Whats Fa Dinna?

Last night one of my new fabulous roommates cooked some delicious casserole to fuel our karaoke outing. It was comprised of pasta, mushrooms, zucchini, corn, cheddar cheese, cream of potato soup, and topped with American cheese slices and potato chips.

GODDAMN that was good. Alarmingly good. Equally alarming was the presence of single-serve American cheese slices in my home.Let’s just say it’s been a while since I bought anything lower than Cabot-grade cheese to bring home (that Annie’s DLuxe no-mix mac sauce doesn’t count!) Laura’s delicious Krafty casserole fueled an adventuresome evening of belting out Kate Bush and Pat Benetar tunes.

Which brings me back….

One of my beloved college roommates was from Minnesota, and schooled us east coast kids in his people’s proud tradition of Hotdish. Wikipedia offers:

“Hotdish is any of a variety of baked, casserole dishes popular in the Midwestern United States, and especially in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. It consists of a starch, a meat, and a canned vegetable, mixed together with canned soup, which serves as a binding ingredient.

Hotdishes are filling, convenient, easy to make, and well-suited for family reunions, church suppers, and potlucks, where they may be paired with pan-baked cookies known as bars.”

(What we ate was not strictly hotdish, as it did not contain a meat. It did, however, contain freshly cooked mushrooms and zucchinis, as well as canned corn, which for our purposes ssubstituted for a meat.)

The members of my college household, featuring the Minnesotan plus two more of my closest pals, would to convene in our kitchen  late in the evening when we were done with classes, work, library study, etc., and prepare a collective small meal, such as noodles or cheese and bread or soup or leftovers, which we took to calling “Hotsnack.”

For “Hot Snack,” The Urban Dictionary offers the following definition:

“It is when you are just sitting around minding your own business and you have a little unexpected burp and a small amount of acidy puke comes up with it and you have to swallow the ‘hot snack’.”

That’s totally not what our hotsnack was like, but it’s a nice surprise to learn that the phenomenon which I have taken to calling “throwing up in your mouth a little” has a concise, catchy little name. Thanks, Urban Dictionary!

Anyway, if you are about to feed a bunch of folks, especially pre- or post- drunk folks, consider Hotdish. It’s comfort food to the max, cheap, easy, plentiful, filling, and perhaps even healthy by some definitions. I hear

tater tots are the potato ingredient of choice, but I gotta say, potato chips melted into the cheese on top was absolutely scrumtrillescent.

Things like hotdish make me really excited for winter, for carb-loading, hibernating animalian behavior, for cheesy baked things and squishy happy boozy evenings dressing up a little more butch than usual and going out to sing karaoke with a new posse of entertaining roommates who like to hang out at home and cook sometimes.

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.

I have been peeling through my bookshelves lately, trying to settle on something to actually read cover to cover. One of my failed attempts was a macrobiotic primer, written for American idiots by an American idiot who found it his calling to interpret the will of Macro-God Michio Kushi. So I gave up on that book pretty quickly, but not without trying, for half a day, to do the good work of Kushi and eat macrobiotically.

I should add that I think macrobiotics is amazing, a great idea for anyone to try if they are unsatisfied with their health, mood, outlook or appearance. I loosely kept the diet for almost two months and ever since I have tried to base my diet on whole grain foods, fresh vegetables and soyfoods. A year of employment in a fancy French-style bakery-café put a significant damper on that. But nobody’s perfect, and now that I’m a 9-5er I have much more control over my diet once again. Also with the Hearty Roots veggie order coming in full swing every two weeks, we have a vast supply of local, organic produce.

So anyway. I went to the health food store near my work, found pre-made macro vegetarian noodle and rice dishes which weren’t all that expensive, and tried one out. It was delicious seasoned brown rice with vegges and seaweeds and smoked TVP or tofu floating around in there. I had that for lunch, then remembered the Jarlsburg, romesco and arugula sandwich I had packed in my bag. Drat. I had that as an afternoon snack, completely negating any attempt to reduce caloric intake, eat only pure, whole foods, and avoid dairy. This delicious and seemingly healthy sandwich broke all the laws of macrobiotics.

So anyway, that was that. The next day I had leftover tofu scramble and rice (not bad, not bad) that we made Sunday morning after a long and steamy hunt through Ridgewood, NY for some tofu. Flashback to Sunday: We discovered tofu at the Stop n Shop on Myrtle Ave, past Fresh Pond, along with scads of other delicious, exhuberant fake meats like Gimme Lean! and SmartBacon. We had a total bean feast that day- tofu scramble with tempeh bacon chopped up in it, black beans, toast. Then we went to a vegan BBQ down the street and ate smart dogs and portobello burgers. I wanted to barf all over the place and felt especially bloated on Monday, but damn, fake meat tastes good and i don’t do it all that much.

Fast forward to the present (actually, past- it’s Thursday!) evening (Tuesday) we had a light dinner at Bonobo’s Vegetarian restaurant, a raw vegan café in Gramercy. It’s pricey, terribly lit, sterile and the hum of the machines in there makes me immediately tweak out and get psycho, but they make a delicious salad and you can get all kinds of weird, delicious “nutmeat” pates and patties and things all up on it. I like the food there so much but I always feel a little bit funny afterwards, like I’m the guy in that movie Altered States and because I’m depriving my body/mind/mouth of the usual bad-for-me things, I’m sort of slowly reverting into a moneylike state. I guess that’s the idea of calling a place Bonobo’s. So we ate that, and of course, a few hungry hours later in the same neighborhood, found ourselves scarfing multiple orders of fries from the infinitely more romantic Shake Shack.

So much for macrobiotic eating.