Eat Shit.
May 03, 2005 11:03 PM
The whole bathroom was pink and white. It looked like a cross between a Jackson Pollack painting, and a Rorschach test. I had just projectile vomited wine, everywhere. That day, was today. Right about 6 AM, but don't ask me, I'm a liar. I said: "Oh shit, Sara, I just puked everywhere." Now know this: In my mind, I put this poor girl through hell as it is. I wake the poor thing up at all hours of the night with stories, questions, rants, and raves. All this, and she has to be to school today at ten sharp.
Fast forward to right now: It is 9:30 PM on Tuesday, May the third, 2005, and I'm watching Dr. House on Fox, one of my favorites, while rubbing Sara's feet. I Iove Sara. I am drinking a beer, Sara is drinking wine out of a plastic cup. Our belly's are nice and full with pizza from across the street, pepperoni pizza. We love food.
I'm sorry, back to this morning. I was full of shit. And wine. And of myself. Here I was thinking: "poor Sara, she's getting up too early". Turns out she's a saint. Good thing, too, living with some one so full of shit. We're all full of shit.
Speaking of shit, Sara's got a story about shit. It goes like this: Sara worked in a group home for the mentally and physically handicapped. One of the folks she took care of was spending an awfully long amount of time in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and laughing. The laughing stopped. Sara thought she ought to poke her head in, and see what was up. The woman had taken a shit in the toilet, used her fingers to take it out of the toilet and was eating her own shit. Smiling and drooling and eating her own shit. Sara put on her rubber glove, got a toothbrush and toothpaste, and did her best to reverse the shit eating process. As the blue toothpaste mixed with the brown shit in a sort of slurry that ran down the client's chin, Sara had to laugh at the fact that she had witnessed a literal shit eating grin.
How fucking funny is that. And how perfect of a story for a challenge regarding food and eating, as well as a contest full of people that are full of shit. Aren't we all?
I suppose I could have posted some recipes. I got lots of those. For instance, did you guys know that simply using a can of ordinary (not diet) soda for a marinade for beef, chicken, tofu, or whatever, totally works. Give it a shot and email me the results.
I suppose I could have told you about interesting dining experiences with cool and famous people. I got lots of those. Like the time I wasn't prepared for Portland's First Thursday monthly "art experience", but was also living in a loft/ gallery that required you to be open to the public once a month in order to retain your subsidized low rent, and I was stumped. So here's what I did. My soon later to be wife and I cleaned the place up, she set the table all swank, I cooked up some cool stuff, we invited a couple friends over, opened the shades exposing NW Broadway to our set-up. Put a sign on the window (well printed) that read: "Family Eating Dinner" as though the folks outside were witnessing a "live art project". Ha! Suckers. It was a hit.
I could tell you all that, and if you ask, I will tell you.
Just Remember, you are what you eat. I am birds, I am cows. I am a pig. I am a pussy. On certain days, I am a vegetable. On all days, I am Joel Conrad Bechtolt, The Utimate Blogger.
Love you guys, thanks for playing.
the first to be last (almost)
May 03, 2005 08:00 PM
Looking back, I feel like I can define entire periods of my life by the meals I consumed at the time. Here are some examples:
*My first year in high school I had to go on a macrobiotic diet for a while for health reasons, (Candida). I remember sitting in the park across the street from school in very dark, baggy clothes, staring at my rice cakes and dried fruit, and then cramming a Little Debbie cake into my mouth. Careless, defiant, impulsive - Willow at age 14.
*Last year, living in Dublin, I used to stop at this Hare Krishna restaurant on my way home from work. It was cafeteria-style, so I would load up my tray with paneer, broccoli, and this really thick, dense bread. I would sit at a table by myself and stare out the window while I ate. I remember thinking that it was a lonely scenario, but actually feeling sublime.
*College. 3am. My dorm room. Stoned. Hunched over the crumbly remains of a Family Sized Tostitos bag and a watery jar of salsa. Melissa and I trying to whisper so as not to wake my roommates, but managing only to cackle hysterically and knock over said watery salsa. (Did we clean it up? We did not.)
*For a year and a half I lived in New York City, in a matchbox apartment on the sixth floor of a walk-up with my friend, Annie. Whenever I returned from vacation, Annie would order Chinese food, and have it waiting for me when I walked in the door. (I did the same for her, of course.) Garlic broccoli, moo-shoo vegetables, scallion pancakes, and we would have the deli deliver a six-pack of Bud Lite. We'd eat sitting on the floor, or if it was warm enough we'd hit the fire escape. It's how I knew I was home.
*I used to be a Camp Counselor, and I still have dreams about meals in the mess hall. Imagine, if you will, 270 campers, plus 80 counselors, in one room, trying to feed ourselves amidst a cacophony of chants, songs, and challenges. I remember shoveling congealed mac & cheese into my mouth and washing it down with purple Kool-Aid as the entire camp sang, "Willow, Willow, get off your pants! You and Tex, show us a dance!" Did I show them a dance? You bet your sweet ass I did.
