eat drink one woman

Dear Japanese inventors,

If you can make a soy sauce ramen that gradually turns into pork broth ramen*, can you please make tofu that turns into a pork chop?  Which will then give me more brain power and bigger boobs?  Just kidding about that last bit, though you're probably already working on it.

Thanks,
Crabby

via TokyoMango via my friend Kim via my magical Google reader

I signed up for a pork Google alert.  While the beef alert sent all kinds of alarmist bits about E. coli contamination and self-immolating beef protesters, the pork news tends to consist fawning love letters to the glories of delicious pork.  Pigs today, they're tastier!  Quì si magnifica il porco!  Death-defying pig roast experience and NONE FOR YOU!

Sure, I miss pork already.  Winnie invited me over for brunch this weekend:

WINNIE: You're not eating pork now, right?

ME: [sheepish] Well, yeah.

WINNIE: Good.  'Cause I was going to put chorizo in the grits --

ME: Oh, you could have put it in.  I would have eaten around it.

WINNIE: But you know I put pork in everything! I made sure there were at least three things you could eat.

And with that, I have become the apologetic special needs person at the dinner party.  SAD.  I suppose it means that it's my duty to host, so I can be in control of the menu.  I owe Winnie, like, 80 meals now.

****

Of the 3 dollar items profiled in the Robs' Cheap Eats list, only one (the classic slice) is non-red meat and okay for me to eat.  How can red meat be so cheap if it takes so many kcals to produce?

Red meat dishes that most intrigued me off their always comprehensive list:

• Ka moo nam dang at Dee Thai Restaurant in Sunnyside
  
• Isaan-style sour sausage at Poodam's in Astoria
• All of the ramens
  
• Grilled bratwurst from Radegast*
  

*I spent Saturday longingly ogling my friend's weisswurst at Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria.  (Yes, I know how that sounds.)  Anyway, when did that place become a totally homogenous, claustrophobic frat party?  It was all mirrored Ray-Bans, ironic t-shirts from Urban Outfitters and uni-boob tube dresses.  This big group of foreskins was actually fake double-dutch jump-roping.  Like two white guys pretending to swing ropes around.  But without ropes.  While cheering all of these people jumping through their non-existent ropes.  And you just know they've probably never seen double-dutch in real life and would never, ever have the balls to pull such a stunt after too many Coronas at Habana Outpost in Fort Greene.  This one chick was doing the awkward, I-need-you-to-look-at-me-because-my-daddy-didn't-love-me-enough, drunk-girl nasty dance up on one of the fake jump-rope slinger-dood's jock while he pushed her away.  She was one pirouette away from puking.  It was a hot mess.

Name: Matt Timms

Occupation: Chili Takedown President/Actor/Filmmaker

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: Single

What did you eat today?

Chili - I made a vat of chorizo and beef chili last week, flavored with bourbon and chocolate.

What do you never eat?

I eat everything, because my parents screwed that into my head when I was tiny. Which doesn't mean I ENJOY everything -- I've tried and not loved all those horrible foods you can find in the city: jellyfish, sheep brains, the bull penis at Kenka...These days I just try and avoid pizza because I want to get not fat.

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

A serious jug of Ice Tea! Those Lipton Cold Brew Ice Tea teabags are saving me this summer. I also keep an inexplicably large selection of condiments. My fridge only gets interesting at the start of the week, when I make a big batch of something brilliant.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

My friend Doug gave me an 8" Japanese Shun knife for being his Best Man. I'm not an equipment snob because I can't afford to be. But I love this knife bad!

Where do you eat out most frequently?

The restaurants I keep coming back to are Minca, Mama's and Tangra Masala in Flushing. Oo and also Pedro's in DUMBO, which has my favorite Cuban Sandwich.

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

Who can eat at a time like this? I'd be making phonecalls!

