Le Diable L'Assaisonnement

Everything Pairs with Hospitality

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:18:00 +0000

Guess what happened to me?! Boy, oh boy, oh boy…it will be a challenge to make this seem food-related. Since we only deal with delicious and pretentious edibles on this site, let me say right off the bat that the experience was more satisfying than, say, a proper three-cheese risotto. I was drinking a Coke Zero at the airport when it happened. There may be no decent food outside Dan-D cashews at YVR, but don’t let that stop you from picking up your friends and relatives there. You never know what kind of social amuse-bouches await you in the terminals!

I had a pretty lazy Sunday yesterday, as my niece is in town on her vacation, which she wisely chose to spend with me, eating, in Vancouver. In the morning, while she squeezed the last few drops of shuteye out of her holiday sleep fruit, I ate my last piece of frozen cake and drank a couple of Nespressos while watching the Food Network. Around noon we ambled down the street and ate some unremarkable and un-Parisian crêpes with Swiss cheese and egg at Café Crêpe. We walked in the broiling sunshine until we were both cooked to medium-well, then decided to hit a marina-side patio for a little Pinot Gris. We were among other folks to have this idea in the 30-degree heat, and I noticed Bridges took the opportunity to add a zero behind every price on their menu. Nonetheless, my Edmonton-native niece enjoyed the $18 personal pizza, her senses seasoned with seagulls and sea water.

As you can imagine, afterward I might have preferred to take a grape-flavored nap than to take public transit to the airport - where, incidentally, my mother was due to roll in around dinner time. Plus, we were meeting a group at Maurya shortly after her scheduled landing, so to ensure the timely arrival of Indian food into everyone’s maw, it might have been safer for my Ma to take a cab. But, as you know, I have impeccable manners; I hopped on the subway just so mum could see my grinning pie-hole at the gate. It wasn’t so bad, especially since I took along Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits for the ride. (Not surprisingly, I totally agree with him that Las Vegas restaurant-copies are vulgar and cannot possibly live up to New York originals. And I haven’t even been to Vegas!)

Now that you’ve had your anecdote apéritif, I’ll get to the memoir main. As my mom and I were leaving the airport, who was in our elevator up to the Canada Line but Ed Begley Jr.! It was like finding a piece of okra in Campbell’s Vegetable Soup! I’m sure all of you know who this guy is, and I love him based solely on the fact the man rides a hybrid electric bicycle to power his toaster! Now this is an idea. Think about it - if you had to produce enough energy on your own to cook all your food, you would never be fat (in fact, you might even starve to death). It’s an ingenious new angle on my own Chocolate Time Machine!! Besides his reality-show about going green, Living With Ed, Begley has starred in such premium cuts of TV meat as Arrested Development (frozen banana, anyone?) and Six Feet Under (the series premiere of which, if you may recall, taught a valuable lesson in preventing serious knife wounds in the kitchen). I love Ed Begley Jr.! I love okra!

Now, I should tell you, as a fragile and pretentious unknown, I avoid celebrities for self-esteem reasons. Years ago, the company filming parts of The Assassination of Jesse James in Winnipeg considered using my Dad’s olden-looking office to shoot a scene featuring Brad Pitt. One of his people actually came to check out the joint, like, for reals. This caused quite a stir among the staff, and not a little dialogue focusing on What would you say to Brad Pitt if you got to meet him? Well, I can tell you, across many iterations of this conversation, to the disbelief of those proposing to congratulate him on his humanitarian works, I continually insisted I would SAY NOTHING. “I don’t know Brad Pitt!” I would cry, defensively. “I’m not going to crank out earnest chit chat while he assumes he’s better than me! I don’t care if I get to meet Brad Pitt- I would refuse to meet him!” And so on, and so on. Truth is, I would love to meet Brad Pitt – I’d like to drink a bottle of Chianti floating down the Assiniboine River with him and Angelina. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to pursue them.

In the elevator with Ed, the only thing natural on the conversation menu was around the pressing of the buttons- and, as you now understand, I would never say anything to a celebrity that wasn’t totally organic. So I contented myself with the fact that I had even spotted EBJ, watched from afar as he walked to the subway, and ketchup-and-relished the fact that he was dressed down like a regular Van tourist on his way to JapaDog. Yet at the platform I saw that Begley seemed flummoxed by the automatic ticket vendor. At this point, what choice had I but to take a page right out of Brad’s book? Humanitarianly, I ripped out a subway ticket from my carnet.

“Are you Ed Begley?” I asked.

“That’s me,” he replied, dead-pan, clearly expecting me to impose, or at least distract him from the tricky transit task at hand.

“Here, take this subway ticket,” I offered, “I love your show, man!”

Begley was a bit baffled by me, but I led him like a little Cambodian tike over to the ticket-validator and got him set to go. “How much is that?” he asked, “I gotta pay you for it.” Of course, I refused, saying I had to be able to tell people I gave super-green Ed Begley a subway ticket. Then I marched onto the train, leaving him to his own devices.

He came and sat behind me and Ma.

I think celebrities are like kittens. They know they’re cute and you want to hug them, so when you ignore them, it messes them up psychologically and they end up in your lap. I, devoted readers, may officially possess the power to psychologically disarm a kitten. Or, getting back to the metaphors of this forum, I should I say I know how to make a great soufflé. Step back from the oven window and ignore that shit!

Or maybe Begley felt obliged. Of course, it was a polite thing to do. Either way, I was stoked and we had a pleasant conversation about transit systems (and Vancouver's cryptic Zone divisions). He seems like a totally nice guy and I hope he gets himself some Oculus and a little 100 Mile Diet while he’s in BC.

Maurya was fantastic. Sweet celebrity anecdotes pair so well with spicy Indian.

Baby Cakes

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:49:00 +0000

The following confession may surprise you.

After all, I am the writer of a highly pretentious food blog -and I’m clearly obsessed with dessert. I drink homogenized chocolate milk, have ice cream for dinner, use bar chocolate prn, and I’m the self-proclaimed pioneer of the frozen cupcake. Then again, none of those sweets are homemade. I guess it will be up to you to determine if I am a food fraud, an ingredient imposter, a kitchen con artist, or a chocolate charlatan. Here goes.

I have never baked a cake.
Well, I guess that’s not true either (perhaps add ‘liar’ to my list of cooking-related credentials). I have baked a cake, specifically of the Duncan Hines variety - two Duncan Hines cakes, actually, including chocolate and Angel’s Food (the famous fat-free cake of the eighties, and therefore my childhood). But then technically it wasn’t really I who baked them; it was the oven. What I mean to say is I’ve never made a cake, like, from scratch. If you’re sitting there thinking Who has?? then you’re like me about two weeks ago. I was squarely in the pre-contemplative stage until I witnessed my notably masculine companion build not one but two whole cakes, totally from the ground up! (Of course, I must compare and contrast our mothers, and blame my own for a non-existent baking education. Or, on second thought, thank her sincerely. Given my natural affinity for hunting and gathering desserts, my acquiring the skills to produce them has dangerous potential. )

As you can imagine, watching my companion baking cakes was inspiring on multiple levels. Plus, I took it upon myself to make the icing for him and I did a really fantastic job- even though I had never tried my hand at frostings, glazes, or fondants either! This prompted me to think maybe I could be more than just a surrogate mother to cakes. (Or, if in the Duncan Hines scenario the oven is the surrogate mom, then maybe I could be more than a lowly and vainglorious middle man- more than, say, a doctor.) Maybe I could actually make a cake, like how people make babies! Yes, that’s exactly what I mean to say. As babies are made from scratch, so would be my cake. And it would look like any number of perfect Jolie-Pitts.

The first step in my cake-making process was to select the kind of cake to make. Naturally I turned to The Joy Of Cooking, the most anthropological of humanity’s cookbooks. I like The Joy Of Cooking because it reads like a manual for aliens posing as highly domestic humans. As I often relate to myself as an alien posing as a human, I like to read the Joy Of Cooking and remark on how ambitious and civilized I am. And there is nothing more ambitious and civilized than making a cake. This is where cake-making actually transcends baby-making, where it seems ambition and civility make negative contributions.

Humanity’s Cake Choices, as listed in the JOC, are limited, but they all seem delicious and fundamental to the success of mankind. To select just one, I adopted the strategy of first eliminating the options that baffled me by calling for an alleged ‘cream of tartar’ (which my mother explained by telephone has nothing to do with tartar sauce; it is apparently a stabilizing ingredient, one that I remained unwilling to buy in a whole tube or jar just to get the required ¼ teaspoon). This ingenious process substantially thinned the choices and finally allowed my eyes to fall upon the ambitiously-named Golden Cake. Of course, I immediately wanted to make this recipe and call the baby cake either Golden Boy or Golden Girl. And I would have, too, if it didn’t turn out Golden Cake requires EIGHT egg yolks. Well, my friends, I have nothing against delicious, rich egg yolks in a cake – but I am an inexperienced baker and I wasn’t looking to waste all of the eggs in the house. I settled on Devil’s Food. As the writer of this blog, it now seems I could have saved some time in choosing.

Out of the oven, my first Devil’s Food Cake, Baby Cakes, first appeared to me as somewhat…not worth my hours of frenzied labor. I had a hard time getting her out of the pan and even from her fallen crumbs I determined she had been overcooked (not JOC’s fault, but that of my oven, which makes out of every nightly cooking operation An Evening At the Improv). I also had decided to ice her with chocolate butter cream, substituting Bailey’s Irish Cream for milk- which seemed my own personal genius at the time, but I kind of ended up just wishing for plain chocolate.