I think that in a few years, when I look back on Right Now, 2005 (living in Portland, anticipating grad school, participating in a reality blog show), I will imagine myself having dinner at Will and Lisa's house. They have 3 year old twin boys, HeBorg and Squeezy-Lou. (That's what we call them, anyway.) I eat dinner over there at least once a week, and it is always delightful. For your viewing pleasure, I documented tonight's meal:
First the boys made pretend dinner.
Then Will made actual dinner.
We had salad...
lots of salad...
Then we ate burritos.
Wow. Wish you could have been there? Click HERE to feel completely in the moment. These fine lads are truly my intellectual peers.
Design for Dinner
May 03, 2005 07:31 PM
"I'd like for you to come out to help me with my webpage, if that's not too much trouble, Karsh."
"Sure...I'll be down in an hour."
On the side from my nine-to-five, I do a little freelance design work for non-profits and small businesses. This client was a Muslim minister out in Stone Mountain who produces a line of children's books. It was a gig I didn't want at first; the last few jobs I did with the church folks sort of soured me when they wanted to pay me in Proverbs instead of Benjamins. Madam Shazzah, hopefully, would be the end of that. She seemed like a nice lady aside from the badly drawn children's books she self-published.
She met me at the station last Sunday afternoon and after a 15 minute drive, we were at her house. I tweaked the hyperlinks, aligned the columns, and uploaded some pictures.
"Are you hungry, Karsh?"
"Sure."
"We're going to have dinner in a while; you're more than welcome to join us."
The us in question were her brother Leroy and their mother. I figured I might as well get a meal out of the deal as well as my payment for updating the site.
I sat down at a small round table with a plastic marble finish. Leroy sat on my left, an elderly gentleman decked out in a University of Georgia baseball cap, jacket and pants. The mother was on my right, her expression frozen as though she smelled a foul stench from under her powder grey wig. The madam comes to the table with a serving dish of brown meaty pieces with huge chunks of raw onion. Alpo's finest. Leroy and mother scooped huge piles of it on their plates, gobbling up the mystery meat mixture.
"Umm...what exactly is this?"
"Giblets, gizzards and livers with some onion. Eat it...it's full of iron." It was like a flashback to 9 years old with me stuffing half-eaten liver into my napkin and then feeding it to the dog.
"I'll pass...thanks."
"Mmmfrmm mmumm fmfmmf," Leroy mumbled through a mouthful of dog food.
"The dinner will be ready in a minute, Karsh. Would you like something to drink?"
"Sure...what do you have?"
"Grapefruit juice and buttermilk," said the mother before exploding into a raspy laugh.
"Water's fine."
The madam passes me a warm glass of tap water and I chug it down without tasting it. Leroy and I make some small talk and soon the Madam brings a turkey to the table with flesh as pallid as a ghost. How it looked so raw but still had steam coming from it was beyond me. The madam also brought over a bowl of lima beans and a pan of beige cornbread. Leroy got up and grabbed the carton of Dairy Fresh cultured buttermilk from the fridge and poured himself, his sister and his mother a glass.
"You want some?"
"No thanks." Hell no, is more like it. People really drink this shit?
The plates were passed clockwise 'round the table and I took a bite of the white meat. Holy fuck, this is horrible. With my mouth still full, I shoveled in two scoops of lima beans. They're cold and slimy. Maybe the cornbread will help. The bite I took fell apart in my mouth like biting into a talcum brick. Stick with it, old man. I shuddered after the first gulp.
"Umm...can I use your bathroom?"
"Sure. Down the hall, second door on the right."
I was wrong to make the call to my friend to bail me out. I was even worse for taking the call during the frighteningly silent meal with a University of Georgia fan, a Muslim minister, and a smelly-faced elderly woman. But the worst insult came when Madam took me back to the station.
"I saved you a plate. Consider this your payment for helping me out on the site." She smiled and put me out at the station before I could even register the fact that I just got paid in a fucking Sunday dinner. I considered ditching the plate right there at the station, but I figured I'd at least get it home so I could have photographic evidence.
As the train lulled into Inman Park/Reynoldstown three stops short of my destination, a Black homeless barefoot woman with knotted Black hair stumbled into the car. She was shaking a styrofoam Zesto's cup furiously trying to free the half-melted cubes from the bottom. They fell into her hand, and she rubbed them across her face and bare feet.
"What the fuck?"
She jumped up and began her speech.
"Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, I just wanna ask y'all fo' a li'l change so a sista can get somethin' to eat this evening." An East Indian guy in a business suit raised his copy of The Economist higher so he wouldn't see the homeless woman. A teenager dug into his pocket and retrieved a quarter. Then she turned and looked at me. We both looked at the tin-foiled covered plate in my lap.
