Memos: September ember ember

A few things I've been up to lately..

• A few friends and I went to the Dayboat restaurant on Wednesday and all decided to go for the tasting menu. We were told by the chef before-hand to skip lunch and wear loose pants. I'll say after just the second course, which was goat cheese stuffed into little baby tomatoes, I was sure it was going to be in my top meals I've had my whole life. The wine we had recommended was Teddy Hall chenin blanc 2007. Next, they brought some teasingly delicate shrimp and scallops in a light batter and garnish that complemented it just about perfectly. There was also a beet salad that, just like most of the rest of the ingredients, apparently all were grown within about 20 minutes of the restaurant. The main course was a pork dish made au torchon, not sure what that means but it must have something to do with it being the softest, tenderest cut of pork that is physically possible to make. I'll say pretty confidently that the Dayboat is now the best restaurant on the island, ,hands down. Last year I never checked it out mostly because the menu, while all the local ingredients sounded amazing, just didn't have any dishes that I could get excited about. This year they've kept the focus on local food but the new chef has jazzed up the dishes considerably.
  
  The funniest part was while we were all enjoying the great food we kept coming back to talking about comfort food we all liked as kids and still do, like lipton noodles and which kind of no-name chocolate chip cookies were the best to the utter pointlessness of 'golden oreos'. Perhaps it was the pleasure in eating such good food that brought back genuinely pleasant memories of food taht wasn't fancy but still had pleasing qualities to it.
  
  
• My thought about the US financial crisis is that the one thing Republicans know how to do well, and that helps them win elections, is to destroy hope. And they're shooting the moon on this one. The wave of Obama's enthusiastic supporters must have been so scary that nothing short of destroying the entire economy was enough to put a stop to it.
  
  
• I just re-read Infinite Jest. Sad that it took the tragic occasion of David Foster Wallace's suicide to get me to do it but I am glad I did. The themes of sadness and human struggle in the face of addictoin and bleak societal cynicism leave me shaking my head but feeling hopeful at the same time. The quest for genuine experience and expression, he seems to be saying, is what leads people to ever more harmful behaviour patterns. There's a 30-some-odd page sequence near the beginning of the book where a character overthinks himself into a state of paralysis while waiting for his pot dealer to show up that grabs you by the gut and forces you to experience the powerlessness of addictoin and the mental acrobatics we try to do to deny it.
  
  I want to some day either find or perhaps take some time and write a comparison of DFW's depiction of Americans and that of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's insitence on small words and straightforward sentences would seem to be anathema to DFW's embracing of esoteric technical terms, unapologetic use of precise jargon when talking about the progression of a tennis match or how a radio transmission works, but I had the same feeling when reading the two that this was the truly most expressive and full-bodied expression I had ever read. I want to find waht it was in both of them taht triggered my empathetic reaction in that wawy.
  
  
• I just got some paintings I ordered from art.com back from the framer today, I'm very pleased with them, The Studio on Queen St. Sure I could have crazy glued and ebay'd my way to framing them myself but these are going to be on my wall for years so I think having an expert do the framing is probably the best way to go for me.
  
  
• I spent the last couple of days adopting some pretty heavy JavaScript code to work on IE 6. And, while I still fully embrace the new movement to just plain drop support for the ancient browser in favour of more standards-compliant browsers, I am still glad I did it as it at least forced me to go over the code again in the same way a rejected article should proof-read every sentence of his work before re-submitting it. So the work is better in the end, even though my cruel master of an editor is the browser world's senile, stuck-in-his-ways boss who makes you write for an audience of reality-TV enthusiasts.
  
  
• Heroes season 3 premier verdict: I'm still gonna watch, but the writers better break out of the arc they seem to be heading in and not repeat the same inter-character and internal struggles of the first season's main characters. I hope they still go ahead with the prequel series that they were talking about towards the end of the first season. Sylar is still my favourite character. "Eat your brain? Claire! That's disgusting!" : best one liner of the whole series so far.
  

Labels: Books, Food, JavaScript, Restaurants, Television

Homemade Pizza Night

Today my friend from work came over and we made the best pizza I've had in ages. A few months ago some of us were out at the 42nd St. Lounge and we got this gourmet pizza they had on the menu that had goat cheese and spinnach and prosciutto, that we all really loved. (Including Sabrina, sorry we didn't realize it had the meat on it when you asked for a slice...)

