Whats Fa Dinna?

This weekend was a really weird one, food-wise, since I felt that I let food sort of sag as a priority while i tended to other things, such as walking around Prospect Park, going to a rollicking staff xmas party, and other varieties of good clean fun.

Here I’ll sing the praises of potato leek soup. It’s seriously EASY to make and really, really good.

For potato leek soup you will need:

bag of potatoes

a couple of leeks

some veggie boullion

butter or EB

cream or cheese if you are so inclined.

So, all you do is clean and cut the leeks, peeling off outside layer. slice them up and put them in a big pot with the sliced potatoes and sautee in butter for a few minutes. Cover the whole mess with water and let it boil, add boullion, then simmer, til potatoes smash apart. You can then blend it til creamy or just mash up the taters with a fork. Add cream if desired or put shredded cheese (gruyere! jarlsberg!) on the bowls as garnish/cheese bonus prize.

Babs and I made this delightful little soup this evening, as well as brussels sprouts (also fried in butter) and some Tofurky kielbasa.  Polished it off with some Green & Black’s chocolate, food of choice for girls talking about feelings all over the world, throughout time. 

Potato leek is a great soup to serve as a main course, but also works with European cuisines of all sorts and can be dressed up with other veggies, fake meat, fancy dairy products, etc. It also goes well with FEELINGS.

All the while, through shopping, cooking, eating, digesting, and cleaning up our meal, we talked about our feelings, boys, past relationships, future relationships, sex, love, intimacy, honesty, getting our needs met, and related matters. I feel like we went to a sauna and sweated but it was like a sauna for feelings, man.  Totally cathartic and awesome girl time. Plus, the food was good.

If you are experiencing a transition, or just wanna bro down with your pal and validate each other, I highly recommend this recipe.

Babs, you rule a lot.

Last night Yoko and I practiced music and she made a delicious Indian dish called khicheri. Incidentally, it’s a specialty of Mumbai, where a few of the fanciest hotels in the country’s entertainment and cinema capital were recently subject to an itchy outbreak of terrorist attacks. I doubt any of the guests were served humble khicheri, but it interesting that we ate a regional specialty only days after that region made global headlines.

I’d never had it, but had heard of it, mostly because Joanna says she used to date someone named Khicheri, after the dish. He is some kinda Hare Krishna or guru-cult child. You’d be surprised how many people you may know who grew up in guru cults. They don’t all have obviously weird names, either. My mom was a pretty die-hard Ram Dass fan, (aka Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s right-hand man and devout prophet of LSD) and a few friends of mine grew up in the Meher Baba community which has centers all over the country. Anyway, Khicheri the man was one such individual, so I’m told.

It’s one of those foods that is unquestionably healthy and wholesome, and is prized in ayurvedic cooking as very easy to digest.

It started with soaking basmati rice and lentils, mung or adzuki beans (we had adzuki) in water for an hour or more. Then you chop up some root veggies and fry them in ghee with spices, add some water, the rice and legumes, and cook til it’s all a big mess. The soaked rice cooks down into a sweet pasty porridge which basically was my favorite part of the whole thing. I ended up sort of picking around the veggies and just going for that. So much for mature eating habits.

I think the ghee is key here. Ghee is this weird semi-opaque clarified butter, which is simmered after clarifying, and which is often made of buffalo milk in India. Other equatorial cuisines use varieties of clarified butter, such as Moroccan “smen” and Iranian “yellow oil.” This makes a lot of sense, since these rendered butters can keep for a long time without refrigeration before turning rancid and can be more easily used for frying and sauteeing than fresh butter. They also have mysterious health properties and taste delicious.

Khicheri is the kind of food one should eat when one is a)ill b)cleansing or c)a spiritual vegan. Evidently it is not the best thing to eat when you are very hungry, have PMS and are in wintertime nesting/fattening mode, since we blew through several bowls each and I was craving pizza by the time I got off the subway in my neighborhood. Unfortunately the pizza joint was closed, so I had to scurry home and make due with some weird-ass pasta salad leftovers from this weekend’s invasion of our apartment by a group of friendly neighborhood folks who needed a space to gather in. I nuked the pasta salad and put parmesan cheese all over it, only to learn that the creamy reddish sauce was not vodka sauce or alfredo, but mayonnaise mixed with juice from the halved cherry tomatoes.

