Excuses, excuses

I've been traveling, I've been writing for the paper, I've been watching Mad Men...

Here's is a recap of what I've had published this month.

Música 24/7: Cierran las calles. Empiezan con la famosa 6th Street, la calle de las barras, en Downtown. Poco a poco, durante la semana, el tránsito humano reemplaza el tráfico de carros por casi todo el sur de Austin, Texas. Y se desparrama la música. Baja por South Congress, cruza los puentes y se insinúa por South Lamar, la escuchas aunque no te lo propongas, aunque no estés viendo en el show.

Vibrante el East End de Londres:  Salir de la estación Aldgate East del Underground es ingresar al meollo de la acción y el bullicio. Decenas de personas de todas partes del mundo recorren con prisa, esquivando vendedores y promotores, las calles laberínticas del East End de Londres, donde se conectan los barrios de Whitechapel, Brick Lane y Spitalfields.

In One Cook's Hands: I grew up on carne mechada and fried plantains the way most American kids my age were raised on pot roast and mashed potatoes. My brother and I would get home from school and dart through the kitchen past Carmen, the woman who’s cooked and kept house for my grandmother since as far back as I can remember, as she flipped a fork-tender bistec (steak) as it sizzled or hovered over a pot of simmering beans that exhaled the smell of recao and garlic with the steam. Yet it never occurred to me to ask her how to make any of the soul-soothing comida criolla, or comfort food, she piled high on my plate. Puerto Rico is where I was born, where I grew up, and where I currently reside. But it’s not where I learned to cook.

Crema de Zanahorias y Calabasa

Whenever Julia Child dropped something on camera or flipped a potato pancake too early or generally fumbled about the kitchen in a manner that made the BBC believe that she was drunk, she would look at the camera, her trademark smile fading for a moment.

"Never apologize," she said, looking the housewife taking copious notes of her deceptively easy recipes straight in the eyes. "Just smile and serve your food as if nothing was wrong."

Most of the time, no one except you thinks anything is wrong anyway.

Me, I cook with disclaimers. "Its too spicy, its a little messy, I know what I did wrong..." But heaven help you if you don't eat the damn thing.

5 Food Places I Wish I’d Taken Advantage of When I Lived in New York

I don’t miss living in New York. It’s a difficult, cold city if you’re not head over heels in love with it. But I also think back on all the missed opportunities—the places I now wish were only a $2.50 subway ride away from me, the flavors and atmospheres I missed and the ones I should’ve been devoted to instead of wasting my time on… other places I don’t currently miss or even remember.

While I won’t get that era of my life back, I know where to go when I visit. And I visit a lot.

Guánica, PR

The best beaches are the ones the pirates used to dock in.

Cruising down the southern highway of Puerto Rico you speed down a road flanked by empty green mountains and farmed valleys, as large vultures called Guaraguaos glide in slow circles overhead. Pass Yauco—a coffee town painted pink and orange against the mountain— and take exit 116 onto a narrow road that seems to go on forever. Walls of trees, cacti, and green brush create a tunnel around you until eventually you hit la Central de Guánica.

Things Change

Things change, and one thing that seems to change consistently is the name of this blog. And I’m not going to apologize for that. Currently its taking on its third and probably most drastic transformation, which only makes sense since 2010 has so far, for its author, been a year of drastic transformations.

Bready Goodness

I currently work next to Amy's Bread in the West Village. While this shop also boasts some pretty incredible-looking cookies, cupcakes, muffins, scones, and sandwiches, they really make some stand out bread. What's wonderful about working next to Amy's is that I've realized that bread is not just bread. Bread is white, whole wheat, multigrain, pumpernickel, brioche, croissant, sobao, de agua, Italian, French, black, potato, Challah, and comes in the form of loafs, bagels, nan, rolls, pizza, sticks, toast... Bread is the backbone of culture (where bread is not found in prominence, rice will often make an appearance, but even those cultures have some sort of bread). You can even have it as a drink in the form of beer (every culture has beer). Its as universal as marriage and dessert.

