Category Archives: Features

Foods for the Agony and the Ecstasy

Posted on by
emotionalstrawberry

Is this strawberry purely happy? Or is there something else behind its smile?

This morning as I was running (or more accurately, as I was stumbling squelchily along in the extreme humidity), I was listening to a story on the Snap Judgment podcast. (By the way, if you don’t know Snap Judgment, stop reading this right now and go listen to some episodes. I’m serious. Go. Now.)  The story was about a song from the 1930s that was immensely popular, but was supposedly so unbearably sad that it was eventually banned on BBC Radio because of its links to cases of suicide. The song was called “Gloomy Sunday,” or, less formally, “The Hungarian Suicide Song.”

I should admit that I did not find the song unduly depressing, but I did find the idea intriguing. And it made me wonder: could a similar phenomenon be found in food? That is, could something you eat (independent of, say, your personal memories of that food) make you much happier or much sadder?

The internet is rife with lists and articles claiming to know the “Top Ten Foods That Will Make You Happier!!!!” I approached them with a great amount of skepticism, but was a little weirded out by how closely they mirrored my typical lunch choices. Suddenly, all of those tofu soups (relaxes the muscles) and avocado sandwiches (contains serotonin) made me feel like I might have a substance abuse problem. Incidentally, is this why I enjoy the company of my co-workers? Anyway, according to these lists, I am one spinach and walnut sandwich away from total bliss, so I decided to leave the cheering foods well enough alone and start looking for sad ones. Continue reading →

Driving-while-Drooling Road Trip Puzzle

Posted on by

Food-Road-SignIt’s Labor Day, everybody, your last chance for a summer road trip! And since (for me, at least), road trips go hand-in-hand with delicious local specialties, we’ve cooked up this little puzzle to test your knowledge of iconic dishes from specific cities. From the descriptions listed below, can you name the dish and the city with which it is most closely associated? Hint: if you’re in the continental U.S. right now, you could drive to any of these cities, though one would require a border crossing. A few of these are tricky, so if you manage to get ten out of twelve, consider yourself a road food champ.

  1. A crust pressed into a high-edged pan, filled with mozzarella cheese, chunky tomato sauce and toppings, and baked
  2. A French baguette stuffed with roast beef or fried seafood and dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickle and mayonnaise
  3. Shoestring fries topped with guacamole, sour cream, Cotija cheese and seared, chopped beef
  4. A particular kind of seafood, formed into a patty (often seasoned with Old Bay) and broiled, served with a lemon wedge and saltines
  5. A long roll (preferably an Amoroso roll) filled with thinly sliced beef and topped with provolone or Cheez Whiz
  6. An open-faced turkey and bacon sandwich, covered with Mornay cheese sauce and baked or broiled until brown
  7. Black-eyed peas mixed with diced vegetables in a vinegar-based sauce and usually served with tortilla chips
  8. French fries topped with fresh cheese curds and covered in brown gravy
  9. Buttered bread filled with roast pork, glazed ham, Swiss cheese and thinly sliced dill pickles, pressed and toasted in a plancha
  10. A cream-based soup prepared with potatoes, onion and a particular shellfish, but definitely no tomatoes
  11. Cubed red meat, deep-fried and served with toothpicks as utensils, with salt, hot sauce and crackers on the side
  12. A meat sauce spiced with cinnamon and allspice, served atop spaghetti and finished with finely shredded cheddar cheese, onions and kidney beans

Don’t scroll down or click Continue until you’re ready for the answers… Continue reading →

The Even-Movie-Characters-Gotta-Eat Puzzle

Posted on by
ratatouille

I fell asleep during this movie, so I didn’t use any quotes from it.

We haven’t had a puzzle around these parts for some time now, and since this is the season of free outdoor movies in New York (enabling me to see Sharknado for the first time last week–divine), how about a little silver screen brainteaser to send us all into the weekend? Name the movie from which each of these finger-lickin’ food quotes is taken. Be warned: some of these are tough nuts to crack. (I didn’t use “Take the cannoli,” or “I’ll have what she’s having,” because I respect you more than that.) For bonus points, name the actor and character who uttered each line.

  1. Lunch is for wimps.
  2. Yes, these crackles are made of synthetic goose and these giblets come from artificial squab and even these apples look fake, but at least they’ve got stars on them. I guess my point is, we’ll eat tonight, and we’ll eat together.
  3. Sometimes the spaghetti likes to be alone.
  4. But you know what does bother me? You know what makes me really sick to my stomach? It’s watching you stuff your face with those hotdogs! Nobody–I mean nobody–puts ketchup on a hot dog!
  5. And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris?
  6. Red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something.
  7. What’s tiramisu? Some woman is gonna want me to do it to her, and I’m not going to know what it is.
  8. When I was a lad I ate four dozen eggs / Ev’ry morning to help me get large / And now that I’m grown I eat five dozen eggs / So I’m roughly the size of a barge!
  9. Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke.
  10. Annie, there’s a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can’t get it out. This thing’s heavy. Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.