Since I didn’t necessary love the cake, I began to wonder if it was worth all the calories to eat the whole thing. Then I started to worry that I couldn’t even pawn the cake off on undiscerning children, since I had put alcohol in the frosting. At this point, I wondered briefly if I should go give the cake to one of the street people outside the apartment. But I didn’t, as a result of my ongoing fear of giving homemade food to homeless people. (Here is my rationale: I am worried that the homeless person will coincidentally die of non-food-related causes, but that someone, perhaps an enemy or a senile old person, will remember a weird lady giving the blameless victim an entire cake and I will somehow, after a series of coincidences, hijinks, and misunderstandings, be charged with murder. This is my concern. My donations are thus limited to restaurant leftovers.) To put off the decision-making process, I cut the cake into small pieces and put it in the freezer.

And that is how I came to love my first cake as one must love any first baby. Frozen cake and frozen icing continue to strike me as true miracles of life. The process hides any imperfections in the cake and totally elevates the texture of the frosting! My love for frozen cupcakes has become my love for frozen cake.

Baby Cakes doesn't look anything like the cakes of my dreams.

Isn’t she beautiful?

Introductory Lectures in Pretentious Gastric Illness

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:10:00 +0000

As some of you know from my bellyaching, I am an expert in stomach trouble. This was not always the case. For most of my twenties I had so brawny a belly I insisted on starting every day with black coffee on an empty stomach. Back then, in my own gastric Camelot, I had no problem with wine, red or white, and I said so cockily of whiskey “If you don’t like it straight, you don’t really like it.” I scoffed at Zantac and hadn’t even heard of Fruit Gaviscon, let alone learned how delicious this product can be in tablet form.

Alas, my glory days ended in San Francisco, Easter, 2009, when I developed a grand and historic case of vomiting, the true violence of which can only be attested to by my traveling companion, Laura Thompson, who listened to the whole thing through a bathroom door in the King George. When I alone try to convince folks how bad the barfing really was, I have to rely on the rhetorical effectiveness of two facts. One, I stayed in the hotel room without eating a thing from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., getting up out of bed only to launch hourly attacks on the room’s only toilet, Laura’s ears, and my dignity. (This was despite the fact that it was my last day in the Bay Area, one of America’s finest culinary hubs. Sigh.) Two, I was so incapacitated by my hurling that I totally relied on Laura to pack my bags, not to mention force me into an upright position and put me on my flight home, unfortunately timed for the break of dawn. As a result, I left behind my iPod, my hair straightener, and a good amount of American cash, at least enough for some fine SF coffee beans and a few loaves of sourdough. (Note: this oversight was in no way Laura’s fault; I had left this crap in the bedside table and I was too sick to recall anything but the Danish I blamed for the pathogen happily touring my tummy like a mini San Fran.) On the way to the airport, our cabbie briefly fell asleep on the highway, yet my fear that I would die that day increased only very slightly from baseline.

I hope this convinces you I experienced a very serious gastric illness in California last year; if not, I’m happy to give you Laura’s number, though I doubt she wants to relive it. Following this memorable spring break, I developed a very touchy tummy indeed. A week after sort-of recovering from my acute illness, I awoke to a sudden Ginsu in the stomach and couldn’t stand upright; this prompted a cab to the walk-in, a prescription for a proton pump inhibitor, and my very first bottle of fruity Gaviscon. I didn’t eat anything but ice cream and hot milk for five days. For the next six months, I still gravitated toward creamy food, rarely felt normal sensations of hunger or fullness, and spent more money on Gaviscizzy (as I began to fondly call it) than on real groceries. In November, I started taking prescription Nexium every day, which was more effective than Gaviscon but lacked crunch and a note of citrus.

My only patch of relief from stomach symptoms in 2009 was when I was in Paris for three weeks, following the Very Best Available Diet for Weight Gain. Of course, this diet represented a departure for me as I usually sublimate the urge to eat an entire loaf of bread for my petit dej. It was also the first time in a long time I wasn’t drinking black coffee on an empty stomach; the hotel I was staying in not only offered a liter of irresistible hot chocolate with its continental breakfast, it had instituted a ban on hot coffee, offering in its place tepid black paint. Thus, if I ever took a coffee in Paris, it was invariably after breakfast, only once my stomach was coated with cocoa. On most days, I ended up skipping coffee altogether. I had quickly become too embarrassed to go into Starbucks in Paris, as this is exclusively for tourists (the chubby, unabashed, slapstick kind- not pretentious foreigners like myself) - and you can’t get a filter coffee anywhere else in France! Moreover, it was contrary to the principles of my holiday budget to buy espressos (i.e., under ‘Beverage Rules’: “Price-per-milliliter, following Euro-CDN conversion, must not induce attacks of acute vomiting”). So when I craved a black coffee, I reached for a café au lait, a lait chaud avec plein de sucre, more chocolat, some Nutella or a quiche Lorraine instead.

I had felt pretty damn great in Paris not drinking coffee, so when I got home I started to wonder…was my Black Beauty to blame after all? Certainly many people, including my mother, who donated much of my DNA and has to limit her own java intake, had advanced this hypothesis. Since I had always drunk loads of black coffee, I was loath to suddenly pin my belly blues on my barista. Yet I couldn’t argue with Paris, so as a compromise I switched to lattés. This, it seemed, was moderately effective at keeping my belly blithe- until I experienced a two-week exacerbation that no dose of Nexium, no flavor of Gaviscon could combat! My coffee bean hypothesis no longer seemed to hold water- even after days of total espressobriety, I couldn’t take anything but milk. (Though the milk I took with Vanilla Nesquik and whipped cream.) Any time I did try to eat, I felt like the food stuck in my esophagus and wouldn’t go down, like anything solid threatened to choke me, then burn a hole in my lifeless gut. Given my way with words, after two weeks on a liquid diet and a notable weight loss, I got squeezed in for a gastroscopy (i.e., where they Annie Leibovitz your tum-tum via your cakehole).

And?? So???

Nothing. They didn’t see anything. There was nothing to see! I had been taking Nexium daily for seven months, yet there was no evidence of acid stomach, let alone a hiatus hernia or an ulcer (excuses I had used repeatedly over the last year to explain my food fussiness to friends.) Faced with the daunting authority of empiricism, I had no choice but to try to eat regular food. With time, this strategy actually worked, and I even discarded the Nexium. Who knows now what I can say about San Francisco, or Paris, or coffee, or milk! (Except that the latter is delicious- I was never tired of it, even after two weeks.)

Apologies in advance to those who will be unsatisfied, but here is the moral of my story: I’ve come to believe that stomach symptoms can be caused by stress.

Yawn!!!! WTF?

No seriously- please don’t throw Fruit Gaviscon at me just yet! You see, I love hunting for the causes of friends’ food sensitivities and intolerances and I plan to introduce much of this material into this forum. Of course, stomach symptoms often have a physical cause- but sometimes they don’t! Unless you think I am a malingerer, or psychologically unstable (hypotheses made improbable by my upfront nature and wordy writing style), I urge you to consider the possibility that stress is as legitimate a cause for illness as real- er, I mean, physical - pathology.

If any of you said I could talk about your tummies and want to revoke my privileges, let me know. I have not only Fruit, but Orange Burst, Butterscotch, AND Peppermint with Soothing Action with which to bribe you!

Five Days to the Forbidden Fruit

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:18:00 +0000

Well, I’m on day five of my low-carbohydrate diet and I have already lost the two pounds I was fretting about. Frankly, I’m almost disappointed. Given my rigorous calculations, I was sure I’d have to put in a whole two weeks- I don’t know what to do with myself now. To maintain a sense of agency amid this perplexing turn of events, I’ve made a list. A list of high-carb grocery items I shall hasten to obtain? Not quite; I will make such a list as soon as I can ensure my two-pound weight loss is legitimate, that I have indeed regained homeostasis. No, the present list is of several hypotheses that could potentially explain my observation of a two-pound weight loss. Let us examine them one by one in the hope of identifying the most robust:

1) My current weight of x is the product of measurement error; I have not actually lost two pounds.

Possible, yes- yet not likely. I weighed myself on two separate scales yesterday, the first of which placed me at my exact preferred weight, right down to the '.0'. (Who among us is prepared to deny the beauty of whole foods or whole numbers?) The second scale actually placed me 1.2 lbs under my preferred weight, which would put my total weight loss since Sunday at 3.2 lbs and call for a homemade batch of buttercream icing and perhaps a loaf of banana bread. Yet this second reading seems a bit extreme- and I have less reason to trust it, as it was obtained from a novel scale. The first reading, however, is from my usual scale at the gym, which has been telling me my weight several times a week for the last twenty months; I have every reason to trust its opinion that I have lost two pounds. But isn’t it still possible that the novel scale is totally out to lunch and the scale at the gym was randomly buggered yesterday? Yes, it is possible.

2) My weight of x +2, obtained just prior to my invocation of the emergency low-carb diet, was the product measurement error; I never actually gained two pounds.

I guess this is also a possibility, though I was damn sure even before weighing myself that I had slathered on at least a couple of bars of Crisco. As I explained on Monday, I was recently forced by the winds of fate to take 8 days off from the gym, a funny coincidence as I had also taken to eating frozen cupcakes, unapologetically and most often while wearing my fluffy slippers. I should also confess, though I’ve heretofore been discreet about it, that I spent most of June following the Second Best Available Diet for Weight Gain. It was a project initially inspired by two oversized, solid bars of Lindt chocolate (one milk, one dark) and a box of Neuhaus truffles, which I received as a gift from London Heathrow. I love solid Lindt, particularly the dark, so I quickly took to eating at least three squares every single day. At the same time, I couldn’t decide if the Neuhaus truffles were good enough to justify their Euro-utrageous price tag so, like any science-lover, I ate as many flavors as possible at different times of the day and night to come to a conclusion.

