A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue. (NY Times)

They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.

The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who styles himself Supreme Commander (Supreme for short) when he’s presiding over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In return, he handed each one a single berry from his jacket pocket.

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

I don’t know what the big deal is. I’ve been using this for years, whenever I’m about to toss somebody’s salad.

Thursday, May 29th | No comments

Meat

• 1 amount of Meat (pork shoulder strips, beef strips, chicken, but in long, thin strips)
• Many stalks of lemon grass, trimmed on both ends, out leaves peeled, and minced like a muthafuck
• 1 knob of galangal, peeled, julienned finely and pounded in a mortar
• 1 small knob of ginger, peeled, julienned, and pounded in a mortar
• Many cloves of garlic, peeled, and pounded in a mortar
• A few thai bird chilies, stems removed, and pounded in mortar

Oh yeah, you need a mortar.

• Stalk of green onions, coursely chopped
• Tablespoon(s)ish of turmeric
• Tablespoon(s)ish of sesame oil
• Tablespoon(s)ish of fish sauce
• Teaspoon or less ground coriander

Mix meat and marinade ingredients together. Allow to sit for a few hours or overnight. Soak wooden bamboo skewers (if using) for an hour in water.

Pork.

Beef.

Chicken. Etc.

“Thread” the meat onto the skewer The surface area of each piece of meat should pierce the end of the skewer at least three times.

Grill.

Peanut Sauce

• 2 thai minced bird chilies
• 1 stalk of lemon grass (de-nubbed and green tops snipped), finely minced
• 1 tablespoon minced ginger
• 1 clove minced garlic
• 4 kaffir lime leaves
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 teaspoon fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric
• 7 tablespoons natural creamy peanut butter (no sugar)
• 1/2 cup pounded (from a mortar) peanuts

Some people would say if you don’t use whole roasted peanuts and grind them yourself you’re a poser, but those people are most likely elitist egomaniacs and effete, latte-sipping Massachusetts liberals. My mom used Jiffy (or whatever corporate peanut butter that was on hand). A good choice is a natural brand that has no added sugar, and you can add sweetness yourself to taste (and the coconut milk lends sweetness as well). If you were really serious, though, you could go to New Seasons or the hippy aisle at Fred Meyer and grind fresh peanuts (which actually doesn’t sound that hard when I consider it), which would gain my admiration.

You could also experiment with the chunkiness factor, but mixing the ratio of creamy to chunky peanut butter. I would advise going against a pure chunky peanut butter, but that’s just a personal taste. For me, the right amount texture is achieved with a smash of a small handful of peanuts in the mortar, adding to the sauce at the end.

Heat a small amount of peanut oil in a saucepan. Add chilies, lemon grass, garlic, ginger and lime leaves, and sautee at high heat for a minute or two. Add coconut milk, fish sauce, turmeric and sugar, and bring to a boil.

Reduce heat to lowest setting and let steep for 5-10 minutes.

Remove lime leaves. Add peanut butter, crank up the heat, and start stirring. Stir constantly until the peanut butter is completely incorporated, and sauce starts to boil. Reduce heat to lowest possible setting and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Watch out as the sauce can erupt and will bubble and possibly shoot hot projectiles of peanut sauce in the air like molten lava.

When the sauce is thick, it’s ready to serve. Garnish with chopped peanuts.

Wednesday, May 28th | No comments

I’ve noticed the Internets have given rise to a virulent and intense sense of self-entitlement vis-à-vis receiving adequate service at a restaurant…or really at most service-related establishments.

For instance (even if a waiter is slammed), if you aren’t appropriated the attention you think you are so special to deserve, that means you’ve been slighted as if somebody held your mouth open and peed down your throat.

Sunday, May 25th | No comments

My friend Onna informed me some time ago she actually was bored one day and ordered a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie after seeing an informercial on televion. She said it sat on her kitchen counter for a few years, and she never used it. I took it off her hands, and she even shipped it all the way from L.A. That was very kind of her. It was a gesture of sorts for all the times she’d drove down (when I lived in San Diego) and I’d make her tom yum soup. I suppose she could have found a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, but that’s besides the point.

As you can see, she wasn’t lying—she hadn’t even bothered to turn it on.

The Showtime came with these handling gloves, which doubles as safety equipment if happen to work in the field of asbestos removal.

Here’s the timing guidelines. I figured I would follow these in the spirit of the original infomercial ¹.

