What Will Oscar Eat?: Spring Greens Edition

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what will oscar eat?My cat Oscar has always had rather peculiar tastes for a feline. The smell of white beans has the same effect on him as catnip. In summer months, he answers to the nickname Tomato Slayer because of all the mornings we have woken to find heirlooms that have been rolled from a high shelf in the middle of the night and gruesomely mauled on the kitchen floor. If any sauce is left foolishly unattended on the stovetop, Oscar is sure to come slinking into the living room with a guilty little beard of it staining his white chin fur. And though all of these habits are exceedingly irritating, I won’t pretend that they don’t also fill me with a strange kind of pride: maybe my pet is special, a feline gastronome.

The boundaries of Oscar’s tastes have never been scientifically tested, however, and if my claims of his spectacular feline palate are to hold any water, they should be well documented. So I set up a little experiment with some salad greens to see if Oscar would demonstrate his omnivorous tendencies. Here are my scientific observations:

in the laboratory

With red leaf lettuce, baby spinach and kale spread out before him, the subject headed straight for the kale. (The researcher initially attributed this to the fact that it was the only organic number in the bunch, but then discarded this hypothesis after remembering that the subject has been known to eat the puke of other cats. The kale was also closest to the subject.) Continue reading →

Roger’s Grub Match Pick: St. Anselm

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roger's grub match pickAnd in this corner of the Grub Match ring, it’s Roger LaMarque (in the photo, he’s the one in the sweater). His pick is Saint Anselm, home of the Axe Handle Rib Eye and the Bourbon Brined Chop.  Here’s more from Roger:

You’re on death row and they’re warming up the chair—what’s your final meal? They warm up electric chairs? I guess something that would take a long time to arrive. The Indian joint near my house takes forever. I could get another appeal in.

What’s the single most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten? The most memorable meal would be my most recent one, since I have a terrible memory. And it was…er… Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Cold War Cola (1959)

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There is obviously a deep human desire for sweetness, and blackness (in your tummy, fool, Heaven forbid the other!), and a good swift jolt of the jitters.  Once upon a time, spices drove economies—and thus politics—but today we have Coca-Cola and its descendents.  Just over one billion cans of Coke are sold each day across the globe.  Short of North Korea and the Mongolian Steppes, you’d be hard pressed, I suspect, to find someone who hasn’t tasted it.  Coke is America’s ambassador; Wikipedia lists 52 non-Coke colas, all built on the Coke template.

Now, if you’re a country that wants no truck with The States, you’ve got to come up with your own competitor to sate your masses.  Iran has three native colas, including Parsi Cola and Zam Zam Cola, the latter of which was owned by Pepsi from its creation in 1954 until the Revolution in 1979.

The Well of Zamzam is located 66 feet from the Kaaba, that big granite cube that everyone on the Hajj circles.  In Islamic lore, it sprung up from the desert at the word from God when Abraham’s son Ishmael was crying from thirst.  In the 2000s, Mecca Cola emerged from the U.K. to compete with Zam Zam, and a fourth Muslim cola, Evoca, boasts as its secret ingredient black seed, of which Mohammed apparently said, “It is the cure for all diseases but death.”

Perhaps Vatican alchemists are working on the Gethsemane Gulp as I type. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Ocean of Loneliness Edition

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Ocean of LonelinessIn the interest of honesty, let me say that I was not in the best of moods when I arrived at the end of the B line in Brighton Beach, and I desperately needed a cup of coffee. But though I found a steaming vat of pierogis inside of a minute, a coffee shop was oddly difficult to locate. I started to feel keenly how little I knew about Russian food in general and this neighborhood in particular. Don’t the Russians drink coffee? Or tea or something? What are they doing with all those samovars in the Chekov stories?

Coffeeless, I ate half of a poppy seed pastry and felt a little better, so I headed to the boardwalk to put my new strategy into action. Since last week’s anxious canvassing of Flushing’s sidewalks did not do the trick, I had decided to advertise with a sign my intention of taking a stranger to lunch (see below). This lower impact approach would be perfect, I thought, and have the hungry hordes flocking to me in no time. Continue reading →

Community News: Big Government in Your Farmers Market

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Though few of us may stop to consider the fact, the modern farmers market is the true market of humanity.  The vast, fluorescent, all-in-one supermarkets where most of us buy our groceries are of a species only about 65-years-old.  They were born out of the boom of technology, cars, and suburbs that became the West’s reward for winning the Second World War.  They were a dramatic upheaval, and it’s a testament to their power that so many of us today see them as the default purveyor of food.