What the hell.
I gave her the plate, figuring the food could do better in her stomach than mine.
"God bless you, young man."
She peered under the tin-foil, took a sniff, and cringed.
"Damn...anybody got change for a soda?
dinner...
May 03, 2005 05:29 PM
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PRIMO ANTHROPOLOGIST MAKES TAXIDERMIC IN PRIMO SLAVIC FOODSTUFFS
May 03, 2005 04:19 PM
Most countries spread out above this Earth are considering digestion of solid foodstuffs as a primordial to the intake of liquids. When you investigate the preparations of dinners and lunches, you think customary to include the pork first and only thereafter to divert to what your guest will enjoy in drink. But this is not the truth in all places. Behind the Iron Curtains, has been developed a TOTAL revolution of anterior models of consumption ; here we oppose to the limitation of biological statistic and, in true Hegelian fashion, make nature subordinate to man, by putting vital ingestion of foodstuffs after the pleasure of the beverage. So it is also in my homeland of Byelorussia and my ancestral Poland that we see the food only as accompaniment to the totally massive and, dare I say, bloodthirsty consumption of our national liquids, which is called "vodka". 
We even have specialistic nomenclature for this accessory foodstuffs; we call it "zakuski" which is maybe contiguous to your "snack". In the literal, it signifies to "make little prick at something", such as to put something under the tooth. As you can see, it only constitutes a fleeting moment, the time for absorbing the alcohols and maybe lining the stomach with premium fat, in order to make possible further drinking. A primo selection of zakuskis will make obligatory to include some of the following: salmons, vegetable salad, sprat, a diverse of herring (oftentimes made ready in its cloak of sour cream, onion and apple - I consider this one the king of herring, yes?) much saussage, blini, rye bread, salmon embryo, and likesuch. There are also various class of zakuski. The aristocratic or the industrial bourgeoisie make common the intake of caviar, which is exceeding incomes in my areas. In reverse, the penniless will enjoy with maybe only some peas. The mission is of collecting multifarious volumes of vodka, so one must always fight the overhung. This we also perform with total dexterity by devouring slices of pig fat in latter stages of overdose.
Still, the hero of the zakuska is not the zakuska itself, but the majestic and, I must state, heavyweight thing that is vodka. And so I compile for your gourmand desires, this gastronomical overview of my favorites:
We make lift-off with one who is maybe commonplace throughout the Former Soviet Union. The Stolichnaya variety, which you come to glimpse on your parents' tables when they make to entertain your decrepit relatives in the interminable feasts of the Holiday seasons (Christmas, Easter and name day is especially notorious). This variety is good, but in definitive not premium, as it wears itself without sex or style. It must not be glimpsed on the dance floor of the primo night clubs, and will not help guide your tongue into opposite orifice on first tryst. You will have more chance of utilizing this in full effect to subdue your grandmother, when she make boring your Sunday dinner by recalling ancient histories for whom you have no reverence (I overhaul this from my pubescence).
Second to this list comes the multiples of the sweet vodka. These come in variable denominations of fruits, such is like apple, lemon or cherry. When you are overtaken an age so advanced as mine (30), these will make you harrow in much nausea, because they revive the childish introduction you forced upon vodka at the age of eleven, at what time the more heavyweight still make you wince (you slowly progressed from juice to hardcore, yes?) From personal judgment I must not include these diminutive beverages on this list, but it remains that they make still ultimate effectiveness on the womanfolk, who enjoy to guzzle upon the bottle for numerous hours, and thus make your offensive slight. For this reasons, I entitle it the vodka in disguise (and I am too sneaky, yes?)
Now come the total warriors of vodka! First we apprehend the Zubrowka specimens, that can now make pride of world fame. It make me especially proud to announce its forthcoming, as it takes root in the same soils as myself: the impenetrable and, dare I say, savage prehistoric forestry of the Poland-Byelorussia borderzone. Here roams the great bison , who gives up his herbs for this premium vodka. If you investigate the picture at close hand you will witness the celebrity "bison grass". This drink you come to know well since first samplings in teen years. It has accompanied you on many quests and you consider it the "faithful dog"; and because it is perhaps the remnant vodka outside the Warsaw Pact nations, it is also the drink for nostalgia (I sometime come to glimpsing it here, in Japan, and it extends many teardrops from my eye). You hold it also in supreme reverence for reason of one absolute quality that is this: when you mix it with the apple juice, it make no alcohol taste on the tongue! This is why Zubrowka is king of romances and the total master of the first tryst. You fathom the possibilities of how far it can lead you, notwithstanding the ultimate penetrations! In our areas, it has also made big gossip as the "deflowerer of virgins", and much
virgin must truly be expressing its gratitude, believe me! (I hasten to develop, that I am not a fan of the virgin, but you shall sample more from this at later dates). So, ultimately, this vodka, which has much sex and panache is surely a maximator!
