lots of pills a day don't even keep the doctor away

This was a project I did as a final for a contemporary art class and since it pertained to food, I thought I might just put it right here.  It's intended to be a commentary on the reductionist tendencies of nutritionism.  Bon appetit!

On Mangos

I have been helplessly obsessed with mangos for the past few weeks; it began with a 2 for $3 sale at whole foods.  They are no longer on sale but I have not ceased buying them.  In fact, I have been preemptively buying them before I have a chance to run out. It makes me anxious if my mango supply cannot guarantee me at least a mango a day before my next trip to the store. Mangos are not local, nor are they a particularly seasonal produce around these parts, but I buy them and I eat them and I love them anyways.  I don't care how large my carbon foot print is in this particular instance. I can't see a theoretical footprint, but I can see and I can eat and I can taste a mango. 

I can eat them spicy and limey and sweet from the ladies on 14th in Union Sqaure.  I can eat them plain, scraping their soft flesh from their bitter skin.  I can also cut up a mango, put the chunks in a bowl and douse them in an adequate pool of cream and call that a snack.  Perhaps that this (in addition to a cookie) constitutes a snack in my life says something about me.  Perhaps it just means I like to put cream on everything I can.  Anyways, here it is; mangos and cream, the original.

poetry that sounded good in my head

I seem to have been particularly inspired (uh, distracted) during my Nurtirition and Health lecture today so while my professor informed us of the roles of vitamins within our bodies I wrote a poem about grapefruit juice, another one about Dos Torros burritos, and a haiku about Whole Foods.  This is more or less a manifestation of the things I've eaten in the past week which have made an impression upon me.  Enjoy.  *snaps*

Grapefruit Juice

tart like early mornings

I put up with you despite the fact

you are as sour as a sour skittle

minus the skittle.

Dos Torros, Dos Culos

Burrito butts beckon

to be nommed upon

like a hyped-up pac man.

No crunchy water (lettuce)

to distract from a mushy melange

of rice and beans and guac and the tasty tingle of

hot hot hot 

sauce.

Burned crispy chicken bits

in my mouth,

burrito juice trickling down my arm

my dinner is good today.

Whole Foods Haiku

Knowledge of a pound

is vital to not fall in 

debt at the hot bar.

things that tasted good in new orleans

This year's spring break destination was New Orleans.  I was a New Orleans noob, sort of am still. I didn't know what to expect except for southern accents, sweet tea, and warmer weather (fuck you new york and your snow in March).  I kind of just figured my significant other who's father grew up in New Orleans (which has thus led to frequent family visits) to hold my hand and lead me around wherever I needed to go to lose my New Orleans virginity.  

Well, I lost it.  I think it may have been somewhere between walking down Bourbon St and participating in the consumption of 16 pounds of crawfish.  Or it could have been eating the powdered sugar smothered (literally mountains of powdered sugar) beignets from Cafe du Monde.  Maybe it was the unprecedented amount of sugar that entered my body by means of snow balls and pralines.  And it may very well have been in the front room of Antoine's where the boy and I realized we had made the grave mistake of falling into the tourist trap when we hadn't asked to sit in one of the nicer "special" rooms that are reserved for the locals or travelers who actually know what they're doing.

So maybe I don't know what I'm doing all the time but I was mostly too occupied with eating to care.  Creole is captivating.  From an outsider's persepctive, New Orleans seems to have one of most well-defined and unique cuisines in the states.  I mean sure, there are other relatively cuisine specific regions in the states but you can find New England style clam chowder in California and California rolls in New England and not to mention "New York style" pizza, which you can find just about everywhere. You would be hard pressed to find crawfish boils, or actually good snow balls (essentially snow cones), or authentic po'boys anywhere but Louisiana.  New Orleans is uniquely a city of strong culinary traditions that cannot be tasted anywhere but its place of origin.  When you step out of the airport, you can almost smell the crawfish.   

As particular as the food, is the city itself.  New Orleans glitters with beads of Mardi Gras past, no one cares enough to discard the plastic beads that hang off off of every surface that can have beads hung off of it (especially people on Bourbon St). In some lawns, the beads grow on the trees.  They litter the sidewalk and peek out of ground.  They're like the Christmas decorations that people are too lazy or too unwilling to take down, so they leave them up instead; a constant reminder that there's always something to celebrate.  

New Orleans is exciting, thinking about it makes me excited and it makes me hungry.  It's getting hipper by the day as young people revitalize the city and I saw people there who would fit right into the hippest parts of New York City.  But no matter how hip it gets, the classics continue to stand strong.  Hansen's Sno-Bliz is the kind of establishent that is adorned with pictures of celebrities and of locals alike; that is serving the same qaulity product that it did 74 years ago; that always features a line of people waiting on one prehistoric looking machine to churn out some of the finest ice I've ever had the pleasure of having melt on my tongue.  I'm a sucker for classic flavor combinations so I got sugar high on cream of almond and wild cherry.  Other flavors amongst our group were cream of nectar and banana, topped with condensed milk, chocolate which tasted like a fudgsicle, and cream of peach with crushed strawberries and condensed milk.  The woman standing in front of us in line confided in us that she had been getting the same thing for thirty years: cream of nectar topped with condensed milk.  None of us followed through on her reccomendation but I admired her conviction.  There's got to be something special about a cup of ice and syrup that someone comes back for 30 years without fail.  