Subsequently, in mid-June, perhaps as a result of my persistent chocolate consumption, I got a hankering for milk. But not just any milk. Homogenized milk! And so it goes that for a stretch of ten days I drank two to three glasses of whole milk every 24 hours, more often than not with Nesquik Chocolate Syrup, as, due to my constant consumption of truffles and bar chocolate in the same period, the milk otherwise tasted bland in comparison. Ah, I’ll never forget the look of incredulity in my roommate’s eyes when I polished off a giant bowl of Cookies n’ Cream ice cream, only to get up and prepare myself an ice-cold mug of homo milk with chocolate sauce. Of course, it was shortly after this event that I started to recognize I had begun to seriously abuse myself. But that’s when, through no fault of my own, I got the Big Cupcake!

With the introduction of the cupcakes into the above regimen, I felt safe in saying I was officially following the 2nd best diet for weight gain. (Of course, now you’re curious now what is the Very Best Available Diet for Weight Gain. I will tell you, as it is in fact the diet I followed in Paris last Christmas for a period of 16 days: a daily breakfast of a two-foot long baguette with butter, Nutella, Vache Qui Rit, and jam, paired with an 18-oz carafe of chocolat chaud; an extended-lunch routine involving the bi-hourly intake of any hot, milk-based drink with sugar, be it plain, chocolate, or coffee-flavored; and a standard dinner of a tablecloth-sized crêpe stuffed with a melted wheel of Emmental cheese. This diet resulted in an empirically-verified gain of five pounds, of which I rid myself in six weeks through frenetic exercise once back in Vancouver.)

In short, I was pretty damn sure I had gained two pounds.

3) It is absurd to take seriously any weight gain within a margin of two pounds; even the intake of one high-salt meal may cause one’s weight to appear higher by two pounds when in fact nothing has happened but water retention. You’re an ignoramus and a hysteric!

A valid point. See above.

4) My two-pound weight loss is true, yet reflects the disintegration of muscle, not fat; I have missed so many workouts as a result of my stupid back injury that I am simply in way worse shape and I have nothing to be proud of.

This is an extremely robust hypothesis, though I hate to admit it. I still have to be careful at the gym not to exacerbate my injury and I’ve hardly been doing a third of what usually do- it’s almost a scientific impossibility that I haven’t lost muscle. But how to know how much muscle has been lost compared to fat? And where does that leave me with respect to how to proceed menu-wise? This is my most annoying hypothesis- I almost wish I hadn’t thought of it.

5) Extremely low-carb diets are dangerously effective. I actually lost 2 pounds in four days, a direct result of eating under 20 grams of carbohydrates per day, causing my body to burn stored fat in lieu of glycogen and putting me in a state of ketosis, not to mention constant thirst.

This is probably the case, regardless of how much muscle I may have lost, and it is starting to freak me out. Though my drastically low-carb diet seems kind of healthy compared to my June regimen- especially since I have been feasting on broccoli, bean sprouts, turkey and tuna- I really am overly thirsty and I am starting to crave fruit. Plus, I’m grossed out by the quantity of mayonnaise, butter, cheese, and heavy cream I’ve ingested in the last few days. Nonetheless, I do feel like I’m back to weight x (as evidenced by the fact I am wearing white pants today). Thus, Hypothesis #5 is probably the most robust, though it could be taken alongside Hypothesis #4.

Maybe I’ll weigh myself again today just to be sure.

Or maybe I'll leave immediately and purchase the eleven ingredients for my fresh, summer recipe idea, Forbidden Fruit Salad. After all, it's 31°C in Vancouver and I'm wearing white pants.

A Very Merry Un-Birthday to the PFB

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:33:00 +0000

Today is my birthday. Technically. That is, it is definitely my birthday following the urban dictionary definition, which, in my opinion and yours soon, is the most accurate available. But it doesn’t feel like my birthday, as really nothing birthday-ey is happening today. It did feel like my birthday on Saturday at the Blue Water Café where, emboldened by a big birthday bottle from Barossa, I celebrated my survival to-date by eating a death-defying quantity of seafood.

My birthday meal isn’t actually the point of today’s reflections, although I will give you a quick play-by-play: I launched into the commemoration of my birth with six colossal prawns served on a wintry field of ice. These were truly sub-zero and came with a kick-ass cocktail sauce, into which I plunged each prawn like a fearless diver hunting horseradish pearls. All the while silently observing the unspoken ontological conundrum at hand, I then ordered and devoured in its entirety a one-pound lobster poached in a buttery vegetable broth, which I think the waiter may have called a Béarnaise. (If he did, he both mispronounced the word and mislabeled the dish, as there was definitely no egg in the sauce. It is also possible that he mumbled a more accurate description or that I’m going deaf as a result of the very phenomenon under consideration, my advanced age.) My merry-making matured with two macarons, offered to me by Blue Water for my birthday free-of-charge, or, if you will, for nearly 300 dollars with tip. In an act of adult austerity, I chose to forego the $18 glass of ice wine which I coveted briefly, but drank an almost identical product later, frugally obtained by me as a birthday gift. The meal was truly delightful and I’m considering getting a tattoo to remember it by.

Today, however, I have only the memory of weekend seafood to rejoice, as, having agreed to celebrate my birthday on Saturday, no honors are being bestowed on me today. Furthermore, as a result of my impressive 29-year-old wisdom and sense of responsibility, I am suppressing my birthday-driven urge to eat an entire cake and instead adopting a strict, temporary, emergency calorie-reduced, low-carbohydrate diet. I’m doing this for two reasons (well, for one overarching reason, for which there are two reasons). The overarching reason is I have gained two pounds, and I have long had an official policy of requiring of myself adherence to a calorie-restricted diet at a specific benchmark of x +2 lbs, where x equals my preferred weight, also in pounds. As a 29-year-old, let me recommend this policy to all of you. Assuming a 500-calorie deficit per day- the upper limit in my opinion- it takes two weeks to lose two pounds. At 29, I have no trouble looking ahead two weeks; however, I still have trouble meditating on a period of five weeks, which is how long it would take to lose five pounds. (Besides, a five pound weight gain- c'est le bordel.)

The reason I have gained two pounds are 1) I hurt my back lifting weights last Saturday and a tragic handicap forebade my use of the trusty Chocolate Time Machine for a whole 8 days, and 2) the week before the injury I was fatefully introduced to the Big Cupcake at Vancouver’s Cupcakes, which are, if you will excuse on my part a brief regression, fucking awesome. It’s funny, because I had no use for the Big Cupcake until I stuck it, totally by chance, into the freezer, where the icing took on the very texture I had always fruitlessly demanded of cereal marshmallows and the whole thing started to taste like the Lucky Charms of my dreams. As a result, though I was initially a passive, blameless victim of the Big Cupcake (which I received at an office party honoring my birthday and other work-people born in July), I actually went to Cupcakes of my own volition and asked for a Big Cupcake just like the one I got as a gift (chocolate cake, with yellow buttercream icing). They didn’t have any, so I reluctantly took a smaller, plain chocolate cupcake and ate it while mourning the other one.

For me, at 29 as always, not working out for eight days and eating one Big Cupcake and one Regular Cupcake easily translates to two extra pounds. Thus, instead of making myself a huge birthday cake today, I am going to go on a diet for two weeks and then make a cake on July 18, the exact date on which my BMI shall be certainly and joyously reduced from 18.8 to 18.5. I promise to tell you all about it!

So, a Very Merry Un-Birthday to moi! Please enjoy this cupcake on my behalf, as I’m late to catch the next departure of the Cocoa Delorean.

29 down and x to go!

I shouldn't be eating either of you.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:46:00 +0000

If there’s one foodstuff I can’t possibly support, it is deli meat. Almost all deli meat contains sodium nitrite, which is associated with an unappetizing buffet of cancers, like the gastric, esophageal, and colorectal. Cancers? Yucky! Yet the very idea of grinding multiple animal parts into a discrete food and then shaping it into a ball that can be easily gripped and slipped into a metal slicer is even yuckier, non? Being totally disgusted by deli meat is vital to my food identity, oui?

Or am I having a food identity crisis?

Recently, as a result of the most dangerous additive of all, peer influence, I ate several slices of mortadella, an Italian cold cut containing a customary and disquieting amount of visible white pork fat. According to one source, mortadella is no less than 15% cubes of fat derived from the pig’s neck. It is a horrific thing even to describe. So waddya mean ‘several slices’?

Clearly, traditional Italian deli meat is an intoxicating agent. My very character, previously so lard-wary and tumor-timid, was fundamentally altered by the first mouthful of mortadella. For once, my thoughts turned away from cancer epidemiology and toward strategies for optimizing pork flavor and texture. I discovered that by folding very cold, paper-thin rounds of mortadella in half, then in half again, one produces a light, savory, edible meat-handkerchief, ideal for stuffing in the mouth straight out of the refrigerator. As a result of my innovation, my companion and I ate 200 grams of mortadella, 30 grams of cubed pork fat, straight out of the deli paper before we even sat down to lunch. I wrote off the event as a moral aberration, filed it away with the time I drank a mickey of Absolut Citron, and blamed the whole thing on my companion.

Yet not too long after my mortadella pig-out, I found myself peering surreptitiously into a European deli cooler on Granville Island. There I had spotted a giant uncut loaf of cold Bavarian Leberkaese, a Germanic invention of corned beef, pork, bacon and onions ground very fine and baked to achieve a crunchy brown crust (of which it still possesses a thin strip when chilled and sliced as a deli meat). With a mouth-watering rush of nostalgia, I remembered that this delicacy once passed, to great acclaim, through the fridge of my childhood home and I had to have it. One hour and 300 grams later, I stood at the kitchen counter explaining to my companion exactly how the incredibly light, almost fluffy Bavarian Leberkaese was also his fault. He was more than happy to accept responsibility, in return for his (scant) 150 grams.

How to explain my double-dabble in sodium nitrites, my delicious departure from clean living? As always, such a conundrum calls for a Freudian approach. Mortadella and Bavarian Leberkaese are similar in that they both kind of taste like bologna, which I haven’t had since I was a child. We didn’t have bologna in my house more than a handful of times, but I occasionally ate it at other kids’ houses, most often on Wonder bread with mayonnaise. My then-impression of bologna sandwiches on white bread with mayo was that they were absolutely spectacular. My opinion was the same on the occasion my mother bought an unsliced hunk of bologna, cut it into cubes, fried it in butter and served it with mashed potatoes just to be retro. This event was never replicated, and it glistens in my memory like melted pork fat.