Don’t click Continue or scroll down until you’re ready for the answers.

Continue reading →

When Good Food Goes Rogue: Allergy Mysteries

Posted on by
peanut picture

I found this whimsical peanut shower by Lou Beach in the New York Times. Yes, that New York Times.

While visiting my homeland of Ohio this week, I learned that my youngest niece has developed an allergy to chestnuts. Chestnuts! Victorian open-fire roasting events and turkey-stuffing festivals will never be the same for her, that’s for sure. And then just a couple days later, my friend Dave was laid low (very low, sadly) in the middle of a wedding celebration due to his unfortunate exposure to pine nuts. It seems that everybody has an allergy to something these days, which begs the question—what exactly is going on here?

To be sure, food allergies are not a new phenomenon. Sir Thomas More implies in one of his books that King Richard III knowingly used an allergic reaction to strawberries to accuse one of his lords of poisoning him, and subsequently demanded his head on a platter. Yeesh. In more recent history, Bruce Lee, the martial arts star who may or may not have suffered from a family curse, died from an allergic reaction to aspirin.

But if you think that allergies seem like more of a problem now than they were, say, when you were a kid, you’d be right. Continue reading →

American Eats: Locavore Bonnaroo as Pop Community

Posted on by

IMG_1246Food is culture, that’s a given.  But what about food as pop culture?  Is there a second tier of American food, an equivalent of The Bay City Rollers occupying some déclassé rank beneath Flannery O’Connor, Mark Rothko, Paul Robeson?  And what do we do with that which is both, people like Chuck D. and Jack White, pizzas topped with baby arugula and farm-fresh cheese, hamburgers made of Kobe beef? Is the cuisine of the United States spread across the low- to middle- to high-brow?

At Bonnaroo this year, Mr. White twisted the universe into songs simultaneously brand new and immutably old, smudging all concepts of sonic social class out of existence.  The food for sale, however, presented a more complicated arrangement. You could at the beer stands spend seven bucks on a tallboy of Coors, but also spend eight on one of dozens of microbrews in the Broo’ers Festival tent. You could spend six bucks on a slice of pepperoni pizza or eight on a bowl of green veggie curry over rice.  Bonnaroo’s food, vastly more diverse than that of most public events of this size, included both the low- and middle-brow.

Except Bonnaroo is always trying something new, and this year a few lucky folks jumped on the festival’s first high-brow dining experience open to the general public. Bonnaroots, a four-course, farm-to-table dinner made entirely of ingredients sourced within 100 miles of the site, was a collaboration between the festival, Oxfam, and a non-profit named Eat for Equity. Eaters sat at long tables beneath an arbor while on a nearby stage a woman in a frog-green bodysuit played trumpet to the beat of a drummer with more hair than “Islands in the Stream”-era Dolly Parton. Cultural tiers converged. Continue reading →

The Way of the Mushroom

Posted on by

Found 'em!Here are two truths that I have come to realize. 1) There are people out there with a natural affinity for finding mushrooms. You will know these people when you happen upon them, because at some point in the conversation, they will not be able to control themselves, and they will tell you about the massive morel supply they scored the previous day. When they go hiking, they practically trip over puffballs and hen-of-the-woods. If physics allowed for the sparkle in their eye to be mushroom-shaped, it would be. 2) I am not one of these people.

this is not going to work.To explain how I learned this, we need to back up a step, to my birthday last month. My friend Mignon gave me a mushroom box from Back to the Roots, out of which you can grow your own delicious fungi. It was a lovely gift, and one that filled me with trepidation, since Jason and I had bungled a similar gift a couple years ago. Twice. But this one did feature smiling children, oohing and aahing over their mushrooms, on the back of the box, which boosted my confidence. I can do most, if not all, of the things a four-year-old can do. And yet, when I found myself balancing cat food cans in order to anchor a wobbly and submerged bag of peat, I had little hope that this experiment would actually work.

Enter my brush with some mushroom folk at Bonnaroo. Continue reading →

Wearing Your Food on Your Sleeve

Posted on by
banana guy

For those days when a t-shirt is simply not enough.

It’s been a slow blog week, dear readers, but I swear we have a good excuse. We were recovering from another fun year at Bonnaroo, where Jack White and Neutral Milk Hotel rocked my socks off. And while, sadly, the primitive skills guy was not there this year to impart his wisdom on mystical fox goodies, food was never far from my mind.

If there was one dominant theme in the t-shirts I saw people wearing at the festival, it was definitely…kittens. (Jason spotted two different kitten/Jaws poster spoofs, one that said Paws! and one that said Claws!). But taking a close second place were food-themed t-shirts of many flavors. And so today, let’s look at the ways you can let your foodie flag fly with your choice of garment. (I’ll link the photos to where you can buy these beauties, in case you want to bolster your summer wardrobe.)

