Category: Food

The Foodista

I had the pleasure of meeting The Foodista herself in person last night. I’ve occasionally perused her blog in the past, as a fellow Astorian–I just never realized we could meet in person.

Anyhoo, she attended our Primary Day Cafe party at Tamara’s last night, where we gorged ourselves on nachos and watched TV, and it was a pleasure to have her company.

Yeah, nachos–sooo highbrow.

But we talked about serious things. Shout-out to Ed for explaining the whole superdelegate issue. To quote Tamara, “Why am I 39 years old, and only just now hearing about this?!” An illuminating evening (uh, that’s the first time I’ve really heard Obama speak, and looked at him–it doesn’t really count on the radio; oh, and also: I always thought Ron Paul=Ron Popeil. I didn’t even know he was a real candidate!), along with some tasty food: democracy in action.

I know.

The comments. It sucks. I’ve been knocked back to super-idiot-level web status. I cannot figure out how to fix this, mostly because I do not have time. I honestly don’t grasp the larger abstract issues re: programming languages, but I’m very, very good at following instructions, which is how I designed this whole blog in the first place. So if anyone can send me a link to some instructions on how to fix the current issue (thanks, spam comments), please do. Otherwise, I’ll look into it more in March, when I’m back from my Mexico trip.

Aw, yeah. That means more Travails of a Guidebook Writer nightmare posts. And my mother will be with me. Brace yourselves.

Or, as they say in Mexico, ay yi yi.

Panera Comes to Astoria

You all read my expletive-filled rant about the demise of the French patisserie, the only source of decent bread in this benighted pseudo-Euro neighborhood of mine. (I mean, it’s enlightened for a million other reasons. Only on the subject of bread is it still in the dark.)

I don’t feel the urge to swear and hurl things anymore, like I did last summer. But I still wouldn’t mind a good chewy baguette now and then.

So, Peter and I are walking along 35th Avenue today, over by the megaplex near Steinway. If you haven’t been there, just imagine the burbs: there’s a Starbucks, and a Pizzeria Uno. Also a FedEx/Kinko’s. And a Carvel. Even the non-chain restaurants, Cup and Cinema Paradiso, look like chain restaurants.

Peter and I are walking, and past the Pizzeria Uno, we see a new Applebee’s! “My god! This landlord must be stopped!” we gasp. (Ironically, the Applebee’s has replaced a Gold’s Gym.) This is just too much of the suburbs to bear! How can so much mass-market horror be packed into such a few short blocks?

And then just as I’m done sucking in my breath, and my eyes have settled back in their sockets, I see a smaller sign (perspective at work) just past the Applebee’s:

Panera.

Now, just up until last week I scoffed at this chain. But there I was in Santa Monica, and I was instructed to go buy bread for dinner at the Panera, and I followed orders. The bread was not bad at all. There was a good selection–various baguettes, loaves, boules–and the sourdough was actually, really sour. I’m more west-coast-oriented in my food roots, and I appreciate a serious, California-style sourdough bread–goes great with apricot jam for breakfast, and with sloppy joes for dinner.

So Peter and I went in. The soft jazz was toodling, the cheesy overstuffed armchairs were filled with bright-eyed folks using the free wi-fi. The muffins and scones were as big as your head. But they had some alluring sourdough, and some crunchy-looking baguettes. In this case, the fact that it looked exactly like the Santa Monica branch (5th & Wilshire) was encouraging.

We got our bread home, and it really is sour and delicious. And the crust is crispy-chewy like it should be. (We also, incidentally, passed Applebee’s and felt a twinge of too-well-off-for-our-own-good guilt. “I guess Applebee’s is great if you don’t have a lot of money,” said Peter. “Where else are you going to go out for dinner?” “Oh, yeah, huh,” I admitted. But later we had boreks from Djerdan! $8.50 for, like, three servings’ worth! True, no ambiance at all, unless you count guys in track suits, and no blue cocktails.)

So, I give. If we can’t keep the damn French guys in business, can we at least keep Panera going, and buy enough sourdough that they don’t stop making it?

(PS: Panera’s bagels look like an abomination: crazy flavors like “french toast” and “crazy sweet-and-chunky something-something”–OK, I’m paraphrasing. But if you order one, they dump it into the most hardcore-looking slicer, a piece of industrial machinery that is both brutal and elegant, not to mention ten times larger than it needs to be. When the counter girl used it, let me just say that Peter and I were not the only people to say, “Whoa!” out loud. It almost made me want to order one of those crazy bagels.)

Like I’ve Been Saying…

The New York Times magazine this week has a short interview with poet laureate Charles Simic. About whom I had no opinion until now:

What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?
For starters, learn how to cook.