Next come the Nemiroff Honey-Pepper variety. This one you noticed on first contact because it carries with it the top class chili pepper! You take real enjoyment from the savour it make you experiment upon (at first you make astonished if such awesome and, dare I say, perverse thing as honey mix chili is possible, yes?) and perhaps you ordain it primo of all vodkas. However, this comes up for debate because it does not fare so swiftly with the opponent sex and you will struggle much if you take shelter in thinking that it must part her thighs, because - put your trust in my hands - it will not. You do, on other hands, make great 
usage from it on your male-male power struggles, because the chili dubs it a violent amongst vodkas.It is liquid equivalent of the "wrestling arms", and must also become the closest you will ever attain to homo-erotic tensions. Nemiroff has much virtues and, if not for the womanfolk element, I might place it on throne.
Finally, we bow down in front of the Zoladkowa Gorzka variety! This Polish name becomes "Bitter Stomach" in English tongue, but make not afraid! it is not so bad as the sound it lets out. We only make reference to "stomach" because it was everyday medicine before wartime. In our era, you have sighted it in every night club, on everyone's palms. It is now the Mr Popularity, and all younger peoples will not be found dead with it, because it simply holds too much life! You find it is unique taste of sweet and sour and make ultimate use of the herb in subtle manner. Maybe not so pleasant for the virgin as Zubrowka, it must be the drink of fashionable disco dancers, deft masculinity and the pinnacles of sexy! I think this is your drink Mimi, because it will make vibrate the din of your inner female, that clamours but is made silent without it. I make import of this fine beverage at some time,
and so I can vouch for that even the Japanese will not die with it!
I add coda of two abnormal specimens: the Spirytus is king of total hardcore. It is illegal everywhere but in Slavic places, because it is 93-97% pure alcohol. You must not be a true man if you did not attempt this in your adolescence,
as it is modern rite for most all fifteen year olds. It contains one minuscule problem: if you make blundering and swallow it, it will destroy your vocals and throat muscles, so you always remember to pour it straight down without the swallow part. This requires training and great skill. This is not a drink for the featherweight! Also there is Denaturated Alkohol which is in veracity a poison, that the lower strata of the proletariat are making fond usage of. In order not to make blind, they must first make a sifting through the bread; thereafter it will become safe! You do not touch these. I hope you make not grudge against me when I affirm that I see you, Joel, with one of these two, because I take you on as a part of Dostoyevski, to be maybe with angst and poetry or suicide, yes?
So this is what food is the excuse for in the Slavic places. If some of you survive unto Ukraine, Poland, Byelorussia or Russian Federation, you will make much use of my guidelines! And, as we say in my tongue: "Davay!"
You gotta crack a few eggs
May 03, 2005 02:24 PM
While grocery shopping today I pulled a carton of "Cage Free Vegetarian" eggs off the shelf at my local Marsh Supermarket and put them in my cart. The ovoid brown shapes each cradled in their individual clear double-topped biodegradable plastic cells looking so much like tiny radio-controlled space-craft at rest. So far from the mounds of warm fresh-from-the-hen eggs I gathered in a willow basket when I was a child.
When I was a child we raised chickens to provide us with eggs for the table. My grandmother loved to tell stories of how raising chickens had saved my father's family during the Great Depression when she had sold dressed hens - which means they were butchered, cleaned, and ready to cook, not that they were wearing costumes - and dozens of eggs to folks in town, delivering twice a week in the old 1926 Model T Coupe. The chickens I cared for were descended from the poultry of that time.
My grandmother believed that caring for animals helped a child learn responsibility and while there is no doubt in my mind she was right I still hated taking care of the chickens. The hen house was a long dark sloop-roofed building with windows on the south. Rows of nesting boxes lined the east wall. In front of the north wall were roosts, think bleachers with very narrow "seats" and wide open spaces between each rank. Roosts are where the chickens sleep at night heads tucked neatly under a wing. While sleeping most of our chickens facing south, toward the windows, with a rare creature bucking the trend and facing in an alternate direction. They looked like a chorus of decapitated fowl that had escaped from a Tim Burton movie. Finally the west side housed the feed room where ground corn and oyster shell were stored and a smaller rank of nesting boxes were attached to the short wall.
Some of the nesting boxes were easy for a child to reach but most required that I stand on an old wooden soap box so I could see into the nest before putting in my hand. Sight and hearing were as important as touch in this process. First I would kick or hit the side of the metal box frames to warn any intruders, who may be lurking in the straw, that something much bigger then them was near...or maybe this just made me feel safer. Then I listened closely to try to hear if any non-chicken sounds were present. You see behind or under the straw a mouse or a rat or a weasel (seen in the picture on the left) or a snake might be hiding waiting for their chance to sample the same eggs I were gathering for our breakfast. Then I watched the back of the box closely as I quickly grabbed the eggs, using as few digits as possible in the process - better to save some for another day, and moved on to the next box to repeat the process.
