News You Can Bruise

"Krusty Korn" Baker

Turn to page 94 and see our New Money Maker. Cooks Frankfurters and Hamburger in Corn and Molds them like an Ear of Corn. They're going to be a Big Hit.

That's pretty silly, I thought. Who the heck thought "Krusty Korn" would catch on? How do you even cook a Frankfurter "in corn"? But it worked. I turned to page 94. And there I saw...

Krusty "Korn Dog" Baker

Something New in Money Makers

It's new, novel, and delicious to eat. The Krusty "Korn Dog" is a corn bread waffle, shaped like an ear of corn, with a "hot dog" baked inside. All done in one baking. IT'S ALL THE GO AND MAKING BIG MONEY FOR OPERATORS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. The "hot dog" is baked inside the corn batter, which, as it bakes, moulds itself to resemble an ear of corn. When broken open it looks exactly like an ear of corn with the golden kernels on the outside and the red cob of sausage in the center.

It's corn dogs. This is the ancestral form of the corn dog. They used to be molded like ears of corn with little kernels. Amazing. Maybe we shouldn't have stopped thinking of the coating as a "corn bread waffle"; corn dogs might be haute cuisine today.

An experiment was carried out in which I brewed the same tea leaves in a pot six times, steeping each pot for five minutes. The results are in the photo-montage below:

The "C" glass is the control glass, which contains water (i.e. zeroth-generation tea). I stopped the experiment after steep #6, because glasses #5 and #6 came out the same color, and because I was out of transparent glassware.

Conclusion: I don't think "lemonade" is accurate; I'll probably go with "apple juice" or "piss".

PS: I drank only the first pot of tea.

I told Beth about this plan and she said that matzah balls are traditionally made small. You only find huge matzah balls in delis (we decided this was for ease of portioning). I didn't know this because I'd only had matzah ball soup from delis, and from my mother, who'd probably only had it from delis. My crankiness unwittingly led to the fulfillment of tradition. So take a tip from Beth and me: small matzah balls means better soup.

Also, the Hillel sandwich is surprisingly good for something that sounds like a theorem in topology.

I made this connection on Sunday when I spent twenty minutes standing in the twelve-item checkout line.

• The single best media value of 2009 is Chrontendo. About 30 hours of video reviews of Famicom and NES games. My consistent exercise companion.
• Academic runners-up: David Blight's incredible class on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and J. Bradford Delong's economic history of the 20th century, which is really more like "J. Bradford Delong talks about whatever he wants and then tests you on it," but which is full of interesting stuff.
• Surprise dark-horse entertainment: bobtwcatlanta's Youtube channel, full of engrossing television ephemera from the 80s and 90s.
• James Rolfe continued to entertain with his AVGN videos (best episode of 2009: Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, posted before Michael Jackson's death made it cool/tasteless to do Michael Jackson-themed web videos). But if you can't stand Rolfe's scatology-obsessed Nerd character, you should at least watch his amazing documentary of a life spent making films, Cinemassacre 200, which only has one F-bomb right at the beginning.
• Infomania's Viral Video Film School and Target: Women also continued their runs of excellence.
• Another noteworthy workhorse: the mega-agglomeration of That Guy With The Glasses, which at this point has a couple dozen web "shows", transformative works all. They're hit or miss, but I've found maybe eight that I really like, and I let those accumulate in browser tabs until I've got enough to get me through a thirty-minute run.
• Now on to miscellaneous one-offs. The Match Game 1977 School Riot, in which the mannered high civilization of The Match Game collapses into anarchy and warlordism. (Don't know how TMG worked? Invest a couple minutes in some boring video of TMG working properly, and then you can enjoy both this video and the excellent Saturday Night Live parody "It's A Match".)
• Music videos: One from the 80s that uses "Sinistar" as a metaphor for a bad relationship. One from TMBG. OK Go does it again. A rerun of "Wishmaster Misheard", revealed in 2009 to have been created by our friend Lucian.
• Music videos featuring unrelated pop culture characters: The world-famous Bohemian Rhapsody Muppets turns the unwieldy, huge Muppets cast into a strength. Four Super Mario World levels, one for each part in Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now".

Film: I don't watch a lot of movies. I think I only went to the theater four times in 2009: to see "Star Trek", "Moon", "My Winnipeg", and "Ponyo". Most of the time Sumana and I watch movies at home. That said, the Crummy.com Movie of the Year is "University of Laughs", a 2004 Japanese movie that I've been looking for since 2005. (We eventually imported it from Yes Asia for an exorbitant sum.) It's an awesome film. Like, imagine "The Five Obstructions", except instead of Lars von Trier playing a funny prank on you, it's a police censor and your livelihood is on the line. And the film is hilarious. We saw it with Lucian and couldn't stop laughing. Between this movie and "Game Center CX", I'm coming to appreciate how dependent is Japanese humor on body language. Truly, this is the real secret of manzai.

Runner-up: the thematically similar "The Lives of Others", which won a lot of awards and you probably don't need me telling you how great it is. If for some reason you demand that I give the 2009 award to a film released in 2009, then I give it to "Moon", despite its huge plot holes.

Television: After Battlestar Galactica ended in disaster, I watched only one TV show: the ultimate Sumana/Leonard guilty pleasure, USA Network's Psych. The show's silliness continually breaks the fourth wall and the old dictum how "if it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage". The "Tonight's Episode" episode titles are the clear spray-on preservative that gives the icing on the cake its gloss.

Food: Is food a "medium"? I say yes, and give appreciation for three New York restaurants that started in 2009 (or very late 2008): Vesta and Bare Burger here in Astoria, and Dos Toros (Mission-style taqueria!) near Union Square.

Books: I read 88 books in 2009 if you count the one I created, which I'm going to because that means I read exactly twice as many books as in 2008. I made a special effort to read more books this year, and it definitely succeeded. The Crummy.com Book of the Year is "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon. Reread of the Year: my mother's copy of Stephen Jay Gould's "Bully for Brontosaurus", the book that originally introduced me to evolutionary theory (a ringer, it was practically my only reread of the year). "The Complete Dying Earth" was amazingly fun, as mentioned earlier. I also had a really good time with two espionage books: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "The Zimmerman Telegram".

I can recommend two books from 2009 that you've never heard of. First, "Monday Begins on Saturday" by the Strugatsky brothers, obtained from Susan McCarthy. Second, "A Time of Gifts" by Patrick Leigh Fermor, which sat on my wishlist for 4 years after I heard about it on Crooked Timber. It's a book where I start every tenth paragraph thinking "This is it, the purplest prose ever, there's no way Fermor can pull out of this nosedive!" and by the end of the paragraph I'm like "Good show, old chap! Pip-pip, what?"

Worst book that I read all the way through in 2009: Reward for Retief, one of Keith Laumer's last novels. (My LibraryThing review: "Man, what a train wreck. Give us more Groaci!") I read it all the way through because I'm a Retief completist and because I admired Laumer for continuing to write after his stroke. Objectively speaking, he should have stopped in the mid-80s, but I'm sure he needed the money. Keeping a midlist author on your publication rolls as he passes his prime is not the most efficient method of wealth transfer, but it's a time-honored one.

I read about 150 individual short stories (ie. not part of collections), from magazines, writing group, and the TE slush pile. There is no Crummy.com Short Fiction of the Year this year because I recuse myself for conflict of interest. Also I can't really think of one, though you can't go wrong with Jack Cady's "The Night We Buried Road Dog".

Video games: I was talking about this with Kirk. Here's the thing. When I read a book, even a book I don't like, I learn something about writing. But when I play a video game, even a good game, I don't usually learn much about game design. There's probably fifty games I spent at least an hour playing in 2009, but I can only think of one that was both as stylistically interesting and as viscerally enjoyable as, say, "A Time of Gifts".

People who love movies might make a similar distinction. There are really interesting movies, there are really enjoyable movies, and every once in a while there's a movie with crossover appeal, the first movie to tell a really fun story using some previously introduced innovation. I think comparing video games and movies is a sucker's game so that's as far as I'm going to take this analogy.

When I think of 2009 games that are pure fun I think of a lot of entries in series: the "Metal Slug" anthology I picked up, "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" in multiplayer, Mega Man 9, the DS Grand Theft Auto game (I really love sandbox games, but most 3D first-person games make me nauseous, so I liked having a modern GTA I could physically play). All of these games combine a close allegiance to some longstanding series with solid implementation and attention to detail. I also think of "Retro Game Challenge" and my "Cave Story" replay, games that are just a collection of well-executed callbacks to older games.

When I think of games I that have a lot of innovation I think of "Scribblenauts", an amazingly creative game that has huge, huge conceptual and implementation problems. I think of "Barkley: Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden", a game that presents a deadpan sarcasm I can't remember seeing outside of interactive fiction, but objectively speaking not a game I want to play all the way through. I think of "Treasure World", a game that I was obsessed with for a couple weeks but which is not technically a game at all.

"Spelunky" is the only game I played in 2009 that I would consider fully successful in both enjoyment and innovation. It took the least popular aspects of roguelike games (permadeath and extreme dependence on randomness) and made them crowd-pleasers by incorporating them into a preexisting genre (super-difficult platformer), introducing roguelike replayability to people who hate ASCII graphics and turn-based keyboard controls.

The fact that I'm describing Spelunky in terms of other games and genres implies that it's not all that innovative. But creativity is almost always the combination of two preexisting things. The ideas in this year's innovative titles will be synthesized into 2011's crossover hits which will lead into 2015's soulless cash-cows.

OK, time to start work on the New Year's Eve party. Happy new year!

When I found out about the pinching technique I thought it was an amazing new discovery. For about five seconds. Then I thought of all those old cartoons and comics depicting someone slipping on a banana peel. The banana peel is always drawn with the stem on top, having been opened from the other end. Is it just that it's easier to draw that way, or did we use to know the better way to peel bananas? If the latter, how did we lose that knowledge?

Brendan had a similar restaurant called "We'll Fry It!"

I took some photos, but Susanna imposed a press embargo so that I wouldn't spoil the present surprise. Well, now the surprise has happened and I've got nothing to post tonight, so check it out. Susanna's entry on the topic has sewing instructions for all the food.

Sumana says of the white, "Astoundingly flavorful." and "Tastes more like a grape than any grape juice I've ever had." The red is less sweet and goes better with food. They're both amazing. I really dislike wine, and it's a shame that there's no Two-Buck Chuck of grape juice, a cheap grape juice that tastes like real grapes. (You can get decent grape juice at the Greenmarket but it's adulterated with apple juice, that universal donor of juices.)

I also ordered a bottle of the acidic green "Verjus", which is supposed to be good for cooking. I'll post about it once I use it.

• Milkshake shots. This lets you sample lots of crazy flavors of ice cream instead of having to pick one. Plus, New Yorkers love small expensive things.
• Ramps on a bagel.

Also new to the Greenmarket is another dairy! Milk Thistle Farms is now competing with Ronnybrook for New Yorkers' milk-buying dollar. I bought some of the milk to taste it and it's definitely sweeter than Ronnybrook's. I wouldn't say it's better for all applications, and it's significantly more expensive, but it's definitely a better dessert milk. According to the famous Greenmarket Report they've been to the Union Square market before, but I'd never seen them. Now, back to working on my hit NES game, "Ramps and Milk".

S: This is a good, down to earth hazelnut.
L: It's the kind of nut you'd like to have with a beer.

And they gave us bags of cookies to take home as well.

