Category: Ruminations

My Glestain santoku and I have had a long and loving relationship for about 3 years now, but the thrill is gone. Okay, so I'm tired of seeing the santoku slut itself around with so many female food show hosts. But I've also had some recent dalliances with La Doug's Sabatier chef's knife. The delicious heft, the generous ten inches, the angle for rocking back and forth...I forgot how great a big, manly knife can be. We're reunited and it feels so good.

I have a dirty little secret I probably shouldn't reveal, since I make some of my living as a restaurant reviewer. But here it is: I'm lactose intolerant. Well, more like lactose low-tolerant. Or milk allergy. I'm also alcohol low-tolerant. This probably means I will never rise to the ranks of big time reviewer, but I can live with that.

My body will put up with a small amount of lactose, it seems, but certain things will really set me off. I once had Thai iced tea with half and half that sent me running off the train at Grand Central. (TMI?) Straight up milk is a no-no. But ice cream seems to be okay in small amounts. I miss cottage cheese.

The worst offender, however, is yogurt. Yogurt! Benign, creamy, calcium-rich yogurt! Yogurt which anoints my balls de falafel! Strained and thick, dotted with cucumbers in tsatsiki! Full of friendly fauna, crimefighting bacteria to police my intestines!

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to suffer the consequences of eating lactose when I'm in my own home. And one of these days I'll probably try that Lactaid pill.

In the meantime, I've been exploring the world of dairy alternative yogurts. Flavor and texture vary wildly in non-cow's milk yogurts. Here's my take on the brands I got my hands on at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.

Stonyfield O'Soy, $0.99 for 6 oz. cup, $2.69 (I think) for a pack of 6 4 oz. cups

This is the soy yogurt for people who don't like yogurt. It's completely devoid of that spoiled milk tang that makes yogurt distinctive. There's also quite a pronounced soy milk flavor to it. The strawberry and peach varieties in the six pack don't have any fruit pieces in them -- they're just flavored and colored with fruit juice (and beet juice, I believe). The vanilla O'Soy has a very mild vanilla flavor and a gentle sweetness. Creamy texture, like pudding. Thickened with pectin, not starch, which is nice. But no fruity pieces in the fruit flavors.

RATING: 6 out of 10

***

This piece will be...pieced together slowly. Hey, I can only eat one carton of yogurt at a time, and I'm not just going to eat a teaspoonful of each and chuck the rest. This blog has a budget of bupkis. Also, I've been adjusting to the rigors of a new job.

I just got back from a quick trip to see my family in L.A. As I was repacking my carry-on for the return flight, I found my Laguiole folding knife, which I had forgotten to take out of my bag. That means that I boarded a flight from JFK to Ontario, CA with a 5 inch not-fucking-around metal blade with corkscrew in my carry-on.

Why did I have it in my bag? I used my backpack when I was clearing my office out at my old job right before my trip and I forgot to take it out. Actually, there was a moment when the security folks kind of conferred over my backpack image on the screen, but then they let my bag pass without checking it by hand.

So while the last time I took a flight, airport security made me throw away my (extremely dangerous) empty travel coffee cup, and travelers have to chug their (volatile and threatening) bottled water before passing the checkpoints, this managed to clear the X-ray machine.

Doesn't that make you feel safe? Don't you want to thank Homeland Security for the bang-up job they're doing, protecting the parched from Vaseline terrorism?

Memes. I secretly love filling them out, but I'm too chicken to send them to other people because I'm afraid of annoying them. This one is "Five things you don't know about me", and I've been tagged by Cathy of Not Eating Out in New York. Since this is a website about food, I figure they should be food related for them to be of any interest to you. I'll change it to "Five food memories I haven't told you about yet."

1. September, 1996 -- I studied abroad in London my junior year in college. I dragged my crap for the year to the dorm, where a bunch of excitable freshers were moving in, escorted by their loving parents. I lugged my two suitcases up three flights by myself -- nobody offered to help. I was starving, so I went out to find some food, but it was a Sunday and the dorm was by Parliament, which meant there were very few places to get takeout. I found a sandwich shop. Mad cow scare was in the air, so I opted to go vegetarian and get a cheese sandwich. When I got back to my dorm room, I opened the wax paper package. I was appalled to discover that the two slices of white bread had been slathered with salted butter, a pale slice of white cheese glued between them. I ate my sad little sandwich sitting on the window sill, staring out into the gray, gray evening. It was a fitting start to a long and lonely year.

2. 1990ish -- My cousin Lynda was living with her then boyfriend Steve in an apartment in the Mission district in San Francisco. We decided to pick up dinner from the nearby Thai House. The chef knew my Pau's brother, who was an electrician for lots of Thai and Chinese eateries all over the Bay Area. My Pau went and asked the chef to make our meal Thai style. We got back to Lynda's apartment, opened the foam containers, and dug into one of the most miraculous Thai meals we'd ever had. There was something magical in that meal. We all remember it. I have vague memories of roasted chilies floating in a fiery tom yum goong, perfect sticky rice, bamboo skewers of charred satay. I don't know if it was because we were all super hungry, or because it was rare for the whole family to sit down for a meal together, but I've been to the Thai House several times since, and no meal from there has ever come close to being as delicious as the takeout we had that day.

