Stimulus again

Some very interesting discussion from Russ Roberts and Arnold Kling on Blogging Heads about the economic crisis. As I've mentioned before, I agree with them that (1) the government is trying to put the leverage-bubble humpty-dumpty back together again (2) their efforts aren't going to work. We are just going to have get used to a world of much lower leverage both at the corporate and personal finance levels, and yet our government officials appear to be trying to just ressucitate the model that just broke down. As Ricky Gervais might have said, why are we sending horses to perform medical procedures? (watch the clip).

By the way, all we normal people are pretty irrelevant to the great economic debate going on. But how should we all act in view of what's going on? To me, the only rational response is to batten down the hatches. 30% of gross income is no longer an acceptable debt burden. De-lever to 30% of net income. Carry no credit card debt month to month. Push savings to over 10% of personal income, if possible. Amass 6 months to a year of living expenses in liquid savings. Oh, and ignore politicians that tell you it's time to spend.

EDIT: of course, I'm guilty of inexact language above. I meant to say that the cost of carrying your debt (the payments) should be no more on an annual basis than 30% of your net income, not that your entire debt should be no more than 30% of your net income.

Dehydrated Olive Tapenade

I got my hands on some extremely fresh wild salmon over the weekend, and though I knew how I would cook it (on my flat griddle, skin down, 10 minutes, until skin is potato chip crisp) I was groping a little for a sauce until I remembered a neat idea from the Alinea cookbook - an olive oil jam made of dehydrated olives.

I don't own a dehydrator.  But I've done well dehydrating tomatoes in the oven at 170, so I put some shriveled, oil-cured, thasos olives in the oven on a low burn and forgot about them for about 7 hours.  They emerged further shriveled, tough jerky like pellets of concentrated olive flavor.  I pitted them, and then set to with my mortar, pestle, and good Cretan olive oil until I got a smooth paste.  The resultant sauce was a fantastic, salty, counterpoint to the salmon with a texture that differed markedly from standard issue tapenade or olive paste (i.e., tapenade sans anchovies).   This is a highly recommended building block, and it's going to make further appearances all summer (this seems an obvious element of an updated greek salad, or a great sauce for baby lamb chops or rack of lamb).  It is salty, however, and care should be taken  when pairing with cheese or other intensely savory ingredients.

Things I was wrong about

I've been thinking about errors that have been exposed by this crisis.  The one that I think I'm most embarrassed about is the 401(k) as a retirement vehicle.  I suppose it seems obvious now, but it turns out to be entirely unacceptable (as others, I admit, said) to base people's retirements on a mechanism that might decline in value 40% (or more) almost at random due to circumstances beyond any normal person's control.  Of course, investing conventional wisdom tells you to shift slowly out of equities over time, but I've never seen any investment advice recommend *no* equities, and that is the only expedient that would have saved a retirement aged  person in this crisis.  Now to find out what kind of employer might offer a traditional pension. 

Err?

Sometimes, you have to wonder whether people really have no imagination, or whether there's something more nefarious at work.  Look, for example, at these two articles - one from the Post, and one from the New York Times.  

They have the same premise - America's blue chip stocks are crumbling.  Reasonable enough that two major newspapers would have a story on that issue given the calamitous state of the stock market, you think.  But the similarities stretch far beyond general theme. They both start by comparing the price of a share of Citigroup to something else - an ATM fee for the Post, and an item at the dollar store for the Times.  Both describe Citigroup's falling below $1.00 as having "broke the buck".  Both refer back to Citigroup's price of $55 two years ago. Both mention that a share of GM isn't enough to buy a gallon of gasoline.  Both compare the price of a share of GE to something else.  Remarkably enough, to precisely the same something else, "compact fluorescent lightbulbs".    Thankfully, they disagree on just how many lightbulbs one gets to buy with that share.

I'm sure, if I had the time or inclination to compare them further, I'd discover even more to list here.  In any case, though, it seems likely that both authors cribbed substantial portions of their articles from some common source. Is there a journalistic practice I'm unaware of that legitimizes this kind of half-plagiarism? 

UPDATE: I was mistaken.  The Post refers to compact fluorescent flood lightbulbs.  There's some good reporting for ya.  Also, in case anyone thinks that "breaking the buck" is a common way to refer to a stock going below a dollar, it's not.  Finance people typically talk about "breaking a buck" when the NAV of a money market fund falls below a dollar - which incidentally is a shocking, world-changing catastrophe that has happened recently. Not when a stock falls below a dollar.

Death & Company

We sampled a number of drinks I haven't had before at our favorite bar in New York last night - Death & Company.  Particularly amazing was the Fancy Free  (mostly bourbon and maraschino liqueur) and the Martinez (potentially a precursor to the Martini - gin, sweet vermouth, more maraschino liqueur, and angostura bitters).  We also liked their Hyde Park Swizzle.  

Organic means safer?

I'm completely, completely baffled by this New York Times article, exposing the amazing secret that the USDA organic classification has nothing to do with food safety. Why would rodents and pests be any less inclined to raid organic grains and other produce than conventional food? And in any case, "food safety" in the traditional sense is often the most gruesome enemy of the organic and localist and taste interest groups. For the food safety advocate, after all, the ideal world is where everything is irradiated to a sterile crisp.

I especially liked the nurse practioner's lament at the beginning of the article, which reminds me of a different misunderstanding:

“Why is organic peanut butter better than Jif?” said Ms. Devlin-Sample, a nurse practitioner from Pelham, N.Y. “I have no idea. If we’re getting salmonella from peanut butter, all bets are off

Catering Follies

The caterer in question in this post today proposed a literally absurd menu. I excerpt my response below - to be clear, I am being as kind as possible in my note:

"However, to be quite blunt, I have not reviewed the food and wine selections you have proposed, nor anything else for that matter, because the price estimate you have provided is utterly unacceptable. Honestly, I am bewildered that you would have taken my clearly expressed preference that we proceed on a budget (I was quite explicit on this point during our meeting, even mentioning the range of other proposals, which I was not inclined to do) and produced a proposal well in excess of $300 per person (even excluding a gratuity, as I read it) without any prior warning. Of course, you are entirely at liberty to set your own prices, and I am sure others are happy to pay for your services at these rates. But on the basis of your proposal, I am disappointed to tell you that we have nothing further to discuss."

* I have not asked the person in question for permission, because I am just republishing my own message. If they don't like it, they can complain to me.

Will touches on "food and sex"

Even if the premise of the op-ed is true (that people invest more care in what they eat than in who they have sexual relations with - I would dispute that most people today care at all about what they eat, outside an elite cadre), I am puzzled to find that George Will is puzzled by that result. People necessarily care about their physical aspect, and part of the taboo against sexual relations outside of marriage was precisely that. Fear of disease, and above all, pregnancy for women and unplanned fatherhood for men.

Technology has rendered moot most of that concern - the careful, prudent elite that Will (and Eberstadt's underlying article) describes can prevent pregnancy (or, more troublingly, terminate it), and disease can be both prevented and cured.

There is yet no answer to the twin physical dangers presented by food, which I will broadly term fat and cancer. There is no "pill" that governs weight the way the birth control pill governs fertility. Every day, it becomes more evident that bad food (though which bad food precisely, we don't know) causes or exacerbates the dread diseases that end so many of our lives. It is entirely rational when presented with this situation that the elite neurotic will expend his or her energy on food safety rather than sexual safety. Sex outside marriage was the corn finished beef of times past.

Instead, we get this prudish morality play from Will and Eberstadt. Odd.

EDIT: Eberstadt's article is more nuanced than Will's, I now think, and acknowledges some of the above.

Corruption

I'm becoming more convinced that Obama's real job, putting aside our fiscal mess, is to root out corruption, both public and private. Of course, some ambient level of corruption is normal - it is the grist of the political mill and of the world outside. But the fetid stink of now is overwhelming. The latest manifestation is Roland Burris, but the moral corruption in the upper echelons of society is deep (when I say moral, I am implying nothing about religion, by the way, in case anyone thinks my problem is that people have left their churches). Of course, my own exposure to the upper echelons has bruised me psychologically for reasons I'm not going to explain here, so I might well be overreacting to personal experiences that have no broader meaning, but I think I am not.

