I have yet to mention my enormous, unrelenting, unfaltering love for seafood. Combine that my new found obsession with French food and you get bouillabaisse - a dish I have eaten three times in last three weeks. Unfortunately, I feel self-conscious about taking photos of it with my crappy point and shoot camera with a flash in the kind of places that serve it. So here’s a photo I “borrowed” from the internet. It’s the best one I could find and it still doesn’t do it justice.

If you are unfamiliar, bouillabaisse is an uber-delicious cornucopia of various fish and shellfish and veg in a seasoned tomato based broth and served with rouille on toasted baguette slices. It’s the French version of the Italian based cioppino (which I’ve made at home a couple of times, despite the high cost). I think the broth in the bouillabaisse is more complex than the cioppino, but I’ve never had cioppino in a restaurant. The important thing is that I can cram as many different kinds of seafoods as possible into my gullet with just one dish.

You must understand that, for me, this is the food equivalent of Jenna Jameson or Pam Anderson or whoever the boys touch themselves to these days.

Matt and I went to Bouillabaisse 126 in Caroll Gardens yesterday for the last night of Dine In Brooklyn (B126 being the only participating restaurant in “Columbia Waterfront“). The restaurant is right next door to Schnäck and it’s backyard can be seen from our new backyard. C’est merveilleux! (That’s French for “fuckin’ awesome”.)

I’m on a mission to try the bouillabaisse at every restaurant in Brooklyn that serves it. Any other suggestions about good French eats in Carroll Gardens would be much appreciated, because there seems to be a wonderfully surprising amount of them.

Seafood, I love you.

The world’s stinkiest cheese has been named: Vieux Boulogne.

I kinda wanna try it. I mean, it can’t be worse than getting Dutch ovened, right?

I was eating my yogurt concoction a few nights ago. Matt laughed at me.

“What?”, I said.
“You’re nodding your head.”
“You’ve never seen me do that before? I do it when I am eating something delicious.”
“Yeah, but it’s yogurt and fruit. That combination is a no brainer.”
“But it’s yogurt and fruit the way I like it. Not like those pre-arranged jobs in the plastic pots.”

I spent a lot of time picking out healthy yogurts the other week at the market. Before I became obsessed with reading food labels, I assumed all yogurt was healthy. That’s the way they market it: “It helps you fit into that bikini” and they show some girl all frumpy and she starts to eat Yoplait and then she puts on a ugly bikini and gets gawked at by brohams at Muscle Beach. Or the one with the interracial lesbian couple who are always lounging around, so happy and full of life because of yogurt. Or maybe they are stoned. Feed your kids Go-Gurt and it makes them ride skateboards with lots of safety gear and call you a “cool mom” so you get to be all smug while you clean the kitchen and prep your husband’s dinner because, god damn it, it better be ready by the time he gets home or so help me, God…

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So, I’m not a great cook by any means. I can make a decent meal that might get me a little closer to a girl’s bed than, say, a trip to the Olive Garden, but I don’t really have such great chops in the kitchen. And when I’m cooking for myself, laziness and apathy set in and I don’t really put too much effort into making things taste or look that great. That said, there have been times when, faced with a lack of money and/or the fact that all stores and food vendors are closed, I have been left to eat a mish mash of the most disgustingly incongruous flavors known to man. “Meals” that pushed the limits of even my indifference. A prime example of this is something I made for myself in early post-college years.

I lived in a small studio apartment in Astoria. It was 11pm and I was broke and starving. I looked in my fridge. It was slim pickins. Obviously, the only thing to do was to create this bizarre and disgusting dish with the few edibles I had:

Poor editor pseudo burrito

1 large egg
1 slice American cheese
2 hot dogs
1 small onion
1 (stale) flour tortilla

Heat oven to 350.
Thinly slice the onion and sautee in olive oil until opaque. Set aside.
Lightly fry the egg in a non-stick pan. When it is cooked sufficiently (you want the yolk to still be runny), place it in the center of the tortilla. Place the hot dogs on top and sprinkle the onions over it. Top this with the slice of cheese. Wrap the tortilla up and toss it in the oven for like 10 minutes or so.

I ate this with various condiments. My least favorite combination was russian dressing, although mayonnaise and Dijon mustard gave it a run for its money. Ketchup was the least disgusting.

Drink pairing: aerated tap water.

The moral of the story is as follows: Don’t be a poor editor.

I am now a poor graduate student and I understand that having a freezer full of Tower Isles beef patties is preferable to such unpleasant experimentation.

