the underbelly

A long, long time ago…back before the crash when people had dreams – attainable dreams – back about….three years, I lived in Los Angeles for a summer. LA is my birthplace. We lived in the lovely, formerly hippy playground of Venice Beach. As a kid I remember playing in the Pacific, watching the inhumanly muscular guys show off in spandex on Muscle Beach, being taken care of by homeless people (that’s true, by the way, just ask my dad). So moving back to the same general area (West LA) was a bit of a let down – nothing’s ever as good as you remember it being when you were five. Though, I will continue to go to Disneyland with the hopes that it will be as good, just once, until I die. ANYWAY. What LA lacked in its former neon happiness that summer so long ago, it made up for in food. Japanese food to be specific. It’s where I first discovered ankimo – monkfish liver. Back then I found it in a little sushi place on Sawtelle. So when I found it in New York like this:

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. But I did know I had to buy it. So along with my multiple slightly-better-than-average ramen packs I got a log of monkfish liver. It was already steamed into its tubular form and it came with a small pack of soy sauce, so I figured it was ready to be eaten. 

Appetizing, no? No. No, it wasn’t. And if I hadn’t known that I loved it so much back in the day, I probably would have been a little nervous to eat it. 

I sliced it up onto some leftover rice and topped the bowl with ponzu sauce. 

Still doesn’t look very appetizing.  But oh man it was satisfying. It has a wonderful, subtly livery, foie-y flavor (yes, I realize that’s redundant). Just for fun here’s a picture of the terrifying creature that this scrumptious treat comes from: 

 Frightening. It’s like an evil puddle of grease with teeth.

So I recently left my internship in order to dedicate myself to freelance writing. I had images of myself hard at work in a coffee shop – typing away, sipping on a large mug of tea, pushing the glasses I don’t own but sometimes think I need up my nose…instead….I made pickles. 

With the abundance of dill that I have from my CSA shipment a friend of mine (whose awesome new blog you can see here) suggested I make easy pickles from a Mark Bittman Recipe. Here’s essentially all it called for:

Kirby pickles (I got “minicukes,” which I think are essentially the same thing), a big bunch of dill, salt, garlic and water. The recipe also calls for caraway seeds or dill seeds. I had neither. Instead I stuck some pepper corns into the mix and a little be of lemon juice towards the end. Since the recipe doesn’t call for vinegar these pickles are more salty than pickly. It also means they only last about a week. But they’re amazingly delicious, refreshing and seriously easy to make. 

The ingredients ready to be pickl-ized. All you need to do is boil a cup of water, mix it with the salt, add the ingredients and cover with water. 

Voila. Then you let them sit under a lid at room temperature for about 24 hrs. 

And then you have pickles!!! Stick them in the fridge and munch on them or add them to tuna to make an awesomely mild tuna salad like I did for lunch today. 

I think it’s a little sad how proud I am of this. I just put things in a brine and left them alone. But I am seriously proud. I guess when you’re mildly unemployed it’s the little things that count….sigh….anyway. Hooray pickles!

My good buddy and I joined a CSA this year. Yup, I tapped back into my Northern Cali hippy roots. And it feels awesome. Here’s last weeks shipment and at the bottom a little dish I made with garlic scapes – something totally new to my greenery vocabulary. 

Collard greens, parsley and spinach

More parsley and dill. (note: I have SO much dill this week. What do I do?)

Radishes!

Collard greens, garlic scapes and an interested kitten (they loved the garlic…I think that one’s Otto…can’t be sure from this angle)

My sauté of garlic scapes (which taste somewhere between leeks, garlic and green onions) cannellini beans, garlic, cherry tomatoes and collard greens. An awesome hodgepodge of a meal on an unseasonably chilly June evening. 

I faced a common problem the other day. What do you do when you have all this left over sea urchin? I know. It’s like when you’re inundated with tins of caviar or don’t know what to do with all that champagne. So what did I do?  I made pasta. 

I’d never had sea urchin pasta before, but I’d read about it…..in places….anyway it’s not like there’s that many urchin recipes out there. No urchin preserves. No urchin dip. So pasta it was. I sauteed up some garlic and tomatoes and then tossed in about half of the urchins (chopped to the size of a small fingernail as the recipe told me – which btws is the grossest chopping instruction I’ve been given) at the end, just to warm them up. Then I transferred that concoction to a bowl and boiled up some spaghettini. A bit of olive oil, some pepper and then the urchin mixture was added to the now drained pasta. I mixed all of that together, tossed it into a bowl and topped it all off with a few more pieces of urchin and cheese. Yum. It was creamy and oceany and incredibly satisfying. Definitely going to happen again.

