Bread and Cheese

I dreamt last night that we flew to Sidney, Australia for a two week vacation. A most vivid dream down to the bug spray on the airplane. I was most distressed to wake up and discover that I was still at home.

I’m trying to figure out whether this dream may have been influenced by the fact that a friend of mine is flying to Paris on Sunday. I know, not Australia, and not even close in oh so many ways. Given the choice, I’d probably pick Paris just because I know it and I miss French food sometimes so much that it’s a physical sensation. And please don’t suggest I can get it here. I can get very good food here that is reminiscent of food in France, food that is made by people from France. It helps tide me over (yeah, that’s been going on now for 10 years and counting ), but it’s not quite the same – particularly if you’re talking about basics like bread and cheese.

I don’t eat a lot of bread, so when I do, I want to make sure it’s good. I will have a reason to be eating some good bread in about two weeks, when said friend going to Paris comes back from Paris with some good, stinky, runny, raw cheese. So I am on a quest over the next two weeks to find the most authentic baguette possible in NYC. NYC has a fair amount of “crusty, artisanal” stuff, but that tends to lean heavily towards the San Francisco school of breadmaking. Don’t get me wrong, it can be great stuff, but it’s not what I’m looking for.

So I’ve hunted around a bit. That is to say, I’ve sat in my chair and typed words into the box on Google and pressed Enter. I’ve amassed quite a list. Some of these I’ve eaten before, some I’ve heard of, and some are new to me. So far, I’m going to be checking out Balthazar, Payard, also Amy’s Bread and Sullivan St. Bakery, although I think Amy’s is too San Francisco, and Sullivan St. is too Italian. Uprising Bread? Tomcat Bakery? Orwashers? Le Pain Quotidien??! A chain?

The Mysterious Squash

What is round like a small pumpkin, and beige like a butternut squash?

This slightly mysterious (well, as mysterious as a squash can be) squash was in our CSA batch of vegetables this week. The dry-erase board informed us that we could choose one winter squash, between two varieties: butternut or pharsi. Yes, that’s how it was written. I asked our CSA leader what pharsi squash was.

"Well," she said, "it’s pretty cool, actually. Farmer Bill told me when he came today that he spent some time in Nepal, and he brought back these seeds with him. He called it pharsi because he found it in Nepal."

Beat.

"Um," said I, "isn’t Farsi spoken in Iran, not Nepal?" My brain floundered wildly for a link and came up empty handed (mixed metaphor intended). Dunno, she said, that’s all the information she had.

Well, whatever the little beige ball was, it certainly seemed to have an interesting provenance, so I chose a nice one over the equally nice looking, but now somewhat plebeian, butternut squash.

This evening after dinner, I turned to my old friend Google (who turned 7 today, I think. What is that in people years?) Googled Nepal squash, and got quite a bit of information on Nepalese Racquetball. Tried removing the word racquet, which helped a little, but not much. On to various searches using squash, winter squash, Asian winter squash, etc. I finally decided to try pharsi squash. Of course, it asked me if I meant Farsi, but I assured it I did not. And wouldn’t you know – the first two results contained just the information I was looking for, never mind that I think they are the only two results on the entire Internet containing the information I was looking for. Two is enough, and now I can eat my pharsi with my mind at ease, so long as it's either jeth or asoj.

Ethnobotanical Notes on Thangmi* Plant Names (PDF)

phatu (I can’t reproduce the little dot under the t)
Nepali pharsi
pumpkin, summer or winter squash, marrow,
Cucurbita maxima; Cucurbita pepo
The leaves are collected as fodder for domesticated animals, but are also eaten by humans as a vegetable curry. The large fruit is also made into vegetable curry when it ripens between the months of jeth and asoj, and the dried seeds are eaten as a peanut-like snack. The fruit is believed to contain agents which help fight jaundice when eaten raw.

*Thangmi is the name of a language spoken by a small ethnic group in eastern Nepal called the Th­ami (with little lines over the a and i like straight tildes).

