Archive for the 'Food' Category

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02
Mar
07

Heaven with White and Red Sauce

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, My Favorite Things and New York
Tags: ,

If you’re looking for a quick chicken fix without the side of rat droppings, run, don’t walk, to the 7, E, F, G, R or V train (but for the love of Mike, don’t run in the station) and head east into Queens. I can sum up gastronomic bliss in two words: Sammy’s Halal. This food cart on 73rd and Queens Boulevard in Jackson Heights is the winner of the 2006 Vendy Award. There is some discussion on Chowhound.com as to whether it is part of a group of Sammy’s Halal carts also found in Midtown and Astoria, and no one has offered a precise analysis as to how one compares with another, but for my money, after having visited the one in Jackson Heights, I have no reason to stray. He’ll have a small crowd gathered at his window. But it’s well worth a 10-minute wait. For five bucks you get a big polystyrene container with heaps of basmati rice, grilled seasoned chicken and a little bit of side salad. Get the white sauce and the spicy sauce. Mix it all up: Heaven.

Jackson Heights, long known for the amazing variety and quality of its cuisine, is lucky to have this guy.

Listen for yourself:

Incidentally, another of the five 2006 Vendy finalists, the Arepa Lady, is also in Jackson Heights, a bit further down Roosevelt Avenue. I haven’t found an arepa yet that blows my hair back, but maybe I’ll give her a go.

18
Jan
07

Mmm, Jurors…

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Dumb, Food and New York
Tags: , ,

The most valuable thing I learned today at jury duty is to never throw away my lunch voluntarily.

It’s my first time ever on jury duty. I reported this morning at 8:30 in Jamaica Center and noticed immediately signs posted all over the entrance to the courthouse: “NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THIS BUILDING.”

I took a quick few gulps of the bottle of water I was carrying and tossed it in a nearby trashcan.

Now, I had packed a lunch this morning. In fact, doing so, coupled with the disorienting break in my routine, had nearly made me late to the courthouse. I briefly considered stashing certain pieces of it in my coat pockets, but I thought better of it, in view of the x-ray machines. They’d find it anyway. Rather than be the dummy who didn’t read the signs in the eyes of the security guards, I thought it better to dispose of it altogether. So I dropped my perfect, neatly packed brown bag into the can. Thunk! A bagel with cream cheese, celery sticks, four Oreo cookies, a banana and an orange — wasted.

For much of the day afterward, I was completely distracted, you might say “obsessed,” in retrospect by this decision.

  1. I hate throwing away food on principle. For me, it’s a question of morality. I eat all leftovers. I clean my plate.

  2. I was almost late to court for making the damn thing in the first place.

  3. The kicker: On the other side of the security checkpoint, people blithely strolled around with McDonalds and bagels and coffee and bags of this and that as if there had been no signs.

So, not only did I feel totally morally compromised, I also felt stupid for throwing money away and being duped by a completely fake rule. To boot, rather than scold these rampant food-carryers, the officer who gave us all our instructions told us that we could leave to get food at any time — and bring it back to the juror lounge! We just couldn’t bring glass bottles in. Whoop-ti-do.

So, what were those signs for?

I hate them.

Apparently the security guards don’t take them seriously, either: One such sign had been amended with a piece of paper, a Sharpie and some scotch tape to read: “NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THIS BUILDING — EXCEPT JURORS.”

So, I bought myself a lunch across the street later on. And rather than bring it inside the building, I sat outside on a slab of granite and ate it there. It was 20 degrees outside, but it was actually rather pleasant in the sun when the wind died down.

14
Sep
06

R.I.P., Oddfellows

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, Gay, Minneapolis, My Favorite Things and Sad
Tags: ,


[oddfellowsrestaurant.com]

My favorite restaurant in all the world was a darling little number in Northeast Minneapolis. (“was” … It hurts just saying that.) It was attached to a gay bar called Boom! under the same ownership. I just learned that the venerable gay-owned Oddfellows closed down on the 10th and Boom! will pull up stakes later this month, which makes me very, very sad. Some heteros got in on the “Nordeast” economic boom and bought them out, I guess.

