Hiromi_X

...'cause you get swollen, inflamed lips from sucking da heads at Quality Seafood, where they overload their crawfish boil with cayenne, yet want to enjoy the orangey fat, you need a special technique. I, a fucking food prodigy who never grew up nowhere near no crawfish, developed this technique during what was only my second experience with crawfish. That's how hard I rock.

After eating my first pound of crawfish of the day, I had to stick my lips in my iced tea for like 5 minutes to cool them off. I came to the conclusion that although suckin da heads is a venerable tradition, the pain factor was outweighing the pleasure factor (I now openly reject the tastebud-obliterating macho "more is more" school of pepper application). While contemplating my throbbing lips, the solution popped into my head: Let the Fat Come to You! I share my technique with you, lucky readers.

What you do: 1. Grasp the head near its base. 2. Gently wriggle it and the tail apart. 3. Enjoy the fatty goodness. If you look closely at the slain crawfish grasped in my manhands, you'll see the coveted orangey globs clinging to its severed tail. I get, like, an 80% success rate with this method.

Posted by Hiromi at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Proof that old dogs can learn new tricks; food issues I'm no longer doctrinaire about:

1) Fruit and chocolate together is now acceptable. Or at least berries and chocolate, and some limited citrus. I've also come to love dried fruit and chocolate after much experimentation with the bulk bins in Central Market. The chocolate-covered Bing cherries, blueberry chocolates, and mixed berry chocolates are to die for.

2) Fruit and meat. I think my distaste for fruit and meat together started as a child, when my mom would open a can of jellied cranberry sauce on Thanksgivings. But I'm starting to come around; for example, I had cranberries and wild boar sausages together the other night. I've also had dried fruit with various meats recently, and liked them. Which leads to the following:

3) Raisins. I've always liked raisins, but only by themselves. The only other form I would eat them in was raisin bread. But lately, I've had raisins in pilaf, raisins in various kinds of salads, and even chocolate-covered raisins (something I never used to even consider food) and enjoyed them. However, I remain close-minded about nuts. I accept them in one of three forms only: by themselves, in a trail mix, and finely chopped peanuts in certain Asian dishes. Otherwise, their very hard texture is off-putting when mixed with other foods. This rule is suspended for things like pine nuts or sunflower seeds; their softer texture makes them easier to incorporate into foods. But never desserts! Nuts do not belong in desserts, except when they come in brittle form (I don't like chocolate-covered nuts, except when combined with dried fruit).

4) Sweetness in entrees. The only sweet entree I used to like was sukiyaki. I liked to segregate the savory and sweet portions of my meal -- entree savory, dessert sweet. This has changed gradually over time and is related to my acceptance of the pairing of fruit and meat. I still reject overly sweetened curries and reject sweetness in soba sauces altogether, but it was the slightly sweetened nuoc cham, or dipping sauce, in Vietnamese cooking that brought me around with its irresistible combination of sweet-savory-fiery.

I wonder if I'll ever get over my aversion to organ meats, though.

Posted by Hiromi at 6:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Being a big fan of crispy roasted chicken skin, I think someone should breed Shar-pei chickens so we can have more surface area of skin per bird.

Posted by Hiromi at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I have completely lost my cooking imagination.

For the past month or so, I've been rotating the following foods when I eat at home.

1) cinnamon toast
2) romaine lettuce
3) avocado
4) bacon
5) eggs
6) whole grain bread
7) PB&J
8) grape tomatoes
9) red, yellow, orange bell peppers
10) fresh jalapenos
11) popcorn
12) Irish butter
13) smoothies (frozen fruit, yogurt, splenda, some water)
14) bananas
15) assorted seasonal fruit

That's pretty much it.

I need a silent ghostlike wife to do all my menu planning, grocery shopping, cooking, iron my shirts, quietly leave, and then return the next day unobtrusively.

Oh, and change my oil and lube my chain.

Posted by Hiromi at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It is OFFICIAL: The inhabitants of the People's Republic of Hiromistan, who at long last are enjoying a period of stability and economic recovery, will now relocate from central Texas to...the Midwest, where they will have no shortage of cheese and snow.

Revolutionary Leader Hiromi X had hoped to go to the Bay Area so that she could enjoy year-round motorcycling and surfing, but alas, lifestyle considerations alone do not serve as justification for relocating an entire republic, and so fate has decreed a sojourn in what Ms. X has been wont to term "The Void."

I feel weird. I'm having trouble adjusting to the whole idea of moving to The Void.

***ain't gonna disclose the exact place in order to preserve a level of anonymity.

Posted by Hiromi at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

The hardest kind of Japanese food to find in this neck of the woods is nimono, which are foods cooked by boiling or simmering. Within that type of cooking, I miss nabemono, or hotpot-style foods, the most.

Famous kinds of nabe:
Shabu shabu, frequently found in restaurants, made from thin slices of beef.
Sukiyaki, ditto, but with soy sauce and some sugar.
Chankonabe, fed to sumo wrestlers to fatten them up.
Yudofu, a delicate tofu nabe found in the vegetarian cuisine of Buddhist temples in Kyoto. Delicious when generously seasoned. I have to stress "generously" -- you get soft tofu, which isn't exactly packed with flavor, simmered in hot water with a piece of kombu in it. They give you a teeny little pot of savory pepper-based seasoning made from a Japanese pepper called sanshô. I had to ask for more pots when I ordered this.

When I lived in Japan, one of my favorite things to do on a winter day was to make a typical homemade nabe. You fill the hotpot with the base, generally a combination of dashi, a kombu or seaweed-based stock, and soy sauce. The stock can be more fishy, or else be meat-based. You could even use miso, although that never appealed to me. Stores sold pre-mixed bottled versions, too. When that comes to a simmer, you add your various ingredients, pick out the ones you want when they're cooked, and put them in your individual bowl. I favored the following:

Meat: very thin slices of pork, but you could use beef or fish or whatever.
Veg: Shiitake mushroom (lots) and either shungiku (chrysanthemum greens) or mizuna, a pleasantly spicy, rocket-looking type of green. The greens had to have a bite in order to balance out the stew -- Chinese cabbage is too bland for this purpose. You left the greens in only until they wilted; soft greens are gross. Sometimes I sprinkled finely chopped negi, or green onion, on top of the stew in my bowl.
Misc: Tofu and lots of shirataki noodles, a kind of thin white noodle made from konnyaku, a dense flavorless jelly sometimes called konjac.

Some people dip the various parts in a tangy ponzu dip, or in a raw egg when eating sukiyaki. I like to just eat the ingredients together in my bowl with the broth. The longer you cook, the more flavorful and rich the broth gets. At the very end, you can put either rice or noodles, usually udon noodles or a kind of transparent yam flour-based noodle, into the remaining broth and eat that to finish it off.

Yumilicious.

What I miss the most right now, though, is oden. I was very surprised to find that convenience stores sold rather tasty versions. A reference to konbini oden is made in Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen, but it didn't translate well at all. Anyway, here's a photo; doesn't it look delicious???

From upper left of the left-hand container: cabbage rolls (I never saw these where I lived), little bags of fried tofu skin with mochi, or sticky rice cake, inside (do not take a huge bite of this when it's hot); rolls of kombu; stuffed chikuwa, or hollow tubes made of fish paste (not sure what they're stuffed with); fried slabs of tofu paired with flat fish cake; shirataki; and daikon.