The chicken turned out pretty well. It was slathered in a paste made from pureed garlic and shallots, smoked paprika, lemon juice, olive oil, thyme, sea salt, pepper.

What I did next was create a slurry to marinade a lovely leg of lamb I purchased from Costco. Now, this was Australian lamb, which is the lamb they sell at Costco. I have no clue to the provenance of this lamb. I was not friends with it, we did not play cribbage together on Sunday afternoons or spoon while watching You’ve Got Mail on the USA Network. I don’t know if this lamb led an honorable life building miniature windmill power farms, or what it scored on the SATs, or even if the animal was properly instructed in the practices of bikram yoga.

Since it was Australian lamb, I assume it wasn’t local.

My slurry consisted of a shitload of garlic, a few branches of rosemary from my bush, coarse sea salt, coarse black pepper, olive oil, the juice of a lemon, a few splashes of red wine vinegar and…Maggi! All of the solid ingredients were mashed together in a mortar, followed by the liquid components.

I used this insanely phallic injection device provided by the Ronco corporation to inject the marinade deep into the flesh. I then lathered the remaining marinade all over the roast. It was all very distrubing.

I put it back in the fridge to chill for a few hours while I drank and pondered the enormity of what I was about to do.

Let’s roll, bitches.

The thing has a switch for rotating that operates independently of the heating unit. The heating unit tends to get really, really fucking majorly hot. It needs to constantly rotate. If the rotary pauses mid-rotation and sits still for more than even a couple minutes, it will really sear the flesh. You’ll think—like I did originally—that you’ll be fine by just “setting and forgetting”, however, with as much concentrated heat being given off, you’ll have to kill the heat continually and set it to rotation-only in order to not burn your roast’s exterior.

After I constantly reset the rotation/heat, I realized I really wasn’t “forgetting” after “setting”, and thus a general distrust of Ronco Enterprises began to foment within the paranoid back alleys of my mind. Could their cook time guidelines also be misadvertised? It wasn’t as if there was an internal temperature guage that I could monitor—the Showtime is binary. Either really fucking hot, or off. And I was already an hour or more in. I tried looking for my meat thermometer. Why didn’t I find that before I started? I pulled the roast and let it sit.

As you can see, it came out well-done. A ruined piece of post-consumer waste recycled cardboard. I’m not going be the fall guy for this shit. I watched the infomercial.

Fuck you, Ron Popeil. You’re an asshole. If I ever witness your sorry botoxed template around my neck of the woods, I’ll bust a fucking cap in your ass.

¹The fine print in the user’s manual actually informs you that you should monitor the unit when you’re cooking it. But the entire informercial was based on the catch phrase, “Set it and forget it!”. Throughout the course of the entire hour, Ron Popeil himself continually compels the crowd to chant this incantation over and over. He pumps the crowd into a mad frenzy, each member whipped into an agitated froth, and cultivates such a shaman-like persona you’d think he was a method actor cast in an Oliver Stone movie.

Sunday, May 25th | No comments

The Japanese Iron Chef really was a rare, deliciously over-the-top spectacle.

Iron Chef America—I’ve just now realized for some reason—really is pretty fucking stupid.

Also, does anybody remember Version 1.0, aka Iron Chef USA? The chairman was William Shatner, Todd English was the Iron Chef, and Kerry Simon was the first challenger. Maybe it didn’t happen, and was just a hallucination.

Saturday, May 24th | 2 comments

Peckish at PFD has posted that Hmart will be coming to Tigard (99W, south of the 217). They will open June 6th.

Think Uwajimaya, with a Korean focus.

LTH thread that discusses the HMart in Chicago.

Here’s a blog post about the food court at the Vancouver (B.C.) Hmart.

Saturday, May 24th | No comments

I got a letter from the government, the other day. I opened and read it, it said they were suckers…who gave me $600!!!

I bought six pounds of jamón ibérico from from these guys and made a couple Hawaiian pizzas (turned out ok, needed more pineapple and ranch).

What did you do with your rebate check from Uncle Sam?

Thursday, May 22nd | 7 comments

Caterers find eco-standards tough to chew. (Denver Post)

Caterers praise the committee and the city for their green ambitions, but some say they’re baffled by parts of the RFP.

