Delta dusk

I am way, way behind on collecting my thoughts and images from an amazing revisit to Torino, which is an entirely changed city since our last trip in 2005. But I have to share a couple of thoughts from the flights to and from. On our way over, Bob and I were seated far apart because the photo center where he was teaching had booked his travel; he worked the American gate agents hard to get us together, but we boarded with me in like 86E and him in 23E. He gently asked the woman in the aisle seat in his row if she would consider switching and she instantly snarled: “I PAID FOR THIS SEAT.” Okay, bitch. It all worked out fine because two Italian guys in two rows near Bob figured out a way to win this game of musical seats, and then the crew came through with even better seating with tons of legroom. But it really struck me how the greedy airlines and their gouging are turning passengers on passengers. I mean, it’s bad enough you have to walk through the rows of business luxury to get to steerage these days (life was better when first class was curtained off). And it’s even worse when Turdblossom is seated in one of those fuck-you-peasants seats on your homebound leg from Milan.

The better part of my recollections involves the food and beverage service. I’ll give huge props to AA for generously pouring (decent) wine from jugs rather than handing out stingy little, cluttery bottles. I’ll take back half those props for them serving “Italian” dressing with the salad with the craptastic pasta on the way home. But the LOL came just before we landed at JFK and the bitchy flight attendant was condescendingly handing out the “hot pocket.”  He offered one to my Italian seatmate, who waved it away, and got a snarky “Oh, you’ve had it before, have you?” And it was one scary slab of starch with a thin layer of processed cheese product in the middle, with so little flavor it actually verged into negative taste. This was on July 8, 2016. And the “best before” date on the box was 24 May 2017. Doomsday preppers need to fly more. . .

RTs are still a thing . . .

Chivalry is not dead: Guy in “unisex” bathroom line at @paowallanyc offered to let me go first. I said no, he’d be quicker. Him: “You assume.” // Chef loses control of a business with his name and it’s just stenographed. Only the Who is answered; the four other Ws go missing. //  Parody getting tougher: Consort brought home a menu from Santa Fe from a place serving “artisanal American dim sum.” Not sustainable? // Today in I Heart NY: Told the egg lady at the Tucker Square Greenmarket I had just enough cash left for a dozen & she said I could pay her tomorrow on Columbus if I wanted to keep shopping. // Something about scooping out a litter box every a.m. makes you see fud photos kinda . . . differently.

Corn-fed chicken breast sounds like the worst implant

If a conservative is, famously, a liberal who’s been mugged, a Sanders scorner is a longtime admirer who finally got a taste of the real Marie Berniedette. Nothing says revolutionary more than a menu for a return flight on a chartered plane that includes lobster sliders just before landing in (I assume) NYC. So many desiccated sandwiches in steerage will really stick in your optic craw. . .

Water for your face, honey for your hair

As an unabashed booster of Buffalo not least for its cuisine, I was as appalled as the restaurateur who FB’d the other day about a new food truck there by the name of Gourm-Asian. Even that, though, is not as bang-your-head-on-the-desk-worthy as a new product from one of those processed-crap conglomerates: Artesano (in big letters) style bread (finer print, hyphen omitted). How cynical could the suits be in envisioning “real Americans” wandering the Kroger aisles and stumbling upon Portlandia? Spell much?

Ask your chef. Or don’t.

In the same set of coupons, I also came across one for something emblazoned “Let’s remove the guesswork.” Not once in the three blocks of copy did it mention what the problem was for the solution being sold. I’m guessing it’s diabetes, a guess that of course induces really sick thoughts about how Big Food and Big Pharma could have been in cahoots all these decades — make ‘em sick and then sell ‘em medically processed crap. Then again, there are billboards on bus shelters in Queens promoting oblique antidotes to opioid-induced constipation. One pill makes you plugged up, another makes you squitter?

Purple Apron, Blue Carrot or painting by numbers?

I try not to take the stinkbait (which always seemed to be my dad’s most successful lure for the crappie he caught), but too many people linked me to the carbonara brouhaha. France actually dared to mess with Italy? Stop the Internets! What was most amusing (or annoying) about it was  how no one seemed to care how thoroughly that classic dish has already been debased in a country where Italian always ranks in the top three, if not as the top one, among “ethnic” cuisines (funny how Western European countries never get that tag). Forget the mascarpone and boiled bacon. “Artesano” types would add white chocolate and macadamia.

Douching is for alkaline, or viza-versa?

No link, cuz the hometown paper refuses to keep me logged in, but I got sucked into “daughters of Nigella” and staggered out wondering how “healthful” and blow-up dolls wound up connected. Shorter, though? They’re quacks. Hometown-paper-validated quacks but quacks nonetheless.