Uni from Deluxe Food Market in Chinatown. 

MMMMmmmm….fresh sea urchin gonads. All of that for $11. Tonight I just ate it raw with some ponzu sauce and lemon juice. I still have a lot left over (uni is rich) so I think I’ll try whipping it into some spaghetti…unless anyone else has some more inspired ideas?

That’s real. It’s a whole chicken and it goes in a can. You just heat it up at 475 degrees in an oven for 10-15 minutes and you have cooked chicken. From a can. I’d really like to make a joke about this. But it’s hard. It is a joke. It’s an entire chicken….in a can. If anyone knows where I can find one of these, please let me know. I think it’d make a good decorative centerpiece.

[foodnetworkhumor.com]

Just in case you don’t read the London Sun on a regular basis, there was an article a couple of days ago that revealed that “lads do not find women more attractive after downing a few pints.” Shit. Apparently the opposite is true: they are more likely to find women – who they would usually get the hots for – unattractive. So ladies, stop forcing booze down your crush’s throat and get to the gym. (Btws, the study also theorized that being drunk does not affect age perception. So when hubby comes home from shtupping an 18 year-old saying that, “Hey babe, I though she was 34, I was drunk,” tell him, that the London Sun disproved that and then tell him hey, even if she is 34 it’s still not cool, douche.) Read more about how all hope is lost for us uggos here.

Lager that is. 

I’d seen these guys sitting in my local Trader Joe’s but hadn’t taken the leap to try them out until a reader vouched for them.  I trust my readers implicitly because they have the intelligence to read my blog.  They are indeed the perfect drink for simpler times: 6.2% alcohol to dull the pain of underemployment and give hope for the next day, $3.99 for a six-pack to keep the wallet happier because giving up drinking is not an option (see reason one) and they come in cans, which take up less space in a fridge so you can buy more of them.  

Taste-wise?  It’s heavier than I would have expected – which is a good thing.  Low on the hops.  Not to fizzy – all the better for drinking quickly after you’ve heard that you’ve been turned down for yet another job and no, that member of the opposite sex (or same sex, or middle sex) you had your eye on was actually interested in your friend, not you.  But I found it necessary to add a little lemon juice to brighten up the brewskie.  Anyway, looks like I have another reason to be more of a regular than I already am at TJ’s.  Huzzah.

Those badly photographed little morsels are the best thing I’ve eaten in a long time – chocolate-covered fritos from my favorite little Texan, Resalin.  Slightly spicy, very salty, with that perfect addition of dark, creamy chocolate.  Yum.  I had some chocolate-covered corn nuts not so long ago.  These trump those little wonders.  I don’t like fritos or corn nuts on their own.  But with chocolate?  It’s like the manufacturer forgot something when he released them all plain and naked – sans chocolate.  Next up?  Chocolate-covered Cool Ranch Doritos.

*Recently I went on a little vacay to Jamaica.  A full post detailing some of the more important things I learned on said trip will appear as soon as I get my lazy self to develop the pictures (we used a disposable camera…yes they still exist).  Until then please enjoy:

Bojangle’s!  If you ever find yourself with a layover (or 10 minutes to spare) in the Charlotte, NC airport then do your belly a favor (for the rest of your body it will be more like a violent assault than a favor) and buy yourself some biscuits from Bojangle’s.  

There is the bacon, egg and cheese biscuit.  The biscuit itself is flaky, ridiculously buttery, perfect.  The cheese is plastic, which works in this situation, and the bacon is salty – adding just the right amount of sodium to ensure a heart attack a little bit sooner than before.  Personally I like a sausage, egg and cheese better – more fat = more better. 

This is their masterpiece.  A fried chicken cutlet on a biscuit.  Nothing more, nothing less.  No sauce.  No cheese.  Just chicken and biscuit and fried.  Yum.  Honestly I’ve started to understand why people live in the South.  If the airport food is this good then I can’t even begin to think about the real food.  Some times after a late night of beering I find myself craving these little morsels.  It’s good that New York doesn’t have this, I try to convince myself, for my arteries sake….