But the farmers market is the original market.  It’s the market that grew up along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.  It’s the market that still delivers the goods on most corners of Earth.  And—with a simple obviousness that should make us stop and consider just how marketing psychology and a buck have shaped America—it’s the market that provides poor people all over the world with good, healthy food.  Only in America are the poorest people the fattest.  Elsewhere, they pay their neighbors for vegetables picked this morning and a chicken killed last night.

But some unsung, heroic bureaucrats in D.C. are getting it together.  The Feds have committed $4 Million Dollars to equip the country’s 7,100 farmers markets with the apps and bandwidth to process food stamps.  Food stamps aren’t really stamps anymore, they are electronic credits distributed among a few acronymic programs like the EBT and WIC.  Right now, less than a quarter of those 7,100 markets are able to swipe plastic cards and send a series of digits zinging through wires to a database somewhere.  Enter Big Government and their aim to add another 4,000 markets to that list.  And enter a company named the Novo Dia Group that has developed an iPhone app to take the process wireless.

Continue reading →

Regulators’ Aggravators

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In honor of the death of the mighty Maurice Sendak, whose classic book In the Night Kitchen dared to include in one of its illustrated scenes the three-year-old hero’s wee penis, thus earning a ban in various pathetic circles, today’s feature contemplates banned foods.  There is nothing here as fantastic as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but we can nonetheless appreciate the process of changing sensibilities, gastronomic if not linguistic.

 

Jesus Rode an Eeyore, Not a Trigger

You’d have a hard time finding horse on any menus in the Western world these days (though I seem to recall an article in The Times a few years back trumpeting its inclusion among the quirky dishes served by a new restaurant debuting to some fanfare.)  In general, though, eating horse is taboo, just half-a-step away from eating a pooch.  Eating horse was a staple, however, for early Anglo-Saxon tribes, who surely relied on the animal to win battles, make clothes, and till earth.  Eating the horse was a way to honor its contribution to their human existence.  Popes Zachary and Gregory III consequently banned the practice in the 8th Century as a way to help eradicate pagan religious festivals.  The ban remains on the Vatican’s law books to this day, but President Obama signed into law a bill allowing the slaughter and consumption of horse meat last November.

Continue reading →

Monisha’s Grub Match Pick: Yerba Buena

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Monisha's Grub Match PickThe first contender in this month’s Grub Match is Monisha De La Rocha. Here’s a little about Monisha and her pick, cocktail haven Yerba Buena.

Do you have any food pet peeves? Many. Cold salads, cold butter that you can’t spread. The taste of burned garlic. Lemon juice from a bottle. Pre-grated parmesan cheese (wax, much!). Being served at a restaurant on a plate that’s clearly either just come out of the fridge or oven. Having my wine poured for me by my server the second my glass looks empty (I’m going to order a second bottle anyway, just let me drink in peace!).

Let’s pretend you’ve come into uncountable gobs of money—who do you hire as your personal chef? The truth is that if I had uncountable gobs of money, I’d quit my job and spend most of my time cooking each meal in my humungous Barn kitchen, and make all those things that require ridiculously expensive ingredients. I’d have every color and variation of salt, and I would think it made a difference in the food.

What is one item that is always in your refrigerator? An extra 4-stick box of unsalted butter. Butter makes everything better. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: A Death’s-Door Déjeuner (1995)

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The Ortolan is a songbird about as large as your thumb.  Its head is green-gray, and its song is slight.  It eats seeds.

The high class and sophisticated of Europe have been dining on Ortolan since Antiquity.  The traditional first step was to blind the bird with knives.  Current preparation is more humane.  The birds keep their eyes; they are instead shut into a tiny dark box.  The rest of the preparation is the same.

Its brain processing the dark as endless night, the songbird gorges on millet day after day.  It balloons 400%.  On the day of your dinner party, it is reprieved from its gluttony.  It is held down flapping into a bottle of Armagnac until it is drowned.

Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Stir-Fried Bed Linen Edition

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A free lunch really does exist, and I was walking the streets of Flushing, Queens recently, trying to hand it out. But I was having trouble finding any takers.

Allow me to explain. For our Friday series, Lunch at the End of the Line, I’m planning to ride one of the MTA subway trains to an unfamiliar stop and then offer to take a stranger to his or her favorite restaurant. As long as the place they have in mind is within walking distance of the train station and I, a longtime vegetarian, won’t go hungry there, I’ll pay for my lunch and up to ten dollars toward theirs.

But the good people off the Flushing-Main Street stop of the 7 train seemed skeptical. They were full of restaurant suggestions (including Szechwan Garden, a purportedly great place for spicy pork, and Nan Xiang, an excellent dumpling joint that I’ve actually been to before), but when I asked if they would accompany me, they began to avoid my eyes and find excuses. Continue reading →