No Loitering

new blog

2006-12-26T10:58:00.000-08:00

http://dailyomelet.blogspot.com/

Swedish Thai Chili Surprise

2006-11-13T23:31:00.000-08:00

How nice it feels to kill two birds with one stone.

Finally, I’ve made right on my promise to challenge Shopsin’s Burrito French Toast. Remember that mad creation? Mushed up bananas wrapped in a tortilla burrito style, egg glaze, coated in corn flakes, deep fried, and covered in cinnamon and sugar. After one look at this thing, I flipped full rotation and cooking changed. I refuse to look back at my past blog entries to see what time frame I gave myself, because I know it took me longer than I expected, but I vowed to make something as crazy, and I think I may have finally done it. You, dear reader, will have to judge whether or not my creation was as crazy as Shopsin’s, and I won’t be heartbroken if you don’t think it was, just be square with me, you know?

Now, how was this two stones and what was this creation? This Sunday, neighbor Heather celebrated her birthday with a chili cook off. For whatever reason, I heard the words chili and I thought root vegetables and from then on it was a race to see what kind of root vegetable chili could take the grand prize at this friendly contest. Hence, crazy thing, chili cook off, one dish, two birds, bird murder.

Before throwing together a bunch of root vegetables, I had to figure out how to make this concoction at least resemble chili. The answer to this call came in the form of old, reliable bacon. Yea, bacon and a bunch of roots, that sounds sort of like chili. To add more chunk, and to find an excuse to use beer in the recipe, sausage would have to make a cameo as well. Yes, yes, bacon, sausage, and root chili – a masterpiece in the making.

Here’s how it all went down.

I browned up some bacon, set it aside, and kept a bit of grease in the pan. Next, browned up some pork sausage, set aside, and kept yet more grease in the pan. The pan was looking nice and greasy, this much was certain. Flavor floated in front of me in its sly and slimy way. Right. Yea I actually poured most of the grease into a corner in our backyard, but I kept enough to keep the flavor, flavor, flavor. Flavor.

In this pan of double flavor I caramelized a bunch of onions, browning as they may and gathering tang over the course of about forty five minutes.

While caramelizing, I roasted up a bunch of diced vegetables, including: carrots, garlic, fennel, leeks, rutabaga, turnips, parsnips, celery root and squash. Once roasted, I combined all the stuff in a pot – the meat, the onions, and all the roasted vegetables. To goop it all up, I tossed in some tomato paste, a bunch of veg stock, some Lagunitas IPA, and a can of coconut milk. Season with some lemongrass, curry powder, salt and pepper and this thing was good to go. It had a nice orange color and my house was smelling like fall.

In my mind there is no other more easily identifiable scent of a season than that of Fall coming from its vegetables. Turnip soup, squash soup, pumpkin stuff, oranges, whites, hmmmmmm. As this chili cooked down, the house filled with the grab bag of all those aromas combined with the smoky bite of bacon and the fatty elbow to the side of sausage.

I went to the backyard to have a cigarette as I waited for the chili to cook down. As I sat there, I took in the beauty of our garden. Actually, our garden is not all that beautiful to the untrained eye. But for those of us in the know, our garden is a symbol of perseverance, persistence, and sustainable urban life. Basically we have potatoes back there from one day over a year ago when I threw a sack of purple heirlooms against the fence. As I sat there waiting for my pot to boil down, it hit me – I had to dig up some of our purple potatoes, grate them, grate some gruyere (which I had bought to use somewhere in this dish), combine the potatoes and gruyere, and make a topping to bake over the chili in the oven. Genius, yes genius! What’s better than an orange vegetable chili than an orange chili covered in a purple cheesy top?

Over at Heather’s, I found myself not very reluctantly answering a lot of questions. Yes, yes, that is the color purple. Yes, gruyere, it’s fuckin European, heard of it? What do you have - beans? While I enjoyed talking up my colorful thing in a roomful of reddish brown goop, the test was on and bragging rights would be decided not by fancy ingredients but on satisfaction delivery.

Unfortunately, the purple and gruyere top was sunk by rising chili juices. I expected the juices to flow over the side of the pot, but inside they flew inwards, dooming the top to nothing more than a mixer inner. I removed the chili, mixed her up, and took my tour of the other offerings, all the while keeping one ear on my orange surprise.

To summarize, comments ranged from, “I’m not eating this, this is not chili” to the more straightforward, “this one kind of creeps me out.” The thing is, orange is a beautiful color, and roots are great too. But when people are surrounded by chili color, topping bars, and cornbread, they don’t feel the beauty of cooking with “Swedes” and coconut milk. Punks.

So I lost the chili challenge. Maybe I lost the Shopsin’s challenge too. But I won my own challenge – the challenge of life. And I had plenty of scraps leftover to make more veg stock. So there you go birds, you’ve been stoned with half a stone each. My eyes are drooping. It’s time for bed.

The Star of Deathblow Becomes a Model

2006-11-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

Remember that dashing lad in Deathblow? The one who delivered the most poignant line in the movie, "I say we wait for an hour then take a lap." Well, Conor, the EVO and Belgrove 5-4-1 alum is now a male model. Check him out.

The Burger Mentality

2006-10-23T22:46:00.000-07:00

This post was going to be called “Anticipating a Burger,” but when I got home and decided to read on the couch and dilly dally before dinner instead of writing on this thing, well, the burger slipped into the past tense and all of a sudden future food writing had to wait. Now we’re in The Burger Mentality.

I’m not sure why burger cravings set in and became so significant. I think it might be simply because I ate so many of them. My dad makes a terrific burger, and growing up I fell into the habit of ordering them all the time at restaurants. Later in life when playing with fire met cooking and barbequing became my first foray into independent eating, the burger, predictably, took the seat at the top of the hierarchy (on top of only the hot dog, but below nothing). The burger habit didn’t die, and when I found myself living two blocks from Street, home of the greatest burger in San Francisco (I haven’t had Zuni’s yet, but fuck that place), the habit only got worse.

Today I trudged back from our Monday meeting, wondering what the hell the big whoop was about pretty much everything we discussed. When I checked my email to find Steve’s idea to go to Street that night, my Monday bitterness withered and in its place the craving for the burger set in. I promptly replied, stating my promise to myself to eat early and lightly, preferably vegetables (there’s nothing worse than eating a burger for lunch only to be invited to Street later in the afternoon. Their burgers are not as good when you’ve already had a burger for lunch, no matter how obsessed you are with ground beef). I wound up having a bowl of pasta (pappardelle with sausage, tomatoes, and peppers in a light white wine sauce) and a green salad at 11:45 am.

By two I was hungry, and lucky me got some cookies dropped off at my desk (uncontrollable me ate all of them, only to get not really reprimanded but more of a shocked reaction from my boss, the guy who wanted one later in the day). By six I was starving and wondering if I should get a banana on the way home. The plan was to eat at 8:30, after Monday Night Football. No, even a banana was going to be too much. I got home, ate nothing, read my book, talked to Big James, and eventually at quarter past eight we set off for Street.

As we approached the darkened restaurant, heartbreak ensued. God damn. I knew that Street was closed on Mondays. I’d had this happen at least half a dozen times. What the hell. Polker’s was going to have to do.

While Street had been a regular hangout in the Hyde Street days, Polker’s came first. It was our Seinfeld restaurant, a place where we went to talk about nothing. The curly fries had a nice seasoning, the burgers were unexciting but gussied up, and that was all we needed. The void Street left in my stomach was quickly forgotten as I ordered the Western Burger at Polker’s. It was good. That’s it. Polker’s burgers do not incite oohs and ahhs. There are no stories told about Polker’s burgers.

It was good. Some adjectives are just brutal. Weird, depressing, good, bad, and nice come to mind. But eating this burger was not about how tasty it was, and certainly not about describing it in any hardcore food terms.

Salt

2006-10-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has ever cooked knows, many many recipes end with the line: season with salt and pepper to taste. For those of us accustomed to exact instructions, this last bit of advice can seem a bit frustrating. How are we supposed to know what tastes right? These last words are almost like spelling out a recipe before adding one last instruction – know how to cook.

To say that knowing how to use salt and taste for it is the same as knowing how to cook is not a huge exaggeration. This last instruction recognizes that recipes are not perfect and that you, the cook, have got to be able to figure things out for yourself. Once you’ve figured out how to use salt properly, you can take it as a sign that you’ve got the cook’s instincts, you’ve learned how to toy with flavor, and that you are in charge of the recipe instead of the recipe being in charge of you.

In my first two classes at Tante Marie, the use of salt has been the most important lesson and it’s been one that’s already made my food better. Let’s take the first example: caramelized onions.

The first dish I chose to make was a caramelized onion, nicoise olive, and anchovy tart. I chose it for two reasons: I wanted to make dough and I wanted to caramelize onions. I read an essay by Jeffery Steingarten about making bread. The essay reinforced the idea that mastering cooking comes from the simplest of concepts (Yea, bread seems simple, right? Well, Julia Child’s recipe for whatever-the-French-words-are-for-classic-naturally-leavened-bread is nineteen pages long. Yes, a nineteen page bread recipe. Simple = complicated). In this case, I felt that making dough would be a good step towards getting through the basics, and I think that it was, but use of salt may be an even more fundamental skill. At some point, I’d like to interview some cooks about what they think the most fundamental skills in cooking are. Remind me.

For the past year or so I’ve made caramelized onions at every opportunity. Having had the perfect burger at the Martini House, and caramelized onions being an integral part of that perfect burger, I started making onions literally every time we barbequed. For whatever reason, I could never get close. My onions just lacked the tang that perfect onions have. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and I asked many cooks how they did theirs. Invariably, they’d have some response about how they'd just threo them on some heat, stir occasionally, and an hour later they’d be fine. None of them had any useful insight.

When our teacher, Jen, advised me to douse my onions in salt right after I put them in the pan, I instantly became excited that this might be the step that would set these onions apart from the onions I’d been making at home. After about forty minutes, they were looking good. We tasted them together, and she had one piece of advise: more salt. We kept adding salt until the flavor went from a bland, cooked sort of sweetness to a tangy, powerful zip that would stand out among other strong flavors. Salt had done the trick. I was amazed and my conceptual palate instantly expanded. I had underestimated salt’s ability to extract flavors.