Wait, here we go --

Appetizer: a sliced roasted Japanese eggplant, a small steak tartare and a Manhattan

Entrée: Chili cooked with Molasses and Brown Sugar, good bottle of Bordeaux

Dessert: Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, a box of mochi and another Manhattan

Matt is hosting the Chili Takedown on August 10 at Union Pool in Williamsburg.

Crikey, this is frightening.  Our economy seems like such a gullible, brittle-boned old lady right now.  After reading my latest installment of The Omnivore's Dilemma and articles like these, I'm beginning to cast a leery eye on all corn.  I know it's not the bi-color sweet corn's fault that the catfish farms are going out of business, but still -- knowing that I'm only adding to the corn isotopes in my body doesn't make me feel better about the less processable members of the species.

If this were a horror film, the downfall of the American economy could be karmic retribution, some manifestation of maize vengeance brought down by patient Native American spirits.

Anyway, I'm thrilled to report two things:

So much for the waste leg of the Abstain Project.  My refrigerator conked out on me sometime between Friday and last night. I had to leave the house at 8:30am and didn't get home til about 6pm; by that time, much of my food was beyond saving.  That pound of ground pork I bought from Flying Pigs yesterday?  Rank.  All of those frozen berries I'd been saving for pies?  Soupy.  The swiss chard I finally got around to cooking on Friday?  Turning.  Real funny, Murphy, you got me good.



Luckily, I had enough of that butter around to make a very rudimentary cobbler with my fruit, though the butter was a little too soft to work with.  I cooked up the sausage and ate as much of it as I could.  In the meantime, I'm refraining from opening up the fridge so that my new wheel of Shushan Snow and the eggs stand a chance of surviving til breakfast tomorrow morning.

It's funny, I'd been saying to myself, okay, I'm just going to cut pork out when I finally finish that hunk of frozen sausage in the freezer.  Now that that's toast, I think it's time to cut red meat altogether.  Thanks for the sign, Universe.

Name: Sasha Davies

Occupation: I sling cheese at a small shop and also do sales for a specialty cheese paper company.

Borough: No borough anymore. I moved to Portland, OR two months ago.

Relationship status: Married.

What did you eat today?

Breakfast- Homemade yogurt & granola, coffee. Lunch: Peanut butter and jelly sandwich (strawberry preserves), hazelnuts, blueberries, prosciutto di parma. Dinner: egg-cheese-guacamole tostada, strawberry ice cream with blueberries.

What do you never eat?

Wet cake, oysters, cooked carrots. [There's a definite throughline there.  I don't know what it is, but it's there. --Ed.]

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

Cheese, peanut butter and butter.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

I think you mean item as in tool... I would have to say my oval French oven by Le Creuset. I use it for braising and roasting, soups, and making preserves. It is the best thing to cross my stovetop since I learned to use it.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

In NYC it was Marlow & Sons (partly b/c I worked there but also it's just so good).
Here in Portland it is this rad little taqueria called Por que no? I think I could eat there every single day.

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

Oh geez. If I had to pick right now I would want perfect bread with cultured butter, a fava bean salad with shaved pecorino and some roasted hazelnuts followed by spaetzle and pork from Tamarack Hollow Farm (best pork ever) [and available at the Union Square Greenmarket --Ed.] combined in some perfect way and then salted caramel ice cream... then there would need to be wine, espresso, and probably some cheese from a few of my favorite cheesemakers- Meadow Creek Dairy, Jasper Hill, Twig Farm [whose website has an awesome favicon, for you web nerdz --Ed.], 3 Corner Field Farm [also available at the Union Square Greenmarket, people.  --Ed.]. And I would definitely have sparkling water too.

Sasha may not physically live in New York anymore, but the fact that she helped put together the Unfancy Food Show for us makes her a New Yorker in my eyes.  She and her husband are also the wizards behind Cheese by Hand, an incredible multimedia documentary about artisanal cheesemaking in America.