Also, I am in the middle of reading Obama's Dreams from my Father. Obviously, this will become a part of the modern canon - the actual fairly pure thoughts of a future president when he was 33? It's an incredible historical document that will only become more important as journalism passes into history, like reading Teddy Roosevelt's early works, but better. But what strikes me most is the almost preternatural unity of Obama's vision. His writing then sounds so much like his speeches now that I'm almost convinced he re-edited the book in the 2004 release to insert the current rhetoric. More likely, he is so clever that he understands the compelling power of a consistent, lifelong vision, and so he hews intentionally to what he said earlier. I laugh at the Obama groupies who convince themselves that even his mistakes are part of some sort of deeply subtle underplan, certainly, but those exaggerations shouldn't hide the fact that for those of us on the broad right, he is a subtle and powerful opponent.

Fleeting thought of the day

Why do I become extremely ravenous at random intervals during the day? When I say ravenous, I mean as if I could eat a turkey if it was here. I wish I could ignore it.

Two meals becometh one

"Oh God", said the voice to my left suddenly. "I must have eaten, like, 200 calories of these things". The owner of the voice was a deathly thin man, hair all akimbo, a pastel silk scarf wrapped delicately around his neck, attempting to stop his fingers from going towards the lavender sugar encrusted Marcona Almonds at the iconoclastic Ubuntu restaurant and yoga studio in the city of Napa. Turning back to my own little tray of the nuts, it occurred to me how compelling delicious food is, no matter how thin we are, or controlled, or used to masochistic diets negotiated under the constant frown of calorie counts and fat percentages. Like a mother who sneaks some spinach into her child's morning smoothie, Ubuntu draws in its northern california crowd with the promise of ascetic, macrobiotic, veggie bliss, but what it delivers is something far more primal - big, uncompromising, flavor.


It wasn't just the almonds. Joining them as a convenient pre-meal snack are chickpea fries, no longer the stodgy cubes of custom, but thin, long, McDonald's like strands of chickpea, crispy with a pleasing interior. But it is in the tapas style main courses that Ubuntu hits its stride. Even in the midst of winter, the artichoke salad with leaves, miso (that is, as opposed to the traditional anchovy) "bagna cauda" and olive marmalade was astonishing, the slight shavings of parmesan a deft salty accent to the sweet sauces and the perfect vegetables. But I save my loudest accolades for the next two dishes we tried - the first, a composition of radishes, grapefruit, the best beet "tartare" I've ever had and "fork-crushed" avocado, (the last especially a subtle surprise rather than just its usual jolt of healthy, natural fat) and then a deeply satisfying bowl of carrot gnochetti, with what the menu called "carrot pulp crumble" adding a little more of what I take to be Ubuntu's sweet signature. Not to mention that I'm usually disappointed by dessert, so much so that I normally don't order it, but Ubuntu's vanilla bean "cheesecake in a jar" with sour cherries (which are nostalgic for my fiancee, as the flavors of her mother's childhood Tehran) was terrific. To the extent I had a complaint, it was about our second dessert, which turned out to be so forgettable that I have forgotten it entirely.

That meal I contrast with our less impressive visit to Zuni Cafe, about which I was more excited. I don't mean to say that Zuni was bad, in any way. My rabbit salad was marvelous, if small. And the famed roasted chicken for two, which takes an hour from ordering to arrive, was extremely good. Really very good, a great chicken only enhanced by its treatment in the wood fire, sitting atop pungent mustard greens and peasant bread half-croutons soaked in oil and lemon, both crunchy and chewy and then tart. But did it change my thoughts about chicken? Should it be thought to be the kind of chicken that makes a career? Not really.

I've grouped together these two meals in these notes because they inspired our first meal back in New York. As I sat at Zuni, it occurred to me that my own much plainer roast chicken, even when I use a mere $9 "all natural" Murray's rather than some ultra-premium breeds, is nearly as good as Zuni Cafe's landmark dish. And it occurred to me that what would go perfectly with it was Ubuntu's artichoke salad, albeit without the still quivering with freshness greens, and jarred artichokes holding the place of those just out of the ground. So I roasted my chicken in the usual way, with a lemon and herbs inside, legs tied together, and plenty of fleur de sel, and made a simple vinaigrette to dress the baby spinach and artichoke. The results are pictured below, and we ate with happy memories of our trip out west.

Cav Wine Bar and "tastes"

We arrived at Zuni Cafe too early for dinner, so we went looking for somewhere to have a drink until the appointed time. We ended up at Cav Wine Bar, just down Market Street, where owner Pamela S. Busch was patrolling the front room with reassuring confidence. One innovation that I saw universally in California, and see more and more here, is the "taste" of wine - a half glass, 2.5 oz. pour for half price. It lets you drink variety without breaking the budget, and at Cav, it let me do most of a Pinot Noir tasting "flight" for under $20. We both loved the Dubakella Pinot Noir, and were astounded by a French Pinot that tasted so much of barnyard that it was almost unpleasant. The atmosphere was welcoming and friendly, and we had a great time.

What the heck happened?

I was sitting in a beautiful backyard in Los Angeles with (soon to be) family when they asked me, as a lawyer in the far-away province of New York, what the heck has happened to our economy. Of course I said I don't know, and if I did, I would be working for Treasury. But I've got a guess, and it has nothing to do with regulation, or credit default swaps, or whatever else, at least directly. Here is the story I told.

Imagine you were invited to a casino to play poker. And let's say that you're pretty good at poker - you can grind out some nice cash by beating up on the casual players, the weekend warriors. But when you get there, instead of being allowed to go to your usual table, the pit boss takes you to a special room. In the room, he explains the deal he's been offering to a few special people. "All you have to do is roll this die, which has 100 sides, every five minutes or so. If you get through an hour without rolling a '1', you win $20 million". That's a lot of money, you think. You never need to work again if you win. "But what happens if you roll a '1'"? "Oh!", says the pit boss. "Then you lose $1 billion. We have to get paid somehow. But here's the good part. Someone else loses that money - not you".

A lot of people in finance took that deal. They knew the risk of rolling a "1". Of course they did. Or at least their bosses did. But they took the deal because almost anyone would take the deal, when put to the test. The upside (and I can't emphasize this enough) was generational, lasting, wealth - complete freedom to do almost anything forever. The downside was inchoate. Some really bad stuff would happen, possibly, but not to you.

Would you have played the game?

We're back from San Francisco and Los Angeles.  We had a great time in both places, and I'll lead off with a few observations. 

1.  LA is not my kind of city.  Too many cars combined with too many malls.  It's like the suburban Virginia of my youth, but much bigger and more vacuous, somehow. 

2. I made a couple of mistakes in this post.  The obvious one, as was explained to my back then, is that San Francisco is not tied with Chicago for second best food city in the country, but is a clear #2 under the rubric I was thinking about then.  The second thing is that the whole rubric is wrong.  Yes, New York is the best restaurant city in the country.   But best food city?  The californian supermarkets, in February, are still packed with extraordinary local produce, even if it is somewhat limited.  Here, we have tubers.  If anything, I suspect the gap in the summer is even bigger, as our farms start working, but theirs explode.  I'm not sure what to make of this.

3. Food (still) tastes better outside.

4. Visiting a city occupied by Armenians is pretty disturbing, especially because you can't use Armenian as your super secret language anymore.  On the other hand, it is somewhat amusing to be somewhere where every second person looks like either your uncle or great uncle.

5. Why does anyone live in New York, again, when things routinely look like the below over there?  I need to work on my rationalizations for this seemingly unwise decision again.

Valentine's Financiers

We're about to leave for the airport, but for Valentine's Day, in between finishing some late night work and packing, I made a few financiers from Aran's recipe (but sans kumquats).  I prefer mine chewier than they came out (I think I made them too thick) but the beurre noisette makes 100% difference in terms of depth of flavor.  Wow. 