Also, recently read in the NYT book review, Michael Pollan articulating my concern with current food media:

On NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” a few weeks ago, Pollan deplored the “heroic” cooking on many food shows. “They make it look really hard,” he said. “You know, it’s like watching too much pornography. You think that that’s how sex is done, and it’s kind of intimidating.”

I’ve been meaning to write a little essay on that very problem, but have not gotten to it. I think I’ve been stuck on identifying the culinary equivalent of the Brazilian bikini wax. Thanks, Pollan, as usual, for being succinct and smart.

Breaking: New York Times Caught in a Lie!

This is totally shady: The NYT has a new column called “One Pot,” with a recipe for some international stew. This week’s was for a Spanish stew called a cocido. I read the column, and spent a lot of time on the first two paragraphs, confused, because there was no transition between the use of the word ‘cocido’ and then an explanation of a new term, ‘olla poderida’. It seemed like something had gotten lost in the editing.

Turns out it was the TRUTH that got lost in the editing. I was alerted by the ever-trusty and -geeky Language Log, which pointed out that the term should be ‘olla podrida’, which really means ‘rotten pot’…in a good way. When questioned, the writer freely admitted she had just made up ‘olla poderida’ (‘strong pot’) because she thought eaders would be creeped out by the word ‘rotten’. Read the whole expose here, along with more details on ‘rotten’ food.

This is kind of shocking, no? I mean, it’s a newspaper. It’s supposed to be factual. I feel betrayed.

I think Elaine Louie should go back to her little Weddings beat, and if the editors can’t give enough space to a story to properly explain something (‘rotten’ can be used as an emphatic, along the lines of ‘filthy rich’–that wasn’t so hard to take, now was it?), then it just shouldn’t run the story. I hate to think what’s happening to the real news.

NZ/Oz: The Good Stuff

So, before it all totally filters out of my memory…

What to Eat and Drink in Australia and New Zealand:

1) Chocolate
Whittaker’s Peanut Slab is deliciously salty peanuts in totally forgettable milk chocolate–sweet and salty, all you need, and available at every 7-11 (there are lots of 7-11s–why?). Also, Bennett’s of Mangawhai Passionfruit Chocolate Bar is also light on actual chocolate sensation–but who cares, when there’s the magical passionfruit flavor? In fact, what am I thinking?…

2) Passionfruit
This should have been item #1. Sure, I already loved the stuff going in. But it’s amazing that you can get it anywhere, usually fresh, un-messed-with pulp, with the slippery little seeds still in. Especially delish on creamy yogurt. Which you can also get anywhere. I also learned that the ‘what-kind-of-muffin-is-this’ signifier for passionfruit is a little arrangement of the black seeds in the frosting on top. Which boggles me that a whole part of the world could be so blase about passionfruit that they don’t even need to put signs next to it saying, “OMG, this is the most amazing flavor ever!”

3) Coffee
Actually, no–this should’ve been item #1. I don’t even really drink coffee, and I drank coffee every single damn day of our vacation (at US$3-ish a pop…ouch). And this was after we’d been in Portland, and pretty impressed with the java there. In NZ and Oz, it’s all espresso-based (no American-style drip), and you get the fun of ordering a ‘flat white’ (midway between a latte and a cappuccino, with very little foam), or perhaps, if you’re feeling tough, a ‘long black’ (Americano). But I think it’s the super-delicious dairy that makes the coffee especially palatable. And the beans aren’t viciously roasted away to nothing. I was depressed at the thought of coming back to Starbucksland. But I guess my stomach lining thanks me.

4) Splashy dinner at Capitol restaurant, in Wellington
Next door to the classy redone cinema in the center of town–we had rack of lamb, of course. And some perfectly good fish. But the lamb was really the standout.

5) Seafood up the wazoo
“Life is too short to bother with bad seafood,” said my pitying LP editor over dinner, after I’d lamented the state of seafood in NYC (ie, you can get anything, but no guarantee it will taste like much). Easy for her to say, when fat, succulent mussels are practically jumping out of the ocean (especially good in NZ), and shrimp are scampering onto your plate, and the barramundi is blinking at you in a beguiling way. Damn. Oh, and those scallops at the Peter Gordon restaurant (dine) in Auckland. With I guess their roe still attached? Little quivering bits of briny sweetness, they were.