It was actually kind of good. Hot mayonnaise pasta salad seems like something only perverts and elderly Depression survivors would even consider eating, but I was feeling frisky, and more than a little economically depressed. There was a car alarm blowing out in front of the house, I Robot on the TV, and a sense of impending adventure and excitement about whose origins I can only speculate…

Last week I partook in a rite of passage of the food service industry, when I attended the SYSCO Metro Area Food Expo at the Meadowlands Expo Center in Secacus, NJ.

SYSCO, for those of you outside the biz, is the largest food service distributor in the United States. If you ever eat in a restaurant, cafe, cafeteria, hospital, airplane, catered event, summer camp, or anywhere else for that matter, you have eaten SYSCO food and used SYSCO products. They OWN food.

They have some competition, but they basically win. They sell almost everything you eat, everything it’s made and served in, and everything in between, from the dish soap to the toilet paper to the little stir sticks for your coffee. The company formed in 1969 in Houston Texas through a merger of eight other small-time distributors. Since then they have gobbled up distribution companies in cities across America, employing a warehouse-saturation strategy similar to our lovely all-American Big Box store, contracting wholesalers and manufacturers to work exclusively through their network, and homogenizing the food supply so that anything you want can be brought to your establishment in neat cardboard boxes from a nearby warehouse.

Anyway, this delightful corporate behemoth supplies the cafes I manage with many of our supplies and ingredients. Therefore I was invited by our delightful sales representative to attend the annual Expo, where wholesalers who distribute their products through SYSCO gather to market their newest wares, spend face time with customers, win new establishments for their products, etc.

Imagine, if you will, a huge corporate expo center, wall-to=wall with cubicles bathed in eerie neon light, no windows anywhere, and at each stall is a little restaurant giving away free samples of their yummiest goods, with stacks of packages behind them. Many people are wearing suits, some are wearing silly chef hats. One can consume an egg roll, antipasto sampler, cookie, small cup of the latest all-natural juice, breakfast sausage, pancake, sandwich, fried shrimp, or hunk of fancy cheese every 10 feet. Luckily, I was not very hungry and had eaten breakfast, so I took it easy.

We were given bags to fill with our marketing swag, from pamphlets to business cards to small sample-sized packages of things like Craisins, Goldfish and Gruyere cheese. We were also given a magnetized card, which could be swiped at every expo station into an electronic console. Every swipe would be recorded and sent to our sales rep, who would then follow up with us on the products we were interested in, and presumably continue trying to sell them to us.

We consumed San Pelligrino sodas as we walked the sprawling aisles of corporate food distribution Christmas. Salespeople hocked their ware, pitched their pitches, made eye contact and smiled. They had all sorts of tricks up their sleeve to make you stop and try a bite.

All told, we spent about an hour getting there, and 1.5 hours getting through all the aisles, making sure to try stuff that looked good without pigging out too seriously. By the time I got to the part where all the awesome desserts were, I was too stuffed to care that there was free cheesecake everywhere.

It was sort of fun, this SYSCO expo. It was weird, it was exciting, people were EXCITED and they were doing business. The ectoplasm of commerce was collecting in the nooks and crannies of the expo center, and the smell of magnetized plastic was heavy on the air. People whose lives center on doing business, buying and trading and selling food, were very happy. But the whole experience strikes me as very unreal, totally bizarre and pretty upsetting.

I’ve always known that most consumers experience a disconnect from the reality of the food supply, but the disconnect between what food actually is, where it comes from, and how it transitions from raw plant or animal material to the thousands of commodities it is made into is also experienced by people at higher levels of food service work. Even the people who sell and cook and market food don’t really seem to know or care what that food really is, or where it came from.

One man we spoke with at length was exclusively selling pre-made guacamole, and frozen, peeled, halved avocadoes. Plastic bags of avocado halves, lime green, bearing little resemblance to the fruit with a peel and a pit. They’ve done all the work, i.e. taken all the nature out of it, and what is left can be preserved, packaged, shipped from a warehouse, manipulated and commodified even further before it hits your, the customer’s, plate. Cha-ching.