Not pictured: the various breads they brought around in a basket (my fave: the pretzel bread), and a few of the drinks they poured/made for us as non-wine pairings.

While going through the menu, I made a list of all the foods and cooking terms I hadn't heard of before, with links that probably won't last long, but oh well:

• Sauce vierge
• Meyer lemon suprêmes
• crosnes
• Castelvetrano olives
• Trappitu olive oil
• Cardoons
• Matignon, the cooking process that produced carrots Sumana considered perfect.
• Oyster plant, another term for watercress.
• Arrowleaf spinach, a term that only shows up in menus, so I don't think it's a real species of spinach.
• Agnolotti, which according to Per Se was a shape of pasta but according to Wikipedia is a ravioli with a specific filling.
• Salvatore Brooklyn ricotta
• Diane St. Clair's butter and buttermilk.
• pecan sable

The calzone was really bland. I don't know what I was thinking. I remember the calzone being kind of soggy when cooked in the microwave, so I decided to go all out for quality and cooked it in the oven. The whole time it cooked I was forming hypotheses about how I was very impatient in college and needed to cook my calzones immediately. Then I tasted the calzone and it was barely warm in the middle and I had to microwave it anyway. I left it unfinished.

So, lesson learned. You can't go home again, where "home" is a room in a former frat house on Gayley that you share with Dan Helfman.

We had a great time with the spinach soup, mushroom cube, crispy tofu, popcorn pudding, etc. And it'll probably get even better once they have gas. I guess waiting for the gas to get turned on is the restaurant equivalent of waiting for Internet access after you move.

Interestingly enough, made by the same company that makes the best cheese, Humboldt Fog.

If you believe in the superiority of some other cheese or cheese name, you know what to do.

• 1 can cannelini beans
• 1/2 head garlic, minced
• olive oil
• red pepper flakes
• salt

Mash it all together. Spread on bread. That's it. It's excellent. I never really cooked with cannelini beans before but I think they're a better all-purpose bean than kidney beans.

The meal started with a little tray of treats. My favorite was a tiny Parmesan basket with some kind of mousse inside it, which gave the impression of eating a cheese-flavored Frito dipped in sour cream.

I started with sweet pea-ricotta tortelloni, with "savory emulsion" (aka FOAM). It was truly excellent. At intervals a guy came around with a basket of assorted breads, urging us to sample his wares. There was a terrific three-seed bread and little mini-baguettes.

Then there was duck breast, which was good on its own but came with some very strange things, including a hollow gelatinous cube that I'm not entirely sure was food, and what I think might have been foie gras taquitos. I ate it all; my general rule at a restaurant this expensive is that I might as well try everything that shows up because I've already paid for it. The taquitos were good, and as moral crises go the crisis of whether I may have eaten some foie gras taquitos is pretty small potatoes.

Sumana had a cauliflower soup and then the tortelloni as an entree. Then the restaurant really outdid its collective self. We ordered dessert: I the brownie and Sumana the chocolate biscuit (except they actually gave her the mousse). This came, and then came this crazy mango-three-ways thing with a birthday candle and a greeting to me piped on the plate in chocolate!

Maybe you get something nice like this every birthday, but the last free restaurant birthday dessert I remember was chocolate mousse served in a fake flowerpot with crumbled-up Oreo cookies to look like dirt. Unlike that, this was great and it was a total surprise; Sumana had told the restaurant staff beforehand that this was a birthday dinner.

But they weren't done showering us with dessert. Oh no. A waiter brought us a big basket of hot madelines. We ate some. They were delicious. I said, "This reminds me of the time I had a madeline at Evan's house." Then they brought us a platter of eight bite-sized treats, including the world's tiniest lemon meringue pie, a weird meringue Like Like with jam inside, a marshmallow covered in toasted coconut, etc. etc.

Sumana said "If they come around with a wafer-thin mint, I'm through." Fortunately no mints were forthcoming; they left us alone with our plates and plates of dessert until we'd finished most of it. Then, the check. Suffice to say that it cost a lot of money. I don't think I'd eat there again given the price, but I said the same about WD-50 and I wouldn't mind going there again now.

• Julia Child's favorite cooking/eating apple
• Very tart (That's why Julia talks the way she does)

Like many books that claim to have no recipes, this book in fact has recipes, but they're not presented in the traditional Joy of Cooking form but in a narrative like you sometimes see when I write recipes, with many hooks for improvisation. The odd thing about this book is that it's a book from the mid-70s, which means it's stuck in the 70s and in a French culinary model that's very sauce-heavy. There is a trick for making sauces in the blender which is used to great effect throughout the book.

The author asserts that "if it's fresh it's nutritious", which unfortunately is not true! The Blue Strawberry Cookbook unflinchingly applies this logic to, eg. butter. Most of the sauce recipes start out "Melt a stick of butter." That's on top of a recipe that often has another half-stick or stick of butter in it.

To boil a potato and then mash it is insultingly mundane; but who doesn't like mashed potatoes? The next time you make them, bake the potatoes in their skins until soft, then scoop the meat out of the skins, add milk and butter and salt and pepper, and mash them that way. Much more taste and much better for you.

"Nooo!" "Nooo!" Mashed potatoes with butter are the vegetable equivalent of fudge. Interesting idea to bake them instead of boiling, though.

Basically there are lots of good ideas in this book, and an inspirational spirit of off-the-cuff invention, but now I think I know why the 70s were so greasy. I don't think it's true that any arbitrary flavor combinations will taste fine, as BSC claims, but this book has gotten me to do more experimentation when cooking and less a priori thinking about what might work well together.

However, the waiter did offer us the ability to poutine-ize our fries.

Oh, you want to know what was in the commercial. Let's suppose there was a health-and-safety video where a kid named Joe hates Fruit by the Foot. But he lives in a universe where Fruit by the Foot is everywhere! Everyone's constantly chowing down on the stuff. It's disgusting. Joe summons a Coily-type spirit and demands that said spirit delete Fruit by the Foot from his universe.

But Coily is very lazy, and rather than carrying out this task in detail, he finds an alternate universe where there is no Fruit by the Foot, and swaps Joe with the corresponding Joe-prime. The health-and-safety video has Joe in his new universe, coming to terms with the disastrous consequences of his Fruit by the Foot-deleting bloodlust. The commercial, however, is about Joe-prime.

Joe-prime's story is the exact opposite of those health-and-safety-videos: he is thrust unprepared into a universe where everything depends on Fruit by the Foot (or, as they called it in olden days, Fruit by the Foote). "Never heard of it," he admits. "Am I the only one?" Yes, Joe-prime. Yes you are.

The lad is understandably confused. After some initial mishap (which I don't remember but which must be there because of the rule of threes), he hails a cab to take him away from the scene. "Doesn't this cab go by the mile?" he asks. "No!" cries the cabbie enthusiastically, pulling out an infinitely long stripe of the maybe-you-can-convince-your-parents-it's-not-candy device. "I go by Fruit by the Foot!" I envision the cabbie as a jovial Topol-type fellow who knows not what torment his words inflict.

Panicking, Joe-prime flees to the safety of the classroom. But in class, everyone's swilling down Fruit by the Foot like it's going out of style. What fresh hell is this? There is no learning here, no order; there is only Fruit by the Foot. Rending his garments, Joe-prime cries out: "Doesn't this class go by the rule?" I think you can guess the punchline. Yes, I just told you a shaggy dog story and omitted the punchline. Don't say I didn't learn anything from my father.

This year Backup Thanksgiving was roast chicken, orange-cranberry sauce, dressing, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, carrots, green beans, and Parker House rolls. So delicious. But now Sumana's sick of the leftovers and I'm almost done reincorporating them. I made stock from the chicken carcasses and bread pudding from the cranberry sauce. Now I have to start thinking about what to make instead of just pulling stuff out of the fridge.

PS: The first six chapters of the REST book are now done!

I've been to a frozen custard place before: Carl's in Fredricksburg, Virginia. So I knew what to expect. And it was good, except here I ordered a concrete that included Valrhona chocolate disks or whatever they're called. I didn't really know what they are so I said "Disks? Sign me up!" Then I got the concrete and remembered what Valrhona chocolate disks are. Those guys are great... FOR BAKING. For putting in frozen drinks they're not so great. It's like putting chopped-up Snickers bars in a milkshake and then crunching on frozen Snickers bar all the time you're drinking it. When you get a concrete, stick to extra things that are soft.

Hamburger: eh. I probably shouldn't even have gotten this since Shake Shack had about 150 health code violations (not an exaggeration) last time it was inspected. It wasn't very good. Andy and I have been going out on excursions where we try out the city's hamburgers, and Shake Shack is pretty lousy. I'd rate it below Burger Joint (trashy take-out burger restaurant in fancy Parker Meridien hotel, primarily famous in class-obsessed New York due to its class-transvestitism; there are celebrity autographs on the wall inc. Stephen Colbert's), which doesn't even use real hamburger buns. In conclusion: Shake Shack is for frozen custard with soft things in it. That stuff is good and you're likely to run afoul of fewer health code violations.

If you're curious, best hamburger discovered so far: Zip Burger at 300 E 52nd. They have Belgian fries too, and non-perfunctory veggie options.

• 1 can black beans
• 2 chipotle peppers
• 4 eggs
• 8 corn tortillas

Drain beans and mash with peppers. Scramble eggs. Serve on warm tortillas. Add anything that you would put on a burrito: salsa, yogurt, cheese, greens, guacamole, etc. It's filling and tasty.

Fortunately, you can use a separate binder that's tasty and goes will with cookies: oatmeal. I got this idea from the fatless cookies at a weird restaurant near Sumana's work that caters to bodybuilders. Today I made these cookies that use an insane amount of oatmeal. And they're pretty good. Applesauce brownies make a pretty good substitute for butter brownies. These cookies are a different animal from a typical oatmeal cookie, but they're definitely tasty.

Totally gross! You know what we're talking about. You've skinned your elbow while crashing your bicycle getting extreme over a gnarly jump in your neighborhood.

I never meant to get extreme! It was all a big misunderstanding!

We ate with Rachel Chalmers at Chez Panisse. We sat right next to the open kitchen and watched people make food. The atmosphere was great and conducive to conversation. We talked about science fiction and Rachel said that I should spend my time writing space opera for her delectation, which is good work if you can get it.

We all had the vegetarian prix fixe. Sumana and Rachel shared a half-bottle of fancy wine and I had two glasses of a really good raspberry Italian soda. We started with bread and butter. Then, the menu!

Appetizer was a pair of crostini, one with tomatoes and one with some green vegetable I don't know what--possibly squash--and cheese. They both were topped with an excellent vinaigrette. The tomato crostini was better, because tomatoes are more awesome than random vegetable.

Then a garlic broth soup with a poached egg floating in it. You cut open the egg with your spoon and the yolk flooded out to be cooked by the soup.

Then the entree, which was a soufflé. It was okay but what I think the non-vegetarian option (something porkish) would have been better. What was really great were the corn, green beans, and other vegetables served around the soufflé. Also there were zucchini blossoms at the top of the soufflé, which was awesome.

Dessert was a great fig tart, and there were some tiny after-dessert cookies, also great.

Chez Panisse was quite an experience, but I was pretty disappointed in the soufflé, a nontrivial part of the meal. I don't really like souflés except for the dessert ones with chocolate in them.

The next day I went to Greens with Adam, Kim, Kris, and Erica. Sumana got sick from the plane trip so she didn't come. I, on the other hand, waited until the vacation was over to get sick from a plane trip. Cough, sneeze.