Seven Eleven had delicious chicken meatballs, by the way. But if you want to be more civilized, many restaurants serve this. One of my very favorite places gave you a big hotpot and let you order what ingredients you wanted a la carte. Generally, I hated lagers, but it's awesome paired with some kinds of Japanese food, including sashimi. Anyway, with oden, you pick out the morsel of your choice and eat it with karashi, or hot Japanese yellow mustard. My favorites are shirataki, daikon, meatballs, ganmo, and usually I'll get the fried tofu (atsuage). And drinking the broth is always an option. The great thing about hotpots is that the broth gets more and more savory as you go.

The bowl in the picture shows boiled eggs, which I never ate, and a thick grey speckled slab of konnyaku. Konnyaku turns up in all kinds of stews and in stir-fries, too. I don't think there's any non-East Asian version of this. Jelly-like textures don't seem to go over well with non-East Asians, but as always, I could be full of shit. The only form of konnyaku that I like is the noodle form, shirataki.

I suppose I could recreate these dishes here in Austin, but it would be a tremendous pain. I don't have a hotpot, clay or otherwise, for one thing, and equivalent ingredients are hard to find. if I wanted a regular nabe, I'd have to find an equivalent to those wonderful peppery greens and have a butcher very, very thinly slice pork, and I'm not sure what cut to use. They have to be almost paper thin or else they get a disagreeable texture. Oden is even trickier; in order to get a flavorful broth, you need all those different things simmering in it. Otherwise tasteless daikon and tofu and noodles soak up that delicious flavor. Many of the fish cake products aren't easy to find here, and in any case, I don't really like to eat them. I've never been a huge chikuwa fan.

:(

Foiled.

Posted by Hiromi at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

The BBC reports here on an overweight boy taken from his mother by child protection services because she overfed him, something that has been done in approximately two dozen other cases. The reasoning is that allowing a child to become obese is a form of neglect.

While that's happening in the UK, I can see that sort of thing happening here. It is just creepy, how far the "For your own good" argument for greater regulation can go. These arguments seem particularly powerful when they involve medical or public health issues; the presence of statistics and data from studies bolster the appearance of benignity or neutrality: We're Just Trying to Help. As a doctor quoted in the article stated, "The net result is that the kind of moralising the obese and overweight have always suffered has somehow become institutionalised."

Posted by Hiromi at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

When did chirpy familiarity become a standard when dealing with any sort of customer? Why do waiters or waitresses have to be your best friend? To me, chirpy familiarity is appropriate only in a family-run hole in the wall.

I'm likely the only person in America who feels this way, but I like my servers to be formal. Formal doesn't mean hostile and cold or grim and humorless; it means respectful distance. I go to restaurants for the food and to be with the people I came with. It would be different if I were a regular and got to know the staff, but otherwise, I don't want bubbliness inflicted on me.

Whatever happened to respectful distance? Why does every retail experience have to be some kind of bonding experience? What is up with all this ersatz friendliness?

Posted by Hiromi at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

If I were allowed to eat only one animal for the rest of my life, it would be the pig. It has the tastiest fat, the skin is fantastic, and you can get a huge variety of flavor from the same animal. From one pig, you can get rich and hearty cuts and light and delicate cuts. Other meats don't seem as versatile. I could be wrong about the insides of the beast, however; I tend to avoid organ meat, so I have no idea whose intestines or liver or whatever tastes best.

I've had pig on the brain since I saw this episode of "No Reservations" the other night. Anthony Bourdain went to South Carolina, where they do "whole hog" barbecue. The scene where they glopped sauce onto the meat broke my heart, though. Whole hog barbecue minus the sauce is now on my pig wish list. Here's the rest:

1) Spit-roasted pig. I have no idea where to get this.
2) Kalua pig, or whole pig cooked Hawaiian-style in an underground "oven" lined with hot rocks, where it steams for hours and hours. The last time I had this was in the 1980s when my family in Hawaii made one themselves.
3) Roast suckling pig with apple in mouth.
4) I need to go on a dry-cured ham tour of Europe. Hell, I need to go on a food tour of the world, period.

Posted by Hiromi at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

This is one of my all-time favorites: lemongrass beef on a bed of noodles and greens, or bun bo xao. Bun refers to the noodles used, which is rice vermicelli. I think bo refers to the style in which the noodles are served -- "in a bowl", maybe? In any case, in the "Noodle Bowl" section in restaurant menus, the dishes are listed as bun bo whatever. I suppose the xao refers to lemongrass beef. I'm not sure what part of Vietnam bun bo comes from, but they had restaurants serving it in Hanoi.

I'm not totally happy with the noodle bowls in Vietnamese restaurants here. If I want it topped with chargrilled pork, I have to go to a restaurant since I don't know how to make the chargrilled pork, which is heavenly. But if I just want it topped with lemongrass beef or Vietnamese egg rolls, I can make it myself.

So, here's what I did (pardon the quality of the photos -- my camera is dying a slow death):

One thing I love about Vietnamese food is the widespread use of fresh greens. For this dish you need Asian cucumber cut into matchsticks (don't use regular cucumbers which suck), lettuce, Asian basil, cilantro, and mung bean sprouts. I like the lettuce to be crisp, so I use the inner leaves of romaine lettuce. You can leave out the herbs, but I like them. Unfortunately, a lot of the wonderful, subtle herbs used in Vietnam aren't available here, so the basil and cilantro will have to do. DO NOT do something horrible like use bag salad, which is something a popular but spectacularly bad restaurant in Austin does.
Boil the rice vermicellis and drain. Unlike Italian pasta, you have to let the noodles sit in the colander until they're completely drained before adding them to the dish. If you don't, you'll end up with watery noodles that don't hold the sauce. After the noodles are dry, I like to chop them up with scissors so they're easy to eat.
The flavors of this dish are pretty complex. Thinly sliced sirloin and red onion are marinated with minced lemongrass and garlic, oyster sauce, fish sauce, and vegetable oil. The entire dish is held together by the dipping sauce in the bowl on top. Toppings include scallion oil (the green stuff), crispy fried shallots, and chopped peanuts. The chile sauce is optional. I don't recommend Sriracha -- its ketchupy flavor detracts from the dish in my opinion. I use the seedy stuff in jars.
I cooked the marinated beef and onions at high heat in a cast iron skillet, and put it on top of the noodles. I then topped that with the fried shallots, scallion oil, peanuts, and chile sauce. While not strictly necessary, I believe these toppings bring out the full flavor of the dish. The scallion oil and crispy shallots deepen the savor of the dish, and the peanuts add an essential note and texture. These things are really easy to make. All you do is chop scallions and fry them in some vegetable oil for like 10 seconds, then put in fridge so the oil remains green. For crispy shallots, chop raw ones into 1/8" width and fry in oil until brown and crisp. Easy peasy.
Finally, pour a quarter cup of dipping sauce on top and mix. I still haven't bought any chopsticks -- you can see my fork of shame in the upper right hand corner in one of the above photos.

Bon appetit!

Posted by Hiromi at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Let's analyze food elitism through the latest episode of Top Chef. Let me group it 1) "good" and 2) "bad":

1) The Patron Saint of Mediocrity, Brian

This son of a bitch is a prime reason why there should be a cumulative aspect to elimination judging simply for justice's sake. He remains only because more talented and skilled chefs just happened to fuck up a little bit worse on the same day that he fucked up YET AGAIN and made something either spectacularly mediocre or downright shitty YET AGAIN.

It doesn't matter simply that his shepherd's pie tasted good. We're talking about chef-ery here. Ideally (though not in reality because it's just trash teevee), a search for a "top" chef should be a search for a food artist. A motherfucker who puts veggy mashed potatoes on top of sausage he didn't even make isn't that. What is up with serving shepherd's pie in a venue like that? Comfort food has its place, but that was a venue to showcase skills. He demonstrated neither skill nor imagination. Fuck him. Let's have some standards for chrissake.

