Everything Pairs with Hospitality

Guess what happened to me?!  Boy, oh boy, oh boy…it will be a challenge to make this seem food-related.  Since we only deal with delicious and pretentious edibles on this site, let me say right off the bat that the experience was more satisfying than, say, a proper three-cheese risotto.  I was drinking a Coke Zero at the airport when it happened.  There may be no decent food outside Dan-D cashews at YVR, but don’t let that stop you from picking up your friends and relatives there.  You never know what kind of social amuse-bouches await you in the terminals!

Baby Cakes

The following confession may surprise you.

After all, I am the writer of a highly pretentious food blog -and I’m clearly obsessed with dessert.  I drink homogenized chocolate milk, have ice cream for dinner, use bar chocolate prn, and I’m the self-proclaimed pioneer of the frozen cupcake.  Then again, none of those sweets are homemade.  I guess it will be up to you to determine if I am a food fraud, an ingredient imposter, a kitchen con artist, or a chocolate charlatan.  Here goes.

I have never baked a cake.

Introductory Lectures in Pretentious Gastric Illness

As some of you know from my bellyaching, I am an expert in stomach trouble. This was not always the case.  For most of my twenties I had so brawny a belly I insisted on starting every day with black coffee on an empty stomach.  Back then, in my own gastric Camelot, I had no problem with wine, red or white, and I said so cockily of whiskey “If you don’t like it straight, you don’t really like it.” I scoffed at Zantac and hadn’t even heard of Fruit Gaviscon, let alone learned how delicious this product can be in tablet form.

Five Days to the Forbidden Fruit

Well, I’m on day five of my low-carbohydrate diet and I have already lost the two pounds I was fretting about.  Frankly, I’m almost disappointed.  Given my rigorous calculations, I was sure I’d have to put in a whole two weeks- I don’t know what to do with myself now.  To maintain a sense of agency amid this perplexing turn of events, I’ve made a list.  A list of high-carb grocery items I shall hasten to obtain? Not quite; I will make such a list as soon as I can ensure my two-pound weight loss is legitimate, that I have indeed regained homeostasis.  No, the present list is of several hypotheses that could potentially explain my observation of a two-pound weight loss.  Let us examine them one by one in the hope of identifying the most robust:

A Very Merry Un-Birthday to the PFB

Today is my birthday.  Technically.  That is, it is definitely my birthday following the urban dictionary definition, which, in my opinion and yours soon, is the most accurate available.   But it doesn’t feel like my birthday, as really nothing birthday-ey is happening today.  It did feel like my birthday on Saturday at the Blue Water Café  where, emboldened by a big birthday bottle from Barossa, I celebrated my survival to-date by eating a death-defying quantity of seafood.

I shouldn't be eating either of you.

 

If there’s one foodstuff I can’t possibly support, it is deli meat. Almost all deli meat contains sodium nitrite, which is associated with an unappetizing buffet of cancers, like the gastric, esophageal, and colorectal. Cancers? Yucky! Yet the very idea of grinding multiple animal parts into a discrete food and then shaping it into a ball that can be easily gripped and slipped into a metal slicer is even yuckier, non? Being totally disgusted by deli meat is vital to my food identity, oui?

Or am I having a food identity crisis?

Magic Coffee Too Magical?

This just in from the US Food and Drug Administration: Consumers should NOT use instant coffee for sexual enhancement.

So, what, Scientific Establishment- after years of fruitless research attempting to ruin coffee for all of us, you’ve resorted to whining that it doesn't heighten sexual performance?  We didn’t think it did. We just thought it was delicious and mildly psychoactive!

Living on the Wedge

In a turn of events certain to have put the majority of my vast readership off their dinners, I haven't been available to make pretentious comments about food since Thursday.  It's simply a case of work getting in the way of work; I have been too busy creating Wedge Salads to write a single thing.  (And too busy contemplating purchasing a new camera.  Please forgive me for the lamentable quality of my Wedge Snapshots compared to the one I stole off the internet.  Lovely, isn't it?  Yet so unlikely to be as delicious as my own poorly lit Wedges.) 

