Read: "Magical Dinners" by Chang-Rae Lee in the New Yorker Food Issue (November 22, 2010)
Lee's writing in this piece is divine. Frank and vivid:
"[My mother] cooks an egg for me each morning without fail...there is always a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime, laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It'll corrupt you for all time. But one morning I'm finally sick of it, I've had enough....I steal into her bedroom with my plate while she's talking on the telephone with Mrs. Suh...and drop it onto her best shoes, black patent-leather pumps. And here's the rub: there is no sound a fried egg makes. It lands with exquisite silence. This is the dish I've been longing to prepare."
The hot weather here has made it difficult to think. I have been keeping my computer off so that it doesn't add more heat to the insufferable amount that just hangs in my apartment. The other night, Tracy and I phoned our favourite podcasters, Jonathan and Seth from "Uhh Yeah Dude," in a fit of heat-induced insanity, and let them know that we were possibly going to perish. Seth called us back the next day to check that we were OK.
And we are.
It's finally cooled down a little bit in Montreal. Yesterday's incredible thunderstorms drove some of the heat out of the city and it's now possible to sit in my place without sweating pouring down from all parts of your body. It's gross, I know.
I am just a week away from going to Toronto for a while and I have to make a decision about where I'll be in September. It's been wonderful here, though I miss you all very much. I like eating fancy cheese three times a day, riding bikes on the way home from the bar and unknowingly walking into concerts any day of the week.
Also, I've noticed that a lot of restaurants here serve water in wine bottles, to be poured into little glasses meant to hold scotch. Little pleasures, right?
It's also been lovely to have months off to do anything I want when I come home. My supervisors atReader's Digest have discouraged me from putting in extra hours; overtime is a compulsion when you work in publishing. Now I come home and have to find other things to do with my life, which has been confusing.
Pie fans: I concocted a blueberry nectarine lattice pie last night - to die for.
I've also taken to listening to more music, taking time to catch up on Pitchfork favourites so I can talk the talk in this city of hipsters (Hey, guy, aren't you hot in those tight pants?). Also, my work with the web department led me into reviewing books so now I am reading some great stuff from Random House (thanks, RH), like The Golden Mean by Annabelle Lyon. I can't wait for more from Lyon.
The best Chinese BBQ pork is not at the well known Toronto joint Kom Jug Yuen but Andy and Dobe on the border of Montreal's Chinatown. The pork is thinly sliced, tender and perfectly sweet. Takeout comes with a few pieces of bok choy, green onion-ginger sauce and a generous portion of delicious rice cooked in chicken stock and fat.
Picnics on Mont Royal with Cookies of Course, a round of crib and a large bottle of wine are a must.
Anyway, that's my dispatch. What are you up to these days?
Talk to you soon.
X- M
(P.S.: Sad Mag is launching issue #4 at the Colbalt on August 4 - it's going to be HOT. The party will be hosted by the fabulous Terminal City Roller Girls!)
Fatties on Ice - a podcast co-hosted my staffer, Cynara Geissler. No, she's really my master (I am the student). Cynara and her co-host, Jenny-with-the-best-voice, talk pop culture and media from a feminist, body positive perspective. I like.
Top Chef - Season 7, and it's still good! I like to watch the celebrity chefs make faces when they taste a bad ceviche. If you like this show, then you'll love Max Silvestri's recaps on Eater.com.
Every Person in New York - A sketch blog so lovely, so simple, it makes you forget how New York feels on most days: crowded and unnerving.
I've saved the best for last: I just heard "Send Me Some Loving" by Otis Redding on This American Life last week, and I was like, who is this person losing his mind over a woman? You could just hear his desperation, and the liquor, and the sweat in the 20 seconds that they played. Next, I'm on Grooveshark, and now I haven't stopped listening to Ol' Otis for days. Here's a video, I love. Watch the audience get their minds blown.
