June 2008 Archives

photo by atomicity on flickr, CC licensed

To the pyromaniac choads in my 'hood,

Happy Independence Day!  Look, I know this is the one time of year you get to pop a chubby coaxing a scream out of a flaming stick.  But do you have to light up the fireworks every night for the two weeks leading up to July 4?  Isn't one night of keeping grandma up with your deafening, gunshot-like noises enough for you?  Let me remind you that it is ILLEGAL to set off any fireworks in New York without a permit.

You know what else is illegal?  Putting a night-vision scope on a rhino tranquilizer rifle and sniping people who insist on interrupting their sleeping neighbors.

I'm just sayin',
Crabby

I didn't slave over the computer today and the hours passed so slowly. I may have to start a one hour of computer per weekend day rule. 

So a few quick things:

• At a dinner party, Winnie's friend Brian mentioned that he likes to drop a bag of PG Tips into his water bottle and drink from it all day -- I tried it, I love it, I'll be doing it all summer.  Enlivens the hydration with light tea flavor and a slow burn caffeine kick all day long. (Winnie, I'm like totally stalking you or something.)
• Finally picking The Omnivore's Dilemma back up again, which I can only read in short spurts before I get depressed, have to put it down and listen to Mariah Carey to fluff my brain out.  Anyway, one rancher tells Pollan that in his grandfather's time, cows were grass-fed, and therefore took longer to get to slaughter weight.  "Cows were four or five years old at slaughter...Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months."  Interesting in light of the South Korea beef fight happening, where Koreans will only accept beef that is "younger than 30 months", or 2 1/2 years old, because younger cows are less likely to have mad cow disease.  Fucked up on a few levels -- that we breed cows to bulk up in 1/4 the time (imagine a kid becoming adult-sized by age 5), that mad cow wouldn't be an issue with grass-fed beef, that the bulked-up young 'un is now the preferred choice.
• Went to Bar Q, loved the food, made me want to go to Annisa.  Fine, the steamed bun with pork is a bite off David Chang, but Anita Lo one ups him by including a few leaves of kimchee and a crunchy swath of crackling on her pork.  Also, bizarrely loved the warm (?) walnut (?) soup (?) with malted rice krispies and a powdery polvorone-like mound.  Polvorones remind me of La Puente.  Eating one is kind of like stuffing a sandcastle in your mouth, a magical sandcastle of nutty sugar. 
  

And now it's past my bedtime.  Dammit!  See?

No YAWYE this week because I've been crazy busy this week. Apologies.

Why I love my friend Winnie:

winnie to me:

dude, Friday is my par-tay. Are you coming or what?

Ganda to winnie:

Didn't I RSVP?  I'm going to be on a llama farm at a bachelorette party.  It's the kind of "party" where we take walks wearing long pants and caps to keep the ticks off.  I'm looking forward to it, but very sorry to be missing what I'm sure will be a fab fete.

winnie to me:

Oh, got it. Yes, you did RSVP. Which must be why I took you off the list for the reminder email. Llama farm sounds awesome. Do you get to eat any?

97 degrees, 80% humidity.  If I had cleavage, you'd be able to poach an egg in it.  

I thought about buying some Weck jars today -- Winnie was excited about purchasing hers, and as I am totally unoriginal, I thought I would follow suit.  But why is it that all the good stuff worth preserving is only around when the weather is oppressive?  I'm getting heat stroke just thinking about turning the stove on.



This week's Greenmarket purchases:
from left to right: 1 1/3 lbs. of ground pork from Flying Pigs, French breakfast radishes, baby scallions, spinach, black Tuscan kale, cranberry pecan sourdough bread, biscotti, shiitake mushrooms, vanilla yogurt, ricotta cheese, drinkable blueberry yogurt, one pint strawberries, 5/6 lb. sugar snap peas.




Still leftover from last week's Greenmarket run:
2 red onions, 1 cucumber, one ripe, ripe greenhouse tomato, half a dozen Flying Pigs eggs, 1/4 block of Colby cheese, some strawberries, about 1/3 of a loaf of bread, a bunch of dill, a bunch of cilantro, a bunch of chives.

Still also have 1/4 of a ball of Tonjes Farms' mozzarella, which I think will be nibbled through by Wednesday.

I did clear out some stuff with today's breakfast of French toast with strawberries.  It's nice to actually save "pain perdu".  I'm using the cucumber, dill, onion and half the tomato for my lunch salad tomorrow.  All in all, I would say that only the cilantro and chives will turn before I have time to use them up.  I'm pretty pleased with how I've done so far.

