eat drink one woman

Name: Steven Kotok

Occupation: Magazine guy

Borough: Manhattan

Relationship status: Looking again . . .

What did you eat today?

Breakfast: Sheep's milk yogurt & bowl of cheerios
Lunch: Ma Po Tofu
Dinner: Leftover poached trout, pasta made with all my about-to-go-bad fresh herbs, yellow tomatoes, onions, garlic, and cream.

What do you never eat?

I eat everything but peanut butter

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

Chumus, schug [I have to admit that I had to look that one up. --Ed.], parmigiano-reggiano, butter, mustard, and about a dozen implusively purchased Mexican, Jamaican, and Asian condiments and sauces that I will never, ever use.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

Battered dutch oven-sized metal pot from a garage sale

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Sakagura, Szechuan Gourmet, Degustation, Eleven Madison Park, & (in a perfect world) street tacos in Mexico

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

Feast for my 100 closest friends:

Good champagne, scallop sashimi, sweet oysters, briny oysters
Wild mushroom salad with poached egg, heirloom tomatoes
Perfectly roasted halibut; "wing & mac snack" from Country Sweet, Rochester, NY; rare, charred porterhouse
Chopped liver, cheese plate (surprise me)
Bread pudding, New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream

Photo from the New York Times: Coffee, Tea or Meat?

It's amazing what you can learn when you sign up for a news alert.  I've been getting daily updates on beef media and I'm fascinated by a bovine brouhaha being stirred up in South Korea.

According to this Voice of America article, South Korea banned U.S. beef imports in 2003 after a U.S. cow died of sponge brain.  Just last month, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak promised our Prez Bush that he'd lift the ban, noting that the U.N. says the beef is safe and so does Bush.  (Bush, of course, showing conservative compassion as number one advocate for the health and safety of the South Koreans.)  Lee's peeps ain't havin' it, though; protests have ensued, with government officials being challenged to "test-eat" imported beef on TV (officials have refused, so far). VOA says last week, "a prominent South Korean TV documentary asserted Koreans possess a special gene that makes them more susceptible to mad cow disease."  Wha?

But apparently, we're talking big Won here -- according to this article, before the ban, South Korea was the third largest market for U.S. beef imports in the world, to the tune of $850 million.  Tiny South Korea!  Third largest!  That's a lot of BBQ.

If kalbi, bulgogi, bibimbap, and sul long tang weren't evidence enough that Koreans take their beef seriously, check this out: students held candlelight vigils in protest of lifting the beef ban.  Can you imagine U.S. teenagers getting that up in arms over, oh, I don't know, salmonella in their dorm food?

Satyagraha, the Met, 5/1

Hypno-tinkle scales
Newspaper golems lit up
Third act sleepytime.

Let's trip down the You Tube K-hole together with some songbirds I love:

1.  Teresa Teng -- woman had pipes.  My dad had this tape he used to always play in the car.  In an alternate universe, she could've been an Astrud Gilberto or Francoise Hardy for the 80s.  I have about 12 of her songs permanently etched in my brain, but I never knew what any of them were called or what they were about.

2. Nantida Kaewbuasai -- Thai pop singer who was big in the '80s.  I wanted to be her when I was a kid, beloved by middle-aged Thai ladies the world over for her sexless sweetness.  I never learned to do demure well, but I still love her voice.

3.  Opera bitches fighting over whose Queen of the Night is best.  My money's on Lucia Popp, but there's no video, only audio.

4.  Jem vs. Le Tigre: so, so right.


5.  Joni Mitchell ripping it up. Who sings like this anymore?

Name: Jeanne Park

Occupation: Freelance Editor

Borough: Psychobabylon, Manhattan

Relationship status: SAF

What did you eat today?

1 soy-chai vanilla latte from Grey Dog's Coffee
Sunnyside-up eggs & hash browns from Bread Tribeca
Tofu bibimbop from Do Hwa
1 oz. bag of Pirate's Booty
5 Tootsie rolls

What do you never eat?

Cilantro.

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

Mexican honey

What is your favorite kitchen item?

My rice cooker

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Ditch Plains, Do Hwa, Blue Ribbon Downing Street Bar, Kirara and Snack Taverna.  [I feel like Snack Taverna is one of those restaurants that flies under the radar, but it ought to be more popular because it's so consistently good. -- Ed.]

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

A white baguette from Poilâne
Caviar tartines from Volpetti
A slice from Joe's Pizza
My mother's mool nengmyun and bulgogi (cold noodles and barbecue beef)
The omakase from Blue Ribbon Sushi  (including the mercury-laden tuna)
The bucatini all'amatriciana from Babbo
A cheeseburger from In-N-Out
Gelato from San Crispino
Japanese pears
The views at Auberge du Soleil

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.