3. February 4, 2007 -- My Mae stayed at Le Parker Meridian when she came to town for the Carnegie show. The next morning, we ate at Norma's, which is in the hotel. We waited for an hour for a table. The first glass of water the waiter poured for me had a short, coarse hair in it, presumably from a mustache. Brunch was utterly forgettable and stupid expensive, as it too often is. My Mae and I both got food poisoning that day.

4. June 1999 -- I had just moved to New York from California. I didn't know how to cook very many things, but I wanted to cook something I knew. I made a Mollie Katzen recipe for a curried yellow split pea soup, a great recipe which I'll have to try and recreate here sometime. It was a typical New York summer day in a typical sweltering New York apartment. I offered some soup to my friend/roommate Julie, who politely declined and said, "It's a little too hot for soup right now." It was a total light bulb moment for me. I had never considered food weather-conditional before.

5. 1987 -- One of my friends had a Welsh mother and a Chinese father. Since her mother had what I perceived to be an English accent, I thought she must have been advanced and sophisticated. During potluck days, my friend would bring in a dessert her mother made, which I thought was dreamily occidental. It was an English trifle, sort of -- slices of Sara Lee pound cake soaked with strawberry Jello, layered with Cool Whip and canned fruit cocktail and refrigerated. I should make it sometime to see if I'd like it now.

Buck stops here because I hate passing it, but if you feel inclined to fill it out yourself, consider yourself tagged.

I love watching Jacques Pepin cook, but my favorite thing is when he carves little decorative creatures out of fruits and vegetables. One cut here, snip around there, et voila! five piglets suckling their mama from a pea pod!

Dear Mr. Bruni,

At first I thought I wouldn't pay attention to your little publicity stunt of a review. But the more I think about it, the more riled I get. The whole thing is just so disgustingly self-congratulatory, even for you. First of all, you want to review a steakhouse in a strip club so you can show us all how goddamned "punny" you are, fine. But talk about the food! You talk about the food for maybe 25% of the article and the rest of the time you spend ridiculing the strippers, who apparently don't know the difference between an M.D. and a Ph.D., who offer to strip and are met with silence. Come on! Making fun of strippers is so fucking low and easy and cheap. You humiliate them all over again for all the world to see in your review.

You're pretty coy about your sexuality in the piece, so much so that some of the people who've been discussing the review in the blogosphere don't know that you're not straight. It's almost like you're trying to show all the straight guys how straight you can act, how good you can be at objectifying and laughing at the strippers too. You may not get a rise out of seeing those women, but does it make you feel good to make fun of them for not being able to spell their stage names? That whole "buttery nipple" exchange -- did you write that for your straight male readers, to give them a little show and get them off? Did you think it was kosher for you to objectify the women just because you're not objectifying them for your own sexual gratification? You want to ridicule, why not talk about the men who go there? (I went to a strip club once, and the people I pitied the most weren't the bored female dancers but the men staring into the punani like it was going to talk back to them.)

And Pete Wells, what was with the fucking slide show? Is the Dining section now playing the role of Page 3 in the Gray Lady? Did those half-clad women help me better understand what a great cook Adam Perry Lang is? Are we going to get slide shows of Mario Batali's orange fuzzed calves next time you talk about his sausage?

Fine, I am a frigid old maid who will never step foot into a Penthouse club for a steak, precisely because those kinds of displays just aren't good for my digestion. But I'm part of the readership. Lots of women are part of the readership. Lots of women go out to dine. And for me, that's a place I'll never go to. How can you review a restaurant that the majority of the female half of your readership will never step foot into? It's okay for a magazine like Esquire to cover it -- that's a men's magazine. But the New York Fucking Times? Marian Burros, Melissa Clark, Julia Moskin, Florence Fabricant, I wonder what they all think about this. I'm disgusted, and if they're not disgusted, I'm disgusted on their behalf.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: When are we going to have a reviewer who wants to talk about food more than he wants to talk about himself?

Ganda

ADDENDUM: It's interesting to think about this review in the context of his role as Panchito, journalist/member of the George W. Bush inner circle. Both are cases of glorifying and excusing bad frat boy behavior, the one having much higher stakes than the other. Still, the integrity of the criticism feels compromised by this need to impress the brotherhood; the reporting gets lost behind the desire to entertain, to write something the guys will have a laugh about. It's playing the role of bemused outsider while really endorsing bad boy behavior with a nod and a wink.

Take back the knife! Check out Jeffrey Chodorow's gauntlet throwdown in the Times (via Gawker). Is he serious? Ballsy? Insane? Sad? Justified? Will anything come of it? I'll watch for at least 15 seconds before I change the channel.

To the person trying to google "what foods can you eat that would make you feel better after you did meth and alcohol and up 4 2 days":

I'm no doctor, but I really don't think a bloody mary and some Emergen-C is going to help you at this point. I hope you can kick that shit because I saw the Frontline special, and meth mouth ain't pretty.

Adam is banning me from A Hamburger Today for certain controversial remarks about slippery miniature hamburgers. On top of being snubbed on this article about food bloggers in the Times, I guess this amounts to me being some kind of tribal outcast or something.

But I got to sing on Carnegie Hall's historic stage on Saturday and I'm pretty much delirious with joy and totally teflon right now.

...the denouement of a story told over dinner is:

JULIE: And then...wait, this is the best part...you put a grated Fuji apple in it!

WINNIE: Really?

LUMI: Apples! Like that Vermont Curry!

GANDA: I have to get a copy of that.