At Greens I had lemonade and zucchini griddle cakes and pasta with tomatoes and chocolate cake. The lemonade was pretty lame (I officially give up on restaurant lemonade, except for the lemonade at the cafe nearest my house). Everything else was excellent.

I've been to Greens many a time and Chez Panisse only once, but I think Greens has better food, as well as being easier to get into and a little less expensive.

I have a more general entry on this topic percolating, but I think there's a point of diminishing returns at which making restaurant food more expensive doesn't make it proportinately better. I hypothesize that this point comes when you stop getting your food from Sysco or a Sysco wannabe and start getting it from diverse local sources. Greens and Chez Panisse are both at this point.

On the plus side, the code is much nicer now, and it turns out errata get fixed in the next printing of the book, not the next edition as I'd always thought for some reason.

Also, you know those allergen disclaimers on food that say "may contain traces of nuts"? Today I believe I succeeded in isolating the nuts! First, a recipe:

Natur-Swiit Oatmeal

• 1 cup soy milk
• 1/2 cup non-soy milk (I've been bumping up the soy milk percentage but 100% soy milk still tastes gross in this)
• 1 handful dried fruit
• pinch salt
• 3/4 cup oats

Instructions: Boil the fruit in the milks and the salt. Add oats and cook for 5 minutes on low heat.

Okay, it's just the instructions from the back of the oatmeal canister, except for the fruit. But the fruit is magic. When you boil the fruit in the milk, it swells up and sweetens the oatmeal, so you don't have to add brown sugar to the oatmeal. Adding fresh fruit afterwards never makes it sweet enough for me.

I eat this for breakfast about half the time. Usually I make it with cut up dried apricots, but today I went with all different types of fruit. I dumped them in the saucepan, turned on the heat, and then went away to work on the promotional tutorial and forgot about the boiling milk. Then I remembered and ran back into the kitchen, where the milk proteins had formed huge bubbles in the pan. And suspended in the bubbles were... tiny pieces of walnut skin!

I'm pretty sure that's what they were; they could have been pieces of fruit skin but they sure looked and felt like walnut. I'm pretty sure I've seen the fabled "traces of nuts" and my life is now complete.

In New York, right next to the place where the maple syrup comes from, they don't do any of this. I've been to fancy breakfast restaurants, as fancy as any I ever went to in California, and they all treat maple syrup like cheap jelly. It's made by Smuckers out of corn syrup and it comes in little plastic tubs with pull-off tops, like non-dairy creamer. They have to stock this stuff because all the restaurants here do delivery, and how are you going to deliver maple syrup in a little syrup ramekin. But they take it a step further and also give it to the people who came over to their restaurant in person! So when I go out to breakfast I never order anything with a dependency on maple syrup. I guess I could be a huge snob and bring my own little container of maple syrup, but then why don't I stay home and make my own waffles?

I've eaten at places in the south (IHOP being the exception), where the restaurant just buys a 20-pack of Log Cabin squeeze bottles and plunks one down on each table. New Yorkers probably think their system is better, but I don't see how. I never thought I'd have anything good to say about IHOP's syrup, but at least it doesn't look obviously fake.

Incidentally, Rocks'n'Diamonds is turning into ZZT.

When he entered, President Bush walked within two feet of me, and for some reason, he turned and looked me in the eye and said, "Let's eat!".

Ned Batchelder and his wife's White House adventure: parts 1 and 2.

As with anything, if you put it on the web I'll randomize it. Thus, my latest feature, Mystery Loaf. It names and creates a new dish every five minutes. Eating them is your problem.

Confusing the point of a restaurant with the mission of a "Saturday Night Live" skit...

In the name of "new style sushi" Ninja employs rice cakes as beds - or sometimes graves - for a rectangle of truffle-flecked omelet (it tasted like soggy French toast), a sliver of sautéed foie gras (pleasant, but how could it not be?) and a finger of seaweed-crowned mackerel (fishy in the extreme).

Adam thought this was orientalism at its finest, but this restaurant is an offshoot of one in Tokyo, so there's clearly some self-orientalism going on as well.

The only cool part: the restaurant is camoflauged. It looks like an apartment building and you go down in the elevator and the door opens to reveal a ninja standing in front of you. They should cut the dining experience short right there and call it "Be Scared by a Ninja For $5".

I developed a samosa song which I sing when I'm awaiting samosas. It goes: "Samosa!" Except you say it on the fourth beat of the measure. I think it could be the next "Tequila".

Now I've discovered Rice to Riches, which only sells rice pudding with lots of different toppings. I think if I start a restaurant it would be easier to start one of the really specialized ones. Let's say, I would sell only choux puffs with various sweet and savory fillings. Meanwhile, here's a copycat recipe for their Rocky Road rice pudding.

I am not a huge fan of dim sum because honestly I find genuine Chinese food kind of weird. I feel that this is in some sense okay because I read an article in Gourmet about the article writer taking some visiting top Chinese chefs to the French Laundry and other fancy Bay Area restaurants, and them generally thinking everything was gross and weird (though one chef liked the oysters at a Fisherman's Wharf oyster bar). I figure if it's okay for actual chefs to be that un-cosmopolitan, I can be too.

Not that I went hungry. I like the sticky pork buns a lot, so I had two of those. There was also a vegetable of the brocolli/cauliflower/brussel sprout family which was also very good, and a dessert bun with red bean paste. But some of the other stuff I tried made me queasy. And I always felt like a friend's mother was coming around with a cart every few minutes urging me to eat more.

Generally I don't order stuff at restaurants when I can make a superior version myself, and a peanut butter sandwich is well within my reach. So I decided to order "The Elvis", which I could make at home but never actually had. This is a peanut butter sandwich with bananas, honey, and bacon, which gets fried.

It was okay. The experience, and the recent visit of the Elvis sandwich to the Minutillo household, got me thinking: why couldn't I make my own Elvis sandwich? I decided to try it.

It was good; better than the restaurant one, certainly. While making it I figured out a couple of things about the Elvis sandwich. Longtime readers (that is, since December) may remember Eggnog Transitive Closure, where it was revealed that eggnog, ice cream, and French toast have the same ingredients. Well, an Elvis sandwich is basically French toast minus eggnog.

Peanut butter, bacon, bananas, and honey are all things that could reasonably go into the middle of a piece of french toast before you dip it in the eggnog and fry it. Load up a piece of french toast with all of those things, and don't dip it in the eggnog, and you've got an Elvis sandwich. The chain of foods continues apace! Chain chain chain, chain of foods.

Then we went to another restaurant for dessert but the portions were really small. Camille vows that next time we will do things old-fashioned Brooklyn diner style so we can have huge pieces of pie.

Camille is somehow representing or works to book gigs for musicians. She was trying to expand her business and branch out, but then she decided to just go for a niche and own it. Her niche is "eclectic" musicians (eclectic as a group, or, I suppose, individually), so she'll find gigs for you if your act is just a guy with a zither and a girl with a triangle. Very vaudeville-like.

We also went over to see this exhibition of black-box analog synthesizers. Most of them did not respond well to my twiddlings, but I got a good sound out of one of them: a sort of funky metronome beat with Star Trek: TOS ship effects on top of it. People I thought about telling about this exhibit in a gloating manner: Jake, Seth, Brian Behlendorf. Then I decided that doing that would be equivalent to gloating that I lived in New York, rather than that I had gotten a chunk of culture into my otherwise philistine system, which isn't something I should gloat about.

There was good ambience and lots of good-looking stuff in the restaurant, like macaroni and cheese and grilled sandwiches, but the hamburger was charred and, though it came with some vegetable fixings they were not very healthy-looking. There was no mustard or mayonaise to counteract the dryness of the patty. The french fries were okay but not great. Sumana's meal (green bean casserole and grilled sweet potato; yes, sweet potato cut in half and put on the grill) was far superior.

And what is the customer supposed to do? You can't complain that you got lowbrow food at a self-consciously lowbrow restaurant. You're trapped. Well played, Mr. Maples, well played. You'll be the death of me yet.

The CnC seems expensive to me (that burger cost $9) but it's probably average for Manhattan. The other stuff on the menu looked good, especially the wide variety of trashy desserts, so I'll probably go again eventually. It's near Union Square.

• It came with lettuce and tomato, instead of that costing extra.
• It came with "raw onions" (ie. onions) instead of onion rings. Onion rings! Onion rings are a side dish, not a topping!

So clearly we have a thing like the British use of "salad" going on here. This diner's version of "California Burger" is more accurate, but less delicious than California's. Hamburgers in California don't have avocado on them by default, but they do have lettuce and tomato and onions by default. Not at this diner. This only confirms my suspicions that fresh vegetables are as rare spices here in the Northeast.

Yesterday I went with Dan, Beril, and Kevin to the Vietnamese restaurant near CollabNet. They (the restaurant) recently changed their name and rearranged their menu a little, so now it features clip art and pixellated pictures of food. It also features milkshakes that star the fruits of southeast Asia, including a durian milkshake. I ordered a durian milkshake.

The durian milkshake didn't smell bad (probably made from frozen durian) and it didn't taste good (turns out I don't like durian), so it was an all-around disappointment. But it's a cheap and harmless way to claim you've eaten durian.

Funny story: I also brought hard sauce for the pudding. Rachel put the sauce in the freezer during dinner, under the theory that hard sauce should be hard. As far as I know this is the only confusing food name for which the French are entirely blameless.

Useful tip: to make hard sauce, simply start making cookies and then don't finish.

Before I learned the truth about eggnog I was planning to make some homemade eggnog to see if that was any better (I still am, actually). One thing that occured to me when looking at the recipes is that the ingredients for eggnog are exactly the same as the ingredients for ice cream. So you could make the eggnog ice cream that John loves so much just by pouring eggnog into an ice cream maker. But then I saw an episode of Good Eats where the exact same thing happened, so I can't take the credit for that idea.

And I did Christmas shopping and played computer games. Tomorrow I'm going to work on my story if I know what's good for me, which I don't.

• 1.5 cups toor dahl (ie. yellow lentils)
• Turmeric
• 1 package fresh green beans, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 2 small potatoes or 1 big potato, diced (I would add more potato, personally).
• 3-4 tomatoes, diced

• 1/2 of the flesh of a coconut

I scooped it out with a melon baller. Save half of it for the raitha. The other half goes into the blender and gets chopped into coconut flakes. Then to the blender add:

• 5 stalks cilantro
• Sambar powder. here's a recipe. Sumana's mother gave me a bag of it; probably you can buy it at a local Indian store.
• 1/2 stick cinnamon
• A little water

Blend into a paste. Scrape into the dahl and stir. Now the sambar is basically ready and just needs to cook some more. While it cooks make the raitha. To the leftover coconut add:

• 1 cucumber, peeled and grated
• 1 serrano chile, diced
• 1 cup plain yogurt
• 3/4 cup buttermilk
• 1 tomato, diced

Stir to combine. Finish the sambar with about a tablespoon of brown sugar and 2 teaspoons of salt. Finish the raitha with 3/4 teaspoon of salt. Serve with rice.

I like putting the raitha on top of the sambar as a sauce. Sumana thinks this is really weird. But I used to put ranch dressing on top of pizza, and this is an analagous situation. To me, it is Sumana's habit of eating the raitha completely separately that is weird.