Warning: Cape Does Not Enable User To Fly

I was cleaning the kitchen floor today (don’t faint), and I started thinking about French fries. No, there weren’t any lurking in obscure corners. It all started when I read the WARNING on the back of the lemon ammonia bottle, the one about not combining ammonia with any product containing chlorine bleach, because if you do it will “CAUSE THE RELEASE OF TOXIC GASES THAT CAN BE FATAL.” (As an aside, why do they try to add “aroma” to straight ammonia? It’s not like there’s any hope of actually making it smell any less noxious.)

I love how, in this litigious society, where they have to put warnings on Halloween costume Batman capes that it does not enable the user to fly, they still leave chemicals casually on supermarket shelves that, if combined with other common supermarket chemicals, can create chlorine gas. Yes, as in World War I weapon. That’s not the only chemical reaction that can occur, but the others aren’t any better, as far as I can tell – like the one that creates hydrazine. That is basically rocket fuel.

So where do the French fries come in? This month, the California Attorney General proposed labelling French Fries and potato chips with a warning that they contain acrylamide, “a chemical created in frying or baking starchy foods that a Swedish study linked to cancer in laboratory rats.” Mmm, no. First off, other studies indicate that the tiny amounts humans consume from their diets is not enough to lead to increased cancer risk. Second, do we really need another really, really stupid warning in our lives? (While they’re at it, if they’re going to label French fries, I think they should label dihydrogen monoxide, too. Dangerous stuff, that.)

So while I was cleaning the floor, trying not to breath (no, I didn’t add any bleach; I didn’t need to for it to smell bad), I thought about the French fries, and I thought about ammonia and bleach cohabitating on the supermarket shelves. I think we can all agree that French fries aren’t exactly the healthiest things to eat. But they weren’t used as a weapon in the First World War.

What?

What’dja say?

Les frites belges vont t’attaquer! Run away!

What I’ve Got Isn’t Enough

My heart was in my throat a few weeks ago as I watched Katrina churn inexorably towards New Orleans and Mississippi, and tonight I’m holding my breath again as Rita is causing the water to rise once again, and threaten still more places beloved by many. I’ve never been to most of these places, so the only vision I have of them is what is shown to me through the miracles of modern technology. It’s not enough, of course – there’s not enough technology to save the cities and towns and houses and trees, and maybe even the people, and my memory isn’t enough, because it doesn’t exist. Jim and I went to New Orleans for New Year’s 2003/2004 and we fell in love with it. New Orleans spoke to my heart; I hope it will live to speak to me again. I hope all the places loved and being lost tonight and tomorrow and the next day and the next will speak again to those who will strain to hear.

I wrote the following shortly after returning from New Orleans.

A short break from weather. work. wistfulness. streaming unconsciousness that is dreaming.

Walking these streets in the madhouse, to paraphrase Natalie Merchant, is an apt description of Bourbon Street just after the New Year’s ball has dropped in Jackson Square. Our bicycle and kayak guide, Veda, told us that some people tell her that they find New Orleans has a distinctive smell, and it makes them uncomfortable. They don’t like it; to them, things smell ever so slightly rotten – a miasma, perhaps, reaching over several centuries of tropical vegetation, disease, and death.

To me, the smell of New Orleans was instantly familiar and comforting. I grew up spending part of every February on St. John, USVI. Some of my first, and best, memories are from that small, beautiful island. Away from Bourbon St., New Orleans smells like St. John, smells like the Caribbean, like the tropics.

Bourbon Street is its own world of dizzying sights, sounds, feelings, smells. The sights of bright lights, waved 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 signs, this bar, that bar, the other bar, the topless bar, the topless-bottomless bar, the backs of bands playing to their audiences within. The sounds of bar barkers, live music from every other bar spilling out onto the street, the Rolling Stones mingling with Jimmy Buffett with blues jazz karaoke George Thorogood U2 songs you haven’t heard since college and don’t need to hear again. The feel of college kids bumping against you barely missing the slosh of beer from their cups, wending your way through the crowd the feel of slippery unknown beneath your feet hoping you don’t skid, the feel of music entering your bones, the feel of beads hitting your head from a balcony above the feel of too much drunkenness. The smell of beer, vomit, stale air wafting from bars that seldom see the light of day. Now that’s a miasma.