Today I noticed that Vincent’s Gmail chat’s status message said, “I’m a 4-course meal, you’re a one dollar hero”. Of course, I had to investigate.

Chewy: tell me more about these four courses

Vincent: diced genius sauteed in testosterone

a thug/academic terrine

filet of sexchampion with a sensitive lover reduction

dessert is an incomparable vocabulary sundae

Chewy: wine paring? beer paring?

Vincent: old e

of course

or crystal

Chewy: then what do you have to drink with the $1 hero?

Vincent: grape drink

It turned out “I’m a 4-course meal, you’re a one dollar hero” is really a line from a song by a rap group called Black Moon. And that it’s some sort of “metaphor”.

Like a lot of other avid cooks and eaters, I’ve gotten over The Food Network. I don’t think I need to explain why because Anthony Bourdain already did an excellent job doing that. One thing he didn’t mention is that at some point after watching X amount of hours of the current Food Network programming, people like me, and probably you, plateau and stop learning new things. There are only so many basic tips and techniques they choose to share. And then they share the same ones again and again. I know that there is much more to learn about various ingredients, cooking techniques and various cuisines. So I was excited to find my new favorite cooking show: Simply Ming, which you catch on public television.

What makes Ming Tsai a good host in my eyes? He’s got all the basics down: He’s good on camera, explains all of his steps and ingredients, and makes simple, easy, cheap food. And I’m learning the techniques of a cuisine that I’m not familiar with cooking. What makes him an excellent host? He’s genuine. Like Ina Garten genuine. He comes across like he’s a nice dude - the kinda guy that if you stopped him in the street, he’d be more than happy to take a photo with you and wouldn’t mind if you gave him a hug. Think a less arrogant version of any male on The Food Network (save for Michael Chiarello and maybe Alton Brown). Best of all, he doesn’t use hackneyed phrases like “off the hook” or have any annoying personality quirks like mispronouncing the word “spatula”. Ming is a huge departure from the over-acted, insincere tasting of tiny bites that Giada and Rachael Ray take: Close or roll your eyes, moan and put the stress on each word of, “MMM. THIS IS. SOOOOO. GOOD. MMM. SERIOUSLY, YOU GUYS.” As hilariously shown here.

Each episode, Ming focuses on one ingredient. In one episode I caught, the theme was ginger syrup (a ginger flavored simple syrup). He made ginger beef and leeks (which took about five minutes to actually cook - in your face, Ray Ray) , blue ginger gimlet, ginger-limeade, glazed chicken thighs with carrots, and a chilled shrimp and cucumber salad with a ginger vinaigrette. AND he did a segment where he went to China and interviewed his adorable parents about food. All that in one episode! How efficient! Can YOU cook a three course meal AND compose two different cocktails AND fly to China and back within thirty minutes?! I don’t think so! Face!

Ming used to be on The Food Network. I guess he didn’t pull in enough viewers because there’s not enough Italian or Southern flavors in his cooking. I don’t know why ethnic foods scare the majority of Food Network viewers. Please leave comments with your thoughts on why.

Broadway Panhandler is sponsoring a knife sharpening and knife skills event. You can have up to three knvies sharpened for $10, which will be donated to City Harvest.

Saturday March 31, 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Knife skills workshop from 12 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

65 East 8th Street
(between Broadway and University)
NY, NY
212-966-3434

I stumbled upon these three amusing lists from WaiterRant.net. Check them out if you are/were a restaurant worker or an avid restaurant goer.

50 Signs Your Waiter Might be an Asshole.
50 Signs You Might be An Asshole Customer.
50 Signs You’re Working in a Bad Restaurant.

I love cooking fish steaks and fillets because generally, they are very easy and fast. I mean super fast. Faster than it takes the delivery guy. I use my toaster oven to finish the fish. Don’t hate on the toaster oven and pigeon hole it as a carb-only device. It’s a miniature oven that heats up faster and uses less energy. There’s no reason for me to use an entire regular oven when I’m cooking just one serving of fish.

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The NPR Food podcast today had a feature on a new up and coming pho chain, Pho 24. Based in Saigon, is expanding rapidly with over fifty locations worldwide.

Owner Ly Qui Trung says fast food pho does well and will continue to do well because it is healthier and tastier than the American fast food franchises, which have recently opened up shop in Vietnam.

He hopes to open the first U.S. Pho 24 at the end of the year in California.

Read the story here

Along with this surge of Vietnamese culture catching on in America, I am anticipating the arrival of dudes who exclusively date Vietnamese girls. They will make halfie babies and then I’ll have someone to hang out with who doesn’t complain about allergies and sunburn.