Category: General

and Helen Hill would hate the very fact of my saying so.
I went to college with a lot of really cool, interesting, smart, crazy people, and being a part of that community was one of the best experiences of my life. Helen was one of them, and so was her husband Paul. I have always thought of the two of them as the most genuinely good, kind, loving and creative people I have ever met, and it pleased me immensely that they fell in love and got married.
Someone broke into their house and killed her last week. They shot Paul too, but he lived through it, protecting their son. How Paul will make his way after this I don’t have any idea, but if anyone can it is him. I don’t know what else to say, but I will try to come up with something so that he knows my thoughts and love are with him.
Any world where this is possible is bad. Worth living in, and filled with good and wonderful things, but at its foundation bad. Please find your loved ones, right now, even the ones you haven’t seen or talked to in many years, and tell them you love them. Those people you think of fondly every so often but never see any more, look them up and write them a letter. Do something good for someone you’ve never met. Make contact. Fight the badness.
What happened: http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/16386330.htm
Helen’s family & friends & how to donate to Doctors Without Borders in her name: http://www.helenhill.org/

hi everybody — sorry to be so absent. I’d been whining about being too busy and too stressed in my sporadic posts on this site, and what happened was that it all caught up with me. I had what I suppose is a minor nervous breakdown, inasmuch as I lost my cool and quit my job, and just generally stopped functioning properly for a while.
While in the midst of an insane 4 month run of unceasing work stress, I got engaged, planned to move back to Boston, and bought a house — and those are just the good things, I’m leaving out the bad things like sick kittykats — all of which generally turns my life upside down and which I really didn’t have time or energy to actually participate in. Which is pretty uncool.
So I quit my job and threw all the cards up into the air. As it turns out, I’m not really quit, since I’ve agreed to work less than half-time for the next 3 months, in order to keep my big stressful insane project on track for success, since a) there’s no one else available, and b) despite copious amounts of specification documentation, apparently I have invaluable project knowledge in my li’l ol’ brain. We will decide after the 3 months are up whether or not I still want to quit, but at least I will have some time in which to live my actual life as it’s transpiring.
So perhaps in between moving, and fixing up two houses, one to live in and one to sell, and finally living with my fiance for a wacky change of pace, I may be able to find a little time to tell y’all about my lunch at Frontera Grill with spleen, and my dinner at Marigold with C, and this year’s thanksgiving extravaganza, and hell, all that great chinese food i was eating in california way back when. Stay tuned.

OK, i have been yelled at before for spoiling Top Chef in posts here, but i think this one is safe enough.
I am so tired of the fine-dining chefs on that show whining every time they get a challenge that is centered on “low food,” for lack of a better term: comfort food, TGIFridays, bar snacks for poker players, whatever. Last night, almost all of them would not shut up about how adrift they were, how completely clueless about what to do — and though a couple of them came up with things that were at least tasty and interesting, far too many of them bungled their dishes completely.
I mean, come on — if you can cook at that level, you had better be able to turn out a decent plate of something at home, for your friends, with one hand tied behind your back. If you don’t have that basic ability to cook food that tastes good, what in the blinding hell business do you have in a 4-star kitchen? (And conversely, in what universe do they live, where nothing is worth eating that doesn’t come from Joel Robuchon or Alain Ducasse?)
This was the thing that struck me most about my stupendously inventive dinner at Alinea, about which I *swear* I will write soon: all those absurd, whimsical, virtuosic tour-de-force things that came to the table suspended from a pin, every last one of them was perfectly cooked and utterly, magnificently delicious. Just because you are a brilliant fine-dining genius artiste does not let you off the hook of giving me something tasty to eat. It may be art, but it is still food.
I have my two picks for who it’s gonna be this time around on Top Chef. Anyone wanna guess?

