Trivia night is tonight at Bar Great Harry. Located at the corner of Smith and Sackett in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Hosted by a couple of crazy kids from Rocketship, the comic book store. 8:30pm. Dogs and dawgs welcome. One scumbag at a time, please.

“Look, my gut tells me Backstreet, and that’s where my brain is. With my gut. They is roomates. But sometimes they don’t get along too well – you know they is always arguing about the bills.”

For some reason this awesomeness slipped through my fingers last December. It’s Anthony Bourdain having an Xmas bird with Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme.

This is either a wonderful dream or a terrible nightmare. 

I haven’t eaten a fresh tomato in eight months.

Sometimes the take-out places will try to sneak in halved grape tomatoes in my green papaya salad and I just eat around them. I see them in the supermarket and don’t even walk down their aisle. I omit them from recipes unless I can get away with using some canned San Marzano ones.

Tomato, I miss you. I will wait for you.

It’s totally gonna be like this.

If you stock up on cologne and Campari in your hotel room, Salma Hayek will totally let you rail her on the bathroom sink.

Maybe you’ve seen the Pizza Hut commercials proclaiming that they now serve pasta. This got me thinking: What is the advantage of ordering pasta delivered from them?

Let’s say it takes them thirty minutes to get to your place. In thirty minutes, you could pull a Rachael Ray and do the easiest “cooking” possible: Boil water (gas and water being virtually free), throw in some Ronzoni ($2 a box), toss with jar of shitty Ragu ($3) and maybe sprinkle some of that Kraft parmesan “cheese” from that green shaker. Or if you want to get fancy, you can sprinkly some 4C bread crumbs on top and stick it under the broiler for a couple of minutes. Estimated cost: $5 for a shitload (”shitload” meaning four to six servings).

Cooking in this bachelor-chow type manner is a half-step harder than heating up a Hungryman dinner (which probably is available in pasta flavor). You can argue that it requires the same amount of effort to mute the television, call Pizza Hut, order, put on pants, answer the door and do the math to get your change back. Pizza Hut’s pasta feeds four (not sure if the portion is for four fat asses as an entree or four USDA recommended portions) and costs $12 plus tip (unless you are cheap bastard)*.

Now, I haven’t tried Pizza Hut’s pasta, but I’ll bet twenty bones that it tastes the same as the recipe above or even a Lean Cuisine or something. And I bet you are more likely to get the shits from The Hut, too.

Check out the ingredients and nutritional contents.

(*If you are a severe recluse with social anxiety disorder, you can order online or through text messaging – without pants on.)

Lady, if you can afford that manicure, you can afford more delicious, nutritious food.

Here’s another entry from The Zodiac Cookbook.

Taurus: April 21-May21. Its symbol is the Bull, and its element is Fire. The Emerald is its birthstone, and Friday is the luckiest day of the week.

The Taurean is a person of high achievement but great innate modesty. You are persistent and persevering, and a great admirer of things of the past. you hoard your mother’s and your grandmother’s recipes and set great store by family dishes which you cook for all holidays and family celebrations. Should a recipe fail, you will not abandon it, but will try it again and at once! The Taurean enjoys the good things of life and should guard against eating or drinking to excess. You love sweet desserts: the richer, the better! And a box of candy can be our downfall! Since your love for color is marked, you will create colorful combinations of foods and interesting menus. The Taurean is born under the money sign, and expensive food and drink are especially to your liking!

With your sensitivity to the arts, you provide a pleasant background for your dinner parties.

Here are a few favorite dessert recipes which will suit your sweet tooth!

Sandra Lee type recipes for lemon ice-box cake, choco soufflé, carrot cake deluxe and surprise pies are listed.

Women like chocolate? That’s crazy talk.

You probably already know of my dislike of the concept of brunch. I don’t believe in it and I think it’s evil: It ruins a big Sunday night dinner. I’m all like, “Hey, you wanna come over for Sunday roast?” and you’re all like, “I’d love to, but I had a really big brunch.” and I’m all like, “You cock.” Also, I don’t like breakfast foods: When I wake up, the last thing I want is a shitload of carbs with sugar on it.

There’s some other food thing people obsess over that I’m not into: Pizza. It’s not that I don’t enjoy pizza. The thing is that that I don’t crave pizza. Everyone I know has a major hankerin’ for pizza every so often. But not me. I am abnormal and crave things like salad. Even at Pizza Express (which I go to everytime I go to The U.K.), I order the pizza with the salad on it (the SoHo pizza–which has raw “rocket” aka roquette aka arugula). Should I be ashamed to be a New Yorker? I know what good pizza is and I know where to find it. I just don’t want it as much as other people do.

A Jedi craves not these things.

For your health!

Ferran Adria wrote: “The difference today between home cooking and restaurant cooking is wider than it ever has been. In the old days, even as recently as when I began to cook, the amateur was nearly at the level of the professional. That’s all changed massively. Now the difference in difficulty between cooking done at home and haute cuisine is on a scale of one to a hundred.”

I love home cooking. I greatly appreciate Cathy’s food blog Not Eating Out in New York: She does some amazing, creative home cooking and on a limited budget. On the other hand, my greatest pleasure is eating out in New York. There are amazing restaurants doing things the home cook can’t (because of resources or scale or cost or time). Plus I love sitting back, enjoying company, trying new things, being waited upon and having someone else cook amazing food. And because it’s a once-in-awhile luxury (plus the fact that I know how much hard work goes into it to make it perfect and seamless), I can appreciate it even more.

There’s a secret in NYC dining that shouldn’t be a secret. It doesn’t get written up for some reason. It’s Del Posto’s Enoteca. For $45 you get five amazing courses in the same dining room where they serve $120 monk fish to rich business men and ladies who lunch. Tonight, we had things like octopus with al dente white beans and house-made orchiette with rabbit ragu and pork saltimbocca.

The dining room is amazing–reminiscent of olde timey New York. Really, this is one of those places that make you really appreciate being able to afford to eat out. If you are looking for an upscale place (three stars from NY Times!) to take your visiting parents without spending all of your rent money, then I urge you to please please please go there to eat some of the best Italian food you can get in this country. No reservations required.

Del Posto
85 10th Ave (between 15th and 16th Streets)
New York, NY 10011
212-497-8090

$45!

Sure, you can get purebred luncheon meats like ham or turkey. But olive loaf is an unholy alliance of bologna (snouts and asses pureed and put back together again– like Frankenstein but not as lonely) and green olives with pimentos. The result is a sweet, sweet forbidden fruit. And that is the money fruit. Er, money meat, in this case.

At work we started making our own dried sopresetta and chorizo (courtesy of Charcuterie and chemicals) and lamb flavored Slim Jim type dealies. I really want to figure out how to make olive loaf.

Here’s a haiku for my love:

Oh, my olive loaf
Soon you will be hip, trendy
NY Mag bloggings

Soon, my pretty, soon.