2) Let's not confuse discernment with class

The first challenge the chefs faced was to reproduce a signature dish from Le Cirque that's served only to VIPs. Doubtless, "VIP" means Rich People with Connections. And that's just wrongheaded to me. That means it's not about the food, and it should always be about the food. Appreciation of food is not linked to income or membership in some kind of social circle.

Here's an example of the opposite. I covet the Columbia classic leather motorcycle jacket made (or built, to use their word) by Langlitz. The company gets orders from celebrities and people with moneys, but they don't get priority over anyone else. You can't pay extra to get your jacket sooner. And they don't use idealized models to model their jacket, either. These practices show a respect for the product itself and the people who respect the product. I can't respect Quality when part of the reason why it's Quality is because access to it is limited by arbitrary, pointlessly snotty standards.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

FOUND: In shelves of candy bars by express checkout, Central Market, North Lamar location. Central Market candy buyers, you guys motherfucken rock.

I have been looking for this candy bar for YEARS, ever since my first trip to Europe in 1999. I've hunted around in import food shops, Brit-specialty shops, grocery stores of all sorts. Yeah yeah yeah, I figured I could probably buy a box online, but frankly couldn't be arsed. That seems unsatisfying for some reason. Maybe I like to actively hunt and gather, or else I'd like to think I live amongst civilized people who have the sense to stock some goddamn Lion Bars amongst the monotonous rows of Cadbury chocolates. I don't like looking for every goddamn thing online. I don't know why. I want to go somewhere physically, look at some stuff, then pick what I want.

Anyway, recently, I was standing in line at Central Market looking at the mixture of nostalgia candies (Bit O'Honeys are another favorite) and ridiculously priced boutique chocolates, and I saw a box of Lion Bars on a shelf close to the floor. My jaw dropped -- am I imagining things? -- no! My preciousssss!

One of my piggish traveling habits is to sample as many local candy bars as humanly possible. Of all the ones I tried in Europe, I like Lion Bars the best. Lion Bars belong to the great tradition of non-snobby, non-premium candy bars. While I love premium chocolate (I'm substituting a chocolate and frites tour of Belgium for the beer tour), there's a kind of satisfaction that only simple candy bars can deliver. Since yesterday, I've experienced "caramel, filled wafer, and crisp cereal covered in milk chocolate" goodness three times. Urp.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

I'm a cat person. I loved our family kitties to a ridiculous extent. The little creatures were part of our family. And like many indulgent pet owners, nothing was too good for our kitties. Including their food. They got nutrionally balanced food. Food good for their fur or digestive system and special formulas for elderly cats. I never wondered how those foods were formulated.

This article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine was a rude suprise. Here's an excerpt:

I had been told that in the basement of the animal-science laboratory building at the University of Illinois, Dr. George Fahey kept a colony of strange-looking dogs. At Fahey’s orders, each of the dogs had undergone a surgical procedure to string a length of tubing from its intestinal tract to a clear plastic spout that stuck out its side. Fahey, a professor of animal and nutritional sciences, could open a spout by hand, fill a bag with whatever happened to ooze out and calculate how much the dog had digested before whatever it had not digested could move farther through its body. The plastic tubing was inserted in the ileum — the exact spot where food absorption ends and fermentation by the microflora and bacteria of the lower bowel begins. Given a large enough sample of any dog food, George Fahey could calculate how much vitamin or mineral or fat or sugar would enter a dog’s bloodstream and how much would be irretrievably lost. Fahey has spent his career investigating the metabolism of domestic animals, and his research has helped define the nature of pet food.

In addition to his dog colony, Fahey supervised a number of other nutrition laboratories in the university’s department of animal sciences, and for the most part his workaday hardware consisted of the various contrivances necessary to measure how much food a pet might or might not digest. Thus the baroque collections of viscometers, desiccators and pulverizers, the vials brimming with dog excreta laced with acid, the racks of test tubes filled with cat urine, the containers of canine and feline gastric fluid and the retorts of dog and cat blood. The largest of his labs contained a walk-in refrigerator holding glass jars of secret-coded dog and cat diets, experimental feeds of the future that in their present states resembled nothing more than heaps of brown dust.

The names of the pet food companies that use the information Dr. Fahey produces were not named. The fascinating thing -- and it's appropriate that this topic should come after my Cloaca post -- is that much of his research revolves around producing dog poop pleasing to humans. I mean "pleasing" as in regular, compact, and tidy -- can't have incontinent dogs, or giant splattery messy poos. I imagine the same goes for cats, with perhaps even more urgency.

Very few of us live on farms and produce our own food. We live in cities, and get our food trucked in for us, already picked, already slaughtered. Same goes for our city dwelling pets. They don't hunt; we put their food in a bowl on the floor. When they do hunt -- like when cats, according to their nature, stalk and kill songbirds -- we disapprove. Their owners should know better. These aren't wild animals; they're meant to live in our houses and eat politely, just like us.

I hadn't thought of the ways that, apart from their domestication, our pets are positioned in a man-made hierarchy. Sure, they eat the leftovers from our factory farming processes, the glands and organs and odds and ends that humans don't eat. You can draw a parallel betwen that and how people in earlier times might have tossed a scrap or two to their animals. But our pets today eat their daily meals thanks to the suffering of a lesser class of animals. Unwanted animals get tubes inserted into them and ground up after death to make sure those lucky to be counted as members of the human family may eat well and not inconvenience us with the true messiness of their existence.

On the other hand, super-elite pets can exist guilt-free. The article mentions a dog food that is completely organic and cruelty-free. It costs $7.50 a pound, so the great unwashed mass of pets will eat the food produced courtesy of a troubling animal-testing system. It's absolutely creepy to me, how we made their world mirror ours.

Posted by Hiromi at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Yesterday, while channel surfing, I came across a program called Bizarre Foods, which sounds like a stupid gimmick of a show, and it was. But I stumbled on a segment that promised Cruel Food of the Exotic Orient, in this case, live lobster sushi.

I freely admit I'm a food fanatic dedicated to taste and satisfaction. Food isn't just stuff you put in your body to prevent death by starvation; it's an experience. In addition to sensory pleasure, it's a social and cultural experience. It's tied to the seasons and links us to the earth. I despise the sacrifice of this to false idols such as vegetarianism** and low-carb diets***.

But on the other hand, I don't embrace hedonism. I find the fetishization of sensory stimulation distasteful. In this case, "freshness" is fetishized with the result of moneyed self-important patrons digging into a live animal like effete Gollums. Eating live animals is gross, you might observe. I can predict the response -- they will insist that killing the lobster (which can be accomplished with a quick cut of the knife to the head) and then immediately serving the flesh somehow degrades it to the point that their delicate palates can sense the difference. I call bullshit.

This sort of thing has nothing to do with refinement and everything to do with a heedless pursuit of more, more, more. This tendency is mostly related to Appetite, either food or sex. What is this all about? It seems sad to me, this ennui-riddled hunger for constant novelty. I'm certain that hedonists will meet my criticism with accusations of repression, uptightness, or a lack of comprehension of their elaborate but ultimately empty justifications. Whadever. Hedonism is just simpleminded boredom.

***Lest I be accused of insensivity to those trying to lose weight, this is what I think is at the root of the "obesity epidemic": a sick overworked society that produced a sick food culture based on highly processed crap useless in terms of both nutrition and taste. We need to place human relationships and connectedness and other such qualities at the center of our society and throw off the yoke of Economic Growth and Consumerism.

