April 2008 Archives

Tested my abstaining mettle tonight over dinner at Hill Country.  IMO, best thing on the menu there is the moist (read: fatty) beef brisket, obvs off limits to me right now.  I made do with a thick but somewhat dry smoked pork chop, starry with coarse black pepper. Fuchsia pork spare ribs were also a bit dry and stringy but with a nice wood smoke ring.  Sides we chose were variations on warm, milky mush -- defrosted "French cut" green beans swimming in canned mushroom gravy with French fried onions, creamy penne topped with broiled, sunny cheddar, and a chewy shoepeg corn pudding.  I know it's authentic to have bad sides, but I would have welcomed a little freshness.  Also, the Epcot Center-style country band playing downstairs was loud enough to loosen my fillings and digest the pork chop for me.  Grandma's too old for that shit.  By the end of the night, my throat was hoarse from yelling at my pals across the table, my hair was reeking of smoke, and my doggie bag was full of unfinished meat.  I'm not a huge BBQ fan to start with, but I've been to Hill Country three times now and I still gotta say it -- what's the BFD? 

According to this article on L.A.'s hot dog scene, New York is the number one hot dog town in the nation.  Not surprising, right?  Dirty dogs, as my friend Dottie calls them, rule the street corners of Manhattan.  You can get plump dogs slathered in sweet onion sauce at Katz's; you can nosh on snappy kosher franks at the resurrected 2nd Ave. Deli; there are as many riffs on Gray's Papaya as there are on (Original?) Ray's Pizza; if you really want to rub it into atherosclerosis's face, you can always go to Crif Dogs for the disgustingly magical Spicy Redneck*, a bacon-wrapped, deep-fried wiener smothered in chili, coleslaw, and pickled jalapenos to cut the grease.  (I have eaten more of those in my life than I would dare to admit to an insurance investigator.)

I can't say I'm so discerning about hot dogs.  I mean, if it's spiced right, dyed pink and moistened with mustard, what do I care if it's made of tofu instead of cow scraps?  So I don't think I'll miss them too much. 

My favorite dogs are Violet Hill Farms' hot dogs, which I hear they sell from a cart called Dogmatic on Bleecker St. these days.  When I was in Thailand in 2003, I had, believe it or not, fish hot dogs, nitrate-free, which we ate for breakfast with soup and sticky rice.  And they were DELICIOUS.  Wrap your head around that.

In this episode of Radio Lab (my latest obsession), Jad Abumrad talks to a guy at the Fresh Kills landfill who says a core sample uncovered a 10 year old, intact, totally recognizable hot dog.  Our intestines are basically sausage casings, so that's pretty narst.

Here's a little Wonder Showzen lesson on how hot dogs are made:



*Never had it, but had to laugh -- they've also got a bacon-wrapped hot dog covered in kimchee called a Chang.

Name: Kara Zuaro

Occupation: freelance writer and author of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the kitchen with your favorite bands

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: Married

What did you eat today?

For breakfast, I had some leftover grapefruit, orange, and mint salad. [Ooh, yum! --Ed.]  For lunch, I scrambled eggs with spinach, Swiss cheese, and assorted leftover vegetables - and then rolled it all up in corn tortillas.  For dinner, I tried out a few recipes from the Veganomicon cookbook - Jicama-Watercress-Avocado Salad with Spicy Citrus Vinaigrette, Messy Rice, and Chile-Cornmeal Crusted Tofu - washed down with a Dogfish Head Chicory Stout.  (I'm not vegan, but I'm pretty into this cookbook.)

What do you never eat?

I steer clear of lengua tacos.  I'll try anything once, but when I tried one of those, I just couldn't get past the texture.  I felt like I was biting my own tongue.

Complete this sentence:  In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Frank's RedHot.  (Pete, my husband, puts it on the table with every meal.)

What is your favorite kitchen item?

As a lover of kitchen equipment, I really can't choose just one.  I love my monkey peeler, my Messermeister chef's knife, my electric tea kettle, my convection oven (which has a rounded back, making it big enough to fit a pizza), my tongs, my stand mixer, my fancy rice cooker, and my mini-prep food processor.  

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Zaytoon's on Smith Street

World ends tomorrow.  What would you like for your last meal?

I'd have to go for a lobster roll at Duryea's.  It's on a pier in Montauk, where it feels like you're at the end of the world.  Plus, they have a B.Y.O.B. policy, so you could really celebrate the last sunset there.

I don't know, this creeps me out.  Meat is not just a cluster of cells -- it's blood, it's the grass a lamb eats, the exercise a chicken gets running around its pen, the breed of pig...I just don't get it.  I often think this dissociation is the root of our fucked up "relationship with meat". The delicious pork chop I ate tonight came from a pig that died for my dins.  I knew a guy who could only eat meat that didn't look like meat -- so drumsticks, lamb chops, a T-bone steak were out of the question, but McNuggets, pepperoni and hamburgers were totally acceptable.  What's that about?