Bruni has a new category called "That Costs WHAT?!?", which is ripe coming from someone who once said that Masa...oh, fuck it, who cares?  If you're reading my blog, I'm pretty sure you're not the kind of person who can blow $93 on lunch for two.  Who gives a shit about a $7 tea when you've just spent $36 on soft-shell crabs at a working lunch paid for by your company?  Seriously, it's like having to listen to Muffy Madison Ave. complain about the farmer who's charging $7 for a quart of strawberries at the Greenmarket when you know she drops 10x that much on daddy's credit card every month to depilate her chocha.

Or it's like this:

Okay, so we had to change our band name.  There's some cover band in New Jersey and some emo high school kids in L.A. who've already laid claim to the name Peas & Carrots.  We really don't want to be mistaken for either one, so we had to come up with something different.

So we are now calling ourselves The Solitary Cyclist.  We even got the .com, which I've just squatted and haven't done anything to yet, so don't bother visiting for now.  I hope you like The Solitary Cyclist, because JL and I quite like it, so that's the end of the band name debate.

And, more exciting, we have our first (pretty rough) demo up at our new Myspace page: www.myspace.com/thesolitarycyclist.  Feel free to download it and own it.  It's pretty representative of what our music sounds like, though the drums, to be provided by the awesome Chris Deaner, will be a lot more human. Hopefully we'll be able to record a couple more demos by next week. Proper, non-Garage Band recordings forthcoming, probably after the gig.  We've got about 10 songs for the set now; two of them are covers, which we'll probably phase out as we write more songs.

Confession: So truth be told, I've been failing at abstaining from waste.  I don't know how people do it.  I don't know how Cathy manages to not eat out.  You know, if I buy one bunch of cilantro, I've got to put cilantro in, like, five dishes to use up a whole bunch.  And I don't have time to cook five dishes in a week. 

I've been really trying hard -- my freezer is stuffed to the brim with prepped food.  I buy one loaf of bread and slice and freeze half of it.  I've got a batch of blueberry muffins in the freezer that are almost finished.  The second the strawberries start turning, I hull them and freeze them.  I spent the morning watching Wimbledon and pitting sour cherries for the cobbler I probably won't want to make until September.  I even froze the apricots and berries leftover from our pitcher of picnic sangria; not sure what to do with them yet, but at the very least I can probably make some kind of dessert sauce or frozen cocktail with it.

But to truly not waste the fresh ingredients I love to buy, I'd have to come home and cook every day, which would mean sacrificing some of my other activities.  Either that or I could just eat slices and packets of prepared food everyday -- but those come with lots of packaging waste.

I want to be a more responsible consumer, but it's really hard to manage ingredient proportions when you are
A.) single and not that hungry
B.) like to cook dishes that require more than 3 pantry ingredients
and
C.) only have time to cook two or three times a week. 

Here's what I've found I shouldn't really buy:

• Herbs -- do I have to live without herbs because I can't use them up in time?  I know I should make pesto with that basil, but I don't really like pesto.  And it makes such a mess.  I lack the energy to cook all evening and clean all night.  And cilantro -- if I ate Southeast Asian food and Mexican food every meal, I might be able to use a whole bunch in a week. 
  
• Lettuces -- I can manage longer shelf-life cooking greens much better than I can manage salad greens.  In fact, I've got a bunch of swiss chard in the crisper that's been guilt-tripping me for two weeks now.
  
• Berries -- I have a serious berry problem.  I can't resist buying them.  But my freezer is already so packed with berries that I'll probably be making jam til October.  And when the peaches come in, forget about it, I probably won't be able to resist those, either.
  

I think the solution is to just live on a diet of toast, cheese, raw fruit and radishes, with the occasional egg tossed in for protein and sauteed dark leafy greens for vitamins a few times a week.  It actually doesn't sound that bad in this kind of weather.  But it is a little sad.  The cornucopia hedonist in me would like to throw out this virtuous save-the-earth conscience and just enjoy the summer's bounty at the expense of a little food waste.  The minimalist in me thinks wanting anything beyond canned sardines on toast is selfish.

I think I need to resist impulse shopping a little better.  This leg of the Abstain Project feels a little joyless.

