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Greening down the house

The funniest headline I saw all week was on an op-ed in USA Today: “Food industry has improved our recipes, marketing and labels.” Who is this “our” of whom you speak? It’s just amazing that two generations — at least — now don’t understand you can make a casserole without a can of soup. (It’s probably not a coincidence that heavy cream became a scary phrase in that same time span.) And now I see, just as a rather awesome short film about the foreverness of plastic is making the e-rounds, that McCormick’s has decided what the world needs now is pre-measured spices packed in plastic on a recipe card. Why not wrap it in a plastic bag, too, and then a jewel box to tuck into a white baggie? Probably the same cretins out in the streets, protesting with all the misspelled words they can scrawl against Big Government intruding too deeply into their lives, are blissful to know they can now cook mindlessly, never realizing Big Food has far, far more dominion. Even the slogan echoes Faux News: “We measure. You create.” Thanks very much, but I’ll make my own “socialist” borscht.

Little pictures

I know nothing about frying pigskins, but I do know a story on the whole trend might want to at least mention why you should start from scratch: The crap in stores is pretty fucking scary. Of course that exposé ran in the paper that also reported on the horrible downside to better food in more casual settings at a lower price point: Bedlam R Us. And also ran photographic evidence of what a French friend who doesn’t get fat noted: Houston is home to America’s fattest Americans. It was all almost enough to give the paper a pass on sliding closer and closer to Faux News in print. No wonder its MoDo is guzzling all the gin she can ingest.

Cough into the subway pole

Another day at Zabar’s I saw, at the same moment, people greedily scooping up food samples and a worker walking past in a flu mask. It was just as jarring as considering how amenable New Yorkers are to communal tongs in the mesclun bins in the midst of an epidemic that has hit nearly all 50 states. Maybe it’s proof that lack of universal health care makes us tougher. We can compartmentalize our paranoia.

When they’re good they’re very good

And I admit I am totally faithless after coming across something on one of those websites where Bourdain wannabes contribute for free. While Googling the other day I turned up a post on a restaurant in Florida in which the “writer” admitted she had just posted the press release, saying she normally would have taken time to rework it but had to focus on paying gigs. The only difference between that and what you so often read on Wednesday is just the honesty.

Mojitos don’t need no stinking bitters

Only two Maroons would go to Cuba and complain that the food wasn’t cutting edge. For Che’s sake, can you say embargo? And poor people? But then as a travel writer friend noted, they were clearly just going through the payback motions for the trip. I blame the Food Coven’s honcho for “printing” their drivel; he does seem to take a hands-off approach with his old pals. One just did a trite ode to a “storied gem” of a trattoria that mentions a tart “in the photo above” when all that’s on display is fruit. But at least what he’s not doing is working. I check in just to see the latest brain wreck.

Bumper crop of teh stupid

Talk about picking your poison: All this newfound fear over whether organic is safer is pretty laughable. Pesticides might be scary, but fertilizer is often just manure with a college education. And it stands to reason most farm products from China would be “organic;” the stories I could tell secondhand of people who have experienced outhouses and pigs together there would curl your tail. I get too depressed digging out my travel notebooks these days or I’d scare up the details from India, but I remember riding past an aromatic and especially verdant field with a huge billboard boasting that it  was essentially a sewage treatment plant for the nearby town. And, you know, shit happens.

Somewhere, Mother Teresa is thirsting

Speaking of which, I am totally enjoying reading the fools sporting Dianne Feinstein hairdos as they proclaim Washington the new New York/Paris/London. Uh. Huh. I’ve lived in six states and consider my recollected travels with consort my retirement account, and I can pretty confidently say that when it comes to eating, the place is Podunk on the Potomac. Even the city’s biggest booster, depending on the outlet, has to acknowledge that its best is 63 rungs below New York, let alone her sainted Berkeley or the finally recognized Mecca, Chicago. Thin-skinned pastry chefs are the least of the problems. You can’t do great food without a great audience — look at the Upper East Side here. Washington is doubly plagued, with the rich and with rubes. Would you chow down where the bloviators on the Sunday teevee shows do? 