Some dreamers of the Sunshine dream

And I may have to quit the Twitter that ate my life if I keep seeing so many “think positive, lift up others” Tweets. But I finally succumbed to the amazement that was the Tampa Bay Times’s exposé of the farm-to-table myth in that state and have to give a shout-out. Leave aside that the place is led by a Florida Man who felt compelled to attack a constituent who shamed him out of Starbucks, and that it is also a state where, as the story notes, “little people wrestling” is a championship played out in restos. It was an impressive piece of investigative reporting on real issues; it makes a serious case for paying farmers more for all they do. What was most amazing to me, though, was how food-strapped Florida appears to be. I never got around to pushing back against a ridiculous push-back against eating local/seasonal in New York, but a big reason to schlep to the Greenmarkets in dreariest winter is to try to do a tiny part in keeping the Hudson Valley and Long Island and what’s left of New Jersey from being bulldozed for McMansions. Shorter, though: If you see local peaches on a menu in the climate-changed Northeast this summer, close your eyes and think of Georgia truckers.

Stapled stomach, messy nachos & 187 ice cream cones

Everyone freaking out over the Orange Menace hasn’t even stopped to envision the real disaster he would be as president. If there’s one thing we learned from the Bushwhacking, it’s that a White House wine cellar and social calendar should never have been entrusted to a teetotaler. Lust in your liver for white zinfandel & next thing you know you’re bombing booze-free Meccas. . . .

Foam spoons and mojito stirrers, all plastic

On my last trip to Istanbul, a year ago, I succumbed to a Starbucks for a wake-up cappuccino in Attaturk airport after a twin-babies-behind-me-with-mom-screaming-what-is-your-fucking-problem overnight flight, so I’m not as derisive as most about the chain opening in Italy. If it can brave the home of Turkish coffee, and also the home of the far superior Gloria Jean’s, it can barge in wherever the hell it wants. Even so, you could only read this and think a flack could not have paid for better placement.

Paddy was a wagon before a corned-beef saint

Also, too, the hardy perennials really seem to be popping up more as the Earth loses seasons. In one week readers were treated to family meal (important!), airline food upgrades (chefs!) and then wedding food (not shitty!) The last, unfortunately, relied on flack statements largely with just one blissfully bilked couple boasting about what they served. In 2014. Wasn’t that even before pie-for-cake?

Hiding the quesarita

If I were prone to conspiracy-think, you’d find me walking into a Chipotle, lunging over the sneeze guard and grabbing a stack of burrito wrappers with which to craft a tinfoil toque. It really is hard to wonder if the whole scandale was not some sort of sabotage, given the glee the processed-crap media took in reporting that people claimed to be sickened by food marketed as clean. Even I never imagined the day would come when the Murdoch Crier would run a hed shaming “fresh ingredients.” Seriously? Jack-in-the-Box did much worse than inflict the squitters, and it’s still cleaning up. I’ll admit the higher-standard-bearers were a little late in confessing they’re using beef imported from Oz. But their pork integrity should still be the standard. Meanwhile, someone actually died after eating Dole greens, and there’s not a hint of Kochian outrage. No one will ever know if Chipotle’s troubles were leaf-driven, but maybe all those salad startups with megabucks could get their McComeuppance as well.

Dusted. Off.

The Murdoch Crier was also guilty of reprinting a press release on the early opening of the TrumpTravesty of a hotel makeover of the old Post Office Building in Washington, but all it did was make me appreciate Jose Andres’s cojones even more for bailing on the deal. Other marquee chefs may have to lie back and think of the balance sheet. He walked the walk. But the real pussyspeak was the story’s careful explanation of why: “remarks that Mr. Trump made that Mr. Andres said disparaged Mexicans.” What part of “rapists and drug runners” do those copy editors not get? Also, too: Unmentioned in the piece was who stepped up to the stove. So I’ll just put it this way:  This country is not always kind to immigrants even from France.

RT/MT/UT:

Tumors or cauliflower? And which ones are malignant? // If the menu says Tuscan kale, those leaves had better be crinkly. // Two levels of no-copy-editors-left: Mr. Meyer is not “the chef behind Shake Shack.” // You know what tomatoes are really good in winter? Canned. // Hand pies always sound kinda dirty. // If someone walks into your place and asks “Are you making kimchi?” you’d better hope you are. // Mystery of winemaking: Why Americans would waste vines and time on insipid pinot grigio. #ohiknow // Finally baked a four-month-old buttercup squash. And it tastes grass-fed. Not in a good way, either. // And: We live in the age of $11 carrot appetizers . . .