Oddfellows always claimed it wasn’t a “gay restaurant,” which I found to be a.) usually inaccurate given the clientel, and b.) irrelevant and a slightly off-putting designation.

However, their chow was magnificent. The menu changed every season and was always fresh. Oddfellows described its food as “Contemporary American Cuisine with an ‘odd’ twist of flavors from around the world.” (Read the description here, before their Web site completely disappears.) Their orange-lacquered pork tenderloin was one of the finest dishes on earth. And I once had a lavender-infused custard dessert there that nearly made me mess my pants. Oddfellows taught me to appreciate excellent gourmet food in human-sized (read: non-Applebee’s) portions, and to not be so uptight about a high restaurant bill — as long as it’s worth it. And it always was.

The inimitable Dara Moskowitz of the alternative news and arts weekly CityPages predicted upon its opening that it would become a “big destination restaurant.”

 
The shingle soon to be removed.
[oddfellowsrestaurant.com]

The restaurant and bar occupied a historic building (c. 1891), the meeting lodge of the Independent Order of Oddfellows. Lots of exposed brick and holes in the wall where heavy timber floor joices once inserted. The high pressed-tin ceiling throughout was cool. The blonde woodwork was a little bit too “Target” for my taste, and the stainless steel bar felt a little cold to me. But it was always clean and bright.

I’ll miss that place. Lots of anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine’s Days and impromptu “fancy” dinners out.

As for Boom!, I can take it or leave it. As a bar, it was not remarkable. The burgers were fantastic, and the fries were tasty (both were from the Oddfellows kitchen), but the drinks were too pricey and it was famously impossible to get a bartender’s attention on a busy night.

The one thing that impressed me about it (besides its Nordeast location — I lived in the neighborhood) is that it was the first gay bar I had seen in the Twin Cities that had enormous windows that were not blackened out or boarded up. It left the ‘mos inside exposed to the blue collar and the sunlight. To me it represented a proud declaration that Minneapolis’ queers would not be kept underground and in the dark.

Oh, how I used to love standing in front of those wide-open windows on Showtunes Night, belting out “Nothing Dirty Goin’ On” from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, being gay and free.

29
Aug
06

Alarm

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, Gross, Health and Me
Tags: , , ,

There are plenty of unpleasant ways to wake up, nevermind that most of the time waking up is unpleasant on its face.

One can be shaken awake or startled into consciousness by an alarm or a bell or a loud clock or a gunshot — depending on one’s neighborhood. One can be temporarily blinded by the sun through a drawn curtain. One can fall out of bed to a hard, cold floor below. One can be aurally assaulted by barnyard creatures. One can be woken by a restless bed partner or a carelessly noisy roommate.

Or, one can be woken up as I was today.

I was wrenched to sudden, desperate consciousness at 5:40 a.m. when I threw up in my mouth and began to choke. Huck! Gasp! Kack!, I said — Huck! Gasp! Kack! — Huck! Gasp! Kack! Seriously, I could not catch my breath. I was scared awake more than anything else. Could I have suffocated on my own vomit? What a crappy way to go. I had exactly two thoughts at that moment: 1.) This is like the first five minutes of a Six Feet Under episode; and 2.) Don’t wake Jeff!

When I could finally breathe, I realized how gross it all was and spent the next few minutes desperately trying to clean my mouth out.

Then I enjoyed a delightful assortment of chewable, fruit-flavored antacid tablets for breakfast before retiring to the couch.

No more pizza at 1 a.m.

09
Aug
06

All This for a Bagel?

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food and New York
Tags:

It’s amazing what you can get for a buck on the Lower East Side: a toasted bagel with butter, a banana, and an earful of conspiracy theory.

A guy ordering a few slices of American cheese from the deli nearby struck up a conversatin with me out of nowhere.

“Did you see that Al Gore movie? What’s it called?” he said.

“An Inconvenient Truth,” I said. “No, I haven’t seen it yet.”

He said he just loved it — “It’s so scary, because it’s all true” — and all but made me promise that I would see it at th earliest opportunity. I assured him I would. And I do plan to.