• 1.5c rice
• 1 T peanut oil
• turmeric
• *curry leaves (I don't remember whether they go here or in the skillet, but if they're like bay leaves they should go in here.)
• salt
• water

Put in rice cooker.

• mustard seed
• *chana (?) Sumana's mother said this was a spice but it seems to be a lentil. Maybe it was "chana [something]" and I just wrote down "chana".
• 2 T peanut oil

Fry in skillet. When it starts popping, add:

• *3 red or green chilis, chopped (we used a bunch of cayenne powder)
• handful of nuts (peanuts or cashews)
• handful of unsweetened shredded coconut

Fry it up. Deglaze with

• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 t sugar

If you have timed everything correctly the rice in the cooker is now about 5 minutes from being done. Drain the excess water from it, and dump the rice into the skillet. Stir, cover, let sit until it's done.

Cleaning tip: chop the lemon rind into quarters and put one of the quarters into the rice cooker pot. Fill with water and turn on the rice cooker for 5 minutes. The turmeric mess will wipe away.

I bring this up now because there's an Italian deli on Valencia I've always wanted to go into, and today we were there when it was open and we did go into it and they had little bags of squid ink for sale. We were on Valencia to have a dinner to celebrate my newfound unemployment. We ate at the fittingly-named Last Supper Club, which was tasty. Sumana liked it more than I did. I would probably have liked it more if we'd had a cheese course instead of dessert: I really had my eye on the gorgonzola fondue.

The first time we ate on Valencia it was at an Italian restaurant called Bistro Annex. I got suckered by the romantic candles on the tables. It was not good eats, though apparently it's a spin-off of Watercress, which we've been to and liked. Bistro Annex had subcontracted their desserts to a dessert company, and the dessert company had printed up a dessert menu that was a lot flashier than the main menu. It was, I realize, disturbingly like Brendan's restaurant that instead of having a kitchen just goes to other restaurants to fulfil your order.

Basically we should have gone to the Salvadorean restaurant next door. We still haven't been to that restaurant, but it probably would have been pretty good.

Anyway, I have just recently started to really observe restaurant kitchens. The neatest thing at Last Supper Cafe was how they cook the pasta. They have deep-fryer machines full of water which they occasionally top off from a pot set under a barely dripping tap. To cook a bunch of spaghetti they drop it into the basket of the deep fryer. When it's done they pull out the basket and reuse the boiling water. It's probably some specialized $600 pasta-boiling machine but it basically looks like a deep fryer full of water instead of oil.

History: Yum! But a little dry.

Screw you, history!

After reading this book the main thing about Futurism I find interesting is the obsession with airplanes. People call themselves aeropainters and aeropoets. The Futurist Cookbook tells you to make aerofood, and to bake bread into the shape of airplanes, and names the dishes of a dinner after the stages of an airplane flight ("Taste Buds Take Off", anyone?). It reminded me a lot of contemporary artists who are obsessed with the Internet. The airplane stuff was kind of cargo cult and distracting from the real point of Futurism, which is actually good because as far as I can tell the real point is fascism. Good aesthetics (modulo airplane obsession), lousy politics.

My mother read the cookbook while she was here and deemed it "crazy". It is pretty crazy, but it seems to mark the first time food was treated primarily as an artistic statement (it's hard for me to pin down exactly what happened here for the first time because of all the stuff that went on in antiquity and medieval times, but it seems like something happened here for the first time). There were some recipes with great names like "Network in the Sky" (possibly interoperating with the Mashed Potato Cloud), and a recipe for risotto balls that sounds really good. Also it had the following anecdote:

The time set for sitting down at table had already passed and no one said anything about getting thie Lucullan feast underway. I got up to ...

— Look, my dear friend, in being late even you are passéists; I thought the Futurists, if only to do something new, would have started early but instead there's the usual boring wait just like at all the banquets in this bourgeois world.

He looks at me and smiles ironically — to eat in the future ... what's more Futurist than that?

Among my spices are many whole spices which I figured I would grind as needed to make them last longer. This has not worked out very well because I have found no good way to grind spices in small amounts. I got a tiny coffee grinder because that's what Alton Brown recommended, but you have to fill it to the top with spices to get a good grind, which defeats the purpose. Should I just buy a mortar and pestle?

Floyd also mentioned that he dabbles in Ruby, so that's one. I am going through the Poignant Guide, which is funny and gonzo and Fafbloggish, and I have a simple question about idiom. I see code like the following, which sets up a block that deals with a single item:

File::open('foo.txt', 'w') do |f|
  f << "text"
end

This idiom makes sense when you're iterating over a bunch of items, but why create a new block to deal with a single item? Is it somehow more Rubic (Rubyic?) than the following code, which seems much more straightforward?:

f = File::open('foo.txt', 'w')
f << "text"

Let me know. I'm trying to spare you the details of my mastery of Ruby (and puppets), but this is undoubtedly the first of many questions.

I made some bread yesterday actually. A couple weeks ago I was running out of pizza dough so I decided to make some more. But I wasn't thinking and I made french dough starter instead. So, lots of french dough starter in the freezer.

He's also got lots of other interesting recipes, mainly for homemade cheese and other dairy products. My seventh grade science teacher was named Larry Fankhauser; I wonder if the two are related.

Perhaps if I made marshmallows using John Agar as the thickening agent. Yes, that would surely work.

Video rental time! We got The Great Dictator and the original Ladykillers. The Great Dictator was alternatively hilarious and bizarrely sentimental. You don't see movies with names like The Great Dictator anymore. I miss that.

Oh, one weird thing about this movie. At the very very beginning there's a scene during World War I and Charlie Chaplin is playing a German soldier. So you think he's playing fake-Hitler, because of course real-Hitler was a soldier in World War I and used this to his political advantage later. But apparently this was not common knowledge in 1940, because in the first scene Charlie Chaplin is playing the other guy in the movie, the everyman barber who just looks like fake-Hitler, and it's incredibly disorienting. You're expecting in the first scene the kind of vicious anti-Hitler humor you end up getting later on in the movie, because c'mon this guy is Baby Fake-Hitler, but he's played as a garden-variety buffoon, the Tramp, not fake-Hitler at all.

We just finished The Ladykillers and it too was great. Truly this is the weekend we struck comedy gold. About halfway through I realized that Alec Guinness' mannerisms in that movie are just the same as Danny O'Brien's mannerisms. I expect the movie would be even funnier if you watched the whole thing imagining it's Danny O'Brien planning the heist.

I inherited a corduroy jacket from my grandfather, which I wear sometimes when I go out. It's great because it makes me classy. Without the jacket I haven't shaved and I'm wearing ratty jeans and a T-shirt I got for 25 cents at a yard sale. With the jacket I get let into restaurants.

Back to working on article.

Check out this thing that finds paths between Wikipedia entries. I love this kind of thing, and this is the most impressive one I've seen. It's as fast as Downhill even though it's probably got an order of magnitude more data to match up.

Still to plant: canteloupe, pumpkin. Already planted: potatoes, rhubarb, garlic.

My mother says there's no way to know what to grow: you just have to plant things and see if they die or not. Nothing grew when I planted last year, but I planted way too late and also the soil in my backyard was all dead. Not even weeds were growing there. I don't have that problem anymore!

I've decided that when I see a word I don't recognize on a restaurant menu, I'll write it down to remember it, and expose its true meaning here on NYCB. First, the only cooking term so far I've learned from menus: coulis is a sauce made in a blender and strained to make it seedless and very smooth. In restaurants it is usually used to garnish a dessert, and is inevitably made from two fruits: raspberries plus something really off-the-wall like passionfruit. Using three fruits in a coulis would clutter up the menu. Using one makes it seem cheap.

Also, jicama, a food I first saw on restaurant menus. Jicama is a South American root vegetable that has the texture of an apple. I can't decide whether or not I like it.

Big problems setting portion expectations. We got salads and they were tiny (and tasty). Then the entrees were enormous (and tasty, though a little salty). We held off on the entrees so we'd have room for dessert, and then the desserts were tiny (and not good).

Oh, I need to review the really good place we went to in Provo. Later.

Well, it turns out two pounds of oranges is six oranges. Furthermore, that six oranges when squeezed yield about a glass of juice. So I spent $4.00 (of Sumana's money) on a glass of blood orange juice. I was enraged, but then we drank the juice and it was really good. Also, if you go out to a nice place for breakfast around here, a glass of non-blood orange juice costs $3.50. So $4.00 for fresh blood orange juice is doable as a one-time thing. I wonder if you can get those Tetra-Paks here, though.

Then I started thinking about sugar and fruit in general and got totally lost. Why exactly is fruit good for you? I have been eating more fruit than I used to to satisfy my sweet tooth, but that's because it's chock full of fructose. The sugar named after fruit.

Obviously a mango is better than a slime moldcandy bar, because in addition to sugar the mango has fiber and vitamin chemicals, while the candy bar has fat and preservative chemicals. But is the mango really a good nutritional investment in an absolute sense? And what about fruit juice? This canned (bleah) 100% fruit juice on my desk says 180 calories and 37 grams of sugar. That's more calories and more sugar than a can of ginger ale. What does the fruit juice have that moves it from the tiny space on the top of the food pyramid into the middle?

I tried to figure this out with web searches but all I got was people telling me to eat fruit. I'm eating fruit! I just want to know what's in the fruit that makes it so great.

Happy Mordecai! I mean Haman. Purim. Happy Purim.

My current favorite example of old-school culinary tomfoolery is this medieval recipe for an enormous egg using 30-40 normal-sized eggs and two pigs' bladders. That sucker's huge! There's no reason to make such a huge egg except to mess with visitors' minds. "Yup, everything's bigger here in Mecklenburg-Strelitz. You should see our cows!"

Update: Sumana disputes this story. Maybe it was someone else.

In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented? : 87
In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 25
 In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented? : 9
In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented?  : 9
In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented  : 8
In what country was Mentos invented? : 7
Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 7
what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 7
country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 4
country Mentos Freshmaker invented : 3
in what country was mentos invented : 3
  In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented? : 2
 In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 2
Mentos freshmaker invented : 2
Where were Mentos invented? : 2
in what country was mentos the freshmaker invented : 2
what country was Mentos invented : 2
what country was mentos invented : 2
where was mentos invented? : 2
 In what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented?  : 1
 In what country was Mentos invented : 1
 Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 1
 what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 1
COUNTRY MENTOS FRESHMAKER INVENTED : 1
IN WHAT COUNTRY WAS MENTOS THE FRESHMAKER INVENTED. : 1
In What Country was Mentos, "The Freshmaker", Invented? : 1
In what country was Mentos "the Freshmaker" invented? : 1
In what country was Mentos invented : 1
In what country was Mentos invented  : 1
In what country was Mentos invented?  : 1
In what country was Mentos the Freshmaker invented : 1
In what country was the freshmaker Mento's invented? : 1
Mentos "The Freshmaker" was invented in what country? : 1
Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented? : 1
Mentos 'the Freshmaker' were invented in : 1
Mentos Freshmaker invented : 1
Mentos the freshmaker invented in what country : 1
Mentos, 'the Freshmaker' invented, candy : 1
WHAT COUNTRY WAS MENTOS INVENTED : 1
WHAT COUNTRY WERE THE MENTOS INVENTED. : 1
What country invented Mentos the Freshmaker? : 1
What country was Mento's the freshmaker invented? : 1
What country was Mentos invented in? : 1
Where was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 1
country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented? : 1
in what country was Mentos "the Freshmaker" invented : 1
in what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented : 1
in what country was mentos 'the freshmaker' invented : 1
in what country was mentos invented? : 1
in what country was the mentos freshmaker invented? : 1
in what country were mentos invented : 1
in what country were mentos invented  : 1
in what were mentos invented : 1
mentos freshmaker invented : 1
mentos the freshmaker invented : 1
mentos the freshmaker invented country : 1
mentos the freshmaker was invented in what country : 1
what country invented Mentos candy? : 1
what country invented Mentos? : 1
what country invented mentos "the freshmaker" : 1
what country invented the Mentos, freshmaker : 1
what country was "mentos" invented : 1
what country was Mentos "the fresh mint" invented? : 1
what country was Mentos 'the Freshmaker' invented? : 1
what country was mentos the freshmaker invented : 1
what country was mentos the freshmaker made in : 1
what country was the mentos freshmaker invented : 1
what country were mentos invented in? : 1
where was  Mentos invented : 1
where was mentos invented ? : 1
where were mentos invented : 1
where were mentos invented? : 1

I gotta say, "the Mentos freshmaker" sounds like a much more interesting device than "Mentos, the Freshmaker". More like a doomsday machine.