Less than half a block from Bourbon Street, though, and all of the above begins to fade into the ether. Languid tranquility returns, and the buildings and balconies, with lush overhanging plants, take on an otherworldly essence, glowing in the late afternoon sun or fading with the light. Slightly crumbling, subsiding, leaning, buildings, luxuriant ferns overhanging intricate delicate wrought iron balconies. A beautiful tropical urban decay. Walking quietly down streets as clop clop of horse and carriage goes by a shutter opens and a man sits on his stoop and begins to play the guitar laughter spills from the restaurant two doors down as people live and laugh and eat and love.

Tonight It Was Sushi

But would you believe I didn’t have any crunchy flake? Well, that’s not entirely true, since we had soft shell crab tempura as a starter. So there. All in all, it was your basic sushi and sashimi meal, although two things stood out – one good, one problematic. The first was that the uni was the best I have ever had. Perfect, really. Absolutely clean flavour, not iodine-y, faint brininess, and the texture was just melting custard that melded with the rice, and oh.

The other concerns fish identification. Generally speaking, I think it’s a good thing when sushi chefs can properly identify the fish they are serving. You know, kind of like an Italian chef knowing the difference between spaghetti and linguine, and a French chef knowing the difference between béchamel and hollandaise. Among other sashimi, Jim ordered hirame, or fluke, and I ordered tai, or red snapper. Our plates arrived . . . and it was clear to us first by looking, then by tasting, that I had the fluke and Jim had the red snapper. We called the waitress over. She didn’t know, and she took my plate, with a piece of each side by side, over to the sushi chef. They conferred, and she returned. She pointed to the fluke, “This one is red snapper,” and pointing to the red snapper, “this one is fluke.”

We go fishing. We catch fluke on a regular basis. On a regular basis, we make sashimi out of the fluke we have caught. We know what it looks like, and what it tastes like. The sushi chef mis-identified them. Like I said, problematic.

Open House New York rocks!

I was very excited that the site list for Open House New York was posted today. The only problem is that one weekend is too short. This year, I am finding the Brooklyn list the most intriguing. The Brooklyn Navy Yard and Floyd Bennett Field are both open, and there’s a Gowanus Canal canoe tour. (!) The Pratt power plant is open again, you can go to the top of the Grand Army Plaza arch, and peer inside the Montauk Club. The question is: will it be possible to do them all? A couple of them you can reserve in advance, which is good, since last year half our time was wasted waiting on line to see the Highline. I shouldn’t really say wasted, because it was worth the wait, but still.

And in other news, New York City has signed a contract with a Spanish company to provide “20 freestanding public toilets on city streets,” to quote the New York Times. Wow!! Twenty!! And what do you think are the chances that one will be installed near the stinky, smelly (yes, both) alleyway I have to pass on my way to and from the subway? Don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question. I think the only tourists around here are the ones I bring.

Night Is The Time When Garden Centers Are Sold

It's still hot here - mid 80s, and low 70s at night. For days now, the air after nightfall has been soft, and it caresses the skin - it's what I call “air temperature air,” which makes no sense, but it’s what I've always called that soft, velvety night air that is the exact temperature of your skin, so you feel like you are moving through emptiness. Mid 80s until at least the weekend. The fall equinox is in less than 48 hours.

As this velvety night deepened, I was faced with our latest CSA vegetables, which this week included an acorn squash – a welcome change from the copious quantities of summer squash we’ve been getting in recent weeks, some of which still grace our refrigerator drawers. Don't get me wrong, they've been delicious, but, you know, very. many. Normally, I’d set it aside since they keep for at least a couple of weeks. But this one had an undetected small spoiled spot (how'd I miss that?), so I needed to use it right away. But how?

Lunch tomorrow, I decided. Pulled some andouille sausage from the freezer. Cut open the squash, scraped seeds, removed spoilage. Nuked the squash. (I can't believe how sweet it tastes. Why do people insist on adding things like brown sugar or marshmallows to its lush sweetness?) Slivered and roasted an onion. Diced, browned and drained the sausage. Mixed it all with a little shredded cheddar, an egg and a little half and half. Salt, cracked green peppercorns. Baked. Moaned in ecstasy at the flavour of a stolen nibble while portioning it out.

