Tag: food

See also “Natural Chips”

At Mother’s Market tonight I saw a “Calorie-Free Honey BBQ Sauce.” What the. Response from friends via Sidekick included:

torgo_x: It’s WINDEX!!

hweimei: Where do they get the calorie-free honey? Wait, don’t answer that.

mendel: Frankenbees. (tiny, tiny terminals protruding from its neck) “Come quickly! I have invented the Splendabee!”

There was indeed sucralose in the ingredients. I wonder how you get the calories out of honey, though, so you can still use that word but without, um, honey? Scared.

The IM is coming from inside the house

I didn’t go to klikitak‘s thing tonight, partly because I am a social anxiety poster child lately and partly because I didn’t want to get extruded through my own car by drunk people going to L.A. and back. Instead I ended up at realitylost‘s where she and Craig stuffed me with really great food and their dogs sat on me. One of the many reasons to like Craig is that he is serious about food. O garlic bread, O cobbler.

I meant to go over and hang with burntcurtis for a few later but a quick trip across the boulevard revealed that his entire neighborhood had been parked upon by partiers. Tonight is official Adult Halloween Party Night, and everyone was getting smashed, with pumpkins. A couple of his neighbors were incompetently necking in the condo complex and I nearly ran them down. She was wearing a slutty noun costume and he was in a rapist costume (pirate, soldier, Haidl, dunno). He was trying to paw her while simultaneously bracing a 24 pack of beer on his hip and she was trying to do the coy push-away-only-not but instead stumbling in front of my car. Two cheers for Halloween; it’s now Daterapemas!

Part of the time at Susie & Craig’s tonight the TV was on. I hadn’t seen the History Channel in a long time. Wow is it dumb! The supposed academic guy referred to the “Cape of Africa” (?) and they spelled Gibraltar wrong, and the show about the history of dragons spent a full segment talking to a couple of lunatics who believed that dragons existed and waved broadswords while saying they were druids.

One of their neighbors has a license plate holder that says “Foamer Forever.” Anyone know what that means?

fire the noodle cannon and eat

After a conversation with the Exploding Aardvark tonight I realize I have accidentally come up with a new holiday.

I haven’t been eating much during the day and then at night recently I’ve been going out for Japanese noodles. A lot. Both frequently and a lot of noodles. Tonight I had the hakata ramen, with extra noodles, chashu, and wonton, at Shinsengumi.

I am celebrating Ramendan. Clearly this is some kind of Flying Spaghetti Monster holiday.

weak end update

This has been a good weekend, full of unexpected social delights and fatty foods.

I have had totally heterosexual man-dates two nights in a row. Friday, burntcurtis took me for Chinese (and I hardly look it) at China Palace, where I ate round-eye delights like orange spicy chicken. Great conversation with him in a romantic booth. Last night threepunchstuff spirited me off to a G(r)eek restaurant where we ate flaming cheese, etc. Thanks to both of you for being wonderfuli and totally heterosexual man-friends!

I also got to see all sorts of people I never see, and purely by chance, including the reclusive handstil and godforesaken who are rarely observed since their natural habitat is fifty feet underground.

And! Other people had sent me books recently so I read a pile of them, including two graphic novels about hellholes. Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang details his time in North Korea working on animation projects, and Ted Rall’s half-graphic Silk Road To Ruin is a combination “comic book” about his travels there and history/backgrounder on Central Asia. Both good. Rall’s is particularly useful and full of the sort of black humor that only places like Turkmenistan provide.

I’m enjoying the Halloween season this year for the first time in forever. I managed to recapture that childhood sensation of anticipation about costumes and haunted houses and candy skulls. I was never big into candy, although acquisition itself was a huge high on the actual night, but I loved the way neighbors did up their houses into “scary” haunts. People around here really get into that, and there are some dark and creepy strobed-out houses with hands reaching out the windows, etc. already. I like that way better than the adult beer-bash version.

Speaking of which, the costumes for kids are turning me into Old Conservative Guy. Nick and Nicole found a set of wrist-and-ankle bondage cuffs in the Halloween store, complete with unambiguous drawing of bound hussy, that included the instruction they were not for children under six. Meanwhile, a young teenager was being urged into a Slutty Nurse Outfit by her mother, as Junior complained “Mom, they won’t allow this at school!” No.

The Santa Ana winds make my eyes and throat dry and are kind of a pain in the ass, but it’s so BEAUTIFUL here right now with that very clear light we never get. I took a load of pics in Santa Ana yesterday and maybe some of of them are salvageable. The “camera out the window at 40 mph” style isn’t conducive to great art.

Maybe I’ll drive out to the desert tomorrow.

Zubie’s, or a trip to Grandma’s

Had dinner at Zubie’s Chicken Coop last night in celebration of berg74‘s birthday. Happy birthday, Dan! It was great to see him and other friends I’ve missed, including a rare appearance from Jeremy & Vicka.