But we've been periodically reminiscing about how good it was ever since. Yes, we talk about good food the way Carrie Bradshaw talks about a nice set of abs.) But we figured we could probably do something similar ourselves, and k. had some goat cheese she got at the Farmer's Market last week. The rest of the ingredients are pretty easy, though we substituted the prosciutto with chicken just to match up with some Rachel Ray recipe or other.

The goat cheese is so soft and creamy, you don't actually need any sauce on the pizza. It's nice and sharp and full-flavoured, and it envelops the other toppings very nicely when you bake it.

K. went all out and even made a crust from scratch. It turned out perfect, just thick enough to have some substance to it without being too doughy, and it crispied up just right in the oven.

The kicker was some smoked sea salt sprinkled on top. I fear I may develop an addiction to that stuff, even though I've never been one to put extra salt on my food.

We ate that while watching DVDs of the Æon Flux cartoon, a better way to spend a Sunday evening I've yet to find.

Labels: Cooking, Food

Steak

OK, so you know how revolting it is when someone orders their steak so rare that basically all they want is for the chef to walk past the grill when he's taking it to your table? Well, my friend Kelly ordered one that way today. Everyone at the table was pretty horrified, especially when it arrived. But I figured, OK, she has good taste and her craziness generally resides elsewhere, so I'm curious. So I ask if I can try a little sliver of it. She cuts me off a corner and puts it on my plate.

My biggest mistake was picking it up with my fingers. It felt exactly like something I would be touching because I was preparing food to be cooked, not to be eaten. But I was far too committed at this point not to try it.

And hoooly christ it was good. So so tender. The cooked edges gave that nice bit of flavourfulness, and inside was just soft ant springy and absolutely showed you what good quality steaks they serve at Hunter's. It just makes me want to walk up to a cow in a farmer's field and bite it. The waitress even said she made sure the chef didn't over-cook it, because chefs have a tendency to overcook steak. Perhaps they just want to feel like a part of the process.

I don't know if I'd want to eat a whole steak in this fashion, but I'm definitely ordering my next one more rare than I ever have before. Apparently The Keg restaurants give you an option of "black and blue" steak where they cook the outside very well and leave the inside nice and raw and tender. This strikes me as just about perfect since you get the most flavour and the best-tasting meat.

Labels: Food

My Most Unhealthy Breakfast Yet

So last week I was running late for work and was really hungry, so I went to McDonald's (Oh Stratford and your myriad dining choices. I hate you so.) I usually would get a muffin or maybe an egg mcmuffin and a coffee. But I was especially hungry that day and thought I'd finally try the McGriddle.

It took them forever to make, it seemed like it was taking one poor girl her whole attention for about 10 minutes. But what I ended up with actually looked kind of decent, even remotely resembling what the picture looked like.

And yes, it tasted very very good and went through me like a waterslide, as McDonald's food has a tendency to do.

But, this post is not about that monstrosity of sausage and egg and maple-syrup-filled wonder.

It's about what I made today.

You see, I hadn't slept much last night, and was up and about earlier than usual out of sheer boredom with listening to the crows and thinking about what a miserable day it was going to be.

And when I have extra time I like to have a breakfast involving slightly more than the long-suffering bowl of Oatmeal crisp and glass of orange juice.

Today I had some sausages in the freezer I needed to use, so I figured a traditional time to eat such things was breakfast, so I grabbed those, threw them in the frying pan and set them a-go. Sausage and eggs and toast is a perfectly heterosexual breakfast, I thought, a good way to start a terrible sleep-deprived day. Instead of toast, though, I just had bagels, which is fine, they're a little heavy but bread is basically bread, now, isn't it?

One problem, I remembered halfway through cooking everything that I don't own a toaster. And I was thinking of ways to actually toast my bagel, the clothes dryer was out right away because I needed to clean the lint traps. Al Gore would be severely displeased if I used the whole oven to toast a bagel with. So, my nexxt thought was to slosh my sausage and soon-to-be-fried eggs over to the side of the pan and throw the two bagel halves on there.

Cutting to the chase, they take a long time to actually 'toast' this way, but they do a fantastic job of soaking up the butter and grease and runny egg yolk in the pan. Let's hope for the sake of our collective public health that fried bagels don't become all the rage once someone sees this post.

And of course, the natural thing to do was to stack the eggs and sausage together on the drippingly delicious bagel and throw some cheese on there for good measure.

