Category: General

I love my husband for many reasons, but one of the most recent is that he bought me this for my birthday. If you are in any way nerdy about either comics or Japanese food, you need to check out this manga series. Awesome!

This weekend we were at the All Balboa Weekend in Cleveland, which was wicked fun as usual. We did a lot of dancing, learned stuff, and made cool new friends, yay!
But the dark underside of all this sunny joy is the food one eats while at such an event. We brought some hardboiled eggs and some dried cherries and almonds, but that’s about all we could manage on short notice and without checking luggage. We had no car, so we were limited to what we could walk to in between classes, which was basically a Walgreens and a constellation of chain restaurants. There were lecture-style classes during lunch, so there wasn’t much option to go out for lunch if you were interested in the class topic.
We bought some Wonder Bread, Skippy Natural and Squeezable Smucker’s Strawberry at the Walgreens, so we could have PB+J for breakfasts along with the eggs. The PB had palm oil and sugar added to it, and the J had hi fructose corn syrup in it, and the squish bread was basically just a puffy cushion to keep the sticky stuff off your fingers. Between all the extra sugar and the total lack of fiber, these PBJs tasted OK but made us feel kind of icky. We supplemented with milk, eggs and/or that trail mix, but it wasn’t enough.
We ate hotel food, hot dogs and cold ham sandwiches for lunches, and one buffet breakfast of fruit, juice, pale “wheat” toast and bacon. Not much better, frankly, especially when one is dancing for hours on end burning calories like a maniac. The gala dinner buffet is just wretched, and I need to remember next year to email friends ahead of time and plan ahead to skip it and go out to the Thai place hidden away in the nearest strip mall instead.

And we ate at Red Robin, Gourmet Burgers and Spirits. I’d never been to one, so I wanted to try it out. Unfortunately it is one of those places encrusted with flair, desperately flailing to borrow character from advertisements and popular culture everywhere. Very nearly every worker in the building came over to ask us how everything was, and I am ashamed to say that the last guy got the full force of my Northeastern Bostonian reaction. My burger was pretty dry, despite chipotle mayo, onion strings, blue cheese and steak sauce, but tallasiandude’s was actually pretty good, being a plainer style and having egg and bacon on top. The bottomless (!) fries made me sad, because they were the thick steak-fry style and soggy to boot. Why do people like this style of fry? They are NOT GOOD. NOT GOOD, I am telling you. Sigh.
And then in the airport, I needed to eat a full meal so as not to feel barfy on the airplane, which meant that against my better judgement I ate a chicken quesadilla and a buffalo wing. There was supposed to be beans and corn, but there were about 5 of each wedged in with the vast chunks of spongy industrial chicken. I was full enough to fly safely, but I felt so nasty the rest of the night. I couldn’t even eat the delicious pea pod stems and dried scallop fried rice we bought on the way home from the airport.
The point of all this is to say that we both became highly aware of the way we felt physically after even a few meals of completely industrial, commonplace American food. My position on such things is primarily intellectual and hedonistic, generated from equal parts desire for maximum deliciousness and desire to have clean, healthy inputs. I am no food snob, I love me some Kraft dinner and flavor-crystal-encrusted potato chips. But usually I eat those things once and then revert right back to what I usually eat. This weekend there was no respite, just meal after meal of it, and it felt BAD.
It brought home the reality of the present food supply in America, and exactly why public health has gotten to the state it has. It wasn’t just my intellect aware of this, it was my whole body telling me that it was displeased with the fuel it was getting.
I have plenty of access to unquestionably good food, some of it from my own back yard. I have a car and enough money. I travel. That’s nice for me, and nice for the rest of the comfortable folks in Newton who love the farmer’s markets and Whole Foods. I’m glad my access to organic foods, especially meats, is increasing, but the real trick is getting actual FOOD into the hands of people who for whatever reason are trapped in the mainstream supply chain.
I should be able to buy unadulterated peanut butter in the Walgreens. I should be able to get vegetables and unantibiotic-ed beef at Red Robin. And the chicken in my gala hotel dinner should not have the texture of cotton balls.
This morning in my inbox I found a few different links about just this sort of subject. There’s a new movie out, Food, Inc., which hopefully will get a mainstream buzz like some of the global warming ones did a few years ago. Michael Pollan is making the rounds, and some legislation is being introduced focused on school lunches. And it’s these school lunch issues that are the scariest to me. I knew that there was a bunch of junk being served in cafeterias, and I knew that kids prefer junk foods, but I didn’t realize that the latter was at this point driving the former. I knew that kids didn’t know how vegetables grow or where hamburgers come from, but I didn’t realize they couldn’t recognize lasagne as something good to eat.
That’s TERRIFYING.