I’ve been eating more mac and cheese lately than I have in a long time. The last two rounds were Annie’s Deluxe, preceded by several days of Hot Dish.

I used to eat tons of it in college, and in high school, and come to think of it my whole life. It was the only dish I ordered from restaurants for a long, long time as a kid, and was the constant but of jokes about “turning into a noodle” if I ate too many.

Well, parents, no need to worry. If I resemble a noodle, it’s a ravioli, or maybe stuffed manicotti. Ha, ha.

In light of two posts ago, where I claim that dairy and wheat are bad for a person most of the time, writing a whole entry on mac and cheese seems a little silly. But, like I said, bad or not, many of the cells in my body are built of this humble stuff, so why knock it.

Today I worked all day in one of the cafes I manage at NYU. This one is in the math and computer science department, and most of the people who frequent are middle aged white men, sometimes with exotic accents, who drink black coffee and can scarcely interact with other humans, let alone female non-mathematicians who serve coffee for a living. It is an interesting place to spend time and I often find myself thinking of the Mentats in Frank Herbert’s Dune books, engineered from childhood to behave like computers. I also find myself becoming very rude to these poor geeks, which probably makes me a bad person.

I also feel conflicted about the kind of food and drink we serve here. On one hand, coffee and bagels and pastry are what people want from cafes. Our soup and sandwich offerings are pretty classy and well-made, but still emphasize wheat, dairy and meat. Just about everything we serve here is something I consider to be at least partially toxic and unhealthy. Soda, coffee, tea, chips, cereal, bagels, muffins, scones, lattes- none of it is very good for anybody, even if it’s good.

But it’s the sort of fare the institution of the coffeeshop is founded upon, so I comply. I can’t help but to wonder whether our collective consciousness, and therefore our political situations, cultural norms, degree of freedom and happiness, etc would be altered if we did not eat and drink poisonous, exploitative crap like sugar and coffee and wheaty baked goods all the time. Perhaps. But then coffeeshops would not exist, and all of the great moments of culture that have taken place in cafes around the world would never be. But maybe we wouldn’t need them, either.

Since our cultural dietary habits, and bionic modern bodies, are hard to kill, at least a few awesome and reputable institutions still exist in the proud tradition of café-cum-bookstore/salon/meeting place, authentic places with good music on the speakers, attractive, educated, hip baristas, good lighting and comfortable seating.

Starbucks can try all they want to make coffee culture suck like McDonald’s but they shall not prevail as long as people recognize the important social function of little independent coffeeshops.

My top 10 places to get coffee and hang out in nyc:

Cake Shop

cake shop is my favorite place in manhattan. its everything a girl could want- show venue, record store, bar, cafe, cupcake-seller, wifi, cute little tables, and there always seems to be a place just for you to sit and hang. I’ve spent two days solid in here and only got sick of it at the very end.

Bluestockings

best and only feminist/political bookstore/infoshop in nyc. they also have yummy coffee and lots of amazing books. best place to meet punks and their dogs.

Goodbye Blue Monday

hell. yes. everything is for sale, there are very few rules, the owner is awesome,  shows are sometimes bad but always exciting, and there is a strange crew of regulars, bartenders, and Bushwick neighborhood artistes around all the time. A quiet, dreamy place to work and hang out during the day, when it’s nearly empty and there is free wi-fi, the couches and tables all available to you.

Housing Works Used Book Café

i work here. when i first entered this place, i thought to myself “i want to work here.” and now i do, and we sell really good coffee. sweet books,too.

Vox Pop

my new neighborhood cafe. have to say, i havent spent much time here. but it fulfills the multi-function cafe-cum-salon role very well. there are shows, an open mic, readings, meetings, books thru bars, and a self-publishing business.

Hungarian Pastry Shop
just go here, once in your life. its freaking awesome.

Everything Goes Bookstore Café

Staten Island’s used bookstore, cafe and show space, run by the friendly, furry folks at Ganas, a communal stronghold on the island since the 70s.