Then he asked me about another documentary, something called Loose Change, which I had not heard of. Many of my lefty friends have, I’m sure. Probably I’m just not paying enough attentinon.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “It’s great. It explains how 9/11 was entirely set up by the government. It’ll knock your socks off! It goes through point by point and says how it was all set up.”

I was incredulous. Was a New Yorker actually suggesting that 9/11 was a government setup? Aren’t we past all of this five years later?

“It’s very convenient,” he continued, “that the only plane that didn’t make it was the one that was supposed to hit the White House.”

I can understand the frustration with our government. As he put it a moment later: “I tell you, I wish it had hit the White House. I’d like to bomb the White House. Take care of all of ’em at once.”

Nevermind that “all of ’em” don’t all work there.

I can even forgive an off-hand wish to see the neocons — gulp — eliminated. But to honestly believe that 9/11 is an elaborate construction of a government that has shown itself over the course of five and a half years to be, at best, incompetent, you’d have to be crazy or just uneducated. It’s just not in the realm of possibility, from what I can see.

“Thank god for term limits,” is all I could think to say.

There’s a good Wikipedia entry on the movie. In its objective, just-the-facts-ma’am way, it sort of debunks the movie by default. Loose Change sounds like a piece of crap. It was made by three guys with $2,000 and laptop using other people’s footage and logically misleading tactics.

I feel funny linking to a Wikipedia entry when Wikipedia is one of the sources cited by the filmmakers, a source which, as explained in the entry itself, is not entirely reliable enough to back up allegations as serious as those in Loose Change. So, how can it be reliable enough to debunk it, right? Well, it has a lot of reputable annotations. Seems good enough to me.

One of them, Screw Loose Change, is blog with a pretty comprehensive collection of debunkery.

Anyway, after revealing his dreams of decapitating the American government, the guy shifted the conversation to big business and Ken Lay. He mentioned a movie called Enron: Where did your Money Go?, or something, playing at some local cinema, as well as a few others I don’t remember. He went on and on about white collar crime and the persecution of the poor and middle classes… Halliburton… bla bla bla… much of which, in the cases of the big scandals, is probably true.

The shop owner, in a futile attempt to save me, tried to wave him off. “Leave him alone. Leave the pooor guy alone!”

I certainly wasn’t doing anything to save myself. Why am I so nice to strangers? I didn’t want to argue with him, but I didn’t want to indulge him either.

Then he veered over to The Media and of course the insidious desire to lie to the public and cover up all the Truth exposed by these messianic amateur filmmakers. He told me I should listen to WBAI, which is not controlled by corporate sponsorship, if I wanted to know the truth. Maybe it is good, but should I go by this guy’s endorsement?

Meanwhile, my bagel was getting cold.

People who live in the United States — which is not the panacea of democracy it wants to be, but which is obviously better than a great many other places in the world, arguably most — are free to criticize the motivations of government and big business. That’s fine. Hooray for democracy: You can wish George W. Bush dead and not get arrested.

But if you think the dark forces of government and big business are as oppressive and dangerous and ravenous as he seems to believe, if you’re that freaked out about the world, how can you wake up and just go about your work like normal every day? If what he thinks is true is really true, I’d be either terrified to the point of suicide or fighting mad. I wouldn’t be wasting my time in the deli telling some guy who works in the neighborhood to watch some documentaries. I’d be on the next boat out of here.

But, oh… he was so smug. He knew it all. He was so safe and above it, and we were all duped. I suppose just before Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, the executives of the New York Times and Andrew Fastow merge and absorb the ghost of Ken Lay to assume their true form as an unspeakably grotesque leviathan, sent here by unseen forces to destroy the world, this guy and the rest of the Believers will be rescued by a passing fleet of space ships and whisked away to an alien civilization where milk doesn’t go sour and flowers don’t wilt.

Maybe I have more faith in the rest of the world outside of Washington to know better than a few guys with a couple thousand dollars and a laptop what’s going on in America. But maybe I’m just naïve.

09
Aug
06

Eating. Why?

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, Strangers Observed and TV
Tags: ,

Eating is bizarre.

