Category: Ruminations

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.

I go to Dunkin' Donuts today. The total bill comes out to $3.47. I hand the kid a $5 bill, a quarter, two dimes and two pennies. He punches in my total. The receipt prints, he hands me a $1 bill and the automatic change machine spits out a bunch of silver coins.

I look at the receipt. He typed in $5.37 as the amount I gave him.

Okay, so the kid can't add -- who can blame him when the machines do most of the work now? But where's your common sense, man? Why in the world would I give you $5.37 on a $3.47 bill?

Math is still important and this child got left behind!

Doug hosted a rather chic dinner party chez nous last night. The main event was a showing of The Descent, which I took no part of because I don't do horror flicks. Luckily, I could still partake of dinner. The menu theme was the color red, after the bloody fare of the movie.

We had:

• Fennel, red onion, blood orange salad with pomegranate seeds and a red wine vinaigrette
  
• Cream of tomato soup with roasted grape tomato "eyeballs"
  
• Chicken salad with blue cheese on crostini, with roasted red pepper habanero sauce
  
• Homemade beet and goat cheese ravioli with butter, poppy seeds, and red dye
  
• For dessert, red velvet cake of course
  

The palate cleanser was a really lovely surprise: Wine Cellar Sorbets Sauternes sorbet, served with fresh raspberries. The sorbet was a huge hit -- fine, soft and almost slushy, sweet but not cloying, like a grown-up frozen margarita. It apparently has 5% alcohol, so don't try to serve it to your preggers guests. It would be the perfect end to a Valentine's Day dinner, served in a classic wide champagne glass with crunchy cantuccini. Our friend Sammy picked up a pint from Blue Apron Foods in Brooklyn, but the Wine Cellar Sorbets website has a list of other stores that carry their stuff all over the city.

Anybody noticed how many Asian American women food bloggers there are? Food writing seems to have surpassed local news anchor as the liberal arts Asian American woman's career path of choice. They're both talky vanity careers with service elements; the former requires a large appetite, the latter requires shiny helmet hair. Sit down meals are often central to Asian family life, and cooking is still a highly valued skill in Asian cultures (as I'm sure it is in France, Italy, Ethiopia and many, but not all, other cultures). But is that all there is to it? Is it, as a friend said with a wink, because we're nerds and like computers?

Check it out: There's me, Chez Pim, The Girl Who Ate Everything, Daily Gluttony, Not Eating Out in NY, Feisty Foodie, The Delicious Life, I Heart Bacon, Su Good Sweets, Best of L.A., Tuna Toast, not to mention people like Saveur's Julia Lee, Padma Lakshmi, novelists like Monique Truong, Mei Ng, Amy Tan to an extent, etc. I'm sure I'm missing tons. This is not to dismiss all of the great Asian American male food writers and bloggers, but they do seem to be outnumbered.

In February, there's a new book (disclaimer: it's being published by my employer ) called Stealing Buddha's Dinner which is about a young Vietnamese immigrant's coming-of-age and her obsession with food, specifically name brand junk foods which she coveted, paralleling her adolescent desire to fit in. I was a little shocked at how much it resonated with me -- the obsession with Little House on the Prairie food (remember the green pumpkin "apple" pie and maple syrup squiggles in the snow?), Chef Boyardee (ahem), the mix of shame and pride for the foreign food cooked at home. As I wrote in the reading guide (yes, for money that they paid me), in a consumption culture, she's trying to eat her way toward an American identity, to become an American from the inside out. Bich Minh Nguyen, the author, has more at her website. Reading it made me feel, well, a little unoriginal. But well understood. And I'm not saying that because they pay me to, I swear.

I used to study the one Better Homes and Gardens Complete Step-by-Step Cookbook we owned and imagine what it would be like to make parker house and clover leaf rolls, how sweet and sticky a floating island might taste, how filling and savory a flaky beef Wellington might be. I'd wish silently that we had all-purpose white flour in the house instead of arrowroot starch and small boxes of Mochiko rice flour. Cookbooks fed my imagination far more than they fed my stomach.

In any case, I'm glad that whatever cultural significance food had for me has been distilled into personal significance, because now writing about food is my way of using the mundane to circumnavigate the vastness of life.

I say the more the merrier. Besides, I know my Connie Chung dream died when I found out she was married to Maury Povich.