Category: Gnews

Sasha Davies and Michael Claypool are holding a fundraiser at Vintage New York on April 25 from 6:30-8:30 pm for their fascinating project, a radio documentary of visits to 40 cheesemakers across the U.S.  [Disclosure: Sasha is a friend of a friend.  Our mutual friend designed the cool flyer.]  Details for their fundraising event and more information about the project can be found on their website, www.cheesebyhand.com. 

Why should you fork over $75 to these people so they can road trip across the nation and gorge on milky products while you're chained to your cubicle?  Because:
A.) You get hors d'oeuvres from Blue Hill, Mas, and the the Tasting Room
B.) You get free cheese and wine
C.) You haven't come up with an idea this good yet; when you do, and you need to raise some money for your dream, you better hope this world is made of more than just jealous hater scrooges.  Karma's a bitch.

Appropriately, it's gonna rain today.  Okay, maybe it's not gonna rain.  Happy Thai New Year anyway.  The Thai temple in Queens is gonna have lots of free food on Sunday.  No conversion necessary.

The problem with joining this guy's refried crusade is that we got a Taco Smell in Sunset Park and I don't want it.

The last time I ate Taco Smell was from a drive-thru in Baltimore after a gig.  (No 24 hour Korean joints in Charm City.)  I was discussing (over a 7-layer burrito) with a vegan (bean burrito sin queso) the merits of the deliciously salty, tart mild sauce.  And then I was hungry again 15 minutes after I finished my burrito. 

Some Brooklyn Taco Smell/Dunkin Donuts combos are open 24 hours, but only drive thru really late.  I've been told that in the madrugada hours, you can sometimes find drunk folk standing on line between cars, leaning down to place their orders into the squawk box.  And no, I don't know this from personal experience.

Gridskipper reports on Chinese-Jamaican food at De Bamboo Express (awesome name) on Flatbush Ave.  The Chinese also sowed their wild rice in Trinidad and Tobago, as evidenced in the hilarious Mighty Terror calypso song, "Chinese Children":

Well, I can't make no child with their eyes so chinky

Meself and meh girl black, we ain't no Chinee

So it is very plain that you can see,

Some Chinese putting milk in meh coffee

Available on the genius album Pan Poetry.

Also on the record is a song called "Yankee Woman Ain't Cooking Sweet", an ode to a yankee girl in New York City who needs to wash her stew pork, which is apparently "tough like rubber, and dry like cork/And so much of hog hair on top the thing."  Um, ew.

• The Shopsin family is bringing the grapefruit julius to Brooklyn.  I probably still won't eat there, but I do kind of like the idea of West Villagers getting their panties in a bunch about it. 
  
• Massachussetts is not so sure about that dirty water anymore.
• Moms need help making dinners like cheesy chicken casserole and Salisbury steak.  Because paying someone to do all the work and taking all the credit is the American dream.
• You know I love me some Jeffrey Steingarten, but isn't it a little weird that he uses his monthly food column in Vogue this month for a phoned-in profile of Iron Chef co-star Morimoto and his new eponymous restaurant?  And that the article also mentions another New York-based Iron Chef, Mario Batali and his new behemoth Del Posto?  And it's actually the less-interesting chef profile in the magazine to boot (it's beaten out by a wardrobe heavy look at Suzanne Goin of Lucques). 
• Keith "Best Garlic Ever" Stewart of the Union Square Greenmarket has a new book.  In it, he talks about leaving corporate New York and starting his organic farm in his mid-40s.  Likely to dredge up self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy among underachieving yippie sellouts all over the city.

Did you know that you can get Adelaide pie floaters (an Aussie meat pie floating in pea soup, often topped with toe-mah-toe sauce) in our beautiful city?  A bargain at $7 considering how much you save on airfare.  The Tuck Shop on 1st St. makes their own Aussie meat pies as well as chook (chicken) pies, dimmies, sangers, and all kinds of eats with thoroughly charming names.  They even have Cooper's Ale, which the beer drinkers on my trip were all raving about.  Why do I bother leaving town at all?

The Tuck Shop
68 E. 1st St. between 1st & 2nd Aves.

1.  You mothers with your strollers and your delicate little babies -- WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?  Do you want your child to lose a limb or two while you dilly dally in the dried fruits and nuts aisle?  New Yorkers with shopping carts and credit cards are not creatures to be toyed with, especially when they're fighting each other for the last bag of avocados.  Do us all a favor and leave your babies at home.  At least until the initial crush is over.
2.  Trader Joe's -- WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?  You have obviously underestimated New Yorkers' rabid desire for bargain priced hippie food.  Didn't you send any recon to Whole Foods?  And their shit is twice the price.  You see how today's line wrapped around the entire store and then snaked through the produce section?  The line will not always be that way.  It will only be that way during lunchtime (11:30-2:30), after work (4:30-closing), and all day Saturday and Sunday.  Especially Sunday. 
3.  I flew home on Wednesday night, completely starving, and found an open bag of Trader Joe's dark chocolate covered pretzels.  Doug claims he didn't buy them, houseguest Justin claims he didn't buy them, and I certainly haven't been near a Trader Joe's in years (until today).  So we finished the bag off and still haven't figured out where it came from.  Was this some kind of guerrilla marketing tactic?  Some hippie temptress fairy leaving innocuous opened bags of Trader Joe's wares in people's pantries?  And did I really go to Trader Joe's today just to get more dark chocolate covered pretzels?  (I think I got the last bag.)
4.  A pound of penne pasta is 69 cents.  A large can of plum tomatoes is 99 cents.  A bottle of balsamic vinegar is $1.69.  Six english muffins are $1.49.  The grand total for my groceries on this initial outing was $30 -- I would have easily spent $60 on the same stuff from Whole Foods. 
5.  Yes the store is small but the variety offered is impressive. 
6.  The fish is all frozen, but that means it may make it all the way to Sunset Park intact. 
7.  The line was all the way around the store but we only waited about 20 minutes from the end of the line to the end of the transaction. 
8.  If none of this is exciting to you, I'm glad.  That means more room for me in the aisles.
9.  Wine store not open yet.  Does Two Buck Chuck come in a sparkling variety?
10.  Trader Joe's, please open in Brooklyn.  Preferably in Sunset Park.  Thank you, I love you, I miss you already.

Mull the Mulligatawny no more.  Muckraked has procured a label from one of the Soup Nazi's North Jersey factory plastic vats and posted it for your perusing pleasure.  Mango, turnip greens, eggplant, almonds, pistachios, raisins, pomegranate juice, but not a lentil in the place.  Where can I try this soup?

...when you can eat a Krispy Kreme burger with cheddar and bacon?

Who am I kidding, I would totally try one of those. 

Thanks for the link, Don Gray!

• The FDA is reviewing the practice of using carbon monoxide to preserve meat pigment, a practice they approved back in 2002.  Oh yeah, let's find out if bombing meat with poison gas is bad AFTER the American people have been eating the results for four years. 

• Nina Lalli frenches dead cows all over NYC. Might I suggest lengua tacos at Tacos Matamoros...
• ...now that Matamoros Puebla in Williamsburg is meeting its Maker.

• And you can't make this shit up -- a Palestinian brewery is about to launch a non-alcoholic beer called Hamas.  Let me break that up for you -- A Palestinian brewery.  Is about to launch a non-alcoholic beer.  Called HAMAS.  It's only a matter of time before we get kosher bacon.