boyardee products, but I hadn’t had a can of ravioli in months and it felt really good to dig into one of my favorite foods of yore. Perhaps the Kanye song this morning was my iPod’s attempt at foreshadowing.

I’d already had dinner planned for a few days. I was just waiting for a night when I had the time to mess around in the kitchen. I sautéed a link of sweet Italian sausage that I'd taken out of the skin. Once it had rendered some juices into the pan, I reserved it and started browning some bacon and garlic. A lot of people decry the browning of garlic, but I love it. Sure, there are some recipes where you want to avoid it, but this was not that time. Don't be afraid to brown your garlic, children!

After the bacon and garlic were both pretty thoroughly crispy I added some veggies. I went for asparagus, mushrooms, celery and onions. Then I dumped the leftover rice porridge from a few days ago over the vegetables, added some water, dill, sage, black pepper and oregano, gave it a good thorough stirring and let it simmer till the water reduced. Then I added some ricotta cheese, bread crumbs, parmesean cheese and Adobo seasoning.

Once the mixture started to bind, I scooped it out into bowls for my roommate and I. He added a liberal shot of hot sauce to his and was very happy with the result. I opted for more Adobo seasoning. A little extra butter would have been nice too, but not really the healthiest option in a dish that already had copious amounts of olive oil, sausage grease and bacon fat in it. It was one of those meals that demands you devour it. Each spoonful just urges you to shovel another one in so that you can gorge on it. I will definitely make it again, and if this were one of those trendy recipe sites, I'd call this my "Provincial Fried Rice."

This isn't about cute names and stars out of five, though. This is about me writing about all the things I ate the day before because if I don't do it, then who will? Neither am I popular enough to have stalkers watching me eat nor can I afford a ghost writer to recount these tails for you with extra professional flourish. It's just me, for some reason dedicated to recounting the inane in great detail on a daily basis. Enjoy.

Mokuyoubi wa kirei deshita

2008-04-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

Breakfast was, was...
well, shit. I forget what I had for breakfast yesterday. I guess it was bound to happen sometime. I know I had a banana. That's for sure. I had a piece of toast too. Was that really all?

Anyway, I definitely had a banana and a piece of toast. Breakfast was mostly inconsequential anyway. What really mattered today was lunch.

Lunch was glorious. It was too nice not to sprint out of the building and across Central park to meet a friend for lunch out on a bench. Among the highlights of passers by were a most adorable little jack russel terrier and a small child, maybe about 5 years old, taging along behind his mother carrying a giant stick. My friend and I both complemented him on his stick and he seemed to hold it a little higher, emboldened, as his mother just shook her head.

As for actual food, I started with a wrap i'd made with swiss cheese, roast beef and the peppered turkey breast. I spread a little brown mustard in there, then I added a carrot, cut in to sticks. I started doing that with the tuna and hummus wraps I made because the texture of the mushy food inside the wrap was a little off-putting, especially as the mush looses moisture to the tortilla causing it to take on a saggy, skin-like consistency. The carrots provide a nice bone-like crunch that is no less disconcerting but much more entertaining.

Then my friend and I had a nice walk around central park, taking picutres of his tie and eating the "Giant Peach Cookies" my Japanese friend brought me as a present from Atlanta where she'd spent the weekend before coming to Manhattan. Though the fictional peaches used to make the cookies may have indeed been "giant," these cookies were in fact bite-sized. I am thoroughly baffled by the apparently subconscious, nearly magical ability of the Japanese to find ways to break the English language. I aspire to cause equivalent delight in Japanese people as I (mostly unintentionally) mangle their language that defies my attempts at cognation (the process of forming cognates? Ed.) and translitteration.

Our nice meander as we discussed modern art and transformer porn left us at the southeast corner of the park, and left me with a nice jaunt back to work with a PBJ and some water to punctuate the nice girls who deigned to wear clothes in the blistering 70F weather and the other people who decided to wear a jacket while walking their dogs or a few other people's dogs just in case the sunshine was a big scam. Spring time in Central Park, folks. Just like the movies.

After that delightful dining adventure, I was all too happy to have a tame, low-investment dinner. Celery and peanut butter as an appetizer and a baked potato covered in chili for a main course, by which I don't mean a broken, steaming spud laden with beef seasoned with chili powder and some dregs of what might have been peppers and onions, but rather a bowl of my roommate's left-over chili that I like even better than my own chili and which is actually fairly balanced nutritional fare sporting a plethora of different legumes and vegetables (things like carrots and chickpeas that are probably going to have chili purists up in arms) which I microwaved and into which I quite unceremoniously plopped a whole baked potato and then proceded to shovel into my person with a spoon. Whew, glad I got my run-on quota out of the way.

I recommend my readers try this, but I also recommend that you only half-fill a large bowl rather than filling a normal bowl so as to allow for displacement as you dig at the baked potato. I get a certain ammount of glee at the presentation-hack involved in the big unsightly rock in the middle of an overlarge bowl surrounded by an unsightly mess of red bits leaving greasy tomato stains around the edges of some nice white porcelain. Anybody want to help fund my restaurant ideas?

Wednesday seems to be a favorite with the stomach flu virus.

2008-04-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

Ah Spring. Spring makes me do crazy things like stay up late playing Xplorers C&K as I battle the kind of insomnia that kept me up many nights as a teenager reading Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L'Engle. I do something to keep from just lying there, staring at my ceiling, waiting for the sleep truck to hit me. The problem with doing something you actively enjoy just before bed is that more often than not you are only delaying the time your brain takes to just let everything settle.

That is why I was running just a little bit late yesterday and had to rush out the door without really having enough time to make a propper breakfast. I had to opt for the "oops, I'm gonna be late" version of my breakfast burritos, which is wrapping a hot dog in a tortilla, microwaving it for 30 seconds and then eating that and a banana while walking to the subway.

Then, at work I drank the last of the free coke I'd saved in a VitaminWater bottle and another bottle of Poland Spring.

Lunch was leftovers of the black bean and tuna pasta and a cup of Earl Grey tea. It was pretty filling for my small portion size. I feel like this is my worst post ever so far, and that takes some doing. Maybe I need to restart my coffee habit.

My girlfriend was really sick today, the way that I was sick when I started this thing only worse. She left work almost as soon as she got there and came to see me to get the key for my apartment so that she could go lay down. When I got off work I went to take care of her. As a vote of solidarity I made us a dinner we could both get down.

I made a very simple chicken stock with a chicken leg I had in the freezer and a little salt, removing all the foam and as much fat as I could manage from the top. Then I added two cups of rice and kept it wet enough to be a little soupy. Then I added some carrots and reserved chicken meat and let them cook in until the carrots were soft.

While I was cooking I had to indulge one of my better habits. I'm infatuated with celery and peanut butter. I don't know when it happened, but if I have both in the house, I eat at least a stalk a day slathered in crunchy peanut butter. I'm exceptionally fond of opening fresh jars of peanut butter when I can use the celery directly as an edible utensil for peanut butter retrieval.

The girl friend and I had our rice porridge and a piece of toast each. I hit mine with a little Adobo seasoning. I was a little worried the porridge would be too complex for my girlfriend's sick tummy, but she finished hers about twice as fast as I ate mine. I guess not eating anything all day will do that to you.

I won't get into the gruesome details here to spare my girlfriend having to read about her sickness after the fact, but she was still ill this morning. I guess I'm not such a good nurse after all. I'm gonna try to pull a Peter Pan to make up for it. If you're reading this, please send some good mojo out to my girlfriend so she gets better soon.

"I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies!"