Mike the Musicologist came up over the weekend bearing gifts. Look what he got me.
Archive for the ‘Food’ Category
Your Christmas present will be blogged.
Monday, December 13th, 2010Things you may have wondered about. (#1 in a series)
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010What ever happened to the very first commercial 747, Pan Am’s Juan T. Trippe? (Note the phrasing; the actual first 747 was only used for test flights, and is now in the Museum of Flight.)
The LAT has the answer; it became a (now closed) restaurant in South Korea. The couple who bought the plane paid $1 million for it, and “$100,000 plus” to have it dismantled and shipped; the LAT does not give a cost figure for the reassembly.
The LAT also does not tell us what kind of food the restaurant served; rumors that it was Seoul food are unconfirmed.
Nice to know that people in other countries make the same mistakes opening restaurants as people in the U.S.
Sad news.
Friday, November 26th, 2010Mangia Pizza, a local chain that specializes in a pretty good version of Chicago stuffed pizza, filed a Chapter 11 petition on Tuesday.
- I was previously unaware that those two locations were independently owned.
- “At the Domain”? If there’s a location at the Domain, I am unaware of it. There is a location in a strip center near-ish to the Domain, but not “at the Domain”.
Spaghetti Carbonara day.
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010We were somewhat amused to see, on the day before Thanksgiving, the NYT publishing a recipe for “Spaghetti With Sausage Alla Carbonara“. As you might be able to guess from the title, sausage substitutes for bacon in this variation.
We are big fans of a well-done spaghetti carbonara, and look forward to giving this particular variation a trial run.
(We know we linked to this yesterday, but for those who do not understand the significance of spaghetti carbonara and Thanksgiving, once again we link to Calvin Trillin.)
Random notes: November 9, 2010.
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art opened in Biloxi, Mississippi on Monday.
Here’s a nice photo of the museum. Can you guess who designed it?
Looking over Wikipedia’s list of completed Gehry buildings, I don’t see a lot of post-1997 that were designed with that intent. The only two I really see as being possible tourist attractions are the Experience Music Project and the Walt Disney Concert Hall; everything else seems to be corporate, college campus, or medical. That just seems like a pointless shot by the NYT.
The University of Texas has acquired Spalding Gray’s archives. I know that Mike the Musicologist is going “squee” with delight at this news.
I also know some folks who tried to go to the “Gypsy Picnic Food Trailer Festival” on Saturday. Their experience was very much like John Kelso’s.
More signs! More portents!
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010Lotus of Siam, my favorite restaurant in the world (at the moment), is opening a second location in New York City.
New York can also look forward to crispy rice with sour Thai sausage.
That’s one of their dishes that I’m personally fond of, but not everyone has a taste for it.
In other news, the Russians are actually cracking down on spammers. Lo, surely the Apocalypse is upon us!
(Additional sign: I noticed the other day that the Joe’s Crab Shack at 183 and Duval was closed. Not that I was a big fan of Joe’s Crab Shack (I wasn’t) but how often have you seen one close?)
On a stick watch.
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010“Top 10 New Foods at the 2010 State Fairs“, by way of No Silence Here.
I confess, the deep-fried cheddar-bacon mashed potatoes on a stick actually look pretty good to me.
On the other hand, the original tornado potato doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but this year’s modification sounds awful. When I think of great tastes that taste great together, my list does not include “potato” and “chocolate”.
And then, of course, there’s the number 1 item on the list, which you may remember from our previous coverage.
Breakdown of the list: two items from the Texas State Fair, three items from the Minnesota State Fair, two from the San Diego County Fair, one from the “San Diego State Fair” (could this be a typo? The link to “My Burning Kitchen” indicates yes), and one each from the Indiana and Wisconsin State Fairs.
Edited to add: Speaking of “My Burning Kitchen”, “deep-fried butter in both garlic and cinnamon sugar flavor“? So not only does deep-fried butter actually exist, it comes in flavors?
“What flavor is it?” “It’s butter, innit. It’s bloody butter, it’s not any bloody flavor!”
Food note.
Saturday, September 25th, 2010Before the chaos set in yesterday, we had a spectacularly good meal at Tino’s Seafood in San Antonio.