I also used some leftover tomato and some of the onion and cilantro above to make guac for a party:



My friend Nancy had given me four ripe avocados last Sunday.  I knew I wasn't going to be able to eat them, so I stuck them in the fridge as soon as I got home.  Refrigeration works quite well if you want to halt the avo ripening process.  A little chopped cilantro, onion, garlic, tomato, and a repurposed cupcake clamshell for transporting the avocados and I had the perfect hors d'oeuvre.  All I had to do was pick up some chips; the hosts of the party already had jalapenos, salt, and limes on hand for my friend Shannon's knockout kiwi-chili margaritas (cribbed from the Modern):


Don't you feel refreshed just looking at that?  Muddled kiwis and seeded jalapenos, Herradura silver, triple sec, lime juice, shaken with lots of ice...I think that's it.  Viva el verano!

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That Lysol in the background of my food pictures is incriminating, isn't it?  It's actually sitting on the window ledge behind the butcher block, far enough away from the food that I'm not going to give myself a health code violation.  Don't judge me!

Related: my friend Julie reminded me today that when I first moved to New York with no job and no money, I used to go hang out in the downstairs dining room at the Wendy's on Broadway and Bleecker.  It smelled like ammonia and cheap frying grease down there, and the company was usually less than savory, but their air conditioning was deliciously Frosty.

I meet an out-of-towner friend for early cooked breakfast at Balthazar.  I find myself struggling over what to do with part of my full English breakfast. 

ME: I'm don't want the bacon and sausage.  If I order it on the side, will you eat it?

FRIEND:  Sure, I'll nibble at it.

ME: Okay, but will you really?  Because otherwise I won't get it.

WAITER: I can just bring it to you on the side.

I'm a little embarrassed to actually articulate why I don't want to get the bacon and sausage -- I don't want to explain my project.  I wonder what the waiter thinks, if he thinks I'm just being picky because I don't want the foods to touch each other.  I also wonder how often he gets requests to omit part of a platter.

Of course the bacon and sausage come, on the side, and my friend, as promised, nibbles on a slice of bacon and a link of sausage.  The waiter clears the rest of the untouched meat away, and it doesn't even occur to me until later that I could have taken it for lunch or dinner.  I'm so used to leaving food on the plate that asking for a to go container doesn't even cross my mind -- because it's too inconvenient to shlep around, because I don't really do leftovers, because the food wasn't that interesting to begin with.

I also leave a very sad "fried" plum tomato with no flavor, a wan, sad little thing that kissed a hot pan.  It's a lot easier to eat all your food when you're in control of how it's cooked and served.

Side note: Why is the brewed coffee at Balthazar so terribly acidic?  Blech.  Does that work well for cafe au lait?  Also, in case you were wondering, Balthazar's breakfast beans are not close enough to canned Heinz Baked Beans for my taste.  I forgot how much I lurve fried bread, though.

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Linky linky:

Three Ways to Cut Your Food Bill on the Motley Fool -- mostly common sense, but some interesting Brit stats in there:

"These days, no one can escape noticing the steep rises we're all paying for basic foodstuffs.  According to the Daily Mail's cost of living index, a basket of basic foods that cost £41.34 in May 2007 costs £49.24 now -- a rise of 19.1%.  Ouch!  Butter has risen by 60%, bread by 20%, cheese by 25%, and rice by 60%,  And, of course, all those other household bills haven't been standing still, either."

The Kitchen Revolution:
One shopping list, one meal from scratch, five leftover variations.  Nice idea, but I'm skurred of oatmeal herrings.

The scoop on the Bagel Scoop (Grub Street)
This is no new trend.  Ladies of a certain wrist circumference have been asking for scooped bagels for as long as I've been in NYC.  I've certainly done it a few times -- mostly because I don't want to eat a whole bagel.  Let's be frank, though, those doughy innards are just giving us doughy innards. Who needs that many straight-to-your-ass simple carbs in the morning, all lubed up with fatty cream cheese?  I save my bagel consumption for the rare occasion when I've got a little smoked fish from Russ and Daughters on hand.  Bagels really ought to just be a lot smaller; I could totally go for Smitten Kitchen's mini-bagels with a little cup of whitefish salad and egg salad.

Name: John Dylan Keith

Occupation: Musician/Sound Designer/Writer

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: In one.

What did you eat today?

Muesli and greek yogurt with a banana. Coffee. Chocolate chip peanut butter Clif Bar. 1/2 a bottle of Cairnbrae Sauvignon Blanc and lobster served Aussie style: grilled w/Australian spices ("Whativah thet mins" my native guide said the first time I hit the Tuesday night $12 Lobster special at Wombat.) Side of fried potatoes, and a pistachio and goat cheese salad, with mixed greens, red grapes, shaved fennel and raspberry vinaigrette. Just inside the kitchen they were prepping the salads- there was one of those giant restaurant baking sheets full of toasted pistachios 2" deep just asking for a face-plant. As it happened I had pistachio ice cream at home, so that's gone now.

What do you never eat?