6) Mangosteen
Just because I, as an American, can. We can’t eat them here in the US because of some vile pest they carry, allegedly, but I have to read articles all the time about how transporting, exotic and thoroughly unique the flavor of this tropical fruit is. So when we went to Cabramatta, an allegedly divey suburb of Sydney (we’d asked our hostess to show us the bad part of town), and I saw a box of mangosteens for sale at the Vietnamese produce hall, I had to get them. Even though the price worked out to about US$2 per fruit, and the woman seemed slightly insincere when she said they were all ripe. Indeed, only about three of the eight or so golf-ball-size guys wound up being edible–and with six small slivers of only succulent fruit inside each one, the price per bite wound up being staggeringly high. But fine. They were pretty delicious, if not as delicious as passionfruit. And I feel like I’ve crossed another thing off my abstract ‘taste every flavor in the world’ list.

7) $6 steak at the pub
Peter and I were getting steadily more dismayed at the crazy first-world prices. We’re just not used to paying more than, say, 80 cents for a midday snack. But we also wondered how so-called normal people can afford to leave their houses in Australia. Even once you consider that, say, a waiter gets paid about A$18 per hour, and so an A$3.50 coffee isn’t too gross an expense, there still didn’t appear to be any reasonably priced restaurants.

And then, on our very last full day, after a long and glorious and soaking-wet bike ride around drizzly Sydney, we were sitting around the living room of our bike host and guide, Lynn of CTA, and he simply said, “Wanna go over to the pub for five-dollar steaks?” Like everyone in the world knew about this phenomenon. Well, I immediately thought of those nasty Tad’s steak places here in NYC, and the current state of undervalued factory-farm beef. Peter might’ve looked a little skeptical too, because Lynn said, “No, they’re really good steaks.” Later, as we were tucking into our massive slabs of beef, chargrilled a perfect medium-rare, Lynn explained that all the profits from the pub’s slot machines basically underwrite the food–it’s just a loss leader to get the crowds, and bring whole families in. A brilliant system. I’d love to eat at more restaurants with a Big Buck Hunter game and giant-screen TVs, if they were as good and cheap as this neighborhood pub Maroubra.

8) Oysters at the pub
Oh yeah. Got some of these too. Salty and also creamy, in a way I’ve never had oysters be before. And cheap.

9) Coffee at the kiosk at the top of Bent Street in Sydney’s CBD
I know I already mentioned coffee, but this bears special emphasis. At this tiny little place, where we stopped near the end of our soaking-wet bike odyssey, I watched the barista, a smooth-talking Brazilian, chat up a woman while he made her espresso. Then he looked at the coffee and frowned. “Oh, no,” he said. “This one’s no good. I’m throwing this away.” I thought it was a ploy to talk to the woman longer, but Peter said, “He did that with my coffee too.” No crema, no sale, baby. This kiosk happens to be the bike courier’s top choice as well–no coincidence.

I think that might have to be all. My mind is a sieve. I am now starving. And we have no groceries in the house whatsoever. I am deeply uninspired at the thought of going to the store and seeing all the straight-from-Chile produce and the shrink-wrapped meat.

I nearly made Peter choke the other night when I said, “I’m thinking of going vegetarian for a while.” The same way I can’t really get excited about drinking coffee here, I also can’t get too thrilled about eating nasty, nasty meat in the US. I can’t apply that sort of existential despair to produce and dairy (both of which were so much better over there on the other side of the world), or else I’d starve. I’ll muddle through. But I sure could use a flat white, or a half-dozen oysters, right now.

NZ/Oz

Well, before everyone starts anticipating too much, I’d better post _something_.

I recently read that Chuck Thompson, surly author of an expose of the hollow soul of the travel writing industry, characterized New Zealand as “a junior-varsity version of the Pacific Northwest.”

I’m never one to encourage Americans to stay home and keep their worldview narrow, but, uh, New Zealand doesn’t seem to have anything that Oregon doesn’t. Hobbits, maybe? Oh, wait, no: glowworm caves. We totally failed to see this natural phenomenon, and also penguins. In fact, we didn’t really manage to see much of anything nature-y in New Zealand, nor we did appreciate its cities much because everyone was on holiday. Auckland especially felt like the H-bomb had hit.

Australia was a lot livelier, sunnier and full of people we knew. We did a whirlwind tour of three cities, interrupted by a 16-hour train ride that prompted our Ozzie friends to say, “Good on ya for taking the train!” and then just look completely puzzled.

Perhaps it’s easier to analyze the trip in terms of…quelle surprise…food. Here, a tidy list:

What NOT to Eat and Drink in Australia and New Zealand (not to start with the negative–it’s just easier to get the short list out of the way first):

1) A lamb sandwich from Subway.
Well, duh, you’re saying–why eat at Subway at all? But it was 8am, and we were about to get on a 12-hour train ride. Subway was the only thing open, and Peter said the photo was very appealing. And what could be more local than lamb in New Zealand? Well, the meat was fine (thin-sliced, rare, like roast beef), but too bad about the hideously sweet mint sauce.