Earlier today I couldn’t take my eyes off a guy with a Baskin Robbins sundae sitting across from me on the bus. Over and over I watched him cut his pink plastic spoon through the whipped cream into the stubborn hard-pack chocolate ice cream below, hack out a small nugget (testing the limits of the flimsy spoon) and carry it to his mouth. He’d close his lips around the spoon, pull it out and start again. Maybe the next time a tendril of strawberry would hang over the edge of the spoon, and he’d have to open wider or give it a bit more action with the tongue. As the sundae melted, the whole process got messier. But he attacked that sundae with determination and rhythm, pausing for breath and to check the street signs — rarely, because he was transfixed by the ice cream.

Here was a grown, fit man, eating a sundae. Totally ordinary. But, briefly, utterly captivating. It wasn’t sexy or funny like food can sometimes be. It was just a guy eating ice cream. But it struck me how silly the whole thing was — this process of carrying food to our stomachs — junk food especially — only to have it passed through, digested and dropped back out again hours later. The whole fact of eating seemed to me in that moment to be just a weird waste of time.

Why chew? Why break it up into small pieces? Why put it in a cup or bowl? On a plate? With matching utensils and napkins? Why cook and prepare it? Why transport it great distances? I wonder why we don’t simply take the raw ingredients and put them directly into our bodies. Why this activity called eating?

I guess, it’s because we absolutely need to fill our minutes with sensation.

People so often invest so much attention in what they are eating. How often have I watched someone stare at a bagel with cream cheese, lift it to her wide-open mouth, clamp down, smear her cheeks with goo, chew madly while wiping her face, then stare at the bagel again? Or blow across the rim of a polystyrene cup, gazing into space as the waves of coffee lap the far edge? What are we looking at?

Maybe we’re watching the steam rise. Maybe we’re looking at the shapes our teeth make or the layers of colors in a sandwich. Maybe we’re looking at the ice cream melt against the spoon or the saliva freeze to the stainless steel. Maybe we’re watching the butter glisten in a bowl of peas or the oil dribble from a slice of pizza. Maybe we’re looking at the holes in the bread or wondering about what grows from a sesame seed.

Who knows. But whatever we’re doing, it seems to me to be an extremely introverted and self-indulgent practice.

Eating is a function of the body no more glamorous than sleeping, crying, sweating, farting, burping, bleeding. Truth be told, chewing is only a few steps away from shitting.

There’s a scene in My So-Called Life, in which Angela says in one of her voice-over monologues, “I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother. It just means too much to her. I mean, if you start to think about, like, chewing, what it really is, how people just do it, like, in public.”

She seems not to complete the thought, but even then I knew exactly what she meant.

And she’s right: We — sensible, boring people, that is — don’t have sex in public. We don’t pee in public. Eating is kind of gross. It’s kind of personal. What in the world are we doing with a sundae on a bus?

05
Jun
06

Cold Pizza

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food
Tags: ,

There is nothing better than cold pizza for breakfast on a Monday.

16
Apr
06

Getting Culture

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, Health and Me
Tags: , ,

I’m breaking my rule. This is about me. Or, rather, a very specific part of me.

The human mouth is a teeming cesspool of shit.

Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, viruses: It’s a real party in there. A constantly moist 95° F. A rainforest of microorganisms, if you like. And what we eat, they eat.

The more than 100 species of bacteria, and hundreds of species of fungi, protozoa, and viruses that have taken up residence in our mouths is difficult to fathom. Microbiologists estimate that, in addition to these known species, there are up to 500 other living, breathing organisms inhabiting our mouths, although only 50 have been identified and named. The sheer number of these creatures is astronomical, considering the fact that our mouths contain more bacteria than the entire world’s population, and the fact that our bodies house approximately one trillion bacteria.

And this is the beginning of my problem. April was not a good month. For two full weeks, I had a heinous bacterial infection in my mouth.

It started with a chancre sore. Not a huge deal. I’ve had them all my life. I even survived the heart-stopping shock of learning in 8th grade sex ed that chancre sores, like cold sores, are a form of herpes. Now I just deal with them.

But this one, for the first time, was on the tip of my tongue. Creepy. Ugly. Then, a couple days later, I started to get more. Two on my cheek where I bit myself on accident. One in the back of the mouth where my gums meet my cheek. One in the same place on the other side of the mouth. One on the soft palate. One that arrived on the inside of my cheek, as if left by the sadistic evil twin of the Tooth Fairy, overnight. Then — because, as we optimists believe, “it can always be worse” — a second, third, fourth and fifth on my tongue.