The next night I had on my hands half a roasted pumpkin. I pureed it and prepared to mix it in with a bread pudding I was making. Taking a taste of the pumpkin, it was just a bit bland. There’s no surprise here, but adding salt took the taste from a mushy deadness to the taste of pumpkin that the canned stuff tries to replicate. Mind you, the pumpkin did not taste salty, it merely tasted more flavorful. Understanding salt as something that enhances flavors without turning the flavor salty was a big part of this new step.

The new salt tricks go on and on, and every dish is getting better and better. It amazes me that it took this long to finally figure out how to season to taste. It also amazes me that the countless people I’d asked for instructions over the years never seemed to mention salt. Like the recipes in a book, they subconsciously left it up to me. Never did anybody say, “season with x amount of salt,” but rather they all just advised me simply to season.

I’m not sure that cooking is a big enough deal for the can’t be taught vs. can be taught debate like they have about leadership in The Office, but salt seems reserved for intuition, no matter how long it takes for that intuition to kick in.

Women and Men, Cooking and Cooking

2006-10-20T00:05:00.000-07:00

On my first day at Tante Marie, I walked in the door, said hello to the other people milling about, and turned towards the table where I was to grab my recipes, a towel, and an apron. An apron. I slung the thing over my neck, looped the strings back around, tied them in the front on my stomach, and took a look down at myself.

I sat down in my seat across from Sharon and Sally. We chit chatted about what we liked to cook and why we were taking the class. Soon enough, Laura joined the conversation, offering that she was taking the class as she didn’t know how to spend all her time now that she’d gotten pregnant and quit her job. Turns out, Sally was in a similar predicament, though she’d already given birth and had a real live kid. Sharon had no children and wasn’t married. I think she’s just really into cooking.

There were two other men in the class: Take and Peter. Take was two months into his three month culinary tour of the United States. He runs the cafeteria for Toyota back in Japan and his bosses decided they wanted more Western cuisine. In both classes Take has made soup, so I suppose they can expect to get some soup there at the Toyota plant when he gets home. Not the soups he made here, no, but soup. He can’t make the soups he made here because they don’t have squash in Japan and bouillabaisse is too expensive.

Sometime after we’d finished cooking (I made a caramelized onion, nicoise olive, and anchovy tart – more on that later), I found myself on the outskirts of conversation. My belly full and entranced by my glass of Burgundy, I hardly noticed as Sally, Sharon, and Laura ventured into a mode of femininity that I’d never seen before. When they asked me what I thought about woman choosing careers or kids, taking time off or not taking time off, staying at home or working part time, I was taken aback. My gut reaction was to make a joke of the question, as I thought it was completely impossible that they’d ask me, a 24 year old guy who’s nowhere close to even getting a dog, what he thought about this.

“I uh, ha, hu, ha, I uh, well that’s just, you know, your department,” I mumbled in a blend between the Dude’s voice and either Beavis or Butthead. Only when I stopped talking and they kept right along with the conversation did I realize that they were serious.

Where were the knives? The flaming grills? The chef’s coats? The people with scars up and down their arms? This was not that kind of kitchen. This was a kitchen where we shared our experiences with our chosen recipes as we ate dessert.

I’m not really sure where else there’s this kind of schism. Depending on who you ask, cooking is either a fiercely masculine, testosterone driven exercise (Anthony Bourdain) or an effeminate, domesticated pastime (Paula Deen). Both masculine and feminine, swashbuckling and demure, the kitchen runs these hormones right up against eachother.

Poached Meringue Don't Fail Me Now

2006-10-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

I’m in trouble because I’ve over beaten eggs. And I thought I knew something about cooking.

Tonight’s Wednesday Night Club considered three factors: we were drunk from our tour of Anchor Steam (which extended itself far, far beyond the normal tour. It helps to work for a company that serves their beer. It helps to have a girl with you from that company who’s friendly with everybody and, well, encourages the brewers to make fools of themselves with the kissing of the hand and the forehead and the ideas for what to do with the phone numbers they’ve dished out. “Call me, let’s go out!”), we had two people arrive with prepared bits of standup comedy (and enough booze in the others to motivate some serious improving. Mine? Lewd and crude.), and we had with us a professional cook, Heath, and very few ingredients. The consequences of such a formula seem inevitable. Drunk. Comedy, some good, a lot…amateurish? And a botched batch of poached meringue.

Yea, I know, poached meringue doesn’t exactly seem like the answer to any sentence that involves “inevitable,” but believe me, it was. We had milk, eggs, and sugar. That was it. What to do when you want to cook and that’s what you’ve got? Poached meringue.

Heath asked me what role I wanted to play in this process. I told him that the charge was his and to tell me what to do. He said to beat the whites into soft peaks, add a half cup of sugar, and beat them to stiff peaks.

I beat like I have many times before. When I lifted the beaters out, I said, “soft peaks?” Heath took a look and told me that I’d gone too far. Yes, I had, they were medium peaks. To be honest, of all the recipes I’ve made that involved peaks of varying stiffness, I’ve never paid that much attention. I’ve aimed for whatever peaks they’ve asked for, but never cared if I was a bit off. I wouldn’t have cared in this situation either, but Heath did.

I poured in the sugar and he added a little vanilla and some Bailey’s Irish Cream. I reinserted the beaters. I beat. For about thirty seconds. I pulled the beaters out and drooooooooooooooop, the peaks fell, the eggs were liquidy, I called out for attention and was promptly told to stop. I’d soon learn that I’d overbeaten the whites.

You see, the problem with overbeating is this: when you drop a dollop of beaten whites into the bath of milk and water to poach them, they need to hold. If overbeaten, they don’t stick together enough. Since I’d never seen poached meringue before, I couldn’t tell that these meringues were doomed. But when we gave up on poaching and decided to bake them, I could see plainly that these deflated armadillos of whites were not the meringues anybody had envisioned.

Sometimes the whites get pulverized and the cooks get peeved. But at least, you know, we were talking about God and keeping it real and everything, even if it was in joke form, and even if the jokes were bad, you know?

Holding Pattern

2006-10-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

Dang dang dang...it's been nearly two weeks since my last post. I will be back though, I will be back. Blogging just hasn't been the right thing to do lately. I've got plenty of material to write about though, so that's a good thing.

Upcoming topics:

Lessons learned from cooking school - yup, I started cooking school at Tante Marie. Turns out that there're some gender issues in the cooking world. These have popped up in David Kamp's new book, The United States of Arugula, too, and I'll be posting a review of that soon enough. The main food lessons from cooking school, however, are easy: know how to use salt and be patient.

A lot of cool cooking lately, a lot of it involving roasted pumpkin. Dude, you best believe that some roasted pumpkin cream sauce and toasted hazelnuts will make gnocchi dance. The theme of my cooking lately has been a pursuit of the taste of fall. I'm getting closer and closer...

And lastly, I haven't forgotten my vow to rival Shopsin's Burrito French Toast. Tonight I'm due to cook for Wednesday Night Club and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be getting loco...

NYC vs SF: Doughnut vs Donut: The Doughnut Plant vs Bob's

2006-10-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

What the heck is this place? The Doughnut Plant? Mark Israel, the chief of doughnuts at this Manhattan bakery, was just on Throwdown with Bobby Flay showing off his tres de leches doughnut and the place looks like a doughnut heaven. It’s got the same old time machine that drops the doughnuts in oil that Bob’s has. It’s got both cake and yeast doughnuts as well as the tres de leches. This place might be the only shop that can give Bob’s a run for its money.

I’ve got to admit that my loyalty’s feeling shaky and I’m definitely intrigued. This guy Mark Israel was making peach doughnuts with a fresh peach glaze. He had more adventurous flavors than I’ve ever seen. The Doughnut Plant is exactly what would happen to Bob’s if it moved to Manhattan and decided it wanted to get onto the Food Network.

Does anybody know what the story is with The Doughnut Plant? It’s now on my list of places to visit on my next New York trip. It's almost time for a Bob’s vs Plant throwdown.

Guest Speaker Series: Nick Cooks with Chocolate

2006-10-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

Appreciation of chocolate is a foodism Nick's taught me to admire. He has managed to see past the sometimes blinding influence of sugar and into the many charms of chocolate.

Over the past few months I've followed an urge to develop a palate for chocolate. I've slowly become obsessed with its seemingly magical properties and subtle tastes. Chocolate, quite plainly, is just really good stuff. I'd never actually made anything with chocolate (aside from the obvious) and so when I was thinking about what to bake the other night there was an obvious choice before me.

A couple weeks ago I requested to receive "more information" from the Belgium tourist office. Among the deluge of brochures and maps and other materials was one entitled "Belgium for Chocolate lovers." On the back was a simple recipe for chocolate mousse:

5 oz. cream
5 oz. dark chocolate
2 eggs

Bring the cream to a boil. Stir in the chocolate in little pieces. Whisk the egg yolks in for 3 minutes. Beat the egg whites until hard, and then add them to the mixture. Cool and serve.

Simple enough right? For my first attempt I used Ghirardelli dark chocolate, which turned out to be a huge waste of good chocolate. I didn't cut the chocolate into small enough pieces. It never completely melted. I boiled it for too long. The butter separated from the cocoa. I was left with a chunky, dry tasting, partially edible, wonder of a mistake beneath a layer of fortified gelatinous goo. Not exactly the chocolaty ambrosial dessert I was hoping for.

After collecting the advice of Tom, Casey, and Jaime I tried making it again the next night. This time I got a French dark chocolate I bought at Molly Stones, Valrhona Le Noir Gastronomie, a Chocolat Noir or "dark chocolate." This is exquisite chocolate, some of the best I'd ever had, so I tried my best not to screw it up.

First I cut the chocolate into tiny pieces and separated the eggs. As soon as the cream was boiled I stirred in large handfulls of the shaved chocolate until it was melted. I stirred it well, and it quickly became a thick, smooth, chocolaty mixture. I removed it from heat, whisked in the egg yolks, and then folded in the whites until it was smooth. The result was a perfect and exceptional chocolate mousse. It also took about a third of the time to make.

