Laura Bush speaking tonight on Larry King Live:
“Many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, uh, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everyone.”
Laura, I know what you mean. Most of the time, my house is very quiet. But of course, the COPS television crew just would have to show up each night after I’ve been sniffing glue and I’m beating my wife.
I blame the media.
Blow for beer as biofuels clean out barley.
The rapid expansion of biofuel production may be welcome news for environmentalists but for the world’s beer drinkers it could be a different story.
Strong demand for biofuel feedstocks such as corn, soyabeans and rapeseed is encouraging farmers to plant these crops instead of grains like barley, driving up prices.
Biodiesel is a sham. Junk science. Kunstler is right. Fuck biodiesel. Its false promises are enablers. We need to get away from using our cars and fooling ourselves that this easy-motoring society is our birthright.
IT’S TAKING AWAY OUR BEER GODDAMNIT.
Teacher faces 40 years because of Microsoft Internet Explorer? Dear God. Make it stop.
A note on Maggi. I commonly use this liquid MSG incubator when I eat things with rice or when I need something to soak my sandwiches.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. There are two types of Maggi. One looks like this:
…and is manufactured stateside. Notice the label, how they suggest that only a few drops will do. Yes, this is unnecessarily preachy. That is because we are America, a nanny state. We can’t be bothered to allow our citizens to exercise free choice and sentient will; we are sheeple that need to be prodded and poked, lectured and proselytized to. We consider commercials broadcast in the first half hour of the Super Bowl to be a cultural high water mark, and suburban strip malls overwhelming barometers of the prevailing zeitgeist when multiplied by the activity coefficients of a Starbucks and an I Sold It on Ebay franchise.
This is what the European version looks like:
This is the good stuff, and it costs twice as much as the stateside produced Maggi. Notice the much more subtle messaging.
The compelling argument to use just a couple dashes is buried on the side of the bottle. This is what a thousand years of intra-continental warfare, colonization and subjugation of foreign countries, religious and ethnic cleansing, genocide, and systematic classism gets you. You become a bit more laid back and the mommy message lives on the side label.
So is the imported Maggi worth it? My mom swears so, and I listen to my mommy.
I ate this all the time growing up. My mom would make a dozen of these, and my brothers and I would eat them over the course of a day or two. It was an easy, go-to meal in our household.
I suppose you can call this a version of the ubiquitous Egg Foo Young. It’s actually known as Trung Mam Hap, but this is my take on the steamed Vietnamese egg dish. That version is more like a cross between a Japanese omelette for sushi (tamago) and a soufflé. I’m not a huge fan of the texture of Trung Mam Hap — for me it’s too light and delicate. This is more substantial and savory, in my opinion. I have enough emasculation issues already.
Beat eggs in a bowl. Combine all ingredients (except eggs) in a separate, large mixing bowl. Pour eggs over meat mixture, and use your hands to really mix the shit together.
Pour out “batter” on preheated, oiled non-stick pan. Cover and cook over medium low for 5 minutes. Flip and repeat, uncovered.
I eat this with Maggi (the favored, potent, delivery vehicle of choice for MSG salt bombs) and steamed jasmine rice.
Via Serious Eats, the $14 hot dog.
The “Texas Haute Dog” at Max’s Wine Dive, the wildly popular new wine bar and restaurant on Washington Avenue, goes for $14. It’s a grass-fed beef frankfurter on a Kraftsmen bun, topped with “house-made” pickled jalapeños, venison chili, cotija cheese and crispy fried onions that look remarkably like the Durkees canned onions of green bean casserole fame. The dog is served on top of a pile of hand-cut frites (that’s French for French fries) that have been garnished with more venison chili.
“Haute Dog”. Get it? Har har. In Houston, of course, the land of defense contractors that routinely defraud the American people of billions of dollars. It would only make sense that’s where the $14 hot dog lives and breathes.
First of all, check out the photo. That thing is so monstrous it looks damn near inedible, thereby violating the axiom decreed by The Hot Dog Council that you should not take more than five bites to eat a hot dog.
Second of all, shut the fuck up.
Rats Run Wild in KFC-Taco Bell in N.Y.
Not sure why this is a problem. That’s sustainable, free-range meat.
MAX nutritive observation: last week, I boarded a MAX train headed for downtown, and a woman boarded at the next stop and sat across from me.
She proceeded to eat an entire Big Grab bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, which she chased with a soda. She then got up and shifted to a forward facing seat down a ways from me — perhaps she noticed me eyeing her suspiciously. She then proceeded to eat 3 consecutive Red Vines until I deboarded at my stop.
