Category: Links

Road Remedies

Oh. I guess you can be a travel writer and not kvetch constantly. Amanda Castleman does just that on Road Remedies.

To-do list for tomorrow:
1) Report on green peppers in New Orleans.
2) Report on fried oysters in New Orleans.
3) Report on fried shrimp in New Orleans.
4) Report on disappointing hitting of wall, appetite-wise, on Sunday night in New Orleans.
5) Recalibrate overall attitude. Life is pretty good.

Oh, except for my lament that I can’t show you a picture of the package of udon noodles we had in the fridge but threw away too soon: “Ingredients: Unbreached white flour…”

Blogsoop: So Meta, So Worthwhile

Blogging is just one big ego-wallow. A couple of weeks ago, I was checking out my statcounter, and saw someone had come to my site from the heretofore-undiscovered(-by-me) Blogsoop, which is a savvy collection of bloggers’ reviews of New York City restaurants.

Turns out the site is quite new, and the nice part is that it’s being put together by hand–as in, someone is actually trawling through everyone’s food blogs and selecting the reviews that go up on the site. Which means there’s not a lot of worthless junk–and the section on Queens restaurants is surprisingly large. It’s organized in a very straightforward way–you can search by resto name, neighborhood or cuisine.

There’s even a little “recently added” section–a detail that shows the site cares about its regular visitors the same way a vintage shop or used record store cares about its obsessive customers so that you don’t have to go through everything all over again every time you stop by.

It was slightly unnerving to see a couple of my posts presented as “reviews,” when in fact they are more just snapshots following a meal, and pretty blurry ones at that, considering the amount of wine usually involved. But when I look at some other more review-y reviews, I think I like mine better anyway. And isn’t that what blogging’s all about? (Pat, pat, pat.)

New Mexico Quarters

This has nothing to do with food, except that I just ate a breakfast burrito with the last of my red chile sauce, so I’m feeling a little New Mexico-y right now, but I just found out (via Duke City Fix) that the proposed designs for the New Mexico quarter have been whittled down to four.

Four variations on bo-ring, that is.

I’ve secretly been excited about the introduction of the New Mexico quarter. It means that the rest of the US will finally realize that spot between Texas and Arizona is part of the country! People in Iowa will be holding the quarter up to the light and squinting and saying, “Well, I’ll be! Since 1912? Who knew?!” And of course the quarter would be some ingenious, unique image that shows off how cool the state really is, and how it basically kicks the ass of every other state.

nmquarterBut it won’t be. Why couldn’t they pick this one, with a big mushroom cloud? Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb–how’s that for ass-kicking? Maybe now’s the time to take up counterfeiting. Does it even count as a felony if my quarter isn’t an exact imitation of existing money?

Sunland Peanuts: Free Samples Work!

In December, I was in Portales, New Mexico. In case you don’t know, Portales is The Peanut Basin of the Southwest. (If I could do that in “reverb” font, I would.)

peanutI discovered this not through Portales’s excellent marketing machine, but through my own research, when a friend in high school went there for college. Frankly, I’d barely even heard of Portales. This visit in December was the second in my entire life, and during that trip I learned that while Portales produces less than 10 percent of the nation’s peanut crop, it produces the large majority of its Valencia peanuts. These little guys are known for their exceptional flavor, and their lovely red skins.

Doing my duty to guidebook research, I stopped in the chamber of commerce offices downtown. A woman asked me if I wanted “the usual info pack.” Why, yes. And did I want peanuts? Why, yes!

Those Valencia peanuts, super-salty and often four to a pod, were super-delicious, and I apologize to the Days Inn Roswell housekeeping staff who had to vacuum up the shells from the carpeting.

I managed to save some peanuts till I got home. Peter was equally enamored. Soon I was perusing the Sunland Peanuts website. And soon thereafter, more peanuts–as well as some peanut butter–were winging their way to us from the Peanut Basin of the Southwest.

I have to admit, there was a little letdown. Peter had inadvertently ordered five pounds of unsalted peanuts. But even those were surprisingly good.

And today Peter opened the first jar of peanut butter. Holy shit! So amazingly fresh-tasting. It’s like each little individual peanut soul is expiring right then and there in my mouth. Nothing in it but peanuts. Not even salt. And if I’m saying something with no salt is delicious, then you know it’s got to be good. If you like peanuts, you owe it to yourself to taste the goods from Portales.