Acorn Squash Mock Souffle

1 acorn squash, nuked until soft (cut it open, remove seeds and nuke it covered for 13 minutes). You will need 8 oz. of cooked squash
6 oz. andouille sausage*
1 onion, slivered
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 oz. shredded cheddar
1 large egg
3 Tbsp half and half
kosher or sea salt
pepper

Preheat the oven to 400F. While acorn squash is cooking, dice and brown the sausage in a skillet over medium heat. Drain and set aside. Spread the slivered onion on a foil-covered baking sheet and toss with olive oil, salt and pepper. Bake for 10 minutes, or until edges brown. Remove from oven and roll foil like a jelly roll, tucking ends in. Set aside. Lower oven to 325.

When squash is tender, remove flesh from skin and place in mixing bowl. Let cool. Mix thoroughly with cheese, egg and half and half. Chop onion into small pieces and add to squash mixture. Add slightly cooled sausage and mix well. Add salt and pepper to taste. Put mixture in 2 cup baking dish, and bake in oven for about 25 minutes.

2 servings.

*You can use any kind of Cajun andouille. (French andouillette is a whole ‘nother animal, or part of one, at least. By the way, while you’re there, check out the gumbopages blog. Great source for news and updates about people and places of New Orleans in these uncertain times.) That said, I’m partial to andouille from Oscar’s Smokehouse – yes, you're right, it’s not Cajun, it’s from upstate New York. But it’s really, really good sausage.

Oh – and the garden centers? Years ago, we watched another velvety night fall as we sat on a verandah in Cruz Bay, St. John, USVI. A friend of my parents sighed, and said, “Night is the time when darkness enters the soul,” which, needless to say, was misheard. On nights of air temperature air, I often think of garden centers being sold.

The Day Nothing Happened

What happens when you look back on the day and realise that the most exciting thing that happened was that you forgot to pay for your coffee this morning? Either that, or watching people’s faces in Freeze Peach when you go back and insist they take a candied vanilla olive as a peace offering.

Well, you could try to think of a way to use candied vanilla olives as garnish in a new sort of martini. Or you could try soaking the olives in various spirits in pursuit of same. So far, the experiment has not been a great success, although my perception may be coloured in part by my continued inability to enjoy a martini, no matter what you start with.

Not to change the subject or anything, but we watched part of a network news broadcast tonight, something we don’t often do. Following stories of the devastation of Katrina and the spectre of Rita came a story of NASA’s latest $100 billion gamble to put man on the moon once again. The juxtaposition was stinging, a slap in the face. Whitey’s on the moon again, while the madman dons his ghostly clothes of jazz and his saxophone cry for help shivers the cities down to the last radio. Maybe the revolution will be televised, after all. But don’t hold your breath.

Green Ecology Limitless Magnificence

WE LIKE THE NEW TASTE,WE
NEED THE QUALITY .AND WE N
EED THE BEST FOOD.HERE
YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU WANT.
COOL FASHION NEED COOLTASTE,
YOU ARE THE NEWMAN. HOW DEL
ICIOUSCAN NOT FORGET, SPECIAL
TASTE, RETURN THE TURE FLAVOUR,
GIVE YOU THE MINERABLE FEELING

All this from a package of preserved vanilla olives.

Sometimes, channel surfing foreign language TV channels can have its rewards. Sometime I’ll tell you the story about the mayonnaise lesson on Korean children’s television, but today is all about U Mart.

Last night, nothing particularly interesting was on any of the couple of dozen channels we get on our weird cable. I started at the Catholic channel at the top of the dial and began working my way down. Horse racing, City Council meetings, Italian game shows, Chinese channel. I paused at the Chinese channel, if only because the last time we flipped through, they were showing a fantastically bizarre broadcast of a woman singing in Chinese pitch with Western harmonies, surrounded by red waving flags, children and acrobats whizzing by.