Not so into insects, though I guess I had a big one for dinner. I'll try just about anything. I don't like raw celery for some reason. There was a childhood incident with a Waldorf Salad, but that usually doesn't affect my tastebuds, though I don't love red 'delicious' apples or mayo either.

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

Fruit, veggies, cheese, but you can't count on them being there like the coffee beans, half-and-half, butter, several kinds of mustards and hot sauces, bitters. They will probably all be outlasted by the giant bottle of Frank's Red Hot Sauce pushed on me by a Costcoholic relative who had a case of four. Tastes ok, but thinking of using it to scrub the sink just to get through it.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

Antique seltzer bottle. Good for slapstick, whiskey and soda, or just soda with a whole lime, or five-ten shakes of bitters.It's kind of like a citrus Christmas tree in a glass, only good.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Carmine's, Yola's, Bliss, Oasis, Nha Trang, Rai Rai Ken, Little D's Eatery

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

Funny, the pistachio ice cream kind of kept a chain of coincidence going. With it, I watched Kind Hearts and Coronets, which opens with a murderer awaiting execution giving his order for his last meal: "Just a cup of coffee and a slice of toast. Oh, and perhaps a few grapes. I hate to disappoint the newspaper-reading public, but it will be too early for the conventional "hearty breakfast". The appointment is at 8, is it not?" I'm not British enough for that kind of resignation, but it did get me thinking if it was really the end of the world, I might go for something with some practical value like a handful of certain species of mushrooms or cactus. But that might contraindicate my first thought which was Porterhouse steak, cucumber and avocado salad, sliced tomatoes garlic-lemon sauteed spinach, a bottle of Barolo. Kind of want a spicy Indian fruit salad but that seems out of place. Cappuccino, and it would be good to have a bottle of Woodford Reserve on hand.

It's been about a month and a half since I decided to give up beef, and since it feels right for many reasons, I'm sticking to it.  Next up on the Abstain Project: waste.  I thought about this one morning before work when I ordered an omelet from dreadful Europa Cafe.  I specified no bread, but they stuck in a foil-wrapped package of white toast anyway, soggy with salty butter.  Whenever I get the toast, it goes straight in the trash.  It's perfectly good food -- why is it so easy for me to toss it?  My parents would never have dreamed of doing such a thing.

I'll cop to it -- I am a terrible food waster.  If I can't decide between the Belgian waffles or the eggs en cocotte, I will order both and eat half of each.  At my favorite Indian lunch buffet, it's easy to load up on a second round and wind up pushing most of it around the plate after my stomach finally signals its fullness to the brain. 

Diet culture encourages people to leave half of their food on the plate -- what an insult to the world's poor!  Not only are we total fat asses, but we also force ourselves to waste our food because we can't be trusted to measure out reasonable portions.

Buying fresh produce from the Greenmarket gives me so much joy; throwing 80% of it out at the end of the week because I hadn't made time to cook was always just collateral damage before.  Even worse, I'm a food hoarder.  I'm sure I picked this up from my Pau, who buys fish sauce by the case and wouldn't dream of buying less than a 72-pack case of instant oatmeal at a time.

Of course, as a single girl with a small freezer, this means that if I impulse buy two loaves from Our Daily Bread as I did this week (I got my standard sunflower millet but couldn't resist the cranberry pecan), I will probably be eating toast with every meal.  Or if I buy a package of sausage, I will have to come up with creative ways to cook and serve it all week.  I'm also going to start to put the preserved and dried goods in my freezer, fridge and pantry to use -- the saffron rice, the dried Chinese black mushrooms, the canned Goya chickpeas, as long as botulism hasn't staged a coup, I will eat it.  I'll supplement with fresh stuff from the market, but I'm going to make every effort to buy only what I'm willing to eat.  I'm really unsure what I'm going to uncover in my cabinet.  But I like this challenge to my ingenuity.  (I may have to throw out that Mott's applesauce though.  That shit has high fructose corn syrup in it.  In applesauce!  The gall!  And parents feed it to their kids thinking it's good for them!)  

It's unrealistic for me to say I'm going to save sausage drippings or fennel fronds or anything like that -- I just don't have the storage space to save foods.  And I will not surrender my house to vermin.  But I will make an effort to use as much of the food as I can.

It'll be interesting to find out how much is too much.  Is a dozen eggs an unrealistic weekly purchase for one person who only has time to cook two dinners a week?  Am I willing to buy a whole head of celery when I only want to use two stalks for a tuna salad?  Where can I make substitutions and omissions?  What kind of reaction will a request for a smaller portion elicit in a culture where more is more?

Besides, this also allows me to keep eating pork for a while longer.  Truth be told, I'm still not ready for even a trial separation from the pig.
 

Cute boys doing crazy/beautiful things with their bodies:


Plus: Loved this article and video on juggler Vova Galchenko.