Ginger Beef

This is a great, very easy-to-make "Asian" dish — not sure where it comes from — that you can literally put together in 20 minutes. I garnish it with red serrano chilies from my balcony but then again I have a steel tongue.

Ingredients:

1/2 onion chopped in square slices as if for stir-fry
1 large chile (serrano, jalapeño, habanero or to taste,) diced
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons grated ginger
1/2 pound sliced Boston Steak (what they call it in Montreal), or good-quality sirloin--slice as for Stroganoff
Shiitake mushrooms, sliced (10-15 mushrooms)
1/2C chicken broth
Lemon juice
Mirin
Chinese chili sauce (Kum-kee chili-garlic comes to mind)
Stir-fry powder
Cornstarch (if needed)
Cilantro for garnish

Method:

Sauté steak in canola or peanut oil on high heat, 1 minute each side; set aside (add few shakes pepper + garlic salt while sautéing).

Add a little oil, sauté mushrooms until they lose all their water--they will first get very liquidy and then start to dry up. Set aside.

Add more oil. On high heat add onions, chile, ginger. Stir constantly, turn to medium high, 4-5 minutes. Add garlic, cook one minute.

Add 1/4 cup Mirin (Japanese sweet cooking rice wine), stir well. Add 1/2 cup chicken broth, stir in . Add splash Schezuan sauce (or other Chinese-style hot-pepper sauce) and a few shakes Chinese stir fry powder (or similar powder--thickens the sauce.) Add mushrooms, stir well. Add splash lemon juice. Now add beef, stir in, cover, simmer on low. Serve in 10 minutes.

If not thick enough, add 1 tsp. cornstarch. If too thick add a little chicken broth. Serve on long-grain rice with cilantro garnish.

Thai Mussaman Beef Curry

This curry is made in the southern part of Thailand that is close to the border with Malaysia, and is obviously heavily Indian-inspired, the Thai twist here being the lemongrass, galangal and coconut milk.

The ingredient list looks daunting, but most of it can be bought at your friendly neighborhood Asian market. The actual cooking of this dish is incredibly easy and this is one of the most flavorful curries I've ever prepared.

Mussaman curry paste

Dry ingredients:
1 T coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
3 cloves
10 black peppercorns
2 dried red chilies

Wet ingredients:
1 1/2 T chopped fresh lemongrass
1 1/2 T grated galangal (easiest to do frozen, with a Microplane grater)
2 T minced garlic
1/2 cup minced shallots
6 Thai chilies, chopped finely (optional)
1 T salt

Method:

Dry fry the dry spices in a nonstick pan on medium heat until toasted but not burned. Grind to a powder in a coffee grinder reserved for spices. Combine with wet ingredients.

Main curry

1 cup shallots, chopped finely
4 T garlic, chopped finely
3 T coconut cream (comes in blocks)
3 T ground Spanish peanuts (with skin on)
1 cup unsweetened coconut milk
2 T nam pla (Thai fish sauce)
3 T tamarind paste (comes in a plastic container in the consistency of ketchup)
3 T palm sugar (brown sugar may be substituted)
3 bay leaves
3 cups chicken broth
2 T Thai red curry paste
1 1/2 lbs. good quality top sirloin, cut into 3/4-inch cubes
1 large russet potato, peeled and cubed
Cilantro
Ghee (clarified butter) or peanut oil

Method:

Brown beef in nonstick frypan with ghee (or oil) in two batches. Set aside. In more ghee/oil, sauté curry paste with shallots, garlic, and coconut cream until well combined and cream is melted.

Add meat back to pan. Add ground peanuts. Sauté 10 minutes uncovered, stirring often.

Add coconut milk, nam pla, tamarind paste, palm sugar, bay leaves, chicken broth and curry paste. Stir until well combined, simmer uncovered 15 minutes, stirring often.

