As I told Zach I’ve been going bananas with thesis stuff recently so I haven’t had the chance to write much. But I’ve got a significant amount of things that I’ve watched or read that I’ve wanted to review.

But before I get into that. I just wanted to say that I’ve been thinking about adding a dish to my cooking repertoire. If you watch anime you’ll often see characters eating a plate of food that’s like half white rice and half meat and vegetables in sauce. That’s Japanese Curry. I ain’t never had it. Anybody have any particular thoughts on this. Is all curry pretty much the same? Part of me wishes that I could get an electric fryer and make my own fried chicken and donuts and stuff but that seems like a dangerous thing for a novice cook to be messing around with.

Anyway, ross and nick have been holding shit down on the podcast, especially the latest two episodes so be sure to give a listen. I’ve kind of been getting back into music recently. I think it’s sort of like a forestry kind of thing, where the life of the forest will be renewed by a fire, allowing everything to grow back. I’ve been jamming to some Japanator radio. Can’t say I’m overall impressed with the music but I’m exploring a lot of new concepts such as listening to stuff I’m not gaga over. It helps me concentrate in a way. But there are some things I think are actually pretty good. I can recommend episode 130, especially the second block with the bump of chicken song.

To unwind the other day I went to borders and bought a manga volume. Here is a review.

Bunny Drop Yumi Unita: Let me start off by saying something.

This manga is heartwarming.

The premise of Bunny Drop, when relatives gather at the funeral of a patriarch they encounter his 6 year old illegitimate daughter Rin. She’s extremely shy and reserved around her family except 30 year old bachelor Daikichi, who resembles his grandfather.

Frustrated that no one will step up and offer to take Rin in, Daikichi brashly offers to take care of her. Obviously, all kinds of insanity ensues as he tries to balance raising a child and working a full time job.

Why would anybody want to read this?

I think I may have some sense of what a story like this speaks to. I’m about to turn thirty myself. Although I don’t really find myself outright wishing I had kids at this point I admit I think it’s something that I’m missing on a subconscious level. Sort of like a phantom limb. The genius of Bunny Drop is that it pushes all the buttons of a guy transitioning into real adulthood, maybe who feels that he’s missing some important milestones in life. However, the contrivances of the plot allow him not to feel directly challenged. So you get all the emotion without the unpleasantness of having to confront your own issues.

Yeah, but definitely check it out. And look out for more reviews.

Note: this post engages in a series of blatant and hopefully amusing stereotypes.

My brief daily commute between Sacramento and Davis gives me some time to think about advertising – this is usually prompted by the many billboards posted along the side of I-80, which lately have included one from Heineken, a watery Dutch lager widely consumed by frat boys and which tastes about the same as Bud Light.  Heineken’s current ad campaign, centered on the rather enigmatic tagline “Give Yourself a Good Name,” has been getting me thinking of late.  I say “enigmatic” in reference to the tagline because of its odd juxtaposition of the notion of winning or maintaining one’s “good name” – suggestive of a system of values rooted in the landed aristocracy – and the numerous hipster cultural cues embedded in the campaign’s print and TV advertisements.  Stepping back from this problem for a minute and looking at the (assumed) marketing motive behind the campaign, it seems like the idea is to associate Heineken with a certain type of hip, New York-centric, twenty-something bar culture, in which the idea of “giv[ing] yourself a good name” might mean something along the lines of burning a copy of the latest Animal Collective album for a friend, introducing your roommate to that hot girl from the artists’ collective, or hopefully from the perspective of the advertiser, buying your mustachioed, fixie-riding compatriots some Heineken!  In other words, Heineken is trying to trade up, at least at the level of appearance, from the frat boys who have reliably consumed Heineken since time immemorial, to the NYC post-college crowd.

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crazy deal on limes today at the store, so chu and i decided to try our hand at making limeade. pretty easy, when it comes down to it. We put 4 washed limes, skins and all, in a blender, along with 1/2 cup of sugar, and 6-7 cups of water (basically filled our blender up). turn it on for a while, let it all get mixed up, and then strain the liquid out. extremely fresh, and the lime skins add a very very slight hint of bitterness to the drink which really puts it over the top of store brand limeades. in researching it online some people suggested adding cayenne to the mix. to me that smacked a little too much of the master cleanse – but it does highlight the power of making your own food in that you can tailor it to your desires. make it half-lemon half-lime, throw in a mango or something. go nuts. anyway the total cost was under 1 dollar and it made about as much limeade as the big “simply limeade” bottles. hope you like it!

EDIT FIXED THE STUPID TYPO

I realize that I might be the only boozer at Roaring Shark, but I’ve decided in the name of eclecticism to write a post on one of my newish interests – California wine.  It will come as no surprise that California is by far the largest wine-producing area in the U.S., and one of the major players in global winemaking.  While other states may specialize in one or two wine styles (for example, Riesling and Gerwurztraminer in the Finger Lakes), California is large and geographically diverse enough to grow basically the full range of grapes and styles, from delicate Sauvignon Blancs to robust Cabernet Sauvignons.   If you buy wine grown in the U.S., there’s a very good chance it comes from somewhere in California.

Though California growing regions like Napa and Sonoma are well-known as winemaking and tourist destinations, it surprises many people – as it did me when I moved out here – that a good deal of the California wine consumed in the U.S. is grown and/or produced in places other than Napa and Sonoma: value-brand wine giant Bogle, for example, is based in the Sacramento Delta (literally down the road from my house), while a lot of Zinfandel is grown in Lodi, in California’s Central Valley.  Beyond quantity, there’s a lot of really great wine produced outside California’s marquee growing regions – a fact that I’ve tried to reflect in this list of five of my favorite red wines from California:

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The true mark of a western New York restaurant that thinks it’s classy, but that in reality is not, if is it has clams casino on the menu.