Top Sushi Seen Canoodling with Total Dumbass

I just ate Vancouver's best sushi seated next to the world’s worst human.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating.  Vancouver has some pretty amazing sushi, and the stuff at Kadoya on Davie is perhaps just among the best.  (I had a California roll, which they obligingly draped with additional avocado for the added fee of $1.75. Sooo worth it. For those of you who want to add ‘California roll’ to a list of PFB-approved cheap choices, allez-y. Kadoya’s wild salmon sashimi is a pillow-y protein party, but pricey; I felt like slumming it today.)

But the man sitting next to me was seriously the worst.

Ichiban, Yo

Just as ultra-pretentious Jeffrey Steingarten loves a couple of low-brow foods, such as fun-sized Milky Ways, I love several of them (which makes me either way more or way less pretentious than he…tough call).  Among my favorite trailer park specials are Ichiban noodles, known generically as instant noodles or ramen.  Ramen noodles are made of cheap wheat flour and constitute the go-to reference for people who wish to a) represent how poor they were in college, or b) argue that an expense under consideration is outlandish and would necessitate a future economical sacrifice of great proportions.  Anecdotally, I can tell you the latter ramen-rhetoric is common among Vancouverites, all of whom can certainly afford a downtown condominium if they ate ramen noodles for the next 25 years.  But perhaps the best-documented example is from pop culture, when Sex and the City’s Charlotte pines after a $1300 piece of wedding china which fiancé Trey opines will look wonderful “underneath the ramen noodles we will be forced to eat.” (In this episode we learn that the character of Trey, a Park Avenue cardiologist with latent ED, has a flair for hyperbole.)

PFB Celebrates Chocolate Time Machine

Both as a pretentious food blogger and as a civilian, I eat a lot of chocolate.  My favorite is Ritter Sport Alpine Milk Chocolate, a bar once brutally lambasted by an overly-candid Belgian friend, who claimed it was merde compared to real chocolate, the kind without lecithin, the poor, stigmatized chocolate filler.  Je m'en fous. I think Ritter Sport is, above anything, the right height. If memory serves, the vertical extent of a Ritter Sport is about one inch, which is the optimal size for hearing my favourite chocolate sound when I break off a square with my teeth.  (With thinner chocolate you definitely hear a snap; I'm still searching for the word to describe the sound from a one-inch bar.  I'm leaning toward thud.)

Hippie Con-diment Poses as Low-Sodium

I still remember, years ago, bearing witness to a child's request for her mother's 'special sauce' on brown rice.  The mother, an acquaintance of mine, enthusiastically obliged her, and me, when I asked what made the sauce so special. "Oh, it's just flax seed oil and Bragg's All Purpose Seasoning," she announced happily, "which is like a salt-free substitute for soy sauce." 

The reason the event stands out in my memory is it was one of the few times I chose to keep my mouth shut, though I had detected a factual error begging be corrected.  The child's mother is a lovely person and I didn't want to put her on the spot; I also didn't want her to think I objected to her daughter enjoying some flax seed oil and Bragg's on her rice.  In fact, this is a delicious combination I think you should try, on rice or hot vegetables, which is what I use it for.  Flax seed makes a rich, nutty-tasting oil you can use like butter.  And Bragg's is indeed a mouthwatering alternative to soy sauce.  It is every bit as tasty as traditional soy, and it offers up a different, maybe even more complex flavor, but it is not salt-free. 

Well-liked Spice Guilty of Fragrant Assault

Breaking news: I just met up with my friend Hayley, who told me a harrowing food tale. Given my privileged position of reaching such a vast audience of eaters, I feel it is my responsibility to publish her case report here. Feel free to start formally recording my acts of public service starting…now!

“Tuesday morning, before work,” began Hayley’s frightful account, “I was sitting in bed, checking my email, eating soup.” (Pretentious Food Blog reading comprehension exercise: please draw a picture including the following labels: a) girl b) bed c) email d) breakfast soup.) “I was in a rush, and sort of inhaling the soup, like this.” Here, mouth agape, she mimed to me an act of hasty shoveling. “My eyes were on the computer when, all of a sudden,” she gasped, both hands rising to her neck, “I sucked a bay leaf right into my throat!!”

Giant Novelty Fork, Why Do You Exist?