I was raging.

Eating, drinking, talking, sleeping — all were miniature excursions into hell. Constant, sharp pain in my mouth all day long put me in a foul mood and gave me a headache. Plus it made me salivate like a dog — some natural, annoying response from the body, I’m sure, like a fever or vomiting — which made me need to move my mouth, which inflicted more pain.

Then the worst of it struck. Some kind of gum infection on the roof of my mouth. Imagine taking a hook, digging it into the flesh around your upper teeth, and stretching it back toward the throat. It would open a pretty angry-looking, sensitive sore. Then fill that sore with dead, gray, decaying tissue. Then add an unpleasant odor. Now multiply it by two, one for each side of the mouth.

I lost almost 10 pounds eating nothing but oatmeal, boxed mashed potatoes, and macaroni with butter. (I couldn’t eat, but I looked fabulous!) I found myself eyeing baby food at the drug store while I was waiting for my prescriptions. Eventually the oatmeal had to go, because it was hard to dig it out of the sores with my tongue. Mashed potatoes I could roll into a ball and carefully pass back to my throat on my tongue. The macaroni was the best, because it just kind of slid down. No tongue. No chewing. Bliss.

I saw three doctors in a week and a half. The third one brought a bunch of his colleagues into the exam room so they could each peer into my mouth with their pen lights. I felt like a circus side show freak. “What can it be?” Whatever it was kept me out of work for a full week.

I assumed it was something bacterial. I thought it might be trench mouth, which I had seen before on someone else. The doctor laughed at me. “Trench mouth? What’s that?”

He only knew it by the more scientific-sounding stomatitis or acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis. Pretty, huh? Only the older doctors in the office knew what trench mouth is.

Trench mouth — a severe gum infection — earned its name because of its prevalence among soldiers on the front lines during World War I. Although it’s less common today, trench mouth still affects thousands of young adults between the ages of 15 and 35. The disease is also known by other names, including Vincent’s stomatitis and acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis.

Trench mouth begins as a bacterial infection that causes inflamed, bleeding gums, but eventually, large ulcers may form on your gums and between your teeth. These are often extremely painful and can cause bad breath and a foul taste in your mouth.

Although the exact cause isn’t well understood, trench mouth seems to develop when factors such as poor oral hygiene, tobacco use and stress disrupt the balance between “good” and “bad” bacteria in your mouth.

They treated me for something viral with a big fat injection in the butt — one of a possible three, I was promised. Rock and roll. They also gave me antibiotics because, after four doctor’s office visits, no one was able to diagnose the problem. Every test came back negative. Every culture came back normal.

I don’t smoke. I had good oral hygiene. The cultures the doctor extracted and grew showed that there was nothing in my mouth that didn’t belong there. There was just too much of something and not enough of another, I guess. Makes sense, but what the heck could have been so stressful to so upset the balance of good and bad bugs in my mouth?

The antibiotics took effect. No more shots, thank God. The infection cleared in a day or so. Then I just had two craters of raw tissue on the roof of my mouth to heal, hyper-sensitive teeth, and no prospects of using toothpaste in the near future.

My biggest problem, actually, is that I can’t play rugby, because I can’t wear my mouth guard.

At least I’m back to solid food again.

19
Dec
05

New York Lesson No. 329: Large Bills, Small Change

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food and New York Lessons
Tags: , , ,

I resent having no choice at 99% of the ATMs out there but to get $20 bills. I remember a time when one could get $5 and $10 bills as well as the 20s depending on the amount requested. Now, rarely, I’ll find one that dispenses 10s.

What am I gonna do about it, though, right?

All I had one morning was a $20 bill, and I really wanted a bagel. I stopped at Kossar’s Bialys on the way to work, because their bagels are lovely. I asked the baker for a sesame-seed bagel and sheepishly pulled the bill out of my wallet — “It’s all I have,” I pleaded pre-emptively. One glimpse of Andrew Jackson and she began to protest, rolling her eyes and sighing loudly.