Add potatoes and simmer on low, covered, 25 more minutes, or until potatoes are tender. Serve on coconut jasmine rice (see recipe below) with cilantro garnish and cucumber/red onion/tomato/ chile side salad.

Coconut Thai Rice

This subtly spiced rice will just hint of coconut — no need to overpower it.

2 cups Thai jasmine rice
2 tsp ghee or peanut oil

3 cloves
3 cardamom pods
2-inch stick cinammon
1 bay leaf

3 cloves garlic, minced
3 large shallots, finely chopped
1 tsp grated ginger (easiest to do with frozen ginger and a Microplane grater)
1/2 cup coconut milk
1 3/4 cups chicken broth

Method:

Wash rice several times until the water runs completely clear. Soak in cold water for 2 hours, or even overnight (past a certain point, the rice will no longer absorb any water.)

Drain rice in colander. In a large, nonstick frypan with a tight-fitting lid, sauté the cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaf and shallots in ghee or oil on medium for about five minutes. Add the rice, ginger and garlic, and sauté, stirring but making sure not to break the grains, for about five minutes more. Mix coconut milk and broth and heat in the microwave; add to the rice, stir to combine, reduce heat to minimum, cover tightly (you might want an aluminum foil assist) and steam for about 18 minutes. Turn off heat and wait ten minutes (or as long as you want after that.) Remove hard spices, fluff rice and serve.

Spring rolls at home

The spring rolls (egg rolls, harumaki) that one gets at Asian restaurants can be really awful: tired, greasy, limp and old.

But you can make them yourself. It really is not very hard. One tends to become intimidated by the long list of ingredients and the prospect of deep frying, but in reality, it’s not such a long list and the deep frying involves maybe two cups of oil and a small saucepan. The frying is over in five minutes, at most.

The most tedious aspect of making homemade spring rolls is the chopping of the ingredients, but again, a lazy afternoon in front of the kitchen TV or conversation with a friend can take care of this.


You can put pretty much anything you want in a spring roll. The only thing you have to remember is that you want a nice crunch of fresh vegetables to contrast the crispiness of the wrapper and the softness of the other fillings.

Here’s a recipe for chicken spring rolls, but you can substitute pork or shrimp or even leave it vegetarian.

A couple of things I consider essential to a good spring roll are:

Bean sprouts
Carrots
Garlic
Green onions (scallions)

All the rest is just gravy.

So, let’s assemble the ingredients:

Bean sprouts, washed
Carrots, julienned as finely as you can make them
Garlic, diced very finely
Grated ginger (freeze and then Microplane)
Green onions (scallions) sliced in thin rings
Snow peas/mangetouts, washed, with spine thread and both ends removed, then julienned
Red serrano chiles, julienned (optional)
Shredded cabbage (optional)
Shiitake or other non-supermarket mushroom, julienned
Boneless skinless chicken
Salt to taste
Spring roll wrappers
Peanut oil


The reason I haven’t given quantities is because it’s totally up to you — it’s like making a pizza. You can omit or add as you like.

In a nonstick frying pan, sauté ingredients in sesame or peanut oil in a rough order of which takes longest to cook, ie. chilies, carrots first, followed by mushrooms and snow peas. You basically just want them to fry for about 4-5 minutes total. The bean sprouts, green onions, cabbage and ginger can literally be thrown in last for about a minute just to warm them over. They’ll get cooked further during the deep fry.


Sauté the meat in sesame or peanut oil, if you’re using, separately until done. With chicken, brown all over and cook through. Same with pork. Cook shrimp (completely shelled) all the way through. Then fine-chop all.

Mix all the ingredients together and let cool to room temperature.

Your spring roll wrappers (they should be about 6” square) will be frozen. Bring the whole package up to room temperature. It will take about 30 minutes.

Put on the oil. To save oil, use a smallish pot, not a wok or a saucepan. I suggest a two-quart pot. Use enough oil to cover one spring roll, and preheat to upper medium-low — about 7 o’clock on your stove dial. It will take about ten minutes to get up to temperature, so now get to work making the rolls.