I can’t recall what was on this time, but it quickly cut to a commercial that instantly transfixed me. I have no idea what they were saying, but they had a picture of a building and some words in English. The building had a banner that said, “Grand opening September 5, 2005,” and underneath was the name “U Mart”, and an address in Woodside. They showed a couple of interior shots – extensive fresh vegetables, large fish section, row upon row of mysterious and alluring canned and bagged goods. Since I’m becoming more and more certain that food is my religion, this morning we set out to visit its newest temple.

Ever since I visited Seattle and my friends took me to Uwajimaya, I have been on a quest to find Uwajimaya East, or at least one that I could reach without using bridge, tunnel, boat or plane. I had high hopes for U Mart, which weren’t entirely dashed. It’s much smaller than Uwajimaya, which makes perfect sense, since Queens is not known for its wide-open spaces, at least not in the way that Staten Island is.

The interior shots in the commercial did not lie. They had a great selection of Asian vegetables and fruit – lots of choy and cabbage, incredible fresh spinach, leeks, scallions, root vegetables, and the inimitable durian. The durian was only 99¢/lb. and not huge, which gave me hope that one of these days I’ll actually try one. In the garage.

The fish counter was fascinating. The familiar were reasonably priced – medium shrimp at $3.99/lb.!, and the exotic were probably, too. The basket of live, woebegone frogs was marked $3.99/lb. Live tilapia, carp, catfish, buffalo fish and more; myriad whole fish, fish steaks and fillets, clams, blue crabs $6.99/lb., mussels, geoducks (!). Buffalo fish parts glowed so brightly red that I looked for the red light source, but found none. Weird, little crooked fish with a 3-piece forked tail and a gaping mouth with needle teeth, like some creature from the deep, were pawed over avidly.

Then the meat, most of which was readily identifiable, at least as to animal. At the butcher counter, the cuts were different – “beef muscle,” for instance. Oxtail was $3.99/lb., and “pork muscle” was $1.89/lb. I got some pork muscle, which I think is a shoulder cut – it’s big enough for a roast, in any event, so I’m going to slow cook it. The prepackaged meat was a bit more interesting. They had black skin chickens, which I’ve previously only seen on Iron Chef (yes, I’m a junkie). They had all sorts of pig innards, reminding us of spying pig uterus in Chinatown in Montreal last summer. We didn’t see any uterus today, but we did see heart, spleen, lung, kidney, intestine, and perhaps most interestingly, “pig bunge.” Did they mean colon? Oh – and ox penis.

On to the packaged goods. It’s nobody’s fault, of course, but transliterated Chinese names tend to look so. . . suggestive. And then when you get them into English, they’re almost always either bizarre, or quite unappetising, or bizarrely unappetising. Ching Yeh Pork Fu, for instance. It’s got umami up the wazoo, so even though it looks like frizzy, fuzzy, shredded brown fiberglass, it’s incredibly tasty and addictive, and keeps you coming back for more™. But if you call it by its English name, “cooked dried pork product,” it’s more like, “what? me? You want me to eat what?” And to discover that it’s made in Iowa is a bit much.

We both picked out a few intriguing unknowns. Jim got the aforementioned preserved vanilla olives (if you have the patience to let the page load). They taste like . . . vanilla, slightly lemony candied olives. I’m still not quite sure, although they might be interesting in fruit cake. I selected preserved duck eggs. Half a dozen for 99¢ – how could I resist? Now that I've got them home, I've discovered that I really haven't the least idea what to do with them. It seems that there are a couple of types of preserved duck eggs, some of which need cooking, and some of which don’t. The only other words on my package in English that give me any clue whatsoever are next to a little arrow pointing to the inside of an egg, and say, “hard yolk.” As for the flavour, well, quite. Some sites describe them as creamy or cheesy, or a little fishy. One says that if you like salty cheese like feta, you will probably like preserved duck eggs. Then, there’s this tidbit:

Nigel persuades a group of people raised on Chinese food to try out a ripe stilton cheese, while a group of gourmet cheese lovers try a Chinese delicacy known as a 'Thousand Year Old Egg' - a preserved fermented raw duck egg. Both groups, trying these tastes for the first time, find them revolting.

As I would tend to fall into the gourmet cheese loving category, I’ll keep you posted.