For what it's worth, the answer is "Holland".

I'll try to keep posting every day despite the month and a half of constant activity that looms before me. I like posting to NYCB but too often it turns into an excuse to procrastinate, which is my big problem. In addition to Ultra Gleeper, where I've finally pulled out of the rest stop and onto the straightaway, this new project is the textbook example of something you don't want to do if you want to retain free time. I guess I can prove the Ultra Gleeper is worth its salt by just spending a couple minutes a day posting links I find through it.

Excellent place to eat on your way up Utah: the Timberline in Beaver, Utah.

I hope I'm better by the time my mother comes up. We plan to go to Greens and the Exploratorium.

• Interactive Go Tutorial. Pretty slick. Java applets galore. I'm afraid to learn about go because I want to do it very slowly while taking copious notes about my thought processes so as to obtain some insight into how a computer would learn go.
• The Particle Adventure is from the government, and it's here to help... help you learn about subatomic particles, that is! It's some flash thing so I can't see it, but there's a Standard Model chart.
• Riana's birthday party is tomorrow. Clearly what she needs is a pirate ship cake.

It's not just called an eclair cake to make it sound fancy. The crust is made of choux paste, the same stuff you use to make eclairs. Except instead of pastry-bagging it into eclairs, you spread it onto a baking sheet and bake it into one big quadrilateral eclair. Then most of the other stuff is cheap versions of the stuff that goes into eclairs (cream filling, chocolate, etc). It is like a big splayed-open eclair. Anyway, it's very tasty and I recommend you try it.

Also, I just noticed that Daily Kos is using my old Clark Community Network rolling open thread code for sites where people love to have huge random conversations. I assume it's my code because the wording is almost exactly the same. Neat.

There's a Darth Vader grotesque (via, with picture) in the National Cathedral. Which makes sense, since pop culture is what we have now instead of myth and folklore. I thought about browsing the NatCat (ooh, good newslang!) site to see if there were any other interesting grotesques, or even if they had a list of the ones there were, but "Darth Vader" was its own menu option so somehow I doubt it.

This reminds me of one of my co-workers telling me about a cathedral they're building in Barcelona (?) which has statues of businessmen and other average contemporary people. I was only half paying attention so I don't remember any details or even who told me this, but I thought it was a good idea. This happened at a disappointing lunch at Chili's restaurant. If you ordered something with bleu cheese and chipotle peppers you'd expect it to have some flavor or at least make your breath smell bad, but that's not how they do things at Chili's restaurant. Anyway, does anyone know anything about this cathedral?

However, I think the food is pretty bad. I had a tamale which in retrospect felt like just a big chunk of lard, and I was not happy because I ate lard. The menu said you could get the tamale with chile, which I misread as saying you could get it with chili, and I was very excited until my tamale came with a line of red sauce down the middle, dashing my hopes of a Doe's-esque tamale. It also came with black beans, which were pretty lackluster despite having intermingled onion slices; spanish-rice-tasting basmati rice, which was very good, and the generic California Random Greens Salad that makes you think you're having a fancy dinner.

I had cocoa which, as happens in some restaurants, wasn't sweet at all; it's like they make the traditional Aztec cocoa and you have to dump in a bunch of sugar from the sugar container to make it taste like cocoa, and you feel un-hip. But hey, that's me to a T.

The signature dessert was rice pudding; I didn't have any because I'm trying to get rid of this peach cobbler in my fridge, but it's probably good. My verdict: come for the atmosphere, leave for the atmosphere.

• The one from the previous entry, where you buy brown eggs especially for boiling and white eggs for leaving alone and not boiling.
• There's some way of distinguishing good eggs from bad eggs by holding it up to a candle or other bright light and looking at the size of the yolk or something. You should also be able to use this to distinguish boiled and raw eggs.
• Just crack the egg and, if it turns out to have been raw, go back in time and stop yourself from cracking it.

It turns out it was a lily, and that lilies are made of poison. The previous tenants must have planted some lily bulbs that suddenly decided to grow even though the stuff I planted is not growing that well. Anyway, I washed my mouth out with a lot of milk and have so far not died.

The lesson is, don't put something in your mouth just because it grew in ground you now control.

Sorry, that turned out to be a sentence fragment. IF [previous paragraph], you will be pleased to know that there is a way to feed your craving that involves real food. A couple days ago I made Alton Brown's Stovetop Mac-n-Cheese recipe, and it was as though the genie of the lamp had said "So, you want it cheesy? I will grant your wish, but with an ironic twist--it will be TOO CHEESY TO EAT!" And it is, almost. I planned to cut it with frozen peas, but my only box of frozen peas expired almost a year ago and looked like it had been defrosted more times than was good for it. I composted the peas and ate it straight.

By the time I was done I was sick of macaroni and cheese and never wanted to eat it again. I packaged up the leftovers and took it to Sumana's house, hoping she would eat the rest. Now, two days later, I want to eat the rest. It's that good.

The only downside is that it's 2-3 times more expensive than the boxed kind. At least it is around here. It's probably proportionately less more expensive (huh?) elsewhere, since the boxed kind seems to cost a dollar everywhere in the country. It's still cheap compared to other dinners you could be having. My faith in Alton Brown is vindicated! Maybe his baked macaroni and cheese will finally live up to my mental image of "baked macaroni and cheese".

Side note: why is this obvious? I don't know! I can't describe this pairing without resorting to terminology like "meaty" and "woody" that seems very unscientific. But at the same time I think that the statement "walnuts go better with blue cheese than pine nuts" is closer to objective fact than to totally arbitrary opinion or taste. If I knew more about food I could find out what compounds give those two foods their flavor and say that they complement each other, but that doesn't explain why and it can't be made into a useful general rule. This drives me crazy.

I wish it didn't take a whole weekend to make sourdough bread or I'd be able to make all my bread. Eventually I'll try my hand at quicker non-sourdough loaves. Susanna sent me a recipe for 'ninety-minute rolls' which looks great.

[N]o one ingredient is by itself critical. Each can have another ingredient substituted for it and the sauce will still work (although the name may need to be changed).

I'm just beginning to appreciate the French genius of totally exploring a well-defined culinary combinatoric space and naming everything differently just to intimidate people with 6000 names for sauces or soups.

I made banana-buttermilk waffles today, and they were a big hit. I thought about making banana-buttermilk-cornmeal waffles but I don't know how many adjectives you can pile on "waffles" before the waffles start to fall apart. I got a Belgian waffle maker as part of my getting-a-kitchen shopping spree; Belgian waffles are the least soggy and I can't stand soggy waffles. My particular waffle maker is designed to be flipped over after you put in the batter, in an obsessive bid to spread around the air bubbles and prevent any possible sogginess. My kind of waffle maker!

The waffle maker instructions say to put chili on top of a waffle and have it for lunch. I guess that could work. Seems like the gateway to waffle obsession, though.

Eating bugs sounds disgusting? If you have ever eaten a crawfish, lobster, crab or shrimp then you have already eaten members of the class Arthropoda, of which insects are a part. So there.

Exhibit A. In the US, when you order an "x salad sandwich" (eg. "chicken salad sandwich"), you get a sandwich made of x salad, which is x mashed up with mayonnaise and celery and other unsavory things. I'd never order any kind of "x salad sandwich" here.

But in the UK "x salad sandwich" means "do you want a sad little slice of tomato and piece of lettuce on your sandwich, or do you just want the bread and cheese and meat and whatever?" And clearly you want the x salad sandwich in preference to the x sandwich, because you need that tomato and vegetable to lubricate the sandwich which is otherwise pretty dry or slathered with some obscure Qwghlmnian sauce.

Exhibit B. I ran into some confusion between "chocolate" meaning a candy bar and meaning an individual, unwrapped piece of chocolate candy and meaning a piece of candy in general. I never did figure this out, and in the end I just went chocolate-less rather than navigate what seemed to be another country's "Want a Coke?" "Sure, I'll have a Sprite" issue. Now that I think about it it's kind of weird that it was easier for me to buy chocolate in French in Belgium than in English in England. Anyway, can anyone clear up this point? It's possible I was merely faced with a surly or inexpert cashier.

Other cookbooks I found that have similar ideas: "How to Cook without a Book" by Pam Anderson (no, not Pam Samuelson); a completely different "Cooking Without Recipes", by Cheryl Sindell and Joachim Splichal; "The Blue Strawbery Cookbook" [sic], by James Halle. I've ordered them according to my guesses as to where they fall on the continuum that travels from Recipe Refactoring Metropolis to the Random Improvisation Olde Tyme Country Farm.

Honorable mention goes to similarly-named Cooking Without a Kitchen, which, aiming for the MacGuyver wannabe niche market, features gourmet recipes you prepare in the hotel coffeemaker.

This is, incidentally, the best thing about Alton Brown's style of cooking pedagogy; he shows you the makeup of dishes, how to analyze them, and the connections between them. One of the best examples of this is that in some episode or other of Good Eats he points out that a cheesecake is structurally a custard, not a cake. It needs to be cooked in a hot bath, not just baked in a pan just because it has 'cake' in its name.

Anyway, for some reason I didn't buy that book! It cost $10 and I guess I decided it wasn't worth it. Later I changed my mind, but the last time I went to that bookstore it was gone.

Today I idly searched Bookfinder for "cooking patterns" and I found it! I don't remember the (long, unwieldy) title and I can't search for it anymore because I bought it and there are no other listed copies, but by a fortunate confluence of minds the author put "patterns" in the title so I was able to find it. And at about the same price it was being offered at the used bookstore! The $3.00 extra I'm paying to have it shipped to me I will chalk up as a "lesson learned" surcharge. The relevant lesson, of course, is: never take chances! Buy EVERY BOOK!

If I ever write a cookbook (which I might) it's going to be a synthesis of this cookbook I've got coming to me in the mail and Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For The Food. It'll be organized around the principles of recipe schemas and recipe transformations based on ingredient or technique. If you can make x, you can make y by applying a transformation. You can start slow, gradually build a repertoire you're comfortable with, but always keep experimenting within the bounds of the known if you don't want to learn a whole new skill to make something different.

I think cooking should be more like quantum chemistry and less like high school chemistry. There's always going to be a subjective element, but I think it can be factored out and that you can learn even from reading about transformations that involve stuff you don't like.

