gastropoda

Almost as jarring is the food styling in Taste of Home as it morphs ever more ludicrously into the poor cook’s Bon Appetit. I actually spotted a BLT turkey salad photographed in a Mason jar. Someone has got to stop looking at what the cool pubs are doing, because I don’t think this is quite what they mean by verrine. Better to have done that shot with something that half made sense. Like the “frosted pineapple lemon gelatin” right below it. Yes, frosted. Jell-O. 

If stars fall in the sky, does anyone hear? I managed to make it through an entire week into my foreseeable future without the faintest curiosity about the “big awards” being doled out to NYC restaurants. With the chances of spending $500 on a dinner about as good as our investing in a bottle of the new $1,450 cognac, who really gives a flying goose fuck anymore? I felt the same way about the silly food “festival” and the silly food-centric magazine, which was apparently designed by the same people who package Ambien. Everything seems so craven — was the magazine pegged to the “festival,” or was it just meant to sell more of those annoying and inescapable Campbell’s attack ads? My favorite curmudgeon went off even more than I did, but he actually read the thing. I only dipped a toe now dying of osteonecrosis into one thing by a guy who I know for sure could barely crank out 500 words on shrimp-shell stock, never a thought piece. But I did tear out the meat of the matter to read on the bus home from the Whitney — and almost snoozed off while wedged in standing up and gripping a handrail. The best and the brightest meets the worst and the dimmest. Don’t they call the damn thing a NEWSpaper? Leave off the S for stupidity. Just tell me something new, please. 

Even that, though, was not as jaw-dropping stupid as the piece about Newman’s Own at “much-loved” Fairway, the Rollerball of food shopping. It had the feel of someone tap-dancing — clumsily — all over a fresh grave that had already been pissed on once that week. Has journalism really come to this, hanging out in the vinaigrette aisle to coax crude comments out of old ladies? Now, if someone had gotten punched with accompanying cuss words, I would have believed it. . . .

File this under How to Stretch a Lobster With Steak: A wine writer decides to go bargain hunting and sets the bar at $20  — while those of us out in the real world are wondering what’s good for $5 these days. But I suppose newspapers still need to pander to the suffering who have to cut corners on nose jobs and private jets in tight times. And I guess it’s better than $400 worth of caviar in a single sauce. Clearly, language is not the only reason no one reading print saw the greatest photo of the last week: At a rally on Wall Street, a protester holding up a sign reading, “Jump, you fuckers!”

Long ago I decided my last meal should be in France, but I never imagined it might precede euthanasia. Or that it might flash before my eyes before my cappuccino. Could the salvation of the cuisine have been made any more soporific? A good writer meets a great topic and readers nod right off. It was still better, though, than the latest installment of Butt Boy for Eli. When the kicker turns out to be “never mind,” you wonder why the damn thing even ran, except to provide just what he intended, a promo for a store where prices are already so absurd I have often calculated it would be cheaper for shoppers to take a cab across town to the real Zabar’s. But the guy, to his credit, does pony up for an awful lot of advertising, especially starting right about now. High holy days, indeed.

Speaking of flacks, the one who sent out the e-release touting the “Union City Greenmarket” might want to offer a refund for her/his services. Sounds more like a John Sayles title than the biggest farmers’ market in the country’s biggest city. And I can only assume he/she is moonlighting for whoever decided to start a magazine and name it after Crisco’s poor relation. Spry? I guess it’s the perfect title for lardasses.

Maybe I am too aware of teh internet traditions, but I really wonder about the wisdom of titling a cookbook “Two Dudes, One Pan.” It sounds awfully close to a couple of girls and a single cup, and I’m not talking chocolate mousse recipes. But I guess Goatsee must have been trademarked.

Every morning, as my consort and I loll in bed and listen to the bloviating on anything but issues that is NPR’s political coverage these days, it seems as if we hear the same commercial (let’s call it what it is). And every morning I realize I am starting my day wondering what is so bad about tomato paste in pasta sauce. What am I missing here? But now I’ve seen the print version of the ad (let’s call it what it is). And it references earthquakes and tsunamis etc. to promote the stupid stuff even as real hurricanes are smashing into real cities. A hundred chimps typing buzzword clouds could have come up with better names for the various variations, too: roasted garlic balsamico, vodka elegante and the geographically challenged Tuscan marinara with “subtle taste of northern Italy.” Twenty-five years in this business, and I now learn the most simplistic distinction between the cuisines of the north and south has been wiped out by one copywriter. Then again, this is red sauce made without tomato paste, not without cream and butter. If I ever start a revolutionary, wildly successful catering company, remind me never to sell it to cretins once I have built the brand.