California

I should say that I'm flying to California (first Los Angeles, then San Francisco) tomorrow for a week of vacation. In LA, we intend to see family and eat Mexican food. The lineup for San Francisco includes the well reviewed vegetarian yoga-studio/restaurant Ubuntu (Bruni's review here) and Zuni Cafe (the roasted chicken is supposed to be revelatory). We'll also try to get to ad hoc (though I think we'll fail) and possibly Chez Panisse or more likely its informal cafe.

Zibetto

After months of frustration about bad coffee in midtown, I've recently discovered Zibetto Espresso Bar on 56th and 6th. No sofas and couches here. No, this is the way they do fast coffee (and breakfast especially) in Europe - belly up to the bar and slap your folded newspaper next to a warmed cornetto and strong espresso. Of course, part of this is pure nostalgia for me - I've had countless breakfasts like this flipping through a Le Monde when I worked with my uncles at their carpet store in Paris. But nostalgia aside, the coffee is very very good.

Jacques Torres

So, what kind of person goes blocks out of his way to pick up a free $2 Jacques Torres bonbon because he heard about it on some blog?



Yeah, me. How'd you guess?

EDIT: I especially liked my effort to sidle up to people handing out the chocolates as if I was surprised to find them there.

A note

Just a random public service announcement - caterers have not understood that the (economic) world has ended between the last time they were busy and today. Maybe none of us has. But really, people, you are not in the driver's seat anymore. Sorry.

EDIT: Also, I realize that you way you used to shame people into loosening the purse-strings was to pronounce the phrase "I realize you are on a budget" with a slight sneer encircling the last word. Soo, that never would have worked on me anyway, as I am not on a quest to produce the puurfect day and I think budgets are very good things indeed, but it really is out of place now. Just so you know.

An agreement?

From an article in yesterday's New York Times about fertility clinics that produce too many children:

"One woman, a nurse who could afford only one try at in vitro, pressured Dr. Chiu to transfer eight embryos. 'I said under one condition,' Dr. Chiu remembered. 'I made her sign an agreement that she would do selective reduction.' That agreement, to remove some of the embryos if they lived, was very likely unenforceable."

You think? A personal service contract requiring abortion?

Having said that, I am generally interested in the idea of restraints that are not necessarily enforceable, though my thoughts range to bylaws passed by the shareholders restricting the the board of a Delaware corporation rather than to fertility policy. Still, what was the doctor thinking? Even if one were okay with the idea of such a contract, can you imagine trying to enforce it?

EDIT: I wonder if such a contract has ever made it to court.

Profligacy

Just flagging that the President discussed the question about whether it makes sense to encourage consumers to spend when they should be saving (maybe) in his press conference:

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. In your opening remarks, you talked about that if your plan works the way you want it to work, it's going to increase consumer spending. But isn't consumer spending, or over-spending, how we got into this mess? And if people get money back into their pockets, do you not want them saving it or paying down debt first, before they start spending money into the economy?

MR. OBAMA: Well, first of all, I don't think it's accurate to say that consumer spending got us into this mess. What got us into this mess initially were banks taking exorbitant, wild risks with other people's monies, based on shaky assets. And because of the enormous leverage, where they had $1 worth of assets and they were betting $30 on that $1, what we had was a crisis in the financial system.

That led to a contraction of credit, which in turn meant businesses couldn't make payroll or make inventories, which meant that everybody became uncertain about the future of the economy.
So people started making decisions accordingly, reducing investments, initiating layoffs, which in turn made things worse.

Now, you are making a legitimate point, Chuck, about the fact that our savings rate has declined. And this economy has been driven by consumer spending for a very long time. And that's not going to be sustainable. You know, if all we're doing is spending and we're not making things, then over time, other countries are going to get tired of lending us money. And eventually the party's going to be over.

Well, in fact, the party now is over. And so the sequence of how we're approaching this is as follows. Our immediate job is to stop the downward spiral. And that means putting money into consumers' pockets. It means loosening up credit.

It means putting forward investments that not only employ people immediately but also lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth. And that by the way is important, even if you're a fiscal conservative, because the biggest problem we're going to have, with our federal budget, is if we continue a situation in which there are no tax revenues, because economic growth is plummeting at the same time as we've got more demands for unemployment insurance; we've got more demands for people who've lost their health care, more demand for food stamps. That will put enormous strains on the federal budget as well as the state budget.

So the most important thing we can do for our budget crisis right now is to make sure that the economy doesn't continue to tank. And that's why passing the Economic Recovery Plan is the right thing to do, even though I recognize that it's expensive.

Look, I would love not to have to spend money right now. I'd -- you know, this notion that somehow I came in here just ginned up to spend $800 billion, you know, that -- that wasn't -- that wasn't how I envisioned my presidency beginning. But we have to adapt to existing circumstances.

Now, what we are going to also have to do is to make sure that as soon as the economy stabilizes, investment begins again; we're no longer contracting, but we're growing; that our midterm and long-term budget is dealt with. And I think the same is true for individual consumers. Right now, they're just -- they're just trying to figure out how do I make sure that if I lose my job, you know, I'm still going to be able to make my mortgage payments.

Or they're worried about, how am I going to pay next month's bills? So they're not engaging in a lot of long-term financial planning.

Once the economy stabilizes and people are less fearful, then I do think that we're going to have to start thinking about how do we operate more prudently, because there's no such thing as a free lunch. So if -- if you want to get -- if you want to buy a house, then putting zero down and buying a house that is probably not affordable for you in case something goes wrong, that's something that has to be reconsidered.

So we're going to have to change our -- our bad habits. But right now, the key is making sure that we pull ourselves out of the economic slump that we're in.

A bit of consumerism

What with all the talk of profligacy below, let me offer a shopping tip. Yes, the most beautiful men's watch in the world is the IWC portugueser (so I say). I will not, however, spend even the $4000 one needs to spend on Timezone to get one (much less the $6,800 new, or $10,000 + for the rose gold Automatic).

Lots of research for things that look like the IWC (I wanted something in the 38mm plus range in terms of diamater, and a main face and two smaller faces, whatever they're technically called), and offer some craft and originality lead me to an unexpected place - Poljot, a Soviet era manufacturer which makes wonderful watches with an interesting Russian made movement for less than $500, and specifically Poljot's Strela (mine is much plainer, but the picture I found online on a dealer's site isn't great). On ebay, where I found mine, the price drops much lower than that.

The chief downside at this point is that the Strela is a mechanical watch, meaning it needs to be wound. I have not figured out how much, as yet. Also, you can really only buy it from a German dealer for a fair price, so there is some execution risk to the deal.

Gino's

We were in Howard Beach, Queens, the other day for things unrelated to food, but I had heard of a local pizza joint with a big reputation, so we made our way there for a quick snack. So, quick is likely never the result of visiting Gino's of Howard Beach, since the line appears to be perpetually out the door, but the "grandma" pizza is truly excellent - thin, crisp, dotted with fresh cheese, and thick chunks of garlic throughout.

Also, they serve a $13 seafood salad which would cost $25 in the city. If, for some reason, one is in Howard Beach, I wouldn't miss this place.

More sauce, less pasta

I've been thinking recently about Mark Bittman's suggestion that we might want to eat "more sauce and less pasta" as a way of reducing refined flour intake, but basically found the idea  unappetizing (I am a strong proponent of the theory that pasta is about eating noodles, while the sauce is just "condiment") until I realized that replacing normal pasta with a strip of lasagna basically gets you a pretty plausible "unstructured" ravioli while cutting actually pasta consumption in half (the lasagna solves the problem of eating a tomato-y stew with a few lonesome pasta strewn therein, and while I would  normally eat 3 oz. of dried pasta, I can get away with a .9 oz. lasagna). 

So last night I made a sauce of swordfish (farmed, cut into cubes and seared before adding back to the sugo) with wonderful canned san marzano D.O.P tomatoes, onions, capers, red chili flakes and garlic, and layered it between two halves of a lasagna. Delicious.

Stimulus

So someone finally asks the question that I think is at the heart of my unease about the proposed stimulus. How is it possible that the solution to deep seated problems caused by years of profligacy is for the government to stimulate profligacy?