In a small bowl, mix a teaspoon of flour with about a couple of tablespoons of water. You want to make a runny paste. Have a pastry brush at hand. You can also use an egg, beaten slightly.

Peel off a spring roll wrapper. They will be quite sticky and hard to peel off, but if you have the right wrappers, they will be remarkably resilient and won’t tear, provided you do it very slowly.

Arrange the wrapper so it’s a diamond. Place some filling, perhaps half a cup to 3/4 cup, in the rough middle. Now fold the bottom corner over the filling and slightly tuck it in on the other side. Now fold in the sides as if you’re making an envelope. When they’re folded in, brush the top of the wrapper triangle with some flour-water, and roll the whole package like a cigar over the top.

You just made a spring roll.


With tongs, drop the roll into the oil. Chances are that the first one will cook very quickly — maybe only 30 seconds. But then the oil temperature will come down and the others will be easier to control.

If you want, cook them partially and then refrigerate. They’ll reheat well in a toaster oven. Serve with soy or garlic-chili sauce. They’ll be the best spring rolls you ever tasted — and you made them yourself.

Things you can add to a spring roll:

Bamboo shoots (thanks for reminding me, Naoko)
Asian noodles (glass or rice)
Mint
Cilantro
Parsley
Ham
Beef
Squash
Tofu
Salmon
Tuna
Crab
Lobster

Easy Spicy Garlic-Dill Pickles

The recipe is here.

Curry

I registered montrealcurry.com. Woo-hoo. Now . . . what's next?

L’Express Raviolis Maison

I’ve always loved the Raviolis Maison at L'Express, but they cost around $16 for five. Now I know why. I decided to try to duplicate them. I was lucky enough to get a recipe of the dish by Joël Chapoulie, the chef of L’Express, through my friend Shelley, and set about trying it out. It was pretty close, and now you can do it too. Note: although I made the ravioli pasta from scratch, you can use wonton wrappers to make the ravioli. And also note: this is a picture of MY raviolis, not L'Express's! Don’t bother making the raviolis from scratch unless you have a pasta machine; they’ll be too thick.

Freeze the raviolis after you make them and you can resurrect them on demand. About 5 or 6 with the sauce will make a full meal.

---

L'Express Raviolis Maison

For the filling (this step can be done the morning of the meal or the night before, but you want it cold before making the raviolis.):

1 lb mixture of ground veal, ground pork and ground beef
2 large shallots, minced finely
4 cloves garlic, minced finely
1/2 C Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1/4 C white wine
1/2 C veal stock
1T flour
Salt
Cracked black pepper
Oregano
Thyme
1 1/2 C finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano (do NOT use pregrated cheese from a container. Using a Microplane grater is highly recommended.)

Sauté the meat in a little bit of olive oil on medium heat, taking care to chop it with a wooden spatula so that it becomes a fine mince. When it has browned and the liquid boiled away (about ten minutes) add the wine and let that reduce until it has been absorbed by the meat.

Remove the meat from the pan and add some more olive oil. Sauté the shallots on medium heat until glassy (about 3 minutes) and add the garlic. Add the meat back to the pan. Liberally sprinkle salt and black pepper. Add oregano and thyme (either fresh or dried); about a tablespoon for each, but you can eyeball it.

In a container, mix the flour and the veal stock until smooth. Add to the meat mixture. Add the parsley and stir well.

Now add the parmesan, making sure to distribute it evenly; you don’t want little clumps of Reggiano in the middle of the filling.

Taste frequently, adding salt as needed (a teaspoon of sugar will help round it out.) You want to end up with a fairly thick, glossy filling that when cold will be easy to shape and not crumble when you make the ravioli. The Reggiano will help as a bonding agent for this and will create great flavor.