Given that food has such a strong porn element, it’s probably not surprising that the Yellow Magazine has started a site with stories and recipes but mostly shopping — native titties are no longer enough. But what a site it is; the Williams-Sonoma catalog has more soul. I assume the recipes come from the purveyors, but there’s no indication of provenance. (Plus the links suck: I am dying to make the “Hamper of Parmigiano” appetizer but can’t connect.) It’s depressing, given how many of my most amazing eating experiences were courtesy of my tagging along with my consort on assignment way back when the bosses were tending the main store: the magazine. We ate in people’s homes; he always had interpreters who led us to the most authentic local foods. The last trip was to India, for caffeine, where we had one extraordinary encounter after another thanks to his fixer, Neha. But click the “explore world foods” button and all you get on the most amazing country, the one where you need all five senses and could use four more, is a bloodless recitation of non-food facts. To see that cornucopia reduced to a $75 basket of rice and sauces is beyond sad. But that’s just me. Anyone looking for tetilla will find plenty.

I know I heard this on the radio, but the Google is pretending it never happened, so I am going to rant anyway. The short segment was on baking your own bread — how wonderful, how simple, how cheap it can be in these cash-strapped times. One of the closing lines was that a loaf from scratch will cost 25 cents. Maybe in some alternate universe. Yeast these days is at least $3 for three envelopes, and you will have to open at least one. And has Mr. Frugalbaker been shopping for flour lately? A pound costs what five did not so long ago. Better advice would be to spin gold into flax. 

In a similar vein, I was pretty amazed to read the blackening of White Lily’s reputation using such fair-and-balanced evidence. When I think of a blind test, I imagine rules and witnesses and, maybe, ya think?, science? To let two obviously prejudiced bakers have at it in unwatched kitchens strikes me as a bit, shall we say, un-Timesian? The most unsettling part was having a paid spokesperson turn on the new product with no disclosure of whether said spokesperson had any millstone to grind. As often as I think I was born at the right time, I do wonder why I had to sit through so many shitstorms over far more innocuous pieces just a Saran Wrap away. Being an editor in the high-tech chicken coop these days must feel like listening to an endless loop of Bruce Springsteen’s “Radio Nowhere” — Is there anyone alive out there? 

At least I read the whole damn floury mess, a feat I could not replicate with the green, green garlic of confusion. But at least I tried. Most people who brought it up raved about the recipes before admitting they had not read a single word of the babble. So I guess this is an improvement over the British Bosom, who also filed stream-of-consciousness with no proofreading, but did it with recipes as well as “stories.” And sometimes crimes are so egregious they can only be punished with quotations. As the inimitable Trex would say (and did say about someone else): “She’s not so much a writer as a serial killer of ideas.” Stick a stake through her laptop. 

How can one section produce something as amazing as a graphic look at real estate hell in the age of avarice less than a week after publishing the most inane local story since I wrote about a purple martin apartment house in Iowa more than half a lifetime ago? I assume everyone else was wondering which Rubeville they were living in on waking up to find their hometown paper driveling about a drunk who wanders into a bar and can’t get back out. Come on! The guy could be president with those instincts.

I also wasn’t so convinced we should think like a chef after reading 30 lessons from them. I was most surprised Lord Thomas recommends bacon made from any old hogs when you can really taste the difference with the heritage kind. And any chef who cares more about carrots than the environment probably should keep it to himself. One thing that does not belong in the kitchen is a disposable razor. Buy that guy a scrub brush if he’s so anal he thinks babies need skinning.

For all my carping about fast food chains engulfing and devouring the world, I have to give them credit for design. If the goal is to move the sheep in and out at the speediest clip, they do it with minutes to spare. Contrast your average Taco Bell expedition with my last two experiences with home-grown wannabes, both of which must have been conceived by bastard bureaucrats from a liaison between the IRS and the post office. At ‘Wichcraft, there’s no overhead menu; only late in the game do you realize you need to pick up a menu in the front and puzzle over it before stepping into the order line, which is more an order clot of confused customers puzzling over menus. If you get your pricey sandwich to stay, you’re guaranteed the runner will make at least three laps around the room in search of your hungry face. The comment card on offer should have been the first indicator that this is not a chute but a maze; that device is the last refuge of flawed enterprises (sorta like sex: places that get it right never have to ask).

Pinch Pizza by the Inch, at least the one on Columbus, was even more of a Bermuda Triangle. Mensa should give credit just for finding the entrance. But the menu is like the agate on the back of your MasterCard bill. Not only do you have you decide what combination of the infinite variations you want. Then you have to do the math — two inches plus jalapenos times what? My head almost exploded, and I spent only a little more than a straight olive-and-pepperoni slice would have cost up the block. I have no idea how they can make it work with a runner, flags with order numbers, utensils required etc. But the staff was astonishingly pleasant. I would go postal in the first hour if I had to listen to two rooms full of squalling human larva while facing down a molasses-like stream of guidebook-carrying, Esperanto-speaking patrons studying the menu for longer than it takes to learn Latin. Plus the occasional childless New Yorker. Because special orders do upset us.