2) A meat pie in a plastic crinkly bag.
Purchased in the same desperate move as the Subway sub. Glutinous and terrifying. Not a fair introduction to the genre of meat pie at all.

3) Abalone fritter
I could go either way on this one. It didn’t taste actually bad. But it was black, which was disturbing. I guess I never knew abalone meat was black. I wanted to order something aside from the usual fish and chips, and use a Maori word (paua?) while I was at it. Halfway through the fritter, I got distracted by the silver-haired 60-year-old woman in black rocker skinny-leg jeans who walked into the fish shop, in bare feet. No one in NZ seems to wear shoes. Britney Spears: there’s a place for you.

4) Dog food
Again, obvious–but weirdly tempting. I didn’t actually eat the stuff, but I was staggered at the selection of fresh dog food in the grocery store: big plastic tubs of fresh meat chunks, and long rolls, like the kind breakfast sausage comes in but much bigger, of really hefty meaty stuff. Kiwi dogs must be the best-fed in the world. That was some of the most appealing-looking food in the whole supermarket, for any species.

5) Hot food on Australia’s long-distance trains
Wow. We haven’t eaten such substandard food since the bad old days of airplane cuisine–and this stuff (butter chicken, beef lasagne) didn’t even come on nifty sectional trays. Oh, and thanks to the grossly weak US dollar, it was expensive to boot. Probably while I was busy chewing the tasteless stuff, I missed seeing a kangaroo. Thanks for nothing, Country Link.

6) Lumps
Another thing I could honestly go either way on. These pineapple-flavored marshmallow, chocolate-enrobed Australian candy bars are just plain weird. At first bite, it feels like you’re starting in on a long and loving relationship with a piece of chewing gum. Next thing you know, the stuff is slithering down your throat. There’s the barest soupcon of pineapple in there somewhere.

Hmm. I told you it was a short list. The positive stuff will come tomorrow…

More Dick, Less Knipfing…but No Salt

I am proud to be from Albuquerque when I click over to Duke City Fix and see the new tagline “More Dick, Less Knipfing.” See, DK is a newscaster and, uh…I guess you had to grow up there.

Anyway, I went to the equally obscure (sort of) city of Pittsburgh this weekend, partially to see Loretta Lynn sing and partially to visit Peter’s friend from grad school, who’s just moved there and illustrates the shocking truth of NYC real estate by living in a house a million times nicer than hours and paying about a tenth as much. Or something like that.

Anyway, really, the point of this post is to say I’m glad I got my creative desperation-cooking juices flowing in the kitchen last week before we went (I did finally go grocery shopping on Wednesday, but I still cooked a pantry-style meal: sloppy joes, succotash, and some radishes rattling around the bottom drawer).

Because as Peter and I are puttering around the kitchen, getting out pans, turning on the burners to make dinner, Gaby says, “Oh, I should’ve mentioned at the store–we don’t have any salt.”

Grrrrrrrrrkkkkreeeeeeekkk. Or however you spell the sound of the record being quickly ground down to a stop.

Wha?

Gasp.

Several more dramatic pauses for emphasis.

…

…

OK. Have I made myself clear? Cooking without salt is a little hard to imagine. It’s every cook’s not-so-secret trick. I mean–you can’t boil pasta without salting the water, right? The Constitution would probably spontaneously combust in its little secret vault. The Starship Enterprise would fall into a black hole and never recover. The earth would flatten out, and I’d probably fall off the edge, to where the dragons are.

Peter offered to run out and get salt. I, typically, dug in my heels. NO. We’d manage. We’re creative people. We had one packet of Chinese-takeout soy sauce, half a bottle of reduced-sodium soy sauce, a jar of anchovies and half a pint of olives. And some parmesan. We’d wring the umami out of those babies and whip up a damn fine dinner–no extra grocery shopping required.

Luckily, my dinner plan consisted of making some grocery-made lamb sausages into a pasta sauce. Those sausages were probably already loaded with salt. I’d been planning to add olives anyway–I added more. I hacked the rind off the parmesan and threw it in the sauce with the canned tomatoes, that probably had salt in them too.

Peter made a Caesar salad dressing heavy on the anchovies. He grated extra-coarse parmesan cheese.

I smothered the butternut squash with feta cheese.

I glugged so much soy sauce in the pasta water that it looked like it had come out of lead pipes that had been rusting for three hundred years.

At the last second, I panicked and added an anchovy to the pasta sauce too.

It all turned out totally freakin’ fine. And for once in my life, I actually had a meal involving feta cheese and olives where I didn’t think, Gah, this stuff is good, but it’s soooo salty.

Lesson learned. New Year’s resolution: Less salt, maybe. Definitely less Knipfing.