* yes, yes, I know. Supposedly the answer to this is that we'll fix the structural problems later, etc, etc, but right now we need to be jolted out of Depression. Maybe so.

UPDATE: A previous post from me on this. Short and unsubstantive, but I link to remind myself I have been thinking about this for a while. This, by the way, is a serious problem even in (or maybe especially in, since we have the ability to save truly disposable income) the upper middle class stratosphere of big law firm practice. People (especially people who got through law school romantically unattached) typically start spending like drunken sailors as soon as the first paycheck clears, and then wonder years later why their debt isn't gone.

UPDATE 2: I note that Paul Krugman has the following to say on exactly this topic:

"Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving — a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now."

School Lunch

Copied below is a month's worth of menus from an elementary school, recently passed along to me by a reader. I count pizza or a manifestation of pizza 5 times out of 13 school days (I include Pizza Dippers and Mozzarella sticks), burgers twice, and fried chicken (popcorn chicken and nuggets) twice. The only food on this list that could even plausibly be made fresh and healthy are the tacos (and I am certain that they are neither) and the bagels (the jury's out).

[UPDATE: For a comparison, here is a random public school menu from France I dug up. It reads like a restaurant. The point to note here is that even though the French menu is incredible, it also doesn't require the full bore Edible Schoolyard approach, however laudable that is. This is a menu that can be assembled in a reasonable form for a reasonable expense anywhere in America, and if the parents don't like it, they can pack the kids' own lunch with crap if they prefer. Here's another menu, equally good and healthful, from a different public school. I suspect that if I searched for a week, I wouldn't find a single french menu, even in the poorest most depressed banlieu, that would have food nearly as terrible as that at my reader's school.]

Each meal costs $1.85. Kids can double their portion of these terrible foods for a mere $.75, with a quarter surcharge for Popcorn Chicken (apparently some sort of premium product). Note that this is a wealthy district.

The point to me made here are obvious, and the comments retreaded so many times I wonder whether it is worth my effort on this little kazoo of a blog.

First, this food is terrible.

Second, I don't know that it's (all) the school system's fault - the wonks tell me that this wretchedness has something to do with federal funding levels.

Third, of course there's room for kids to enjoy burgers and fries and all that. But once a week, twice a week at most, is reasonable. Not every single day, not every single option. I understand the impulse not to be paternalistic, and I am as libertarian as anyone on matters of personal choice. But there is room to be paternalistic with little kids - they are the people for whom paternalism was made, because they don't know better, and will almost always reach for the fast and efficient shot of fat and calories and sugar. Even if there are also sandwiches, as I am assured they are, most kids will simply not order them when presented with the option of hot, fat laden, food.

* On this I have special experience. As a child I became addicted to these shots of fat, through the vehicle of doughnuts. I am getting married to someone who was never given such things, or only afforded them once in a blue moon at a friend's house. The difference in the quantity and types of food urges we have when things go off the rails makes me think that there is some basis to what I'm saying.

----------------------------


Grilled Cheese or Rib Patty (i.e., a McRib?)

Pizza Dippers (i.e., bread sticks with tomato sauce)

Hamburger, Hot Dog or Chicken Pattie (with fries)

Cheese Pizza

Popcorn Chicken

Soft or Hard Tacos

Bagel Day

Burgers

Mini Pizzas

Nuggets

Mozzarella Sticks

Cheese Pizza

Super Bowl Dinner

The Super Bowl was good, and our dinner was just as delightful.

To start, I fried some calimari and made a sauce out of chipotle peppers and Mexican crema.

I followed with Bittman's intriguing wine marinated rib-eye with onion marmalade (onions cooked for about an hour with balsamic vinegar for the last 40 minutes). I love the combination of orange peel and clove with beef, and the marinade does wonders for what is not necessarily the most tender cut.

Favorite thread anywhere

Even with all the food related boards and blogs I read, my favorite long-time comment thread anywhere on the internet is this - Balmoral Boot P&rn. I offer it up this morning as some friday morning light-heartedness.

In a better world, this would be the only type of dress shoe a man would wear.

Take it light

I've been pretty confused by a New York subway sign encouraging you to take your trash with you for a while now. It goes as follows:

"Take care. Take it light. Take the subway. Take responsibility. Please take your trash with you when you leave the train or station."

I had never seen the phrase "take it light" before, nor ever heard it said, nor could I really figure out what it meant in the context of the rest of the sentence. Apparently, though, according to the Urban Dictionary, "take it light" means something like "take it easy".

Why did MTA use this phrase? Is whatever group that unironically says "take it light" (assuming there is such a group) somehow responsible for trash on the subway? I am puzzled.

Plus, second prize for bad language goes to this Will Wilkinson bloggingheads, for grotesque overuse of the word "epistemic".

Bar Breton

We visited Bar Breton the other night to try their galettes - crepes, but with a toothsome, somewhat acid buckwheat. I'll say that I enjoyed mine - the first ham and cheese with egg, and the second nutella - but will note that I found it unnecessarily expensive ($16 for a crepe?). My fiancee had a salmon dish on the menu, as she didn't want crepes. It was competent, but entirely a throwaway. My pear cider was excellent.

What do I recommend? Get a savory crepe at Bar Breton, and then visit the amazing Crepes Lady in midtown for your sweets. She makes an amazing crepe, crunchy and tender and blistered with butter, and you get to talk to a treasure of a woman while you're at it.

EDIT: My last visit to the crepes lady, Madeleine messed up the first crepe she tried for me, made another, and folded the first into the second before applying the nutella, saying that when she was a child, this is how it was done in Brittany anyway. I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I don't care, as it was doubly delicious.

LLC

What is this supposed to mean? Are normal people understanding LLC as some sort of special protection for them as investors?


"The offices were beautiful, and I was told it was a limited liability corporation,” said Reggie Roseme, a deliveryman in Wellington, Fla., who lost his entire savings of $35,000 and now faces foreclosure on his home."

(This is from an article on Madoff-like ponzis in the New York Times).

Squid with Feta

Bittman's recipe for squid stew caught my eye recently, but my influences here in Astoria are more greek than anything else, so I converted the idea into a tomato stew with olives, feta and herbs. For textural interest, I added fried calamari - there's nothing like mixing the rustic (homey) with the rustic (junky).

The rising costs of food

I have a long running entirely one sided (in the sense that he is unaware of it) argument with Ezra Klein about his "locavorist" policy prescriptions (which, in short, amount to changing government policy to raise the cost of meat). His theory is that if you raise the cost of meat, people will eat less of it, and the environment will be better off. The issue has come back again because of Anthony Bourdain's recent tart comments about Alice Waters, the high priestess of American market driven cuisine. Waters's occasional high-handedness reminds me a lot of Klein's, and it is equally annoying. But in any case, we are in the middle of a great natural experiment in seeing what happens when the price of meat rises in relation to the average person's income (through the unfortunate mechanism of dropping incomes). I am confident that no less meat is being consumed. I realize I don't have the empirics to back me up, but I can at least start my analysis with the observation that the reaction of burger chains (some of the keenest observers of food trends anywhere) has been to provide cheaper rather than less meat. Mcdonald's has surveyed the landscape, and the McDouble is their inimitable answer.

Underlying all this, though, is that the fact that the good food lobby is riven with contradictory and competing interest groups. While they all think they're allied, in reality they are not, and tensions caused by people like Waters are a sympton of the fact that there are many things one may mean by "good food". Consider the below preliminary taxonomy - if pushed, I would put myself in between the taste and localist groups, but with an intense historical sympathy for the advocates of the poor. In terms of practicality, though, the only answer is a humble, incrementalist approach, somewhat akin to Mark Bittman's "less meat-ism". The food situation in so many places in our country is so bad that almost any improvement, whether providing vegetables to those who don't have them, or providing somewhat dubious "naturally raised" meat, is a measurable, valuable improvement to the lives of real people. I disdain the zealots who refuse to consider these modest steps.