Verb on Bedford (no link)

ok so people here might be a little bit snobby, “hipsters,” even, but if you are on bedford you know what you’re in for. Earwax is on the corner, that’s my excuse. At least you know where a good cup of coffee and an old wooden chair can be found.

Joe The Art of Coffee Waverly Place

This is a tiny-ish, unassuming coffee-only kind of place. Their coffee is truly delightful. I used to walk a good 15 minutes out of my way to get coffee there before work, and there was a line. The staff was always pleasant and prompt.  Sitting here works if you miss the rushes, otherwise it’s too crowded.

Mud Truck at Sheridan Square

So ok, it’s not a “shop.” But this Mud truck is great. The girl who works here is amazing and cheerful and sells delicious coffee. It’s just parked there, flaming in the middle of the most flaming neighborhood in the world.  I don’t know how I feel about Mud’s weird branding campaign, but I admire their homemade aesthetic and their hardcore, almost Turkish coffee. They have one size, which is more awesome points. I also have a thing for cool food trucks.

After Friday’s adventures, I thought I wouldn’t have much party left in me. But by about 2 o’clock I was feasting on home-cooked brunch at a long table with the OJ All Day planning committee at Sam and Julie’s totally awesome house. Things are going well with that, the festival is definitely shaping up to be a really neato event. So many people are doing so much work to make it happen.

A few of us were chatting afterwards about  interacting with non-musicians, and how it almost seems like a novelty to have friends who aren’t musicians or artists of some sort. Likewise, muggles, er, I mean, normals, seem to find it odd or unsettling to be among creative types all the time. A funny thing to consider.

We met early in the day at brunch-time because I had a show at Brooklyn Tea Party in the evening. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while now. I set it up for Ohbijou, a really rad band from Toronto that I’ve been hearing about for years now from the friends in Guelph. Also performing were the Passenger Pigeons, myself, Erin Regan and Shilpa Ray. It was probably one of the most awesome bills I’ve ever played on, everyone was awesome and it felt like a show that was heavily focused on ladies without being overt or condescending about it. It wasn’t like “oh come check out all these ladies who write cute songs and play music,” but more like an incidental fact that this kick ass bill would be featuring mostly women.

My experience of the Tea Party was also enhanced by some very special brownie….

In food news, I visited the Donut Pub last night at about 12:30 AM on my walk from working the late shift at Kim’s to the decrepit-ass L train at Union Square. L train is so lame.

As you might imagine, the wearying walk from Christopher Street to Union Square at midnight in the misting rain after a long busy day of renting out pornography, as well as the prospect of a 90-minute subway commute with a train packed full of drunken tight-pants, required a delicious, freshly-baked donut reward. Donut Pub is no Doughnut Plant , but a Boston Creme is a Boston Creme.

In other news, I just had an interaction with Carly Simon at the video store.

She and her blond handler/consort/stylist/young husband or whatever  came in and asked if they could return videos from the other Kim’s location. When I answered “no” they then asked if the other Kim’s had pickup service, to which I sneered some sort of reply along the lines of “No, you need to return the videos to the store where they came from.”

Only when they left did the customer I was then helping inform me that it was a celebrity.

“Did you see who that was?”

“No, it looked like a sun-baked zombie wearing big, black sunglasses.”

My bad, Carly. I mean, I like your songs. I think you probably did a lot for the credibility of women in popular music. But like, why this celebrity black sunglasses living dead bullshit? I also get it that you are rich and famous and dated Mick and everything. But come on now- a video pickup service? Don’t you have some houseboys for that or something?

So, I’m not very good at keeping commitments like this. Like, you know, updating a blog all the time. I’m just not. I thought having a very obvious theme, like what I eat every day, would keep me at it, but alas. It also doesn’t help that I do not own or work with a computer. I have plenty of computer access but it never seems appropriate to blog on another’s computer.

Anyway, last week I performed in a thing called Church, which is run by The Leader at a place called Superfine
I decided not to do music, and instead to read or perform something. I have a preoccupation with the idea of the coffeeshop and the commodification of coffee, also the fact that coffee is loaded with all these cultural and countercultural and intellectual association when really, coffee is about the least radical drug on the market. It’s a drug you take so you can work and be bored all day and not go to sleep.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the stuff. But you know. So that’s sort of what I read about, and I felt really good about reading something I wrote. Also, Dan came over before the thing and read a paper version of it, and laughed, and having someone laugh at a joke in something I wrote also feels really good.

