Category: Ruminations

Went to eat at Butter on Wednesday, hosted by my friend Wirt who cooks in Alex Guarnaschelli's kitchen. Because we all went with Wirt, we got extra TLC and a few bonus nibbles from the kitchen, so this is not going to be a review.

Disclaimer aside, if you're interested, here's what I have to say about it. People think of Butter first and foremost as a celeb hive. They don't discourage this reputation -- visit the a href="http://www.butterrestaurant.com/">Butter website and the first thing you see is a video of Paris Hilton on Letterman talking about how it's her favorite place to eat. An accolade like this might otherwise turn me against a place since:
1.) Where the celebs go, the lame wannabes follow
and
2.) I wouldn't ask a Mormon how to make a martini, so why should I take restaurant advice from someone who, clearly, doesn't eat?

But Wirt tells some great celeb stories, one of which is that Paris Hilton:
1.) Always brings flowers for the chef when she comes in.
2.) Couldn't be more gracious to the staff
and
3.) She eats. Yes, she really eats! And she tips really well.

And I believe him. It's plausible, don't you think? Yes, she courts attention, but that doesn't mean I should dismiss her as substance-less, right?

And so, here we are at Butter, a place with serious food that sometimes gets lost in the Page 6 shuffle. Alex Guarnaschelli is a true Greenmarket fanatic. I saw her there days after the birth of her daughter, Ava, chatting up her farmer friends and swooning over scallions. Butter's food reflects that passion -- a tower of onion rings is made from the Paffenroths' sweet Kelsae onions; panko-doused crispy oysters are nestled on a dill-fragrant tartar sauce and showered with edible purple flowers; sweet late summer fennel is roasted and transformed into a nourishing soup. I loved the cup of velvety watercress soup with its tiny truffled brie sandwich -- so dainty and pinky-in-the-air. My favorite entree was probably the slow-cooked pompano, enrobed in creamy beurre blanc atop a bed of Greenmarket sweet corn and greens -- light yet rich, it's the perfect transition dish between summer and fall.

And what a lovely room. Curved, lofty arches with woodgrain wallpaper are stacked horizontally against a lightbox image of a birch forest. Plush booths line the walls under low lights, punctuated by massive bunches of spindly, hunched branches. The room recesses endlessly -- it's like the Holland Tunnel under an enchantment spell by Galadriel. We were there on a Wednesday and the room wasn't loud -- in fact, all of the tables seemed to have that rare air of privacy that can be so hard to find in New York. It would be a great date restaurant.

Prices aren't insane (apps are about 16, entrees about 28), and portions are actually quite generous. I'm serious. And if you've got room at the end of the meal, get the raspberry beignets dipped in creme anglaise -- puffy little sugar-coated rounds with seedless raspberry coulis, they're what jelly doughnuts better be like in heaven. For your sake, I hope the dessert menu hasn't changed by the time you read this.

Butter
415 Lafayette St. at Astor
6 to Astor Pl.
(212) 253-2828

I'm from California, and I am still easily impressed by some of New York's wonders. Take fall, for example. It came on Friday, maybe Saturday -- snap! Just like that. Like somebody just flipped the fall switch. Like we were on a crowded subway train, and as we pulled into the station, fall just snatched summer's still warm seat from right under our noses. And I went from wishing the berries, peaches and tomatoes could last 4ever to remembering, hey, you know, I miss the taste of hot coffee. And cinnamon sugar. And won't that walk be nice tomorrow?

Tonight, I made a late dinner of a cold roasted sweet potato. I ate it on the subway on the ride home, its skin and flesh the colors of New England autumn and the D train. I enjoy these kinds of selfish/monastic meals most in the fall. I'm not in a rush to go from summer's sensual bounty to winter's sluggish fat padding. I'm just taking a break and fortifying myself for the long haul, thank you very much.

Next time you visit a friend with a baby, ask them to save you some baby food jars. They're the perfect size for taking homemade vinaigrette to work. Just toss your ingredients in and shake them up when you're ready for lunch. The twist top means no spills. Best of all, smells don't carry over in glass, so I can make basil ginger soy dressing today (pictured here) and mix up a lime mint honey vinaigrette tomorrow.

Sorry for the aside, folks, it's about to get geeky up in here. Come back tomorrow if you just want to hear about the food.

I was having a really lovely Saturday afternoon yesterday, so I decided to try and upload Movable Type 4.0, release candidate 4. I've been wanting to solve the spam problem I've had for months. Big mistake. 12 hours later, at 3:30 in the morning, thank goodness I had the sense to reboot my database. Complete disaster.

Much of the problem was my human error, I'm sure. I felt sympathy for the befuddled generation who couldn't figure out how to program a VCR. There are whipper snappers out there who could out-upload me in a second, I'm sure. True, the migration from Typepad to Movable Type was accomplished only with much hand-holding by my buddy Adam. But whatevs, I've been running this website for over three years now, surely I could handle a simple upgrade! But no, I got smacked down by the technology.

To anyone who's curious, MT 4.0 Release 4 beta LOOKS like a fine tool.

*The interface is a little blocky and cold, which I don't mind. <

*Comment clean-up seems much faster -- you can choose to display 100 comments at a time. There is apparently a CAPTCHA to reduce spam, which I couldn't find in my republishings of the site.

*I liked the rich text editor, which I would much prefer to the hand-coding labor I do on my current iteration of MT 3.2.

*MT 4.0 beta's rc from 6/27/07 seemed to upload to my server in a snap but was a little buggy, so I upgraded to rc4 and my site crashed.