"Between two thick slices of white bread, you'll find a generous filling of diced beef in a tangy tomato and herb sauce, layered with cooked pasta sheets and finished with a creamy cheddar, ricotta and mayonnaise dressing."
In your opinion, how does this compare to the KFC Double Down? Comments on presentation, packaging, overall health concerns, taste, potential tastiness while stoned/drunk, and all pertinent characteristics of these two sandwiches are all welcome. Unfortunately, both products are not available in Canada, so most of us will just have to speculate.
Last summer, just as we were sending our first mag to print, Lono Ranger and I went to see End of the Line. The 80-minute documentary turned me off fish and for almost 12 months, I've managed to stay away from salmon, tuna, swordfish, and halibut--the big fish. Cautiously, I'll eat little fish like herring, sardines, and sometimes mackerel... because it tastes good.
But yesterday, I read an adapted excerpt from Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals and it may be turning me into a vegetarian. (Did you know there were three contemporary authors from Brooklyn with the name Jonathan? Ames, Safran Foer, and Lethem.)
Read Safran Foer's piece in the New York Times Magazine. Rather than being a polemic against eating meat or an annoying declaration of self-righteousness, the novelist delivers his case in stories relatable to anyone whose family traditions involve eating meat:
"While the cultural uses of meat can be replaced...there is still the question of pleasure. A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit."
Finally, a vegetarian that admits that meat tastes good! And before I know it, I'm totally won over by Safran Foer's handsome prose and his sentimental portrayal of family. In the end, it might have been the writing that made me swoon more than the reasoning... when they make the movie version of this, my long and loving relationship with meat might finally end.
There's nothing like the Internet to homogenize travelling. With sites like Trip Advisor, travellers gravitate towards the same "top 10" restaurants, hotels, and attractions.
Andy and I just got back from Portland and today, Andy found blog posts that document an Asian couple's culinary tour of the city. Well, maybe I didn't need to bring a camera on our vacation because these people just took the pictures for us -- they ate all virtually all the same places. At one restaurant, they even ordered the same dishes as us. Weiiird.
Follow bizarro (older) Megan and Andy, and share in our delicious adventures.
Vermont's legislature - despite their Republican Governor's wishes - passed legislation earlier this year recognizing full marriage equality in the state. That law takes effect [today], September 1, and to celebrate Vermont-based Ben & Jerry's is altering the name of one flavor of ice cream to show their support for same-sex marriage.
In partnership with Freedom to Marry we are gathered here to celebrate Vermont and all the other great states where loving couples of all kinds are free to marry legally. We have ceremoniously dubbed our iconic flavor, Chubby Hubby [Fudge covered peanut butter filled pretzels in vanilla malt ice cream with fudge and peanut butter!] to Hubby Hubby in support, and to raise awareness of the importance of marriage equality. Check out our press release.
To learn more about the issue in your state and take action, visit www.freedomtomarry.org
Hubby Hubby will be available across the state at Ben & Jerry's shops, though regular Chubby Hubby tubs will continue to be sold across the rest of the country due to distribution challenges.
When people ask me what I've been doing this summer, invariably the answer involves eating or cooking. Food has become something of an obsession. Perhaps you should stop reading this blog for the week as my hunger for food photography, recipes, and cuisine-related articles is at a fever pitch.
In addition to a number of thoughtfully revitalized neighborhoods, [Vancouver] has an excess of slender glass high-rises that make it appear as though the city was invaded by aliens who constructed identical breeding towers.
But it's not the architecture that most interests Richman, but our complicated food politics. While the 100-mile diet is gospel for chefs like Robert Clark of C, it's comes off as gwai-lo propaganda in Richmond. Other chefs such as Robert Belcham and Dale MacKay buy what tastes best, whether it's local or not. But the pressure to conform to eco-friendly practices in Vancouver is so deftly conveyed as Richman writes,
A friend of mine who lives near Vancouver tells me, "We're a culturally diverse place, and people want food from where they're from." I am reassured, not because I want the opportunity to buy such products, but simply because I want to find out whether the merchants are comfortably able to sell them. (If you wish to walk around with such items, I suggest purchasing an Organic Acres Market cotton shopping bag: perfect camouflage.)