I still made fun of my roommate when he got a McGriddle, though. Because everyone knows McDonald's food is bad for you.

Labels: Cooking, Food

PEI Shellfish Festival

So I never thought I would have such a good time at something like the PEI Shellfish Festival before I went this year, but the entertainment and the events really were as good as the food wsa.

We got there and had a couple of free samples of mussels and chowder from the chowder competition, and then got some more substantial food. The Culinary Institute had their truck there, the one that's a fully-equipped kitchen in the back of a truck, very impressive, and they were serving mussels cooked in various ways and oysters and other things. I got Casino Style mussels, and a bowl of chowder from one of the vendors. Sadly the girl selling the chowder didn't quite know what was in it or anything, I think I sort of embarrassed her when I asked. It was pretty good, though, your basic mix of seafood chowder.

Then they announced the winner of the chowder cooking competition, and it ended up being Duncan Smith from the Claddagh Oyster House, who's my friend Kelly's husband. He was really not expecting to win, he even said that he hoped he didn't win because if he did he'd have to make the damn stuff every day, but he ended up destroying the competition. Second and third places had something like 147 points and 145 points each, very very close to each other. And Duncan's score was so high that they didn't even say it when they announced the winner, he ended up winning by more than 20 points. For a dumpling he had to get Kelly to run to the store and grab wonton shells at the last minute because the ingredient he wanted to use wasn't working out right because of the humidity today. Kelly was happiest about the prizes, which included a full set of Paderno pots and a $500 gift certificate from A1 vacuum sales, which is not a place where I think I'd spend $500 but if I had the chance I would absolutely love one of those nice canister electrolux deals that last 20 years and are indestructible.

The funniest thing about Duncan's chowder was that he called it something like "Dad's own recipe", but in reality his parents never cooked anything more ambitious than chicken nuggets and Kraft Dinner when he was a kid.

After that was the oyster shucking competition. Not the most exciting thing when you hear about it, but trust me, it's a good time to watch them up there shucking away. You had people who were first time competitors going up against experienced old pros who are repeat national champtions, and you could really see the grace and skill that the veterans had. The had the whole thing shown up on a big screen at the front so you could see in detail all the action, and spot damaged oysters and ones that weren't fully severed from the shells and other things that would result in a penalty.

In the end the penalty time was what really mattered, too. Second and third places all had very low times, 1:02 and 1:07 each I believe, but they both had 30 seconds in penalty time added on. Amazingly, the kid who won had only 2 seconds, which means all of his oysters were perfectly shucked, not something you normally find in competition where time is the critical factor. He also then went on to help beat the American team in the Canada vs. The World shucking relay competition, another fun spectacle, and again Canada lost on flat time but ended up winning because of judging and penalties.

The other big penalty was for blood on the oysters, since cutting yourself is pretty common apparently. I made sure to check carefully before eating the oysters that they brought out to the side of the stage, where I was strategically standing, to let people have the oysters from the competition, just in case.

Everyone who thinks they don't like oysters needs to try them again, and chew them this time. If you swallow them all your tasting is salty slime, that's no good, it's the texture of them that is why they're so prized. Trust me, there's a reason people like them so much.

Labels: Food

Re-building the Pantry

Of course, by "pantry" I mean the one cupboard in my kitchen I'm now setting aside for spices and ingredients to things I haven't cooked in a while but used to really enjoy making. The frozen pizzas and cans of soup are getting demoted, to make way for more "real food".

I've had phases where I'd cook every night, and make pretty elaborate dishes, intersperse with phases of going out for lunch every day and just being satisfied with a sandwich or something small in the evenings.

I basically taught myself to cook ever so slowly in the first Summer I lived by myself when I was 18 and living in Saint John doing my first co-op term at the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant. It wasn't a choice then, since NB Power paid its junior student workers, even fancy-shmancy computer science co-op students, rather little. Adding to that having to pay all my bills and also save up for school in the Fall and I can count on my fingers the number of times I ate out and picked up the bill.

Back then I didn't know much more about cooking than what I gathered by osmosis from eating what my mother made for us growing up. Now, this is nothing against her, she fed us well to be sure, but I was not overly eager to just cook the same things she always made during the first 18 years of my life. So on top of having to learn to cook with no real guidance, I also had to figure out just what kind of food it was I actually wanted to make.

So that Summer I figured out what cuts of meat were good (and / or cheap but still decent), how spices worked, which ones went with which ingredients well, all that.

