My brother is going to be in town and I want to show him the time of his life before I tell him I need to borrow eight grand for a small business venture I’m planning (a Mummy/Zombie-themed apparel store called Tuts and Bolts). My plan is to get him blazed, take him to MSF, eat like hogs, check out Ruby Skye, triple kiss District Attorney Kamala Harris, and then hit him up for the money.
Best Answer
Yes.
Yours truly will be guest chef at MStonedF, which will feature renditions and reinterpretations of classic munchies fare, with the helpful, loving hand of the MSF crew. Num nums include:
Dinner for two, for one (for the indecisive and hungry)
This will either be a complete fucking nightmare, or a triumphant spectacle. I expect nothing in between. As always, things start rolling at 6pm at Lung Shan (Mission, b/w 18th and 19th). Come hungry, and good luck with Tuts and Bolts!
Last night, after scarfing chicken skin and honeycomb tripe at O Izakaya with Samantha, I had a fitful sleep. I dreamt I was at the Asian Art Museum, when a 16th-century samurai costume descended from its platform and began to speak: O, Izakaya, why are you so empty? Why don’t people flood into you? You have the best yakitori in the land and likely the best ramen. Your musical choices are a fucking tragedy, but everything else about you is so, so sweet. I want to save you. I want to be inside you, while others are inside you at the same time. I can only speculate that you are struggling, but I can’t see how you are surviving.
* * *
As part of my payment for helping MSF out with the Yerba Buena event a few weeks ago, A & K offered to take me out to Aziza. I’m cashing in on that offer tonight. I’m scrambling to get my work done as the dinner hour looms, trying to stay focused on the task at hand, but all I can think of is COUSCOUS.
Oh, speaking of Yerba Buena, I dug up these photos of 1) the ridiculous amount of bread we purchased from Costco, and 2) The stocked 24′ refrigerated truck Anthony rented. Ridic.
* * *
Finally, this Saturday, I’ll be “doing a night” at MSF, ostensibly themed Mission Stoned Food. Full menu to follow, presuming I get permission. But the inverted nacho will be making its debut, as promised. Um, please come.
The wreckage of the HMS Hog Island: Salty oyster guts dried to the hood of Jaysephina's car, parked on the side of Highway 1. Sorry, Jay!
Flamin’ Hot Cheetoh–wire: I pitched a theme night to Anthony for MSF, that I think would be the perfect opportunity to premiere my inverted Bruce Willis Nacho and something I’m tentatively calling “Is this birdseed?” Details to follow, but I think this is gonna be the straight fat sauce. [via FatBumps]
Adam and Eve–wire: Tried eating a weird fruit we found while camping on the Russian River last weekend. Thought it was a chayote, but it turns out I don’t know what a chayote looks like. It tasted bitter like fear. Ate it more than once. [via BeersForEars]
Ashton Kutcher–wire: We’ll never have a legitimate street food culture in America so long as people are afraid of puking. Crotchety hot dogmen harrassing mobile macarooneries, and shithead real estate moguls getting pissy about their sidewalks have something to do with it. But territorial competition stems from permit bureaucracy. The permit system, in turn, seems to be rooted firmly in the belief that if we don’t issue permits then every yahoo without a job will start serving cockroach cupcakes from rat poop rickshaws. But as someone who has worked and eaten in fully permissible restaurants as well as permitless hovels, I think the difference is hazy. That’s not to say that there’s a linear solution. If we were all to get over our sanitation phobias—both reasonable and skittish ones—and a free market street food system arose, it wouldn’t mean that we’d suddenly be looking at Chiang Mai West, I don’t think.
Is street food a positive byproduct of an underdeveloped infrastructure? I mean, if your tap water gives you diarrhea, do you care whether or not your food was prepared on your neighbor’s toilet seat? Conversely, if you can get a permissible “clean” cookie for $.85, would you buy a street cookie for $.80? Are we too civilized for a decent street food culture? And if that is the case, can moving backward possibly be part of moving forward, food-wise? Alas, I fear a complete socioeconomic collapse and reset might be the only road to American street food.
I guess this discussion is forced by the emergence of the fancy pants street cart, which some complain is itself an impediment to real street food culture. But I feel like the nuisance of the designer cupcake cart resolves itself in post-apocalyptal Street Food America, as the novelty of eating fancy food in non-fancy places fades away when there are no fancy places. [via VaguelyRacistPointlessMusings]
Yountville To Vegas-wire: It’s irresponsible to eat at Bouchon in Vegas, right? Or am I actually saving on carbon emissions by meeting the Lobster Lady halfway from Maine? Is it a shame to fly to Vegas for a meal I could have (probably better, too) right in my backyard? Where else am I going to eat in Vegas, if not Bouchon? [via BIMBY]
Quilty-wire: Man’s meal, take two, at Tataki last night with Daddy Daycare, Quilty, and Sarek. Discussed: Peyote-eating policy consultants, suspension-raised scallops, rhubarb dick, My Own Worst Enemy, & family-style marijuana panic attacks. [via @mammaspaghetti]
Some totally boring photos I dug up of Anthony’s and Karen’s miracle fruit birthday bonanza. Psychedelic, bra.
None of these photos do justice to the ridiculous melange of foodstuffs we wolfed down trying to test the will of the miracle fruit. I left covered in tabasco sauce and American cheese.