Hopefully this is just the first of many experiments in creating chocolate goodness, and I learned two very important lessons. First of all, timing and process are everything in cooking delicate foods. Chocolate clearly is no exception. Second, it appears that knowledge of the details may be one of those things you have to learn from experience; or in the case of chocolate, one of those things that's probably best studied in Belgium.

Live Show Series: Are you ready Art Bruts?

2006-10-04T00:53:00.000-07:00

Over the summer between sixth and seventh grade, Andrew, my friend who was a year older than me, mentioned that he’d brought a girl to see PCU and made out with her. Genius, I thought, this was something I had to try. After writing those two sentences, I have a few more questions for Andrew. Did his mom drive him to the theater? Or did her mom? Or did they walk? What scene did he wait for before he made his move? I think I would’ve leaned in as Droz was watching his ex from freshman year play Ultimate Frisbee against Jerrytown. It’s a nice lull, you get to see Droz’s sensitive side, and if you bump teeth or something you can just say, “huh, Jerrytown.”

I went home after that summer and watched PCU as soon as it came out on video. Two things happened. PCU became one of my favorite movies (This penis party’s got to go! Hey hey! Ho ho! = magic), inspiring me not only to go to college, but to have a lot of fun in college. Second, I bought a few P-Funk CD’s and went to see them live and uncut on March 9, 1996, three days before my birthday, with Ben, Garth, and Colin at the Maritime Hall. The legacy of these two happenings? Well, one would be the first entry on my top five live shows of all time, the other would be having a lot of fun in college, and the third would be the nexus of the two, bringing the man himself, George Clinton, to CMC to play a show (didn’t realize how much the crack had gotten to him at this point, though. This show was a distant distant third of the three P-Funk shows I’ve seen. What’d CMC lose on that one Bick? Twenty five grand?). Without further ado, here are the top five live shows I’ve seen…ever.

George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars, Maritime Hall, 1996.

The thing is that technically the Warfield show in 1998 with my man Gabe was the best P-Funk I’ve seen, I mean, if we’re just talking about overall coolness of the show. But the 1996 show was my first concert ever and therefore it wins.

Before the music got going, the four of us impressionable youths wandered around the venue, learning that it is possible to buy mushrooms and weed from pretty much anybody at a P-Funk show. We weren’t quite there yet in our stages of rebellion, but we all thought it was pretty cool to get offers. Underneath the stage in the merch room was a full on head shop. Bongs galore were for sale, and in the middle of the room were couches where people thickened the air. I’ve never seen a setup like this at any concert since, but at the time I expected that this would be the madness I’d find as soon as I got the f out of middle school.

Once the music got going, we found ourselves pressed against the back wall, unable to see the stage, and too feeble to plow through the crowd to the front. We still grooved, believe you me, but we couldn’t see the onstage spectacle that makes P-Funk P-Funk. We could see the silhouette of Michael Hampton being projected onto the walls against a backdrop of a psychedelic light show, though. We rocked, we rolled, we crashed at my Aunt’s place in the Richmond, and we ate pancakes. We left Marin boys with memberships to BMG and Columbia House and returned men who had smelled pot smoke and heard the Godfather of funk.

Pat Green, San Juan Capistrano, 2002.

After a summer of listening to Claire et al sing “Songs about Texas,” I couldn’t get the dang song out of my head. Soon enough our suite had a cowboy and cowgirl party complete with fiddles playing, bales of hay, and dreams of getting a goat, and so it was time to cash in and buy a Pat Green CD. The music took hold and became a regular in my car and in my room. Three Days became one of the few soundtrack albums for Bick, Nina, and my trip from Michigan back to California. Something about that country twang seemed right as we sped across the West with the windows down and hot air exfoliating our skin with its blast.

Word got out that he was playing in Orange County and we snagged tickets. We chugged a beer in the parking lot and got pumped up – there’s nothing like tailgating for a country show in an Orange County parking lot. At the door they checked our ID’s and noticed that Sydney was from Texas. Since they wanted to get the real fans right in the mix, the bouncer led us to a front row table. Around us was a hodge podge of quasi cowboys and guys in brand new bright red Angels shirts (this was their World Series year and the first time anybody had ever paid attention to them). Amidst that crowd of fair-weather baseball fans and novelty seeking country music sniffers/displaced true blues was the kind of rocking out that makes your throat hurt. Hate Texas and George Bush and cowboy stuff all you want, but those guys have got spirit and maybe even the white man’s version of soul (debate?).

Dave Mathews Band, Concord Pavilion, 2000.

Just kidding ha ha ha somebody gave me a free ticket and we ate Chinese chicken salad from Woodland’s Market on the grass. Oh my God…Dave…fuck.

Lords of Acid, Maritime Hall, 2000.

Me, Quincy, Cate. Long Island Iced teas, hanging out with some dudes from Benicia in the parking lot, Quincy designated driving with one hand. Naked people on stage. Lyrics that I really hope were translated from German or something (“marijuana in your brain, takes more time to ejaculate” seriously). Not exactly Underworld, but Lords of Acid were pretty rad in a techno sort of way. By the way, see It’s All Gone Pete Tong if you haven’t already.

Ween, The Fillmore, 2001.

My dearest Ween. This was the first Ween show I saw, the San Francisco stop of their White Pepper tour. Before anything else, a little background.

Way back in the day Spencer and I mobbed from HMC to Marquette to pick up his friend Bobby who, little did we know, would wind up doing beer bongs with Bart and puking off Spencer’s balcony. Last I heard of Bobby was about four years ago, he was at Boulder, and had a beard. The one memory I have of that trip into Marquette was a strip of road after Halfway (a town in Michigan, not on the first page of google or on google maps, but I swear it exists, even if it’s not a real town) through new growth forest with the clickity clack of Voodoo Lady on the stereo loud and us nodding our heads. The time was right, we were on to something, it was time for Ween.

Dean and Gene Ween spent their teenage years huffing glue and Lysol in their hometown of New Hope, PA. By the time they’d made it big, they’d started performing in shorts when it was hot out and they had amassed thousands of songs.

Their show is like nothing you’ve ever seen.

A child without an eye
Made her mother cry
Why ask why?
They kept the child clean
On Buckingham Green

- Buckingham Green

At times dramatic like Hamlet being performed at Treasure Island on the Vegas Strip, at others exploratory like the Dead without beards, Ween’s live performances are like running through the car wash naked, liking it, then stealing a brownie from 7-Eleven and making it into the shape of poo and throwing it some girly with a backpack on.

Spinto Band, Art Brut, and We Are Scientists, The Fillmore, Last Night.

Spinto had just taken the stage as we arrived, their melodies greeting us just past the ticket checker. I sprinted to the front left of the stage, posted up, and began to bob.

A brief history of the Spinto Band. Jake knows them, they are from Delaware. He put them on a 2001 mix that included the Band and World Party and we listened to the song we deemed their future hit single, Let’s See What Develops, constantly. Sure enough, last winter I heard them not once, but twice on Live 105’s Listener Live Space (“yea so ummm, this is Randy from Los Gatos and tonight I’ll be playing the Cure, the Pixies, the Spinto Band...). You get the idea. They became the indie band that nobody’s heard of that amateur DJ’s with two hours of time after midnight on weeknights would drop after bolstering their unestablished and never to be established reputations with a few hot hot classics. That being said, if I were to get a slot on Listener Live Space, I’d definitely play Let’s See What Develops. As it is, few people have heard that song. They didn’t release it on their album and they don’t play it live (until just recently, having put it on as a B-side on the UK single for Oh Mandy). I guess I’d have to get on Myspace to get onto Live Space, but whatever. In addition to hearing them on Live 105, they came on at least once a day while I was listening to Indie Pop Rocks on Soma FM for a while at work. They're making strides and I’ve got a lot of faith in these lads.

Spinto was the band I came to see, and I found it merely convenient that they were opening for the Claremont band, We Are Scientists. Back in the day I loved the Scientists. They were hilarious with all these superhero songs about them beating bad guys with their science powers, and they played constantly for tiny audiences in cool spaces with kegs and stuff. So I have lots of really grand memories of the Scientists. I’m not as down with them now that they take themselves all Brooklyn seriously, but it was a nice perk still to have them coming on after Spinto.

But what’s this? A third band playing after Spinto but before the Scientists? Art Brut? Who are they? I had no idea, but wished they hadn’t been there, as my legs were beginning to tire and a seat, or better yet a couch seat (or better yet the couch seat I’m in NOW) was sounding good. That all changed as soon as they took the stage.

Tall lanky blond guy with a Strat that had protective material on the tips comes out and and swivels around, glowering at us through his blond bangs. Attitude, I like it. The she bassist, bulky with red hair in her eyes and a polka dot dress – pure sex appeal just for playing bass. And the other guitarist with the Robert Smith hair and the bug eyes. And then the drummer. What the fuck. Blond hair greased to the side of his face. J-Lo version aviators hanging from the crease in his white polo shirt, and he plays standing up. They kicked off with a punch, banging out the first few measures of Back in Black. The crowd roared. I have no idea if they all knew what they were in for, but I most definitely did not.

Out runs their singer, the tall and boyish Eddie Argus. Song. Pause. Crowd noise. Some barely coherent English accent style babbling.

Argus raises his hand, cries, “Are you ready Art Bruts?!?!?!?!?” drops his elbow, and they wail. And he says this before every song.

I listened to their album three times today. I’m not sure if the genius carries into the studio as well as it does onto the stage, but if you ever hear the words, “Are you ready Art Bruts,” you best be dashing to the front and preparing yourself for a show like you’ve never seen.

Please follow the link to World Party and listen to song. It came on by mistake after I found their website, and I let it ride. As promised, it’s a World Party.

Opening Day for Tea Season

2006-10-02T00:14:00.000-07:00

“Would you like milk and sugar?”

At last, I heard the magic words I’d been waiting for ever since I came back to San Francisco. Returning to a foggy, windy, damp, and chilly city after four sunny years in the Southland promised to restore tea drinking to the supremacy it gained while studying abroad in Dublin, the perfect tea drinking city. In Dublin, I’d walk about two hundred yards from class back to my apartment, and that amount of time outside, coupled with the fact that our apartment was always freezing, ensured cravings for tea and the tea never failed to satisfy. I drank tea after returning to LA from Dublin, but much like smoking in that city, it never really worked. Standing outside in the sun with a hot paper cup somehow wasn’t the same as experiencing the soothing warmth spread from inside out, thawing out chilled bones. I expected that San Francisco would be a great tea drinking city as well, as it has all the right ingredients. But after tenaciously trying to mold San Francisco into a tea friendly experience, I failed.