1. The environmentalist crowd - The focus here is to limit the harm caused by food production on the global environment. This means less meat and less fishing. To be clear, this doesn't mean "better/natural practices in raising livestock". Indeed, raising chickens or pigs or cows in a humane manner would only exacerbate the environmental impact of meat, because organic, healthy, animals need land and resources. What these people want, ideally, is vat grown, artificial meat.

2. The taste crowd - Their goal is to bring back flavors that have been lost due to the growth of the food industry, from vegetables to meat to fish. They might care about organics because they taste better, but they do not necessarily care about environmentalism. Indeed, if one thinks about it, better tasting meat might mean that more meat is consumed, eventually.

3. The localist crowd - Local food might or might not taste better, but the point is to live within your area, to experience New York, or Virginia, or Lyon, as New York or Virginia or Lyon. Of course, while this is all well and good, true localism condemns millions to wretched food for much of the year (unless, I suppose, one really loves tubers) and rolls back gains made over centuries of economic development (forsooth, our medieval ancestors stabbed localism in the back when they started importing sugar). As such, localism is highly susceptible to hypocrisy (e.g., a "localist" food event staffed by chefs and food flown in from around the country). Local for thee, but not for me.

4. The cruelty crowd - The puritanical allies of the localist and taste groups, the anti-cruelty advocates care not so much about how the meat tastes or where it comes from, but whether it was raised in a way that respects the animal's life. They may think it a nice side effect that humanely raised meat tastes better, but the point is emphatically not flavor. The fissure between these lobbies is illustrated by foie gras, which scandalizes the cruelty crowd, but is positively encouraged by the taste/localist groups.

5. The improving the food of the lower middle class and poor crowd - Another interest group with less glamor under the broad umbrella of the good food movement are those advocates interesting in raising the eating standard of the poor and lower middle class, of persuading people whose food is so often based in restaurant junk food (bad) or on very bad food made at home (a little better) to try something new. The problems here are the lack of availability of decent food in many of the places these people live, and money. Of course, these problems would be made much, much worse by the success of any of the lobbies above. While we, the affluent, might do well to put aside our industrially raised vegetables, the problem for these people is the lack of exactly those things which we're so happy to sneer at.

No knead pizza bianca this morning

2666, again

I finally finished 2666.  The last book is masterful, as Archimboldi floats back and forth before the reader, slipping out of our vision while offering no satisfaction.  The first three books are mostly masterful.   Book 4 is, simply, a pornographic nightmare of death and terror, and I would never read a word of it again.    How would I react were a beautiful meal to include one course of rotten meat? Of course, I would be disgusted by everything.  Should not the same be true here?

Gout

I too am surprised that people still get gout. I hope that Mr. Ozersky isn't serious about the below:

I just want you, Feedbag readers, to know that I won’t be altering my lifestyle at all, and that you can continue to expect the up-to-the-minute coverage of the city’s dining scene that only total bodily dedication can bring.

EDIT: I should note that one of my heroes, Pitt the Elder/Lord Chatham, was afflicted with gout, and I was always touched reading about his efforts to govern despite it. 

Swirling thoughts

Best wishes to Obama. Wow.  But the press coverage is so irritatingly fawning.  He's got a lot of problems to fix - hope he does that.  But a lot of them are problems he has nothing to do with. Well, he can regulate, can't he? But some of the problems were the government's fault.  Not the worst things, surely, those were business's fault.  But stimulus is really not going to work.  Krugman is mocking economists who think stimulus isn't going to work - it's simple math.  But it'll end in tears.  Yeah, probably.

Thought I never tire of working around in my head until I start grinding my teeth

I could take all our wedding guests to some place like Corton and drown them in tasting menus and wine until the cows came home for the same price as some of the "estimates" I'm getting from caterers. 

More to the point, for half of these "estimates" I could drown all those guests plus all sorts of other people in kebabs and falafels, if only there were proper arabic caterers around.

BONUS: Phrases I am tired of repeating to said wedding caterers after looking at yet another inappropriate menu they can't possibly execute:

"You know, if I really wanted to take everyone to Per Se, I'd, like, do that".

A couple of quick notes

Some quick notes while I work on some longer writing projects: 

Candle 79: We visited this vegan restaurant (recipient of 1 star from Bruni) last week.  I very much enjoyed my seitan with butternut squash and pomegranate seeds, while our shared dessert of key lime pie was quite good (the crust held together without butter somehow grew on us, as did the various incarnations of cashew milk/cream).  Above all, it is an extremely comfortable restaurant, and I would return. 

Sweet Leaf Coffee: I visited this new coffee shop on a tip that they brew the apparently iconic Stumptown Coffee.   The coffee was good, the people friendly, and my apple pie comforting (though I do not believe they make it themselves, despite what the signage in the store says about baking on premises.  I could be wrong).  I brought home some ethiopian wondo at the same price as on Stumptown's website, which is quite generous of Sweet Leaf.   They're clearly still working out kinks, though, because I overheard someone who seemed to be in charge explaining things to people who weren't in charge, and also I got the last dregs of drip coffee from the pot (which I should have said something about).   The main downside?  The store is *very* small.  Not really the kind of place people can snuggle up for a while.

Roquefort-wars

The United States has placed a punitive tariff on Roquefort (english article here) in retaliation for French refusal to eat American hormone laced beef.

My understanding from people who know about these matters is that we're right on the law (i.e., we are permitted under WTO rules to impose these sanctions). But on the substance? I'm with France.* In fact, I think France is right substantively on most of these matters (GMO, the marketing of geographically protected wines in the US, etc, etc), but we keep winning the legal wars.

*(though would French people eat hormone-d beef if labelled correctly? Probably not, so the government is likely overreacting by forbidding the beef when it would simply die anyway).

** enthusiasts of American cheese will simply say, "Good riddance, as we make perfectly good blue cheese here". Yes, we do, but they don't taste like Roquefort.

New York, the center of the world (well, America) Part 1

I've been in a number of arguments recently involving the proper ranking of cities for food in the United States.  I suppose one might have some trouble with the idea of ranking cities at all, but I think that once one accepts the idea that it is preferable to dine in New York than to dine in Wilmington, more granular determinations necessarily follow.   What the use of ranking cities might be when most people have a limited range of experience and can't or wouldn't move to the higher ranked city for any number of non-food related reasons in any case probably remains unclear, but that is the nature of most ranking parlor games. 

Having determined to rank cities, the conversation in my experience tends to revolve around three endlessly repeated arguments.  In any group of food people discussing this matter, for example, there is invariably one who plays the great New Orleans gambit, which, for the uninitiated,  holds that the Big Easy is the best dining destination in the country, both before and after Katrina, and those who disagree are doing nothing better than sniffing down their foie gras infected noses at real cuisine.   Much outraged banter about Alan Richman ensues, with eventual agreement from everyone other than the gambiteer that New Orleans is, at best, Number 4. 

This resolution leaves the door open for everyone else to proceed with the two remaining set pieces, which look approximately like the following: 

1) Everyone agrees that New York is Number 1, but there is mortal combat between Chicago and San Francisco for a strong second fiddle, and the discussion collapses into a weighing of how important precisely Alinea is, whether The French Laundry is in San Francisco, and the excellence of this or that hot dog/deep dish pizza. 

2) Someone from Chicago or San Francisco says, frustration bubbling over, that New York is an overrated cesspool and that in fact their city is Number 1.  Usually this is supported by some reference to the fact that New York smells (bad) most of the time. 

For the record, I believe that set piece #1 is the correct discussion to be having, and further that the correct ranking of the top 5 is as follows, with the caveat that I rank New Orleans by reputation only. 

1. New York City

2. Chicago

2. San Francisco

4. New Orleans

5. Washington D.C.(?)

Why? The answers for me have to do with this weekend's juxtaposition of Per Se and Sripraphai.  But that post will have to wait for the morning. 

  

Air Blade

Not that it has anything to do with food, though it does have to do with the menu I posted below, but the Dyson AirBlade hand dryer is a miraculous invention. Paper towels begone!

More on this later

2666

I had one of the best meals of my life tonight (more later), but for the moment am thinking about 2666, the much lauded book by Roberto Bolano.  Can anyone out there explain to me in what sense precisely Book 4 of the five book oeuvre is not one of the most gruesome slogs in the history of writing?  