 

There's also something to be said about pralines.  Particularly the ones at Tee Eva's.  We were on our way to lunch at Guy's on Magazine St for some good ol' po'boys when we passed by a closed Tee-Evas (we later learned they had been out the night before marching in the parade as members of the Baby Dolls and so their late opening was excusable) and spotted pralines cooling on the counter.  We were coming back after lunch.

We came back after lunch.

 And I tasted my first, and possibly best praline.  But not until I had a bubblegum syrup soaked snow ball, which is blue, not pink, contrary to some expectations.  I then channeled this high quanitity of sugar into buying three dresses.  I often act reckless under the influence.  And I'm not sure what sort of pralines I was eating before but if these are the new benchmark then I don't want to eat enything but puddles of caramelized sugar studded with soft pecans from now on.  

And the gluttony didn't end with sugar comas.  Rather, it continued, at a more sophisticated pace, at Antoine's - New Orleans' oldest and most tradition imbued restaurant.  This was the place people used to dress up to go, where grandfathers took their sons for Sunday lunch, where families celebrated special occasions.  This was were we ended up spontaneously for lunch on our last day, casually dressed, unaware that the front room (where we were promptly seated) was actually intended for tourists and oblivious locals.  Regardless, the meal was really quite good.  I began with escargot a la bordelaise which was escargot like I've never had it before: baked in a rich red wine sauce and topped with cheese and parsely, begging to be sopped up by soft, warm fresh bread.  

This was followed by my first bowl of gumbo.  Yup, never had gumbo before.  It was dark and rich with shrimp and crab and crawfish with a small mound of rice in the middle.  It was such a cute mound of rice.  I can only hope I did it justice.

 And because I couldn't risk letting my newly elevated blood glucose dip too low we finished our meal with one of the better bread puddings of my life.  There was no recognizable border between the bread cubes, which lent to a uniformity I never realized bread pudding could acheive.  And although it was creamy it wasn't mushy but rather required a bit of chew.  It was studded ever so sparsely with golden raisins and pecans so that you were brought back to reality from that goddam uncanny creamy bread. It was nestled in a pool of deeply amber caramel and topped with a vanilla bean studded freshly whipped cream and it was perfect. 

New Orleans is perfect.  It's a city with traditions so strong and bread pudding so delicious it would take an apocolypse to take it down.  New Orleans is a big deal and coincidentally I picked up Saveur's special edition issue on... New Orleans.  Coincidence?  Perhaps.  I took it as a sign from the food magazine gods that I was in the right place at the right time.  Hallelujah.  

Things that tasted good this week

So another week of tomfoolery and gluttony passes us by, poorly documented but well remembered nevertheless. On Wednesday I ate an incredibly satisfying everything bagel with vegetable cream cheese from Bagel Bob's on University Place.  There's almost a whole 1/8 of a serving of vegetables in that shit.  Healthy food, really.  

On Thursday, amidst a blur of naked juice and chocolate covered goji berries and a not sufficiently grilled dining hall grilled cheese I most vividly recall Thursday evening's pizza.  Although it was ravenously devoured before having to run off to check out an apartment in Brooklyn, it was not ravenously devoured for naught.  Ray's Pizza Bagel Cafe has tasty pizza, amongst them was the ricotta spinach which is a favorite in my book of favorite pizzas, and I was not disappointed by the one Ray makes. It was large enough for a respectable fold and delicious enough to be remembered 5 days later even though the spinach totally tasted as if there was a freezer somewhere in its past but that's part of the charm of cheap slices of pizza I think.

On Friday, I ate tasty Mediteranean food at Sticks on 23rd, but today, I am too lazy to draw a realistic representation of this whole experience which consisted of fries with feta, meatballs and tatziki, fresh whole wheat rosemary pita, a bulgar salad reminiscent of tabbouleh, and chicken on a stick shared amongst friends.  Instead, I will draw an unrealistic yet accurate representation of this meal:

Sometimes a smiley face is all it takes. Today's liberal use of emoji's is a prime example.

Other times all it takes is some stale donuts on a Saturday morning to start your day off right.  Nothing says I'm going to have a mediocre day better than sprinkles and crusty frosting. 

However, a mediocre day I did not have.  It ended with a lovely little shindig in our common room featuring an array of delicoious southern inspired foods such as chicken pot pie, mac and cheese, biscuits, creamed kale and leeks with cannelini beans, cornbread drizzled with lyle's golden syrup, brown butter rice krispie treats, and magnolia bakery's banana pudding.  All consumed alongside some sweet iced tea.  We sure do have some funky fresh times.

Also, this is how you prep kale in college:

On the floor because the kitchen has no counter space.