As a child- if you will, a human being with an undeveloped brain and palate- I truly liked bologna; in fact, I liked deli meat generally. I even liked Spam. (One time, a friend’s mom went so far as to bake crispy Spam with brown sugar on top and as of today I am dangerously close to going off-wagon yet again to try to recreate this at home. You’ll be the first to know.) Thus, the leading explanation for my recent salume bender is a deep-seated yearning to return to my childhood, a totally justifiable crisis just days before my 29th birthday.

Or perhaps the truth is that mortadella, Bavarian Leberkaese, even Spam and bologna, are mind-bogglingly delicious- if your mind can be temporarily boggled enough, by peer pressure, or perhaps lemon vodka, to take the first bite. As a kid, I liked bologna and Spam because I didn’t think too much about them, not about their cancer-causing properties, not about their fat content, not about the animal that made them. Unfortunately, as an adult I think about all these things and so I edge most deli meats off my plate. But my disgust at them, I realize, arises from my developed brain, not my developed palate.

I plan to get right back on the wagon.

Magic Coffee Too Magical?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:03:00 +0000

This just in from the US Food and Drug Administration: Consumers should NOT use instant coffee for sexual enhancement.

So, what, Scientific Establishment- after years of fruitless research attempting to ruin coffee for all of us, you’ve resorted to whining that it doesn't heighten sexual performance? We didn’t think it did. We just thought it was delicious and mildly psychoactive!

I'm kidding. The FDA's taunts are limited to Magic Power Coffee, an instant coffee being sold online as a dietary supplement. As it turns out, Magic Power Coffee contains a chemical similar to Viagra, which has got the FDA all hot and bothered. (Since this is a food blog, and a pretentious, well-reputed one at that, I won’t get into the effects of Viagra; let’s just say it serves a similar purpose as, say, adding cornstarch, or beating egg whites.) The active ingredient in Viagra, and now, for your steamy morning convenience, Magic Power Coffee, may interact with nitrates and cause dangerously low blood pressure along with your dangerously high bedroom prowess.

Have I mentioned that nitrates are heart medications most frequently taken by old people, i.e. the very population that consumes the most Viagra? That’s right. Yet Viagra is approved for sexual enhancement. Just not Magic Power Coffee.

To clarify, Magic Power Coffee should not be used for sexual enhancement because it contains a drug similar to an FDA-approved drug for sexual enhancement. Basically, Magic Power Coffee is TOO magical. For once, a dietary supplement with an effective active ingredient!

Of course, I'm celebrating the irony, not disputing the FDA’s actions. Viagra is a relatively tightly controlled product compared to instant coffee- at least, the doctor prescribing it to you, and the pharmacist dispensing it, is supposed to make sure you are not taking nitrates. In the end, the FDA really just wants to make sure you can’t get coffee-flavored Viagra without a prescription.

But coffee-flavored Viagra sounds like a cash cow, doesn’t it? (Oh- sorry, Magic Power Coffee. I guess that was the idea.) Perhaps in the future, spunky old people everywhere can enjoy a nice cup of prescription MPC under medical supervision, at least on the days they can forego the nitroglycerin. Until then, I guess they will have to somehow chase their brazen blue pills with a little Starbucks VIA Ready Brew. Any the chance the barista's in pharmacy school?

Living on the Wedge

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:21:00 +0000

In a turn of events certain to have put the majority of my vast readership off their dinners, I haven't been available to make pretentious comments about food since Thursday. It's simply a case of work getting in the way of work; I have been too busy creating Wedge Salads to write a single thing. (And too busy contemplating purchasing a new camera. Please forgive me for the lamentable quality of my Wedge Snapshots compared to the one I stole off the internet. Lovely, isn't it? Yet so unlikely to be as delicious as my own poorly lit Wedges.)

For those of you who find it difficult to discern the one commonality among the first four salads photographed here, a Wedge Salad is any salad where you use a large intact portion of a head of iceberg lettuce as the salad base. Usually, one uses a quarter of an iceberg lettuce for a single serving, but as iceberg lettuce is 95-96% water, I sometimes use an entire half a head for one person's dinner. Ultimately, as in any salad, the lettuce is simply the vehicle for the dressing. But in my own Wedge, the lettuce is also the Sun, around which carefully-piled ingredients orbit like delectable planets.

Most recipes for Wedge Salads, like Paula's Deen's, call for blue cheese dressing, bacon, and tomato; the recommended presentation typically has the ingredients piled in a simple, yet elegant manner on top of the Wedge. However, I have been experimenting with sophisticated salad breeding techniques, pretentiously and selflessly, of course, in order to bring to you the CobbWedge, an ingenious hybrid of two classic salads, the Wedge and the Cobb.

A Cobb Salad, made famous by a debate as to its origin on Curb Your Enthusiasm and by the fact that practically every restaurant in America serves one, is an arrangement of blue cheese, hard-boiled egg, bacon, tomato, and avocado- and often chicken, and sometimes olives. I had my first and only perfectly-executed Cobb Salad on the patio of Rockefeller Center at the age of 15, in which the ingredients were arranged in fastidiously neat rows, or columns, depending on how I turned to plate to admire them. I've tried to find a picture to represent it, but it falls short, as do most attempts to relive one's childhood.

To create a CobbWedge is profoundly complicated. As you can see here, the results are highly variable, but let me assure you this is only in measurable domains outside deliciousness, which has practically no variance as long as you select high-quality ingredients. To serve two people, you boil two eggs (I find that, although the Joy of Cooking recommends 12-15 minutes for a hard-boiled egg, mine turn out perfectly in ten; it's like how some kids skip a grade) and fry until very crisp two slices of bacon. As you may be able to tell from my locally-produced photographs, you can use different types of bacon for different effects, or even substitute some sort of non-bacon sausage meat that only a male companion would purchase. The bacon can be crumbled, cut into chunks, or even left whole, as in dark and mysterious home-cooked-photograph #3. The egg should definitely be sliced into strips or diced (they may also be left out, as in sausage-marked salad #2, though this is not recommended for anyone but male companions performing independent research, and even then they better have been, er, be, in a terrible hurry).

In addition to one egg and one piece of bacon, each person should get half an avocado and a small handful of either cherry or, preferably, grape tomatoes, sliced in half so as to boost and separate their flavor prior to meeting the Wedge. The avocado should be cut to match whatever design you applied to your hard-boiled eggs. Then, carefully position all the ingredients casting the head of lettuce as Vincent Chase and the avocado, bacon, and tomato as Turtle, Drama, and E, thus creating tight-knit bundles of distinct ingredients worshiping the Wedge. Finally, douse the Wedge in California sunshine, bikini-clad ladies, or blue cheese dressing, topping it off with real crumbled blue cheese if you are an insane partier or have recently won the female lead in an unexpected, yet welcome, upcoming third installment in the Bridget Jones' Diary series.

Apply pepper just before photographing in a shadowy apartment around cocktail hour.

Top Sushi Seen Canoodling with Total Dumbass

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:39:00 +0000

I just ate Vancouver's best sushi seated next to the world’s worst human.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. Vancouver has some pretty amazing sushi, and the stuff at Kadoya on Davie is perhaps just among the best. (I had a California roll, which they obligingly draped with additional avocado for the added fee of $1.75. Sooo worth it. For those of you who want to add ‘California roll’ to a list of PFB-approved cheap choices, allez-y. Kadoya’s wild salmon sashimi is a pillow-y protein party, but pricey; I felt like slumming it today.)

But the man sitting next to me was seriously the worst.

For starters, despite the presence of an artfully-arranged Bento box, the guy persistently gave his mouth the heinous misdirection to talk about himself instead of even once attacking the plump tempura shrimp that could have served so discreetly to quiet him. As I was sitting down, he congratulated himself for being 34 years old this year, then (as I myself was politely asking a waitress for light Kikkoman) moved into a wordy description of his struggle to select the right Porsche to honor the occasion. I gather he was choosing between a something-Cayman and a 911, coincidentally the very number I would consider calling for assistance by the end of my maki. I should mention that his lunch companion was at least ten years older, and, at the very least, didn’t seem to be finding said sports car soliloquy as appetizing as his own chicken teriyaki. But he still chimed in with a recommendation for some other car, some banana-kiwi-strawberry Aston Jaguar, disons, which chatty-Charlie affirmed with excessive confidence was “a good car”.

If there is one thing that can make my eyes water more than wasabi, it’s the entitled use of understatement. Clearly any car necessitating multiple fruit adjectives (as interpreted by a female listener quietly enjoying her extra ginger) and possessing a label even resembling ‘Aston’ is more than “a good car”. I could have splashed my complimentary, slightly nutty-tasting green tea right in his face!

Then, to my gustatory and intellectual horror, this speech-gifted weiner asked his lunch-mate a question more transparent than the oblivious oil that futilely fried his battered Bento bits.

“Do you like my shoes?”

Gaaaaa!!! I stabbed a chopstick right into my eye! Okay, I wished I had. That way I would have rushed to the hospital and narrowly escaped what ensued, which was the offender’s poor, misguided meal-mate barely spitting out the sentence “Where are they fr—“

“SAK’S FIFTH AVENUE!” the verbose salami jumped in ecstatically. “Really. It’s a great place to shop.”

And, you can eat fish raw. It’s called sashimi.

As full as I was becoming from the party-platters of cutting-edge information from my table-neighbor, I scarfed down pieces #7 and #8 of my generously-stuffed roll (Kadoya’s portions are almost as huge as was my antagonist’s ego). I tried to focus on swallowing the imitation crabmeat without choking, but the self-obsessed ramblings from nearby pulled my Freudian death-instinct into a perfect negative linear relationship with my diminishing appetite.