Lately I've opted for more savory baked goods as my mid-afternoon, I'm-going-cross-eyed-but-have-no-desire-for-coffee pick-me-ups and for some reason I feel guiltier after eating two bread twists or half a mini-loaf of some delicious bread (they even contain seeds and healthy things like that) than if I'd eaten a whole chocolate chip cookie from Jacques Torres or City Bakery (big, big cookies full of butter and chocolate). And I'm slightly outraged by this. I've fallen into the cultural trap of hating bread. I've been well-aware of this for many years but I really thought I was over it. I want to make a case for modern Americans, myself included, not to hate bread.

For centuries bread has been close to holy. Challah is eaten on high holy days and blessings are read over loaves as big as a medium-sized dogs. To invite someone to break bread with you is an indication of trust and affection. Everything cool that has been invented is called the best thing since sliced bread. For so many years bread in America was as wholesome as white bread.

In the Middle East, bread is eaten with every meal even if that meal already includes rice or couscous or pasta. In Ethiopia it replaces cutlery. Even in Europe bread is a daily part of life. For breakfast, for lunch, for dinner as baguettes, sandwiches, or creating a bread crumb and cheese crust over a cassoulet or a gratin. My friend Marc, whose culinary habits I find intensely curious specifically because he is French, would sometimes eat nothing but a bagel all day. Then have another one with us after several rounds of beer. Bread and peanut butter were his food of choice. And yes he was skinny (stupid French people).

Bread often makes top ten lists of favorite things about being alive. A warm loaf out of the oven, the smell of bakeries, the way butter melts and becomes yellow and liquid on softly browned toast, the tart crust and the soft sweet insides. They look attractive, be it speckled with whole wheat, dark and black, pure white and yellow, their insides flaky or crumbly, magically leavened by yeast. So what happened, people? Bread was been basterdized (like everything else was) by the food and diet industries.

I started making my own bread recently because I wanted to save money and because I really

don't like it when things in my life are too easy. The ingredients in the recipe I found include whole wheat, yeast, honey, salt, milk, eggs. A stark contrast to the bread I would buy at the supermarket that for some reason contained high fructose corn syrup, sugar, natural flavors, and coloring. The good news is that like everything (the best thing to happens to organics since profits), certain brands are embracing the Obama-Vegetable-Garden, celebrity chef with a cause, 20 and 30-something-year-old urbanite mentality that processed food should still be food and taste good, so you're seeing a drastic reduction in their ingredients lists. Score one for bread! But why is bread still the bad guy?

Basically, bread still hasn't found its margarine.

Back in the days before trans-fats, butter became Public Enemy Number One and margarine came on the scene as the savior of both our taste buds and our arteries. Of course chemically produced spread made with hydrogenated oils were better than rendered dairy solids! Except, they were better in the way that guns are better than knives. Once margarine was ousted as the real enemy of your heart, butter came back into the good graces of the public or at the very least stop being attacked.

Since Atkins, bread has not found a satisfactory scapegoat to blame fatness on because the problem is Atkins actually worked. It didn't work the way Atkins followers believed it worked (all they were really losing was water), but people were becoming thinner. And while nutritionists brought people down from the bacon and eggs enduced highs and told them they needed to start eating fruits and vegetables again, bread remained black listed. It feels too filling, you know? It expands in your stomach. Its so easy to overeat it. Yes. But you can say that about anything we like to call food, specially if it contains sugar, alcohol, or cheese.

At the height of my own diet-craze I came to stark realization: What's life without sugar, alcohol, and cheese? Dull. And living without bread, while it would mean I would be skinny, would also mean missing out on one of the better things in life. I don't have to eat it three times a day but why feel bad if I do? We eat corn flakes, for god's sake, and that doesn't make any sense either if you think about it nutritionally and in terms of flavor.

So go out right now and eat some bread! And I'm not talking the sliced stuff from the supermarket. There are still bakeries in abundance. Don't worry, you'll walk it off on the way there.