So the blog's been moving sluggishly, right?  I'm sorry about that.  I've been busy with a new music project with my buddy John Lindaman.  The band's called Peas & Carrots The Solitary Cyclist, it's a melodic exploration of the duet (read: no Kaoss pad) and we're having our WORLD PREMIERE next month!

It's a big deal for me, really.  I've been a side man for about seven years now, mostly singing backup for a bunch of really awesome people including Cibo Matto, Miho Hatori, Yuka Honda, David Byrne, Charming Hostess, Steve Earle, Petra Haden, +/- and lots of other bands you may or may not know.  This is the first time I'm fronting a band with songs I've helped write, and I'm really excited.

We've got our first gig at The Stone -- Tuesday, August 12, 8pm.  August is being curated by the inimitable Trevor Dunn, who basically had to nudge me into committing to do a set.  Please mark your calendar!  We start our set at 8:15, we're done by 9:15, you can get home in time to watch whatever you DVR on Tuesdays.  I would love to see you there.

A warning -- there will be no drinks, no dancing, no pinball machines.  From The Stone's website:

"The Stone is a not-for-profit performance space dedicated to the
EXPERIMENTAL and AVANT-GARDE...
There are no refreshments or merchandise at The Stone. Only music."

Of course, we are probably going to play the straightest music that room has ever heard.  No bowed dissonance, no laptops, no found object feedback.  It's gonna be harmony in thirds and hand claps and a whole lotta major 7 chords. Which is kind of punk rock if you think about it.

8/12
8pm, The Stone
Ave. C @ 2nd St.
$5
Peas & Carrots The Solitary Cyclist
A low-decibel, melodic pop exploration of the duet. Tunes by John Lindaman (True Love Always) and Ganda Suthivarakom (Smokey and Miho). Featuring Chris Deaner (+/-) and Madelyn Burgess (Hula).

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!

****
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.

----
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.

Name: Francis Carlow
     
Occupation:  I work for an art gallery  

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: Married

What did you eat today?

Breakfast was a black coffee, sunflower and flax sourdough toast with damson jam and scrambled eggs.  Lunch was a falafel sandwich from Taim in the west village with pomegranate tea.  Dinner was homemade catfish tacos, fresh salsa, guacamole and a few of bottles of Pacifico and a chocolate birthday cake.

What do you never eat?

Meat

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

Marmite and Dijon mustard.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

I used to chop garlic but now I use a garlic press - magic!

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Dumont, Bottino take out, Hasaki, Marlow and Sons and Kum Gang San in Queens.

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

A fresh crab open sandwich from the Point Bar in Caherciveen and a cold pint of Guinness.

5/21, Wednesday morning, 9 am



San Franciscans love their pastries.  They're everywhere.  On any given S.F. corner, you can exhale pot smoke in any direction and hotbox a fancy pastry shop.

On my last morning, we hit up La Boulange de Hayes, a kind of west coast Le Pain Quotidien.  The darkly caramelized cannelés de Bordeaux are a little too boozy for me at this hour, but the almond croissant is making me happy (though I think I prefer the buttery, almond paste-overstuffed chocolate almond croissant from Mission Beach Cafe).  My favorite thing at La Boulange is the free condiment station where you can load up on cornichons from a little glass jar.  Like all-you-can-eat.  Like my inner suburban immigrant is doing a happy dance in the frozen party snacks sample aisle at Costco on a Saturday afternoon.  Also, the tuna nicoise sandwich and herb dusted potato chips I pick up for the plane trip are perfectly portable and delicious.

It's been fun, but I leave S.F. knowing that it's not my town.  Not anymore.  There was a time when I thought I'd take root there.  All the buttery pastries and all the produce, all the fragrant flora and oversexed fauna, they're still fun to enjoy as a tourist.  It's weird, I've been in New York for nine years now.  We may not be able to grow Meyer lemons or avocado trees in my apartment; I still wish we had a dishwasher and a garbage disposal; I want to roll out of bed and have a yoga studio across the street instead of a White Castle; but NYC's home for me now, and I'm looking forward to getting back.