Update: My proposed cure for the "obesity epidemic": a balanced and varied diet combined with a balanced and varied lifestyle. However, our convenience- and consumption-obsessed society makes this very difficult to achieve.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I love local grines*. Hawaiian food is part of my upbringing. I love mac salad. I respect local chefs who give the finger to food snobs and serve Spam with pride. But it can go too far. As much as I hate to admit it -- being a staunch lifelong opponent of low-fat anything -- there is such a thing as too much grease. There were two notable local kine grotesqueries during my recent trip to the Big Island.

Gravy cheeseburgers, for instance. Now, I love gravy. When I make roast beast and put some on my plate, it looks like beef stew, I put so much gravy on it. Same with turkey; except with turkey, I strip off all the skin and eat that first, and then drown the rest in turkey gravy (in order to prove my gravy cred, I make gravy with actual stock, always). But gravy and yellow cheese together? That counts as gravy abuse to me. And I'm sure I'm gonna get pilloried for this, but so is that nasty thick white breakfast sausage infested crap they defile biscuits with here.

The other example of grease gone too far was the chili dog rice bowl. You're familiar with rice "bowls", right? It's a mound of white rice with a topping such as pork cutlet and eggs with broth or thinly sliced beef or tempura served in a, surprise, bowl. One lovely Hawaiian version of the bowl is the loco moco. The loco moco is neither gravy abuse nor bowl abuse as brown gravy and rice is a match made in heaven. But chili and hot dogs on rice?

They need to put defibrillators in some of those places.

*grines (or grinds) = food in pidgin

Posted by Hiromi at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I haven't had sushi in ages, so my sponsor and I went to Musashino to get some the other night, and as an extra thpecial treat, Ray's in town, so I dragged him along. It was insanely crowded and there was a long wait for seats, so we people-watched and pointed out particularly gruesome specimens to each other.

This might be bad behavior particularly considering we're all reformed drunks trying to purge character defects, but recreational misanthropy is an art form. Plus, it's actually egalitarian in a way. For instance, you never make fun of people for things they can't help -- physical shape, looks, ethnicity, any handicap. On the other hand, things like clothing, hair, comportment, and general behavior are fair game. "Progress, not perfection."

The waitstaff at Musashino are uniformly young, Asian, female, petite, and cute. This can't be coincidence. Our teeny, doll-like waitress brought us hot hand towels. God, I've missed those. I've always loved that particular part of Japanese restaurant service, especially getting the occasional chilled towels in the summer. I tried to figure out the ethnicity of our waitress. I concluded Vietnamese. My dining companions were probably wondering why I was objectifying her like that, given my hatred of being asked "what" I am, but it's something we Asians do to each other. We like to speculate on what sort of Asian a person is, and we like hapa*-spotting. [Note: I'm gonna delete any comments whining about how minorites are able to do to each other things that non-minorities can't do.]

We were silly to not have ordered edamame or something, since it took forever to get our sushi. Plus, being recovered alkies, we couldn't even get a buzz on to make the wait pleasant. Instead, we were reduced to looking for Shiatsu pressure points to suppress hunger.

Here's what I eventually got: salmon skin hand roll (which was fucken fabulous), a marinated maguro (I don't like plain maguro, although toro is always welcome), fatty salmon, hamachi (they had hamachi cheeks on the menu, but were out that day, to my crushing disappointment), spicy lobster, tai (red snapper in this case -- actual tai isn't red snapper, but one of its relatives), and tempura softshell crab roll. There might have been more, but I don't remember, 'cause the other sushis were eventually overshadowed.

Ray likes uni. By "like" I mean he'll order like seven or eight and might spear your hand with a chopstick if you try to cockaroach** one. And after he polishes them all off, you can see him getting restless, eyes darting around, as he mentally weighs an uni-heavy restaurant bill against things like mortgages and clothes for his kids.

I've always said I hate uni, that it tastes like the bottom of a fish tank. But after uni-related conversations with Ray and Syl, we came to the mutual conclusion that I probably have had bad uni. I've eaten it multiple times, with retch-inducing results. I'd felt like I'd given it more than enough chances. I've also had crab innards (kanimiso in Japanese, the crab equivalent of tomalley) another retch-worthy experience, so I have viewed sea creature innards with suspicion.

Anyway, Ray offered to order one for me, like a crack dealer offering a free sample. He actually offered me half of his four, but I said, no, I'll just have the one. It lay lightly and delicately in its little nori nest. Unlike the other unis I've had, which were grainy and somewhat dry-looking, this one looked lustrous and moist. Here goes, I thought and popped it in my mouth.

Brok da mout***! Luscious briny creaminess! So ONO****!

I did not have just "the one."

Why am I so excited that I wrote a long-ass post about this? You have to understand that I love the ocean. It pulls at me in a primal way; I felt that pull when I went sea kayaking. You also have to understand that food also pulls at me in a primal way. That little urchin contained the ocean in microcosm. People like Ray and Syl aren't crazy, I've just had the cosmic bad luck to have eaten bad uni each time. A wave of remorse washed over me as Ray reminded me that I have lived years in Japan and could have gotten the good stuff, had I not had uni-phobia. I'd been a total fool. I'm officially converted, and will henceforth join the Uni Cult.

This was most instructive. It makes me think I've had bad crab innards, too, so kanimiso here I come.

**cockaroach = pidgin for "steal." Upon discovering a missing uni, a Hawaiian might angrily say, "Who ben cockaroach my uni???"

***brok da mout = "break the mouth," meaning "extremely tasty".

****ono = also means delicious.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

What do you do after a healthful morning of yoga and organic cereal with soy milk? Drive to San Antonio for cabrito (goat) and flour tortillas made as God intended: with lard! Even if I didn't have family there, I'd probably still drive down there for the food. I haven't been there in a while. Each drive down there -- San Antonio is about 90 miles south of Austin on IH35 -- is like a snapshot of the ever-increasing sprawl that will soon connect the two cities. And the place where my parents live used to be in the sticks; the area used to be just outside the official city limits. There were even cows and horses there, but now, it's completely developed.

Back to the food. From what my sister tells me, you can get goat at two places in SA: Los Barrios and Pico de Gallo. Both places do Tex-Mex as well as continental Mexican cuisine. I didn't want to mess with downtown, so we went to the former. I'm not telling you guys this because I expect anyone to go to SA and try these places out, but because I like to take every opportunity to talk about my Tex-Mex philosophy.

Los Barrios is, on the whole, worth going to. On the plus side, the free bowls of chips were hand-made corn tortillas cut into quarters and fried to a crisp. On the minus side, their salsa is cooked (I prefer fresh), and does not rank among the best cooked salsas I've had. On the plus side, our waitress was a tough old bird who had probably been working there since it opened. My sister got fajitas, which were tender and with just the right amount of char and accompanying grilled veggies (the usual onions and bell peppers with some surprising tomatoes), but we couldn't figure out why they tasted different. I tasted some kind of herb rub (generally fajitas are marinaded in some form of lime juice mixture). At the end of the meal, I realized that it tasted like the lamb rub from Whole Foods, and my sister said they tasted gyro-like. Fajitas with hint of gyro are a real departure; I'm not sure what I think of that.