Then there were always the stray eggs to be gathered from under the roost or along the window ledges. Misguided hens, thinking that difficulty of access would mean their eggs were less likely to be removed, would lay them anywhere they could find enough footing to squat. These places required the types of bodily manipulations that are unique to children and circus performers - left arm stretched out, waist twisted to the right 45 degrees and bending forward hanging over the side rail, right leg braced against the roost at a 90 degree angle, left foot firmly planted under the stand to keep me from falling, all the while wiggling to get just one inch more length so I could grab the egg in front of me. In these places we had the usual fur-bearing critters and snakes to worry about but without an easy way to either scare them off or to see them before they struck. Now in truth none of the kids in my family were ever bitten, but it was often a very near thing.
Beyond the constant concern about what we might find in the nesting boxes there were other issues we faced when entering the hen house. The primary one having to do with unhappy poultry mothers who didn't want to see their children, or potential children as it were, taken away. Trust me you haven't lived until a pissed off hen lands on your head and tries to force you to drop her off-spring by pecking at the top of your noggin...of course the hen didn't realize that dropping an egg is not conducive to hatching a chick. We won't even get into the fact that there was no rooster in our flock so fertilization was pretty much impossible. In the summer there was the added issue of the ubiquitous feel of chicken crap oozing between your toes if you dared to try doing chores barefooted, and I lived barefooted when I was a child so I felt the ooze often.
I hated taking care of the chickens and gathering the eggs, but oh did I love eating the fruits of my labors. There is nothing like the taste of an egg from a farm-raised cage free hen, the store bought versions don't come close. When cracked the ones I remember had sticky clear whites with just the palest tint of yellow that cling into a rounded mound surrounding the creamy lemon colored planetoid that is the yoke. Chill them for a day or two in the produce refrigerator, then hard boil till the yokes are perfectly set.
Hard boiled eggs were the snack of choice when my brother and sister and I set off for our adventures into the Wild's, a tangled overgrown marshy area of the farm. We kids could play for hours getting completely dirty and generally wearing ourselves out in the Wild's. We took breaks from our play to settle onto tree stumps and crack our hard boiled eggs trying to peel them in one continuous piece, something that I'm sure is totally impossible to actually do, then leaving the shells scattered around the ground - scratches to mark our passage.
The Rhode Island Reds laid brown eggs - the best tasting by far in my opinion, while the Leghorns gave us the more common creamy white-shelled eggs - which were easier to peel after boiling. My frugal German Lutheran Grandmother would not have understood the call of fancy eggs like Martha Stewart's favorite Araucana with their blue-shells and contents that taste the same as their more humble white-shelled cousins but cost three times as much. Why do you need expensive when the cheaper varieties will do?
Well I think I'll make a frittata for dinner tonight. Maybe the Mediterranean version - Kalmata olives, feta, zucchini, red pepper - which is about as far away from my frugal German roots as these plastic encased spheroids are from the eggs of my childhood.
Maybe it's time for hubby and I to get a few chickens of our own so we can have fresh eggs. How about some Rhode Inland Reds and a few exotic Araucana for variety, those blue-shells are so pretty and they don't cost more if you raise your own. I wonder if you can peel a hard boiled Araucana egg in one piece?
Significant other white meat
May 03, 2005 12:26 PM
Amongst a guy's closest friends--the inner circle, if you will--it is appropriate to brag about one's girlfriend's sexual prowess. The more she does to you in the sack (or in creative places outside the bedroom), the more she's into you/loves you/likes the way you make her feel, etc.
However, this measuring stick is inappropriate when it comes to telling casual acquaintances, family members, and clergymen about your significant other's dedication, and that is why the ability to cook is a major barometer in any relationship.
Whereas I might brag to my best friend that my girlfriend made me breakfast in bed between blowjobs, that is not likely to be the topic of conversation with my mom. What I would tell her, though, is that my girlfriend made the most awesome chicken dish I've ever had (chicken and broccoli braid) or that she made me a banana cream pie (a significant time investment) because she knows that's my favorite dessert.
Food is a lot like sex in that way. Sometimes we go out of our way to do things we don't like because we know it will make our partner happy, and in no other arena is that more true than in the bedroom or the kitchen.
It can extend to beyond just your partner, of course. When I traveled 75 minutes south to ask my now fiancee's parents for their daughter's hand in marriage, my now future mother-in-law made pasta with meat sauce--one of life's simple pleasures. I'm sure she knew I liked it (I've often bragged on my grandmother's Italian dishes), and it was a nice way of making me feel comfortable and welcome. On several occasions, my future sister-in-law has noticed what I order at restaurants (meat loaf or hot brown) and invited me over her house for similar meals to amazing success.