To be clear, "gruesome" refers to the dozens of rapes described without narrative, and "slogs" refers to the dozens of rapes described without narrative.

What is the purpose of this 300 pages? Why does anyone believe it to be worthy of merit? I am very confused.

 

Spending on what you need

A television commentator just now, in a shocked tone, bemoaning the economy - "The numbers right now show that people are only spending on what they need. That is not a recipe for prosperity."

Yes, of course. Much better to have people spending borrowed money on frivolous luxuries. Excellent.

There's a lot of bias against recipes (for cooking) among food people - "I don't need a recipe", they say.  "I just cook what seems good".  Sometimes this comes off as a little self righteous.  Or actually a lot self righteous. 

All that it may be, but I agree with the anti-recipe sentiment anyway.  But sometimes recipes are so tempting that I make them anyway, and such is the case for the below, Tom Colicchio's eggplant napeoleon, from Think Like a Chef.  There's nothing s

pecial here - just fried eggplant sandwiching eggplant "caviar" (i.e., baked eggplant, roasted red pepper, lemon, parsley, roasted garlic), topped with a little avocado and a lemon vinaigrette dressing, but it is very very good.

The eggplant can be fried in advance and warmed in a 350 F oven, I found.  

Menti

I've found that no matter how much one pines for certain foods, some things are too much of a pain to almost ever make.  Mente, or Menti, are one of those things - eraser sized dumplings made of a yeastless dough of flour, olive oil and water, and tiny balls of cayenne spiced lamb, all squeezed into a Star Wars-y canoe shape.  That is, imagine making ravioli, but instead of six per person, having to make thirty.  But it also turns out that it's easier to make Mente while watching football, and with Wild Card Weekend upon us, I decided to give it a go.  Iphone pics are below.  

In case you have the inclination, instructions follows:

1. Make dough with some flour, a little olive oil, some salt, and enough water to make a pliable mass.  It doesn't need much kneading - just until all mixed.  Let rest for 1 hour. 

2. While resting, mix some cayenne (to taste) and salt (again, to taste) into ground lamb.  Roll between your fingers into little balls - as I note above, about the size of erasers on a pencil.  Allow 30 per person. 

3. Roll out the dough paper thin.  It is very important that the dough is extremely, extremely thin.  You should be able to read a newspaper through it with little difficulty.

4. Cut the dough into small squares, about an inch long and half an inch wide.

5. Place a meat ball in the middle of each dough, and push the sides together to form the shape in the pictures.  The meat should stick out of the middle, as if the meat were a middle-aged vacationer sitting in a dough-canoe.

6. Place a small piece of butter/solid lipid of your choice on top of each dumpling. 

7. Bake at 375 F until the dough is quite crisp, like a cracker.

8. Add hot chicken broth to pan in which dumplings were made.  The crispy dumplings will soak up the broth and partially soften. 

9. Serve (finally!) with garlicky yogurt and mint and Syrian dried peppers (fine, fine, paprika will do) and sumac. 

Bar Boulud

We stopped by Bar Boulud last night on the way to see The Wrestler (very good, though hard to watch).  Consistent with all the reviews, I could see no reason to order any of the main courses.  But we assembled a meal from a masterful pate of chicken liver and pork and cognac, a terrine of lamb and sweet potatoes, some fries, and a plate of almost pickled coriander carrots.  This is the new wave of dining in New York - snacks, and plates, and communal tables.  I like it.

Simple Syrup, or adventures with knefe

On a recent episode of Mike Colamecco's Food Show on public television, Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 was asked to explain the genesis of modern "scientific" cooking, or what others have called molecular gastronomy.  His point was telling: although he was a perfectly good traditional chef, he became frustrated by the somewhat stilted explanations he received to his questions about technique, which didn't go much further than assurances that one roasted a chicken in this or that way because it worked.  With the help of Harold McGee and others, Dufresne and Achatz and the Spanish chefs have exposed many of the answers to Dufresne's questions, and manipulated those traditional methods of cookery to produce new foods.  Funnily enough, what Dufresne didn't recognize in the clip I saw is that his inquisitive methods are now simply being aped, precisely the same way the traditional chef's methods have been aped for centuries.  That is, unless you think that the thousands of chefs making ice cream with liquid nitrogen know anything more than some vague pap about smaller ice crystals. 

In any case, I'm not a professional chef, but something that Dufresne said in the interview with respect to bistro owners resonated with me.  As he put it, sure, it's nice to make fancy molecular food, but the bistro owner wanting to make the same perfect fries every time has an equivalent interest in scientific cooking.  It occurs to me that on a very small scale, so does the home cook. 

An example: Knefe bil jows is a dessert consisting of two layers of shredded phyllo (aka, kataifi) sandwiching a layer of walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon, all doused while hot with cool syrup.  The nightmare scenario for any home cook is when your sugar syrup crystalizes, leaving you with grainy, unpleasant, knefe with the mouth feel of fudge gone wrong.  For most Armenian/Lebanese/Syrian cooks, crystallization is a calamity with about the predictability of a flood or tornado, but with less warning.  Suddenly, apparently from nowhere, your sugar seizes up, whether in the pan, in the jar while cooling, or even when thrown onto the pastry.  The dessert everyone has been looking forward to is ruined.  In the meantime, the traditional prophylactics are about as logical at first glance as the tiger's paw a tribal witch doctor might prescribe.  Lemon, cream of tartar, or honey, in varying amounts, thrown into the syrup while stirring, or not stirring, or while cooling.   These methods work, just like the traditional method for roasting chicken usually works, but capriciously, and with no guarantees.

And here, of course, is the point.  Science can explain how to keep your sugar syrup from crystallizing, and in fact the whole process is very well known and entirely commonplace.  And yet, generations of middle eastern cooks are left making knefe in terror, or, like some of my family, not making knefe at all, because the whole thing might be carried off at a moment's notice by whatever the cooking equivalent of gremlins might be.  I do not except myself.  While I've read McGee's chapter on sugar syrups twice now, I'm still worried the thing might crystallize the second I throw it onto the phyllo.  

Maybe I'll figure it out with one more read. 

PS: Science tells us that honey, cream of tartar and lemon work because they impede crystallization by inverting the sucrose, and allowing the cook more time to "cool the syrup into a clear candy".  What I don't understand entirely is whether I read McGee correctly to say that crystals can form in sugar syrup at any temperature above 212 F, or whether my failed syrups have all failed because I let them go above 235 F into the fudgey stage.  

 

Sometimes simple food is tiring, though

Or so I thought after finishing the kofte and the knefe bil jows I'm taking to our friends' house for New Year's Eve, and sinking into the couch and drifting asleep (pictures, descriptions, later).    And that's even leaving aside my subsequent dream involving putting some chocolate powder on my Starbucks cappuccino, realizing the chocolate wasn't labelled, and deciding that the perpetrator was a murderer who had put cyanide in the bottle, but was too scrupulous to mislabel the chocolate/poison as chocolate.  

This, of course, is the kind of murderer I would be, and the world is fortunate just for the sake of avoiding further ennui that I am so docile. 

Sleepiness

Stuart Buck notes, correctly, how devastating the loss of sleep is to all sorts of things.  During my own annus horribilis (October 2006 - December 2007) I couldn't have slept more than 5 hours average per night during any week in that period (except for the 5 days off I took in August, 2007), divided between rare full nights of sleep and all-night firedrills.   Putting entirely aside the fact that my efficacy in my job dropped off one fairly shallow cliff at about midnight and another, much steeper, cliff at 3 or 4 am (to near uselessness), that nightmarish period had a lasting effect on my already prone-to-fat metabolism, which I haven't even come close to fighting off now a full year later.   I don't really begrudge the fact that society has organized itself in such a way that these hours are thought to be laudable for a young professional, but there is no doubt that my constitution, at least, was no match for them. 

