Whats Fa Dinna?

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….

I’ve had a pretty interesting weekend of ingesting mind-altering substances and kicking it with the pals in Brooklyn.

Friday was a rainy bummer of a day, so I met with some friends at the hippest spot in Bushwick hell, Wyckoff Starr coffee shop, for a cup of DAMN good coffee, and HOT. Wyckoff Starr like Northeast Kingdom down the street, makes me feel very confused because it is so clearly a hangout for the white hipsters in the neighborhood, but also the only place to get a cup of coffee that doesn’t have that kitty litter aftertaste. We were en route to Main Drag Music in W’burg, so that I could attempt to trade in corny old Warwick bass for some cash dollars to buy myself a SansAmp or something.

It looks just like this.

DENIED. Main Drag= WAYYYY too cool to have a Warwick bass hanging around. He told me to go to Guitar Center, which was sort of insulting until I remembered that I got the bass years ago at a Sam Ash. So it goes. I’ll do it eventually. In the meantime if anyone wants a mid-grade active pickup “Rock Bass” I’ll sell it real cheap. Like 100 bucks.

We then ate some delicious and inexpensive Thai food on Bedford. Of course I ordered Drunken Noodles with Veggie Duck, the best thing ever. They are named for their large, irregularly cut wide noodles (as if a drunk person cut them up.)

We then decided that to soothe our rainy day blues, and because we are young and reckless and didn’t have to go to work that day, we would go back to my house and make some special tea.

Boy was that fun. Totally mellow and funny. Sometimes it takes a psychedelic experience to snap me out of my grouchy whining super neurotic inner monologue and be reminded that I’m 24, have great friends, live with my nice boyfriend and cat in a nice apartment, and basically get to do whatever I want, like play music, eat Thai food and screw around all day.

Last night Dibs and I prepared a delicious meal at home. We have been actively trying to eat at home more in the last few weeks. I didn’t get a second job so I could spend it all in restaurants, after all. Turns out I will be spending it all on increasingly expensive groceries, at least until we start getting our bi-weekly Hearty Roots Farm produce pickups and I leave for the summer at Hawthorne Valley Biodynamic  farm, school and summer camp to work as a cook. Here’s to permaculture and living close to the food supply!

In preparation for eating dinner at home I paid a (guilty) visit to the Bowery Whole Foods, which is the most convenient grocery store to my workplace and subway line. Unfortunately, Whole Foods is, and always has been, goddamn expensive. Now that retailers have an excuse to bump up food prices, Whole Foods and everyone else did not delay in raising their prices on everything. So instead of the $20 I intended to spend to supplement this week’s rations, it was more like $35. I actually asked the clerk to remove a few items because I couldn’t justify spending the amount they asked ($1.43 for one small green apple, for example. Yes I know they are out of season. I am ashamed enough to have been shopping there in the first place.)

But anyhow, the prices have all gone up over there, and in addition there are an alarming number of visible security or “loss prevention” personnel all around the store, guarding the entranceways and stationed randomly throughout. (Probably where the cameras have the most trouble reaching.) This leads me to believe that Whole Foods has experienced, or expects to experience, an upswing in theft due to the upswing in food and gas prices, and a general state of despair over the economy. Very smart, those executives. I guess they didn’t get rich letting people eat for free. I was certainly tempted to cram several items down my pants, particularly a wedge of delicious aged gouda, a pricey tube of my favorite lavender-scented aluminum-free deodorant, and some vitamins which I didn’t end up buying. Alas, I was wearing a form-fitting ensemble with no pockets, which would bulge with my dinner soon enough.

We prepared a delicious summery salad, with mixed greens, orange bell pepper, carrot, tomato, mixed garden sprouts, and the aged gouda cheese. I mixed up a little salad dressing which was REALLY good and Dibs said was the gingeriest dressing he’d ever had outside of Dojo. It goes something like this:

juice of two lemons

2 tsp grated ginger, juice and all

2 tbsp soy sauce, tamari or Bragg’s

2 tbsp sesame oil

2 tbsp olive or canola oil

a few dashes of rice vinegar

3 tsp turbinado sugar, dissolved in a bit of hot water

mix it all together and shake it up real good in a jar. I thought of adding sesame seeds too but thought too late. I think orange juice would also work very well.

We also ate roasted red bliss potatoes with dill, garlic, rosemary and olive oil, some sauteed Brussels sprouts in butter (mmmmmm) and some baked barbecue tempeh with scallions. We both ate heartily and have two containers of leftovers now.

Over dinner we discussed a lot of heavy topics, such as science, religion, graduate school, hypocrisy, staying inspired to change things for the better and amend exploitative habits and ways despite inevitable complicity in “the system,”Hakim Bey a.k.a. Peter Lamborn Wilson, and the kitty cat Roze’s behavior.

