From the category archives:

food

Frita Batidos: Fruit Flies, Terminal Hair, Bad Attitudes, and a Mean Streak

October 26, 2011

I am not in the habit of writing reviews of restaurants as I rarely feel compelled to force my bitchiness judgments of a particular establishments merits on another’s subjective experience, but tonight’s dinner at Frita Batidos was so piss-poor that I feel obliged to warn others for their own protection. This was my fourth meal [...]

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cocoa for fun yes, profit maybe.

October 7, 2010

The more I consider the options of what I can get to greenhouse grow, the more I’m interested in cultivating a variety of nuts and spices to complement my focus on fruits. Nutmeg, cloves, allspice, black pepper, coffee, and alongside these,  cocoa. The missus and I were reconnoitering the conservatory at Matthei Botanical Gardens Sunday, [...]

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nutmeg and mace: myristica fragrans

September 9, 2010

I just learned what fresh nutmeg looks like. Here are some visuals to aid in blowing your mind: What you buy in the store – if it isn’t ground – is the dried seed (which is inside the brown part inside the red web). But I don’t care about the spice any more. I just [...]

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the impossible mangosteen (garcinia mangostana)

September 3, 2010

My two new mangosteen trees arrived from Hawaii today, looking wonderful. I had pretty low expectations for the size and health of the plants after all my searching and researching. Not only are they nigh-impossible to grow in the US, it seems they’re also pretty hard to come by. Most of the tropical fruit tree [...]

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fish pocky baby yeah

March 21, 2010

I went in Lucky Market looking for rice cakes last day, and lo, what did I find in the freezer section, licking her lips at me beguilingly from between the squid and the whale? Perfect inscrutable temptation! In my inexorable quest to be early-adopter to everything, I present for your viewing pleasure these gold-wrapped tubes [...]

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It’s Official: Offal’s Not So Awful After All

November 9, 2009

I’ve been thinking about all the kinds of foods I’ve eaten in the last couple of culinarily adventurous years, and am somedeal proud of the assortment of variety meats I’ve been lucky and brave enough to try. Below is a list of the types of offal I’ve eaten, organized by animal, followed below by my [...]

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housed neatly somewheres on the decadence spectrum

November 6, 2009

Oh what a meal. 1st course: calf’s brains 2nd course: sweetbread now we shall repair to our Jaquish island manor.

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The Search For the Elusive Kai Kua aka (untranslatable Thai) aka Guay-Dtieow Kûa Gài aka Kway Teo aka Guay Tiew Kua of New England (and probably elsewhere) Abetted By a Visual Aid

November 4, 2009

Girlfriends, let’s dish: The missus and I stopped for lunch at Ithaca, NY’s Taste of Thai Express Monday. Not wanting yet one more slightly varied permutation of ye olde staple pad thai, I ordered a dish called kai kua. I didn’t invest much hope in my straying from a well-trod path, but one bite showed [...]

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Vegetable Porn

August 23, 2009

There’s something especial about the turn my sublimation has taken this late summer, something especially dramatically vegetable. It’s no surprise that tomatoes have got me breathing heavy thanks to my falling down the heirloom rabbit hole last late summer. But now it’s spreading. Tigger melons I bought last week just because I heard their siren’s [...]

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Little Shop of Horrors: Garden Full to Burstin’ (not Ellen)

August 15, 2009

It’s mid-August and things are really heating up around the garden. I’ll pick my first ripe tomato tomorrow, I’ve got more cucumbers than I can deal with, and the pumpkins and gourd vines are threatening to swallow the house. Despite all the shade I stupidly failed to foresee in the back yard, I did manage [...]

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