When the cheese is thoroughly incorporated throughout the mixture, remove from heat and put the filling into a container in the refrigerator. If it is completely cold it will be much easier to handle as a filling for the ravioli.

The goal in making the filling is that it should taste good enough to be eaten on its own, but provide a burst of flavor when cooked in the ravioli, so adjust seasonings constantly and taste constantly.

Raviolis

1 1/2 C unbleached flour
1 1/2 C durum semolina
5 large eggs
4-5 cloves crushed garlic (optional)

Whisk eggs and garlic together in bowl, add to flours. Mix thoroughly with fork. Knead in bowl with hands until firm enough to transfer to cutting board. Knead until smooth, about 12 minutes, into a ball. Wrap with plastic wrap and let rest for thirty minutes.

Divide into 4 and run sections through pasta machine until the last setting (five on an Imperial pasta machine.)

Cut pasta sheets into approximately one-foot sections, flouring liberally.

For each section, place about one teaspoon of filling per two inches on the bottom half of the pasta sheet.

With a pastry brush, moisten the top half of the pasta sheet with water. Fold over the fillings and carefully press out any air between each filling. Cut out the raviolis with a pastry wheel and trim any excess. Flour liberally and freeze immediately.

To cook, drop frozen ravioli into boiling, salted water. Bring again to boil and remove with a sifter after 8-10 minutes (don’t dump them into a colander.)


Mushroom sauce

10-12 Shiitake, cêpes or other good-quality mushrooms, sliced thinly
2 1/2 cups veal stock
1/2 C sherry
2 shallots
4 cloves garlic
4 T unsalted butter
1 T flour
Salt and pepper to taste

Sauté mushrooms on medium-high heat in two tablespoons butter until they give off their liquid and begin to brown. Add shallots, garlic, sauté for 2-3 minutes. Add sherry; with kitchen match, set alight and flambé.

Add veal stock and reduce for about thirty minutes until syrupy. Add remaining butter and stir well. If still too thin, stir flour into tablespoon of water and add to sauce. Adjust sauce with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve over raviolis with chopped parsley and Parmigiano Reggiano.

Pizza Test #1

I tried the broil-method pizza today. In case you haven’t been following, it’s an effort to get one’s home oven as hot as possible without breaking the lock on it and entering the 800-degree “clean” cycle (from which there is no return.) Then, one puts the pizza on a preheated stone as close as possible to the elements on 550-degree heat to try to duplicate the blast-furnace temperatures of coal and woodburning commercial pizza ovens.

Today’s experiment was a success. Not a resounding success, but a success nonetheless. The remarkable thing about the whole thing is its simplicity. I’ve mentioned that the way I used to make pizza, I’d par-cook the dough so it would support the ingredients better. This is because recipes I used to follow actually recommended cooking the pizza at 425 degrees! Or less! This is like boiling your spaghetti in hot tap water. The entire pie, if one loaded it with the usual ingredients, was one soggy mess. Thus, the pre-cooking.

What came with that was docking, or making holes all over the dough to prevent bubbles. Now I know that we want bubbles. Just that we want them only in certain places, namely, the outer crust.

One glaring limitation of the home oven, in addition to its lack of heat, is its narrowness. You won’t be baking any 18” pizzas any time soon.

The max seems to be 14”, so that’s what I aimed for. This, however, proved to be a mistake; hence, the not-a-resounding-success part. You’re already pushing it to expect to make a New-York-style pizza in a home oven. Trying to make a big one is an even bigger mistake. But I digress.

I have a pizza stone called a Hearthkit. It’s a blah-blah-blah make your oven a professional one blah-blah-blah. It seems to help a bit but I’m sure any pizza stone will do.

I positioned it on the top rack of the oven, as close to the elements as possible while still having access to it, and preheated the oven at 550F (broil) for 90 minutes.