As I read more in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, particularly the Grass section I’ve just finished about both corporate organic and extremely local intensively managed not-government-approved-but-might-as-well-be organic farms, the concept arises that local food is perhaps even more important in the fight for safe clean food than organic is. Local production by its very definition cannot be subverted into an industrialized machine, with the universe of sins that come as part and parcel of that industrialization. I have been thinking a lot about what this means in my own life.
Bottom line, I am going to keep doing what I am doing, going to farmers’ markets whenever I can, growing my own vegetables and herbs, and supplementing that with organic from whatever supermarket I can get to, and generally doing the best I can. I will try harder to buy local, though, because the figures on how much petroleum is burned growing and transporting food to me are appalling (one quarter of america’s petroleum use, if I remember the figure correctly, go to food production and transport?).
But here is the other thought that came out of this: If getting food and other goods locally is the most effective way to fight or at least circumvent the industrial food machine — and all its foreign-oil, agribusiness, big-box, gene modification and chemical allies — then isn’t devoting time to the production and gathering of local food an intensely political act? And if that’s true, it isn’t just the farmers who are politicized. Isn’t devoting time to “traditional” housewifery activities such as cooking, preserving, & gardening now even more overtly a deliberate political act in this attempt to improve the world? (Even sewing and crafts start to fall into this view of the world, if by so doing you thwart globalization and fossil fuel use.)
I think that hardline old school feminists really ought to put that one in their pipe and smoke it. The debate goes back and forth, who is most righteous, the mommies or the careerists, and most of the arguments are subjective. This view of local food strikes me as a pretty rock-solid argument for the mommies — which I suppose I am, even with a full-time technology job and without any kids, considering how much cooking and crafting I do and wish I could do. Really it seems to boil down to a couple of things: what do you enjoy doing with your time? and what are your economic politics?
The worry for me, though, is what about those of us, men and women, without the time, inclination or know-how to eat local in any meaningful way? It’s all very easy for me to say, considering that the same way men are reputed to think about sex every 17 seconds, I think about food at least as much, and cook far more than is warranted for a career girl living alone in a city.
How can we help the not-so-food-obsessed make the eat-local thing work?

hi everyone, sorry i haven’t been posting. Was at dance camp for a week — woot! — and am back in Chicago for less than 24 hours to drop off some luggage & make sure the house hasn’t burned down, then I am back to Cupertino for another week. There are some posts about Chinese food in Silicon Valley, with more fodder coming up soon, for sure a Chinese Muslim place in Milpitas, and a few other odds and ends, though none from camp, since the food there is borderline school-cafeteria quality, at best. We mack down a ton of it anyway, since we are burning calories at an insane rate, but it is hardly up to standards. Alas. So stay tuned — hopefully i will have time for a few posts while I am in CA.

Remember all those sausages I got for the big summer party? Well, I grilled ’em up to wild approval, but we didn’t even come close to eating all of them. This was a year of somewhat lower attendance at the party, which happens some years, and we were stocked up for the fullest of onslaughts. So I gave some away, tallasiandude and I ate a few meals’ worth of sausage, and froze the rest.

The ones we did eat were awesome. My favorite was the Hungarian wieners with garlic and paprika — they were juicy and savory with all those spices. The smoked Italians were a big hit with partygoers, and they *were* rather good, just a touch smoky on top of the usual Italian spices. I ended up somehow with an extra five pound box of the veal brats, so it’s a good thing they are tasty, mild, white li’l guys. And the fresh brats cooked in beer disappeared in the blink of an eye. Garlic knockwurst and chive-studded bockwursts, just as good as last year.

from an email my dear friend B sent to me on his return from a trip last week — this was just too utterly perfect not to share.
“We just returned from a fabulous week in Nova Scotia, at the hunting lodge of a friend, who bought a couple square miles of pristine northern wilderness there last summer.
We thought of you often during the week, because we ate things like Finnan Haddie made with beautiful fresh smoked haddock from the neighbor

It is 5:30pm here in Chicago, and it is over 100F outside. Heat index is 107F. This is RETARDED. Make it stop.

It is so disgustingly hot and humid here in Chicago, I can’t bear it. I went out in the dark of the evening, barely even around the corner to Damen & North, and even still, I was so uncomfortable on my way home that I opened the door to my house swearing, stripped down to my underwear and immediately ate some frozen cherry juice slush. Once I could stand to be near myself again, I took a shower. And I swear, I am not going outside my air conditioned apartment again until it’s sane again out there.

I am such a total freak. I just got a shipment from Penzey’s Spices today, and the freebie they threw in was a sample of Country French Vinaigrette mix, which is a blend of salt, sugar, mustard, herbs and pepper. I put a little in my palm to taste it. And then I put a lot in my palm and licked it off for a snack. It’s like the best flavor crystals ever, without all that annoying potato chip to get in the way.