On the menu, the cabrito was described as "mild and flavorful," which set off alarms, but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to have goat. It's hard to find goat here; you have to search through ethnic restaurants to find it. But this goat was milder than lamb! My dad, who grew up in Hawaii, said that Filipinos cooked goat all the time, and it had a strong, distinct smell. The barbecued goat I had in Vietnam was gamy. This cabrito smelled like beef, and resembled prime rib somewhat. I guess it's safe to say that gamy goat doesn't appeal to your average American, hence the "mild" disclaimer on the menu. Next time we'll try the special marinated beef and pork dish, I suppose.

In any case, the restaurant was completely redeemed by the quality of their tortillas. People don't seem to be aware that tortillas are to Tex-Mex what bread is to a French or Italian meal. You should be able to eat them by themselves, with or without butter. Corn tortillas tend to be dry, but these were moist and tender. Good flour tortillas should be thick and fluffy, and being made with fat, should be sort of layered, with an elastic quality somewhat like the inside of a good baguette.

The drive back was an utter nightmare, thanks to yet more highway construction. It continues to amaze me that people haven't come to the realization that building more and more highways never solves the problem.

Posted by Hiromi at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Even though this winter storm thing has been most underwhelming so far, people must be staying indoors today because I was able to zip around I35 during rush hour. Lamar was also fairly clear all the way from the downtown Whole Foods to the new tacky-kitschy Chinatown Center on North Lamar, where I finally checked out MT (My Thanh) Supermarket. This is the first Asian supermarket in Austin the size of a standard supermarket. The first benefit of bountiful square footage is of course a wide variety of products; the second benefit, not quite as apparent, is that the smell of durian doesn't mug your nasal cavities as you walk in as it did in their previous, much smaller location. In that location, they put a freezer bin of frozen durian right by the door. Despite the smell however, I wish that fresh durian were available here, but I think import restrictions limit durian to frozen form.

Today was just a walk-through; given my budget, the last thing I need is to impulse-shop in a new foodie haven. The store is mostly oriented (heh heh) toward Vietnamese/Chinese products, so their kimchee selection is vanishingly small. I was in a bit of a rush, so I'm not sure of their selection of Japanese staples, although I noticed they had no anpan amongst their fresh bread products. On the other hand, I was happy to find banana blossoms in the produce section, which means that I can finally make a Vietnamese dish that combines it with chicken in a salad. I wasn't as lucky regarding oyster sauce. I've been trying all kinds of oyster sauces since coming back to the States, but can't find anything that's as good quality as this stuff a Vietnamese friend hooked me up with when I lived in Japan. There were no new oyster sauce brands in that store.

A quick trip through the cold cases turned up an impressive array of dried squid, dried octopus, and wee dried fishies; wonderful snacks. I love dried squid grilled over a stove burner. I need to learn how to make a sticky spicy-sweet Korean sauce that is put on the wee dried fishies. Fishballs and other seafood meatballs take up considerable space, and there is a decent selection of miso, although I don't remember seeing the really dark kinds. I was suprised to see little jars of Hainanese chicken rice flavoring. Hainanese chicken rice is a dish widely sold in Singapore; it's fragrant rice cooked with chicken stock, accompanied with tender pieces of chicken. I'd forgotten about this dish, but I'd prefer to try to make it at home from scratch rather than relying on jarred fixins.

Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai dried noodles and wraps abound, with a decent amount of dried Japanese noodles. I've been sick of ramen since 2005, when I almost died of a surfeit of tonkotsu ramen while travelling in Japan. And that's fresh ramen -- I haven't had the instant stuff in years, maybe even a decade. However, the contents of their instant noodle aisle are intriguing enough to make me reconsider my personal embargo.

As usual, I had to physically restrain myself in the snack aisles. As with ramen, I'm completely sick of Pocky, but they have three new flavors -- kinako (soy flour), goka (five fruits -- peach, apricot, and I can't remember what else), and kurogo (black sesame, black bean, black pine nut, blah blah) -- that are going to be hard to resist. More interesting, however, are the unfamiliar Chinese and Southeast Asian snacks. Aside from candies and pastries and crackers and the like, highlights include hot fruit beef jerky, tofu jerky, and all manner of fruit jellies, gels, and gelees. I forgot to look for gula melaka, Malaysian cane syrup, so that I can make my own ice kacang. I hope they carry it.

I can't resist looking for weird meat in ethnic grocery stores, but their meat selection was disappointingly non-weird. They had things you wouldn't find in a standard grocery store, such as pork spleen, pork kidney, and some cuts of pork that still had the skin on, but nothing as interesting as the vat of ovaries I found in a Houston grocery once. There was, however, gawk-worthy fare in their seafood area, which is larger than Whole Foods'. There were freshly made fishballs, including some with fish eggs, as well as lobster balls (!). I approved of the general lack of a fishy odor, the bright-eyed fish in their cold case, and the constant stream of water flowing through net bags of shellfish, but what I saw in their live tanks gave me pause. They had crammed an unnecessarily large number of catfish in one of the tanks; several nearby tanks were mostly empty. The poor things were as long as the tanks were wide, so they ended up stacked on top of each other like wriggling logs. There were three rows of catfish mouths opening and closing rapidly at the front of the tank. Animal cruelty aside, who's going to want to buy fish pointlessly swimming in water cloudy with their own crap? Geezus, people.

They had a table near the front covered with various handmade goodies such as sticky rice filled with sweet or savory fillings, with or without banana leaf wrapper, and various pastries. Aside from improving the living conditions of the pitiable catfish, one change I'd like to see made is adapting the store more along the lines of Whole Foods or Central Market in terms of food prepared in the store. It would be great for them to sell handmade goodies; they'd make a killing when curiosity seekers gather on weekends. As it is, they have a bit of an intimidation factor due to unfamiliarity; their main customers are Asians and people who know how to make Asian dishes. Offering prepared foods would attract more people and more importantly, make me happy.

Posted by Hiromi at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Please tell me I'm not a lone fucken voice in the wilderness. I just got back from a death march looking for real popcorn to pop. On the stove. The stove, not the microwave. With oil. The two major grocery chains, HEB and Randall's, have stopped carrying Orville's and instead had nasty, dried out looking storebrand stuff in dusty pockmarked bags on the bottom shelf vastly overshadowed by a phalanx of microwaveable shite in 10,000 varieties. I had to go to Whole Foods to buy organic popcorn for crying out loud. Real popcorn should not be the province of gourmet or specialty stores. Good food in general should not be the province of gourmets or snobs. Don't tell me to chill, please; this shit matters. American food culture is under attack by well-meaning but fundamentally wrong-headed health fads and above all, the evil god Convenience.

I'm not talking about foie gras or truffle oil. I'm not saying you have to grate your own parmesano reggiano, or that you must always use fresh herbs or bake your own bread. I'm talking about loving and enjoying real food. Homemade mac 'n cheese takes the same amount of time as making that vile bright orange packaged abomination:

1) Boil water
2) Put dried pasta in the water
3) Heat some milk in a pot
4) While the pasta is boiling, melt butter in a heavy-bottomed pot over med-low to med heat. When it's melted, put in an equal amount of flour (1 tbsp each is enough for two servings). Add hot milk, mixing constantly, until it's the consistency of heavy cream.
5) Add shredded cheddar to the sauce
6) Add the cooked drained pasta

That takes 7-8 minutes, tops, if you can forgo baking it. Put some grape tomatoes in a bowl with some thinly sliced red onion, throw dressing on top, and thassit. That's fucking it.

What I'm talking about is passion. Put some effort into it, and some fucken heart. Put some love, lust, frivolity, or silliness, but some feeling in it anyway. Life ain't freeze-dried, pre-packaged, from concentrate, with preservatives added, in individual servings. It's not butter-flavored, it's buttered.