While most of the tea I drank in Dublin was in the confines of my apartment, the motivation to get into the stuff, and my manual for how to drink tea properly, came from the tea I drank in public places. I learned that in Ireland, one generally does not specify what kind of tea one’s after – it’s just tea. I grew to appreciate the presence of a pot instead of a bag per mug. And while I didn’t realize it at the time, as cream wasn’t even an option, I learned to take my tea with milk, and occasionally a little sugar.

Ordering tea out and about in this city is a lesson in interrupting rhythm. The process is typically doomed from the start, as most restaurants and coffee shops will have entirely too many options. From Breakfast Americana to African Tribal Dreams to Black Gold (those last two are invented tea varieties, but you get the idea), nothing would ever work. Even English Breakfast tea seemed wrong. All I wanted was to say, “I’ll have a cup of tea,” and not have to make any further specifications or answer any other questions. In Ireland the process is so widely understood that it just flows, but in San Francisco ordering tea can be as annoying as doing homework or car shopping (what the fuck is torque?).

If you’re at a coffee shop, you can select either a large or small or maybe even a medium paper cup. They hand you a bag and a cup either way, but depending on the size you select, they charge you more or less, presumably for the incremental costs for larger sized cups and more hot water. Somebody somewhere has got to lay down some ground rules here – you should not be charged an extra fifty cents for another inch of paper cup and hot water. The pot system alleviates this problem, or rather prevents it before it even starts.

After you get your hot water and tea bag and paper cup, you can wander over to the milk area. The coffee shop probably will have skim, 2%, whole, and cream. Again, the problem with the choices and interrupting rhythm: this is just one more example of the cluttered country we live in, overgrown with the weeds of options that have shot up and out of control, unchallenged by the native grasses of tradition. Sometimes the coffee shop will bungle the milk array. At the Motley, they put ice cubes in their milk to keep it cold, oblivious to the fact that milk with ice in it is absolutely revolting.

The deal breaker, however, comes when ordering tea while seated at a restaurant. While yet to be deterred by the signs of San Francisco tea doom, I’d often order tea after lunch and dinner and while out to breakfast. If left uninstructed, the waiter would deliver tea with sugar and cream, not knowing that cream in tea is disastrously overpowering and can ruin even the best of cups. At first I’d ask for milk, but to them this seemed like a frivolous request, and if they did remember, they only brought me milk grudgingly. Even the three restaurants I worked in during my service career served tea with cream, and two of these were highly sophisticated restaurants. Did I speak up about this? Not with any success. They still serve cream with their tea to this day.

If my milk quibbles seem finicky, an experience at Teavana discouraged me from the San Francisco tea experience in a profound way. This place epitomized the curse of choice, and since they wanted to present themselves as tea masters, they put milk or sugar in your tea for you instead of pointing you to a self serve station. After ordering a mug of whatever black tea, I asked for milk. The barista looked at me for a second before offering a lecture about how tea (even black tea) is supposed to be taken without milk and sugar. That was enough.

After about a year of tea ordering frustration, I found myself drifting towards the lull of espresso. Before I knew it, negotiating for a proper cup of tea had become a thing of the past, and tea settled into a supporting role in my day, an afternoon cup at work or a weekend fix at home rather than a defining beverage. By spring of this year, the routine became: coffee in the morning, espresso drink of some sort after lunch, and tea in the afternoon. Caffeine took hold over me as it weaseled its way into my system in higher doses than ever before.

Summer came along and with it new habits – more time in the ocean and the bay, football catch and running around in the park after work, and less and less caffeine. The coffee in the morning kept its position, but the caffeine addiction (and sugar addiction, but that’s another entry) subsided, and tea dropped from its supporting role into an occasional blast of nostalgia.

But what comes after Summer? That’d be Fall, and with it old habits stormed back. Espresso drinks after lunch aren’t here yet, but afternoon tea is, and tea suddenly found itself back in my consciousness. The discovery of Tal-y-Tara could not have been timed any better.

I found out about this place as I logged into Yelp and glanced at the recent reviews. A few words about horses and tea grabbed my attention and I checked the place out. Way out in the boonies towards Seacliff, this place specializes in equestrian gear, tea, and a sandwich called the motorloaf. I gave them a ring and got the machine. An elderly English accent bumbled through their hours and other information. I was sold.

I visited this place on Saturday afternoon at around two not having eaten, fending off a massive hangover, and exhausted from errands all morning including x-rays at the hospital. The time for tea was ripe, and that motorloaf was sounding good. I walked in and sure enough the front of the store was all horse gear. As if to remind the amateurs who didn’t recognize those whips as specialty English riding gear, they had a life size horse model dressed with a saddle and other décor. I glanced around and headed towards the back where there were little couches set up around about five tables. The guy pointed me towards a couch and I sat down, kicked back, cracked open my book, and took in the atmosphere.

Playing on the radio was the classical station. When contrasted with the Muzak that’s increasingly typical in restaurants, hearing actual radio helped Tal-y-Tara seem homey, as if you were over at somebody’s house. Next to me sat two grandparents with their granddaughter, talking in whispers as if afraid to pierce the peacefulness. The guy came over and dropped a menu for both food and tea. Yea, I said it, a menu for tea. They had many, many options. Sitting neatly at the top, however, was Barry’s, a grocery store Irish brand. I didn’t read any farther, my non-choice having been made. I’m ok with them having choices, as long as they have an option for those of us who’d rather not think about it.

After the guy took my order, he offered the famous words that inspired this entry, “would you like milk and sugar?” YES!!!!!!!!!!!!! Finally, after all this time, somebody was prepared to serve tea right. From here on in I knew I was in for a treat and I savored the experience. Out came a pot of tea accompanied by milk and sugar, and soon later came the motorloaf – a loaf of dark bread hollowed out then refilled with a series of different tea sandwiches. Tea season had arrived, and this time it had started right. Even though I’ll still be making most of my own tea, knowing that there is a decent tea house out there for the anglophile in me comes as a relief. We’ll see what sort of ripple effect this place has, for there might be a tea culture in this town after all.

Guest Speaker Series: Bick Goes Clubbing in China

2006-09-28T00:41:00.000-07:00

Bick writes to use from China, the country they say is the wave of the future. No Loitering is pleased to present news from Asia, the future, and from Bick, former ASCMC President and author of 'When I Was the Boy.'

i was going to write about buses for this guest post. that was before i got whisked away by the drunk fairy (read senior teacher) and went clubbing.

i was sitting in my favorite chinese restaurant, after i had ordered a delicious meal of fried rice, beef cooked some way, pork cooked some way, and vegetables cooked some way, (i don't know how to order chinese food. i say a meat, then the waitress points to a bunch of dishes on the menu). one of my co-workers, an american named nadia, came over and told me that a senior teacher, chen (surname) lao shi (teacher) had invited all the foreign teachers to hot pot, and that we should go. a free meal sounded great. i am not being paid until the end of the month, and for the past six weeks i have been living off 200 dollars in chinese yuan i had bought in the states. i was down to my last 70 yuan (or less than 10 dollars.). i told the waitress hastily that we didn't need all the food, and we were in fact going to eat somewhere else. since we eat an incredible amount of food (at least compared to the native chinese) about four days out of a week, they understood, and took it in stride.

chen lao shi was a jovial fellow that we had met multiple times outside our apartment. rachel, one of the british teachers, was sure that he was a derelict who hung around the campus of our school offering foreign teachers cigarettes. instead he was soon known to be a "class master".

a note about the chinese school system. up to about the junior year of college, chinese students stay in the same classroom the entire day, while the different teachers come around teaching. the teacher who is basically the homeroom teacher is known as the "class master."

we left quickly with the class master, who spoke a few words of english (as about as much as i do chinese), in a hired car from the school. we were taken to a hot pot joint in downtown xi pu, the suburb near the school. we were introduced to the "lao ban" (manager) and it was clear that chen lao shi had some connections. a hot pot is a boiling pot of oil that sits recessed in the table. you order raw food, and put it in as you wish. some of the highlights of tonight are: beef tendon, mushroom, tripe, beef balls (meatballs made of beef, get your mind out of the gutter), duck tongue, different mushrooms, chicken feet, a different kind of mushroom that looks like a pig's ear called pig's ear. it was delicious. the duck tongue was okay, as long as eaten with the tongue tendons intact. then it seemed like a part of a chicken that you had never tried. but when you ate it without the gristle (as i did once i was told you were not supposed to eat the bones) it was suspiciously like french kissing a dismembered daisy duck. (she was sensuous, and delicious.)

as we finished, chen lao shi's friends showed up. they were about 20 years younger, and loaded. they suggested we should go to "Barbie," the hottest club in cheng du currently. all of chen lao shi's friends owned bmws. and by all, i mean both. we drove into chengdu in their two cars, which were by far the nicest cars i've seen here. i kept trying to tell our driver/friend that driving in a beamer was much better than taking the bus, but he didn't understand. after driving 20 minutes, and waiting in a line of cars for 5 minutes, we made it into the parking garage. at this point, our new rich friend gave us his card. it had red text and was printed on gold metal. it is completely rediculous. we walked from the car to the elevator. on the elevator doors was an ad for the club. it had a very attractive western woman, and a bunch of chinese text that went something like this: "chinese text chinese text chinese text PLAYBOY chinese text chinese text chinese text chinese text." obviously, i was sold.

we exited the elevator into a dimly lit club with lights and monitors everywhere. we were sat at a booth with ice tea mixed with chivas royale. as the music blared, i followed my first animalistic urge. "where is the bathroom?" i asked. my english speaking companion pointed to a waitress who, with hand motions, told me to follow her. the bathroom was a normal chinese bathroom, with one exception. as i washed my hands, a man pushed the button on my faucet to keep it going for me, and gave me a nice, i like to think shiatsu, massage. i deposited ten yuan (the price of a dinner plus 2 beers at our regular restaurant) on the tip plate.

i returned to find the men ensconced in a comfortable booth. on the table was an ashtray, an iced-tea pitcher (oh not your normal iced tea) and fruit with long toothpicks for snacking. in addition to the two western women teachers and the one chinese woman teacher, there were two women i did not recognize. they would politely drink when chen lao shi toasted them, and dance when he did not.

now i don't want to be too forward, but when one is invited to the vip room of a strip club [one t. dibblee knows of which i speak], the women act much the same way. when they are not grinding in your lap, they look to drink with you so you spend your money on the exorbitant prices at the bar. these women are much the same way, but more classily dressed, and much more reserved. but having them there introduces the possibility for any man that it could be his lucky night.

as i downed "iced-tea" after "iced-tea" to prove my worth, my groove thang began to shake to the rhythm uncontrollably. the western women said i was having "too good a time." chen lao shi pointed at the modestly dressed strangers who sat down to drink with us and said something i didn't understand exactly but i definitely got his drift. i quickly told my interpreter that i prefer, "getting my own." i believe that was the way i phrased it.

meanwhile the monitors played out of sync with the music. the videos were sexy western women dancing in next to nothing, and they had nothing to do with the song. i believe the club played sexy music videos regardless of what the music was like at the moment. i have seen the same technique deployed on chinese long-distance buses.

since we had started at a quaint 7 pm, i was back before 11:30 so now i am well ready for a full day of classes tomorrow. i was glad for the opportunity, but next time, i will get my own.