Candy

Halloween has passed and the leftover debris of that nigh of sugar and alcohol fueled debauchery now sit in neat little boxes at office reception areas where people waiting pick at fun sized bags of chocolate and candy. They don't serve the leftover alcohol at these reception areas because there wasn't any leftover alcohol. But post-Halloween candy is always in abundance. As kids we understood that that was the whole point. On Halloween you created a stash, a bag or a bucket full of refined sugar, something to hold us over until Thanksgiving. But now candy is bad.
Except its really not.

Candy is such a visceral experience, innocent as childhood, fun, impulsive, pointless, and sweeeeeet. The stigma around it is undeserved, I feel. The only reason kids binge on candy is because they are not allowed to have it or they are allowed to have too much of it. Instead of celebrating it as a treat, kids scream and kick and demand it when they pass it at the pharmacy or supermarket or deli, and if parents give in or if kids are forced to sneak candy on they side, they gorge on it, taking its delicate magic for granted. This is not the kids' fault. Kids don't understand the consequences of too much of a good thing they just know what they love. Parents in this age of over-abundance have forgotten how to eat properly or they eat too properly, so they are rendered useless when it comes to teaching their child how to eat candy properly, and there is a way. Candy is an impulsive desire, a rush of happiness that should be savored not abused, and that becomes deadened if candy is handed out too often or not at all. The easiest solution would be to have more candy stores and less candy aisles.

New York City has several candy meccas: Dylan's Candy Bar, Economy Candy, the Hershey Store, and Max Brenner. Other notable candy shops I've visited are The Olde Candy Shoppe in Boston, with walls lined up to the ceiling with jars of candy and eccentric antiques like stuffed leopards and weird lamps; a candy store in Madrid that had every inch of wall covered with displays of colorful, barely identifiable candy, dried fruit, and nuts, and of course the candy store in the biggest mall in the Caribbean, Plaza las Americas, where as a child I would always buy a bag of gummy worms and eat them as I followed my mom and my aunt to boring stores. What they all have in common: sheer, beautiful, colorful quantity and variety.

Candy stores, like Halloween, are once in a while explorations. To do them more often than once is to kill their magic, which is exactly what the overabundance of candy aisles has done. They create the possibility of candy so often that a treat becomes a threat. There is something incredibly thrilling about seeing stacks and stacks of candy, gummy bears, coconut chocolate turtles, sour patch kids, twizlers, malt balls, hard candies, M&M's arranged in blues, reds, pinks, yellows, greens, gummy sharks, chocolate-covered peanuts... it goes on and on and on... then dipping a small shovel into a chosen bin and scooping out loot. Once again you're creating a stash. Its like a mini-Halloween, an event and a trip, instead of a bad idea. Because the other thing these stacks and stacks of candy do to a child is they overwhelm them. They couldn't possibly have all of it, much less stuff it all into a bag, so they become selective. They create assortments that won't bleed into the rest of the week because the portion control is built in and more than anything they are getting exactly what they want.

So if you want to boycott anything, boycott the candy aisles and large bags of generic candy shit. Get the good stuff. Its a bit of a walk (all candy stores require a bit of a walk) and the quality is infinitely better. And if you need a fix now, don't go downstairs to the deli, just visit the reception area. They usually have a little bowl of sin taunting the poor receptionist. Or, you know, have a cookie.

They Need Me to Feed Them

One morning I woke up surrounded on all sides by the three most important men in my life: R, Tito, and Spider. Looking at the three of them all cuddled up to me I realized: I have to feed them every day. They rely on me for this.

There was something strange about that realization because while its a given that cats have to be fed, its odd to think that my human does as well. But its really not that strange, Hispanic and an aspiring foodie I insist on feeding everyone who comes over, like it or not. I've spontaneously made cookies, beer bread, and muffins, the occasion being we had another person in the house. And alternatively, when R goes away on a trip for even as long as three days, unless I have guests over, I eat out my lunches and have toast with cheese and jam for dinner every night. Cooking just doesn't seem worth the trouble. Even making a simple pasta seems a tediously long process during those times. Yet when I have someone to cook for I go all out, like last night: rotini al telefono, braised bok choy, cornmeal cookies with lime glaze, and the dough of a quiche tart. I went to bed at 1:30 am and I'm up at 7 am. Why? My cats demanded to be fed.