Having my fiancee's family cook for me shows that they have welcomed me into their family, and that means a lot, but nothing can replace the satisfaction of a wonderful meal for two either prepared by or prepared for the love of your life.
I remember the first time she cooked for me. It was 3 1/2 months into our relationship but a week after our first major fight. We had long since made up, but I'm a milestone kind of guy, so I remember those sorts of things. Anyway, she made dinner, then we went out for some drinks with friends, then to a bookstore for a coffee nightcap. It was easily one of our best dates ever, and going out to dinner rather than staying in definitely would have detracted from it.
We've been dating 27 months now and engaged for a year, and making food together never gets old. Sex never gets old, either, but I'd only tell that to my friends. As far as my parish priest is concerned, my fiancee loves to cook.
Dinner at Mimi's
May 03, 2005 09:15 AM
So my first 'ultimate blogger' challenge has been assigned as writing about food. I protest. I survive largely on a diet of bagels purchased from Faidr at the Convenience Store, cigarettes and tea. Excessive cups of tea. Occasionally I'll break out and go for the bourgeois luxury of a can of beans, followed by the altogether risque option of stealing my roommate's Ben & Jerry's. I have become an expert at delicately scooping off the first initial inch of ice cream and reforming the layers below into an identical sculpture, so that one is totally unable to perceive the theft. Sometimes, if I'm really desperate, I'll munch on the kitty-kat treats set aside for our communal cat. I have found that combined with taste buds destroyed by nicotine, they have a taste and a texture akin to Japanese Rice Crackers.
In the grand scheme of things (illegality, poverty, lack of sex), a varying diet is the least of my concerns. Faced with the option of nutritious, tasty food or a pint of beer, I'll go the beer route. A constant hangover, I have discovered, has the pleasant and beneficial side effect of eliminating any kind of appetite I may once have entertained. Food for the soul baby. Oh yeah.
But all this talk of food leads me onto the altogether more flavorsome topic, How to Eat Someone Out, as opposed to Eating Out. I met Carlos from Queens last night, one time shag now become male best friend, for an in-depth analysis of this topic. Men, I have recently discovered, have been reading Cosmopolitan far too much recently, and their liberation is both a blessing and a curse. Having located the g-spot, their appetites have been whetted, and the taboo of rimming, once purely an arena for the adventurous, the Cuba of sexual destinations, has opened up and started a democratic fan base anyone can join. Rimming has become the Prime Rib on one's a la carte menu.
Every guy now wants to stick his tongue up one's derriere. What has McDonald's done to the nation's taste buds? Why is a packet of Cheeto's no longer sufficient? I have discussed this topic previously with my ex-roommate and honorary prick Raoul. Whilst a human bidet can be a useful attribute for any relationship, the thought of my nether regions being hoovered out with the gusto of an energetic tongue wielded like a lawn strimmer doesn't immediately make me wet and dripping with lust. Unlike, incidentally, the rather gorgeous picture of the delectable Lyova sporting an impressive boner, which I have placed for maximum effect above my bed, on my porn hall of fame, which also includes portraits of Chancellor Kohl (Hot!Hot!Hot!) and the little fat kid from The Goonies. No, I'm an old fashioned girl. Perhaps I would be more amenable to the idea if I cast off my repression and learned to love my anus with the same deep affection with which I regard my daily victuals of cigarettes and beer. To this end, I propose the inauguration of a 'Respect Your Anus' Day, which I hope will culminate in everyone throwing aside their prejudices, putting dinner on hold, and progressing from the first orifice (passe darling) onto that exciting, oily and rich pooper hole where few venture.
I'm not convincing myself. Indeed, the peanut butter crackers I ate for breakfast are in danger of a rapid reappearance, hastened on by my imminent hangover. I've found many things in life vomit-inducing recently. Stephanie Klein's repulsively onanistic blog, which has just been sold for a six figure sum, followed by the small child on the subway who excreted some really nasty boogers onto my bagel the other day, plus of course, Republicans, and Right Wing Christians, who keep sending me emails exhorting me to 'pray for them'. Well, who the fuck's praying for me? I want to know. Prioritise, for fuck's sake.
I'm going out for dinner with a man tonight. Divorced, rich, screwed up.
Yummy.
Mama I am not hungry
May 03, 2005 05:45 AM
but if you want the truth eating food has been a duty for me than pleasure,if my mother dont force me, i may dont eat anything for 2 days, I am a vegeterian and i hardly eat meat ...yeah I am so thin and I have no problem with being thin .
in Islam there is a month called Ramadan which you shouldnt eat anything during the day light for 30 days ! even I am an infidel , I did the fast in Ramadan month, it was fun ! lol
if you want my idea, "a blogger who is amused to foods isnt a good blogger "
a true blogger's food are comments and e-mails,.like this blogger ,who dedicated his life in the way of blogging ,
hm..let me add something else and put end to this post,
if you eat your meal alone , you never feel like to eat, but if you have a good friend to have meat with, he /she can motovate your appetite .
