Category: General

I have been struggling to eat often and well enough, though the meals when I have them have been pretty good. I didn’t realize just how much I rely on my kitchen. Funny story: my pal H packed me off to this empty apartment with a few things from her pantry, and I did one frenzied pass through a crappy supermarket (i had to pee REALLY bad; more on the crappiness of Dominick’s markets in another post). So with these paltry supplies and one skillet, I tried to figure out what I would make. I decided on a couple meals, one of which was a box of Goya rice, a can of octopus, and a can of ranchero sauce. I intended to cook this that night. But I went to see an apartment after work, and by the time I left there I was ravenous — and it’s an hour’s train ride way the fuck uptown to the apartment, and I knew I would be nauseous the whole way because I was hungry. So I looked for a taqueria for a quick bite, but what I found was a Cancun-style seafood place. And I bet you can see the punchline coming…. I ended up eating pulpo ranchero for dinner: rice with octopus in ranchero sauce. I didn’t even know this was a real dish, i was just trying to combine a set of random ingredients in the least weird way possible. Turns out it is in fact extremely tasty. *yay*
When I finally ended up making my version at home, it didn’t really stand up. The rice was fine, and the sauce was much spicier, but the pulpo tasted canned and the sauce was kind of eh. It’s food, but just barely. Oh well. I’m eating the rest of it mixed with some mexican chorizo and eggs, which is a great improvement. I have to stick to things that can be made in a single skillet, which is an interesting exercise that I am eager to conclude.
Screw it, we’ll talk supermarkets in this post. Dominick’s is just overpriced and has crap selection. In the ‘hood up north it caters to its primary demographic with packaged food and more packaged food, with not even a boneless breast of chicken to be found, while near work in the gallery district it caters to *its* primary demographic by being relentlessly yuppie, but the sort of yuppie who doesn’t ever cook. Blech. I went to a Jewel, in Wicker Park, which was better, but still expensive. This one was inhabited by hipster couples, some with infant, some without — oy vey. But at least there were reasonable things to buy. I had a much better time at the indy markets up on Devon, and I think I’m going to stick to the indies and to the occasional Whole Foods run, and only hit the big supermarkets when cornered. I guess Fuck Corporate Groceries is on to something, not just a personal experiment but a straight-up necessity.

in the Hasidic stretch. Heh.

Not particularly auspicious, but there it is. I moved off my friend’s couch and into her friends’ empty apartment way up in Rogers Park. My first night there, I tried to pirate someone’s wireless from the apartment, but no dice, so I ventured out to find an internet cafe. 8 or 9 really long, cold blocks later, schlepping my heavy-ass laptop, I finally found one, a Starbucks that was going to make me pay for a T-Mobile subscription. F that. By now I am one hungry, cranky little camper, but there has been nothing in the way of places to eat, which I find bizarre for a residential neighborhood. So I hump it back to the one place I did see, a Giordano’s pizzeria. And I vaguely realize, somewhere in my hindbrain, that this is a stuffed-pizza place, and is at least theoretically a Chicago specialty, so all is not lost. Unfortunately for me, Chicago stuffed pizza takes 30 minutes to hit your table. I talked to tallasiandude on the phone (sorry, i know talking on the phone in restaurants is really bad, but the place was nearly empty and I was really quiet, I promise) to stay distracted. The pizza was actually pretty good, with a nice crunchy outer crust and good sauce flavor and lots of cheese, kind of like an Uno’s pizza without all the extraneous grease. I’ve been eating the second half of the thing each morning for breakfast, one slice at a time in my empty, borrowed kitchen. It gets me through the hour-plus trip down to the office, whereupon I eat a supplemental breakfast. 🙂

While I’m on the topic of labelling, check out the ingredients list on this package we found in a supermarket in Chinatown a few weeks ago.

I guess they’re on the right track, at least.

Because of the FoodNerd, I spend a lot more time paying attention to what I’m buying at the store than I used to.
I look for organic products, the grain-fed/antibiotic-free meats, and while, for years, I’ve looked at the nutritional info on most of the packaged food that I buy (originally to check for fat, then sodium), now it’s all about trans fats — the partially hydrogenated oils that seem so pervasive in our food supply.
It’s really depressing to discover how many things we eat actually contain the stuff. I went through the candy bar aisle at Costco a while back looking for a cheaper alternative to the Balance bars and new Snickers marathon energy bars (which will run you almost a buck a pop), and just about everything had some kind of partially hydrogenated oil. (I ended up buying a large bag of peanut M&Ms.)
So, I had heard that several manufacturers were making the effort to take the trans fats out of their product lines (and adding a “trans fat” entry into the nutritional information table), so I’ve been dutifully checking the ingredients lists of some of my guiltier pleasures. Not much luck there.

Oreos? Trans fats.
Twinkies? Trans fats.
Doritos? Trans fats.