I say, if you're going to review restaurants, better have an oversized novelty utensil to bring along.  Accordingly, I brought this giant fork to the Red Door Pan Asian Grill in South Granville, where on Saturday I enjoyed a generous plate of perfectly-cooked scallops and peapods, a delicious serving of juicy red curry shrimp, and a distinguished helping of Vancouver's signature dish, szechuan green beans.  For those of you currently residing in a dry climate and paying less than $500/sq ft for housing, let me inform you that everywhere in Vancouver serves szechuan green beans, even McDonald's.  (Okay, this is an extrapolation- yet, statistically-speaking, a safe one.  In a logistic regression, with the presence of szechuan green beans across Canada as the dichotomous outcome variable, the odds ratio associated with a restaurant in Vancouver compared to elsewhere in the country would be in the magnitude of ~100, with a 95% confidence interval of 85 to 115. I only go to McDonald's for breakfast, so I'm pressed to make this reasonable assumption regarding its dinner fare).

The Balls Are So Great

Since I started my insufferably f---ing snooty internet food site, I've been asking friends to write me with their latest food crazes/crises.  I received this letter from my very favorite food friend Adrienne, who responded to my query regarding what's new in baby food (important background: last year, Adrienne created a new human using her own body.  Her husband was partly responsible):

"Loenne [the tiny human conjured from what previously was nothingness] is a huge fan of meatballs and I have them individually frozen for her dinner every night.

Failed Indian Food Becomes Hamster Fare

Tonight I tried to make Indian food: Palak Paneer and Chana Masala.  My first mistake was relying on a packaged paneer; my second was trying to use soy protein balls instead of chickpeas in the Chana Masala. The soy protein balls were a total failure, comparatively much worse than the flavorless, uninspiring paneer. In fact, the balls were totally non-edible, low-carb or not. Perhaps, you'll argue, I could have anticipated this- that soy protein balls are an unsuitable substitute for garbanzo beans, and, also, they are yucky. But! I'd retort, I'm such a fan of texturized vegetable protein I'd come to believe none of its long-distance meat substitute relatives could disappoint me.

I was devastated to learn that soy protein balls (at least, those obtained at the same Granville market food-stand that is the source of my wondrous TVP) taste like chewy dry Kibbles and Bits and look like any no-name wet dog food when swimming in curry sauce.  Worse, the soy protein balls stank.  I'm desperate to explain it.  My first instinct is to say they smelled like bread, but then you might think they smelled unbelievably good. But they did smell like bread, just like wet dog bread, bread after it gets mixed into dog food and is already in the dog's mouth, not yet, but just about to be, spit out and replaced by curses to a witless owner.

Not having a dog, I had no choice but to feed them to my hamsters.

Fat Bastard Bit Fugly

Vancouver Magazine's 2010 Wine Awards just came out. Okay, they came out in January, but only now, with the advent of my pretentious food blog, can I justify spending the money to test out their recommendations.  Given a recently-developed affinity for the big reds (yes, yes, a result of influence- like when people start to look like their Chow Chows) I decided to start with their "Best Rich Red Wines" category.  Accordingly, this afternoon I took a trip to Vancouver's flagship government liquor store, the Signature shop at Cambie and 39th.  This liquor store is a Vancouver ethanol oasis.  There is so much beautiful wine there; they even have a section devoted exclusively to wines for litigators, surgeons, and cosmetic dermatologists!! (Confession: staff at the 39th and Cambie liquor store were busy this Saturday and I wasn't able to verify the accuracy of my assumption regarding the target market for their velvet rope section; with wines ranging from $60 to $885, I feel confident in waiving this one wee fact-check.)

Crowned Jack

As this food blog is already four days old, I figure it's about time I introduce you to my mother. When it comes to food, I believe mothers are a major influence, their home cooking pivotal in shaping the palate and their kitchen-competence an undiscovered dominant allele. Plus, all the best chefs are mama's boys*. You can expect to hear from me all sorts of recipes that originated with my mother and she knows a lot about weird ingredients; she’s really just a Costco-sized bag of food ideas. All that and she knows how to fillet a fish! She even has a really funny story about teaching someone to do it. Because I care about you, my tiny but presumably rapidly-expanding readership, I asked her to type it out for us. Here it is, fresh from Manitoba:

Springtime Delicacies: Mo Fiddle fo Rel

In the course of a Sunday trip to Granville Island Market, I made the discovery of- and acquired, by exchanging bushels of cash- not one but two alimentary celebrities from my childhood. These were, one, fiddleheads (which I remark are described by an online encyclopedia with an apparent appetite for alliteration as “the unfurled fronds of a young fern harvested for food consumption”*) and, two, morels, a chic and porous mushroom with the absolutely most mushroomy taste- disons, robin is to bird as morel is to mushroom flavor.

