Whats Fa Dinna?

(more…)

Me n Dibs went out for a delicious meal at Curly’s Vegetarian Luncheonette tonight. Wow is that place good. Anytime I got out to a vegetarian place and I can order everything on the menu it’s a little overhwhelming. Plus it was a place that had lots of awesome fake meat and fried food. So I was happy.

I got the Cobb salad, which always puzzles me a little bit. The Cobb salad is a really weird salad. It’s also always a little different. Here’s what wikipedia says about its history:

“In 1937, Brown Derby owner Robert H. Cobb went into the restaurant’s kitchen to fix a late-night snack for Sid Grauman, operator of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He browsed the refrigerator for ingredients, and chopped them up finely. Thus, the Cobb salad was born. From then on, Grauman often requested that a Cobb salad be prepared for him. Word soon spread about this creation throughout Hollywood, quickly increasing its popularity. It became such a hit that film stars started requesting “Cobb’s salad”, and it was eventually added to the menu of the Brown Derby restaurant.”

So that settles the mythology, and the name. But why those ingredients? I guess they were just in the fridge when Mr. Cobb went to work that fateful night. Even so, it’s a pretty wacky salad. Sometimes chicken, sometimes turkey, sometimes both, always bacon, always onions, always eggs, always cucumbers and lettuce, sometimes carrots, avocadoes, sometimes many kinds of cheese, sometimes one. This one had balsamic dressing but I’ve seen it with ranch or blue cheese .

I’ve also seen people throw corn on there, probably because the name is confusing. I mean,you hear “Cobb” and you think “corn on the…. Plus corn goes good with bland, fatty, all-American things like bacon and fried chicken pieces and bleu cheese and avocados.

The original recipe, also from Wikipedia (who knew it was such a wonderful resource on the history and ingredients of food?)

1. Lettuce (head lettuce, watercress, chicory, and romaine)
2. Tomatoes
3. Crisp bacon
4. Chicken breast
5. Hard-cooked eggs
6. Avocado
7. Roquefort cheese
8. Chives
9. Special Cobb salad vinaigrette

I guess that all makes sense with the other versions I’ve seen. Kinda like the Waldorf salad; you can mess with it, but the major players remain the same. Anyway, the one at Curly’s was pretty delicious. It involved a pile of awesome fake fried chicken, fakin bacon, avocado, cukes, red onion, lettuce, bleu cheese, and some pretty dang good balsamic vinaigrette. It was also huge. Dibs ordered the Tostada salad with chorizo (also fake of course) and only ate half. It was really big. A whopper of a salad, really…

What is going on here?!?! I really hope this is art and not some bozo’s idea of feeding the children of the world. They don’t want goddamned garden salad.

Once again I find myself struck mid-blog by the audacity of my own existence, and by the kind of self-indulgent bullshit I’m allowing myself to write about. The idea of this blog was to sort of tease the self-indulgent, egocentric blog format, but I find myself totally loving it. But I get so carried away…

I’m really really glad I haven’t had to live through a food shortage or famine. We’re all pretty lucky in that sense (Probably. Sorry if you’re reading this and starving. Maybe try a non-food-themed blog? Or Dumpster diving? See links.)

While our government’s (and others’) colonial, capitalist exploits and conquests and retarded feudal economic order have kept millions of people hungry, they have also ensured that people like me have been very well fed. Well fed enough that we have all kinds of fun things like eating disorders, obesity, war for oil, diabetes and high cholesterol, gastric bypass surgery, liposuction, Stacker II, indoor gyms, fat camps, plus sized clothing, pilates, fashion magazines, veganism, fast food, Hollywood, pro-Ana, fat activism, the list goes on. Not than any of these things alone is particularly bad. Fat acceptance and pro-ana help a lot of people deal with having different bodies as a result of eating and food issues. (Yes that’s right I am grouping pro-ana and fat acceptance as two sides of the same coin. Think about it for a while before getting outraged.) Gyms and veganism can help people feel healthier and more connected to their bodies. But I think these are all parts of a bigger picture of a really warped and sick culture surrounding food, eating, bodies and privilege. Perhaps all facets of the same many-sided die.

The logical visual way to highlight our culture’s insanity around food is often to compare starving people from poor foreign nations to obese Americans, like this:

But really seeing this textbook anorexic supermodel is somehow more decadent and upsetting than obesity.

The thing is, this woman has all the resources she needs to have a healthy body, yet chooses to live in a sick one. Seeing people who really starve themselves at will is more upsetting to me than seeing huge obese people, who are probably just pretty normal cool people who ate too much or have a poor metabolism for some reason. Maybe because a human’s natural response to food abundance is to overeat in preparation for the (naturally) consequent food shortage. You eat a lot in the fall to get chunky for the long, cold winter. Since that shortage rarely ever arrives, we just keep overeating. Maybe that winter will come for us someday and we’ll all be psyched that we never lost that last 10 pounds, because it’ll keep us stronger.

But the idea that the culture could create such unnatural abundance, and then psycholigically poison people into starving themselves to conform to the aesthetics of social constructs like women’s fashion, Hollywood, what have you, seems completely terrifying. Mind control is indeed upon us and it’s literally eating away at us.

And perhaps to illustrate how wrong things have really gone, we have people dressing their babies up like hot dogs:

Hot dogs are made of slaughterhouse scraps and refuse, like this:

I guess we are what we eat after all! A bunch of filthy rotten pigs, trying to do things as best we can between getting born into hot dog suits and dying of starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of us will eventually turn into dirt anyway.

last night we had dinner at Vegetarian Paradise 2, on W 4th street. It’s right next to Red Bamboo, which I haven’t tried yet, but both are owned by the same people, and they both serve totally yummy fake meat pan-asian/soul food fusion. Or something. It’s kinda junk-foody, definitely heavy on the gluten, but mad delicious. We split a scallion pancake, which was very cakelike and tasty, and an order of General Tso’s “chicken.” I thought the Tso’s was decent, but didn’t really have the punch I expect. It was much tangier and more citrusy than I’m used to for that dish, but my expectactions are based on getting really cheap ghetto Chinese food General Tso’s tofu, corn syrup, peanut oil, MSG and all.

This dish was definitely more lovingly prepared than those usually are, but they could hold some love- like putting cut up celery and cucumbers in a hot dish! WHO DOES THAT?!? Otherwise it was good, and we two did not even finish it all so there are leftovers. Tso-tally awesome.

I’d go back to Veg Paradise- the service was exceptionally friendly and fast, ambiance was unobtrusive and relaxed, except for the drop of water that periodically condensed on the ceiling and fell on my head. They didn’t pressure us to buy drinks or dessert, and didn’t mind that we were splitting an entree. All in all, very cool.

Here’s what is not so cool: Late last night, we discovered cockroaches in the apartment, which almost sent me into a catatonic fugue state. We smashed about 20 very tiny baby roaches that appeared to be hatching before our eyes from the faucet fixture, many more escaped, including a larger, more developed baby that scrambled up behind the cupboards. The roaches must have been feasting on the tiny bits of food stuck in our drain catch.

Sick. more on that later, I’m sure.

So after a fitful night’s sleep of digesting pure wheat gluten, and having nightmares about roaches crawling into my ears, I slept in and grabbed a delicious Polish donut from the bakery for my ride to work. I intend to finish my unremarkable egg salada sandwich, with the health bread and the sundried tomatoes, for lunch.