After we paid for our purchases, the woman bagging our things slipped a yellow jug of something into a bag and said, “here, it’s free, for you.” I figured it was either a jug of cooking oil or cleaning fluid. It turned out to be Vitarroz Double Lucky corn oil. Cross-cultural marketing at its finest.

p.s. I just noticed the writing below the recycle symbol on the package of preserved vanilla olives. It says, “Protect environment – main ourself pride”. Yes, indeed.

Cleanliness is next to, um, the water?

Today was a day that let us feel pretty good about ourselves. After a late breakfast/early brunch with friends, we rode our bikes down to Astoria Park, where we joined in the Astoria/LIC Shoreline Cleanup. Yeah, it kind of needed it, being bordered on one side by a walkway with not enough trashcans (not to mention a startling number of people who seem not to understand the concept of putting garbage in a can), and on the other by the Hell Gate, through which garbage barges are towed on a frequent basis, and if you think all the garbage stays on the barges, well, no.

Signing up got us a little sticker we could put on our shirts, which entitled us to pizza later on. We divided up into teams, and assigned ourselves various responsibilities, and got to work. Over 70 people, 3 ½ hours – it was pretty amazing. I thought I would save myself 11,954 words or so, so here are a few photos. (I have fixed the layout a little but, but I'm still not terribly happy with it. Whatever a picture's worth, it doesn't necessarily save any time.)

Before:


After:

Before:

After:

Detritus of vices and pleasures:

Parks picked some of it up:

It's in the bags:

Awaiting Godot, Jr.?:

Just another piece of trash:

When the trashcan is trash:

Discarded animals, too:

In the end, much improved:

Fish bones are crunchy

Let’s face it, konnyaku eaten plain sucks. I mean, blech. But that’s what you get when you’re desperate for something to eat, but you’re determined not to open the freezer, crawl in, and make yourself at home with a pint of Phish Food. Well, nevermind the fact that I haven’t got a pint of Phish Food in my freezer, but you get the general idea.

This must be what happens when you kind of stopped eating dinner the night before because you swallowed a fish bone. First bite, chew, swallow – OH SHIT! Having never done this before (er, the fish bone part), you immediately drop your fork, put your hands around your neck, and start moaning. Your significant other looks at you in alarm. “I swallowed a fish bone” utters from the side of your mouth. You poke your throat where you feel it. This helps. You take a sip of water. Tears fill your eyes. You run to the computer and google fish bone swallow and are instantly horrified by the number of results that contain the words esophagus and perforate, often in the same sentence, along with generally unpleasant descriptions of various procedures used to remove said bone. Meanwhile, significant other hovers, alternating between offering a slice of bread and a lift to the emergency room.

I see one site that says in no uncertain terms not to eat a slice of bread. I push it away as if it is the devil incarnate. I post to all my online friends a frantic cry for advice. They respond with several suggestions, including to drink some vinegar – I suppose the theory being that the vinegar will help dissolve the bone if it’s really stuck. I decide to swill some down, also thinking that if there really is a tear or cut or scrape, the vinegar will burn in that spot like hell, so I can self-diagnose. Right.

Anyway, it didn’t burn beyond the normal battery acid feeling that one gets when one downs undiluted vinegar. The oh-my-god-I’ve-got-a-fish-bone-in-my-throat feeling finally lessened – I’m not talking about the mental feeling here, but the literal feeling in my throat. I decided to wait until morning.

Morning came, and as it took me about 10 minutes to remember that I had swallowed a fish bone last night, I figure I’m ok. Jogging did no harm and produced no sensations of being stabbed by a tiny needle from the inside. I still seem to feel a fish bone phantom from time to time, but I think it’s mental. Fitting, I suppose.

But that’s a very long way of saying that I didn’t eat all of my fish for dinner last night. I have no idea whether that contributed to my insane desire to keep eating for long periods of time tonight, but at least it makes a good story. Dinner was very good, but afterwards came the order from id: must. continue. eating. But what? I really don’t know what possessed me, but I opened the block of konnyaku that’s been sitting in the fridge for a bit. Perhaps it was some subconscious knowledge that plain konnyaku would be truly gross, and that eating a piece of it would put an end to kitchen foraging for the night. At least, that’s what it did.