Recently I was chatting with my friend Mario about why we cook. A newly minted Culinary Institute of America student with lofty dreams of a Momofuku-style restaurant empire, he and I differ quite a bit in terms of our approach to cooking but are bonded by it (and our mutual love for R). The chef of Savoy Cabbage in South Africa explained it best in an article he wrote for Gastronomica: its the difference between men and women. For men its about showing off what they can do, for women its about making sure people are well-fed and satisfied. This symbol seems to be a motif but its no less true, its yin and yang. Mario and I embody that. He cooks

the way artists paint and actors perform. For him cooking is more than just nourishing, feeding, and palatal pleasure, its spectacle, presentation, and above all experimentation. So I asked him why he cooked, having recently discovered my own reasons for it. Forget about passion and love for food and creativity, if anything that's a given. The question was, what is the driving force that makes you want to cook?

Mario loves working in restaurant kitchens, loves standing around in a small cramped space all day with people yelling. He loves the kind of food you can only get at restaurants, specially the ones that use chemicals to transform them into something completely different from what they were or could ever be in nature. He loves the hierarchy of the restaurant, the chef's coat, and went so far as to admit for him being a chef is a power thing. He loves standing by the table and having people looking up at him, he loves that whole culture of fine dining and innovative cooking. And at 22, he's rather good at it. But at the end he put it quite simply: "I cook to be loved."

For me, restaurants are not my bag. The hierarchy intimidates me, I can't take the structure and prestige of it too seriously because I can't shake the feeling that at the end of the day, its just food, except when there's a business and stocks and employees and benefit plans involved its not just food. Maybe because I don't go to restaurants often, because I don't have a sense of presentation, because I'd rather control my kitchen than be part of the kitchen factory. While I consider culinary school and cooking professionally on a daily basis, an idea borne of the philosophy of making a career from what you love to do, the more I think about entering the restaurant world the less appealing it sounds to me. I like that in my kitchen there are no rules, no pressure, I'm alone and free to do what I want. Its how I unwind and express myself creatively. I cook because I enjoy feeding people and eating good food, but I like sitting at the table with them and eating with them. I'm the home cook to Mario's restaurant chef.

If you boil it down, though, we're not really that different. I had a telling moment a few days ago when my friend D was here. He stood in front of me as I offered R a taste of something I was making for the first time. He says my eyes widened in anticipation in this please like it sort of way, something I wasn't conscious of doing. I'm sure I make that face every time I ask R if he likes what I've made. At the end of the day Mario and I are still cooking for the same reason, even if we approach cooking very differently. Like him, I cook to be loved.

Thanksgiving Syndrome

Hi David.

At some point I realized I was beyond full and found myself pleasantly surprised at my own capacity to continue eating. It was almost my responsibility to do so. My body observed me place another cracker with cream cheese and caviar in my mouth in a state of utter confusion. One thing was perfectly clear to my poor body, though, this was not an occasion where its protest would be of any relevance. 

I collapsed into bed a couple of hours later, full of serrano ham, deep-fried chicken livers, hot dogs with parmesan cheese and truffle butter, cake, wine, cocktails... I'd been home in Puerto Rico for less than 12 hours and that was only the first of several parties being held in honor of my homecoming. I vaguely recall calling my boyfriend, who was safely in New York losing weight in my absence, and groaning, "Oh my god, I haven't eaten this much since lunch." Several hours before this first cocktail party my family had celebrated my arrival with a two hour lunch at Al Dente restaurant complete with bacon wrapped escargot and pumpkin ravioli. This pace did not let up for the next two days.

Each and every visit I make to Puerto Rico is a homecoming, the fatted calf is slaughtered, cakes are baked, and champagne bottles pop, figuratively and literally (maybe not the calf part). But this isn't something unique to me. Homecoming, graduations, holidays, weddings, any joyous celebration, and even sad ones like funerals, require an obscene amount of food to make them complete. It's what I'm going to call Thanksgiving Syndrome: a cross-cultural need to celebrate by eating and drinking in large groups to the point of collapse. 