Also, even though it might sound clever, don't bring your hummus to the party in a leftover Trader Joe's hummus container, or people will unintentionally insult your wondrous hummus by thinking it's the grainy Trader Joe's stuff.

I made vanilla/coconut/mint ice cream yesterday using the paste, and it was great. More on this later.

Suppose you want the glory of Wiki contributorship, but you also crave the greater proportional glory that comes from contributing to a Wiki that lacks thousands of contributors. Check out the Wiki Cookbook, the most promising of the WikiBooks. It has few specific recipes, but as with Wikipedia the potential is there to focus our individual obsessions on a single semicanonical web site. Check out, for instance the Caesar salad recipe--they have the original recipe from Caesar's Bar along with a bastardized modern version. Completeness mania strikes again! Huzzah! A global namespace ensures that variants of recipes will be explored within the context of the larger dish rather than stuck somewhere else. I hope.

My only complaint: I can't find any way to get any of the special Wiki pages (random page, recent changes) for a particular book (ie. the cookbook). There's one big dataset of all the changes made to every WikiBook from which these pages take their orders.

We shared two great appetizers; southwestern bean cakes and a "spring sampler" with walnut bread, bleu goat cheese, walnuts, and dates. I had a great polenta-in-soupy-stuff entree, and Sumana had shish kebobs which she didn't like as much. I ordered a chocolate mousse torte for dessert, which I haven't eaten yet. (I couldn't eat it yesterday due to my new "jam every other day" diet.)

Total cost of meal was $60, which I think is pretty good for an upscale dinner in San Francisco. That $60 does not include the enormously expensive cookbook I bought. I'm going to end up one of those people with a bookcase full of cookbooks. A cookbookcase.

I think there's a resemblance (I used to think I looked like a concrete pillar).

This relieves me of the need to come up with an awesome dessert named after Stack for my "dishes named after programmers" diner menu.

Incidentally, if you're a Yankee in the South and you see "fried pie" on a menu, you might think that it's an eccentric dish made by this particular restaurant where they take slices of pie and deep-fry them. If you find this idea simultaneously repulsive and compelling, you might dare to order a fried pie, hoping and fearing to see a golden pie wedge breaded like a shrimp and plopped onto your plate with some whipped cream. If this is what you are expecting, you will be simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Fried pie is actually a completely standard dish that is basically a better version of those inedible $0.25 Hostess fruit pies. I'm not saying don't order it, but know what you're getting.

Give it a try. It's easy and artichokes are cheap right now. You don't need a special set--just make it in a saucepan and dip the bread or whatever in with forks. Cheap non-trendy fondue!

Next time: hearty ad hoc soup that inevitably makes my housemate say "this is squash?". Like I would lie about squash, and it's really caramel.

Then I realized: these were the real tortillas. Tortillas are now the designated low[er]-carb alternative to bread. It's only a matter of time until someone sees Dr. Atkins' face scorched into a tortilla.

Anyway, Sumana suggested I could make an April fool as a dessert today. As far as I can tell no one has ever thought of doing this before, though there are lots of April Fool's Day themed recipes for tormenting your kids with. I don't have any specific April ingredients, but there were key limes at the grocery store yesterday, which there usually aren't, so unless they've started selling the runts as key limes those are probably seasonal.

This was my thinking way back this morning, when I thought a fool was a kind of sponge cake or something. It turns out it's just cream whipped with flavored syrup. Now it doesn't sound like much of a dessert. Sounds like the thing Brendan got in the Sizzler clone in Illinois that he thought was pudding but turned out to be Cool Whip and Oreos. Wait, that was hilarious! If I could somehow harness the power of that incident, I'd have the perfect April fool April Fool!

• Samoa Samosas
• Tagalog Tagalongs
• Wheat Thin Mints
• Double Dutch Apple Pie

The first two are the only ones I can think of ways to make appetizing (crushed Samoas + banana wrapped in phyllo dough and fried, Tagalongs + coconut cream + canteloupe or avocado + etc., some sort of halo halo thing; needs work).

Anyway. Today I made ice cream of madness (coconut-banana-lime, not the ice cream of madness I'd originally intended to make), as well as two other dishes I'd never made before (fondue and bread pudding). Remind me to tell you about it when I'm not asleep.

Dessert: They were out of tiramisu, but they comped us some panna cotta because apparently they're still trying to figure out how to make panna cotta. I thought it was good because I'd never had panna cotta before, but Sumana said the texture was weird.

PS: please do not do a Google search for "Sexy John's" until this restaurant becomes very popular.

I used to hate squash and zucchini. I still hate bell peppers, but I might not in a year.

Tomorrow: I plan to make the ice cream of madness. Turn back!

1. Does the restaurant serve more than one flavor of ice cream?

The reason this is important is that good milkshakes are made out of ice cream that's the flavor of the milkshake. Bad and mediocre milkshakes are made out of vanilla ice cream blended with flavored syrup. This is in defiance of the Fundamental Theorem of Ice Cream Flavoring, which is that you flavor your ice cream while you're making it and not afterwards.

You can apply this decision procedure by looking at the dessert menu and seeing if they ever hint at the possibility that ice cream might exist in more than one flavor. If you're at a fast food restaurant there is no dessert menu, but come on! Fast food restaurants are the classic case of a restaurant with bad milkshakes--they pull vanilla ice cream out of a soft-serve machine and add syrup to it, right in front of you. You can't even pretend it might be good.

NOTE: Unlike the hot sauce procedure, which has been confirmed dozens of times since publication with no known failures, this decision procedure goes to press with a known flaw. In-N-Out Burger flagrantly violates this decision procedure (you can actually see the syrup in its finished shakes), but its shakes are pretty good.

The only thing I can think of is that if you start with good vanilla ice cream, you can make a decent shake out of it by adding syrup. The decision procedure explains the fact that you can't even get a good vanilla milkshake at a restaurant with only vanilla ice cream by assuming that if you don't care enough to get multiple flavors of ice cream, you don't care enough to get good vanilla ice cream either. I guess this assumption doesn't hold for In-N-Out.

As long as I'm complaining: these pens keep falling apart. They are Staples "Comfort Stic^TM" pens. Don't buy them!

Bonus: To make fake Nutella, or "Notella" (Ha! I am hilarious!), mix peanut butter with cocoa mix. Note: I have not tried this.

martha stewart living flan recipe april 2002

Living flan?!?! Wait, never mind.

martha stewart monkey cake

Fortunately, monkey cake (aka monkey bread; caution: midi) containeth no monkey.

Cotham's in the City: A restaurant near the capitol where, I suppose, all the politicians and staffers eat lunch. The whole restaurant is decorated with signs from political campaigns, and they have a rotating "stereotypical dish of the day": chicken and dumplings on Tuesday, fried chicken on Wednesday, etc. It basically involves either chicken or frying or both. They also have a dessert called "Mississippi Mud" (not the same as a Mississippi mud pie), which sounded really good but which I found disappointing. I may try my hand at improving it.

Dixie Cafe: This restaurant's entrees are nothing to write home about, but they have good sides (like fried okra) and a good fruit cobbler for dessert (they were the inspiration for my attempt at blackberry cobbler). They also have this whole little sub-restaurant inside the restaurant called "Polar Freeze" or something. It's an ice-cream parlor for kids. It's lit up all blue and it's a little scary, since we go there at night and there's never anyone there. It's like the Milkshake Research Laboratories or something.

Popeye's Chicken: This is a nationwide chain, but I just wanted to give it a dishonorable mention because it used to have fried okra and now it doesn't. Boo!

The pizza crust in Little Rock is still no good (still haven't tried Dammegoode Pies), but there's a restaurant called Bosco's (Oh, Bosco's!) that has good pizza on a really thin, but at least not crunchy crust. Good soup, too, though a little salty. We went right before they closed and they were out of a lot of stuff, which meant a lot of free food given in exchange for the food we'd ordered.

Caper's is a fancy restaurant, too fancy for the likes of us, but they left price-fixe coupons in the campaign lunchroom so we figured they had to let us in. We dined well in an old house with fireplaces and everything, taking great care not to accidentally order the $150 bottle of wine. My only complaint: the "portobello potstickers" I ordered were not potstickers at all; they were turnovers. It was a little weird.

The Purple Cow is a diner with great milkshakes and a funny menu. One of the few places I've been to where you can get a bleu cheeseburger; excellent if you want people to flee at your approach.

Last night we went to an excellent Mexican restaurant called Señor Tequila's. They had sopapillas on the menu but I did not subject them to the real-sopapilla test. There were so many of us there that it took forever for the meal to end without me messing everything up by ordering dessert. This is in accordance with Leonard's Immutable Law of Restaurants: "Dinner for n takes O(n²) time." For more details, see my upcoming paper, "The Mythical Man-Meal".

PS: A couple of times, such as today, we've had volunteers bring in big platters and tubs of home cooking. As always, that's the best stuff.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

• PROPRIETOR, a purveyor of pizza
• CUSTOMER, would-be consumer of same

[The scene: a pizza store.]

Proprietor: Good morrow to you, sir!
Customer: The same to you, sir.
Prop.: Welcome to my quality pizza-serving establishment. How may I assist you?
Cust.: Your finest "pizza", if you would.
Prop.: Certainly.

[The same store, later. CUSTOMER is seated.]

Proprietor: All right, who has the nachos?
Customer: Nachos? You must have misheard me. I ordered a pizza!
Prop.: Pizza? You must mean "nachos with tomato sauce and pizza toppings".
Cust.: I shall never dine here again! [Arise and exit.]
Prop.: [Calling out] Good luck with the take-out pizza you're planning to get instead! It has the same crappy crust!

Disclaimer: I have not yet eaten at Damgoode Pies (sic), so there might still be hope for pizza in Little Rock.

Subject: Get what you need today!kumquat

That reminds me of a joke Jason made up. "What do miners say when they strike helium?" [squeaky voice] "We're rich!"

We also talked about making Nethack trendier by adding an Atkins diet conduct. To keep this conduct you could eat all the animal corpses you wanted, but not vegetable-based foods, or potions of booze or fruit juice. Alternatively, there might be a vegetable timeout.

Also check out newCROP, which has an enormous list of food crops, as well as the disturbing list of Famine Foods.

I've complained in the past about the practice of including famous people in works of fiction (Sumana analyzed this as a projected Mary Sue impulse in reality fan fiction), but it turns out that, like all mankind, I am flawed. I think it is really cool that Samuel Pepys has a non-trivial part in Quicksilver. I thought I had a principled objection to this practice, but it was merely that no author had yet met my price. My price is apparently measured in some form of indie-cred economy units, since really famous people like Newton aggravate me when they show up, but I throw the door wide for less famous people like Pepys. Let's try some thought experiments. Robert E. Lee: blah. Hyman Rickover: sure, I'd read that. Einstein: waaay overdone. PGP author Phil Zimmerman: cool! Lewis Carroll: only if the story did not involve fairies.

My understanding is that there is a Chinese swallow that sticks its nest together using its viscous saliva. This dries into a brittle mass. In Chinese cooking, the nest is boiled and reduced and whatever chemical makes the saliva gooey is used to thicken broth. "Bird's Nest Soup".

I tasted some once on a CSF trip to San Francisco--I ate lunch with the Ho sisters in a dim little out of the way place they knew about. The menu was only in Chinese and the offerings were scary. The soup was nothing to write home about.

Swallow's nest: the honey of the vertebrate world!