The whole experience served to remind me that, until about midway through college, I identified very strongly as a WRITER and a JOURNALIST. That was my schtick, career plans and all. Somewhere along the way I figured out that music is much more fun but I do miss using words more. So once again I will attempt to keep a blog, this time with a looser theme perhaps.

I would also like to note that I finished Season 2 of Twin Peaks last night, and the ending of that show was one of the greatest disappointments of my entire life. Seriously. So many loose ends and presumptions to make. And Agent Cooper becoming a villain? Come ON. I wasn’t expecting a fairy-tale ending from Lynch but they coulda thrown us a bone here.

I guess I just have to watch Fire Walk with Me ASAP. There might be some redemptive information. I gotta say tho, I really wasn’t psyched about that ending.

…and boy are my arms tired! holy crap spam is amazing. I have been getting and ignoring emails about comments for months now and ignoring them. As I no longer work at a desk or have a computer, keeping up with my blogospheric contributions has been rather difficult. I’m pretty resigned to the idea of not being a blogger for now.

Hello, fair readers. I know I know, I haven’t posted in a month. You;ve been asking yourselves what I ate for far too long now. Suffice it say, lots of  noodles, pan-asian cuisine (!) and fresh summer veggies from the farm share.

It’s unfortunate that I haven’t blogged more,  since today is my last day working for the Union and the temp agency. Starting on Monday I will embark on a yet-to-be-determined new job in NYC’s enormous, cutthroat, and legendary food service industry. I probably won’t have much time in front of a computer, but I will have excellent Fadinna fodder based on my many future culinary adventures.

There are plenty of good reasons why I wanted to get out of the restaurant world for a while, try the 9-5 office thing, and I have found many more reasons why I never ever want to sit at a desk in an office again. Unless, of course, I can actually work on saving the world from said desk. Since that isn’t really happening, I’m gonna jump back into a big pile of food and try to make some goddamn money.

Though I applied for a range of jobs- from preschool teacher to nanny to high school teacher to editorial assistant to barista to fine restaurant manager, the only ones that bit were restaurants and cafes. This is perhaps serindipitous. As some of you know my dream is to open my own coffeeshop/music venue/hangout spot someday and while the life of a service employee is far from glamorous, low-fat or easy, I feel that developing my experience will benefit me in the long run when/if I try to make my own place work.

The offers so far have been from a chocolate shop/cafe, which was totally cute but basically would not earn me enough money to live on, from a vegetarian/organic cafe in the Seaport area where I would love to work but again, pays very little, and from a swanky Norwegian restaurant in the W Village. The latter is offering the most money and would also arguably be the most stressful, since I’d be a manager and have very little fine dining table service experience. I’d probably need to go get a bunch of fancy black clothes, start wearing makeup and maybe even deodorant again, and perhaps even <gasp>shave my legs. Ultimately, this position is good and promises excellent weekday hours (M-F 9-5!) a lot of cold hard cash but would require me to pretty much sell out. But nevertheless I think it would be pretty cool, eating Scandanavian food and lookin fancy. My name will even fit right in with the Scandanavian theme.

Why am I dallying on my decision, you may wonder? Because I won’t find out if I’ve gotten my ultimate dream job  that I interviewed for until Thursday. That’s tomorrow. So for now I have accepted  two positions as Plans B and C, but if this amazing social enterprise coffeeshop-inside -ookstore calls me back to be their manager I will cry tears of joy. Even though it means I will not earn very much. I won’t be able to save and I probably won’t get a raise for a while. But I’ll be learning how to manage several small cafes and be helping an amazing charity/social reform organization and fighting the good fight for accessible public space, one latte at a time. Ha.

Anyway, dear readers, I am signing off for now but am about to meet a crew of antifolkers for lunch in midtown,  as a final farewell to the largely overpriced and mediocre eateries of the neighborhood. I’ll fill you in if it’s interesting.