I’ve always been tempted to try Sandra Day O’s enchilada recipe from my home state, but now that I know she’s too remorseful too late, I’m hoping she and Panchito will just go off to contemplate the damage they did. Into the tequila sunset should suit ‘em both.
I was fortunate enough to be locked out of the Internets during all the Enron on 12th Street celebrations, for which I will be eternally grateful. Beforehand I did hear an inneresting tidbit from someone kvetching that the “journalism” categories have been clumped together to the point of even crazier unfairness: With media outlets committed to squeezing every penny out of overstretched hamsters, how many have the resources anymore to pay into the medal-making machinery built on entry fees?
The older I get the happier I am to be past kiddledom, not least because the school lunch program in this country seems to be a cross between “starve the beasts” and “go all medieval on their guts.” My cranial sieve is notoriously unreliable, but I remember bringing crapwiches of peanut butter and brown sugar wrapped in waxed paper to school because my family could barely afford the 4 cents a day per spawn for a quarter-pint of milk. Whatever kids today are getting has to be better than that, even if the privileged are reduced to videographing the sins of the cooks. Although I wonder where the parents are, letting ‘em eat GMO corn oil instead of time-honored butter . . . .
If you’re following the nutty news lately, take my advice without a pound of fleur de sel: Ignore it all. I managed to tune out all the dire warnings on salt all these decades and still somehow maintain low blood pressure, so when I read that’s no longer the white demon I closed the paper and went on mainlining lard.
All my notes are connected: Which is scarier, antibiotics in the ground turkey, or shit in the ground turkey? And the WSJournal reported two pink slimesters are in a race to the bottom now, trying to compete with ever-lower-priced “meals” even as workers are increasingly walking off the job to protest their Bangladeshi wages. And as you eat those fat strawberries, know the pickers may have been fired for protesting life-threatening conditions in the field. Also, too: “Worker dies in large meat grinder in Clackamas.”
I was happy to learn I was not the only reader feeling cheated by the Omnivore Goes to MetFood stunt misplayed as “let’s draw in our own staffer with his own book to obfuscate on how the fuck you make a pizza for lunch when the oven needs proper heating.” It had more missed opportunities than Trader Joe’s has processed crap. A friend out in Portlandia emailed to say: “thanks for letting me know that Berkeley is a Northern California (!!!!) town that is also home to Chez Panisse. THAT clarifies things. And for letting me know that you can make a decent meal simply by shopping in a supermarket. How does that garbanzo soup sound to you?” At least I had a response to the last point: Soup needs fermentation.
The scandal was presented as rat sold as lamb. But old copy editors never die; they just bitch away. So I’ll point out that lamb ain’t mutton. Much as I can’t tolerate the former, I know vermin could much more easily pose as the latter.
Wondered what “white pinot noir” might be. Turns out it’s “unpretentious rosé.” Or, the new white zinfandel. // First thing you learn when reporting on the bog on cranberries is that the people who produce them are adamantly not farmers but growers. // New rule: restaurant designers should have to eat a meal in every seat they cram in. (Walked out o’Fat Radish rather than face wall off bar.) // @DwightGarner read this memoir so we don’t have to. Ouch, to put it mildly. // Just found this Aldo Leopold: Humans are like the “potato bug, which exterminated the potato and thereby exterminated itself.” // Cheese: When it’s not snobbish indulgence of the elites, it’s junk food for the poors. // Sometimes you can only tell mango by the color. // And the best dairy name ever has to be: SoyCow SoyMilk. (Video should show udders on the beans.)
Someone needs to alert Panchito: No one wants his “lessons.” We’re still trying to unlearn the last one. The inestimable Charlie Pierce deserves a Pulitzer for this observation alone: Sportswriters have been accused of selling out for a steak dinner, but “you can buy the Washington press corps with a cheap nickname.”
Every morning I wake up to some new set of links to food start-ups that are hoping to do good by doing well. And I wish them more than well, since I’m a big believer in food as the solution to all problems. So I was encouraged to read that vulture capitalists are starting to put their mega-money where their big mouths are. But someone is really going to have to answer why they would invest in the type of companies that are trying to come up with substitutes for nature’s most nearly perfect food. They might as well be attempting to develop a fat-free avocado. The other half of breakfast at least made sense, since even vegans lust for bacon.
I heard a fair amount of sad chuckling after the Newtown massacre over the confusion between the two NRAs. The fud one, of course, was perceived as the innocuous lobby. But an oddly combative interview on Lenny, and a flurry of publicity for the book, made me realize again that very few pimps pimp for noble causes. You can hurt people with unregulated guns & ammo but also with laws that keep wages at a Bangladesh-in-the-USA level ($2.31 an hour, FFS?) Uzbekistanstan, indeed.
Relatedly, I saw much hooraying over the return of Twinkies etc. but almost no awareness in the fud world that the whole brouhaha was yet another greedy/bogus “Mission Accomplished,” given that the goal was to destroy the unions, loot the company and let it be reincarnated as a Bangladesh-in-the-USA enterprise. Enjoy your fresh Ho Hos. Just don’t stop to wonder if there’s any blood in the Sno Balls.
Tweezers are fine cooking’s way of saying: Slow down, you’re eating too fast. // I misread Pollan as Palin and thought Monty Python was back with a cheese nun sketch. // Cheerleaders are trouble. // With fish, baked is another way of saying fucked. // “Fat kebabs sweating on spits” would put you off your Istanbul dinner. // So scrapple is the new lard? (Sorry. Does not compute.) // Flair/flare is the new palate/palette. // Not even 1 1/2 shades of grey. // And guess we have to wait 60 years to hear the Chimp’s taster come clean. Although that poor woman would have been restricted to pretzels and hot dogs, not asparagus and pasta.
Also, too, I started to post this but thought better of it, given the loons loose on the series of tubes: “Instead of trying to save the ducks (as if), these people should get (mental) help for themselves.” Considering I was uncharacteristically too timid to Tweet, I’d say terrorism works.
I’m assuming the Chimp’s new library will have a Panchito Canteen. Where you can have a beer (and a pretzel) and finally understand that he sold America on a dry drunk.
And I really wish we were living in the future and none of this had happened yet. So now the Boston suspect has been charged with having a “weapon of mass destruction” and I guess everyone had just better prepare to surrender their pressure cookers. I grew up with one of those scary things — my mom used it every day to cook dried beans or, when the freezer was otherwise empty of venison, boil a deer heart into submission, and all seven of us kids would cower as it rocked back and forth on a burner, looking ready to detonate. I wasn’t surprised one could be converted by an evildoer, but I remain amazed at how many “reporters” seemed unaware it is not “like what you might use to cook rice,” as NPR’s terrorism expert helpfully explained. (Yeah, you might, but you might be thinking rice cooker.) At first I was going to make a joke about how airlines will one day no longer allow Prestos in carry-on bags, but then a Twitpal informed me Williams-Sonoma has already pulled those potential IEDs off its shelves. The crazy gets crazier and crazier. While I keep wondering why those founding fathers never thought to write in any rights for those of us who would just like to fly home with a bottle of wine or olive oil without having to check a bag. Didn’t Jefferson produce both?