Buddha Got Fat for a Reason

2006-09-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

A more spiritual person than I mentioned today that Buddhism values the mundane as a baseline without which we wouldn’t understand the exceptional (sorry Buddha, I googled “Buddhism mundane” to see if I could get some information aside from one offhanded comment, but nothing was clear cut). The comment came in the context of a conversation about work – should we take it for granted that we’re going to be bored on the job sometimes (fuck, a lot of the time)? That we’re going to have “morning busy work?” Soon enough, however, my thoughts drifted back to a familiar resting place – food. Does this perspective jive with the idea of making eating exceptional three times a day? Or does it fuck with it?

I suppose it’s tough to really drive home an argument based on one comment and having no background knowledge of ze Buddha, but let’s muse anyway. Buddha aside, should we value the mundane? And if so, does that challenge our pursuit as foodies of colorizing the most quotidian of activities? In a way it seems as though foodies are trying to bring excitement to everything, even if everything isn’t supposed to be exciting. In another it might be a rebellion against the banality of the rest of our lives – if school is really boring, we look forward to lunch time, right?

Having thought about this for about fifteen minutes now, I’m not yet completely sure where to go. So let’s turn to another example of finding the mundane entertaining and see where that leads us.

The Office accomplishes two big things. One, it brings out the humor in our everyday boring selves. My job would not be the same if it weren’t for the perspective I’ve gained from that show. Two, it shows how vulnerable we all are. David Brent’s veneer is thinner than paper, and Dawn and Tim’s yearnings fester at the surface, not below it, even though their desires last unrequited for so long. If their environment had not been so overly mundane, we would not have seen the human spirit exposed at the surface in its effort to provide life to live for itself in the face of cubicle depravity.

I just read an article that mentioned how the fixation on entertainment and being funny at all times has infiltrated our lives beyond reason. Peter Hyman argues that this started well before The Office with Seinfeld. Seinfeld originated the everyday-life-can-be-funny concept, and it’s morphed into this fixation on everything needing to be funny now. He argues that this constant pursuit of funniness separates us from reality.

This is an unfinished thought. I will be back to it. I don’t want to cheat the idea just to finish tonight’s entry. Gotta drink some water, read a bit, and go to bed. Mundane, I know.

The California Dialogue

2006-09-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

The thing is, LA’s not that simple. It’s not a simple love hate. It’s not a simple city. It’s hard to know whether or not you’re even in LA, and if so what it feels like. San Francisco not so. Whether arriving from the North, East, or South, your vision of San Francisco fulfills itself before you even get there. With its distinctive skyline and the backdrop of the bridges and the bay, the city you’ve been expecting unveils itself as soon as it comes into sight.

LA’s complicated because while it may be heinously unattractive and the country’s best example of urban dissonance, it’s lots of fun. The Bermuda grass is thick, you never need to wear anything aside from flip flops, and that sun beats down with an infectious burn. There’s cheap food (and furniture, and smut, and used cars) everywhere. The smog brightens the colors of the sunset and spreads them all across the city. In the sun you bask, happy enough with your bit of grass and a couple buddies to join you as you pass the time.

Here in San Francisco we have fog, the gray cloak that adds texture, reveals the swirls of the wind, and drives us to inflect our lives with aesthetics beyond the weather. In the absence of the sun to keep us endlessly complacent, we learn to appreciate coffee, beer, wine, smokes, food, and art music and everything else. People are drawn to San Francisco by an idea of it that comes true, a simple bonhomie, a place where openness reigns and every avenue gets explored. For this freedom we trade conflict.

In LA nobody agrees. The discussion itself is so lightly trodden that you’re bound to come up with an original insight just by bringing it up. The city itself, wait there is no city itself. Here in San Francisco the conversation stops and starts with how much we love San Francisco.

Didion, Pynchon, West, Fante, Bukowski. The Southern California edge. Compared to the predictable San Francisco aesthetic. Even the legacy of the Beats is preserved by cafes and poetry readings. Sometimes I think I should go to a poetry reading or something like that, but when I did go to one at City Lights there were so many micro ponytails and leather jackets that it just didn’t seem right.

While the fog holds our stories in the air, gives us time for pause, LA is not far behind. Let’s give them home field advantage. Think of the movies. San Francisco films bear all the telltale signs – hills, cable cars, fog. LA’s mystery turns on itself in the barely noticeable, grayish brown, smoggy backdrop. Our stories drift in such an obvious swirl, while theirs hang above the city, evident to anyone who looks, but more likely to be ignored.

Guaranteed Crowd Pleaser Series: Baked Penne

2006-09-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

In life there are very few guaranteed crowd pleasers, slightly more than there are absolute truths, but still not that many. The first would be “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate. The first thing ever to earn the title, this song defines the whole concept of guaranteed crowd pleasers. Perhaps this is a story for another time, but let it be known that any DJ who refuses to play Hot Chocolate is a clown.

The true test of guaranteed crowd pleasers is time. Ever since seeing it written on Josh’s shirt in August, I’ve thought that the sentence, “My cousin, Chris, flies an F-16” was a guaranteed crowd pleaser. No matter the tone, the context, or the timing, if somebody said the words, “My cousin, Chris, flies an F-16” it was funny. I still think this is funny – but will this phrase last for the rest of my life?

Likewise, if “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys ever comes on in any situation, I’m rocking out. This started in 2004 and it’s carried on ever since, but will I want to rock the Pet Shop Boys while dropping my kids off at school when I’m all old and they’re all impressionable? Guaranteed crowd pleasers have to work in every situation.

This weekend I may have stumbled upon a guaranteed crowd pleaser for the food world. I was lying on the couch dozing while Drew and Jules watched college football. Horizontal felt good, and the state of relaxation ushered in a vision of classic comfort food: baked penne. While throwing some pasta in a dish with tomatoes and covering it with cheese is less than exciting, a few ideas popped in to enliven things and the vision persevered.

Here’s what you need.

Pound of penne
Little basket of cherry tomatoes
Few cloves of garlic
Bit of olive oil
Pound of whatever kind of meat you want to use
Small Onion
Little can of tomato paste
Half cup red wine
Tomato sauce
4 oz of French Muenster cheese, cut into small cubes
2 cups of grated mozzarella.

Heat oven to 350.

Cut all the cherry tomatoes in half and throw them in a bowl. Dice the garlic finely and throw that in the bowl too. Douse the bowl with olive oil and mix it up. Dump the bowl out onto a sheet pan, spread out the tomatoes, and put the sheet pan in the oven for fifteen minutes or so – we’re roasting these suckas. Take them out when they look a bit cooked but before they lose their shape.

Cook your penne in salted water until a minute shy of when you’d normally take it out. It’s going to keep cooking when you throw it in the baking dish. Strain and set aside.

Cook up your finely diced onion in a bit of olive oil in a big frying pan until it's soft and beginning a to carmelize – a few minutes. Throw in your meat – we used chicken and basil sausage. Season if you want, we used a bit of cumin. If you’ve got a greasy kind of meat, you may want to cook the meat ahead of time, drain off the grease, then throw in with the onions. Once the meat is browned, throw in the tomato paste. I happened to have a carrot and tomato paste on hand from the night before. If you’ve got some carrots and a food processor, I’d definitely recommend using this instead. I love the sweetness of carrots.

Once you’ve got the paste worked in and it’s looking good, throw in some wine over it to seize up on all the sugars you’ve got flying around. Cook off the extra liquid, add some tomato sauce and you’re good to go. Take it off the heat.

Mix the pasta, cherry tomatoes, and the meat and sauce mixture in your baking dish. Stir in the cubes of French Muenster. The easiest way to cube this is to cut off the rind, cut the cheese into slices, put the slices in the freezer for fifteen minutes, then take them out and cube them up.

Cover the dish with a layer of grated mozzarella and put the dish into the oven for half an hour or so. Take it out, you’re stoked.

When I made this on Saturday, I had everyone going back for seconds. Normally while in the kitchen I try to balance out my desire to get tricky and experiment with my duty to make something everyone’s going to like. With a layer of cheese covering up everything you do, however, you’ve got a crowd pleasing feature that buys you a lot of leverage.

Roasting the cherry tomatoes totally brings out the flavors and is worth the effort. In this instance, I toasted some cumin in the pan before cooking the onions. The aroma from the pan during the toasting process makes me think that this has got to add some serious impact to the dish. The carrot puree just happened to be what I had leftover in the fridge, and that had a ton of flavor. To make it, I just sautéed a bunch of carrots, some peeled and deseeded tomatoes, and a bit of garlic before throwing it all in the food processor with a bit of veg stock. Since I didn’t have any wine for this one, I threw in vodka after browning the meat. Lastly, the French Muenster is so stinky my kitchen still reeks - it could have easily overpowered the dish. Add up all these crazy flavors and experiments and you’re rolling heavy. But again, with a layer of cheese on top to protect you, everyone’s going to be happy.