Continue clicking on the above link, preeze! Sankyou!

Posted by Hiromi at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

I love writing food posts. I'm sick of the usual treatment of turkey leftovers, so I made turkey gumbo.

The mirepoix: onion, celery, green pepper. Plus green onion. I don't sautee green onions; instead, I like to add them to soup while they're raw. I don't like how they get sticky and flat in the pan; for some reason, that really bothers me aesthetically.

I made the roux out of bacon fat. I think I decided to make gumbo just for the chance of making bacon fat roux. It turns out that I had just enough bacon to make half a cup. I strained out the solids because I didn't want them to burn while I was making the roux.

Here's the tangle of bacon after the rendering. I didn't want to eat it because it was more well-done than I like. Instead, I froze the bacon to be used later in bean cookery.

Roux, stage one, in my beloved cast iron skillet. I inherited it from a foodie friend who moved to England, and it was perfectly seasoned when I got it. I used a wooden spoon to stir it. Since I've never made this sort of roux before, I cooked it at a lower heat than recommended. I'd turn up the heat until it cooked faster than I was comfortable with, then turned the heat back down.

I cooked it until it was darker than milk chocolate cocoa, but lighter than a chocolate bar. I wasn't quite sure what color it should be, but at a point where I was afraid to cook it any longer, I added the mirepoix to cool the roux and wilt the vegetables. People always say that you should wipe, not scrub, your cast iron skillet so as not to ruin the finish. However, if you have a sticky mess, this is impossible. What I do is pour in a little oil to act as a solvent, and clean the pan with a paper towel.

Andouille from Central Market. Whole Foods had only turkey and chicken andouille. Update: I forgot to mention -- here's my fabulous new chef's knife! I love it! I can actually cut shit up now! I used to fling my cheap knives in the sink or chop on any old surface, but I care for this knife like it's my own baby.

Chopped okra. Okra is a really cute vegetable to me: raw and whole, they look like furry, friendly green slugs. Chopped, they look like stars or flowers.

Here it is, bubbling away after I added shrimp.

Ready to be eaten. Favorite soup spoon on the side.

Posted by Hiromi at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Eeeeeeew... the September 23rd-29th edition of The Economist contains a biotechnology article titled "A Meaty Question" that describes...cloned meat. Cloned meat! Granted, meat made from cattle and pigs artificially blown up by antibiotics and hormones and tortured in fattening facilities is disturbing and gross, but the proposed alternative, clumps of cloned muscle cells grown in vats of nutrient broth, is hardly appetizing.

Also, is it really needed? Meat-substitute products made from soy have gotten quite tasty in my opinion, having made giant strides away from the NotDogs of the mid-90s. Has anyone had a NotDog? It had the exact texture and taste of pencil erasers. Anyway, the stuff I've eaten, things like veggie burgers and other meat substitutes in vegetarian restaurants, isn't bad at all. But for me, they complement the meat I include in my diet and are thus not an actual substitute.

However, for poor unfortunate vegetarians, there are things that can't be duplicated by faux meat, BACON being the prime example. But according to the article, it seems that only one-millimeter thick clumps of muscle cell are currently possible; there doesn't seem to be any attempts to clone porcine fat, although "meat scientist" Henk Haagsman is working on creating "minced" pork from cloned stem cells to use in burgers and sausages. It remains to be seen what they're going to do about the lips and assholes portion of sausages, which I'm sure contributes greatly to that distinct sausage or hot dog taste.

Of course, cloned meat has its benefits -- no animals are mistreated or killed, outbreaks of death by nasty bacteria are avoided, huge vulgar meat meals will not be unhealthy but might contain beneficial nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids or whatnot, and it might even, as the article pointed out in its inimitable Economist way, allow us to enjoy things like panda steak.

Nevertheless, it grosses me the fuck out. The article describes how cloned fish flesh would have its own functioning system of blood vessels to nourish the cells -- this gives me shivers. I am picturing a clump of pulsating meat in a petrie dish. I am imagining cringing diners poking amorphous masses of glistening protoplasm shot through with blood-vessels with their forks, and I am picturing these diabolical lumps of flesh achieving sentience and turning on the diners.

Update: one gross-out factor that I did not explicitly state is the amorphousness. It's not even meat-shaped! It never walked the earth! It's so Lovecraftian!

Posted by Hiromi at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

This post is an ode to childhood roadtrip food.

When I was a kid, my family went on roadtrips a lot. Actually, we stopped when we moved to Texas, but we did that a lot in Wyoming and Okinawa. They were never elaborate; we just drove into the mountains or to the beach and had a picnic. The other good thing about roadtrips was that we'd stop at McDonald's on the way home. For the picnic, my mom would pack onigiri, which are riceballs wrapped in nori (thin crispy sheets of dried seaweed, if you don't already know). They're also called omusubi, but onigiri is more common. A friend of mine in Japan said that some women prefer to say "omusubi" because the verb from which it is derived, musubu, means "to close" when referring to the hand, while nigiru means "to grip", and apparently gripping is vulgar. Who knows if there's any truth to that story, though.

Although we translate either word into "riceball," I've never seen them in actual ball form. They tend to be shaped like rounded, flattened triangles which are shaped by hand, hence onigiri or omusubi. My mom has this knack of shaping them perfectly. There are molds you can use, but they're a pain. Using your hands is much quicker. She'd make a pot of rice (in our rice cooker, of course), or sometimes she'd just use leftover rice. She'd wet her hands with water, sprinkle salt onto her palms, scoop some rice into her hands, and then kinda mash them into perfect triangle shapes. The best I can do are deformed pyramids. She's genius at things like that -- she folds my dad's undershirts into amazingly uniform squares, like a stack of square white cotton poker chips.

So, next step: the sheets of nori are cut into the proper size. You have to toast the nori before you eat it, so she'd quickly pass them over a burner on the stove a couple of times. Some freaky people use those pre-cut, pre-toasted, pre-seasoned nori, but I hate that. You can eat those nori strips with hot rice, but they have no business on onigiri. Anyway, she'd wrap the riceballs with the nori and set them aside to cool. End result: a perfect triangle with a wide black nori stripe. I like the whole thing to be covered, so I don't bother with cutting when I make them. I toast the sheets and wrap the entire pyramid and tear off the extra bits. My onigiri are pretty ugly.

After they cooled completely, they'd go into tupperware and into our car. You can't pack them while they're hot or they'll get all slimy. The side dishes were generally browned crispy slices of Spam, salted cooked salmon, or -- since this is a confessional blog -- slices of hot dog cooked with ketchup and soy sauce, god help us. We'd sometimes have these little fried chicken drummettes that my mom marinated in soy sauce, sake, and garlic. She'd then roll them in cornstarch and fry them.

You can put things inside the riceball, like umeboshi (a teeny salty pickled plum -- my aunt who lives in Kitakyushu makes them herself, and they're fucken awesome), bits of salty cooked salmon, miso, takuan (pickled daikon), whatever. I prefer no filling, so she'd make some with filling and some without.

Convenience stores in Japan have a mind-boggling array of onigiri. In addition to the fillings I've already mentioned, recent innovations include tuna mayonnaise and bulgogi (both are really good). Often, the rice itself is flavored. The one I remember seeing the most is rice cooked with soy sauce and "mountain vegetables." The kind of veg you have to go out into the woods and gather, like bamboo and fiddleheads and crap. Wild plants. Convenience store onigiri are packaged in an ingenious manner. When you look at it, it looks like rice wrapped in nori, but the riceball itself is separated from its nori wrapping by a thin plastic sheet. You pull on two corners of the wrapping in a particular way, the sheeting falls away, and the nori sticks to the rice.