I'm so glad that Dunkin' Donuts decided to pull the ads showing that jihad lover Rachael Ray.  But why stop the boycott there?  There are so many unpatriotic, treasonous coffees on the market right now.  Here's a list of java you should avoid unless you want the CIA to know you love terrorists too.










1. Timothy's -- You know those disposable brew-per-cup coffees you like to down before meetings at work?  Those little shots of ground coffee are made by a Canadian company, and you know what Canadians are -- NOT American. Just like terrorists are NOT American.  Therefore Canadians = Terrorists.  Remember, we need to protect our borders from people who put gravy and cheese curds on Freedom fries.



2.  Peet's -- Peet's got its start in Berkeley, CA, aka the Hellmouth.  That's where stoners send their drug-retarded offspring to become Godless Sufjan Stevens-enthusiasts and  The Nation-reading fornicators.  I hope I get to stand by St. Peter when he informs them that there is no affirmative action in heaven.



3. Chock full o' Nuts -- Okay, maybe not terrorist, but obvs gay.










--

...And the one coffee that will let the terrorists know that they can't take away our freedom, democracy, or faith:

Wear your flag pin and only buy your iced coffee from Starbucks.  "Star" like fifty stars in the flag and "bucks" like free market means TERRORISTS KEEP OUT.

God bless America.

5/18, Sunday, 11:00 am

The Lodge's restaurant is ill-equipped to handle the 30-person brunch my cousin and his wife have arranged for the morning after, but it's fun to be seated at a long table with our big Thai family and Alanna's big Irish family. 

After brunch, Sirion and Alex drive me back to Julie's.  We pass the dregs of the Bay to Breakers run, which is basically a cross between a frat kegger, the gay pride parade, a group acid trip, a middle-aged amateur porno without the sex, and a 12K run.  Up by the Marina, we drive by a hot twink rocking an ensemble of short white tennis shorts (through which his American Apparel tighty-fluorescent-greenies are visible), a popped-collar white polo, mirrored aviators, striped headband and tennis racket.  We're not sure if he's for real or if he's in costume.  I hope he's for real.

Back at Julie's, we grill up a feast -- marinated chicken, carne asada (none for me), big gamy steaks of goat, Italian sausages and more.

 

My contribution: a grated carrot salad with plum tomatoes, garlic, sesame oil, and Meyer lemon juice.  (I put those Meyer lemons in EVERYTHING.)  I go overboard on just about everything, but it's the radioactive Cool Whip cake that puts a fork in me.  I ask for a cup of tea while everyone around me gets trashed.  An old friend shows up while tripping on mushrooms.  By himself.  Ladies are making out on the coat pile in the bedroom, nook nook is happening in the laundry room downstairs, flirtations turn into out and out propositions, bi-, gay, and straight sexual intrigue abounds.  But not for me.  I'm hiding out at the top of the stairs, nursing my mug of green jasmine tea and thinking, "Doesn't anybody have to work tomorrow?  It's a Sunday night!"  I am such a grandma.

We end the night closing out The Mint, where Grandma pulls it together enough to kick out a little 2 am "Welcome to the Jungle" before going back chez Julie and passing out on the couch.

5/19, Monday

Julie and I have a most glorious hangover day of yoga and food shopping.  We invite my friends Justin and Jim for dinner, where I cook a bunch of my standards.  We gab at the kitchen table over way too much food.  I keep thinking giddily that this is how I should be living my life every day.  The best part of the meal is dessert -- two ice creams from the Bi-Rite Creamery, salted caramel and orange cardamom.  Very adult flavors.  Be jealous, that shit is CRAZY delicious.  The ice cream is a little airier than gelato or frozen custard.  The orange cardamom is totally for me -- spicy and sunny, yet cold and creamy.  It will have to be another obligatory stop the next time I'm in town.