Evidence of this tedency can be found as far back as the cave drawings. What did prehistory humans like to draw and tell stories about? Hunting the big bison that would become the weekly dinner feast (the metabolism stayed, the eating habits changed, what's happening evolution?). 

In Homer's Odyssey, every time Odysseus set foot on a new land, some sort of cattle was slaughtered and he and his new friends, who never asked what his name was until the tenth course, would feast all night. 

In the Bible, Jesus feeds a throng of people with two fish, a loaf of bread, and a skin of wine... all of which conveniently never ran out despite the hundreds of people devouring seconds and thirds. 

Food is a common offering to the gods, from bowls of milk to cakes left at the feet of statues then distributed among worshippers. 

Times of fasting usually culminate in feasts, from the breaking of the Yom Kippur fast at Katz's Deli for the Jews (or at least the Jews I know) to streets flowing with the blood of slaughtered animals at the last sundown of Ramadan (true story). 

I don't think I need to go into Thanksgiving, except to reiterate the 5000 calories generally consumed on that day and the inexplicable abundance of leftovers after the gorging. 

It's culture, it's tradition, it's human nature.

We could just as easily do something else and omit the food part, play music all night, dance, go somewhere special like a beach or church (maybe not church). And, we do. But without the giant meal throughout those festivities it would feel like something is missing. These special, large, no-holds-barred meals are what make the event. On a practical level, you need tons of food, if you're going to feed tons of people. But that much?

Your stomach hurts, you get tired, you can barely move, you've gained at least two pounds in two hours, but somewhere deep inside you are at ease. You feel warm, your mind calms down (food coma), you feel, um, satiated, to say the least. There is something comforting, grounding about being able to eat as much as you can and then eating more. And being able to stop and go back to your normal eating habits once the party is over. Overeating in the context of a party, something that happens occassionally and with many people, is more than OK, it's the whole point. In a way it reminds you how good it feels to not do that all the time. What elevates binging to celebrating, though, is that celebrating is collective binging. It's social deconstruction of you body and brain (if you're drinking). 

Food is important to people for reasons of survival, comfort, energy, nutrition, but what makes food special is eating it with other people. It's one of the most complete sensory experiences you can have as a group. Memories are triggered, places and events are relived collectively through the palate. And somewhere around this point, there is an understanding. A line is crossed usually after the first set of appetizers, lubricated with booze, and once you reach that point, there is no turning back, there is only pressing forward. You know that by continuing to eat and drink you will cause harm to yourself and you know it's going to be awesome. 

That's why desserts exist.

Simplicity, simplicity

While French and American haute cuisine has embrace a culture of complexity when it comes to food- reductions, confits, exotic ingredients, strange parts of an animal you didn't even know you could eat- there's been more than a few place that I've visited recently where what has prevailed is simplicity over engineering. Among them Momofuku Milk, Egg, Una Pizza Napolitana, and even 11 Madison Park, although the latter isn't as clear-cut as the others.

Momofuku is a dessert restaurant in the East Village that is part of the other Momofuku restaurants including Ssam bar (rated one of the top 50 restaurants in the world), Momofuku Noodle bar, and Ko. At Momofuku milk you have a wide range of desserts from cookies to cakes and pies, bread, milks, and if you're looking for savory, pork buns and beer. The kitchen is visible from the standing-only tables and the smell of sweet dough and cookies slowly baking is thick in the air. In the evening the line rivals that around Magnolia during the summer tourist season. The first two things I ever tried there set the tone for me and established it as my favorite dessert restaurant: cornflake and marshmallow cookie and cereal milk. I'd heard about this new trend that was happening among the pastry chefs in New York of incorporating breakfast flavors into desserts and breakfast being my favorite meal of the day, combined with a massive sweet tooth, this was heaven. The cereal milk was the remnants of a satisfactory bowl of Frosted Flakes and the cornflakes cookie was perfectly crispy around the edges and gooey and thick in the middle. They somehow manage to do this with all their cookies. But the cakes pushed it even further. Each is a three story affair with a distinctive identity- chocolate cake, chocolate chip cake, banana cake- but it's the small layer of filler in between each of the layers that demands to be heard. The banana cake, which my friends got, almost made me cry it was so good. The cake itself is soft and in between the layers of soft banana cake were gravelly sweet layers of cinnamon and brown sugar. This was repeated in the chocolate chip cake where layers of passion fruit offset the classic vanilla cake with chocolate chips embedded. Their most successful pie, though, is also one of the simplest things: crack pie, or just pie, the kind of pie people made when you couldn't afford to mix fruit and frills in with the butter and sugar mix. A sweet oat crust with a simple filling. Works every time. I could go on about their soft serve (last time I went they had Sour Gummy and Fireball as flavors) and the rest of their repertoire but I think the examples say it all. These are classic simple flavors reinvented within another very recognizable and accessible form. 