Then it was back to University and the worst era of Beaver Foods crimes against human nutrition I've ever lived through. I still loved having someone do the cooking and cleaning, though. Making ood food was a pleasure, to be sure, but not an addiciton, I could live without it.

Then the Winter term was my next Co-op term at Lepreau. I had a roommate this time (what ever happened to that Greg fellow, anyway?) and an unfortunate couple of Role Playing Games I was determined to finish, just to see that 2 minutes of video I can go on Youtube and watch right now with zero effort. But I still cooked most days.

Unfortunately, with having to share the kitchen, and going to Fredericton or home to see the girlfriend most weekends instead of spending them in the city by myself, I only had a window in the evenings to cook. So I'd get home at around 5:00pm, after the 45 minute trek home from the isolated wasteland where they built the plant, muck about on the Internet for a while if I could get there before Greg decided to play Need for Speed III, then cook when it was my turn in the kitchen. But by the time the cooking and eating and cleaning was all finished it would sometimes end up being 8:30 or 9:00pm. Which left me about an hour to walk through caves and fight random battles with the same silly RPG monsters over and over until I got sleepy and went to bed for the night to get up stupidly early the next day and go to work again.

So this sort of turned me off of spending much time in the kitchen, when I didn't have a lot of time to begin with. My next work term was when I was making more decent money and could afford to eat at the Regent Mall food court (when you work in the Fredericton Knowledge Park you don't have a lot of options) and I was never hungry in the evenings so I'd just have somehting small. This has mostly been my habit when employed ever since.

The exception to this was the year or so I spent in Fredericton. I was working a lot, and going through some pretty hard times emotionally that I've never quite straightened out or really talked about, and won't go into now, but I felt like the only pleasure I really allowed myself was when I'd get home in the evenings and make a meal. I was experimenting with making different kinds of curries and pasta dishes, and loved spending a lot of time in the kitchen, because I didn't have to talk to my roommates - the air of pre-occupied urgency I took on in the kitchen kept them from expecting small-talk, and I just forgot about everything that was stressing me out and making me miserable that whole time.

Now I am not feeling particularly stressed, can't say I have anything of substance to be unhappy about, but I do have more time now, at least I have the opportunity to make the time, and I'd like to start cooking and exploring doing interesting things with food again. Charlottetown has a lot of great places to eat out, and most are pretty reasonably priced, but I now have the pleasure of a kitchen with enough cupboard space that I can call my own and a good grocery store within walking distance so I can get inspired to try something right now and just go and get what I need and make it.

I'm excited.

As a side-tidbit, if you haven't tried it. Oishi sauce tastes so good you're basically cheating.

Labels: Cooking, Food

Claddagh Room

So Sabrina and I have decided to eat Macaroni and Cheese and Chef Boyardi five nights a week and then go somewhere really nice once a week. This makes sense to me.

So last night we went to the Claddagh Room, just because my friend Kelly keeps raving about the desserts she just had when we get together in the evenings. I'm surprised it took this long for me to try the food there, actually.

It's the kind of place where the waitress takes your coat but doesn't pull your chair out for you. We were seated next to a table of Russians who were ordering oysters by the hundreds who were pretty loud and boisterous but in a genial kind of way so it was fun to listen to them.

As for food I ordered chicken samosas as an appetizer, , they came with spinnach that made me cry when I think of what you get from the grocery store. They were perfect, thick little leaves with a little bit of lemon juiceon them and all I thought eating them was 'this is what food is supposed to taste like'. The samosas theemselves were naturally a far different affair than the ones they sling at the farmer's market.

For the main course I ordered the feature of the night, which was seafood bouillabaisse, which was pretty much just a really indulgent pile of mussels and shrimp and salmon and holy christ it was good. The soup base was light and didn't intrude on the seafood's flavour at all. I didn't have good seafood since the Summer so it tickled some tastebuds that have been languishing for months. I was so stuffed at the end that I didn't even get dessert, I just stole a little nibble of Sabrina's cheesecake which had raspberries baked into it and looked beautiful.

Labels: Charlottetown, Food, Restaurants, Reviews

Clever

I'm pretty sure the expiry date on my yoghurt is covered over by a sticker that says "For quick sale $1.50".

Would it be unwise of me to eat it anyway?

I'll let you know.

SUSPENSE?!

Labels: Food, Self-harm