I got my wishes – to experiment in the kitchen with a battleground of intense flavors. The eaters got theirs – a bunch of pasta, meat, tomatoes and cheese. When it came down to it, the deal breaker was the French Muenster. Holy crumb – that cheese is so fun to cook with. Intense and fragrant, it takes the center stage without throttling the other flavors.

So is this a guaranteed crowd pleaser? I guess I wouldn’t want this for breakfast, which, according to the criteria, disqualifies it as this dish does not work in every situation. But it may be a lazy gray Saturday got a few friends over uneager to change out of your sweatpants kind of crowd pleasing.

Lusting for Liver: The Foie Controversey

2006-09-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

The foie gras controversy is to food what steroids are to baseball, and despite my efforts to avoid furthering the debate, today I found myself suddenly and irreversibly immersed. Merrily along I browsed through reviews on Yelp, eventually finding my way to the page for Gary Danko. Five stars after five stars headed glowing tales of the ballet-esque service, shimmering sauces, and the notorious cheese cart. I caught myself dream gloating as I wolfed down hunks of cheese knowing that even though I was stuffed I was going to have a properly sweet dessert course as well. Across the table sat the lovely damsel who had saved me from food purgatory, ended my quaintly earnest attempts to go gourmet with scraps and leftovers found in the fridge, and fed me the food I loved, no, deserved.

Effortlessly I glided through this vision, thankfully removed from the sight of my computer screen feet in front of my face and the pain in my hunched back, when out of the blue came with a jolt an awakening of the rudest sort. Like a zit on an otherwise perfect complexion stood a one star review. What? Who would dare insult my dream meal with a single star? Even Thai Stick got more than one star! I read the review and felt the loathing rise up and thump my chest.

“gary stank-o.

serving both veal (dead baby cow) and foie gras (diseased liver of tortured duck that is outlawed in many countries because of its inherent cruelty!) i was taken here on a date and did not know about the gross out factor of the menu before i went so i thought it might be useful info for others.

also, the waiter was not very nice and wearing WA-HEY too much cologne”.

Aghast, I fumed at this poster’s ignorance and unleashed a comment propelled by my in-the-moment fury.

"right i see but that engorged liver is the taste of sin, and that's why it tastes so good - it's no mistake that a sliver of cruelty might be the best tasting thing in the world"

Apparently she didn’t find my comments amusing.

"excellent yes. then i would like to ram a metal rod down your throat and force feed you until you literally explode then eat your liver. you are clearly already fattened so that will help!"

And so I realized how deep this conflict runs. If torturing ducks is so obviously horrid to her, why don’t I explain why we fight for foie gras. The most alluring of delicacies, foie gras is the linchpin of indulgence, the peak of culinary hedonism, and the taste of sin.

In my days of running food in the kitchen at the Café, I saw a lot of shit go down. Not Anthony Bourdain style glorified shit, but still shit. Yes, there were drugs, cuss words, burns, and knife wounds, but what I’m talking about now is demented food experimentation. The fryer was a constant presence, as dipping weird stuff into the fryer was a guaranteed crowd pleaser. The fryer, however, putted along in the twenty five cent peep show league, while the real fun to be had was with foie gras.

Often when I’d order my dinner at the end of the night (the runner is the only person who gets to do this, for scheduling reasons), I’d instruct the cooks to, “fuck with it,” which is to say to get creative, do whatever the hell they pleased, and come up with something wild. Brett Young once gave me the single best onions I’ve ever eaten in response to these instructions. Carmelized with some carrots thrown in and drenched in vinegar, onions will never be the same. One night I began my nightly ritual of debating my order when Kevin chimed in.

“Can I just make you something?” he asked, innocently enough. Of course the answer was yes, and as I buffed glasses and ran food, I spied as he whisked together twenty quail eggs, diced up some bacon, and finally cut up a bunch of foie gras. Yes, this was a twenty quail egg foie gras and bacon omelet. The taste was pure pleasure, as my senses duped my body into thinking this omelet was a good thing, the ultimate trick. Kevin took one bite, but aside from that I ate the entire thing, which ended up not being that much of a challenge. I called my dad right after to announce my meal, proud of the middle finger I’d given to broccoli, cereal, and turkey sandwiches. People weren’t supposed to eat like this, but I did.

Then there was the famous duck sundae, an often employed cooks’ trick to win the waiters’ favor and glasses of wine when the chef was out of the kitchen. The duck sundae entailed nothing more complicated than searing a duck breast with the thick layer of fat still on, topping it with a pad of seared foie gras, and drenching it with one sauce or another, let’s go with huckleberry for the sake of the vision. There was no surprise more pleasantly received than a duck sundae at the end of a shift.

But of all the foie gras crimes committed in the kitchen, the greatest may have been the stuffed beef tenderloin. It was a slow night and David had found a hunk of beef in the back of his freezer. He brought it in and gave Justin carte blanche. While the rest of us barely worked and counted down the minutes, Justin chiseled a hole in this thing, stuffed it with apples and bleu cheese, wrapped it in bacon, encased it in caul fat, seared it off in a cast iron skillet, threw in some potatoes around the sides of the meat, topped it with a massive hunk of foie gras, and threw it in the oven. As we spooned the foie gras and bacon grease over our perfectly pink cuts of meat at the end of the night, we knew that it would never get any better than this. We knew that no matter what happened at the Café, no matter what cooks would disappear, what addictions would ravage our force, that at this particular time we were sitting there united in our appreciation of this massive, flagrant meal.

I’ve only cooked with foie gras once. For my birthday, I requested that my family and friends eat what I wanted to cook. In reality this happens all the time, but in a way it doesn’t. I’m always aware of my audience in the back of my mind and the fact that my experiments, my inside jokes between me and the kitchen, might not pay dividends when it comes time to take a bite. But for this day I could do what I wanted, and so I did. Among other things, I bought an entire lobe of foie gras, which, as our philistine yelper friend referred to earlier, is an engorged duck liver. Imagine a duck. Hold you hands up and size it out. It’d not that difficult, it’s just a little wee duck. Now imagine a liver as big as the entire body of a normal duck. That’s how big it is. Holding it is a feeling of power, a feeling that you have a tool that’s a curse unless you can master it, the lord of the rings ring of the food world.

I had mine sitting in the freezer for a few days before it was time to cook with it. I’d occasionally open the freezer just to check on it, to take it in, to make sure that it was still looking good. I took it out before work the morning I was to cook with it, came home, threw it in the bag with the rest of my materials, and drove to my parents’ house where the feast was to take place. Nervous that the foie was not defrosted, I ran it under a bit of warm water to defrost it. Bad idea. As soon as I saw a bit of foie butter collecting at the edges of the plastic, it was time to stop. Yes, foie butter. This is meat, but when it gets warm, it turns to butter.

I took it out of the plastic and put it on the cutting board, a massive hunk of liver packed with more fat and flavor than any other food I’ve ever had. Kitchen minglers and in house passerby watched with a combination of amusement and disgust as I cut the entire thing into serving sizes. My plan was simple – season with salt and pepper, sear it off, throw the pieces on top of the steak I was cooking. I threw it in the pan and it began to melt instantly. The foie had been too warm. It cooked too fast. Where once a pan full of cut up liver had lain, there were now paddies of liver floating in its own butter. Still, there was enough to be sinful, and the butter was good anyway. I spooned the butter on top of the steaks as each diner held out their plates, unsure of what they were in for.

Eating foie gras is a feeling of luxury and decadence. The texture melts in your mouth as you’re overwhelmed with the flavor of a meat that’s not really meat. Foie’s its own category, a dish that can preside over an entire meal, even at a place like the French Laundry. Not even Thomas Keller can overshadow his foie gras course with his dazzling innovations. The foie holds the upper hand.

Cooking with foie gras is an entirely different story. Handling the liver, feeling the size of it, seeing how unnaturally large it is, cutting it up and callously throwing it in a pan to sear, to make flavorful for the next indifferent dandy. If anything, handling this mutilated liver confirms the balance and clarifies the pleasure of foie.

If foie were commonplace. If people did not have to torture birds to get it. If it weren’t eaten in tiny quantities. If it weren’t massively expensive. If it didn’t melt with just a touch more heat. If it were healthy. If it were friendly. It wouldn’t be half the experience it is now. Killing is killing. You want to kill stuff and eat it go ahead. I’m going to. This is why meat is more desirable than vegetables and why beef is favored over chicken. What would you rather kill? Steer or a chicken? Kill a steer, you’re the chief. Kill a chicken and you’re a damn punk.

The yelper was right. Force feeding a duck until its liver grows to be the size its entire body should be is cruel. I’m just not sure that cruelty is evil.

Guest Speaker Series: Alyssa Reviews Shopsin's

2006-09-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

Let me just start by saying, there is no way this post will do the place justice, just as I am sure that no other place for brunch will do a hangover justice again in my life after my first Saturday afternoon at Shopsins. Descriptive phrases may not exist to explain Zack, the young man in the Mets cap with a white dish rag over his shoulder, who coordinates the seating process and who's portrait hangs on the wall in the restaurant along with paintings of the rest of the family -- his father and one (twin?) sister juggle the menu, and another (twin?) sister single handedly waits, methodically, on all customers. There are also a handful of adolescent men who run food and assist Zack with clearing tables, but this is the essence of a family-run place.

On our first visit, we stood on the sidewalk for a better part of an hour waiting for a table, with Zack periodically popping outside to call in other waiting parties, or inform us he was locking the door (this took a few tries), or offer us some complimentary swedish fish or fireballs while we waited. Fifteen minutes after we were seated, Zack stopped by to let us know we could help ourselves to some coffee in the other room if we wanted...fifteen minutes later we also helped ourselves to a Connect Four set from another table and played a few rounds...finally the sister/waitress came over and patiently walked us through our questions about the menu and take our orders, telling us about her own favorite dish on the menu, the raspberry macaroni and cheese pancakes, and also mentioned the Tiger Paws (mini egg and cheese buns). While taking our order, she stepped away several times to review her notes and direct Zack and the food runners as food emerged from the kitchen. At last, our food arrived: Sliders for me (with bacon and cheese) and Andrea (with cheese), a scrambler with bacon, avacado, and blue cheese for Conor, and despite the epic menu of endless choices, Jess requested a chicken sandwich with cheese. Boring. Her food also took an extra ten minutes but that's what you get for ordering something outrageous. I cannot describe food with your panache, Tom, but I can tell you that this food was pretty damn good. In the words of our new friend Zack, "Doesn't everything just taste better on a small bun?"