Good food doesn't have to be complicated, volume 7 Billion

I'm working from home today, and decided to have some a light snack of fish for lunch.  I mixed some ras al hanout with mayonnaise, and spread it on my plate.  Then I cut up American farm raised tilapia (according to what I can figure out, this is good, cheap, fish from both a sustainability and not eating fish laced with a Valdez worth of chemicals perspective), powdered the fish slightly with a mixture of flour, salt and smoked paprika, and fried in extra virgin olive oil.   I dotted each fillet with fleur de sel and some balsamic. 

PS: You don't need ras al hanout or fleur de sel.  Plain mayo is fine,

 as is mayo with almost any spice you like.  An appropriate substitute for fleur de sel, amazingly enough, is salt.  And no complaints about how olive oil is expensive either.  The small bottle I used on this cost 3 dollars. You don't need balsamic. A lemon works as well. 

Train

I am on a train to Washington to celebrate Christmas with my family, and then will return to New York in the morning to be with my fiancee's family. To all those who celebrate Christmas, merry Christmas!

Momofuku Milk Bar

Last night was one of these deeply New York food nights, with the usual caveat that everything didn't go right. I left my firm at about 6:00 for Russ & Daughters to get some Gaspe Nova, and unfortunately got out at Broadway-Lafayette Street instead of Lower East Side station, and thus arrived at Russ precisely when they were locking up. I made the shape of smoked salmon with my hands through the window, but no luck. Annoyed, I walked ten blocks up first avenue to Momofuku Noodle Bar, on the theory that I might get a bite to eat, and then visit the new Milk Bar for a dessert to take home. The two problems with that plan were that Noodle Bar was packed, and Milk Bar is behind Ssam Bar (which is an avenue and two blocks away on 13th and Second), not Noodle Bar. So I walked to Ssam bar and went into the bakery to get one of the deep fried egg pork buns. Of course, they stop serving savories at 5:00 pm. Instead, I had a pistachio cake as dinner, wolfing it down at the standing table in the bakery itself, and took a banana cake home to share. Then I walked across to 20th and between 5th and Park, where I picked up 5 bottles of wine (4 Becco Rosso, and a German Sylvaner) at Moore Brothers for Christmas, before grabbing the train home. Exhausted, obviously.

Now to substance. Before anything else, let me make clear that I have the same complaint about Milk Bar as everyone else. The service is truly appalling. There were only three of us in line, and my cake took about 12 minutes to slice. It's not even an organizational matter, which might be excusable. Rather, the particular guy charged with slicing my cake was so excruciatingly slow that I felt like jumping over the counter and doing it myself, and despite the glacial speed, he still gave me the wrong order.

As for the cake, the Banana Cake is delicious, though nothing I would pine to order again. The combination of fudge, the nutella-like Hazelnut crunch and the banana cake and cream layers is terrific and pretty unexpected. I've got less love for the pistachio cake, despite the masterful lemon curd. The real point here is that at Milk Bar, Chang fails at doing what he usually does, which is tweaking classics to make them more "delicious", as he constantly appears to repeat. Traditional French or German patisserie is just better than this hopped up American stuff, no matter how many calories Chang packs into each 14 foot high slab, but the bakery is run without any knowledge of that underlying fact. As I heard one employee explain to a customer asking about Momofuku's italian stick bread, "it's like a baguette, but more flavorful".

No, not really.

A question

An interesting hypothesis that occurred to me last night as I penguined my fiancee delicately back to her house after dinner last night, doing my best not to fall on the sheets of ice people hadn't shoveled from their pavements - does the increasing number of renters in Astoria have something to do with the lack of shoveling?

Questions: Are there increasing numbers of renters? And are they doing less shoveling? My fiancee, who was literally raised on the same street she lives on now, says "yes" to both.

A report on Kofte

For a snack last night, I made what we at my home would call kofte, what other calls kibbe, and what I've seen rendered in some books as "stuffed footballs". All of these things are the same, which is to say a football shaped shell of bulghur wheat, onion and ground meat of some sort, stuffed with more ground meat, spices, onions and nuts, and then fried to a golden brown. Though they turned out fine, they could have been much better. My notes follow:

1. My grandmother used to make these by pounding the meat, bulghur and onion by hand until it was a paste thick enough to make a shell. A food processor works great.

2. 1/2 cup of burghul for a half pound of meat does not make a proper shell in terms of flavor and color. I will up this to a full cup per half pound next time.

3. Seasoning, seasoning, seasoning. Kofte needs salt. Lots of salt. And other spices too (Query allspice, cinammon, clove?).

4. Do not be afraid of the deep fryer. Low temperatures do nothing for kofte.

Beacon

I've long meant to go to Beacon, mostly because the restaurant watching community in New York has a lot of respect for Waldy Malouf's food oriented, not over crowded, pleaser of a restaurant.  Part of the magic is the Thursday burger bar, and part of it is Malouf's kitchen counter Thursday night bacchanalian 12 course menu for a mere $98, but most of it is the fact that Beacon is a comfortable, happy restaurant churning out excellent food.  I loved my comfortable leather seat, I loved the spacious dining room overlooking the woodburning kitchen, and I especially loved my simple roast chicken and strong, bracing martini.  My fiancee's lobster salad was equally good, a full half of lobster set aside a number of roasted shrimp and delicate leaves. 

As we left, a tourist couple outside was looking at the menu and was wondering aloud if Beacon had only a prix fixe.  I assured them that there was a full menu inside.  They looked relieved, and then asked how much things cost.  "$27-41 for main courses, except for the burger", I said.  They winced, understandably, and then started walking along 56th street for what was likely to be a much inferior meal elsewhere.  Most places, I wouldn't have minded.  With Beacon, I wish I could have convinced them to go inside.

Maya

I awoke to a figurative fire drill at 4 am (ah, the joy of international law), so here I am at 5:45, things still smoldering.  It's as good an opportunity as any to blog about Maya, a haute mexican restaurant we ended up in Sunday night when I relied too much on the idea that everything is always open in New York, and thus left my fiancee and myself standing disconsolate outside a very closed Sushi Seki.  I was not in a good mood. 

I'm happy to report that the main courses at Maya, although a little dated (hey look, what we ate is mentioned in this old review from Ruth Reichl, who hasn't been the reviewer for the New York Times since 1999, I think) were terrific.  I have nothing but good things to say about my dark, mysteriously spicy, chicken mole, and her adobe chicken with warm pico de gallo was actually very tasty and just lively enough.   Of course, they could have been served at any time from 1984 to today without nary a change, but one doesn't always need innovation, even from restaurants who claim to be "modern".  

Dessert, however, plunged me back into despondency.  A mushy, cold tart, filled with tasteless almond (supposedly) cream, lashed with blueberry treacle? (Blueberries?  now?).  Just awful, inexcusable, glop. 

Maybe my judgment of the dessert is a little stilted, I think, because I was and still am in such an awful funk (see first sentence).  But then I think back to that pathetic, pale flour color circle, and the bland cream that wasn't even encompassed in the crust, almost sneaking shamefacedly away from a pie no one would want to hang around with.  Nope.  If anything, the fact that the mole was delicious probably made me better disposed to that awful dessert than I would have been.  It was bad. 

And yes, as the New York Times says, Maya is expensive.  Unlike many places, I cannot tell you why. 

Friday, thank god

I've had a terrible, wretched week at work, which was not made any better (surprisingly) by the knowledge that my analagous weeks in 2006/2007 were much, much worse. That is to say that I'd be equally stressed out, but also wouldn't sleep more than 2 hours a night. At least I've slept this week, I think to myself.



But it doesn't make it any better.

The chef recommends . . .

The topic over at Tom Sietsema's food chat is whether it's ok to ask a chef to change his or her food for you. My dashed off post is below:

Like other people, I think it depends. At an "important" restaurant, I would never change anything unless it literally makes me sick. I mean, what is the point of Minibar or Citronelle or Alinea or Per Se or French Laundry if you're going to micro-manage these people? The food is what it is. At a lesser place without grandiose aspirations, I think it's ok to change things (though I personally don't do it). No one is going to make a face if you want your Mcdonald's cheeseburger without ketchup. It's a distinction between gastronomy, I guess, and eating. The closer you get to the former, and the further from the latter, the less acceptable it is to monkey with the food.