The place looks kind of divey, and the menu is a bit limited, but they make the best fried fish and shrimp I’ve had in a long time. Both were not greasy, not oily, and nicely fried with a crisp crust. Everything is fried to order; nothing sits around under the heat lamp all day. A decent sized basket of four large shrimp and two large fish fillets with fries or cole slaw goes for $6.99. They also have ceviche, shrimp cocktail, and soups, none of which I tried, but they looked pretty good.
I found it interesting that in addition to tartar sauce (one slight drawback; you get one tartar sauce with the meal, and extras are 20 cents each), there were also three sauces on the tables; cocktail, what I believe was an escabeche (pickled vegatable) sauce, and a habenero cocktail sauce that was quite tasty.
Tino’s appears to be a regional chain; the other locations are in Brownsville and South Padre Island, as far as I can tell.
Highly recommended. I’d happily go back.
You’ve got to know when to Myhrvold them…
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, has a new “cookbook” coming out “sometime in the not-too-distant future”, says the LAT.
(According to Amazon, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
“The food world eagerly awaits the former Microsoft technology officer’s book on the science of cooking.”
I don’t know that I’m really representative of the food world, but speaking strictly for myself: no. I’d much rather read Ferran Adrià’s book
“I see it– coming here– hell-wind– titan-blur– black wings– Yog-Sothoth save me– the three-lobed burning eye…”
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010Giant squid are roaming the Pacific, and they’re not just wiping out fish stocks; they’re eating fishermen.
Honestly, I take this entire article with a grain of salt. However, any time I have a chance to link to a story about giant man-eating squid, I can’t pass it up.
(Hattip: Dinosaur Comics. Really.)
Quote of the day.
Monday, September 20th, 2010“…for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings.”
—Anthony Bourdain, from Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Clippings: September 1, 2010.
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010Obit watch: Laurent Fignon, two-time winner of the Tour de France, and the man who lost the Tour to Greg LeMond by eight seconds in 1989.
Is it just me, or do Tour winners tend to die relatively young? (Yes, I read the obit. Yes, I’m aware Fignon blames his drug use. I’m trying to avoid painting all the Tour winners with the same broad brush.)
Kim Severson profiles Roger Ebert, rice cooker chef.
I wanted to blog this yesterday, but didn’t get a chance: the Barnes and Noble across from Lincoln Center is closing. People are sad, though it sounds like many of them were getting their books elsewhere. Remember when people were indignant that Barnes and Noble and Borders were destroying the little bookstores?
50 words for General Tso’s Chicken.
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010Patrick over at Popehat links to a NYT article I noted late last week, but didn’t have time to read until yesterday.
Guy Deutscher’s article is basically (as I see it) a call for reconsideration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that our language determines how we think. I encountered Sapir-Whorf for the first time many, many years ago, in the pages of the late lamented Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and it blew me away at the time. I figured, “Well, if language influences how we think, then I need to learn FORTH. And C. And LISP. And…” Later on, of course, I read the various arguments against Sapir-Whorf, and don’t completely buy into the strong version of it any more, but I still retain some affection for Sapir-Whorf.
The Deutscher article is an excerpt from his (forthcoming? It looks like it comes out today) book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
In other notes, sorry about the blogging slowdown; I spent the weekend at ArmadilloCon, and am now somewhat tanned, rested, and relaxed. I spent some time yesterday bumming around various Half-Price Books in a futile search for A Short History of the French Revolution
- Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
, which looks like a lot of fun. I read her chapter on The Great Kosher Duck Scandal last night.
- Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity
. I haven’t been disappointed in a Standage book
yet.
- Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
. I blame Calvin Trillin
- Not a Half-Price Books find, but a find at Armadillocon, and one I paid half-price for: Willie & Joe: The WWII Years
. I admired Bill Mauldin greatly (the HouChron used to run his editorial cartoons, and they were among the few I agreed with in that paper) but I wasn’t even aware this book existed until I saw it on the Austin Books sale table. By the way, for those of you in Austin, Austin Books has a big sale coming up this weekend.
Turn out the lights.
Thursday, August 26th, 2010The peak of Western Civilization has been reached, and it has been reached by the great State of Texas.
We have figured out a way to fry salad. And beer, too! The deep-fried “frozen margarita” also sounds interesting.
(Hattip: Bill Crider.)