All that rigamarole is meant to keep the nori crispy. Most people like the nori to be crispy, but I strongly prefer it to be softened and stuck to the rice, just like an onigiri that had been sitting in a tupperware all morning in a car on the way to the beach.

Posted by Hiromi at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

I know you're all dying to know what I've been eating lately. I'm over my bacon sandwich obsession: BLTs (actually BOLTs since I always add onion), bacon/egg, bacon/avocado, bacon/turkey, bacon/egg/guacamole/cheddar breakfast tacos. Now I'm on smoothies.

I don't bother with ice. First of all, I have a crap blender, and second, ice just waters down flavors. Instead, I have a freezer full of frozen fruit: berries of all kinds, mango, pineapple, peaches. I also freeze old bananas (yellow ones don't have enough flavor). Basic fruit smoothie: fruit/fruit combo of choice, plain yogurt, Splenda, OJ (or other fruit juice) for added liquidity.

I've also had a peanut butter/banana/yogurt/soy milk smoothie, and a pumpkin/fresh ginger/soy milk smoothie. Predictable, I'm now fixated on these, and am consuming a largely liquid diet.

Any suggestions? No wheatgrass or veg or anything nasty like that, please. Or avocado -- I had one in Vietnam...bleah.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Today, I was seized with a wonderful idea that I had to act upon immediately. I'd been pondering nostalgia as a factor in food appreciation over the weekend. This morning, I wondered if Spaghettios and Hostess products -- specifically Twinkies, CupCakes, HoHos, and Ding Dongs -- were as good as I remember. So I ditched work and headed out to buy all of the above.

I had no idea where to buy these things in the grocery store. I found the Spaghettios in the pasta aisle. For some reason, it didn't occur to me to look there. I was wandering around the canned food aisles. Also, I didn't think to look for the Hostess products in the bread aisle. They just don't seem bread-like to me at all. However, they're only sold in big boxes because American corporations hate single people, so I had to go to a convenience store to get singles.

I'm sorry to say I fought and lost an internal battle with Pointless Food Snobbery at the convenience store. I wandered the aisles until I found the Twinkies, HoHos, etc. Then, I waited until the aisle was empty of customers before grabbing one of each. I refused to wait in line with those things in my hands, as if the guy buying a Jumbo Slurpee and one of those dubious convenience store ham sandwiches and the woman with the Doritos and Big Red were going to judge me. Nevertheless, I hid until the other customers were gone, peering above stacks of candy bars and motor oil to watch the progress of the line. I went up to the register and resisted an urge to explain to "Ester" that this was an experiment in food nostalgia. Ester barely glanced at me or my Twinkies, and I felt vaguely ashamed.

Spaghettios

I loved these things as a kid, even the weird little spongy meatballs. Especially the weird little spongy meatballs. And I loved how the O's came in three sizes. Apparently, they start with some kind of noodle cylinder in the factory, and punch out holes in three different sizes so as not to waste any noodle. I don't know about you, but I find that fascinating.

I just now heated up the can. What the fuck???? It's SWEET. The sauce has even less tomato flavor than ketchup! Wait a minute... it tastes like condensed Campbells' Tomato Soup. Of course. Spaghettios are made by Campbells. And that explains the goddamn noodle process!

All right, I'm trying a meatball. Jesus Christ. What *is* that taste? Why on earth did the sponginess appeal to me as a kid?

I just rinsed one off in the sink, and it looks like a turd.

So much for nostalgia for Spaghettios. Now, dessert. Here's what happened:

HoHos

I was pleased to find that HoHos come three in a package. How unexpected! An odd number of items in a package! What I always found lovely about HoHos was that you could unroll them. A HoHo is a chocolate-coated chocolate roll cake with white cream filling. More specifically, it is a nasty piece of chocolate leather-coated chocolate roll cake with gritty sweet white grease in the middle. The problem is, the chocolate sponge cake, which is the best part of the HoHo, is very thin, so the nastiness of the chocolate leather and the sweet white grease are overwhelming.

Next.

Ding Dongs

Wait a fucking minute... HoHos, Ding Dongs, and CupCakes are the same goddamn thing, just in different shapes and proportions. Shit.

Actually, it turns out that shape and proportion *do* make a difference. A Ding Dong is a chocolate sponge cake in the form of a hocky puck, with a zot of sweet white grease in the middle. The puck is then coated with "chocolate". The chocolate sponge cake to sweet white grease ratio is much higher than that of the HoHo, so Ding Dongs are more tolerable. Also, maybe I had a bad HoHo, because the cream filling in the Ding Dong wasn't gritty (Hostess doubtless uses the same cream filling in everything). However, the weird chocolate leather coating is still actively unpleasant. I'm sure the manufacturer had to dick around with the chocolate coating so that it wouldn't melt too quickly during packaging, transport, etc., but that means it doesn't melt in your mouth. Which feels just wrong. You don't chew chocolate like gum!

CupCakes

By far the best, as it has the highest chocolate sponge cake to sweet white grease ratio. It does have a slab of that nasty non-melting "chocolate" on top, with a pointless swirly pattern of what must be sweet white wax. However, chewing the "chocolate" in slab form is somehow less unpleasant than chewing it in leather form.

While I'm not surprised that these things taste horrible to me as an adult, I'm a bit disappointed that the Nostalgia Factor is so low.

On to Twinkies.

My fingers got greasy when opening the package: a bad sign. My fingers got even greasier handling the damn Twinkie. Twinkies have a low sponge cake to sweet white grease ratio, so I didn't expect much when I bit off half of one. I had to spit it out. The sweetness and greasiness were overwhelming. It occurred to me that the flavor of chocolate can mask a great deal. Twinkies, being made of yellow sponge cake, have nothing to mask their disturbing chemical taste. It was as if they're not made of flour or other edible ingredients, but with petroleum products. However, the sheer nastiness of the Twinkie posed an interesting challenge. I wasn't about to give up. I had 1.50 Twinkies left. I decided to freeze the other half of the one I bit, and deep fry the other one. I'd heard of deep fried Twinkies, a horrifying concept, but what the fuck. I decided to try it.

The frozen Twinkie was somehow not as bad as the raw Twinkie. It's not that the cold numbed my tongue; rather, hardening the sweet white grease turned it to a kind of nougat candy, and I just like the texture of frozen cake.

Now, for the other Twinkie. I whipped up some tempura batter and heated some oil. I rolled the hapless Twinkie in the batter, and dropped it into the hot oil with some trepidation, worried that it might fall apart or something. It bubbled satisfactorily, and a pleasant aroma wafted up. When it was golden brown, I lifted it out with tongs and placed it on a rack. I tapped the tempura coating -- hmm, nice and crisp.

It. Was. Fucken. Good. The tempura batter fused with the greasy yellow sponge cake and transformed it into a feather-light lattice with a cakey interior. An important lesson learned here: *hot* greasiness is good while *cold* greasiness is disgusting. Best of all, the sweet white grease transformed into... MELTED MARSHMALLOW GOODNESS!!!

So, while the Nostalgia Factor rates disappointingly low for all the things I tried today, I discovered that Twinkies make a fine raw material.

Posted by Hiromi at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

San Antonio is one crap city. Somehow anything that gets done there is done in such a third-rate manner. It's one of the top ten cities in the U.S. size-wise, but really it's just an overgrown small town. The only reason I go there is family and good Tex-Mex. Having eaten there this past weekend, I'm now writing the obligatory polemic.