There was a point last year where I stopped eating sushi. I'd never been one to turn down raw fish before - ceviche, poke, carpaccio, sashimi: yes, please. Still, after chowing down on a rice-less roll at Sushiyama, I felt sort of sick to my stomach. From then on, the thought of uncooked fish summoned the gag reflex. I had reached the mythical sushi-saturation point.
A few months later, I started having sushi again. Dynamite and BC rolls eased me into finally digging into raw fish. And in the past little while, I have been a loud advocate of the saba-bien roll--heavenly salty, fatty mackerel on rice, delicately topped with scallions, which add some mild bite--at Zipang Sushi, definitely the best little Japanese joint in Vancouver.
Still, I think twice every time I take a bite of that delicious concoction. I wonder if I'm threatening the delicate ocean ecosystem. It's no secret that the world's governments have enabled fishermen to overfish the sea's stocks. We may run out of fish in the next 40 years, say the makers of the hot documentary, The End of the Line:
Scientists predict that if we continue fishing as we are now, we will see the end of most seafood by 2048.
The End of the Line chronicles how demand for cod off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1990s led to the decimation of the most abundant cod population in the world, how hi-tech fishing vessels leave no escape routes for fish populations and how farmed fish as a solution is a myth.
The film lays the responsibility squarely on consumers who innocently buy endangered fish, politicians who ignore the advice and pleas of scientists, fishermen who break quotas and fish illegally, and the global fishing industry that is slow to react to an impending disaster.
The film's trailer says, "Lay off the Filet-o-Fishes," rather well, I think:
Earlier this week New York Magazine published a guide to ethical eating which placed eating seafood at the pinnacle in the hierarchy of earth-ruining foods. I felt so sad reading it, thinking I should just eat flax and spelt for the rest of my life.
But I was liberated from my gastronomic prison when I discovered that Japanese school children were eating dolphin for lunch. HA, suckers! My greedy consumption of super-drugged salmon paled in comparison to these kids who dined on Flipper regularly.
OK, actually it was a free lunch program and the kids had no idea where their school lunches came from or what they were, for that matter. Furthermore, they were forced to clean the mercury-laden meat off of their plates. In Taiji, a sleepy seaside town in Japan, dolphins are captured for export to aquariums around the world. Others are slaughtered for meat.
But no one's blaming the Japanese. Most have had the wool pulled over their eyes regarding what filmmakers of the exposé documentary The Cove call "a systematic cover-up of mercury and dolphin hunting issues in Japan." In a piece by Brian D. Johnson at Macleans, director Louie Psihoyos links the secret industry to government corruption and the yazuka--Japan's mafia.
See the shocking level of secrecy and unscrupulousness in The Cove's harrowing trailer. It chills the blood:
Right now, I'm trying to reconcile my disdain for places like Whole Foods (yoga pants, Jack Johnson soundtracks, and $10 boxes of crackers make me grumpy) with my genuine desire to reform my habits of consumption. But curbing my gluttony is a no-brainer though; now that delicious saba-bien roll comes with a side of Green Movement shame.
UPDATE: Missed this earlier... Bruni's free pass at publicity from the Times's Magazine. A Sunday cover story: "I was a baby bulimic, July 19, 2009"
Also, food critic Frank Bruni of the New York Times has a new book, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, detailing his life as a restaurant critic, a former bulimic, compulsive eater, and a lover of food.
Sad Mag's editorial board went out for dinner last night at the Irish Heather. We had Orchard Hill cider (DELICIOUS) with Braised Cabbage & Mashed Potatoes and (wait for it.....) Roasted Suckling Pig with Apple-Rosemary Sauce. It was "seeeew geeeewd," said this guy.