As long as we're talking about odd food: the Roman emperors used to eat eg. fried flamingo tongues, and Romans of all classes enjoyed their lamprey. Special question for classicists: what's the source for the spine-chilling tale of Augustus' lamprey-keeping friend? (In old days, they would probably leave such gruesome passages untranslated, but nowadays we can just hide the gory details behind a link.)

Sumana had a fennel and apple salad, and an entree composed primarily of tempeh. I will let her give her opinions of that once we fix her NewsBruiser install to keep up with the latest weird changes OCF has made to their hosting setup.

For an appetizer there was free bread, with a tofu-based aioli. The bread was good, and the aioli tasted okay but had a really weird texture. I think they should have just mashed up some garlic in olive oil instead of putting tofu on every flat surface.

There was a wide variety of desserts. I had a cannoli with a tapioca filling and a fig sauce, which was great. Sumana had a chocolate/tofu cake.

Also, Millennium had these fruit juice drinks called "refreshing potions", and Sumana ordered one, so the receipt says:

1 POTIONS                    6.95

Sadly, Millennium would not accept payment in gold pieces. I don't recommend the potions anyway; get the hot chocolate instead.

Also present: a few recipes, including one for potstickers ("When I overcook them, I usually announce to my wife that I have prepared them 'authentically', thus leading to our often using the word 'authentic' to mean 'screwed up'.").

re: breaching sharks
go to your library and have them order a documentary video entitled "air jaws". it totally delivers.

re: garlic cracking
i always keep a hammer in the kitchen for this purpose. well, i don't
keep it there just for this purpose, but it suits this purpose fine.
just give em a little tap. don't mess with garlic presses, even the
purportedly self-cleaning ones- these things are for yuppies only.

I hope you're keeping caught up on Brendan's Jake Berendes West Covina graphic novel. Embarrassing factoid: that blotch on Jake's nose on the bill is a slip of the Gimp pencil that I didn't notice for about a year. Then I was too lazy to do anything about it, and now it's being reprinted elsewhere. Let this be a lesson to you: never undertake any action!

PS: here's Air Jaws, which definitely looks better than Air Bud. Quote from Amazon review: "For the first time, you can watch a huge 15-foot white shark flies [sic] in the air with a seal in its jaws!!" No seals were harmed in the making of Air Jaws.

The worst ones are flat and you're supposed to wrap it around garlic and push down. This is really aggravating because it takes too long to set up. The better ones are cylindrical and you put the garlic inside and push down. This is better. But what you should actually do is just whack the garlic glove with the flat of your chef's knife. You're already using the chef's knife, and you'll have to wash it anyway. So save yourself some trouble.

On cooking shows they place the flat of the knife against the clove of garlic and press down gently, putting their fingers in the most horrible danger. I do not know why they do this, because it can't help them avoid lawsuits. I was always afraid to follow their example, and to avoid doing so I kept buying garlic-clove-cracking devices, but now I say: just whack it.

Very few people came to Sumana's birthday party yesterday, which is fine because it was not really her birthday party. Let me switch gears here and talk about poker.

The best part of poker is that when you are the dealer, you have the opportunity to make up some bizarre variant of poker. One variant I came up with that I liked a lot, but which needs some refinement, is one in which instead of drawing cards you designate a rank of card to be wild. I have not playtested this, but I would like to try some combination of poker and blackjack in which you can combine two or more cards to get one virtual card of higher rank. I am sort of tempted to search for a big database of poker variants, but most of the fun is in coming up with the variants (and stupid names for them) during play, so I will abstain.

• FIRST COURSE
  • Two Potages.
    • Good Woman's Soup, dite flamande, white and thick.
    • Soup a la beauveau, brown and clear.
  • Two Fishes.
    • Turbot with lobster sauce.
    • Slices of crimped salmon, boiled, with same sauce.
  • Two Removes.
    • Turkey a la perigeaux, puree of chestnut.
    • Leg of mutton roasted.
  • Six Entrees.
    • Cutlets of mutton braised with soubise suace.
    • Salmi of young partridges a la Espagnole.
    • Vol a vent of salt fish a la maitre d'hotel.
    • Casserole of rice with puree of game.
    • Saute of fillets of fowl a la lucullus, with truffles.
    • Fillets of young rabbits a la orlies, white sharp sauce.
• SECOND COURSE
  • Two Roasts.
    • Three partridges roasted.
    • Three woodcocks.
  • Six Entrements.
    • Spinach with consomme, garnished with fried bread.
    • Whole truffles with champaign [sic].
    • Jelly of marasquino.
    • Buisson of gateau a la polonaise.
    • Charlotte of apples with apricot.
  • Two Removes of the Roast.
    • Biscuit a la creme.
    • Fondus.

More gems from the past coming soon. (What is a "remove"?)

The scene: a restaurant... on the moon! Inside, a waiter hovers with pad in hand over a customer, who looks up from his menu and says:

"The lobster... is it fresh?"

Thank you.

PS: Carrot Cheesecake tries but cannot wrest the carrot crown away from Carrot Cake Soup (nice recipe format there, BTW; is it for some kind of Iron Chef home game?).

A link to keep you at bay: Muji Online, a company that sells stylish things made of recycled materials shaped into the wrong dimensions. At a Muji store in London I got a notebook for Sumana from a two-story Muji store, and the notebook paper was about two inches by six inches. It looked like Sir Humphrey Appleby's margin-shaped notebook paper from the Yes, Minister book. In fact, it looked like the Muji store itself, which was two stories high and about ten foot by thirty.

I have a book, so there's no reason to keep rambling on. See you later.

PS: My mother called all in a panic. I'm just checking my cholesterol level and lipids and whatnot. Don't worry.

The bad news is that at that roadside stand in Gilroy or wherever that has a whole shelf of hot sauces, there are probably only a couple, if any, which will survive this decision procedure. The good news is that you won't waste your money on that shelf of hot sauce.

To run this decision procedure, you must ignore the funny graphic on the front of the bottle and the "This is the hottest damn thing you've ever tasted in your life! Not for sissies! This will blister your tongue and the tongues of your ancestors!" bravado on the back of the bottle. Those things are a constant on every bottle of hot sauce, no matter how un-hot or foul-tasting it actually is. Instead you must look at the ingredient list on the side of the bottle, where by federal law an honest reckoning of the contents will be found, and answer the following questions:

1. Is the first ingredient habanero peppers? The first ingredient should be habanero peppers, or be somehow based on habanero peppers. If it's some other kind of peppers but all other conditions are met, then it might still be good (if you like that kind of pepper), but it probably won't be as hot.
2. Is the second ingredient some kind of vegetable matter? The second ingredient should be a non-pepper member of the vegetable kingdom, such as carrots, or mangoes. This is the 'base' of the sauce, a nonreactive substance which prevents it from being merely a habanero relish. Note that the base must be something you like: if you don't like mangoes, you won't like a mango-based sauce.

   "Why do you have this rule?", you might ask. "What non-member of the vegetable kingdom could possibly be the second ingredient of a hot sauce? Venison? Drywall? The set of all natural numbers?". No, I refer to that scourge of this decision procedure: vinegar. If the second ingredient of your hot sauce is vinegar, this means you have what we in the business call "a vinegar-based hot sauce", which is no good. Most hot sauces I've seen are vinegar-based, for some reason I cannot comprehend, so you need to be careful about this.

   Now, some of you may like vinegar-based hot sauces, and at this point you are probably seething with vinegary rage. "You'll get my vinegar-based hot sauce when you pry it from my cold dead hands!", you might be saying. Well, THAT'S JUST FINE, because NOBODY WANTS your lousy vinegar-based hot sauce, and if we did we could just BUY SOME FROM THE STORE, so stop being so touchy.

   It is okay for vinegar to show up later in the ingredient list. All hot sauces I've seen contain some vinegar. If you like incredibly hot sauces there might be no hope for you but to go with a vinegar-based sauce.

   NOTE: Sometimes the non-pepper member of the vegetable kingdom comes first in the ingredient list, and the pepper comes second. In my experience, this is fine. It just means that there's more base by weight than there are peppers. If there are a bunch of vegetables in the ingredient list, and then the pepper, then what you probably have is a salsa rather than a hot sauce, which is fine. In fact salsa is generally better than hot sauce because the vegetables are fresher.

3. Does it contain the bonus ingredients? The bonus ingredients are garlic, lime juice, and onion. They are not neccessary for a good hot sauce, but they make it taste better.
4. Does it not contain the malus ingredients? The malus ingredients are things like sugar, corn syrup, cornstarch, and drywall. Most of these are put into a vinegar-based sauce in the misguided hope of thickening it. This is misguided because 1) they should have given it a vegetable base in the first place, and 2) it just makes the sauce taste worse. If you have these ingredients you probably also have a vinegar-based sauce. If nothing else, try to find a vinegar-based sauce that doesn't have this junk in it.

The following sauces are known to pass the decision procedure, and meet with the approval of Kevin and myself:

• Sontava! brand hot sauce. This is a very flavorful, fairly hot habanero sauce, and I use it as the gold standard for other hot sauces, because it was the first one Kevin and I found that was really good. There is a hotter version which we haven't tried yet.
• Mo Hotta Mo Betta puts out at least one good sauce, the mango-based Red Savina sauce. It's hotter than Sontava!, and it has a sweet flavor to it due to the mango.
• "Voodoo Queen" hot sauce. This is an alarming macaroni-and-cheese orange color, but it tastes good, and slightly hotter than Sontava!. Kevin and I call it "Zombie Queen" for some unknown reason.
• The 85% Pain and Batch #37 sauces are put out by the same company and are basically identical except that Batch #37 has more garlic. Both are good, but Batch #37 is better because of the bonus ingredient rule. Both are a little hotter than Sontava!.
• Melinda's brand hot sauce. I was actually going to give this as an example of a vinegar-based sauce that tastes okay, but when I looked at the ingredient label it turns out that it's actually a vegetable-based sauce with vinegar in it. So the decision procedure works better than my own memory, and there are no vinegar-based sauces I recommend.

At dinner last night I had an ice cream dessert, like a giant Mochi, called a "Tartouffe". I do not know anything about it or why it is named after a Moliere character, but it was tasty.

I went to Amsterdam. I've been hanging out a lot with Jarno and his girlfriend PrustiTaina, because their travel plans have overlapped with mine to an unbelievable extent (eg. they planned to go to Amsterdam the same day I planned to, they chose the same hotels that I did, etc.) I also ate a waffle. My French is only good for reading and not for hearing what people are saying, nor for talking because when I try to talk to someone in French they just respond in English.

Consider the archetypal replicator command: "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." Captain Picard never orders anything else from the replicator, yet either there's no way for him to get the replicator to know that when he wants tea he wants hot Earl Grey; or there is such a way, he can't figure out how to set it up, and he's too proud to ask anyone for help.

What's more, the captain's utterance implies that if he just asked for "Tea. Earl Grey.", either the replicator would give him iced Earl Grey or the ship's computer would ask "At what temperature do you want the Earl Grey?" like a text adventure parser. How come they had time to do a molecular scan of a cup of Earl Grey but not time to put into the 24th-century equivalent of Cyc that Earl Grey is the sort of tea you drink hot?

This is not rocket science; it's the sort of thing that contemporary programmers use as fanciful examples in their EuroPython talks. "Let's take a hypothetical Person, Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc likes Tea, so he sets that as his default Drink, but there are many different kinds of Tea, so he can set a default for Tea as well..." It wouldn't be hard to do the interface either; after you got your elaborately specified tea you could say "Bookmark. Tea." and thereafter it would just be "Tea." Except for the inevitable wacky malfunction, where the attempt to bookmark tea would give you a tea-colored bookmark, you would be fine.