I won’t spend too much time nitpicking about the production quality (ie. overexposed reproductions of home photos that make all the sexy chefs look like sexy facial peel zombies). It doesn’t seem fair to pick on TCBCafePublishing or TasteTV for things like their inability to choose/stick with a font style. (1)
But somebody has to be held responsible for the book’s hideous conceit. Part travel guide, part escort catalogue, this is an exemplary instance of darling chefs being made more darling, square-peg-into-round-hole’d into horrible parodies of themselves. To wit:
Chef Adam [Jones of Market Street Grill] is a young up-and-coming yet established chef. He has a hot look and his food is even hotter. He provides striking visuals on the face and on the plate.
What?!? I mean, really, WHAT? What does “provides striking visuals on the face” mean? Is he going to punch me? Get a Mike Tyson face tattoo?
What makes Justine [Miner of RNM] sexy is the way she takes classic dishes and combines them with local ingredients to create different textures and flavors that make the dishes all her own.
Are you making cassoulet? What’re you going to do with these local sunchokes? Oh! You’re going to put them IN the … Oh. Yes, yes. These different textures! This dish is all your own! Oh shit I’m gonna blow.
from Cindy’s Pearl Oyster Soup (pg. 93)
Poach the six oysters until just cooked. Rinse tapioca rice balls in cold water and set aside.
Make six omelet skins with a pan or large Chinese ladle. Fold uni into the omelet roll and seal with a 1/2 fold so the omelet looks like a crescent.
Make six omelet skins? What in the world is an omelet skin? Does it somehow differ from an omelet? All I know is that the ingredients list calls for 2 eggs. The rest, it appears, is up to me.
I just don’t understand the point of this book. I can’t figure out if it’s supposed to be a masturbation aid, or a cookbook. Until I get clarification, I will therefore be using its pages to start charcoal and catch cum. (2)
I’m finally getting around to Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin. You should pick it up and give it the slow, deliberate reading it warrants and deserves. It’s fucking magnificent, even if you’ve never been to Shopsin’s—which regrettably I haven’t—or even if you don’t care about cookbooks—which regrettably I do very much. This is from the Shopsin’s recipe for Squaw Eggs (Bacon, Peppers, and Hominy):
To my mind, this is the scrambled American Indian version of a western omelet. At the time I came up with it, the feminist Andrea Dworkin was making a huge racket about things that were offensive to women, and I thought Squaw Eggs would be offensive without being too offensive—so I put it on the menu to piss her off even though I don’t know her and she’s probably never heard of this dish. I put hominy (dried corn kernels) in them, which has a squaw feeling for me because American Indians used to grind hominy to make all kinds of breads and shit like that…
A man after my own heart! Not a darling chef (”This egg dish reminds me of Summer in Provence…”), or a faux–tough guy who-gives-a-shit cookbook (”When I cook eggs, I like to listen to Black Flag…”). It’s so good. The rest of the recipe after the jump (for no reason). Keep reading →
A few weeks ago I was making myself a super cute dinner of fava bean shmoo (1), and sausage and spring vegetable pasta.
I blanched the favas in salted boiling water, took them out, shocked them, and started shelling them.
Sixteen hours later, after I finished shelling a pound of beans—fava joke!—I added more water to the pot, and waited for that shit to come back to a boil.
A few minutes later, I went to put some orechiette! in, but lo and behizzold, the fucking water looked like this:
Stigmata water! Stigwater! Stigmater! What the fuck, right? I cooked the orechiette in there anyway, as the water tasted fine—briny, like blood. The pasta bloodbath yielded orechiette with a sort of wine-purple tint, not unlike the chunkier, recognizable bits of post–eating-and-drinking-too-much-at-A16 vomit. A little bit gross, but fine.
I can’t think of any explanation for this, and Google is silent on the matter. Thus, according to chaos theory—as explained to me by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park—there’s only one logical answer:
Jesus Christ.
Of course, as you all know, there are numerous precedents for Judeo-Christian figures presenting themselves in edible form (2). But it was so unexpected that I, a humble Romanian farmboy, would have my very own gastrospiritual experience. It inspired me to seek out similarly fortunate souls. And it didn’t take me long to find Youtube user thesmiths1013. (I encourage you to watch this whole video, or at least the first minute, and then again from 2:20 on).
Not being from a place blessed with Golden Corrals, I then set out to find out more about the restaurant. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly. A place to nourish both body and soul. Somewhere where strangers whisper into the ears of angels. A land of miracles.
What I found was a land of lobsters.
As unsettlingly vulgar as that ad makes Golden Corral seem, I am grateful, for it returned me to the world of the secular restaurant, which brought me my angel:
Take your top off,
Chris
(1) Shmoo’s a word I picked up during college from my chef at downtown in Berkeley. Anything with a puréed texture was shmoo. It didn’t matter if it was foie mousse that had been passed painstakingly through a shark-skin sieve, if it was pasty, it was shmoo. Then he’d say, in his endearingly nasal whine: “Chris, put more shmoo on there.” In this case, shmoo is fava been puree with mint, green garlic, parmesan, olive oil, and lemon.
(2) Most notably, Cheesus (the Cheetoh Christ), and the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich.
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