“Now that I’m going to be CEO,”

“Waitress, a glass of water please!”

“I’m desperately trying to avoid moving to Toronto,”

“No green tea ice cream- I’ll just take the cheque!!”

“But, really, can you believe how many people work a REGULAR job?”

As I thrust into my pocket a packaged thank-you mint and spilled an uncounted tip onto the table, his recitation of today’s ego-menu items miraculously came to a close. Had it all been for my benefit? Or did today's personality-disordered subject just finally want to maow his by-now be-floppen shrimp? Here I will give the credit to Kadoya; even this tamagoyaki-head couldn't resist their Bento forever.

Readers, I only sat down for lunch today to avoid consuming yet another take-out box, my greatest source of personal anguish these days. But now I must recommend sitting in for more reasons than just the environmental. For, today, I was rewarded with so much more than fake crab to nourish me!

Ichiban, Yo

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:32:00 +0000

Just as ultra-pretentious Jeffrey Steingarten loves a couple of low-brow foods, such as fun-sized Milky Ways, I love several of them (which makes me either way more or way less pretentious than he…tough call). Among my favorite trailer park specials are Ichiban noodles, known generically as instant noodles or ramen. Ramen noodles are made of cheap wheat flour and constitute the go-to reference for people who wish to a) represent how poor they were in college, or b) argue that an expense under consideration is outlandish and would necessitate a future economical sacrifice of great proportions. Anecdotally, I can tell you the latter ramen-rhetoric is common among Vancouverites, all of whom can certainly afford a downtown condominium if they ate ramen noodles for the next 25 years. But perhaps the best-documented example is from pop culture, when Sex and the City’s Charlotte pines after a $1300 piece of wedding china which fiancé Trey opines will look wonderful “underneath the ramen noodles we will be forced to eat.” (In this episode we learn that the character of Trey, a Park Avenue cardiologist with latent ED, has a flair for hyperbole.)

The filmmaker Michael Moore, in attempting to convince American college kids to vote in 2004, was criticized for giving away underpants, potato chips, and ramen noodles to students who signed up to be on the voters’ list. The criticism heard from Republicans was that Moore was buying votes; I didn’t hear input from dieticians, but I imagine that any parallel second-guessing from their camp would have targeted the nutritional poverty and starch content of his treat choices (including the underpants, I guess, which presumably were new and unwashed). Ramen noodles in particular are notoriously low in vitamins, minerals and fiber, high in fat and simple carbohydrate, and even higher in sodium. In many ways, ramen are probably worse than potato chips, some varieties of which are available without salt, and which score a surprisingly low 55 on the Glycemic Index (compared to the baked potato’s scandalously elevated 93. Who knew! Values are, of course, approximate and derived from the internet.) Yet, unlike potato chips, ramen noodles at least have the potential to feel like dinner and curb snacking, especially if you add peas. And you’re probably even less likely to add peas to your potato chips than you are to add them to your underpants. Go ramen.

As I said, one of my favorite blue-collar delights is Ichiban noodles, which is a specific brand of instant ramen. I like all ramen noodles, but Ichiban, especially the chicken flavor, has the best taste and noodle texture. (Okay, Ichiban actually has the second best taste and noodle texture, behind an obscure Chinese brand I’ve seen only at Superstore. This brand comes with a clear plastic package of garlic oil and an aluminum flap of chili flakes. I love this brand. However, its portion size is slightly small, it is not widely available, and there is no video of it on YouTube. Still, if I ever get to one of Vancouver’s remote Superstores, I’ll look for some for you.)

As you can see in this ancient commercial Ichiban's full name is Sapporo Ichiban. As far as I know they are not associated with the light and refreshing Japanese beer Sapporo, though a pint might go well with the 2000 mg of sodium in a package of Ichiban. (On that note, my first choice beverage for pairing with Ichiban is milk, my second choice, Coke. But usually I feel so guilty for eating them I just have a glass of water, followed by six to eight more.) Sapporo Ichiban is so delicious, they may make you fall off a fence, before or after they promote in you various nutritional deficiencies, so do not eat them too often. As a general guideline, I suggest you eat them no more often than I do. For your sake, thank goodness I am out of college.

PFB Celebrates Chocolate Time Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:09:00 +0000

Both as a pretentious food blogger and as a civilian, I eat a lot of chocolate. My favorite is Ritter Sport Alpine Milk Chocolate, a bar once brutally lambasted by an overly-candid Belgian friend, who claimed it was merde compared to real chocolate, the kind without lecithin, the poor, stigmatized chocolate filler. Je m'en fous. I think Ritter Sport is, above anything, the right height. If memory serves, the vertical extent of a Ritter Sport is about one inch, which is the optimal size for hearing my favourite chocolate sound when I break off a square with my teeth. (With thinner chocolate you definitely hear a snap; I'm still searching for the word to describe the sound from a one-inch bar. I'm leaning toward thud.)

The Alpine Milk is the plain milk chocolate Ritter in the light blue package. A recent taste test proved it is remarkably different, and much better liked by moi, than the basic Ritter Sport Milk Chocolate in the royal blue package, which boasts no affiliation with the Alps. Both are 30% cocoa, yet the light blue tastes very mild and creamy, while the royal blue looks slightly darker and is more spicy. Only once all available Alpine Milk has been polished off will its lamentably non-mountainous competitor become subject to predation by pretentious food bloggers.

I also like Ritter Sport because it is cleverly marketed with the word 'sport' in the title, which continues to convince me that I am working out by eating it. Nonetheless, I am often plagued by guilt after I have eaten an entire bar of Ritter Sport, which contains 533 calories (though I was delighted to read in a Jeffrey Steingarten essay that cocoa butter isn't entirely absorbed by the body, likely reducing any chocolate bar's 400 calories to 300- a rumor worth verifying.)

I am often heard to say after enjoying a whole Ritter Sport (or a half-tub of Breyer's Cookies n' Cream ice cream, such as last night's, or three glasses of homogenized milk with Nesquik chocolate syrup, as was in fashion Monday and Tuesday of this week) that I wish I had a Chocolate Time Machine. By this, I mean not a time machine made of delicious cocoa, but one that would bring me back to the moment just prior to my decision to eat a quarter or more of my daily calories in the form of chocolate.

Concerned readers relax, as at last I have found it! The elusive Chocolate Time Machine does in fact exist! Moreover, it is so incredibly simple to use, it requires no more intellectual prowess than, say, stepping one foot in front of the other! It is also quick: ten minutes in the machine allows one to travel back approximately 100 calorie-units of time. At least, this is the estimation legitimate to apply to an average 120-pound human; heavier, more muscled humans would require an even shorter session in the Chocolate Time Machine to travel back 100 calories! Of course, for advanced users, there are many ways to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness at chocolate time travel; I'm happy to explain these to any of you who are interested, should you come offering something cocoaey in return for my sweet, melty advice.

In the course of my tireless search for Chocolate Time Machine, I tested several models, many of which worked well enough; in fact, you can read up on the efficiencies of various Chocolate Time Machines on the internet:
http://www.primusweb.com/fitnesspartner/calculat.htm. While I still play around with several chocolate time traveling techniques just to hone my skills, only the invention pictured below will you see pretentiously revered here. Behold the Alpine Milk of the Chocolate Time Machines, the Stairmaster, the one true Cocoa Delorean!

Hippie Con-diment Poses as Low-Sodium

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:38:00 +0000

I still remember, years ago, bearing witness to a child's request for her mother's 'special sauce' on brown rice.  The mother, an acquaintance of mine, enthusiastically obliged her, and me, when I asked what made the sauce so special. "Oh, it's just flax seed oil and Bragg's All Purpose Seasoning," she announced happily, "which is like a salt-free substitute for soy sauce."

The reason the event stands out in my memory is it was one of the few times I chose to keep my mouth shut, though I had detected a factual error begging be corrected. The child's mother is a lovely person and I didn't want to put her on the spot; I also didn't want her to think I objected to her daughter enjoying some flax seed oil and Bragg's on her rice. In fact, this is a delicious combination I think you should try, on rice or hot vegetables, which is what I use it for. Flax seed makes a rich, nutty-tasting oil you can use like butter. And Bragg's is indeed a mouthwatering alternative to soy sauce. It is every bit as tasty as traditional soy, and it offers up a different, maybe even more complex flavor, but it is not salt-free.

So try the flax seed oil and Bragg's! Bring on the fat and salt!

Bragg's markets itself to hippies on the premise that it is chock-full of amino acids, many of which are indeed essential to human nutrition.   Perhaps it's even safe to say that Bragg's is healthy for you.   Nonetheless, one of the (non-essential) amino acids in Bragg's is glutamic acid, which contains salt. Glutamic acid is actually what they get MSG from (more specifically, monosodium glutamate is a crystalline salt of glutamic acid). This is why Bragg's is so damn tasty- it contains a whackload of salt.   However, I am suspicious that Bragg's wants us to think otherwise.

At its most upfront, Bragg's free-loving website murmurs that its All Purpose Seasoning "contains a small amount of naturally occurring salt"; yet, elsewhere, it is more conniving in emphasizing that "No table salt is added". The latter statement strikes me as purposely misleading. Sodium is sodium, regardless of the proverbial table. It would be just as absurd to boast "No table salt added" to any number of gourmet salts. And of course sodium is naturally occurring. Good grief, people- it's an element!

So how much sodium is in Bragg's All Purpose Seasoning? What, in fact, does Bragg's consider to be a "small amount" of salt? Well, on its website, Bragg's APS owns up to having 160 mg of sodium per 1/2 tsp- that is, per 2.5 ml.  On the bottle in my fridge it says it has 110 mg per 2.4 ml (which is less but since it's the exact same product, the discrepancy makes me trust Bragg's even less). The soy sauce in my fridge admits to having 860 mg of sodium per 15 ml. Time for math!