Meanwhile, all over the world, food riots are breaking out, children starve in countries where the food they produce is too expensive to buy, a volcano forces Chilean peasants to evacuate their homes, monsoons destroy Myanmar, war rages on in the Middle East, prisoners resume being executed by the United States of Amerikkka, and a generalized international mayhem and apocalypse seems to be clearly upon us. 2012 needs to goddang happen already so we can get on with things.

But never fear, I will continue to provide my readership with salad dressing recipes until in the not too distant future I can’t afford to use salad dressing, or a computer, anymore. 

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?

Per a reader’s request, here is a transcript of the thing I wrote and then read at aforementioned Church last weekend. Feel free to imaginitively apply emphasis and dramatic mannerisms.

It is 7:55 AM, at my opening shift at the MetroWorks Cafe in NoLiTa.

My first morning customer has demanded her “usual” in her usual way, by staring at me and waving money.

This regular’s “usual” is the thing that waits under the stairs for every starry-eyed co-ed lured by the understated glamour of the barista gig. The ones who still believe that serving coffee is somehow cool, who believe in the mystique of the tattooed, birkenstock-wearing barista, you know, the one outside sullenly smoking a cigarette

But nobody really wants to do this. You wake up one day with a $200,000 degree in 1968 studies and the geopolitics of punk music, and find yourself delivering resumes to any and every local dealer of brown swill within the reaches of your bicycle.

Back to the Drink.

I should know by now, The Decaf Skim Latte will appear to torment me every day. The bastard redheaded stepchild of Swiss Water Process Decaffeinating technology, agribusiness milk processing, a diet/fashion/media/medical complex hell bent on selling people “guilt free treats” they dont need. For three dollars or more, you may have a tall foamy glass of nothing. No fat, no sugar, no caffeine, no guilt. For this daily tall glass of notihng you will shell out the cost of a month’s worth of food for a starving third world child to get the fix for your “latte habit” You know, the one you joke about with the girls from the office.

Sometimes you recall with horror how you once got accidentally served whole milk. of course you asked her to throw it out and make a new one for you. It’s gotta be decaf. skim. This latte is purely symbolic.

The crusty rim of the milk jug makes a sick scraping sound as i pull off the pale blue plastic cap. A dribble runs down my hand in the space between thumb and forefinger where I hold the steaming pitcher. As I steam the watery skim milk for this symbolic latte, I contemplate that every coffeshop in every part of the country is using millions of gallons of milk every day to feed their customers these nothings.

Milk created in the bodies of huge animals to feed their stolen young, creatures enslaved somewhere at a dairy carefully concealed miles off the highway in a wasteland near you. Creatures whose excrement fills methane-enshrouded bogs that span acres, whose grain and energy consumption rivals that of many third world nations. The lives of the young heifers are sustained until they are old enough to be impregnated themselves, bear a calf, and spend a few years of hormone-fueled milk production before, at the worn-out old age of 5, the creature from which this latte sprung forth will be sent to the hamburger factory, where, after a traumatic, hard trek through sludge and blood and the defecation of the other inmates, she to be shot with a bolt through her skull.

I wonder if the drinker of this latte has ever seen a living cow.

When was the last time you saw a cow?

Has a cow ever tasted coffee?

I scoop the powdery espresso grounds into the filter.

The bag the coffee comes from has a cute, brightly colored illustration of a Central American woman on it, holding a woven basket of what i assume are coffee beans over her head. The background is lush, tropical foliage, her floral wraparound skirt and braids accent the exotic scene.

Did you know? This happy cartoon woman picked all of these beans JUST FOR YOU. We aren’t exploiting her, we’re giving her a good old fashioned opportunity to earn a living and better her life.

The IWW reports:

“A coffee worker’s wage is extremely low. In Kenya, coffee workers earn about US$12 per month. In Mexico, if lucky, coffee workers are paid a minimum wage of US$2.50 per day. Women are often paid less than men.”

“Child labour is a prevalent problem in the coffee industry. In Kenya’s central province, 60% of the workforce on coffee plantations are children. They may start working when they are tall enough to reach the lower branches and old enough to identify which berries to pick. Children are involved in all aspects of coffee farming and manual processing activities: picking, sorting, pruning, weeding, spraying, fertilizing and transporting. During the planting season and harvesting season in Honduras, children make up 20% and 40% of the labour force.”

As the syrupy brown espresso flows forth, I imagine all the children in Park Slope lined up in a scorching hot coffee plantation, mom and dad cruising by with pesticide sprayers strapped to their hunched backs as the children hurry to pick coffee berries from whatever branches they can reach, hoping to earn in 10 hours of hard labor the amount of money one decaf skim latte will cost one person in New York City.

I wonder if this customer has any children.

Why aren’t children allowed to drink coffee?

“I’m sorry, what?”

I have spaced out. It is, after all, 7:55 AM.

“Oh, Of course I’d be happy to mix in two packets of Splenda for you.” And so I do, making sure to call to mind the people who will develop cancer working in the aspartame factory. In this, the age of obesity, we must cut calories whenever possible, at any cost.