Thinking more about it, I've come up with this informal taxonomy of the eating v. gastronomy spectrum. The dashed line roughly divides up where I think it's no longer ok to ask for substantial changes in the food. For reference, my views on Prune are here and Babbo here.

Corruption

The really pathetic thing about the extraordinary allegations of deep corruption against the Governor of Illinois, is that Governor Blagojevich was allegedly trying to sell the golden goose of the Senate seat at his disposal for a job paying a mere $250,000 - $300,000. Hasn't he heard of consulting companies, or lobbyists, or any one of fifty thousand places that might pay him such a non-princely sum (non-princely for a Governor, I mean) without trying to sell a Senate seat?

Butternut Squash custard and failed sous vide-y pork tenderloin

I'm not sure what to call this other than a custard, but in any case it is great with pork tenderloin. Simply roast an entire butternut squash in a 350 degree oven for about an hour and a half. Scoop out the flesh, and mix with two eggs, grated cheese, salt, pepper and mascarpone cheese (or, full fat greek yogurt). Pour into a pan, preferably a springform, and bake for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool a little (I ate it warm) and cut into pie slices before topping with grated ricotta salatta.

I wrapped the pork tenderloin into a tight sausage in plastic wrap, and tried to poach gently in the plastic, as set forth in the Alinea cookbook. I loved the result of wrapping the pork in the plastic in terms of getting a manageable shape out of a difficult cut to cook evenly, but the poaching didn't work especially. Instead, I pan roasted in butter, basting with butter constantly. It tasted great.

Birbiglia

I've liked Mike Birbiglia ever since I saw him with Jeremy a couple of years ago,  and I liked very much his performance of Sleepwalk with Me.  I associate myself completely with Jeremy's review of an earlier version of the show, except that Birbiglia didn't lose us when he admitted the bad thing (I assume we're both thinking about the same semi-fast food related item), and I thought that the last joke would be that his dad also saw the jackal. 

Anyway, highly recommended.  Even for $30. 

What I'm dreaming about cooking tomorrow before I leave for dinner

Butternut squash custard sprinkled with pancetta and cheese

Small fishes, filleted,  fried in extra virgin olive oil sitting on a mild curry sauce.

Finding a resy

Going out in New York is sometimes a little nervewracking.  We're headed to a comedy show tonight in the West Village, so I needed somewhere to eat.  The obvious place is Otto.  Booked solid.  So is Lupa.  Macao Trading Co. is too.  Kampuchea and the various Momofuku's are likely to be busy and don't take reservations.  John Dory is crushed.  I didn't like the Double Crown review from Bruni (an Asian-British fusion? Flurgh).  Anissa is booked. Little Owl is booked (when is it not?).  

Finally.  Anita Lo's Bar Q, blessed/cursed with a fairly tepid reading two stars from Bruni, and with otherwise decent reviews (Platt) from (Cuozzo) the secondary reviewers (Robert Sietsema hated it).  

Oh crap -just remodeled! Maybe that's why there was space. 

Cooking for friends

I don't often cook for friends. As I get older, I hope to do so more and more. Indeed, I've been thinking recently how nice it would be to get a low-key supper club together. There are problems with cooking for friends when one is used to cooking for oneself, or oneself and a girlfriend or fiancee. Of course, you need to be sensitive to likes and dislikes, though my friends have broad palates generally. But also, there's the simple matter of portion size. I'm afraid, especially because my second course went awry, that I left my guests hungry. Alas.

In any case, we started with small cannolis out of fried wonton wrappers and stuffed them with crab salad (crab, sour cream, lemon). The fried wonton wrappers were a triumph in terms of shape - I wrapped them around a wooden dowel and fried them on the dowel until done - otherwise they puff up and close the cavity. However, I filled them too early and they sogged on me. I also made baby roasted fingerling potatoes topped with sour cream and lox.

My second course was meant to be Blue Hill's soft boiled, deep fried, egg. This failed utterly, as I broke all the soft boiled eggs when I peeled them. So I got rid of the dish.

Dinner was pork short rib braciole, as per this recipe from Carmellini. It is a delicious and really perfect recipe even for a larger dinner party, as it can sit in the oven with literally no ill effects basically indefinitely. The pork shredded, the sauce reduced, the cheese, egg and parsley topping gave an interesting texture and flavor.

Dessert was my (i.e., Jacques Pepin's) apple galette, made with higher fat European butter. The tart has a propensity to leak, but it is always tasty. This is a reliable, workhorse dessert, equally good with pears or peaches.

Wine was this 2007 Oregon Willamette Valley Belle Vallee Pinot Noir. I think this was universally liked by all four of us. Fruity, yet with pinot noir ink.

Erg.

I realized I was going to come to terms with mediocrity back when I understood everything Paul Gowder was talking about in these two posts and could have given him a long and boring lecture on various lines of the Najdorf, and still never got past a 1450 chess rating.

Diet Coke

I stopped drinking diet Coke (or any Coke or Pepsi, for that matter) during my vacation to France this summer. My theory was, with some encouragement from a special someone, that it couldn't possibly be good to be drinking quite that many chemicals in such quantity, and in any case the overwhelming taste of sweet was probably ruining my palate for other more interesting uses (I would have two 20-ounce bottles a day).

It's now been about three months, and all I can say is that from a tangible standpoint, the results of my little self experiment are decidedly mixed. I certainly feel a little less jittery, since my caffeine intake is down (I also have two coffees a day). I can't say that I feel better or any more vital in any substantive way, except that I had a diet soda at a movie the other day, and found it unbearably sweet. I do think my ability to taste wine is somehow better - I'm still not going to taste plums or cherries or what have you, but I feel like I can pick up a little more subtlety now than before.

The experiment continues. Hopefully, the next thing is to cut out the splenda from the morning coffee.

Obama as Glass bead player

In all the hundreds of descriptions of Obama I've ever read, none fits him so well as this description of someone else, from Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (thanks to Amber's comments for the recommendation). So sayeth this lesser man, at least:

"A good many of Knecht's friends and later disciples envied him as remarkable men are always envied, not only for their greatness of soul and energy, but also for their seeming luck, their seeming preferment by destiny. The lesser man sees in the greater as much as he can see, and Joseph Knecht's career cannot help striking every observer as unusually brilliant, rapid, and seemingly effortless. . . . Nevertheless, there are outstanding men with whose lives "luck" is intimately bound up, even though that luck may consist merely in the fact that they and the task proper to their talents actually intersect on the plane of history and biography, and they are born neither too soon nor too late. Knecht seems to have been on of these. Thus his life, at least for a considerable part of the way, gives the impression that everything desirable simply fell into his lap."

Thanksgiving Dinner

A brief note on Thanksgiving dinner at the restaurant 2941 in suburban Virginia, which my family enjoyed very much. The amuse bouche was a risotto asiago fritter, which was satisfyingly crunchy. I followed that with seared Hudson Valley foie gras (am I the only person who enjoys the slightly less unctuous North American product more than true French foie?) with an apple and espresso sauce (puzzling but good). The main course for me was pan roasted artic char - although the fish was good, I'd eat the crispy, salty, skin instead of potato chips any day. My butternut squash puree (in reality, a small butternut squash tart) was tasty and simple, while we all enjoyed the after coffee macarons, pate de fruit, and warm lemon beignets. I chose a South African Kanonkop Pinotage 2005 to drink ($65 on menu, $25.99 online), which did a great job bridging the gap between my fish, my dad's turkey, and my sister's and fiancee's prime steak. If I was being picky, I'd say my father's pecan square with chantilly was too small a dessert, and the soaring, spacious dining room lets in a little too much chill wind. While leaving, I noticed a well thought out and tasty seeming children's menu - a touch that must have been a blessing to parents.

EDIT: I find people who refer to foie gras as "foie" really annoying, though I did it above, and thus presumably find myself really annoying.

St. Andrews

The New York Times has a nice story on my alma mater, among others, describing a supposed trend of Americans heading overseas for college. Much of what they say is true, and I'll say more as I think about it, but I will say now that spending four years at St. Andrews was one of the best experiences of my life, for many reasons.