Students, in 15 ml there are 6 units of 2.5 ml. Multiply 160 x 6 and you have 960 mg of sodium in 15 ml of Bragg's- 100 mg more than in the soy sauce in my fridge!!

Of course, you deserve to know what kind of soy sauce is in my fridge. True confessions, I got it at a Chinese grocery store and its label refers to the 15 ml serving not as a tablespoon but as a 'bowlful'. The brand is written in Chinese characters and the only English says 'Superior Light Soy Sauce'. Okay, so I have light soy sauce. Bragg's has more sodium than one obscure brand of light soy sauce. What about regular Kikkoman soy sauce?

Sorry Bragg's. 920. Kikkoman regular soy sauce has 920 mg of sodium per 15 ml serving. And its light version has 50% less than that, i.e., 460.  If the lower Bragg's estimate of 110 mg per 2.4 ml reading is the correct one, then Bragg's would have roughly 687 mg of sodium per 15 ml- less than regular Kikkoman soy sauce but more than light.

So, what, Bragg's, are you relying on hippies' shitty math skills, printing a ridiculously small serving size of 1/2 tsp and hoping we don't realize your APS is extremely high in naturally occurring, non-table-related salt? I don't think it's the metaphorical use of the word 'table' that makes me bloated after sushi, Bragg's. You're full of salt and shit!

Readers, for those of you who don't wish to look like you've crossed into your third trimester after your first salmon ngiri, I recommend you bypass the Bragg's and reach for the Kikkoman light. Of course, if you aren't worried about bloat or salt, go ahead and shake on the Bragg's. Deceit can be truly delectable.

And if anyone is offended that I have labeled Bragg's target market as 'hippies', let me alert you to their website, http://www.bragg.com/, which on a recent visit bore the statement "May Your Life Be Filled with the Majestic Beauty of Mother Earth".

You can't argue with science!

Well-liked Spice Guilty of Fragrant Assault

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 05:05:00 +0000

Breaking news: I just met up with my friend Hayley, who told me a harrowing food tale. Given my privileged position of reaching such a vast audience of eaters, I feel it is my responsibility to publish her case report here. Feel free to start formally recording my acts of public service starting…now!

“Tuesday morning, before work,” began Hayley’s frightful account, “I was sitting in bed, checking my email, eating soup.” (Pretentious Food Blog reading comprehension exercise: please draw a picture including the following labels: a) girl b) bed c) email d) breakfast soup.) “I was in a rush, and sort of inhaling the soup, like this.” Here, mouth agape, she mimed to me an act of hasty shoveling. “My eyes were on the computer when, all of a sudden,” she gasped, both hands rising to her neck, “I sucked a bay leaf right into my throat!!”

“No way!” I shrieked. “A whole bay leaf?” She nodded, her eyes wide, I suspect with the memory of near-strangulation by aromatic leaf. “Yes, an entire bay leaf. And it stayed there, stuck, right in my windpipe. I was choking. I was actually choking. For several seconds I thought I would die. But the bay leaf was sort of fluttering in there, like with the vibrations in my throat. Finally I managed to move the leaf, and hold it in a way that let me breathe out of one nostril.” She demonstrated to me her emergency technique of positioning her neck, as though purposely trying to give herself a double-chin.

Interruption: have I mentioned yet that my friend Hayley is a highly attractive female? Let me print this fact at once, before I go on with this story, which she’s allowed me to relay to you uniquely for your own safety. For the record, Hayley does not actually have anything resembling a double-chin and it is a blessed miracle she mustered enough of one to save her own life.

Readers, this is the part of the story where you learn that, beyond being so incredibly sexy and fit, Hayley is an extraordinary character. “Since I could partially breathe,” she went on to tell, “I walked myself to the hospital.”

PFB Hero Alert!! Can you believe it? As my own accepted modes of transportation to hospital include only ambulance, fire-truck, helicopter, and potentially the human back, I am preparing to whittle a medal of bravery out of my finest baking chocolate. Yet Hayley is modest.

“When I got to the emergency room, I started to panic," she confessed. "The line-up was really long and the bay leaf was slicing my throat. Every once in a while it would move again and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. They stuck me ahead of everyone in an observation room while I waited for surgery to have it removed. The ordeal went on for six hours, with me every so often having fits of choking. The doctors let that go on, by the way, just to see if I would randomly dislodge it. But in the end it took two scopes and an extraction under sedation.”

Today’s tip for blog followers: when making soup, for heaven’s sake tie your bay leaves into a bouquet garni and remove the entire thing before serving. And before sitting up in bed and furiously inhaling a quirky breakfast, Hayley and I both suggest you brush your hair and put on a bra. You may just end up at the Surrey Memorial ER, where folks will look up to you for it.

Giant Novelty Fork, Why Do You Exist?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:37:00 +0000

I say, if you're going to review restaurants, better have an oversized novelty utensil to bring along. Accordingly, I brought this giant fork to the Red Door Pan Asian Grill in South Granville, where on Saturday I enjoyed a generous plate of perfectly-cooked scallops and peapods, a delicious serving of juicy red curry shrimp, and a distinguished helping of Vancouver's signature dish, szechuan green beans. For those of you currently residing in a dry climate and paying less than $500/sq ft for housing, let me inform you that everywhere in Vancouver serves szechuan green beans, even McDonald's. (Okay, this is an extrapolation- yet, statistically-speaking, a safe one. In a logistic regression, with the presence of szechuan green beans across Canada as the dichotomous outcome variable, the odds ratio associated with a restaurant in Vancouver compared to elsewhere in the country would be in the magnitude of ~100, with a 95% confidence interval of 85 to 115. I only go to McDonald's for breakfast, so I'm pressed to make this reasonable assumption regarding its dinner fare).

En tout cas, to review a Vancouver restaurant favourably, at the outset, the place has to do a decent szechuan green bean. And Red Door does; in fact, its SBGs are totally kick-ass, garnished as they are with the perfect amount of savoury pork. (Well, I thought it was pork. My companion thought it was garlic, and our dispute has yet to be settled with the requisite amount of physical violence.) SGB pre-testing completed, the real gastronomical ANTM at our table that night were the scallops, among which I hardly could have chosen the prettiest one; I loved them all equally. To supplement these, the SGB, and the bountiful, tender panang-ish shrimp (which would have been enough for me), my companion ordered the beef and broccoli, which I think I can report accurately were also well-prepared and flavourful, though all I did was pick out the sauce-drenched veggies (red onions and, I think, gai lan. Definitely not regular broccoli). Our waitress gave an extra-long explanation about how the beef and broccoli ended up on the menu (it used to be on the kids' menu, then the waitresses started ordering it and omg it was so good!) yet I was happy to listen, as I was, at the time, deeply self-actualized by a 9 oz. glass of 2007 E Minor Shiraz.

Although it posed a serious threat to my gastrointestinal homeostasis, because I care so much about you, my single-celled, pre-mitosing readership, I also ordered not one but two desserts, the curry butterscotch pot de crème (with real scotch!) and the hand-wrapped banana spring rolls. While the latter were not at all special, I have since adopted a special skin care regimen which involves applying the combination of curry and scotch to the oral mucosa twice daily as needed. Did I mention the pot de crème included chocolate ganache? This I use for ordinary cuts and scrapes.

Here I am pictured holding my fork in the proper manner to politely indicate that you should go eat at the Red Door. I can't wait until a restaurant disappoints so I can grumpily spear the wait-staff!

The Balls Are So Great

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 05:57:00 +0000

Since I started my insufferably f---ing snooty internet food site, I've been asking friends to write me with their latest food crazes/crises. I received this letter from my very favorite food friend Adrienne, who responded to my query regarding what's new in baby food (important background: last year, Adrienne created a new human using her own body. Her husband was partly responsible):

"Loenne [the tiny human conjured from what previously was nothingness] is a huge fan of meatballs and I have them individually frozen for her dinner every night.

Since she refuses to eat vegetables the past couple times I have ground in my food processor broccoli, spinach, carrots, onions, celery and garlic superfine, almost to a coarse salt consistency. I add the ground veggies to the meat and prepare the balls as normal. I ended up adding a lot more eggs and breadcrumbs than normal since the vegetables are so moist and without fat, and anyway they have never been that successful. I have been cooking them in the slow cooker in sauce- the first time I just threw the balls in raw and cooked for about 8 hours- but they were super mushy and fell apart very easily. The next time I browned them first thinking this would keep them together but they fell apart even worse. If you have any thoughts. . . I think it's a great food for babies so I would love to perfect it. Iron deficiency is very common among children, and the balls are so great because they can be cut up into little graspable chunks. Help!"

After discussing this problem of dissolving meatballs with a science-savvy companion, I feel confident in providing the following advice: do not use a slow cooker for meatballs. Meatballs are invariably made using ground meat (the only exception being veggie meatballs, but those shouldn't be prepared in the slow cooker either- j'y reviendrai) and ground meat has already been through a grinder, which does much of the same work as a slow cooker. That is, a slow cooker, by cooking stuff over a long period, functions to break down the muscle fiber in meat, rendering it tender and tasty by the time the children get home from school and you finish washing their underpants, etc.. Thus, since your George Forman meatballs have already gotten the Mohammed Ali from the grinder, if you put them in the slow cooker the result is a level of breakdown that is simply unacceptable- a total junior high bathroom stall spectacle. So, don't use a slow cooker for meatballs.

Instead, to prepare delicious, sproingy meatballs, use the following technique: bake in a 350-degree oven for around fifteen minutes for typical-sized balls and use texturized vegetable protein instead of bread crumbs. In Vancouver, TVP (as referenced in Sunday's post) is available at the Granville Island market food-stand that does the bulk nuts, etc.; I don't know where it is available in Toronto or elsewhere, but I invite you to let me know. TVP is a meat substitute made of de-fatted soy flour and it comes in sort of grainy flakes, like granola. To reconstitute it, you pour enough hot water to cover whatever quantity you're using, usually equivalent to the amount of bread you used before you found out TVP is way higher in protein and fat-free.