5/20, Tuesday
We hit a 9 am yoga class being taught by Jehfree Spirit.  His drag name is Freetah B.  I didn't even need to make that up. 

For lunch, we head to the Ferry Plaza market.  Stone fruit and berries have already come in for California, and I'm reveling in the blush-fleshed peaches, fleshy brook cherries, and fragrant blueberries. 



The dried fruit selection is unbelievable -- pluots, tangy apricots or sweet apricots, moist golden raisins the size of june bugs, Asian pear rings, and pretty much anything else you can think of. 

The Ferry Plaza market is like foodie yuppie heaven.  Seriously, if someone locked me up in there overnight, my liver would be foie gras by morning.  Acme Bread, Stonehouse Olive Oil, pastries, meats and more -- it's like Dean and Deluca on steroids.  I love foods that taste like expensive perfume because they make me feel like a lady; these Miette rose geranium macarons are like the culinary incarnation of Nancy Mitford in two crisp-cloudy bites.
 


I especially love the bombolonis we get from the Italian shop.  They make me want to bomboloni someone, or bomboloni all over their bomboloni.  They're round fried doughnuts the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's fist, dusted with granulated sugar and piped til they're ready to burst with nutella, chocolate, seedless raspberry jam, or our favorite, bombolonidacious golden pastry cream.  You can't see, but a single tear just rolled down my cheek.  If that isn't enough, the bomboloni are being sold by an unbelievably adorable gaysian Gumby with a five inch pompadour and clear braces.



We've missed breakfast at Boulette's Larder, but we sit down for one of the most fortifying, nourishing, lively lunches I've had in a long time -- verdant Japanese turnip soup sprinkled with fried giblet bits, a rich sardine salad with endive, dill and feta, and a poached chicken salad with barberries, pistachios, za'atar spices, tahini, and the most tender bloomsday spinach ever, the arrowhead leaves impossibly sweet.  Most of the ingredients are local; low prices keep it from being precious.  Why aren't sardines on the menu more often?  I will order them whenever I see them.  You can't see, but I am totally pumping my fist and engaging my mulabanda while taking these pictures.





After an easy, digestive walk up Market St., we get back to Julie's house and noodle around on the guitar and piano, singing Carpenters tunes, nipping at wine, cheese, and our fruit booty from the market.  For dinner, we make a Mexican feast, mostly using leftovers from the previous two nights.  I can't remember the last time I ate so well -- a boatload of homemade guac, cumin-scented black beans, fresh, thick tortillas from the Mexicatessen, grilled chicken stir-fried with broccoli raab and leftover red peppers, store-bought salsa fresca spruced up with fresh habanero, and an incredible tart slaw Brent made by mixing my fresh meyer lemon relish with slivered green cabbage -- perfect in a taco with the leftover pan-fried salmon.  Mostly leftovers, but still, one of my favorite meals of the whole trip.  It's kind of a revelation.  This is how I want to be eating, every day -- surrounded by friends, at home, using good, honest ingredients and letting nothing go to waste.  As a California ex-pat, I used to dream about Bay Area burritos all the time, but sometimes I forget that I'm perfectly capable of making Cali-style Mexican food exactly suited to my taste.

to be continued...

5/17, Saturday -- Wedding Day

My cousin Sirion and her boyfriend Alex pick me up in a sunburnt orange compact car.  (Is that the teal of the aughts?)  We snake down Divisadero to Lombard St., which takes us straight to the Golden Gate Bridge.  The wispy fog looks like it's been piped in for a movie set.   It's picturesque and romantic without obstructing drivers' sightlines. 

ALEX: It looks like they've got a fog machine going, doesn't it?



Tiburon is one of those tiny Marin county towns on the other side of the Golden Gate.  Spiny sailboats are moored along every dock.  Multi-million dollar homes cling to the verdant cliffs against a backdrop of blue, blue ocean.  It makes me think of the Hamptons -- the few clothing boutiques mainly sell Amalfi-ready sandals and gauzy cover-ups in pastels and whites, and oysters on the half-shell are easier to pick up than a can of hairspray.