Egg is a variation on the idea of simplicity because unlike Momofuku Milk it doesn't strive to reinvent so much as excel. Their food is classic Southern cooking with fresh, seasonal ingredients produced locally (like their cheddar cheese and brioche) or grown upstate. While their dinner crowd is still rather (thankfully) thin, their breakfast and brunch crowd waits almost an hour for a table in their narrow dining room. I hate waiting for table. It makes me irritable and generally makes me more aggressively critical of the food. But Egg although always a wait in the morning is entirely worthwhile. The Egg Rothko (brioche with an egg cooked inside a hole in the middle and smothered in cheddar cheese with a side of either meat or seasonal vegetables and some roasted tomato) and the Grits and Eggs (also with a side of either vegetables or meat) astound because of their precise, fresh flavors that are so simple their natural complexity is brought out. This is even true in the coffee they serve, always in a french press with lots of grounds, the coffee is very flavorful and rich, even thick if that can be achieved with french press. During lunch their half-pound, grass-fed beef burger is pretty much the best burger I've ever had. When you ask for medium rare that's what they give you and the seasoning of the meat complements it rather than overwhelming the flavor of the meat itself. Skip the french fries, though you probably won't be able to. Recently they've also started serving wine and beer. They stock some local brews including Brooklyn One which gives continuity to their philosophy of fresh and local. For dinner, the duck and dirty rice still haunts me, although I can't say they have the best corn bread (Peter's takes the award for that) butvtopped with kale it becomes something else. Their mac and cheese is excellent (anything with cheese you have a good shot with) as are their biscuits. You will never leave Egg hungry and you will never regret having a meal there. As one chef put it when asked how he taught his child to eat well, if he made a macaroni and cheese with four cheeses and bread crumbs, it may be more fattening that your out of the box M/C but the ingredients are real, it is more wholesome. That's Egg in a nutshell. Basically you know you're eating something good.

I've already discussed Una Pizza Napolitana in my previous posting so take a look, it's a similar idea to Egg's just boiled down even further.

As for Eleven Madison Park, you could almost say the simplicity of their food is relative. Relative to other restaurants of their caliber that use more complex ingredients and preparations (and I'm sure 11 MP does too in certain dishes) but their was a great deal of simplicity in a lot of the dishes. Slow-poached egg with asparagus was bright and interesting, the Atlantic Halibut tasted like halibut with lemon and capers, even the duck had a simple symphony of lavender, honey, and rhubarb to offset the fattiness, but the red, soft meat still stood out among the undertones. The best dessert was the Tahitian Vanilla Souffle with Passion Fruit that beat out the intensely chocolatey Symphony No. 2 and the Cherry Crumble (that one was interesting, the cherries were sour and intensely sweet, almost like candy except for the texture). But their were little things served aside that really stood out for me. A bite-sized roll of cucumber and salmon that simply jumped out at you, the cucumber wet and sweet with a blast of salmon flavor packed into a pink square one square inch in size. An olive and rosemary bread, smaller than a normal rolls, served with either goat's milk butter and unsalted cow's milk butter with salt on the side (the separation of the salt and butter made a huge difference in the flavor). And finally, these small cookies you get at the end, with a flaky crust and a half inch layer of creamy filling, with flavors ranging from rose to peanut butter and jelly, those two in particular being the stand outs of the crowd. They're very small and anything but one note. The rose in particular was complex and unexpected, sweet with a flavor you're not used to, unlike the violet that definitely tasted of chocolate. I can't even talk about the wine.