Note that TVP lends a sproinginess to meatballs that is typically only seen in commercial meatballs, like the Swedish babies at Ikea (btw, if you are there, try the wine; a good source testifies that Ikea wine gets you drunker than any alcoholic beverage outside sake. I plan to test this hypothesis for a future feature). I personally like this sproinginess, though if you prefer heavy, dense, high-calorie loser meatballs made with bread, allez-y.

For those of you who tend to get flustered, texturized vegetable protein is different from hydrolyzed vegetable protein, which is a high-glutamate flavor-enhancer like MSG. They aren't the same, so even if you have, or think you have, an MSG sensitivity, you can still benefit from the high-protein, bouncy excellence of TVP. (And for those concerned about MSG, I refer you to Jeffrey Steingarten's provocative essay "Why Doesn't Everyone in China Have a Headache?" Is he wrong?? Are we outraged?? I should certainly do my own research, for dissemination via this forum.)

Anyway, Adrienne, I hope these tips were helpful for you and that your future meatballs will turn out as plump and juicy as Loenne. I loved your idea of making a vegetable salt and feeding it to her unwittingly. You are such a good mom, there is no damn way that child is developing iron deficiency. In fact, I'm considering visiting you in Toronto just to get my iron up.

Oh, and I said I'd come back to the idea of using a slow cooker for veggie meatballs. Um, don't use a slow cooker for veggie meatballs. Just brown them in a pan and serve with eggless mayonnaise on a bed of kale.

Failed Indian Food Becomes Hamster Fare

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:27:00 +0000

Tonight I tried to make Indian food: Palak Paneer and Chana Masala. My first mistake was relying on a packaged paneer; my second was trying to use soy protein balls instead of chickpeas in the Chana Masala. The soy protein balls were a total failure, comparatively much worse than the flavorless, uninspiring paneer. In fact, the balls were totally non-edible, low-carb or not. Perhaps, you'll argue, I could have anticipated this- that soy protein balls are an unsuitable substitute for garbanzo beans, and, also, they are yucky. But! I'd retort, I'm such a fan of texturized vegetable protein I'd come to believe none of its long-distance meat substitute relatives could disappoint me.

I was devastated to learn that soy protein balls (at least, those obtained at the same Granville market food-stand that is the source of my wondrous TVP) taste like chewy dry Kibbles and Bits and look like any no-name wet dog food when swimming in curry sauce. Worse, the soy protein balls stank. I'm desperate to explain it. My first instinct is to say they smelled like bread, but then you might think they smelled unbelievably good. But they did smell like bread, just like wet dog bread, bread after it gets mixed into dog food and is already in the dog's mouth, not yet, but just about to be, spit out and replaced by curses to a witless owner.

Not having a dog, I had no choice but to feed them to my hamsters.

Fat Bastard Bit Fugly

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 02:31:00 +0000

Vancouver Magazine's 2010 Wine Awards just came out. Okay, they came out in January, but only now, with the advent of my pretentious food blog, can I justify spending the money to test out their recommendations. Given a recently-developed affinity for the big reds (yes, yes, a result of influence- like when people start to look like their Chow Chows) I decided to start with their "Best Rich Red Wines" category. Accordingly, this afternoon I took a trip to Vancouver's flagship government liquor store, the Signature shop at Cambie and 39th. This liquor store is a Vancouver ethanol oasis. There is so much beautiful wine there; they even have a section devoted exclusively to wines for litigators, surgeons, and cosmetic dermatologists!! (Confession: staff at the 39th and Cambie liquor store were busy this Saturday and I wasn't able to verify the accuracy of my assumption regarding the target market for their velvet rope section; with wines ranging from $60 to $885, I feel confident in waiving this one wee fact-check.)

If I may interrupt my own wine review for moment, I will give another plug to the Cambie wine megastore by saying there was a big party going on there today, involving a delightful tasting of Spanish wines (a thin Tempranillo with lilts of burnt rubber and an even thinner mild Rioja) and appetizers, including meatballs in tomato sauce and crispy risotto cakes. I didn't try any of the food, but only because an hour earlier I had been at the Cookworks on Broadway and Granville, which had a tasting of waffles with syrup, fruit compote, and whipped cream. (This I enjoyed for its high carbohydrate content, though lamented later when I didn't have room for its fatty cousin, the fried risotto.) The atmosphere at the shop made for a singularly fun wine-buying excursion. I don't think anything could go wrong in the lives of any of you should you decide to make regular trips to the 39th Avenue liquor outlet.

En tout cas. I ended up buying four wines off the Vancouver Magazine list: the 2007 Shotfire Barossa Quartage, the 2005 Mount Langhi Ghiran Billi Billi Shiraz, the 2005 Wolf Blass Grey Label Shiraz, and the 2008 Fat Bastard Shiraz, the only non-Australian (French, in fact) one in the bunch. Given its conspicuous nationality vis-à-vis its competitors, my companion and I decided to try the Fat Bastard first.

For those of you who may want to try the 2008 Fat Bastard, note that its price at a government liquor store in B.C. is $16.99. In the context of Vancouver's ostentatiously over-priced libations, it is a perfectly acceptable wine, that is for sure. Yet I am slightly less than downright shocked that it ended up on anybody's list of wines to applaud. "You know what I don't like about this wine?" I determined. "It has absolutely no character. I feel like I'm at a reception." My companion agreed. "There is nothing to it," he said. "It is just wine. There is no finish. There isn't even anything up front. It isn't objectionable, but it's definitely not spectacular." Still, it is possible to pick up a cheap shiraz that's actually special, such as the 2008 Rosedale Chook Shed (Australia, $14.99 at BC Liquor stores).

With this, my companion went to the fridge and cut us two spectacular chunks of Spanish Manchego cheese. This we did applaud, and, thankfully, it heightened our experience of the Fat Bastard. "You know, this might not be a bad wine if you put it down for a while," my companion said as I grabbed my computer to access my pompous weblog. "Oh, should I hold off writing the review?" I asked. "No," he said, "I mean put it down for a couple of years."

Which we didn't. Manchego cheese is soooo good, we drank the bottle before heading out to dinner, wishing to wash away the memory of mediocrity with a marvelous Meritage (e.g., Burrowing Owl, Okanagan, 2005)...

Crowned Jack

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:19:00 +0000

As this food blog is already four days old, I figure it's about time I introduce you to my mother. When it comes to food, I believe mothers are a major influence, their home cooking pivotal in shaping the palate and their kitchen-competence an undiscovered dominant allele. Plus, all the best chefs are mama's boys*. You can expect to hear from me all sorts of recipes that originated with my mother and she knows a lot about weird ingredients; she’s really just a Costco-sized bag of food ideas. All that and she knows how to fillet a fish! She even has a really funny story about teaching someone to do it. Because I care about you, my tiny but presumably rapidly-expanding readership, I asked her to type it out for us. Here it is, fresh from Manitoba:

“Spring reminds me of the time I taught my friend Billy from Montreal how to fillet a fish.

Billy and I shared a duplex in the teachers' housing at Grand Rapids in Manitoba. He and his wife had gamely left Montreal to teach in the north here for an adventure and to save some money. Billy liked to fit in with the local guys and he was popular because he liked a joke even if it was on him. When spring fishing was about to start, he was getting invitations to join in the fun, but he wasn't accepting any. One day he came to my side of the house to explain why.

Billy the City Boy had never touched a fish, and he feared the hallmark northern teasing if he were to catch one and not be able to perform. He could laugh even if he was the butt of a joke, but this prospect was too much. He couldn't ask one of the guys. Of course I said I would help him. It's not hard to fillet a fish. My dad taught me when I was a kid. All Billy had to do was bring me a fish.

Pretty soon he was at my door beaming because someone had given him a big jackfish. It was Saturday morning and he had the jackfish in a plastic bag. He spilled it, thrashing, into my kitchen sink. “Holy crow!” I yelped, “This is a huge fish. It should really be baked, not filleted.” The fish could not have laid flat in the sink even if had been fully dead. The head went up one side and the tail up the other. I said, “Billy, let's hit it on the head, have a drink and wait for it to calm down.” So I poured us each a Crown Royal and Coke and we sat and waited. Every time we finished a drink we hit it again but we were pretty drunk by time the fish was merely twitching.

I pulled out my filleting knife and we lay the huge thing on the table with lots of paper and room to spare, since it still moved quite a bit. Billy was squeamish about this but the worst part was actually getting a firm hold on it long enough to make the cuts. I have pretty small hands and jackfish are slimy. Anyway, I was able to do the job and he quickly grasped the angles. I coached him to feel the backbone with the knife edge, and then to feel the skin against the flesh on the other side of the fillet. I told him to go slow with his first few and feel the fish under the knife so he would get a nice fat fillet. Otherwise he would still get the razz from the guys.

Billy was very, very happy and quite pissed when it was done. The next day he reported that he had gone fishing with some local guys and done some filleting. Nobody laughed at him.”

The moral of this story is that it is great thing to know how to fillet a fish. (This may shock you, but I still need to learn; I am a delicate sort of person and, though I do have plans to finally make my mother proud, it will take me a quantity of Crown Royal I’m still saving up to buy.) The fact that the victim in the story here is a jackfish specifically is of no great consequence, but because they are such interesting creatures, I’m going to tell you some of their secrets (learned, of course, from my mom).