I used frozen pizza dough from Pain Doré (I will get around to making my own dough as soon as I establish this method of pizza making as the right one.) Since I wanted to make one large pie instead of two medium, I lopped off about an 8th of the dough and used the remainder to make the pie.

I brought it to room temperature; after that it was fairly easy to manipulate.

You will have your favorite method of shaping the pie. I used a combination of a roller, the knuckle method and the steering-wheel method. It was good enough. The pie came just to the border of the cutting board — maybe 14”.

I loaded it up with the sauce — Aylmer whole tomatoes, tomato juice discarded, garlic and basil added and puréed with a hand mixer — and Mozza di Bufala cut into chunks. I’m a bit of a glutton and I like lots of toppings, so for me Kalamata olives, green pepper, red onion and Rosette de Lyon salame was showing restraint.

Once the pizza was assembled, there was no way I would have been able to get it onto the stone in one piece without this marvelous pizza peel (pictured.) Or gotten it off, for that matter. The pizza slid effortlessly onto the peel, soggy and all, and perfectly off onto the stone.

Cooking time was about 4 minutes — not bad for a home oven. The crust was crisp almost all the way around, my mistake being to try to make too big a pie. The very middle was still slightly undercooked. Next time, it will be two pies instead of one.

The pizza was lissome, crispy-yet bendy like NY-style pizza, thin, and very tasty. When it comes out of the oven, be sure to put it onto a wire rack instead of a cutting board or plate; this will prevent it from steaming where it sits.

I’m very impressed with this method and the pizza peel and will most definitely try to perfect it very soon.

A Slice of Heaven

How can I adequately describe New York? When I lived here as a child, I found it marvelous, magical, and frustrating. Today, I find it marvelous, magical and frustrating.

As a child, I didn’t go out to restaurants. More on that in a minute.

But yesterday I had to make a couple of choices: how best to arrange my day around several cab rides? It didn’t help that all the weather sources available were predicting the same thing: heavy rain.

It seems that weathermen are scarcely better than those who pull the handles of VLTs. The morning was cloudy, but the afternoon was spotless. And herein lies a tale.

New York is great. Downtown is amazing. But something you will soon find is that no matter how sunny it is in the sky, you will almost never see the sun. Everything is perpetually in shadow. It’s bizarre, to say the least. You can walk twenty blocks and never see the sun in a cloudless sky.

Once I got past that, I hopped a cab to where I used to live, on E. 76th St. and York. Everything was shrunken from what I remembered (I was ten.) Gentrified. There was a doorman at the building in which I used to live. There were no doormen when I was a kid.

Then, it was Ground Zero. Somehow, had to do that. To add to the list of weirdities, I found myself discussing 9/11 with a Chadian taxi dude who was in Darfur on 9/11. In New Yorkese.

The site itself was disappointing—nothing really to see, just a vast construction zone. But the cabbie brought it all home as he pointed down to the end of a large gap between a bunch of buildings: “See where all that empty space is? That’s where the World Trade Center used to be.”

And then, the crowning glory: Luzzo’s. It is rarely given to this misbegotten scribbler’s soul to experience a piece of heaven, but it was experienced on this night. If I had the money to expend on a plane ticket a day, it would be from Montreal to New York, and Luzzo’s every night onwards for the rest of my days.

We were a party of 8, but it seemed like a party for 200. None of us was from New York. None of us had ever eaten at Luzzo’s. But suddenly, Matteo, our server, was quickly our new best friend (and to the ladies, their new eye magnet.)

I quickly glommed onto the Pizza Dudes, a trio of hard-working men who were just steps from our table, whirling huge discs of flour and water and shoving things into furnaces.

When our first pizza came out—the Martha, with bufalo mozzarella, truffles and prosciutto, the entire table fell silent. After two or three bites, the murmurs were unanimous: this was the best pizza we had eaten in our entire lives. Unanimous. It was on a level several orders of magnitude above anything I have ever eaten. All by these three young dudes behind the counter (see video to follow.)