I think that part of the reason Tex-Mex doesn't get the respect it deserves as a Great Regional Cuisine is because tacos, enchiladas, and the like have gotten bastardized beyond recognition. As a result, people are willing to listen to the pointless food snobs more concerned about prestige than enjoyment who look down their noses at the Combination Plate.

Things like chowder and cheese steaks also get bastardized, but the abuse inflicted on Tex-Mex occurs on a far wider scale. I use three items to judge the quality of restaurants: tortillas, refried beans, and salsa.Like vanilla ice cream and the cheese slice, if those three things are good, then whoever's running the establishment knows what they're doing. It doesn't matter what else is on the menu. Geography also matters. If you're in Texas, the best thing to do is head south, specifically south-central Texas. San Antonio is the northernmost point on the Rubicon dividing hit-or-miss Tex-Mex from good Tex-Mex.

So, How I Avoid Bastard Tacos

Tortillas

A galling pet peeve: people who claim flour tortillas are somehow less "authentic" than corn. Flour tortillas are eaten in Northern Mexico, which is...next to Texas. Hence their presence in Tex-Mex. Anyway, it's my theory that the water in a particular locale makes a difference in flour tortillas. SA has very hard aquifer water, and the flour tortillas there are wonderfully fluffy and flaky. Even the Taco Cabanas (a fast food chain) there have decent tortillas. On the other hand, the water in Dallas is soft, salty, and atrocious, and Austin and Houston use swampy-smelling lake water, and the flour tortillas in those locations are grossly inferior.

You can get a good corn tortilla anywhere as long as the establishment uses fresh masa, in my opinion. There's a family-owned tamale place in San Antonio that uses hand-ground masa harina (hominy flour) to make their tamales. Unreal. I just like eating the masa part of those tamales; the filling is almost incidental, the masa is so damn good.

Refried beans

The use of lard ties tortilla issues with refried beans issues. While the use of lard in flour tortillas isn't totally necessary since shortening yields good results, pig fat is an absolute must when frying refried beans. It's so strange that something so simple as refried beans, which are just mashed cooked pintos (NOT black beans) fried in lard or bacon fat, can get fucked up so often. Cumin, onions, and black pepper have no business in refrieds. The only thing you can add is garlic, dammit. If I make it at home, I boil the pintos with slices of cooked bacon, and then mash and fry them.

Off topic, but I have to mention one of the best alternative uses of refried beans: Chris Madrid's, a hamburger and nacho joint in San Antonio makes a bean burger, a hamburger topped with refried beans, chips, and cheddar. That place is singular in that it has top notch hamburgers, hand-cut fries, *and* fantastic refried beans.

Salsa

I'm going to use the word "salsa" as it's commonly used here: the tomato-based sauce you dribble over your tacos and such or eat with chips. I prefer fresh unembellished salsa over cooked: just tomatoes, onion, fresh jalapeno, cilantro, lime juice, salt. Just like I can't stand bakeries that overload their bread with sundried tomatoes, feta, pesto, rosemary, sunflower seeds, and other atrocities I avoid restaurants that cook, smoke, or add fruit to their salsa. I just don't like the extra frou-frou.

One very important caveat: the large number of tourists in San Antonio distorts the local cuisine. This happens anywhere with large numbers of tourists. It breaks my heart to think people eat crap food at places like the Riverwalk (downtown tourist magnet) and go home with a totally wrong idea of what Tex-Mex is.

Posted by Hiromi at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The hell with experimenting with non-alkie beverages, I discovered a much better hobby: Casey's New Orleans Snowballs. When it's over 100 degress every fucking day and your life is full of Big Suck and Little Suck, it's time to ditch work and buy a great big dessert.

I've driven past this place on 51st and Airport a dozen times and was impressed by the ever-present long lines, a sure sign of a good food find. Even better, it's in a somewhat dilapidated old house, and the customers are old hippies, Mexican families, black families, university students -- a totally non-suburban crowd. Also, fellow food snob Ray told me that he was told that their texture is like Hawaiian shave ice, so I finally started going last week. Started going, as I intend to run through all their flavors.

Their menu is about a mile long. There are sugar free and pure juice toppings for health nuts, pussies, and communists. And I guess diabetics. You can top your snowball with whipped cream, cream, condensed milk, or caramel, and they are super generous with the syrup. The sizes range from baby-sized to True Blue American No Fucking Shame tanker size. I get the medium ($1.75).

My first flavor was coconut with condensed milk in honor of my favorite Hawaiian shave ice: coconut ice on vanilla ice cream. In Hawaii, the shaved ice is served on top of ice cream. You can even put sweet red beans in it, which is much better than it sounds. The second one was Boston Cream Pie, my favorite so far. The next one, nectar cream, was a disappointment -- it tasted rather chemical-y, which makes me a bit nervous about orchid vanilla cream, but I feel obligated to try that one because the name is just too intriguing. The Famous Chocolate tastes like a fudgsicle, and the Chocolate Covered Cherry tastes exactly like a cherry Tootsie Pop. Today was Dreamsicle, which was okay. The next flavors I'm trying: orange + guava (since I've been avoiding straight fruit flavors), tamarind, and the orchid vanilla.

Two flavors of snowball I won't try even if a gun were put to my head: bubble gum and cotton candy. Even when I was five years old, my palate wasn't retarded enough to like those flavors. I never understood Big Red soda -- just thinking about it makes me want to vomit.

Anyway, what I really need to do is take a snowball home and dump it on ice cream to relive Hawaiian shave ice. But somehow, those things never make it home. By the time I get to my intersection, my shirt front and seat belt are covered with snowball drips, the roof of my mouth is frozen, my chest hurts, and I'm carrying an empty styrofoam cup.

So these snowballs can cover the premium snow cone niche and serve as a kind of surrogate for shave ice. What is sorely lacking in Austin are the Asian shave ice desserts.

You used to be able to get a version of it at Coco's Cafe, but they're closed. Which doesn't matter because their version sucked. I recommend the iced che's at Huong Giang on North Lamar; however, the ice is very piece-y -- you will run into chunks. But otherwise, the taste is first rate. Huong Giang has the best bun bo (noodle bowls) in Austin, by the way. Momoko used to have this fantastic, wonderful, awesome, just downright beautiful thing called "Nana Family." It was very, very finely blended ice with a creamy, malty base upon which you could add your choice of jellies, pudding, tapioca pearls, dried fruit bits, whatever. Despite my tearful pleas, the owner refuses to reinstate this dessert, claiming it's too much trouble.

When I went to Southeast Asia, I discovered that Nana Family was her upscale version of the indigenous shave ices: ice Kachang, chendol, che... I can't remember all the names. Whatever the name or country of origin, you go up to the stall and take your pick of different jellies, dried fruits, sweet beans, sweet bean pastes. The non-Vietnamese versions have a wonderful malty taste that, as El Diablo helpfully explained to me, is the result of gula melaka, a cane syrup. I bought bamboo tubes containing lumps of raw cane sugar in Cambodia, and it's fucken good. Fucken good.

I better stop writing about those desserts before I start crying. Somewhere, maybe on the west coast, these things are available, but not here.

Posted by Hiromi at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Since my move, I have no microwave. I've suddenly rediscovered pots and pans. Did you know you can reheat leftover spaghetti sauce or curry in a pot?

Here's a really good discovery I made -- latte without an espresso machine or a... uh... microwave. Yeah, I used to pour milk in my coffee and nuke it and call it a latte. I realize coffee snobs will faint at that, but fuck 'em.

So, here's my new latte:</