Some other choice phrases from Zack:

"Yeah, we used to make fun of this kid in high school and call him laser beam eye. So every time he'd look at us we'd duck and yell "Look out, laser beam eye!"

"Yeah, I'd say texture accounts for about 30 percent of food quality."
- "For me it's more like 70 percent."
"No, no it's like maybe 30 to 50 percent."
- "But for me, personally, texture counts for 70 percent of how much I enjoy food...probably more with foods I don't like."
"Well, no, I'd say it's like 50 percent. Texture counts for 50 percent, tops, I think."

"Hey, thanks for coming girls, come back soon. If you wanna hang out, leave your phone number and I'll call you. IM SERIIOUS!!"

Oh man, this isn't working, this is truly not a had to be there experience, I simply cannot find the words...I swear, it was just one of the most chaotic, fun and unique dining experiences of my life. I think the culminating experience says it best...not that I'll do this justice either...but we were among the last few parties in the restaurant around 4pm when a heavy, rotund man with wild white hair emerged from the kitchen carrying a giant pan of something unidentifiable from our vantage point. He seated himself at a table and, as his family bustled and bickered around him, gripped a giant knife by the blade in both hands and dug it through the concoction in the pan in slow, even strips. His thick hands dipped into the mess and the edge of the blade bounced off his potbelly as he cut through...we speculated about the contents, my best guess was macaroni and cheese. When Zack relieved his father of the pan and carried it back to the kitchen, we called over to him to find out what's inside...he obliged and came over to show us the bread pudding. "Here, try some! Usually we serve it warm, with caramel on top....this is cold, try it!" he said, scooping chunks out with the same knife that had rubbed against his dad's kitchen stained shirt. We held out our hands and he dumped in pieces of the cold pudding...I hesitated when offered a second helping, claiming it to be too much and he said, "Oh, give it to him, he's a boy, he'll eat it..." so I handed off the remaining lumps to Conor, who simply had to accept the challenge and polish it off. As Zack headed back to the kitchen, he said good bye over his shoulder and reminded us, "Take some candy!!!" So we collected our things and raided the now legendary candy shelf and set off into the sunset sucking on lolly pops and smoking candy cigarettes.

Debate: A Cup of Tea

2006-09-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

Can a cup of tea with sugar be a satisfying dessert?

Earth: The Planet the Playground

2006-09-20T00:44:00.000-07:00

Jake: been abroad for years. Alyssa: leaving in less than a month, following through on the conversations we had that got me through boring work days. Bick: gone and blogging. Nina: back and wiser.

Sunday: sent resumes to Wine & Dine in the UK and Maison Neuve in Montreal. Today: sent a resume to China.

Sunday: bought supplies for the ski season and hatched plan to get a place in Tahoe for the winter, a stretch of fun that would lead to biking around the breweries of Belgium in April and Bay to Breakers in May. Today: scoured writers market for magazines like Chow, only to realize that I’d forgotten about Chow altogether. One near success turned rejection and two cold shoulders from that magazine be damned, it’s the perfect publication. Got to break into their fold somehow. Today: well, that resume to China for a job that starts in October. Today: damn I don’t want to go to sleep. And I saw a beer on TV and it looked good. So I’m having a beer.

After everything happened today I grabbed ice cream out of the fridge (trust me this is the biggest food event of the day, everything else was embarrassingly drab) and turned on the TV, feeling motivated to break my writing discipline.

L’Auberge Espagnole, probably the greatest study abroad movie of all time, was on. I sat absorbed and unthinking until the scene when Xavier says goodbye to everybody at the club. They present him with a shirt and he leaves. The scene prompted me to remember the morning after the party in Dazed and Confused when Tony says to the chick something like, “nothing like piling on some pancakes and syrup after a night of beer drinking” and then they play Tuesday’s Gone. Because of that scene I will hate that song for the rest of my life. I love pancakes and syrup, I hate Tuesday’s Gone, and I hate scenes in movies when the party’s over.

Top two Fuck it Sucks When the Party’s Over Movies of All Time:

Dazed and Confused

L’Auberge Espagnole

Except here’s the thing. The party doesn’t actually end in either of those movies. At the end of Dazed and Confused, Randall Pink Floyd turns on his coach and gets in the car with Wooderson to drive to Houston for those Aerosmith tickets. And in L’Auberge Espagnole, Xavier wanders through the tourist district back in Paris, cries, goes to his first day of work, it sucks, and runs out the door. A montage ensues and next thing you know he’s clacking away on his computer, looking at pictures of himself, and then finally running down a runway with his arms spread like wings.

No plan or too many plans, I think the message is clear.

Photographs

2006-09-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

I swear from here on in I'll get some photos on this thing. I've got my brother digging around for the very high end digital camera that he never uses, and in the meantime I'm trying to figure out how to get pictures from my low end camera to work. Also it's going to take some persistence to figure out how to get Blogger to upload correctly every time - might need to consult a techno wizard on that one.

So they're coming up, don't worry. Motivating me a bit more today was this how to write a food blog article from the Amateur Gourmet. I think he might be my favorite food blogger.

Wow - how funny and frustrating. My work computer refuses to upload any pictures of any kind, so on the occasion that I try to post from here, like this one, I can't put in any pictures, even though this is a post titled 'Photographs.' Wow.

Free Ideas for Restaurants

2006-09-18T23:19:00.000-07:00

While I can benchmark my interest in food with epiphanies and memorable advice, the foundation for it was there all along. Food has always been a bit of a canvas for my ideas and I’ve been throwing out restaurant concepts for as long as I can remember. This tendency led to my current job. Now having had a bit of experience in the biz and having seen how these things actually work, I think it’s time to comb through some old ideas, starting from the very beginning. So here is my list of restaurant ideas, working from birth up to the present.

Make Your Own Pizza Joint, circa 1997 – Yea, I realize that 1997 is way beyond birth, but I can’t remember any restaurant ideas between birth and age fifteen. I did cook from time to time, and if I had restaurant ideas I don’t remember them. Maybe we should adjust the time frame here from 1997 to present instead of birth to present, and just write off the first fifteen years of my life as a waste of time in the restaurant plans department. Is that fair though? I mean, age fifteen wouldn’t have happened without age fourteen, and teens never happen until after the pre-teens, and pre-pubescence is in there somewhere and I’m not sure what to do with that. Let’s just say that years zero through fifteen were a warm-up session full of stretches, holding it, and exhaling, a preparation period essential to the development of strong and healthy muscles.

This joint took much inspiration from my first job at Papa Murphy’s Take and Bake (take and bake equals we give you raw uncooked pizzas to take home) Pizza. In many ways, Papa Murphy’s was the ideal job. There was a toaster oven so that we could make and bake our own pizzas for snacking, a boombox for reggae after Kathy left, and plenty of other kids working nearby who were willing to barter with us for mini pizzas – Peter at Jamba Juice, those birds at Peet’s, and the ladies at Yogen Haus. The best feature, however, was the ingredients for experimentation. With dough, three kinds of sauces, and endless toppings, the creations were unlimited. There were stuffed pizzas, calzones, and sculptures that didn’t exactly bake evenly but were fun to mold. All of this added up to a first class work experience, and that’s why the Make Your Own Pizza Joint floated into my head.

Man I really wish I had had a name for this idea so that I didn’t have to keep on typing Make Your Own Pizza. The Make Your Own Pizza (MYOPza) place would have a buffet of pizza ingredients. You’d cruise up and get your dough, then go by the sauces where you’d spread on the sauce of your choice (we’d have at least six or so – double Papa Murphy’s and triple pretty much anybody else), then go on to toppings where you’d pile them on as you please. At the end of the line would be an oven of some kind and in ten minutes – bing! – you’d have a pizza.

Looking back on it, this idea is not that far fetched. It’s just like Fire and Ice except with pizzas instead of stir fry, which makes my idea even easier. I still like this one.

Ninja Sushi, January 2004 – Hmmm, this is kind of a drought. Seven years between ideas? That seems unlikely. I just can’t remember what any of the ideas were that happened between those two times. There were fantasies about bringing quality chicken parm subs to California – does that count? What about opening a Doyle’s in America? Or a doner kebab shop? Ah well, Ninja Sushi is the only one that’s sticking, even after really really thinking hard (eyes kind of squinting, trying to flex the brain, drifting off just enough to allow a memory to creep in), so we’re going to have to go with Ninja Sushi and skip the half memories.

Somewhere in the Southwest with Jake, Heath, and Juelsgaard, Jake and I found that we were debating such heavy topics as the presence of evil and that big country China. I can’t remember what state we were in, but it was dark and the debating had run its course. Road trips have only limited space for serious conversation. Somehow the idea of Ninja Sushi popped up.

The restaurant would be set in a temple like in a ninja movie. There’d be dudes in martial arts clothes everywhere and occasional fights would break out. The menu would be entirely in Japanese and the staff would speak no English. Upstairs above the open space where fights happen, there’d be a room with a fish tank for a wall and this dude with slicked back hair in a white suit sitting there at all times. He’d have babes on each arm. Busty ones. From time to time people would come in with briefcases and they’d sit down, sip some tea, and slide the briefcase under the table. In the briefcase would be the merchandise.

The restaurant would be set on a back alley in Hollywood, with only neon Japanese characters identifying it. We decided that Quentin Tarantino would be our lead investor and key to big media attention. We later realized that Tarantino is into Kung Fu, which is Chinese and therefore a bit of a problem for our plan. I can’t remember what we resolved to call it (Weeping White Widow?), but all of a sudden the concept switched to a Chinese temple with Kung Fu guys and Chinese food instead of sushi. Aside from those alterations, the concept remained the same.

Somebody stole our idea and opened up a place like this in New York. I remember reading the review (scathing) when it first came out, but I can’t remember what it’s called. Maybe they should hire me and Jake and we can give them a lesson in martial arts cuisine.