Sorry to have been AWOL for a while. We adopted 3 new kittykats and they’ve been keeping us busy! Two of them are fostered strays, and they’re taking a lot of time — it’s been a week, and our main victories have been getting them to eat and getting them to come out from under the chair for a few seconds at a time. The other one is a ball of fire, only 1.5 years old and still mostly kitten. As far as he is concerned, the Best Game EVAR is to chase the little wire+paper toy around and around and over and around the bed, until he’s panting and falls over. (I have never heard a cat pant like a dog before — it’s pretty damn funny, I have to say.)
The way all this relates to food is that little Mr. Ball-of-Fire also loves to eat. When he’s not playing, he’s crying in hopes we’ll give him some more food. But he’s a little bit, how should we say, well-upholstered already, and the shelter folks said we should put him on a diet to keep him healthy.
So we bought the light kibble, and we’re giving him only the amount it says for weight loss in a cat his size — which of course means he acts like we are starving him to death at all times. His bowl is always empty, because when food goes in, he macks it down as fast as he can. If we drink milk or eat something meaty, he’s all over that like white on rice.
And I totally feel his pain, because I know just how much dieting sucks when you love to eat.
But the one good thing about it is that by being in charge of keeping our little tons-of-fun on a diet is that it keeps me in mind of my own need to show a little restraint. And that coinciding with the onset of spring and the return of vegetables may just be good for me. Let’s hope so!

Thanks for all the dances. We’ll all miss you.

HOT DAMN. My crazy project has gone unexpectedly dark, and I have no work to speak of until it resumes, and so I have gotten permission from the powers that be to say YES YES HELL YES to tallasiandude’s plan to skip town and spend two weeks in Hawai’i starting immediately after our San Diego dance weekend.
Which means as of Thursday evening, we are outta here, suckers! YAY!
So, internet — if we were flying direct to Kaua’i, I would go immediately to Hamura’s for saimin… but we are going to O’ahu this time. Where does one go for the really good saimin treat in Honolulu?

I thought maybe I was doing a little better today, but after a sane breakfast (banana, plain yogurt, marmalade) and a sane lunch (baingan bhartha with rice and a hardboiled egg), and two small 15-minute naps, I still found myself today at 3:30 intolerably hungry.
I had some crostini crackers and chipotle hummus, which didn’t even make a dent. So I applied protein to the problem, in the form of some lovely cheddar cheese. Still not good enough! So I ate a big bunch more of those dark chocolate salty almonds, and that finally did the job.
It’s a little bit worrisome, but it really does feel like extra fuel is being requested in order to do repair work in there. The nap cravings reinforce that feeling. I do feel much better the last day or so, but clearly all is not entirely back to normal just yet.

So the last few weeks have been really gnarly with work, and the last few days, from about last Wednesday, have been one long endurance test of remarkably little sleep, remarkably high levels of anxiety, and one firedrill after another. But we got through it, and very successfully too, and now after two nights (in a row!) of more than 9 hours of sleep, I am starting to feel human again.
And I am musing on what exactly I have felt the need to eat the last couple of days. During the worst of it, while traveling and doing a big presentation to clients, I ate pretty healthy food and I think that helped a lot: congee with preserved eggs and pork, a cold salmon nicoise salad, good quality sushi, eggs and bacon and fruit. And omega-3 fish oil capsules have been helping me feel much more alert across the board the last couple of weeks, so that helped too.
Since I took a horrible early morning flight home, too early to get a decent breakfast EVEN IN A CASINO, I managed on a bottle of milk, a Zone bar, and a bottle of berry-based superfood-ish juice, and then gnawed my way through the last of my homemade Chex Mix on the plane to keep my mind off my bodily suffering. Coke Zero on the plane kept me lucid. Blargh.
When I got home, I drank a bunch of water, and then we had a pepperoni & mushroom pizza at Upper Crust. That hit the spot, and then I keeled over and slept for 11 hours.
Yesterday, I had a spinach & cheese omelet and some banana and orange sprinkled with cinnamon, and a big fat coffee. Dinner was rice and korean pickles and tofu and the last bits of beef soup broth. And then I was overcome by the need to eat chocolate: I had a bunch of those awesome dark chocolate almonds with salt.
That kept on this morning, when I capped off my rice, egg, furikake & pickles with the last bit of a Ritter Sport dark chocolate hazelnut bar.
Not sure what to make of that, really. But given what I have put my body through over the last week, I am going to give it whatever the hell it wants for another day or so. Then it’s back to normal, and hopefully with a nice sunny bit of springtime weather to go with it. That would be nice.

Normally, I adore everything about The Fatted Calf. All their meats are delectable, and I look forward to reading their newsletter even though it inspires dreadful, inconsolable longing, because it is such delightful food porn.
But lately, I’ve been rolling my eyes back into my head when I read those newsletters. And the reason is that they’ve been (goodnaturedly) complaining about the horrors of winter. Oh PLEASE. What a bunch of candy-ass whiners. I’m sorry, if you live anywhere that has a farmer’s market even in February, you have no grounds whatsoever to complain about winter. Ever.
Take this for example, from the newest newsletter:
“Indoor living starts to feel a little stale by the time March rolls around. I start to have hopes and dream of picnicking on less sodden ground. While the rain blows sideways, I think about cooking paella over an open fire at the beach instead of on our Weber in the freezing carport. And already, dressed in parka and galoshes I am gardening in short stretches between rain showers.”
Oh, the terrible sadness of having to cook on your carport Weber in March, and having to garden with a coat on. Listen, wusses, I dug my car out of 8 inches of snow YESTERDAY. Don’t talk to me about your suffering or the cold weather. I don’t get a fresh local vegetable around here until JUNE. SO SHUT IT.

I am not going to spoil anything, because I am sure lots of you have yet to watch the finale on your TiVo, but I will say that the winner is NOT the best chef of the crew by any measure. Technicality piled on technicality piled on bad luck piled on the producers’ need for Drama, and some of the strongest contenders were out well before their time. Feh. My only consolation is that it could have been worse.

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