Subtle as Beef

Dear Sasha,

You know what’s a subtle flavor I am deft at detecting? That of efforts to sneak political content into my pretentious food blog. Soon I will have to speak directly to readers so as to assure them they are safe here from non-food related issues.

As you can see, I agreed to post your link to the Dan Barber speech, as it is about food, though hardly as trivial as the topics I myself plan to address here. As long as you realize I can smell the beefy fragrance of your ulterior motives.

A+,
Stephanie

You know what's delicious?

Stephanie,

I suppose we’d best switch to an all-food dialogue, so as to maximize the utility of our exchanges. In the event that we need to switch to a non-food topic, I suggest we begin our sentence with “you know what’s delicious?...”

To wit: You know what’s delicious? The fact that Obama is pursuing criminal charges against the bad dudes that caused the oil spill:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02spill.html?hp

Or, in the alternative: You know what I’m hungry for? Justice. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Thompkins case leaves me starving for justice:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1470.pdf

I mean, they’re practically overruling Miranda v Arizona, after 44 years!

Sasha

p.s. You must, must put a link to this speech on your blog, it is about food!!!!!

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html

Comme Fleur de Sel

Dear Sasha,

I am appalled by your suggestion that I shorten my web address and consider it a testament to the decay of language education. Shouldn't everyone, particularly the gourmands who will be deeply interested in my blog posts, be able to type a 23-letter phrase? (And shouldn’t, in fact, everyone possess knowledge of enough French words in order to garnish their speech with the odd mot juste, heightening it perfectly as though with Fleur de sel?)

Anyway, despite my disgust at your recommendation, I’ve decided to acquiesce and, as you can see, have catered to the lobby of the attention-deficient and/or poor-at-spelling, whose interests you’ve chosen to represent. Congratulations on your win.

Of course, this means I have indeed decided to write my food blog. Finally the public can benefit from our witty correspondence.

A+,
Stephanie

The Devil the Seasoning

Stephanie,

You will need a shorter web address for your blog. Apart from that, I like the title; it is wildly pretentious but that suits me fine. So, I guess that quote means, “God created food, but the devil created seasoning”? Why would God want us to eat bland food?

Although I can see why the devil might invent seasoning, so we eat more than we need. Assuming the devil wants us to be fat. I’d say, God created food and seasoning, but the devil created our insatiable appetites for same.

I like the concepts you advance for the blog, and will read it regularly. But be warned, you have to update it pretty often, if it is to remain cool. A good way to cheat is by finding links to useful articles on other sites, such as:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/health/01real.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

But also http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/dining/28bruni.html?ref=dining which I sent you last week, and many others I will send you periodically from now on.

More on that after lunch…

Sasha

Commençons?

Dear Sasha,

I am writing to say I have almost fully decided to start a blog. Of course, I am the first to hate the self-indulgent, micro-focused writers of blogs, and by extension blogs themselves, but who am I to deny my own obsession with moi-même, let alone feign interest in big-picture issues?

My blog, because I am a snowflake, is going to be about food.

The blog will include content such as what delicious items I am most into at the moment (and perhaps what delicious items my friends are into, if they’re sensible enough to like legitimately delicious items), what hilarious foodstuffs are currently causing foodborne illness according to the FDA, my opinions on the programs I am importantly viewing on the Food Network, my impressions on food essays such as the ones I’m reading right now by Jeffrey Steingarten, and various insights into how to eat the best food without getting fat.

Now for the part where you give me your opinion: for a title, I am interested in a James Joyce quote (curiously enough, one in French) that says “Dieu a fait l’aliment, le diable l’assaisonnement”. I want my blog to be quite pretentious, so I am thinking of calling it Le Diable L’Assaisonnement. What do you think? Does anyone actually type in web addresses anymore? This is the only disadvantage I can see to creating www.lediablelassaisonnement.com

A+,
Stephanie