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” she said.

“OK, I’m sorry,” I said, turning red, wanting to run. “I’ll just come back later.”

I was willing to run down to Rite Aid or something and get a pack of gum to get change so I could run back for the bagel. (They’re good bagels!) But I guess she recognized me from my many visits there, because she told me to go ahead, take the bagel, and just come back later to pay her. Because, as she sized me up and committed my face to memory, she knew: If I did not pay her, I’d never be able to set foot in that place again.

I was shamed. I had just bought a 65-cent bagel on credit.

I returned to pay her back just minutes later after getting a coffee down the block. I tried to give her a whole dollar for her trouble but she refused and gave me back 35 cents.

New York can be a small town, too.

She might have taken a $20 later in the day after collecting a lot of smaller bills and loose change. The typical purchase at Kossar’s must be less than a couple bucks per person. And it’s a pain to take a bunch of smaller bills early in the morning. I was once verbally flogged at a post office in Minneapolis for daring to use a $20 bill early in the morning.

“You know, you’re lucky we do the early-bird service. And now you’re gonna come in here and gimme a twenty? Gimme a break.”

So much for Minnesota Nice.

Incidentally, a friend of mine recently got two $50 bills from an ATM when he withdrew $100 from his account. To his gastronomical disappointment, none of the Indian restaurants in my neighborhood would take a $50 from him. So, he had to do without some really, really good chow.

…Until he came upon a Taco Bell that would take his $50.

He was forced to substitute a burrito supreme for sag paneer. Thanks, Chase Manhattan!

08
Oct
05

A Quarter Pounder and four Chicken McNuggets

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, Other People's Stories and Theater
Tags: ,

It’s not every day a ticket to a major award-winning Broadway show — with the original cast — falls into your lap. It’s never happened to me. My husband bought tickets to see Bernadette Peters in Annie Get Your Gun for my birthday a few years ago. By the time our show date came around, Peters had left the cast and been replaced with none other than Cheryl Ladd. It was a fine show, but I feel compelled to point out that anything Bernadette Peters can do, Cheryl Ladd cannot do better.

Last week a friend of mine, who will remain unidentified, bought a front-row seat to Spamalot from a colleague for $30, a considerable bargain for an off-Broadway show, let alone a ticket worth … what was it? … $240 or something? She had a scheduling conflict, apparently, the poor thing. So, hooray for my friend.

The social conventions of tourism being what they are, it’s reasonable to expect that much of the audience of any given show will be wearing t-shirts and blue jeans. There’s a certain casualness about a night out on the town these days. That’s fine. It’s Spamalot, not the La Traviata. But there are certain things I would not recommend doing in the front row at a major Broadway production.

For example: Eating a Quarter Pounder and a four-piece Chicken McNugget during the show!

However, this is precisely what my friend did. He didn’t have time to eat before the show, and apparently, he didn’t want to wait until intermission to eat a cold hamburger.

After being roundly admonished for this, he tried to defend himself.

No one knew! he said.

He described to us how he ripped the burger up into pieces in its package inside his backpack and only extracted one bite-sized morsel at a time. I give him credit for discretion, but the fact remains: He was chowing down on fast food in the front row in plain view of hundreds of people and the actors on stage.

Besides that, didn’t someone smell it? Someone in the front row must have been wondering where the scent of grilled beef and fried chicken was coming from in the first act.

I mean, even Spam is mostly pork, so it couldn’t have been a special effect for the show!

But no one smelled it! he said.

I’m not so sure. McDonald’s has a distinctive odor. It’ll stink up a subway car. I can tell from down the hall if someone has a McDonald’s take-out at lunch time.

He told us that David Hyde Pierce looked at him during the performance. I don’t doubt it. Maybe he was amused by my friend — or maybe he was just hungry. (“Are you finished with that?”)

I can just imagine him on a talk show or in a magazine interview talking in his clipped, erudite way about memorable moments from the run of the show.

“… Yes, and believe it or not, there was a guy one night in the front row who had brought McDonald’s to the show. And he actually ate it during the show …”

Not a bad deal for my friend. Cheap and easy notoriety for less than $5.

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the untallied hours