Korea Snack Bar
May 03, 2005 03:48 AM
So Bagram is a base that we share with a number of coalition forces, including the Poles, the Kiwis, a couple of Brits, Lithuanians, and the Koreans. I'm sure there are more, but that's all I can think of right now. But the Koreans...oh how I enjoy having the Koreans around. They have this soccer field on their compound and I wish I could play with them every time I walk by. It's simple stuff like that that really makes you miss being at home. But yeah, the reason I bring up the Koreans today is because I had a chance to do some exploring in the time that I had to wait for my "Freedom Bird." And in that time, I discovered a little gem hidden behind the Motel 6. (Note: it is interesting that the Motel 6 in Bagram refers to the building housing the Personnel Branch. Downrange, the Motel 6 refers to a holding facility for prisoners.)
Enter the Korea Snack Bar. In the middle of a now somewhat stable combat zone, the Koreans have decided to set up a little shop to sell Korean food to American soldiers with too much money in their pockets. I mean, the Army provides us with anything we could possibly want to eat; but every once in a while, you'll get a craving for something different, like Korean food. So feeling like I needed something more interesting to write about, I thought I'd try it out. You can check out the spread below. (Note: the boonie hat next to the tray indicates that I am now on vacation.) I would explain it more, but I can't really pronounce any of the items on the menu besides the bulgogi and kimchi. Anyway, the food was great, my belly is full, and now it's time to take a nap at the PAX terminal until my C-130 rolls in. I'll give another shout when I hit the ground.
CHALLENGE NUMBER UNO: Ritchey's hot food entry
May 02, 2005 07:00 PM
As many of you already know, there are a very small number (2) of things I love more than food. They are, in no particular order:
1. having all my arms and legs; and
2. food.
My diet being mostly-vegan (for emotional reasons), my interest in food-related health being high, and my commitment to a heavily eating-based lifestyle being non pareil, you can imagine how excited I was when the new UNITEDSTATES.GOV food pyramid was released in late April. Unlike the old food pyramid which we learned in elementary school, and which I remember being totally baffling ("cereals?") as well as ethically/healthfully suspect (didn't it say you were supposed to eat like four servings of red meat every day? Well, that's the way I remember it. "Memory, Agent Starling, is what I have in place of a view."), the new .GOV sanctioned pyramid is not only aesthetically pleasing (incorporating many different neon-styled colors as well as a clip-art graphic of a multi-gendered person running spryly up it, effectively utilizing the food pyramid as a literal "staircase to health"), but it takes into account many (12) different lifestyle choices. Among these are "morbidly obese" and "light housework."
Until very, very recently, I led an incredibly sedentary lifestyle, thinking that my vegan high horse would carry me over the pitfalls of weight-gain and general body grossness that accompany the traditional American diet of 50 cheeseburgers and a six pack of beer ingested bi-daily.
Imagine my chagrin, then, when I inputed my daily food intake and discovered that the .GOV pyramid believes I ingest many, many fat points over my daily allowance. I was unaware, apparently, that "one (1) avocado" contains your entire day's dose of fat. That can't be right, can it? I added "three tbsp olive oil" to my chart, to see if that made my fat dose higher, but it didn't. However, my "oils" section now read "**." Additionally, there was a frowny face next to my "milk and dairy" section. Hardly surprising, but why a frowny face? Certainly if someone is intelligent enough to logon to the intraweb and downframe the .GOV pyramid webstation to their mainline, they are capable of understanding bar graphs without the help of emoticons.
The pyramid also told me that I eat too many fruits and vegetables.
The moral of the story is this: 20 years, unbelievable advancements in technology, and the creation of a multi-faceted interactive website have rendered the food pyramid just as incomprehensible as before, only now there are no "cereals" on it.
Pretty weak, U.S. Government. If you want people to lose weight, this is probably not the way to do it. Instead, why not try regulating the fast food industry? WHOA! What next, comrade?
Think about it.
Probably I'm being too harsh. At least they're trying. SOMEBODY must do SOMETHING. Do you people even know what's IN hot dogs? Neither do I. And brother, I don't want to.
While perusing the food pyramid, I was reminded of this New Yorker article I read some time ago while I was at the gym, trying to avoid the Fox News which was inexplicably being broadcast above the "arm and legs machine thingy" that I favor.
The article was one of those ha-ha chummy New Yorker pieces written in a sort of self-aggrandizing, mocking tone which I freely admit to using myself quite often. The piece was basically a short, autobiographical article completely and intentionally glorifying gluttony (a subject addressed in the opposite manner by our new food pyramid). The author, a self-described "gourmand," documents his quest to create The Perfect Lunch.