A few tips on ordering from the mega-clunky (but awful cute) website: You want the “old fashion peanut butter,” without the hydrogenation, etc. Somewhere else on the site, they sell the processed stuff, and you don’t want that. And you probably wanted salted peanuts, rather than just plain ol’ roasted. [UPDATE: The site has been redesigned! It looks much nicer, but you can’t order online now/yet. Better to talk to a person anyway, to get the details right.]

gutFinally, you’ll want to bone up on the peanut butter diet, just in case you’re feeling a little dodgy about having 25 pounds of good-and-greasy legumes delivered to your doorstep. One look at those rock-hard abs, and I am pretty convinced. One bite of that Valencia peanut butter, and I am never lookin’ back!

Nice Chops! Nice Texans!

Peter was searching for banh mi recipes, and found this:

The Porkchop Express

That list in the sidebar of all the banh mi joints in NYC, with reviews, somehow releases some inner anxiety I didn’t know I had. I keep a mental list, but I always have a creeping fear that I’ll forget a crucial one when the pressure is on.

The feeling of keeping track of all the data I’m currently carry in my head is something akin to carrying some floppy piece of, say, inner tube filled with water that also happens to have quite a lot of holes in it. Every time I shift my finger to stem a leak, the whole thing is at risk of losing its structural integrity and spilling everywhere. Clearly the answer is to get done with this damn guidebook, so I no longer have quite so many details to keep track of.

But in the short term, I’ll probably feel better if I just have a banh mi.

And Porkchop Express looks very promising in general….except, ooh, I just scrolled down and saw my most loathed food-writing cliche ever: “X was a revelation.” Everything else, though, I’m lovin’.

Oh, and since I’m currently immersed in this New Mexico project, I was very happy to find The Homesick Texan, especially because the most recent posts are about chile (which those strange people spell “chili”–close enough) and sopaipillas (which they put cinnamon sugar on–what the?). At any rate: mmrrrmmm. Fried doouuuughhh.

Back to writing.

Michael Pollan in the NY Times

It must be That’s What I’ve Been Saying All Along Week at the New York Times!

In addition to telling the world how great Queens is, now the newspaper of record has published another fine and sensible essay by Michael Pollan, who has been one of my favorite writers ever since I read Botany of Desire years and years ago (thanks, Heidi, for the rec).

His story “Unhappy Meals” in this week’s magazine starts: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

There’s plenty more, of course, but that’s the gist. He goes on to detail just how we got into such weird federal dietary guidelines (politics, natch), and talks about the rise of “nutritionism”–the particular way so many Americans have come to look at food as sources of nutrients, rather than just food.

Even if I didn’t agree so fervently with him, I would still love Pollan just for the way he writes. It’s never overblown or too alarmist, but he allows himself the occasional bit of flair–characterizing the produce section lying “silent as stroke victims,” for instance, while all the processed food boasts about its health benefits. Because he writes so simply, without manipulation, he gives me hope that he’ll be able to convince people.

He also makes the brilliant observation that we shouldn’t be so surprised that carbs make us fat–humans have been fattening up animals on carbs ever since we started domesticating them.

If you’re overwhelmed by all 12 pages of it online, you can skip toward the end, where he outlines his basic suggestions for how best to eat, slightly expanded from his opening sentences. But then you’d be missing out on all of Pollan’s great writing.

Dan Barber in the New York Times: Down with Bland Food!

There’s a great op-ed today in the New York Times by chef Dan Barber, “Amber Fields of Bland.” He argues in a very smart way for changing federal food regulations. Rather than bombard you with truly horrible details about what’s wrong with the current food production system, he asks: Don’t you just want your food to taste good?

Eerybody laments how crappy tomatoes are now (not Barber’s exampe, just my personal gripe), and how chicken doesn’t even taste like chicken. Whose fault is that? Stupid agribusiness. And of course there are all the other gruesome flaws (E. coli, zombie chickens, mad cow, etc.), but, Barber says, if we look at regulating in terms of improving food’s flavor, then, by happy coincidence, we also solve a lot of these problems.

Of course, coming from a super-high-end chef who cooks for rich people all day long, arguing for flavor in the face of economies of scale smacks of plain old snobbery. But he dismisses that with a smart historical analogy:

Some people argue that the desire to promote smaller, family-run local farms is gratuitously effete and nostalgic. That’s just nonsense. It’s the agriculture industry’s mind-set — high on capital, chemistry and machines — that is actually old-fashioned. Just as the Industrial Revolution of factories with heavy machinery and billowing black smoke is yesterday’s news, so too are our unsustainable farming operations.

It is interesting that he doesn’t argue against farm subsidies per se–I guess that would be just way too crazy to consider–but he does suggest giving them instead to farms as an incentive to diversify and concentrate on food crops, rather than corn and soy, which need to be hyper-processed before being eaten. Maybe that is a good middle route.