“I think it’s a great idea for our community and our environment. The question is, how practical is it?” asks Nick Agro, the owner of Whirled Peas Catering in Commerce City. “We all want to source locally, but we’re in Colorado. The growing season is short. It’s dry here. And I question the feasibility of that.”
Agro’s biggest worry is price. Using organic and local products hikes the costs.

“There is going to be sticker shock when those bids start coming in,” he says. “I’ll cook anything, but I’ve had clients who have approached me about all-organic menus, and then they see the organic stuff pretty much doubles your price.”

…

Joanne Katz, owner of Three Tomatoes Catering in Denver, cheers the committee’s environmental aspirations and is eager to get involved with the convention, but she wonders if some of the choices the committee is making are really green.

Compostable products, such as forks and knives made from corn starch, are often imported from Asia, delivered to the U.S. in fuel-consuming ships. But some U.S. products are made from recyclable pressed paper. Which decision is more environmentally sound?

Tuesday, May 20th | No comments

Tomorrow is primary election day here in Oregon. Well, if you’re like most people, you’ve already voted as you received your ballot in the mail weeks ago. Me? I like to wait out the entire campaign cycle before dropping my ballot at a drop box location—which for me this year is the Capitol Hill Library. (This library incidentally currently has a “Graphic Novel” section featuring three compendiums of Peter Bagge’s Hate, as well as an Arcade Fire album, and noise canceling earphones joined to the computers that cause my daughter to yell “I want a new one!” at the top or her lungs because she’s unable to modulate her own pitch).

One of my reasons behind waiting until the last minute, other than sheer laziness¹, is so I can be sufficiently assaulted by the full ad cycles from each candidate. Take, for instance, the Democratic primary for the opportunity to take on Gordon Smith (R-Pendleton) for the right to represent Oregon in the U.S. Senate.

To this point I had been on the fence. The two candidates are Jeff Merkley, who is currently the speaker of the Oregon House, and firebrand lawyer Steve Novick. Both seem like perfectly fine candidates. Merkley seems the more conventional candidate, with a fine resume of legislative service at the state level, while Novick has made a name for himself as an environmental lawyer who took on big pollution.

Gordon Smith, the two-term incumbent that one of these Democratic upstarts hopes to unseat, is your standard-issue, right-wing rubber stamper. However, his well-coiffed affability and perceived centrist demeanor gives him a bit of crossover appeal and has allowed him to serve two terms in the U.S. Senate representing what is ostensibly seen as a Democratic state. Part of his appeal, as you can clearly see below…

…is due in large part to his hair. Look at that lid. You’d be hard pressed to find another elder statesman in either chamber of the U.S. Congress with such marvelous hair (this includes the three recent Democratic House special election winners). One can easily get lost in his wavy browns. It is mesmerizing, and literally exudes gravitas. Smith is like the Samson of American politics; if you were to shave his head, he would literally cease to be a politician.

With this in mind, Merkley would appear as the safer bet, and conventional wisdom would decree that he matches up in the general with Gordon Smith. If you compare the photos of Merkley and Novick on their websites you’ll see Merkley’s smile featured prominently, a blissful grin that says “life is good, I’m a good person, I am generally satisfied with my life and my place in the world.” Novick’s smirk, on the other hand, says “I know you’re fucking your secretary.”

And, if you don’t already know, Novick is also a 4′9″ impish troll. And he has no left hand. Instead, he has a steel hook.

However, Novick is so resourceful that he makes all of this work to his advantage. You can’t help but like the guy and his non-conformist gumption. He has a mean streak, and he’s shown he’s not afraid to “stick it to the man”, whomever he or she may be or whatever power vacuum is being currently usurped.

But in recent weeks, up until tonight, the one thing that has swung the pendulum to Novick’s side has been television advertising. Not Novick’s, but Merkley’s².

Exhibit A: one Merkley ad, which ran quite frequently, took Novick to task for trashing fellow Democrats. The irony was lost on Merkley, apparently, but this is politics. However, the quotes attributed to Novick were ripped from his off-the-cuff blog posts, and were taken largely out of context. This kinda pissed me off. I mean, if somebody took direct quotes from this blog, such as Rush Limbaugh “…is a fat, disgusting drug addict. He is a hypocrite, an unfortunate scion of pent up rage, unrequited hatred, and inordinate hubris…He is a wheezing, decrepit, decaying piece of rotting maggot filth…” or that Sandra Lee “…must either a) be fucking some exec at the Food Network or b) have a photo of the same exec in bed with a dead hooker or a live boy…” or simply, “Fuck you, Dick Cheney”, and attributed them directly to me, they’d be a) somewhat disingenuous, and b) entirely accurate.