Our dinner reminded me of a bowl of ramen served at the legendary Momofuku Noodle Bar. It was a bowl of noodles and pork so delicious, I've written about it before, and I'll never forget. So it annoys me to read that the Pâté Police are protesting at this beloved downtown joint:
True to its “sustained presence” policy, the Animal Protection & Rescue League, the group that picketed Momofuku Noodle Bar back in May for serving foie gras, will hold another protest outside of the restaurant this Sunday from 7 p.m. till 9 p.m. Organizer Bryan Pease tells us, “We have sent lots of follow-up information to David Chang since the last protest months ago, and the Humane Society of the United States even sent him a letter, but so far no change.” Ya don’t say? Just to make things even more media-friendly, this will be a bicoastal protest, with picketers simultaneously gathering at Mille Fleurs restaurant in the APRL’s hometown of San Diego. We’re assuming the commenters who lashed out against the organization’s last demonstration will have something to say about this one (hell, maybe they’ll even show up), but know that the group isn’t just about shoving their message down the throat of restaurateurs — according to their newsletter, they’re also handing out free vegan bites at San Diego Comic-Con!
Get a life. P.S. Have you heard of a place called Au Pied de Cochon?
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Other weapons of Martin Picard's insane culinary genius can be seen here.
Locally, PETA types can be found regularly picketing Fuel (and Gastropod, while it was still there) on 4th Avenue. Both are very lovely restaurants which source local, responsibly produced, and organic food, when are where possible. Still, Liberation BC shakes up the yuppy dwelling zone known as Kitsilano with obnoxious protests, which they have documented here. Back in the day, Gastropod issued a statement to their customers via facebook, claiming that the activist group reserved seats and left hem empty to make their protests look more effective.
Now, before you write to me and accuse of being a conscienceless glutton, do yourself a favour: just taste it. Then you can properly decide who's in the right. In Vancouver, foie gras can be found at the restaurants and shops marked on the map below, as well as these locations, according to LiberationBC.
Also, here's an article that begins: "In some circles, admitting you eat foie gras is like saying you enjoy drowning kittens in your spare time." Anna Zakewska reports on "ethical" foie gras, made only in Spain.
Grey Poupon is owned and manufactured by Kraft Foods. It is the processed cheese of mustards. It is the fucking Velveeta of faux-French products. Can we all shut the fuck up?
5.03.2009
This looks so bad but I'm going to watch it anyways
Tips on how to order at In-And-Out, how to put in 1/2 star ratings on iTunes, how to leave voicemail on a certain someone's phone without letting their phone ring... and more!
I'm high off of a great tour of CBC Vancouver on Friday. I was lucky enough to hitch onto a SFU communication students field trip to the mothership, and since then, my love for most things CBC has been renewed. So, I'm excited this week about another series of food docs that's hitting the screen. Last year, The Current broadcast some great pieces about the global food situation called "Diet for a Hungry Planet".
The Great Food Revolution takes the microscope to North Americans', and specifically, Canadians', diets:
The Great Food Revolution is a rich and spicy stew of stories about a food revolution that has transformed the way we eat, drink and think about food. Food is the new status symbol. For a rapidly growing number of people, it’s a measure of personal sophistication and the magic ingredient for a long and healthy life. It is the 21st century’s magnificent obsession. Food outsells sex on the bestseller lists, TV chefs are revered celebrities, dining has become "an entertainment", nutritionists are the new therapists.
Four, hour-long episodes, shot in High-Definition television, chart the exotic course of this all-consuming revolution that has cut a daring new swath through staid family and national traditions and altered the course of the global economy. desert
The Great Food Revolution is a celebration of our new culinary fascinations, told through character-driven stories that speak to the culture of food, the passion of the times and the forces of the future.
I'm always thinking about food - thinking about what to eat now and later, what I just ate, and also in a social, cultural, and political context - so these are right up my alley. I hope these interest you too.