And of course I have double-cupped. People really hate to feel that their hand is too hot from holding a single paper cup full of their drink. Even when you use those little “java jacket” sleeves, some folks will ask you to double cup, just in case.

I hear the groan of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. I hear the creak and crack of the Amazon rainforest that we’re all so tired of hearing about. I hear the whirring of the paper mills and I smell dead fish floating in the river downstream from the company that makes the bleaches, waxes, dyes for the paper that will become these two nesting cups. The sound of the milk and espresso pouring into these cups is the sound of rainforest clearcuts and pogroms of indiginous tribes to make room for the new industrial cattle ranch, which will farm cheap beef and milk for us, the calorie-counting Americans, in countries where most people starve for want of grain. Of course the cattle will be heartily fed imported grain by the ton, until they are fatter than all of the coffee-picking children of Honduras put together.

I wonder how this customer would react if I served her a pint of blood. Maybe a gallon of petroleum. A gallon of the unprocessed, sickly, blood-streaked milk of an overworked cow with advanced mastitis. Maybe a bag of sawdust from old growth trees, with a child’s brown bony fingers sticking out of it clutching a ripe coffee berry.

I do not do this. I press a plastic lid onto her double-cupped, two-spenda’d decafe skim latte. She hands me a twenty dollar bill, I return 16.75, she drops a quarter into the tip jar. I say thank you.

I have nothing to thank her for. I am very busy thanking the children, and the trees, and the coffee bushes, and the cows and the genetically modified grain, the ozone-hole’s bright sunshine and the acid rain, the methane bogs and the depleted Amazonian topsoil, and all of the people in the world who are driven to work themselves to death so that we can have things like decaf skim lattes, so I can have a job to work away my youth paying for my cigarettes and my student loan.

I tell her to have a nice day.

At this point there is a small line of morning regulars forming behind her.

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.

Today is Dibs’s birthday, so we celebrated yesterday by having a brunch with friends and dinner with the family.

We met with about 10 folks for brunch at Moto, a really nice and slightly fancy bobo kinda place off the Hewes ST stop of the J. It’s decorated in a “distressed antique” way, but not bad. Lots of rust, old mirrors, random French advertisements, black and white photos, etc. At night, bands play there and they seem to serve pretty decent wine, but I’ve never been there for dinner. The brunch food there is always fantastic, not too expensive, and there are several appealing vegetarian options. It is conveniently located, off our train, and most people like to go there. The only drawbacks: They don’t serve regular coffee, only Americano, which are delicious but are not free to refill. Therefore a brunch at Moto will require supplementary coffee later in the day. Also, there are usually a couple of really unbearable vampire-looking hipsters scrounging around, nursing coke hangovers with the grilled donuts ($4, plate of 3) and espresso. They won’t bite, but will sneer.

Anyhow, I always get one of two things at Moto brunch: the baked apple pancake with crème fraiche and real maple syrup, or the house eggs in creamy tomato sauce with grilled bread and mixed greens. Oh yes, Mot grills their bread and it’s pretty good. Then they put butter all over it and serve it to you with a place of eggs over easy cooked in butter, and doused in a sweet, tomato-y cream sauce. It is goddamn good and this is what Dibs had, so I had bites. I enjoyed the baked apple pancake, which is so buttery that each of your teeth has a little heart attack as you eat it. It’s real good. We settled up after a leisurely hour and a half brunch, just as the place was starting to fill up.
Then we went home to play with our beautiful new kitten Rose.
The fam showed up around 4, and we hung out and opened housewarming/birthday gifts. We now have an officially awesome Cuisinart blender, and I will commence to drinking smoothies and fancy drinks any day now. We decided it was too hot to cook in the house so we went out.
The challenge was to find somewhere nice but not super outrageous, with veggie and meat options, and a fun, hanging-out-with-family-in-NYC vibe. Original plan was to go to Flea Market on Ave A and 8th, where we went for brunch once. It seemed too pricey and also very meat-centered (French cuisine- duhhh.) So we gave a shot to Yuca Bar, catty-corner from our home away from home, the Sidewalk Café. This place definitely isn’t “cool” but it actually did the job quite well- we all got something good, drank some ridiculously boozy sangria (I opted for a Blue Moon). Even though they had a few veg options, we decided it was a splurge and eat fish kinda night, so we did. Curiously, the women all ordered the yucca-encrusted salmon, which came in a saucy mixture of sundried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, corn, tomato, avocado and a bunch of other things. It was quite delicious and very savory. The men ordered the mahi-mahi, which came over a bed of coconut rice with pineapple jalapeno salsa. Very sweet, also very spicy. Mahi mahi is really good, so is salmon for that matter, and having fish once a month or less makes it an even better treat.
All in all it was a pretty fun day. We ate well, hung out with good peoples, etc.

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.