It was 7 AM.
SDF deploys perky mascot to boast cuddly image.
“Prince Pickles is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for,” said Defense Ministry official Shotaro Yanagi. “He’s our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery.”
Graham at the excellent noodlepie pulls together a very comprehensive anthology of Vietnamese food videos.
There is much activity in the Valley of the Dancing Bare.
The last couple months have seen the opening of North Portland branches of The Cup and Saucer and E-san Thai. I have yet to visit either, and although I don’t have any desire to dine at The Cup and Saucer, there does appear to be a wait every time I go past the joint, so apparently there’s a demand in the neighborhood for restaurants that serve food.
And after visiting the bank this weekend, as I biked down N. Denver with my daughter in tow, I noticed a new pizza joint is opening up/has opened (they are closed for lunch until next week). I forgot the name, but it looks somewhat promising. In addition to pizza, they have some standard Italian fare as well. There is a counter up front where you can get slices, but the place appears to snake into a dining room towards the back that is flanked by a FULL BAR(!). A decent place within biking distance to my house with a FULL BAR is always a good thing.
Also, next door is a liquor store that promises to open on President’s Day, obviously to honor this country’s fine tradition of lushes and drunkards who have occupied the White House (present company included).
And Kenton Station appears to be taking notice of their fancy new neighbors and revitalizing themselves (not knowing enough about the place…vitalizing?) as they proudly displayed a sign advertising a Fat Tuesday celebration sponsored by New Belgium replete with live music and everything.
The crusty feller who cut my hair at 7-Bucks-A-Whack (oh yes it is worth every dollar) claimed there are possible plans to tear up the entire stretch of Denver Avenue north of Lombard and repave the street with a median overflowing with decorative landscaping and wide sidewalks featuring benches that people can actually sit on. Upon conclusion of this public works project I would suspect Kenton gains serious cred as an entrepot of all things exciting and mysterious.
Holy OMFG. Via The Great Taco Hunt — World record pastor.
A group of businessmen in the Mexican city of Chihuahua broke a tasty record Friday, making a hunk of meat on a skewer big enough to serve 24,000 tacos….the meat for a pastor taco, a variety of the Mexican dish that consists of pork squashed onto a stake, weighed 3.9 tons and was 13 feet high…
Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records recognized the hunk of meat as the world’s “largest skewer of kebab meat.”
Where are they gonna get all the radishes? How come nobody told me about this? This was the Hajj of my lifetime. Oh well. Hello empty, meaningless life.
It is delicious on a hot summer’s day.
Dear God. The canned guffaw track really does makes something so horrifically bad seem even more so. Kinda like putting Miracle Whip on Jello Pudding Pop.
If there was any affirmation of the truism behind why the Right has Ted Nugent and the Left has Bob Dylan, this is it.
Drink’s big claim: It burns calories. “Skeptics don’t buy Coca-Cola, Nestlé green tea product.”
Sweet. Can’t wait to add it to my KFC, pork rinds and ranch dressing induction diet.
Tofu and egg fried rice topped with Maggi fried egg.
Banh cuon is a popular Vietnamese dish. There’s a restaurant in the Fubonn plaza, called Banh Cuon Tan Dinh, which, as you can guess, specializes in Banh Cuon. You could go there. They take credit cards and everything.
But here’s another tip for you: you can eat it at home as well, quite easily, for 1/3 the price. There’s a store on 99th and Prescott, called Hong Phat, and another on 65th and Sandy, Thanh Thao, that sell pre-made banh cuon. Don’t worry, all banh cuon is pre-made…you don’t whip up this dish on the spot. It’s a (slight) reheat and simple garnish effort, so as long as the banh cuon itself is of decent comport, you’ll be in a good spot as long as you’ve got your garnish act together. And it’s cheap…you can get nearly 3 servings out of a single to-go container.
First of all, what are banh cuon? Imagine it as a rice flour cannoli. Sheets of rice “pasta” or “crepe” are rolled around a filling consisting (usually) of seasoned and sauteed ground pork and wood ear mushrooms. The banh cuon are plated and typically topped with fried shallots, fresh herbs, blanched bean sprouts, and thin slices of cha lua (a fish sauce scented pork loaf, aka Vietnamese bologna). The whole plate is given a generous drink of nuoc cham, a Vietnamese condiment made with fish sauce (“nuoc mam”), chilies, sugar, lime juice, and often pickled garlic, and maybe dressed with some shredded carrots or even daikon.
