I’m back

So, as you might have imagined, I’ve been a little busy. Maybe I’m just not cut out for the commitment of blogging… I mean, 3 months… what kind of commitment is that?

Well, you fuckers all seem to come back, so I might as well keep writing.

I’m not making excuses, but let me bring you up to speed on where I’ve been.

My last report from the New York bureau is true: there’s a new man in my life. Unlike men past, this one sort of snuck up on me. I wasn’t trying to find him- like I have been trying to find a man my whole life- he just kind of happened. He cooks, he likes to eat, he loves restaurants… the only thing that makes me suspicious is that he likes me so much. I have been traveling for work and/or to see him for most of the last 3 months, and thus not cooking (much) and going to restaurants I’ve been to a million times, and even though I don’t need to be cooking to blog things I cook, I’m only interested in blogging them as I do them.

Also, as the economy has tanked, so has my work. I actually haven’t worked in over a month, and the horizon isn’t looking too great honestly. I’ve been busy, though. I spent every waking minute from the end of my last gig until midnight on election day working to defeat [prop 8 in california]( http://www.noonprop8.com/). I’m sure you all know how that turned out. [There is a huge movement developing]( http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2008/11/breaking-ca-supreme-court-agrees-to.html) to overturn prop 8, that I imagine will be successful, but I’m not likely to be directly involved in it. I’ve just been spending so much time away from home lately, and will likely to continue to, that I can’t, sadly. But, for what it’s worth, thank you if you voted no, thank you if you gave money, thank you if you volunteered. If you voted yes, you can go fuck yourself and close your browser **right fucking now**. I hope all your souffles fall, your braises dry out and your pizzas burn.

This brings me to my next piece of news: The Omnivorous Fish is moving again. We’ve pretty much narrowed it down to Seattle or the Bay Area, and currently Seattle is ahead, but that call will get made in the next couple of months. Anybody want to weigh in?

OK, my battery is about to die, so I’m going to run, but I’ll be back with some recipes asap.

About a Boy

*From the new york bureau:*

So, there’s a boy. I guess we’ll call him Hot Pants. Anyhow, we went to the (in)famous Una Pizza Napoletana tonight for some $20 pies.

As you might be aware, I know a little something about pizza, probably enough to be dangerous. I can say that I liked it a lot, and I would go back, but it was not my favorite pizza of all time. Hopefully I’ll write more later on the subject, but for now Hot Pants and I are headed to bed.

Listening: “The Barnyards of Delgaty” Old Blind Dogs, from the Album Tall Tails

Observations

*From early yesterday morning*

Living in LA, I often arrive at work an hour or more early, so I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, catching up on magazines and watching some movies. This morning I’m watching Oliver Stone’s JFK, and I can’t tell you yet if it’s any god or not, but during the beginning of the movie, I suddenly burst into tears. No, I haven’t reached menopause- I don’t think- but it was incredible to me to watch the nation and the world hold an American president so beloved. I’m sure Kennedy had millions of detractors, but his youth, exuberance and poise held sway over many who didn’t vote for him, my parents included. But today we have a filthy, lying, moronic scumbag running the country, destroying the country, and its people, destroying the principles the country was founded on. We barely live in a Republic anymore; our freedom is forever lessened, our reputation in the world annihilated. Had I been older when he was first elected, I probably would have left. Had he been re-elected this year, I can tell you for sure I would have moved to Vancouver. I wasn’t a huge fan of Bush 1, but he was a competent individual we could follow, someone we could be proud to be led by, disagreements aside. I cannot wait for the day I can be proud to be American once again.

Listening: hokey music from the JFK DVD.

*From this afternoon*

The movie wasn’t that good, but our president is still a mook.

Listening: Aqua Teen Hunger Force

A la Bastille!