Now, here’s the rub: I’ve checked the ingredients list on a bag of Doritos before and was sad to have to put the bag back when I hit the partially hydrogenated something-or-other. (replaced by a bag of Tostitos — ingredients: corn, oil, salt.) So, how psyched am I when I notice the words “no trans fats” on the label on my most recent trip to the ‘Co? And I turn the bag around and halfway down the ingredients list, I see it again: partially hydrogenated blahbity-blah. Then I look at the nutrition label:

trans fats 0g

Um…
Now I’m wondering if I’m confused about what trans fats are. So I check the web when I get home. Ok, partially hydrogenated oils are trans fats… what gives?
Then I get to Frito-Lay’s page:

– The list below provides you with many choices of Frito-Lay snacks that contain zero grams of trans fat per serving. In some of our seasonings, there are trace amounts of partially hydrogenated oils, but in all cases, the amount of trans fat is so small that it is considered dietarily insignificant by the FDA, or equal to 0 grams of trans fat for the FDA labeling regulations.

At this point, I’m wondering what the exact wording on the bag was.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but to me, zero means, well, zero. As in none. nada. zip. It’s misleading, and saying that the FDA considers it “equal to 0 grams” sounds as stupid to me as the “Indiana Pi bill” that tried to legislate the value of pi.
But I guess that’s just how my brain works.
Given that I’m already making a concession in buying the Shawr’s/Stah Mahket oatmeal raisin cookies (because, well, they’re just too damn good), I can probably manage to eat a few Doritos without coming to harm. (Or at least, not any more harm that I’m already bringing upon myself.)
But I can still be annoyed.

H & J let me tag along to a dinner party given by their friends D & T, and for this I am intensely grateful, because not only are D & T nice people, they give a hell of a dinner party. D was the chef, and he did three courses, all beautifully plated (readers of this blog will recall my frustration the last time I tried a plated dinner for guests) and utterly delicious. I bow before his greatness.
The starter was a creamy corn and potato soup, with chives and some sort of spicy heat, either curry or cayenne or a touch of both. He followed this with a monster pork chop, brined in bourbon, salt, honey and mustard, and grilled, with sage and a pile of caramelized onions. This brine gave the pork a smoky, sweet, salty flavor almost like ham, with a fabulous crispy exterior and a moist flavorful interior. The last course was a salad that I am definitely going to steal: watercress, matchstick raw beets and carrots, red onion, and a dressing of toasted pecans, dijon mustard, honey, salt, sherry vinegar, fresh thyme, and a tiny bit of oil. Completely fantastic, a wonderful mix of complementary sweet, earthy, nutty and peppery flavors. He said the recipe came from the second Union Square cookbook, which on the strength of this recipe alone I may have to buy.
A delightful meal, and a wonderful start to my social life in Chicago. 🙂

My friend gave me some old magazines because she knows I’ll read anything about food — there were some Food & Wines (including the one I read on a plane and copied out a dozen recipes by hand because I was extra bored and they sounded good), and some Vegetarian Times. Now, I am no vegetarian but I have friends who are, and I can see how it might be appealing for a variety of reasons, so I try not to be a bigot about it. But this magazine SUCKS.
First of all, the nutrition is horrible: a meal of pasta with tomato-eggplant sauce is not “balanced perfectly” by a green salad and breadsticks. A recipe for pad thai has no protein whatsoever, neither eggs nor tofu. A committed vegetarian or vegan is going to need better than this to stay healthy.
Some of the recipes sound okay — a curried red lentil & coconut milk soup for instance — but most of them are pathetically boring. A reader-featured recipe is a dish of sauteed onion & red pepper braised with a can of white beans. As if a vegetarian with a week’s worth of experience in the kitchen couldn’t come up with that one. Please. The best recipes seem to be the ones cribbed from the cookbooks being pimped in “feature” articles.
And finally, the editorial is pretty poor. One article used the phrase “rein in” at least twice, and misspelled it “reign in” both times. That is just bone ignorance, and there are droves of competent copyeditors who would love the chance to work at a magazine; hire one, for heaven’s sake. And I do wonder what articles on yoga and living simply have to do with anything about vegetarianism. It’s more like this is a pamphlet for earnest crunchy wanna-bes who aren’t quite sure how to get started.
When I compare this with the things that I find on vegetarians’ blogs, like www.tinyfork.com (which I would link to if the site was up), there’s no contest. I didn’t even notice Fae was vegetarian until she mentioned it, because all her recipes sounded so yummy. No matter what you eat or don’t eat, there is no excuse for crappy food and poor nutrition, and magazines like this one are a scandal.

When the foodstuff itself is used as a marketing medium, something is horribly, HORRIBLY wrong. *shudder*

This cat will not touch bits of chicken or pork from our plate, and doesn’t like cheese or milk. What he does like, though, is starch. He licks the crumbs left on the plate from your sandwich. And just now, we were finishing up some seafood noodles, and offered him a bit of surimi. He licked it and turned away. But when we offered a bit of the noodle, he sucked it right down. He is a very odd kitty. But adorable.

um, so yeah: foodnerd is moving to chicago for a new job. This is exciting but also very scary, because tallasiandude is unfortunately staying in boston. 🙁 So if anybody knows of someone nice who needs a roommate in chicago, and wouldn’t mind living with a foodslut, let me know. You can email me at foodnerd -at- paisleysky -dot- net. I’ll be back and forth between the two cities periodically, so you’ll be getting double your money’s worth. Or something. *grin*