The banh cuon themselves are rather labor intensive. I guess. My mom never made them much growing up, because one of her best friends was in business making Vietnamese specialties like banh cuon, bun bao, even her own cha lua, and selling them to the Vietnamese community (and a few Tucson area offices during lunch). This friend made amazing stuff, so what was the point in doing it yourself? So what I’m doing here, taking other people’s canvasses and coloring by numbers, is very much in the fine tradition of the Vietnamese-American experience. That, and marathon gambling, moth balls, yelling into phone handsets for no apparent reason, voting knee-jerkingly Republican, 2-foot spoilers on Nissan Sentras, drinking insane amounts of Hennessey, shaming your own children because their friend’s child graduated from UC Irvine with a BSEE in 2.5 years, harboring a healthy distrust of conventional FDIC-insured banking institutions, etc.
If you do want to make it yourself, here’s a very nice step-by-step post and wonderful photo gallery.
Hong Phat and Thanh Thao will give you the base banh cuon to work from. The sell these plastic to-go containers in their respective deli sections for only $5. One advantage of making them yourself: these are a bit on sparse end in terms of meat filling, so if you rolled your own you can be more generous. But since it’s only $5, they taste just fine, and I will be adding a generous helping of sliced meat topping, I’m not going to be a whiny ass titty baby about it.
Here are the toppings:
1. Bean sprouts. Blanch them in boiling water for about 10 seconds and then drain and shock them in an ice bath and then drain and set aside.
2. Cucumber. Peel, cut off the end, then score the blunt end three times, then slice thinly.
3. Cilantro. Chop up a bunch.
4. Mint (if you want to add that purplish mint and shiso then you’re well on your way in becoming the coolest person ever). Chop up a bunch, yeah?
5. Thai basil leaves (optional). I like it. Or not.
6. Fried shallots. You can do this yourself, or buy the dried stuff the sell on the shelves.
7. Nuoc cham sauce (recipe to follow).
8. Cha lua . Slice as thin as possible and then halve those thin slices.
First the cha lua. Most markets will sell this brand, sometimes in the freezer section. This will do, but Hong Phat has their own cha lua THAT IS DEEP FRIED. And this is the lean stuff, not the stuff with the strange, ringworm-type vein of organ fat running the length of the loaf. I’ll mention it once again, in case you missed it the first time. This cha lua IS DEEP FRIED.
Apparently, once it is DEEP FRIED, it magically takes on transformative taxonomical properties and becomes “cha chien”. Simply amazing.
For the sake of the scientific method, I present you the cross-section of THE DEEP FRIED cha chien.
So here’s the MO: plate the banh cuon. I would only use about 1/3 (or slightly more) of the portion you’ve just bought. Top with bean sprouts and tent with plastic wrap. Nuke in the microwave for 45 seconds.
Scatter a generous amount of cha lua on top. Top with herbs and shallots.
Spoon as much nuoc cham as you’d like — I won’t tell you how much because I’m not normal and eat way too much of this stuff. I don’t want to drag you into my world. I didn’t choose this life, and it isn’t for everyone. Ride the snake if you must.
Here’s an example of the work-in-progress. Notice the pool of nuoc cham at the bottom of the plate. After finishing the banh cuon, I will drink this. Don’t judge me. I’m not a role model.
Case in point: I don’t subject my daughter to the sauce. It’s not for everyone. She has the innocence of childhood to experience before she herself foments any vices.
Now for the nuoc cham recipe.
Funny story. Growing up, we called this “nuoc mam”, when in fact it is properly referred to as “nuoc cham”. I guess. This point was really hammered home one occasion when I saw Emeril Lagasse in 1997 on the Food Network (before Emeril Live when he became a circus freakshow) make lemongrass beef salad and he kept saying “nuoc CHAAAAHHHHHHM” over and over with a huge emphasis on “CHAM” with a long overextension of the “AAAAHHHHMMM” like he was a drunk Red Sox fan yelling “No-MAAAHHHH Garcia-PAH-AAAHHHHHH”.
We still called fish sauce (the uncut, bottled stuff) “nuoc mam” as well. But whether you referred to fish sauce or the prepared condiment depended on context, much like when the Republican Party says they are all about upholding the constitution. And at every Vietnamese restaurant I’ve been to, each time I ask for nuoc mam with my goi cuon, there has been no misunderstanding, so I don’t think this was peculiar to my household.