Today I received an invitation to trade blogrolls with a new site called [devour.tv](http://devour.tv). I declined to do so, but I will give them a free plug, because it led to an email correspondence that made me write up some feelings I have about the New Food Culture that I have yet to express much in the blog, despite how strongly I feel about it. Here is an excerpt:

>Since you’ve read my blog, you know it’s mostly about cooking and empowerment of cooking. I try to put 20 years of professional and amateur cooking experience into each cooking post, so they’re meta-recipes, rather than lists of ingredients. Below is the list of “definitive pieces” I point people to.

>So, the porn aspect. I’ll give you the long answer, since I think you’ll appreciate it. When I was a kid, I watched Julia Child and Jacques Pepin on PBS. They were educational shows, produced to teach the viewers about cooking. These were documentary: demonstrating a process. Modern cooking shows (IE, everything on Food Network) are pornographic: they are a wanton display of food. If you watch Paula Dean’s show, for example (who, unlike many TV personalities, actually knows how to cook) if she’s making a cake, she’ll start with her pre-measured ingredients laid out, dump them into a bowl, and no matter how skillfully she proceeds to mix them, the process is edited out. Two cuts and four seconds later, the batter is ready: nothing about gluten development, nothing about air content, nothing about leavening, nothing about batter structure, nothing about cooking. If they cut a recipe or two out of the show, or the ‘let’s set the table’ featurettes, or damn near anything they wanted to, there would be plenty of time in the format to include information about cooking. But that’s not the goal. The goal is heavy product placement (all-clad, oxo, kitchenaid, etc) and speedy delivery to languorous footage of finished products, interspersed by more advertising. Some of the content then says “ok let’s cook” but what they mean is “let’s open a package.” So then they’re further encouraging people to eat things that are not food. Of course, Food Network is not a public service. They are a business, in business to make money, not to steward the planet. It is also true that I don’t need to support them simply because I am interested in food.

>Now, to give you specific examples in the devour.tv content, I looked at three things: The Telepan segment, the Dueling Foodies congee segment and Pied Piper Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic segment.

>The Telepan segment had nothing to do with cooking, and very little to do with the dish itself. It was largely a much longer than needed discussion about the details of a dish that the reviewer had yet to taste, followed by a pronouncement that a dish is great without any true detail of its preparation. “Simple ingredients, done just right,” is the reviewer’s summation. How? What? Who? Tell us: the brioche was perfect, the crumb was just right, the butter flavor came through. The mushroom had this texture, this flavor, the egg. No, we are left with the comment “this is the afro of mushrooms.”

>The dueling foodies was cute, but again lacked in depth. This congee is too brown this one’s too green, this one tastes like snails, which the editing taunts us to think is overwhelmingly exotic, which of course it isn’t, especially in New York. I have to assume this is a function of editing since we know that David Rosengarten was geeking out the entire time.

>Finally, the Pied Piper, probably the best of them, again edited too much. Let’s calm down the electronic music and let the cook finish showing us the deboning process. He started out being very informative, and then all of a sudden we were somewhere else. Likewise the browning; If I didn’t know how to cook, I’d have thought he turned the chicken pieces over, then immediately added white wine, which of course he did not.

>I don’t mean to pick on what you are doing. It is what the pop-culture food world is doing. You guys are absolutely typical in terms of ethos. Even though I’m 29, and I’m supposed to be part of the sound-byte generation, I simply don’t like it. I strive for a little PBS in the noise of the internet. If there are camps, I am securely barricaded in with Jacques Pepin and Lidia Bastianich, with the ghosts of Julia Child and MFK Fisher hanging around. The camp with Giada de Laurentis and Rachel Ray is distant and, to me, destructive.

List of definitive pieces:

Guazzetti:
[http://omnivorousfish.com/node/265](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/265)

Poeles:
[http://omnivorousfish.com/node/176](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/176)

Gnocchi:
[http://omnivorousfish.com/node/199](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/199)

Pasta:
[http://omnivorousfish.com/node/209](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/209)

Empowerment:
[http://omnivorousfish.com/node/211](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/211)

Listening: NPR: National. Public. Radio.