Crispy. Succulent. Cheesy. Burnt/not burnt. Buttery. Smoky. Chunky. Spicy/not spicy. Tomatoey. Something . . . as one very happy female member of our crowd mentioned, she would go down on her knees for the creator of this pie, and not for the reasons you would assume. And she willingly confided this to me, a perfect stranger until a half hour before.

And this was before we had the Arugula (tomato, mozzarella, prosciutto, shaved parmiggiano cheese, arugula.) I swear, I will never look at this humble green the same way again.

I tried to give the pizza men a twenty in lieu of a nice bottle of wine (they insisted they couldn’t drink on duty) and they finally accepted it. I only wish that that twenty could pay for the supreme pizza knowledge that those three guys hold within their skulls. If it were just a money issue, it would have been thousands.

The memory of those pies lies inexorably entwined within the dendrites and axons in my brain. I will never have another pizza that approaches this until I again sit down at a table in Luzzo’s.

But that’s just my opinion.

Back to Montreal today, and a checkin bag full of memories.

On the road #1

Best Western Convention Center, 522 W. 38th St., Room 605, 8:30 a.m.

The clock radio just barked into life, shouting something in Chinese. I'm hooked to the Internet with a balky Ethernet cable. It's grey and nasty outside the room and I can hear denizens wandering in the corridor outside.

Manhattan is happenin'! All the way through our drive from Newark airport--a nasty one-hour job through rush hour ending in the Lincoln tunnel--I marvelled at all the New Yawk signposts. Hoboken . . . Frankie!!!!! Empire State Building poking through everything, sadly on its own once more.

Hotel: Fanfuckingtastic! Very Japanese, approaching one of those micro-rooms for businessmen. Frill-less (viz: Ethernet cord) but ideal for a road warrior like moi.

Yesterday: priceless. Cab drivers in this city should each have their own reality show. The guy who took us from here to Peter Luger in Brooklyn was at turns surly, friendly, accommodating, and finally, expansive--an Egyptian bundle of Manhattanness that warmed the cockles of this cynic's heart. Once he heard us speak French, he realized we weren't the insects of the tourist world, and all his stories of learning French came tumbling forth.

And, Peter. Luger.

Peter,

Luger.

Peterluger.

When Indiana Jones finds the Holy Grail, there's a big production with Nazis and whirling Visitations from Above plunging down and bad guys' shrieking skulls and lots of noise.

This was Peter Luger. The Holy Grail!

I can honestly say I can now die, content. My last breath will be "I . . . went . . . to . . . Peter Luger." (Note: This properly belongs on my steak blog, but I'm so amped that it will be here first; when I get home and analyze the photos/video, I will post it there.)

Forget everything you've heard about Peter Luger, and start from scratch. At 7:30 last evening, it was an insane zoo.

My tiny boy was dwarfed by legions of men--yes, mostly men--swarming the entranceway and bar area, with waiters bustling through carrying trays of this and that, murmuring Excuse-Me s at every turn, but never was he in danger of being trampled. A more gentle crowd of gentlemen I have yet to encounter.

And oh gods, where should I start? Should I start at the perfect Martini (actually a Gibson, issued with nary a hairy eyebrow) that sent electric shudders of recognition for what it was: the preferred nectar of superior beings, with the exact combination of gin and vermouth, fairy-dusted with miniature orbs of holy cocktail onions? Exquisiteness is not a word that does this glass of magic justice. However, it was like being felled by a silver sledgehammer. On version 2.0, I was reluctantly forced to stop drinking for fear of ending up among the legs of my companions.

Then: bacon. The Bacon. The Exquisite Bacon-not-Bacon. And the Tomatoes. (Had to try these. "Daddy, these are the biggest tomatoes I've ever seen!" Yes, son, they were. Six inches across, I'd warrant. And every angstrom a taste treat.)