My Perfect Lunch would probably consist of bread, olives, and an avocado. Or, possibly, a really good burrito. I imagine your Perfect Lunch would be similar--maybe a really rad piece of fish, or the greatest pizza ever made. Maybe you want a hamburger and french fries, or your mother's lasagna. Mr. Peterson would say "a sandwich."
Not so the self-styled gourmand. His Perfect Lunch includes but is not limited to a suckling pig with delicate truffles stuffed UNDERNEATH ITS SKIN, and garnished with hundreds of garlic-braised frog legs which are cleverly inserted to create the illusion of spines running down the pig's back.
The quest for the Perfect Lunch ended in a small chateau in France, where The Lunch was cooked by one of the world's most famous chefs and served to a group of 10 or 20 people (men) who had all paid an outrageous sum of money for the honor of being present. The author says something like, "we chuckled when someone told us that for the cost of our lunch, we could each have purchased a Volvo. However, since we did not want a Volvo, we merely wanted lunch, we contented ourselves with the knowledge that having skipped dinner that night, we had recouped our losses."
or something.
I thought that was a pretty classy thing to say. If by "classy" you mean "the polar opposite of classy."
The Lunch was somewhere around 20 courses long, and consisted of things like 'baby pig snouts surrounding a creamed souffle made of the blood of fetal elephants' and that awful thing where they stuff a pig with a turkey, and they stuff the turkey with a chicken, and they stuff the chicken with a small rat, and they stuff the rat with a pigeon's egg, and then inside the pigeon's egg is the eyeball of an endangered gorilla or something.
I am not really exaggerating (I am exaggerating). The menu was pretty appalling. Rich people showing off how rich they are, how dissolute, how little they care about anything but tasting the most forbidden of fruits. One is reminded of the Roman royal family eating banquets and having sex while watching slaves run each other through with tritons in delightful holiday spectacles.
"Paolo, bring me the silvered tray of delicately spiced prawn croquets that Lady Haversbaugh'd sent via her maidservant sunday last. They should be topped with prawn emollients of only the finest prawn ink in preparation for mother's tea. And mind you adequately stock my bedchamber! Last night I awoke bruised and disoriented, and found the prawning toureen on my nightstand to be completely dry!" etc.
It seems like food is to these guys what giant pickup trucks are to city-dwelling, Oakleys-wearing men.
I think you know what I'm trying to say.
So, on the one hand, I deride the new food pyramid for being so impenetrable. But on the other hand, the pyramid sees the detriment to gluttony like this--it sees the unholy terror of a life wasted on putting too much crap, or the wrong kind of crap, into your body. Whether it's a terrible diet caused by overabundance, such as in the case of our friend the gourmand, or a terrible diet caused by poverty and poor education, as is the case with so many Americans, I have to give the food pyramid "mad propers" for "keeping it real." They could so easily have fallen prey to the fat cats who run this country (you KNOW George Bush eats him some endangered gorilla eyeball), or to the strangely omnipotent McDonald's Corporation. But they didn't. They didn't say that everyone needs to eat more "blood." They didn't say "support the massive conglomerates that make our nation strong by eating their food-based products no matter how actively harmful they are." They instead show you a healthy way to lose weight and lower your cholesterol in today's godforsaken America, where you can buy that new sandwich at Burger King that is a burger on top of ribs on top of a fried egg on top of six pieces of bacon wrapped around a pound of melted cheddar cheese. And the meat is mostly made of sawdust and old hot dogs. It's not often that a government institution actively tries to help people rather than just devising new ways to shiv them out of their money and turn them into blank, shambling zombies who just want the next O-Town album. And for that, I must commend them. Yes--I must commend the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, which, since rural electrification and the passing of Roe v. Wade, has done very little to impress me.
I for one welcome the new food pyramid. It is trying its best. I like to think that we in America will pay attention to it, our lives slowly becoming richer, longer, and more buoyant. Our plight shall no longer be one of needless suffering under the stress of heart problems. For us is not the road paved with sorrow that is eating nothing but chicken wings for breakfast lunch and dinner. For we have been shown a new way. We are not the mindless automatons our persnickety English brethren take us for--nay! We have been given the gift of the New Way and we shall not tarry. This way is colored with many bright neon lights, and we can run up it as though it is a veritable stairway to heaven. If we are wise enough to unlock the code of poor web-stationing that plagues it, I do believe the new food pyramid .GOV could bring us home to glory.
In other news: I just ate an entire loaf of french bread, because I felt like it.
I think I just disproved my own theory.
I know what you're thinking. "Whoa," you're thinking, "she posted first. Such audacity, such chutzpah, such SHEER MAGNIFICENCE."
Well, you'd be right.
If there's one thing you are to know about me in the context of this Blog-em-ups, it is the following:
I AM THE BOSS OF MY OWN DESTINY, AND I AM NOT AFRAID TO BE THE FIRST IN LINE FOR MY FATE.