Dancing with the editors

File this under HFS*: Did the hometown paper and its trashiest Sunday competition really use essentially the same lede in paying homage to the loser-est onetime chef in town? Did none of their editors notice the pretty racist tone to both? But at least one mouthpiece did not bite on the Jamie Oliver wannabe-ism — put this notorious spendthrift in charge of the school lunch programs and even Madoff wizardry could not generate enough cash to keep them afloat. Funny to think someone so pathetic is almost getting more ink than Grant Achatz, and apparently all he’s done lately is hire a propaganda catapulter. But whoever that is hit a grand slam.

*Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Jump, you fuckers

Of course the biggest horseshit of the week was the rush to document how the rich are suffering with Wall Street collapsing. We got the inevitable comfort food drivel, the inescapable quotes from bankers reduced to drinking beer, the unfailing rush to check in with sweet old Harry. Not just my old employer was guilty, but it all reminded me of the heyday of Krazy Rhymes-With-Lunt, when section editors were ordered to produce instant reaction pieces to some blip. Life is complicated; disaster takes time. But that doesn’t fill newspaper columns.

$79.99 and counting

More proof that we are truly in end times: The WSJournal ran a story on instant marinators. Not only that, it found enough of the silly machines to do a comparison (without ever addressing what marination does, and does not do). We deserve a new ice age if we are really wasting resources on something so ridiculous. Now, if they could kill salmonella, that would be a different story.

Water? Only bottled.

My newfound frugal streak is not a pose. I freak out every time I exit the Food Shitty with a jar of Hellmann’s stickered at $5.39 to replace the one I have just thrown out with a $4.69 label. (And I go through mayonnaise like grass through a goose.) But my real sense of battered-diner syndrome kicks in with restaurants. The other night we met five friends for sunset wine at the uptown concession in Riverside Park and left a couple of hours later $35 a person lighter, after (admittedly) too much wine but only three burgers, three Caesar soups, one order of fries and two ears of corn. Seventy dollars a couple used to buy real food in a room with running water and a working toilet. So I can’t even begin to describe how much more satisfying a picnic was two nights later within eyeshot of the Gouge Bar. We settled onto the intensely green grass with another couple who had brought two V&T pizzas (outstanding even cold), gentle-jerk chicken (actually Cornish hens) and corn-tomato and zucchini salads, all of which we supplemented with curry-deviled eggs, cucumber-chive salad, Kahlua brownies, Paffenroth’s radishes (French breakfast and Easter egg), an epi-baguette from Amy’s and two bottles of rose. Given what a bottom feeder I have become with wine, I doubt the whole too-much-to-eat spread cost much more than $60 for the four of us. And I can’t decide which was more pleasurable, watching the sun set over Jersey in a rose haze or seeing a deck full of suckers getting bled dry just a shout away.

A fistful of grissini

Say one thing for Cesare, though: If he had to go out with much less overkill, he was exiting with an abbondanza bang. We were on our way to the subway from my new favorite restaurant when I remembered the invitation to stop by for wine and salame, and so even though we were five minutes ahead of schedule four of us muscled our way in as the party for regulars was loudly winding down. I felt a little like our friend who rang the doorbell early for a going-away dinner in his honor and overheard my behind-on-the-ice-cream consort blurt out: “Shit!” But the herb-scented one’s assistant immediately escorted us into a booth and brought drinks and then the food started coming, much more than promised: the great fried pasta from the bar; cheese and meatballs; steak and shrimp. A waiter dropped off two bottles of wine for the second round, and it was hard to dislodge my friends before we could consume it all — and we had just finished a huge meal. The good news is that the creativity is undiminished: the prosciutto arrived wrapped around watermelon slices. And the better news is that he’s opening closer to us. I just hope he keeps the horse wineglasses. And as one of the accidental crashers with me said: The closing was more fun than an opening.

Those weren’t pecans

From up-close and personal experience I know rats are the Al Capones of the food world. Why do they infest bakeries? Because that’s where the sugar is. So the news on the NYC Health Department’s shutdowns of some famous cookie outlets was not exactly surprising. I remember we always had to leave one tray of shortbread uncovered at night because the owner figured the resident vermin would choose the easy dinner over gnawing through plastic film. Now it turns out it’s another way of saying: Leave the droppings. Take the cannoli.