Bonnaroo prides itself on its politically engaged audience. For instance, I saw a pretty awesome “Stand Up for Your Food” shirt at the festival, which I coveted but have not yet been able to find online. Anyway, why not make a statement with your tee, whether your opinions run toward supporting local farmers or force-feeding more geese?

TS-0804FRM-M-2FoodieShirts_GrowFood_1024x1024foie-2-large

Continue reading →

Tamarind Time Machine

Posted on by
tamarind tofu

I didn’t even have to squeeze anything out of a sock this time!

A lot of the time, my days in Cambodia feel very far away. Going through my old notebooks is like walking into a weird time portal, full of interviews with people I don’t remember (“Question: how long does it take you to paint a single tuk-tuk?”), odd to-do lists (“Find copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for Savuth”) and discarded lyrics for a comedic folk song entitled “All My Linga Wants Is Your Yoni” (funnier than it sounds, I swear).

But with the publication of this cool anthology, which includes some of my Cambodian musings, I was looking for a way to pay homage to and feel reconnected with the Kingdom of Wonder. That’s when I went hunting through my notes for the recipe for Tofu with Tamarind, Chili and Basil. I scored it while writing a weekly column for The Phnom Penh Post called The Learning Curve in which I would try to learn traditional Khmer pursuits and then make fun of myself while I bumbled my way through them. Looking back, I see that I must have irritated a lot of busy people while researching this column, but they tended to be unfailingly good-natured about it, and Oeurm Pav at Arun Restaurant was no exception.

But would I be able to remember enough about interviewing her to recreate my favorite Khmer dish? It was a long time ago, my notes were sketchy, and even in optimal conditions, I’m lazy about measurements. However, I was able to purchase tamarind paste in an Indian grocery store in Queens, whereas in Cambodia, I had to boil the tamarind and squeeze it through one of Jason’s socks for lack of a cheesecloth. Perhaps giving undue weight to this head start, I decided that I could just intuit my way through the rest of it. Continue reading →

School Lunches and Fomenters

Posted on by

I get a fair amount of prophomer foodaganda in my inbox.  One recent email trumpeted Congress: Don’t Gut School Lunch Standards and Damage our Children’s Health!   I learned there was a party-line vote to move forward in the House with a bill to provide more “flexibility” in applying the school lunch standards set by the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFK).

The death of a public good by a thousand, GOP-led cuts?  How much more zeitgeist’y can you get?  I was on it.

And then, well, I had to dig for the meat and potatoes of the situation.  And those meat and potatoes illustrate remarkably well a different contribution to the zeitgeist: folks barking in caps and exclamation points to rally the hoi polloi to post a rant, click send on a petition.

So the caps-&-!! email informed me that four years into the country’s current experiment in mandating healthy school lunches, Republicans seek to let schools opt out of applying those new health standards if their budgets are suffering as a result of implementing them. The School Nutrition Association, a professional group of school nutritionists, supports the idea; however, it also happens to be funded in part by food manufacturers like Domino’s.  But the National School Boards Association, a national federation of 95,000 school boards, supports it as well.  Hmmm.

It turns out the opt-out folks have some good points.  Continue reading →

My Darker Self, Buried within a Knish

Posted on by

“Okay, I’m really going to do it this time,” I whispered to Jason as he flipped through books on Brooklyn history with antiquated titles like Fire Laddies and Every Kind of Shipwork.

“Yep, you got this,” he told me. “Remember: spinach. Eye on the prize. Don’t get distracted by the lady with the pigtails.” He was right; the woman in question definitely had crazy in her eyes. I circled the table, trying out a stealthy, jaguar-like walk, and moved in for the kill.

knishbookcover-silverlauraWe had come not with the purpose of hunting, but of listening. Laura Silver, author of the new book Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, was giving a reading in the Brooklyn Collection of the library. The reading and the Q and A session did turn out to be fun; that woman seriously knows her knish. But I found it a little hard to concentrate, still flustered by the scene of primal competition that had gone down at the preceding wine and knish reception.

yonah schimmel

What was at stake (photo courtesy of the Village Voice)

If we can back up for a moment, I will try to explain why I was excited about this reception in the first place. It’s possible, if you are reading this from somewhere that is not New York, that you have not tasted a knish. I don’t think I knew what one was until I first moved here, and, walking friendless and hungry around Central Park, I pointed to a deep-fried little square on a hot dog cart and asked if it was vegetarian. I think I got laughed at, but I was rewarded for my humiliation with a greasy, mustard-drowned potato pastry. A street knish: not fine dining, but exactly what I needed in that moment. And later, I found the sublime, handmade knishes at Yonah Schimmel, mounds of mashed potato filling so substantial that the thin pouches of pastry can barely contain them. Every cuisine has its dumpling comfort food—the pierogi, the gyoza, the tamale, the ravioli—and the knish is among my favorites. Naturally, when I heard about the reception, I looked forward to the opportunity to commune with fellow knish-lovers and break potato with them.

So I was a little upset when the other attendees turned into a pack of slavering, ravenous wolves, stealing the free knishes right out from under me. Continue reading →