The bacon was superlative: meaty, juicy, thick and ultralounge. I'm sorry, there are no ordinary adjectives to describe it.

Then, the steak. The steak for two, medium rare, and the steak for two, medium. Of course, I cough in the plate of those who prefer their steak anything more than just sliced off the cow, but at Peter Luger, it doesn't matter. You are going to get The Perfect Steak.

And perfect it was. Oh, the regret! That I don't have a refrigerator to keep the leavings in. If ever there were a celestial doggy bag, this would have been it.

The sundae . . . I would go on, at length about the magnificence of this creation, but at that point the second martini kicks in and everything becomes somewhat hazy. I think I had an Irish coffee--that should tell you everything about the sundae. But creamy, world-class gooiness is what remains on the myelin sheaths of my dendrites this a.m.

And the famous surly waiters? Gimme a fuckin break. Our main guy almost went through hoops to give us a great experience, grabbing my SLR and video cameras at various points in the evening to document this historic event. Everyone at Peter Luger was a total joy to deal with--please toss the myths.

So, Holy Grail #1 accomplished. Where to now? Maybe the ultimate burger quest . . . trouble is, if I have an ultimate burger for lunch, will it leave the proper amount of room for Luzzo's?

Accelerated Decrepitude

Entropy, in case you didn’t know, is the default state of the universe. It means that, left to its own devices, any state will tend towards decay, randomness, and ultimately dissolution into the building blocks that formed it.

Ice will melt, the lettuce will rot, you’ll get fat.

Well, my kitchen has been hewing mightily to the entropic paradigm for nigh on thirteen years, and recently I decided to arrest its rapidly devolving development on multiple macromolecular fronts by clearing its entire innards to another similarly-afflicted entropic sinkhole of the house and just, well, starting the process all over again, this time from the Organized end of the spectrum.

That meant clearing every item out of every cabinet; every glass off every shelf; every decade-old box half-full of couscous; and then, the rampant, semi-vigilantic debridement of any physical object in the kitchen that I did not deem essential to its holistic welfare.

And boy, does that all feel good!

I cleared out all the cabinets. Amazing what piles up, and amazing what you think you will need someday. I found probably 50 hard taco shells in various forms of preservation, for one thing. It’s Old El Paso’s fault, not mine. Who eats 15 fucking taco shells at a sitting? And who eats tacos two nights in a row? Well, I do, but I vary it with flour tortillas the second night.

Then there were the pastas. Half-filled boxes of Barilla penne lisce and rigate, masking-taped incomplete boxes of spaghettini and linguine fini, soup macaronis, farfalles, rigatonis, manicottis, tortellinis. Most of which had only marginally seen the light of day since 1997. See, when I get a great culinary idea and the thought of using what's in the cupboard versus what's fresh at the store today comes up, guess which choice wins.

Then came the mismatched cutlery. This stuff is heavy in a garbage bag, but the crockery is worse. I threw out cups and glasses that I have been staring at every day, mutely, for ten years, without ever lifting one to my lips.

Oh, I could blame my ex-wife, but really, it’s me who just couldn’t deal with getting around to dealing with it.

But wonders never cease when entropy is repelled. Newly-wiped clean shelves are now lined with minty-fresh shelf padding. There are dark corners which never saw the light but are now pregnant with anticipation for what will be lined up in their parking spaces.

The kitchen has a new lemon-yellow coat of paint and ceiling-sunken halogens and screams Look At Me Now. I am whole again, I am new, and just watch me fry to the four corners of the universe.

Sharia Lite

Why do fatwas have to be fat? Couldn’t we have thinwas? Instead of being stoned to death with rocks, perhaps we could be pelted with kebabs. Beef, preferably. A good, lean cut of beef would make a decent thinwa.

WayBack When

There's a treasure trove of stuff that's lost from the montrealfood site but that exists in Cyberspace at the WayBack Machine.

Back in the early days, it really was a blog. I just didn't know that's what you called it.