That was not a funny story at all.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to the “nuoc CHAAAAHHHHHHM”. One, which is my Mom’s style, is spicy, vibrant, full of sweet and sour and tangy. She’s from the south, so I think of it as “The Republic” sauce. Up in the north, as I understand it (and I admittedly lack advanced comprehension skills), they can be a bit more timid, and will maybe just cut fish sauce with a bit of water and sugar. That’s it. Commie red bastards.
Combine garlics, fresh chilis and ground chili in mortar and pound with a pestle. Transfer to a jar, and pour in wet ingredients. Halve the limes, and squeeze them into the jar. IMPORTANT! Don’t throw away that lime. Take a small paring knife and cut into the sections and get as much pulp sacs from the fruit itself. THIS IS IMPORTANT! I CANNOT STRESS IT ENOUGH.
Pour in sugar and stir until combined. Taste for sweetness, you might want to add some sugar to take the edge off.
This recipe scales incredibly well, and will keep a long time. I’ve been known to make a huge jar of the stuff and keep it in the back of my fridge. Usually I’ll time it so my batch of nuoc cham runs out just when my mom visits, and I’ll let her make the next industrial sized batch.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead, Wolf?
BLITZER: Yes, we’re going to — updating our viewers coming up shortly on…
CAFFERTY: I can’t wait for that.
BLITZER: … the mysterious circumstances surrounding that, Jack. Thank you.
Our society has officially bottomed out.
I see Kangaroo has resorted to ad hominem attacks on tofu.
Shameful, really.
And in keeping in the spirit of dirty political maneuvers, Kangaroo twists Tofu’s own words to against itself to mischaracterize its policies and positions.
And Kangaroo starts a whisper campaign about Tofu’s alleged effect on the size of the male member.
Really low, and baselessly dishonest. In the world of political theater, this kind of stunt has a friendly bedfellow in George Bush’s hijinks during the 2000 Republican South Carolina primary. There, you’ll recall, Bush operatives played the racist card by claiming John McCain fathered an illegitimate Bengali child. They also said his lovely wife was hooked on prescription painkillers and was batshit insane. Kangaroo’s slurs and slanders bear the imprimatur of Karl Rove.
And just as it worked in South Carolina, I see in early voting patterns these slanderous lies are having the same effect on Tofu.
Kangaroo has no substantive policies from which to position itself as THE ULTIMATE, so it is relying simply on the trading of rumors, innuendo, and specious attacks that hit below the belt (literally).
The only thing Kangaroo can claim for itself is that it is healthy? It really wants to pick a battle with Tofu on its own turf? The sophistry! The absurdity of ludicrousnessosity of that premise is so laughable that I’m laughing so hard right now that I fell out of my chair ouch that hurt oh well it was so ludicrous to it was so worth it the pain you know so ludicrous.
Let me recap: Tofu is THE ULTIMATE. Just ask Jim Rutz.
Kangaroo is a furry marsupial. People flock to zoos in order to pay homage to this noble creature. So cute, so furry, so not-delicious. Healthy? Who the fuck wants healthy meat? You can’t braise kangaroo short ribs for hours in a La Cruset with red wine and cipollini onions. Kangaroo is an also-ran. It shouldn’t be invited to the kiddie table, much less make it to main event.
Kangaroo has nothing to run on, except slander, lies, and an appeal to the basest fears and discriminatory evils that lurk within the darkest hearts of mankind. I compel you to repudiate this atavism, to defenestrate the shackles of thousands of years of oppression.
First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
The funny via Twitch @PortlandFood.org: Portland Barbie Dolls.
MIA:
EatDrinkandBeMerry goes on the fusion tip and imagines a world with Korean taco trucks.
What kind of world would that be? A better world. A better tomorrow.
Excuse me as I go into hyperbole mode, but this is THE BEST FREAKING FOOD INVENTION SINCE MSG.
For some reason, this tickles my fancy as very few things can. The ultimate in fusiony goodness — IMO the justification for the interracial relationships.
Mark this day on your calendar…the birth of the Korean taco.
The City of Boston collectively freaks the fuck out. Take a valium. Think happy thoughts. Marshmallows. Rainbows. Unicorns.
UPDATE: more from the AP.
Outside, they met reporters and television cameras and launched into a nonsensical discussion of hair styles of the 1970s. “What we really want to talk about today — it’s kind of important to some people — it’s haircuts of the 1970s,” Berdovsky said.
UPDATE II: Video of deliciously good agit-prop here.
Paraphrase: “Media…you are so lame.”