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!!”