Fair enough, but then tonight I saw another ad with Merkley and his daughter. Pimping your daughter out is one thing, however, I really don’t care about that (she’s only 11 or something and for all I know her dad is threatening to delete her MySpace profile), but the real crime was the ad used the font Comic Sans MS.

And for that reason, the official Guilty Carnivore Endorsement for Democrat for U.S. Senate goes to Mr. Steve Novick. Sir, now that you will ride my ringing endorsement to a primary victory, may I suggest your first course of action once the general campaign commences is to do something, anything, to demonize Gordon Smith’s hair. Perhaps a whisper campaign, that when it was a young buzzcut it was educated in a madrassa, or that it hangs out in the airport restroom.

¹A bonus for not mailing your ballot early during a hotly contested presidential primary, I’ve discovered for the first time ever, is that each candidate will call you often. Just yesterday, the a campaign called me to ask if they could count on my vote for Hillary Clinton, who apparently is still in the race.

With all the calls, you start to feel good about yourself, like you’re a hot commodity, with many courters. Then it gets kinda weird and feels more like stalking, which in itself is not unwelcome, either.

²It should be noted that Gordon Smith himself is on the air, as well, but with two potential opposing candidates running neck-in-neck, the gist of his commercials has been “One of these guys is a total dick.”

======POST-ELECTION UPDATE======

…and Steve Novick…lost. But, in the sage words of one Bret Michaels, every rose has its thorn: the Republican candidate for the open U.S. congressional seat in my district will be the abortionist who threw cocaine-fueled sex parties on his yacht (allegedly). Happy day!

Monday, May 19th | No comments

It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to parody shit these days. (Link to some batshit insane woman who fashions herself an Ayn Rand-ian deep thinker).

Sunday, May 18th | 1 comment

Chicago Overturns Foie Gras Ban. (NY Times)

Wednesday, May 14th | 1 comment

Government asks court to block wider testing for mad cow. (AP/Yahoo! News)

The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

Monday, May 12th | 1 comment

I just watched famed magic act (and Las Vegas stalwart) Penn and Teller perform their “act” on David Letterman.

I’ve been more entertained watching my beagle throw up on our new carpet.

Friday, May 9th | 1 comment

Chef wants to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. (Reuters)

Celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay said restaurants should be fined if they serve out-of-season fruit and vegetables.

“I don’t want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home-grown,” he said after raising his concerns with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

“Fruit and veg should be seasonal. Chefs should be fined if they don’t have ingredients in season on their menu,” he told the BBC on Friday.

Ramsay, whose London restaurants include Petrus and The Savoy Grill, said Britain had become a nation of lazy eaters who followed trends and fads rather than substance.

“There should be stringent laws, licensing laws, to make sure produce is only used in season and season only,” he added.

Punishment should include having to watch the same Hell’s Kitchen episode on a continuous loop for 72 hours.

Friday, May 9th | No comments

We’ve heard this before. (In-N-Out to PDX? thread @PortlandFood.org)

Tuesday, May 6th | No comments

Déjà Vu Dining. (NY Times)

Summary: “Elitists” visit the chain restaurants of the suburban hinterlands; discover the natives are bitter and cling to their Bloomin’ Onions and fried potato skins.

Monday, May 5th | 2 comments

Saturday, May 3rd | No comments

I encourage everybody to check out Kirk’s dispatches from Vietnam, which are now being showcased at his most excellent blog.

Friday, May 2nd | 1 comment

All salmon fishing banned on West Coast.

Salmon fishing was banned along the West Coast for the first time in 160 years Thursday, a decision that is expected to have a devastating economic impact on fishermen, dozens of businesses, tourism and boating.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez immediately declared a commercial fishery disaster, opening the door for Congress to appropriate money for anyone who will be economically harmed.

The closure of commercial and recreational fishing for chinook salmon in the ocean off California and most of Oregon was announced by the National Marine Fishery Service.

It followed the recommendation last month of the Pacific Fishery Management Council after the catastrophic disappearance of California’s fabled fall run of the pink fish popularly known as king salmon.

It is the first total closure since commercial fishing started in the Bay Area in 1848.

Friday, May 2nd | 2 comments