I've never been a fan of the mock duck, mock chicken, etc.  I don't want something made of hydrolyzed proteins shot up with stabilizers and coloring agents etc. so it can parade poorly as meat.  And come on, who's being fooled by that perfectly striped fake bacon?  Certainly no one who actually knows and likes meat.  I like my proteins like I like my people -- true to themselves and honest. 

From the New York Times' Green Issue:

Dashka Slater:

"Pork, lamb and poultry all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate."

Michael Pollan:

"Which brings us back to the 'why bother [going green]' question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others -- from other people, other corporations, even other countries."

****

Over Meet the Press this morning, La Doug and I were discussing the awful but not impossible scenario where McCain wins the White House over a fractured Democratic party. 

LA DOUG: I talked to Mark, who was in D.C. when we went from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.  It went from a sushi town to a steakhouse town overnight.

[And we're back! -- Ed.]

Name: Trevor Dunn

Occupation: Musician

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status:  whipped

What did you eat today? 

Water,  maple granola with yogurt and a banana and Earl Grey tea, a slice of watermelon, fusilli with a homemade sauce of oil, onion, garlic, shiitake mushrooms and pecorino-romano cheese, a glass of Sicilian white wine, lapsang souchong tea, three olives, an Amy's organic country vegetable pot pie, some French red wine.
 
What do you never eat? 

Pineapple.  Can't even stand the smell of it.  I love most fruits and tropical ones especially.  Mango, papaya, kiwi, passion fruit....yum.  Pineapple, however, makes me want to vomit.  I also don't do oysters.  I admit this with a bit of shame because oyster culture seems sexy and high class to me.  I think it's a texture thing.  Again, I love most seafood and shellfish.  Clams, mussels, crab....yum.  Sushi.....yum.   Oysters taste like nothing and feel like someone else's phlegm in my throat.
 
Complete this sentence:  In my refrigerator, you can always find: 

Yogurt, guava juice, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, swiss chard, parsley.
 
What is your favorite kitchen item?

The Knife.
 
Where do you eat out most frequently?

Sushi Mura, Nono Kitchen, Little Dishes (all in the Slope)

World ends tomorrow.  What would you like for your last meal? 

An entire suckling pig, butternut squash ravioli with sage, chard sauteed with tons of garlic, a caprese salad with extra basil and olive oil from Sardinia, Concord grapes, the stinkiest  French cheese plate in the world, my mom's blackberry pie (she picks the berries herself),  the most expensive bottle of red wine in the world and limoncello.

Among the many reasons I love Trevor: he taught me to refer to the upright bass as "the doghouse" and the electric as "the pork chop". You can follow Trevor's gigs, learn the secret of the dead bass goon, or read some of his kick ass answers to fan questions at trevordunn.net.
 

This is a statue of Jao Mae Guan Im, known to the Chinese as Guan Yin which, according to this site, means "Who Contemplates the [Supplicating] Sound of the World".  She's apparently a bodhisattva, the female incarnation of Avalokitesvara, embodiment of compassion.

Growing up, I only knew her as "that statue of a woman in my aunts' houses."  Jao Mae Guan Im was not part of our standard issue Sunday school Buddhism.  First of all, she was a she, and for all the wonderful things Buddhism is, it is not a culture of the feminine divine.  Secondly, she was often distinctly Chinese-looking, standing among swirls of water or curling lotus petals in a sort of Venus on the half-shell tilt into the wind so her long robes and pretty beehive/Crystal Gayle hair combo were permanently aflutter.

Not everyone had shrines to her in their houses,  which made her seem that much more mystical to me.  Those who did worship her had to give up beef.  (This was the only thing I knew about her because, go figure, I only ever seem to remember details about food.) Depending on where you google, her followers believe her cruel father was reincarnated as a cow; since they don't want to eat him, they don't touch beef; the other story is that Guan Im was so compassionate that she was always a vegetarian, even in utero.

Interesting too that it's beef her believers give up, as the cow so often represents matriarchy.  Even the word cow (as opposed to bull or the neutral food term cattle) refers to the female -- how many other animals do we call primarily by the female gender's title?  Not sows, not ewes, not hens, not mares, not bitches.

Here's a fun page on cross-cultural cow lore. 

And in case you've forgotten why corned beef and pastrami got kosher clearance (except when applied in a Swiss-cheesed Reuben): it's the Leviticus-approved combo of cloven hoof + chews the cud.

CHARLIE: I don't want to go to this party.  I always wind up talking to the same girl.

ME: Well, is she cool?

CHARLIE: She's Korean, from Minnesota.  And she's a vegetarian.  It's so unattractive.

ME: ...

CHARLIE: The first two are interesting, but vegetarians...I guess it depends on your relationship with meat. 

I like the Rain Man-style review in the middle of this Pinkberry lawsuit article:

In a class-action lawsuit filed last year, Pinkberry -- which operates roughly 50 stores in California and New York -- was accused of misrepresenting its product as "frozen yogurt" and making bogus health claims, including that the dessert (which comes in three flavors: plain, which is very sour; green tea, which is chalky; and coffee, uncommonly delicious) was "all-natural."

Number of search results in Google news for downer cows: 462