My whole family is staying at the Lodge at Tiburon.  I find that I have become the kind of guest that must find something to complain about.  I get a room for my parents and a room for myself -- can I switch the room on the second floor for one with two queens instead of one king?  Can I switch the room on the ground floor for security reasons and because it smells strongly of chlorine from the pool it's situated by?  Can I get a room with a bathtub instead of just a shower?  Why don't the windows have screens?  I don't really give a shit about amenities, I just don't like thinking that somebody else might have been given something better.

 

But it's great to be with my family, whom I adore.  I love the way my very private cousin  Sakorn endures being the center of attention, and the way his wife's eyes tear up as he reads his vows, which are far more tender than we might have expected.  I love Sirion's speech, which reveals her intimate knowledge of her brother, but also how much his wife Alanna will be able to teach us about Sakorn's character.  I love the way my cousin's baby Sadie lights up when she sees my Mae, her bonus grandma, and the way she stretches her soft little arms up to be held.



The festivities are over in a flash, but in a moment, our family has grown by one.  Alanna has tied her fate to his, thus mooring her life to ours.  The details of the day have already faded a bit, but I'm left with the muscle memory that my heart is full.



To be continued...

"It can't be all that pretty,
when all of New York City misses you."

--The Magnetic Fields

5/16, Friday night, 11pm

It kills me that I've missed the opportunity to have dinner tonight because of a plane snafu.  We head to Home, down the block from the house I'm staying in.  It's close to midnight, and our first choice for casual eats, Chow, is already closed.  I'm staying with Julie, my dear friend of 18 years.  I tell her and her boyfriend Brent that I've given up beef, which seems to really throw them for a loop.  We nosh on mac n' cheese and a veggie burger.   The night air is uncharacteristically balmy, thick with the musk of night-blooming jasmine.  A primary-colored Market streetcar rolls by slowly, easily, its antennae sliding knowingly along the tangle of overhead cables.

5/17, Saturday morning, 7:30 am

JULIE: Gandhi, are you awake yet?

I pull my eye mask off and it takes a second to adjust to the golden sunshine streaming into the room.  My room is a little mug and the light just pours and pours into it.  I'm bathing in it.  Julie is on an astroturf-covered deck right below my window, squinting up at me and stretching her slender arms and legs.  Below the deck, a prolific garden with some of the most ecstatic looking greenery I've seen in a long time.



I know how those plants feel.  That's how I feel.

The plum tree next door drapes fruit-laden branches over the fence in a neighborly way. 


Apple trees and blueberry bushes promise bounty in a matter of weeks. 


Best of all, a squat Meyer lemon tree in a shady corner perfumes the air with its heady gardenia-citrus smell, its twiggy stems burdened with tender, golden lemons.


This is the dream I can't realize in New York, the fantasy of a little fruity Eden in my backyard, of citrus trees, avocado trees, stone fruit trees generously brimming with edible gifts.  It's breaking my heart.

5/17, Saturday morning, 7:50 am

We head down for my obligatory S.F. visit to Tartine at 18th and Guerrero in the Mission.  The doors haven't opened yet, and the line goes down the block, 15 deep. 



Jules and I don our sunglasses and grab a side table to enjoy a sticky orange and cinnamon scented morning bun, a flaky rectangular scone encrusted in fat sugar crystals that is at once light and dense, a cup of eggy, syrupy bread pudding with peaches and blueberries, and a cappuccino in a perfect bistro cup the color of almond skin.



Julie's housemate Carlos rides up with his friend Maurice, leaning their bikes up against a telephone pole.  They've already biked through Golden Gate Park, down to the beach where gray cloud creep persuaded them to return to the inner halo of the Mission's sunshine.

We stroll back to the house, past the tennis courts in Dolores Park, past creamy stucco churches.  I'm full.  It's quiet and warm.  Is this really what life could be like?

To be continued...