Next time: I tackle the question of what happened to all the industrial designers between Enterprise and TOS.

There's also a Chinese Restaurant Name Generator which comes up with better names than the one I wrote for my PyCon paper, but it's some weird Javascript thing that only works once, like the guy's variety act in that Warner Brothers cartoon.

One great use for Downhill is finding new weblogs. That's also a great use for writing Downhill and having people link to it. Once the buzz dies down, an Eater-style postmortem where I talk about new weblogs I found (also coming soon: the not-really-that-shocking results of an ad hoc experiment I ran against the readers of pyblagg). I hope the announcement that I'll do a postmortem won't affect the way people link to me.

The second best pasta in the world might be ziti, but I'm not sure.

Update: Sumana's suggestions, in helpful outline form:

1. You know that it has been through a factory at some point, and that it is not plain tap.
   1. prestige
   2. safety, quality of water (my hypothesis on why Russians want their bottled water carbonated)
2. Costs more (prestige).
3. Flavors. Like an Italian soda without the calories.
4. More "festive" so teetotalers can fit in at a party.

Update #2: A. Cairns writes on the topic "Why I drink sparkling water":

It's like drinking deadly, alkaline poison -- without all the messy dying!

It calms my fears of mortality.

"You'll like our crust!"

The food here is okay; the decor, kitschy. I can't say how the apricot pie is, because it turns out I don't like apricot pie.

Back on the road.

If I, myself, were planning to commit suicide by eating myself to death, then I, like the characters in the film, would want the relevant food to be really good. Unfortunately, I would then feel guilty about putting the cooks (for such there would have to be) through all this trouble to make all this food that I was just going to use in a suicide attempt. The characters in the film cleverly sidestep this problem by enlisting among their number a gourmet chef, whom they all assist in preparing the food. I really like this idea, and to me it's the most touching part of the film. It's not a big, wasteful, impersonal catered bachanal like I was expecting: the characters are intimately involved in preparing the instruments of their suicide.

Oddly enough, the last half-hour, the climax of the film, is pretty boring. But there are some funny scenes near the beginning, and great French movie lines like "Le deluge universal... du merde."

There is lots of pointless French movie sex in this movie. Also, the characters die like Muppets (I don't think I'm giving away anything when I say that people die in this movie). They're living, living, living, then suddenly they sort of thrash around and stretch out, dead. This fits into my mental picture of Muppet death, in which the animating force, or "hand", leaves the Muppet body and lays out the Muppet prostrate on the nearest table.

To get into the spirit of the film, I gorged myself on the following food while watching it:

• 1 bowl pasta with cheese and avocado (aka "I Have No Vegetables And I Must Eat" Pasta, similar to Trader Joe's Super-Carbohydrate Monopoly Pasta)
• 1 slice toast
• 1 can Hansen's grapefruit soda with added grenadine
• 5 Girl Scout Cookie Thin Mints

I was pretty full after that, but I survived.

[0] Three of the Frenchmen are actually played by Italians. Sure, why not. I couldn't tell.

"It is very exciting to be associated with a fun brand like Lay's. I am sure Saif-n-Kaif Hot & Sweet Chilly, Caribbean Style with its spicy, tangy taste is a flavour that will go down well with the younger generation," said Saif.

This reminds me that in Trader Joe's, Sumana and I saw some fliers for Tom's of Maine mouthwash. Only they weren't consumer-oriented fliers, they were fliers that tried to convince stores to carry the product. They said:

• Ginger flavor appeals to cultural creatives.

I was just thinking, "Ginger-flavored mouthwash, that's an interesting--gaaah!" If there's one thing us cultural creatives hate, it's to be identified as such.

For some reason, the closest Mongolian BBQ I could find to San Francisco is Colonel Lee's. Without knowing anything at all about why this is actually the case, I blame archaic health regulations against communal ingredient choosing and leaving frozen meat out in the open.

There's also a nice used-bookstore-that-tries-to-look-like-a-new-bookstore right across the street from Colonel Lee's.

Right now you're thinking "Leonard, why are you bringing up the durian? I already know all about the durian! I hit your site with my mondo RSS reader to read your witty comments on completely irrelevant topics, not to see you link to the durian site that's already #3 on Daypop!" But unless you've been reading NYCB since 1998 (or have read the archives), you don't know that I had a physics professor at UCLA whose name was Doug Durian. He was a good professor, but I did horribly (C+) in the class; this was entirely my fault.

In a bizarre turn of events, this NYCB entry is not the first time Doug Durian has been mentioned in conjunction with the durian fruit; it's been done before, in greater detail, here.

PS: I do untold amounts of research for each and every NYCB entry, except the ones clearly labeled with the blue triangle which means "completely unresearched". Reading my UCLA transcript to find my E&M grade I get the uncanny impression that as I progressed through my time at UCLA I actually got smarter. I don't know why I find this so uncanny as this is exactly what's supposed to happen when you go to college.

Ingredients

• 1 can black beans
• 1 can small olives
• 1 tomato
• 1 small cucumber
• 1 avocado
• 1/2 bunch spinach
• Caesar dressing (or whatever)
• Shredded hard cheese (optional)

Peel and chop cucumber. Cut tomato. Put spinach, cucumber, tomato, beans, and olives into a bowl. Dress and shake the bowl around to mix up dressing. Cut up avocado and put in (if you put it in before shaking the bowl the avocado will become part of the dressing). Put cheese on top, if you want cheese. Serve with rice pilaf.

• Recipe Circus, a chaotic Geocities for personal recipe lists. Goes first on the list because it's run by JB Hiller, my old co-worker from MAP.
• RecipeSource, which takes the prize for sheer number of recipes. This is what I use most often. Sumana is on her way over to my house right now and we're going to make pasta with tomato-avocado sauce. It also includes silly recipes for extinct arthropods like Ammonite Chowder and Trilobite Creole.
• Michael Witbrock's Recipe Archive Index is very old-school and includes recipes from the uncanny valley of food, like sourdough chocolate cake.
• I don't really trust the fancy interface to Epicurious' recipe index, {but, and} the recipes therein are taken from fancy cooking magazines, so the recipes are more highbrow; not many recipes there in which pudding is an ingredient. However, there are good-looking recipes for fancy puddings, like pumpkin bread pudding and Lemon Surprise Pudding ("[T]he surprise being that it's chocolate").

[0] Also, I really like the self-published cookbooks that you see in tourist traps and restaurant gift shops while on road trips. I've never bought one, though.

Right now you're thinking "Leonard, these baby kiwi are great and all, but when it comes right down to it, aren't they really just a flavor-packed snack?" Ha ha! You have walked right into my tasty trap! For you see,

Hurst's Baby Kiwis are more than simply a flavor-packed snack. They are rich in Vitamin C and naturally low in fat, cholesterol and sodium. Hurst's Baby Kiwis are also high in fiber and a great source of potassium, Vitamin E and magnesium. Six ounces of this delicious fruit only contain 130 calories.

I must admit it's easier for me to get you to walk right into my tasty traps when I get to write your interior monologue for you.

PS: Is CollabNet weird for still providing free food, what with the dot.com crash and all? Even Microsoft, of the famous free-soda policy, sells food to employees in vending machines, and when I first heard of their free-soda policy (in high school, possibly from Microserfs, or BBS-era geek urban legend), it sounded really extravagant.

One time I was 100% wrong and I remain defiant. I refer to Dippin' Dots. Dippin' Dots is an ice cream-like substance which comes in tiny pebble-sized spheres. You eat it with a spoon like real ice cream. It's advertised as "The Ice Cream Of The Future".

I first encountered Dippin' Dots in my senior year of high school. They set up a little stand in a Bakersfield mall. I tried some once and it was nothing special. It wasn't as good as actual ice cream, it was gimmicky in an annoying Jetsons/dystopian cyberpunk future way, it had no facility for Ben and Jerry-style interosculation of tasty non-ice cream items, etc. etc. Despite all these flaws it seemed to actually believe that it was the Ice Cream Of The Future, when I saw it pretty clearly as being the Won't Go Anywhere Manufactured Fad Of The Mid-'90s.

However, I was wrong. Dead wrong. Dippin' Dots has survived; nay, it has prospered. Dippin' Dots is now being sold at McDonald's! I can only hope that the novelty can still wear off, that my perception of Dippin' Dots longetivity is due to my having been part of the very early test market for it. Otherwise... well, it's not really that big a deal. It just bugs me.

The other thing that bugs me (but pertaining to which I never had incorrect premonitions of market failure) is those drinks with huge blobs of tapioca-derived substance living on the bottom of the cup. I think there's something about little balls of food that rubs me the wrong way.

• Lemon
• Strawberry Lemon
• Key Lime Pie

Yogurt Flavors I Was Afraid I Would Like, But Which I Don't (Whew):

• Strawberry Mango

One of the desserts was a custard thing with fruit syrup on it. Innovative, yet not very good. The other was tiramisu. Non-innovative, yet extremely tasty! The tiramisu was the best I've ever had. That's not saying a whole lot, since most tiramisu I've had was pretty bad; there was available to me, many years ago, some tiramisu made by Ellina Poulson which was probably as outstanding as everything else Ellina Poulson makes, but I don't think I actually ate any of it. My point is that I've suffered through bad tiramisu, and as such can recognize good tiramisu, such as the tiramisu served at the Steps of Rome.

But that's not all! Sumana then took my to the City Lights bookstore, where I nosed around and considered buying a copy of a Lovecraft anthology, but did not for three reasons:

1. There are already too many books on the 'to read' portion of my bookshelf, some of which have been languishing there for over a year.
2. Lovecraft seems like the sort of thing I can find online.
3. I did not want to be seen in the hip City Lights bookstore doing something so gauche as paying for goods with money!

Moderate that I am, I felt positively counter-revolutionary in the hard-left atmosphere of City Lights (and Lectures, I always want to add). However, it has a really good sci-fi section which is all the better for being incredibly small; despite devoting only two shelves to sci-fi and related genre ghettoes, they had more Lovecraft than I've ever seen outside of a non-specialty bookstore, and more Lem than I've ever seen outside of the UCLA library (or outside of my room after I checked all the Lem out of the UCLA library). Thus, by my patented Stanislaus Lem Bookstore Quality Index, City Lights is the greatest bookstore ever! Hmm, I may need to recalibrate that index.

Sumana: [pointing to book titled "Against Empire"] Where's "Pro-Empire?"
Leonard: [in stage whisper] They don't stock it here! Keep your voice down!

In other news, Pakistan is apparently now CNNistan.

Don't they know that when you do anything distinctive involving mayonnaise it makes your state a laughingstock? My advice to states and their inhabitants: stay far, far away from mayonnaise.

I'm not too crazy about the actual deadly onions; too much like killer tomatoes. But even that makes the whole thing seem like a goofy, poorly-translated video game in which you are a fighter pilot commanded to "defend attack of deadly onions from planet deadly onion!" and when you beat the game you are told "attack of deadly onions is repelled! but this is not the end of your quest!" and then it makes you do the whole thing again, only with cabbages or something.

    I am sick on account of not cooking my cinnamon rolls enough. It is not good.

    Adam has a website now. It is http://fire.csua.ucla.edu/~kaplan/.