*I liked the added option of allowing tags, keyword editing, excerpts because I like the science of SEO. I wouldn't necessarily use them, but I like that they're an option.

And really, I read the documentation (well, I read it after I crashed my website), but in one part, it says to upload the MT folder into a cgi-bin folder, and in another, it says it should live on the root. And I would recommend a fresh start upload instead of an overwrite because otherwise, you'll have to go through and clean out all your plug-ins, which may prevent your database from getting configured. You'll have to re-upload all your plug-ins, but I don't actually use very many so it's not a problem with me. (Also, I think Blogroll doesn't work in MT 4 yet.)

I'm just going to wait til the bugs are fixed and the release is stable and approved by many before I shepherd everything over. The release candidate from June 27 didn't crash the site, but the current release candidate did. For the curious: I think it's the templates. I'd have to rebuild all my templates from scratch because MT 4.0 has a new system of templating which you have to use in order to publish anything. I've realized that I built my website in this hodge podge coat of many colors way (Dolly's coat, not Joseph's coat). So a migration to the new system means building the site from the bottom up. The code and tags would be much cleaner, but it's hard to commit to that kind of work.

I also learned that I have lost many of your comments to the spam filter. If you've ever written a comment and it didn't get posted, it's not because I didn't like your comment. It's because I'm having this horrible spam problem and your comment got shifted into the manure pile of tramadol prescriptions, cheap airfare and enthusiastic ladies who think I have a "Very good site!! :-)" The commenter trusting option has never worked on my MT, and the 18,000 spam comments I have effectively bury the real comments.

Anyway, an upgrade TK. Whether I move to Wordpress or MT 4. I guess it's time to redesign, too. If any of you have any advice for this old broad, I'm all ears.

(If you were my therapist, or my friend Julie, you might say, Ganda, you quit your freelance assignments in order to free up some time for a social life. And yet, here you are, shackled to your computer. You didn't go out last night because you were migrating folders back and forth on the FTP. Don't you think it's time you left good enough alone and went out and dated once in a while? To which I might reply by mumbling something under my breath about having to clear out my spam box while staring at my shoes.)

Was recently featured on my friend Rebecca's new blog, Cooked Books. She has a great Desert Island Cookbook series. She works at the grand 42nd St. library and often teaches classes on how to dig up food research. (Just don't call her a hip shusher.)

Read her YAWYE here.

We get a lot of swag in the mail at work, sometimes edible swag. The other day, someone had left some cookies out for everyone to try. My co-worker walked by and said, "I better get away from those. They look dangerous." Isn't that an interesting choice of words?

This is an idea I've been obsessed with for a while: food as a weapon, and the ways in which food can be used against people. Of course we have the poisonings, from Snow White and Nero to Ukraine President Yushchenko and the Russian spy Litvinenko. But there's also the Parsley Massacre, in which a Dominican dictator executed Haitians who couldn't properly pronounce "perejil", Spanish for parsley. My friend Johanna was recently in Andalucia, and she told me about a book she read which said that converted Moors and Jews often proved their dedication to the Catholic church by consuming pork and crustaceans with gusto. A hail paella?

I saw this story on BBC the other day about arrests in China after a sting op uncovered solvent-softened cardboard being used in place of chopped meat in steamed buns. The cooks say they don't eat the buns themselves, they just sell them. I see this as an attack on their customers. But how do you get to that point, where you value your clientele so little that you would never eat the food you serve them?

How many dishes have been born of war, like budae jigae, a Korean stew of kimchi, spam, ramen noodles, and sometimes canned beans? Baby booms must happen in the kitchen as necessity and rations collide.

I wonder what role food is playing in the Iraq war. Paging food editors: there's a story I'd like to read about.

Explaining steamers to Francis:

GANDA: They're about [measuring with index finger and thumb] this big and oblong--

FRANCIS: Like razor clams?

GANDA: No, not quite that long, but they're meaty. And they basically have this thing that's like a penis, and you have to pull the foreskin off before you eat it.

[Pause.]

DOUG: It's not a penis. It's a clam belly, and you don't have to eat that part. I don't eat it.

Bright blue = Nature's way of saying, hey, don't eat this.

3 days with my visiting friend Anel have just about undone about four weeks of working out at the gym. I look like one of those Chinese happy Buddha statues right now. Or a Teletubbie. Somebody is probably going to give up their seat on the subway for me tomorrow. I am Olympic champion of water retention. I would like to pop my belly like a zit.

There comes a time in every food writer's life when they have to decide if they're going to go the way of M.F.K. or the way of A.J. I know which way I'd like to go, but it's going to be a battle.

Meanwhile, at a pre-slaughter fattening dinner at Otto with nine people (I gotta say, except for the really loud music, that place is great for groups) we loved this Zaccagnini Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, available at Astor Wines for $13.99. It's dark chocolate-y and smooth. In my very slow and barbaric wine education, I'm finding that I prefer the Italian wines.

At the Li-Lac Chocolates counter in Grand Central, getting my weekly mocha fudge fix. I notice a sign that says supplies will be low while Li-Lac moves its factory to a new Brooklyn location.

ME: [with feigned nonchalance] So where in Brooklyn will the new factory be?

CHOCOLATE SALESGIRL: In Sunset Park.

ME: [with undisguised glee] That's where I live!!

CHOCOLATE SALESGIRL: [frowning] But it's not open to the public.

ME: [disappointed] Oh.

[UPDATE: Apparently, my roommate La Doug had the exact same conversation with the counter person at Li-Lac on Jane St. down by his work. We've decided we're going to get into that chocolate factory somehow. Stay tuned for an embedded report.]