Jackfish, or Northern Pike, is a delicious medium-firm white fish present in the lakes of Manitoba. Where my mother grew up, in a town of only several hundred people called Bissett, folks referred to it as ‘snake’. This is because jackfish are terribly slimy (and although snakes aren’t, they are thought to be) and very difficult to handle. For this reason, jackfish aren’t as popular as their taste alone might have made them and they aren’t available commercially. In Manitoba, even fishermen who know jackfish are tasty are apt to throw them back if there are pickerel (a.k.a ‘walleye’), sauger, or perch biting alongside them. This is because, as well as being tough to grip, jackfish are impossibly hard to clean. First, like sharks, they often have unappetizing surprises lurking in their bellies, like shoelaces, or intact dead mice. Second, jackfish flesh is possessed of dreaded Y-shaped bones, which make filleting them a terrific challenge even once the carcass stops flapping. So, in my mother’s experience, many a jackfish is caught just to be bonked on the head and left to float for the seagulls, with or without its eyes in their sockets, as these may be plucked out and used for bait.

If I haven’t yet ruined your appetite, I’ll pass on the news about how to eat a jackfish, should you ever come across one. (Note that jackfish are indeed so unpopular that even I, hailing from Winnipeg, have never tasted one, so it isn’t likely you will either; read on nonetheless, as you are better safe than sorry.)

Number one, you want to prepare a jackfish just like pickerel† or sole, or any other white fish with a lot of bones. That is, you want to pan fry it or boil it, preferably not bake it whole, because it’s safer to de-bone it before it’s cooked. (For those of you who have never heard of boiling white fish, this method is rumored to lend it the texture of lobster. This I heard not from my mother, but from a fellow I met at a dinner party in Toronto who reported learning the technique from some old guys, First Nations, again in Manitoba.)

My mother cautions strenuously against eating jackfish fast, as no matter how diligently the chef may have removed the bones, some of those Y-shaped devils are bound to have been missed, and if you get one caught in your throat, in the words of my own mother, “you’re fucked”. By this she means to say that a Y-shaped bone is uniquely tricky to remove from the throat. Instead of simply swallowing a piece of dry bread (which, legend has it, will help pass down the gullet a bone from a simpler, less fascinating fish such as snapper), you may have to go the hospital to dislodge a Y-bone. Word to the wise.

No matter how you prepare a jackfish, or any other white fish, including the anonymous, grilled, publicly available one pictured above, my mother advises “Let loose with the butter.” Here, proving the DNA basis of culinary convictions, I have to agree. White fish like cod, sole, haddock, and halibut is naturally free of fat and it needs it.

And if my approval means that much to you, have a Crown and Coke too.

*Here, I am referring to both men and women chefs, the best among them who praise their mothers’ influence, as ‘mama’s boys’. I find this preferable to changing the phrase to ‘mama’s boys and girls’. Rest assured I can also be counted on to call men who really like their dads ‘daddy’s girls’. In the words of the Kinks, girls will be boys and boys will be girls. It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world. (Except for Lola).

†This is indeed the second time I’m mentioning pickerel without explaining its wonders. I promise to enlighten you at the first opportunity, which should coincide with my first chance to eat it this season.

Springtime Delicacies: Mo Fiddle fo Rel

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:18:00 +0000

In the course of a Sunday trip to Granville Island Market, I made the discovery of- and acquired, by exchanging bushels of cash- not one but two alimentary celebrities from my childhood. These were, one, fiddleheads (which I remark are described by an online encyclopedia with an apparent appetite for alliteration as “the unfurled fronds of a young fern harvested for food consumption”*) and, two, morels, a chic and porous mushroom with the absolutely most mushroomy taste- disons, robin is to bird as morel is to mushroom flavor.

Both fiddleheads and morels are available only in the springtime, for a short while, as little of each is harvested and clever people like them. Accordingly, they are also, as I’ve hinted, both expensive- I got a package of fiddleheads enough for two people for seven dollars and the morels were $19.99 a pound. But mushrooms are light; a nickelbag of morels will do you for any imaginable entrée for two.

On a personal note, the reason these fern and fungi were the Zack and Cody of my early years is that my mother never failed to cook them in butter. This was an exceptional trend, as I grew up in the Snackwells era (credit here goes to Jeffrey Steingarten for choosing Snackwells cookies to stand for the era of low-fat diet hegemony) and really very little in my house was always served with butter, perhaps only fiddleheads, morels, and pickerel, an incredible white fish of Manitoba which I will discuss with you when the time is ripe.

En tout cas, fiddleheads and morels are delicious and I urge anyone with means, motive, and opportunity to avail themselves of both immediately, while there is still time. If you can believe it, without his even knowing they are twinned in my memory due to the historical pairing of each with butter, Emeril Lagasse has a recipe for a dish containing both morels and fiddleheads, Morel and Fiddlehead Fern Ragout: http://www.blogger.com/url

Now, I myself might move to recommend, especially if you’ve never tried fiddleheads or morels, that you simply stir-fry either one in butter, shallots, and garlic, so you really get the idea.

Before I turn irresponsible, I have to impart a little wisdom I myself learned too late- this is on the topic of fiddleheads specifically. Apparently these bébés de fern were associated with a rash of foodborne illness in New York and Western Canada in 1994†, and while they don’t confirm the cause, Health Canada guesses the illness resulted from an unidentified toxin present in fiddleheads. As much as 1994 was a long time ago, I’m still vulnerable to humming Nirvana and, evidently, you still must take precautions when cooking fiddleheads. I didn’t know this on Sunday when I cooked my fiddleheads, so I just cut off the ends and fried them in butter. However, Health Canada recommends‡ that fiddleheads be washed in several changes of cold water and cooked in boiling water for 15 minutes or steamed for 10 to 12 minutes until tender. They also suggest they be boiled or steamed prior to sautéing, frying or baking- which I didn’t do, though I also did not experience any illness (for a change- more about my delicate constitution in posts to come). Also, don’t drink fiddlehead water because it may contain unidentified toxin causing diarrhea. Please try to hide your disappointment.

Just to give due end focus to the morels (they are my favorite out of the two, shhh!), one of the best mouth memories I have is a pizza topped with morels that had been sautéed in garlic butter.

Ok, make it a dimebag.

*http://www.blogger.com/url

†http://www.blogger.com/url

‡http://www.blogger.com/url

Subtle as Beef

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:12:00 +0000

Dear Sasha,

You know what’s a subtle flavor I am deft at detecting? That of efforts to sneak political content into my pretentious food blog. Soon I will have to speak directly to readers so as to assure them they are safe here from non-food related issues.

As you can see, I agreed to post your link to the Dan Barber speech, as it is about food, though hardly as trivial as the topics I myself plan to address here. As long as you realize I can smell the beefy fragrance of your ulterior motives.

A+,
Stephanie

You know what's delicious?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:07:00 +0000

Stephanie,

I suppose we’d best switch to an all-food dialogue, so as to maximize the utility of our exchanges. In the event that we need to switch to a non-food topic, I suggest we begin our sentence with “you know what’s delicious?...”

To wit: You know what’s delicious? The fact that Obama is pursuing criminal charges against the bad dudes that caused the oil spill:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02spill.html?hp

Or, in the alternative: You know what I’m hungry for? Justice. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Thompkins case leaves me starving for justice:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1470.pdf

I mean, they’re practically overruling Miranda v Arizona, after 44 years!

Sasha

p.s. You must, must put a link to this speech on your blog, it is about food!!!!!

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html

Comme Fleur de Sel

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Dear Sasha,

I am appalled by your suggestion that I shorten my web address and consider it a testament to the decay of language education. Shouldn't everyone, particularly the gourmands who will be deeply interested in my blog posts, be able to type a 23-letter phrase? (And shouldn’t, in fact, everyone possess knowledge of enough French words in order to garnish their speech with the odd mot juste, heightening it perfectly as though with Fleur de sel?)

Anyway, despite my disgust at your recommendation, I’ve decided to acquiesce and, as you can see, have catered to the lobby of the attention-deficient and/or poor-at-spelling, whose interests you’ve chosen to represent. Congratulations on your win.

Of course, this means I have indeed decided to write my food blog. Finally the public can benefit from our witty correspondence.

A+,
Stephanie

The Devil the Seasoning

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:55:00 +0000

Stephanie,

You will need a shorter web address for your blog. Apart from that, I like the title; it is wildly pretentious but that suits me fine. So, I guess that quote means, “God created food, but the devil created seasoning”? Why would God want us to eat bland food?

Although I can see why the devil might invent seasoning, so we eat more than we need. Assuming the devil wants us to be fat. I’d say, God created food and seasoning, but the devil created our insatiable appetites for same.

I like the concepts you advance for the blog, and will read it regularly. But be warned, you have to update it pretty often, if it is to remain cool. A good way to cheat is by finding links to useful articles on other sites, such as:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/health/01real.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

But also http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/dining/28bruni.html?ref=dining which I sent you last week, and many others I will send you periodically from now on.

More on that after lunch…

Sasha

Commençons?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:18:00 +0000

Dear Sasha,

I am writing to say I have almost fully decided to start a blog. Of course, I am the first to hate the self-indulgent, micro-focused writers of blogs, and by extension blogs themselves, but who am I to deny my own obsession with moi-même, let alone feign interest in big-picture issues?

My blog, because I am a snowflake, is going to be about food.

The blog will include content such as what delicious items I am most into at the moment (and perhaps what delicious items my friends are into, if they’re sensible enough to like legitimately delicious items), what hilarious foodstuffs are currently causing foodborne illness according to the FDA, my opinions on the programs I am importantly viewing on the Food Network, my impressions on food essays such as the ones I’m reading right now by Jeffrey Steingarten, and various insights into how to eat the best food without getting fat.

Now for the part where you give me your opinion: for a title, I am interested in a James Joyce quote (curiously enough, one in French) that says “Dieu a fait l’aliment, le diable l’assaisonnement”. I want my blog to be quite pretentious, so I am thinking of calling it Le Diable L’Assaisonnement. What do you think? Does anyone actually type in web addresses anymore? This is the only disadvantage I can see to creating www.lediablelassaisonnement.com

A+,
Stephanie