Where I’ve been

I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging, guys. I’ve been in South Africa for the Confederations Cup. Check it out, I was on TV! 

(via Jay, probably via Deadspin)

LoL SOrRY JK AzN FrEAQs! I’m going to try posting more fun and interesting facts about food and life in the fat lane in the coming days. Wuv woo!

Miracle Fruitz

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.

From my least favorite cookbook of the last year

This book is the pits.

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 TCB Cafe Publishing 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)

 

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(1)

so many sexies

(2) Too far, dude.

The storied pambaso

This is the beast I was talking about.

Pambaso: the highlight of last night's horror show of a game.

 

From my favorite cookbook of the last year

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).

Stigmat-er

How I Met My Angel

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

 

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(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.

Cheesus

Grilled Cheese Mary