You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2009.
The picture on top, I took at a Japanese mart in Vancouver, BC in Canada. These Beer Pretz were on sale for 49 cents because they were expired. I bought 2 boxes. They still tasted okay.
The picture on the bottom, I took in Seattle, WA at post-ally(??). It’s a wall covered in ABC gum. The ally smelled like old spit. It looked really incredible.
I met the doughnut shop of my dreams a couple weeks ago in Portland Oregon. It’s called Voodoo Doughnuts.
I went here late night one Wednesday with Chris Duffy to find bums, musicians, Scion reps, teens, all hanging out like a big cloud around the front of the shop.
Inside, it’s decorated like a big weird dougnut shrine, with a bunch of artifacts and fun crap. It’s pretty packed with crap. Also as we were waiting in line, some sort of drunk drama was unfolding before us as some girl waiting in line flirted with some dude who apparently was not her boyfriend, who stormed in seconds later to pull her out of the line. At the time that we went, this Voodoo Doughnut was staffed by very cute and pierced and punky black t-shirted teens.
The doughnut selection itself is every bratty 12 year old’s dream come true. Doughnuts here are topped with captain crunch, froot loops, cocoa puffs, dubble bubble gum, marshmallows, crispy bacon, etc… They are flavored by sprinkling various flavors of powdered kool-aid and tang and nestea on top, which is totally brilliant by the way. And they are variably shaped like giant penises, huge blunts, playfully tortured voodoo dolls, sloppy chunks, and of course like a doughnut. On their online menu, they definitely had once offered doughnuts glazed in pepto-bismal and nyquil.
The doughnut I went for that evening was the “GRAPE APE.” The secret ingredient here was definitely a thin layer of powdered grape kool-aid delicately coating the icing on top. This doughnut blew my mind. It tasted exactly how a grape doughnut would taste: sugary, yeasty, grape aftertaste. I’ll be coming back for more.
Here is a Nokia cell phone web blog video I am in. Features music by White Williams. The dinner I am making here is black cherry cola ribs, shrimp and peach spring rolls, fried dough dipped tofu with powdered sugar, and scallion buttered stove-burner-grilled corn. We ate this a couple weeks ago. I oven baked these ribs, and embarrassingly burned them a little! (I’m still so bad at oven-cooking, I admit it!!) Still decent ribs, if not jerkey-ish, which is totally acceptable to me. Check out our favorite hair artist extraordinaire, Antonio Velotta’s, amazing pose in the final still of the video. He blew dried my hair that day!!! He can do yours as well!
The guys who filmed this, Andrew Hinton, Daniel Trapp, and Josh Neale were pretty cool, really British, in their thirties, nice, handsome, really into eating different things, and hanging out. Check it out, it’s wild.
So a little while ago there was a big buzz in the fast food world about KFC’s Double Down sandwich, which if you don’t know is a sandwich where fried chicken is the bun and bacon, cheese, and some mystery sauce is the filler. However it was then revealed that it was only being sold in select markets and those of us not in those markets were left with only our imaginations as to what this monstrosity could taste like and just how many of them we could eat before dying.
Well, what was also sort of causing a little buzz, granted only in the midtown lunch world, was Midtown Lunch’s Sandwich Challenge. Sort of a competition, the idea was for midtown lunch spots to come up with a sandwich under $10 that is, in Zach’s words, “Bold. New. Unhealthy. Wrong (but oh so right.)”. Some entries included a Mexican Cheesestreak from the El Rey del Sabor cart, a Fried Calamari Hero from Lazzara’s, and a Duck Pastrami Sandwich from Free Foods. Sadly enough, a lot of these places are a little too far out of my jurisdiction here in midtown east (the El Rey Del Sabor near me didnt have it), so I didnt get around to trying any of them…until now. And which one did I try? The winner of the Midtown Lunch August Sandwich Challenge, The Colonel’s Heart Attack from Cer Te.
Located a little bit of a walk from my work, Cer Te is a place Id been meaning to check out for a while due to the many entries about on Midtown Lunch. So with today finally being a slow day here in magic TV land, me and my usual lunch companions Phil and Delancey made the trek and got 3 Colonel’s Heart Attacks to go. Oh what’s that? What’s a Colonel’s Heart Attack? Well I’m glad you asked. It’s 2 pieces of boneless fried chicken breast, topped with mac & cheese, and collard greens sandwiched in a biscuit with a side of gravy. How can you go wrong? Well first off, upon ordering the guy told us they were out of collard greens, but they had sauteed spinach. Ok, fine, even though I would’ve rather have had the collard greens. And then we ended up waiting for honestly at least 15 minutes. Ok, whatever. Like I said, it’s a slow day at work. And it’s a $9.75 sandwich. Look as long as it fills me up and is good, fine. We get our sandwiches after slowly depleting their supply of free brownie samples and made the trip back to the office. Everything looked good, it was a good size, and I dug in. Shit was crumbly. Crumbs were flying all over the place so I switched to a fork and knife. Still crumbs, so I put it on a paper plate and went to town. It was good, but I noticed that it was also somehow a tad bland and dry. But no problem right? They gave us gravy on the side…no they didn’t. It turned out to be a little container of cole slaw and some bullshit pickle (I hate pickles). But whatever, I dumped some hot sauce on and finished that thing.
The moral of the story: conceptually it was a good idea, but, but what I think this is an issue with a lot of these Frankenstein Foods is that as you start to combine all these foods, shit just gets too convoluted and next thing you know you’re not really tasting one thing or the other. And in the case of the Colonel’s Heart Attack, not only did flavors blend into each other, they blended into each other in a bland way. I mean right now it feels like I just ate a biscuit and spinach sandwich that had some crusty stuff and yellow glop in it. Now before this ends with me sounding like I’m damning the Colonel’s Heart Attack, I still want to commend Cer Te for making a creative sandwich, and I will definitely consider going back to check out some of their other sandwich specials such as the Thanksgiving Dip (I’ve always wanted to open a year round Thanksgiving restaurant that just served Thanksgiving food), as well as what looked like quality desserts.
It’s also summer 2.0 outside, so you should just do yourself a favor and go for a walk regardless.
Enjoy!
I am an ally of ice cream. I support it in all seasons and for all occasions. A few days ago I discovered Laloo’s goats milk ice cream at my local food co-op and promptly bought a pint of Black Mission Fig. I was curious about how the earthiness of goat product (their meat has that same goaty dirtiness that the milk does) would work with the earthiness of the figs and I was left with wonderful feelings. My first bite surprised me because the fig flavor is so strong that the ice cream almost seems more like something that should exist in a small, sassy dollop and not the main event. It begins on a creamy caramel note and ends in an almost savory, goaty, mushroomy funk. It brings to mind a scene- the dead and the living feeding overripe fruits to one another on a velvet picnic blanket in an autumnal graveyard. Then the dead devouring the living and fashioning the picnic spread into a crude gown. Tawdry, unlikely, and pretty goth, but in the end it was a good time and I have gained a wealth of calories while expanding my palate to undead extremes. You should try it!
Nocturnal Yum Yum
If you need more figgy things in your life, I highly recommend this black fig soap crafted by and indie soap-making company called Savor. Find it here (they run out of it periodically, but I think it will come back):