Preemptive defense – this would be about five hundred times cooler than Medieval Times, which is already pretty damn cool. We wouldn’t have falcons flying around, but we’d have fights and we’d be way more authentic and bad ass.

The Public Library, Spring 2004 – This one’s a bit sentimental, probably the most sentimental of them all. The idea sprung from a very simple observation. When wandering around a city, I found myself stopping in at three types of places when I needed a break: bars, coffee shops and bookstores. Bookstores were nice hideouts because you could grab a book, find a nook, and read away. When you got bored, you could wander around between the disorganized aisles bordered by bookshelves. Bars and coffee shops are pretty evident: get tired, get drink, sit down, that’s all there is to it. But what about combining them? Seems like the perfect hangout.

This concept was not exactly new, and in fact there were at least two places out there called The Library – one in Boulder and one in Santa Monica. Ours was different though. Ours would be set up like a true library, but with more comfortable seating at the end of the aisle than a simple gray footstool like they normally have. We’d have sandwiches and eggs benedict. We’d have a global selection of beers and parliamentary style debates instead of open mic. The image was right there. This was the plan.

And then it came time to pounce. All of a sudden the idea seemed a bit scary. I’m not sure if the difference between this idea coming to life and this idea getting put on the backburner was straight up fear or the more pragmatic reason I gave myself – I needed experience. Even now when I think about launching a restaurant plan, I think that I’m not ready to commit to such a project, but then again that doing so would make my current job look like a waste of time. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Shit Food, Summer 2004 – Shit Food was my excuse to not think about The Library any more. Once again restaurant ideas were a joke, and this was the worst of them. Shit Food would offer ramen, baloney sandwiches, and the cheapest beer in town. It was going to suck.

Rip Off of the Stumbling Monk (Seattle), Fall 2005 – The only “idea” component of this was that San Francisco doesn’t have anything like The Stumbling Monk. An old corner store, these guys had installed a bar with kegs, coolers with bottles, and a whiteboard listing their extensive selection of Belgian beers. Dimly lit and thick with smoke, the Stumbling Monk was the first place I went when I got off the plane last fall. San Franciscans would drink a place like this dry, it’d be cheap to set up, and the margins on beer are good. This one’s a cakewalk.

World Party (formerly known as Jelly Donuts), Now – Robert once wondered why we fret over failure with women. After all, we’re going to fail with all of them except for one. I’m not sure what parallel I’m after here, because I don’t really think that my future wife and a donut shop will have that much in common, but just because I have a track record of ideas ending at the idea stage doesn’t mean that I can’t hold on to one. In the end, a jelly donut might be just what the world needs.

Activity

2006-09-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

The problem I face on Sunday nights is having too much to write about. Let’s take this weekend for example – should it be the geriatric comedy show I took in on Friday night that featured Carol Channing (an 85 year old Broadway vet. Does she need introducing? I’d never heard of her but I guess she was a star back in the old days.)? Or the world class disc golf (or Frolf) course we played on Saturday that features the world’s longest hole (over a thousand feet)? Or perhaps the tasting at A. Rafanelli? Or having a librarian yelling at us to clear way to allow the “door to function” as we tried in vain to get into the room where Michael Pollan was speaking? Or maybe even sitting at Bob’s this time not alone but with Nick and then Steve and Ben? What about the sandwich from Bianca’s, the greatest deli in the Bay? So much to learn about food there – the meat and cheese are no different than any other deli, but that ultra sour, chewy, cracked crust bread? That changes everything. Or should it be watching the entire first season of Extras today, which, as soon as I started thinking about it as a prelude to The Office, had me as wrapped up as ever in the world of Ricky Gervais (the TV gods are feeling generous right now as season two is airing on the BBC and they’re putting the complete episodes on their website…can’t wait to see what happens)? Or could it be a mourning session for the day of jelly doughnut making that never happened (Heath the Chef bailed at the last minute)?

Aside from things happening, plans were hatched for things that will happen. Chocolate making, a Belgian Bike and Beer tour (last time I checked in with the three b’s it was beer, babes, and bongs, or maybe beaches, Beam, and basketball, I can’t remember), Christmas Hullabaloo, stand up comedy night at Wednesday Night Club (dude this is going to be killer – everyone has to write up two minutes worth of comedy, we put the paper in a hat, and whatever jokes you draw you must get up and perform for the rest of the class), and the list goes on. Whatever these plans were, they were motivating enough for me to try to get next year sorted out, which is sort of a nice phase to be starting again.

I don’t know. That’s a lot of activity. My fingers and back are computer worn right now anyway, as I’ve spent the evening tapping away on this thing for non-blog purposes. So this might not be the night for words words words.

Tomorrow words. Until then, buenos noches amigos.

Doughnut vs Donut: Fill It With Jelly

2006-09-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

There are two contexts for a donut fantasy: Bob’s and a junk food binge. Tonight was an exception to my chowhound ways, as I had Popeye’s, Coke, and ice cream for dinner. I have a weakness for Popeye’s. I like it because it’s from the South and I’m the only white guy there when I go (tonight there was actually a diverse crowd, but that was unusual). I can’t imagine eating at KFC and haven’t for at least ten years, but for some reason Popeye’s makes perfect sense to me. Also, I’m mired in a Coke addiction. I rarely drink soda and that’s been true forever, but when a roommate happens to buy a two liter, I can drain it in a sitting. I don’t know what it is, but when I have a bit of Coke I can’t stop drinking it. Something about that fizzing sweetness.

As for the Bob’s context, the unique feature of Bob’s is that, despite it being a donut shop, the food itself is only a bit player in that shop’s mystique. I don’t eat donuts anywhere else, not because I don’t like them, but just because I rarely want to kick back and eat a donut. Except, of course, when at Bob’s. Bob’s is an exception to the donut rule, and tonight’s heart attack formula violated my culinary code as much as any night can. Combine these two features and you’ve got yourself a pure play on donuts.

While walking home from work I found myself fantasizing about owning my own donut shop. It’d be called Jelly Donuts and there would be no riddle – all we’d sell would be jellies. The donuts would be classically made and perfect as would the fillings. We’d have pineapple jelly, kiwi jelly, and even some kind of chocolate filling unlike the normal goop you’d expect. Maybe a puree of chocolate and candied orange peels fluffed up somehow. Dude that sounds good. We’d probably have a few other kinds of donuts too, but the emphasis would be on stuffing them with adventurous flavors. Naturally we’d have coffee and I think some great espresso might be a nice addition as well.

This thought came and settled in and I didn’t think much about it until I was sitting down with Nick and Ben in the living room talking about whatever when Nick happened to bring up the Donut Man. While I experienced the Inland Empire for four years, I never heard about the Donut Man and I wish I had. This is how Nick describes it.

Head straight west on Foothill from the Mont until you hit the 210. Cross the 210 and keep going to one of those suburbs. Despite the fact that Nick didn’t describe the town any more than “one of those suburbs,” neither Ben nor I had any trouble visualizing this place. Such is the convenience of a city like Los Angeles where everything looks the same. We surmised that the burb was probably San Dimas, although I’m holding out the possibility that it’s in Azusa. Somewhere in there is a little shop called the Donut Man. If you go in strawberry season, you can get his specialty, which is a donut stuffed with “fresh strawberries and strawberry goo.” Apparently this donut is unbelievable enough to get Claremont kids to drive the forty minutes to get there. Sounds great to me, I’m convinced, and next time I’m in the area I’ll be going.

The plan is to do a test run on stuffed donut making on Wednesday for our sugar snack festival. I think it’ll be cool to figure out how to make nice puffy donuts, but the image that has me going is a Dr Seuss-esque stovetop covered with pots filled with colors ranging from guava pink to orange to red to blue, all cooking down into delightful goos which we will then pump into puffs of deep fried dough. Yes, this sounds fun.

Guest Speaker Series: Seamus from Phoenix

2006-09-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

Somehow at the end of Seamus's post-college campaign job drifting, he landed in Phoenix, a city whose population of twenty somethings is geared towards buying condos and getting married. Marooned in the most mysterious of biomes, Seamus brings us news of the change in scenery as the tide of summer retreats. Also, I will kill blogger. I've been trying for twenty minutes to get a fucking picture up here, and it's not happening. I'll try to throw one in later, for Seamus's sake and ours.

Not to continue to beat a dead horse re: the U2-Radiohead debate, but my choice would definitely be U2.

The summer is ending here in Arizona and while the phrase calls to mind leaves drifting off of maples and turning brown and muddy on the ground or oaks dropping their little oval spiked leaves that turn brittle and sharp, the ending of an Arizona summer entails neither of those things.

Instead, it's a gradual relaxation that sets in. The temperature drops perhaps a quarter of a degree each day until the monsoons begin to blow. The monsoons are spectacular and completely unlike anything I've seen in California. Being a coastal kid, I'm used to storms blowing in over the course of three days, the sky darkening ever so slightly each day until one drop and then another fall and dissolve in the sandy dust. Here, at six o'clock each day, clouds churn up in the northern valley and move south. Lightening hits Camelback first and then everywhere. The temperature drops dramatically, by ten, fifteen degrees all at once and humidity rushes into the air. And the rain just pours.

Ghana had great storms and I had a great view, but they don’t compare to this deluge. Intensely hard, beating rain, pounding on our concrete patio. Heaters switch on and doors sit open, letting the moisture flow through the house, parched as it is from a summer of air conditioning.

More than all that, I just love that I live in a place that has something so exotic it’s called ‘monsoons’. It’s a great word. Trying saying it to yourself a few times.

Back to heat though, because when you’re not looking, when you’re still thinking about the great monsoons, it sneaks up and hits you. Today, after a week of low-nineties, boom! One-oh-eight. Getting into the car hurts again and it whines from the compressor working overtime. Seat belt latches burn the skin and it’s a fucking miracle the CDs don’t melt or degrade somehow. Living in central Phoenix doesn’t help either – all my drives are generally less than the five or so miles it takes for the A/C to really kick in, so I sit and sweat on the black leather seats and think about the graphic I saw the described how the surface temperature of the dashboard can reach 160. That’s a made-up number, I’m fairly sure, but who can say?

But slowly, slowly, the hundreds give way to nineties and excited news reporters talk about lows in the sixties for the first time in five months. And the monsoon season gives way to winter.

I’m seriously considering moving back to Vail.