Flowers might seem like something you wouldn't categorize as "simple" but they're as simple as it gets. Like when you have breakfast for dessert, the difference is you're experiencing something familiar in a different way. This is the testimony of complex culinary experimentation but the foundation of that is simple, fresh ingredients with classic preparations that take something ordinary and push it further, done especially well when it's an almost obvious direction you wouldn't have expected it to go in.

Brisket Moist

Despite what my friend Eissa said, I decided to republish my "journal-like" postings because they are actually helpful to me. I will try to be more anecdotal and less meditative. My plan for dinner tonight: Honey Biscuits, Salmon Patties, and Peas and Carrots with butter, half a bottle of wine from the Texan place I went to with R last night.

This Texan place was weird. Of all the dining that there is to be had in NYC, this particular restaurant is not one I would be particularly prone to visiting... ever. But I did. Yesterday I was fatigued, overfed, in a bleh mood, so of course as soon as R comes out of class: "Can we go get comfort food?"

In an ideal world, I should've convinced him to go to Egg, in Williamsburg. The duck with dirty rice and a side of biscuit was calling to me. Or at the very least Peter's where the mac and cheese would share a plate with spinach and ocra- vegetables!!! But instead I decided to trust in R's, "I know a perfect place near where I work." I thought he meant Comfortable Food, which looks really chic (it was where Andy and her bf make up at the end of Devil Wears Prada) and I was down for that. Really my priority was wine. But in any case... after we trek it up to 26th st. complaining about what a waste we both are... We walk into what looks like an old Texan salon, with a large flag of Texas painted on the back wall. It's cafeteria-style, like Katz's Deli, so we get out little cards where the servers note down what we've ordered and which we hand in to the register at the end when we're going to pay. We pick up a Shiraz from Texas (didn't even know Texas produced wine, it was sweet, but not bad) and R gets a ginger ale, served to him in a glass jar. Behind the bar, in little niches in the wall are jars and jars full of bottle caps, mostly from beer bottles but also from sodas. I watched one of the waitresses uncap some beers and toss the caps into an almost full bottle and decided, OK, this place can grow on me for the time being. We went on to the next stations.

While R got our Brisket Moist (we really should've gone for the Brisket Lean but more on that later), I went for some sides. I quickly decided against the farmer's salad in favor of the sweet potato bourbon mash, along with some green bean casserole and some corn bread. Meeting back with R, the brisket was wrapped in paper and in a basket. We opted to go to the downstairs dining room where it was quieter and less packed.

The brisket, as you can imagine, was dripping with grease and sported a layers of pink fat. It was barely warm and even barbeque sauce wasn't really helping it. The fat was what was killing it for me because the meat itself was soft and tasted all right.  Like brisket. The sides were much better. The mash was stringy, so you could tell it was made from real sweet potatoes, the corn bread was tasty (not quite Peter's but good enough), and the green beans were awesome. The beans, cheese, crunchy onions, and mushrooms were creamy and tasty and rich. 

When we left I felt a contradictory sensation: my legs felt heavy and I really wanted to levitate. Not standing up but just lie down on the air and float. So much food. It amazes and appalls me that people eat like this regularly. Or at all, really. I love a good steak and I understand the benefits of fat when it comes to flavor, but I don't understand eating grease-dripping meat with a layer of fat. There's no subtlety, no mystery, everything is out there and for the taking. Which I guess appeals to some people. But then think about your arteries for god's sake. Specially since after a meal like that, there's nothing else to be done but to go lie down and sleep.

Which is what I did. My stomach's not been happy with me lately and my energy level has been through the floor. I remember why I never liked spring. OK, almost, 7, what am I still doing here?

Peace.