When I was a kid we used to drive all the way out to Lancaster on some holidays to visit my Aunt Midge (Mildred) and Uncle Lee. They were actually great-aunt and uncle, and were old my whole life. We would sit in their drawing room and munch on Jordan almonds and talk, and then sit down to a classic Midwestern/Southern holiday meal of some kind of Large Meat, potatoes, overcooked vegetables, two kinds of bread, a ceremonial salad, and great big glasses of iced tea. It was a trip back down the family tree, and they’d tell us stories of the family going back to the turn of the century and before. That side of the family had come to California on covered wagons, so the family stories were and are fascinating.

Zubie’s is that place to me.

People who know old Orange County punk music may dimly recognize the name, because their original place is mentioned in the Vandals’ “Urban Struggle” as the cowboy bar. It was next door to the old Cuckoo’s Nest punk club, and the cowboys and punks used to get into it, which inspired that song.

That Zubie’s is long gone, but the family has the Chicken Coop restaurant, which took over a former French place in the 90s sometime. It’s eccentric. They serve pretty big portions of standard American home cookin’ cheaply, which is an attraction. A full chicken dinner is $8.95. Their specialty is fried chicken but they don’t call it that; it’s “broasted,” which is something old-fashioned restaurants advertised in my 1970s childhood. I think it must have been a fad around 1960. It’s a brand name process for pressure-cooking chicken as you fry it that supposedly results in less grease. No one under 40 even knows that broasted chicken is fried chicken.

The sides are mashed potatoes with gravy and green beans. By mashed potatoes I mean very, very smooth whipped potatoes and bland light-brown gravy. The beans are prepared the way my grandmother did, southern style: a bit overcooked but with enough salt and grease that you do not care about that.

There is a house salad that comes with your dinner. The salads got all confused but I think that’s what I got. For some reason it had shrimp in it. It was the iceberg lettuce salad of my childhood with a tremendous quantity of dressing. There were also rolls which were very soft and warm and required immediate buttering.

The chicken was pretty good if a bit dry, and there was a decent amount of it. The other diners got more food and many of them had to ask for to go boxes. Apparently overfeeding is one of the attractions of Zubie’s. I’m glad I got the right amount of food, myself.

The menu was full of weird quirks and errors. The “Oyster Bar” page was also labeled as the To Go menu, and had two entries for fish taco at the same price with different descriptions: one was the “Grande” and other was advertised as having two filets and being the house favorite. The pizzas were advertised as being sixteen feet in size due to an apostrophe/quote confusion; it was not stated whether that was diameter, radius, or thickness. When the check arrived it was totally incomprehensible so we just did our best and made sure enough money was there.

As you probably figured out most of the clientele was over 65, with a few families. In general it wasn’t a restaurant; it was a trip to someone else’s grandmother’s house. The food was home-style in both good and bad ways, there weren’t many options, and everything was up to the standard of a conservative farm-style dinner in 1960. I assume they remain in business because of old people and because of the bar.

It’s not the best restaurant in town but it’s a gem. Mostly because it’s a little piece of my great-aunt Mildred’s generation sitting smack in the middle of go-go millionaire decadent Newport Beach within sight of nightclubs where strippers and mortgage brokers are doing tequila body shots and stuffing coconut shrimp into their faces. I like the contrast.

If I could put time in a walrus

  1. NO: AN INTRODUCTION: the Exploding Aardvark shares her “NO” tag.
  2. My del.icio.us stuff tagged “NO” has some links in common, because the ‘vark and I share an esthetic of “no.”
  3. And then, there’s my LJ stuff tagged “no.”

I spent most of the day in a shitty state of mind but had a nice long coffee talk with becauseshewas at which dawn_michele unexpectedly showed too. Good blather was had.

Want to know what keeps me hanging on? Chili pepper, that’s what. Specifically, hot sauce made from my own chili paste which in turn was made from chipotles, chiles de arbol, ancho chiles, salt, and vinegar.

Maybe I should take a jar of the stuff to therapy tomorrow and hand it to Carol and say: physician, spice thyself.

I appear to have at least temporarily lost all interest in cars. How’d that happen?

Chop wood, carry water, stem chipotles, seed anchos

If you’re looking for a mindfulness exercise, I recommend working with dried chili peppers.

Food preparation is the closest I come to meditative exercise anyway. Preparing the chiles means removing the stems and seeds manually, which requires attention to detail. It’s absorbing and keeps me in the moment. And if I lose my mindful presence with the task, I’ll inevitably touch my eye or nose or some tender spot with a hand covered in dust and seeds from very hot peppers. This is as good as a Zen monk hitting me in the face with a stick. Instantly, I am back in the moment.

Mindfulness, focus, attention, process, an absence of distraction, and finally: chili paste. So even if I am not a step closer to enlightenment, the next few dinners are greatly improved.