This whole op-ed is linked to the fact that the every-five-years reexamination of the farm bill is coming up in Congress soon. As Barber proposes, anyone who cares how food tastes–never mind their stance on or knowledge about Big Food Biz–should speak up to their representatives now. Maybe some tasty treat mailed to Senators Clinton and Schumer would be more effective than a phone call?

Perceptive Travel: Hot Times in the Riviera Maya

Here’s a little essay about a luxury hotel sweat lodge gone awry–it’s flattering to be up alongside the consistently great writing at Perceptive Travel. (Fresh issues come out every couple of months–well worth bookmarking.)

Dedicated readers of this blog will recognize this tale of steam-fueled woe from a research trip a couple of years ago. At least in this new iteration, you have a more coherent narrative, not to mention some very pretty pictures!

On a side note, I am under a gigantic deadline-gun, more of a deadline-RPG-launcher–hence the paltry posts. No one got Christmas cards, or even presents, from me either, so no sulking. Expect more action by February.

Last-minute gift idea: Frappe Nation

frappe nationAttention all Greeks! All friends of Greeks! All people who’ve ever visited Greece! All residents of Astoria and Melbourne! All Manhattan- and Brooklynites who don’t really get what’s so cool about Queens! Hell, just anyone who really likes coffee!

This new book, Frappe Nation, by Vivian Constantinopoulos and Daniel Young, is truly wonderful.

But first, for all the people who fall into that last two categories, allow me to explain what a frappe is.

It’s simply the most genius coffee drink ever. It involves powdered Nescafe, cold water and ice. If you happen to like sugar or milk, you can have that too. You shake the bejesus out of the Nescafe and the cold water (and maybe sugar), till you get this beautiful velvety beige foam, then you pour it over ice. Then you add a little more water, or milk if you like. Then you sip and sip and sip. (Or, if you’re like me and have poor straw-management skills, you slurp too fast and have heart palpitations.) It kicks the ass of your standard iced coffee, because the sugar is blended in, and it lasts a lot longer. If you’re shuddering at the thought of instant coffee, get over it. It works perfectly.

I act as though I was born to frappe-ness, but of course I didn’t learn about it till relatively late in life. I’m sure it was Peter who first made me a frappe, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I moved to Astoria. You’d think I’d recall that formative moment, but I suppose it changed my life so irrevocably that I can’t remember what it was like pre-frappe.

But about the book: It’s a pretty, glossy bilingual coffee-table book. And rare for coffee-table books, the text is actually worth reading–it’s the best kind of food-writing, in which some foodstuff is analyzed and refracted back on the culture that produced it, so that you don’t have to be a frappe drinker (yet) to appreciate what this coffee concoction represents to a whole country.

In the book, you learn about Greek kids secretly making frappes in their bedrooms, and about the early Nescafe campaigns promoting it. You learn about Greek coffee culture in general, and you get some recipes and strategies. Ferran Adria, that master of foam, is name-checked by a Greek chef! You hear the ad-man who promoted Turkish coffee as Greek coffee in the 1970s admitting that, really, the frappe is the true “Greek coffee.”

And the photos are great, particularly because they counterbalance the common depictions of Greece as a land of black-shrouded, wizened, toothless women, bleary-eyed old men in a perpetual state of backgammon-ness, and goats. Who would’ve known: young, cool people live in Greece! They’re hot, they’re sexy! They’re even vaguely “European”-looking! And they all drink frappes.

If a ticket to Greece or even the book is out of your reach financially, you can still visit the authors’ website, Frappe Nation, for recipes, general info and even cute “Frappe Nation” tank tops (I happen to own one myself).

Or you can just come out to Astoria and sample one yourself: see Alpha Astoria for ratings on the best of the cafes. I know it’s a little cold for a frappe now–I guess you can wait. But I’ll remind you when the springtime comes.

Cool Sushi Site

Sushi is not my forte. I get all worried when I start reading how-tos, because they’re very persnickety, and there doesn’t seem to be much wiggle room at all.

Then I found this site: Make My Sushi. First I watched the “funny sushi video” (link in the left column), then I read about how to pick fish. I had laughed enough that when it came to the part about slicing up carrots in a very precise way, I didn’t immediately run screaming. I’m also fascinated by the process for making tamago, the little omelet slabs.

I still haven’t found the promised “pictures of celebrities enjoying their sushi in partial nudity,” but maybe I haven’t looked hard enough yet…