Tuesday, my tragic twin

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.