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...
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Classics Wednesday.
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.
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, June 10, 2008
Tuesday? Hot.
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
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.
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.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Thursday? Free food? It sure does feel good to be back.
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.
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.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
The yesterday that was Wednesday, the fourth day of June.
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Special Bargainnaisseur Recommendation
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
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