UPDATE: here is the image. sorry it’s a little blurry, it’s from my phone. also note that i added broccoli this time, which shows off how versatile the dish can be.

It’s often frustrating to have to go out to get something to eat when you know that given access to their kitchen for 5 minutes you could figure out how they make your favorite dish. What was once an enjoyable experience becomes something almost frustrating as you throw another 8 bucks down the drain.

Aja Noodle is a place in the 12 corners of Brighton that I don’t get to go to very often, but when I do I usually end up ordering their chinese black bean noodles. Chinese black beans are very different from what we normally call black beans in America. They’re actually soybeans that have been fermented. What follows is a passable version of the Aja noodle dish.

Ingredients

• 1 16-oz. package rice ribbon noodles.
• 1 red pepper, coarsley chopped
• 1/2 small onion, coarsley chopped
• 3 scallions, coarsley chopped, white and green parts separated
• 1 carrot, shredded
• 2 tablespoons laoganma-brand black bean sauce
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce

1. Bring a pot of water to a boil and add the rice ribbon noodles to the water and boil for 6-8 minutes. While water is boiling, add a tablespoon of vegetable oil to a pan and cook peppers, onions, and white part of scallions along with 1 tsp. salt over high heat for 6-8 minutes or until slightly soft.

2. Drain noodles and rinse under cold water. Add black bean sauce to the pot where the noodles were and cook over high heat for 30-40 seconds. Add the noodles back to the pot, along with the soy sauce, and stir around until the noodles and sauce are well-mixed. Add cooked vegetables, carrots, and green parts of scallions.

3. Eat.

I figure that this will serve two people and costs about 5-7 dollars in total, depending on how cheaply you can get the red peppers.

I know I’m in the minority on the blog when I say this, but I admit to finding a true joy in cooking. Which is not to say that I’m particularly skilled at it, since I rely mostly on others’ recipes in order to put together a dish. If you asked me to cook something blind, I would probably come up with something pretty mediocre. Still, even working from a recipe, there is still something pleasing about starting with raw ingredients and progressively working one’s way to a completed dish encapsulating flavors and experiences not present when considering each ingredient separately. And in this day and age where even simple products typically have lengthy ingredient lists full of unpronounceables (for freshness), there’s certainly something to be said for knowing what you’re eating, for controlling the process from start to finish. To that end, let me submit a modest recipe of my own devising which produces a passable alternative to my favorite dish at local Vietnamese eatery Mamasan’s:

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I always get suckered in by anything using a “NEW!” promotion. I don’t know if it’s because I’m supremely gullible, or that I’m just naturally curious, but I can’t pass up the chance to try new foods. So when shopping for cereal last week my eye was immediately caught by a new cheerios type, Oat Cluster Crunch Cheerios. So new, in fact, that I couldn’t find a single damn image of the box online. It’s not even listed on the Cheerios website! But I digress. I’m a pretty big Cheerios fan, and a pretty big Oh!s fan, so when it looked like I was going to be able to buy some unholy hybrid of the two cereals I jumped at the chance and brought home a box.

This morning was the first opportunity I’ve had to try it out, and I was dismayed to see the crappy-ass cereal they’re trying to pass off as anything to do with a cluster. Usually when you buy a cereal with “cluster” in the name, you at least get some pea-sized crunchy bits of oats and who knows what else. Something vaguely sweet and differently-textured to offset the morning monotony as you shovel another spoon-full of soggy flakes into your mouth and watch some jerkoff band play on Good Morning America. With the Oat Cluster cheerios, however, there was nary a cluster to be found. Ostensibly the cereal was supposed to be Multi-grain Cheerios mixed together with Honey Bunches of Oats style cluters. Instead, the cereal is mostly the Cheerios, with a sparse scattering of single oats floating around on their own. And the Cheerio-oat ratio is so bad that in any given spoonful you’ll get, at most, like one oat. In the end all I had bought was a more expensive box of Multi-grain Cheerios, whose taste I’m sort of indifferent to to begin with.

There’s this biology experiment you can do where there’s this one gross chemical that most of the population can taste, but you only taste it if you have this one gene. It’s supposedly really really bad tasting, but when we tested it in my 10th grade biology class, it turned out I didn’t have that gene and so it was just tasteless to me. As my whole class was standing around retching and gagging over how awful this one chemical tasted, all I could think about was how robbed I was that here is one more thing that I can never ever experience (right up there with twinship). I guess in that sense, then, it’s better for me to have tried the cereal and found it lacking than to have just reached out for another box of Oatmeal Squares.  In most other respects, though, the Oatmeal Squares would have been the wiser choice.

I was thinking that it might be a lost cause to post a review of a cookbook on a site where at least 50% of the author-/reader-ship is fundamentally opposed to both cooking and food, but then I realized that this is basically the case for almost any post that shows up here. Even if you’re anti-food or anti-cooking, though, I think there is something here that might appeal to you.

For the amateur or aspiring cook I think the most frustrating thing is that we lack the comprehensive knowledge of how ingredients interact with each other to balance or enhance a dish. Thus you can start out with a recipe whose ingredient list is appetizing, spend money and time preparing the meal, only to end up with something that, while ostensibly edible, is thoroughly unappetizing. Enter The New Best Recipe, a hardcover compendium of hundreds of recipes by the folks at America’s Test Kitchen. The difference between the Test Kitchen and pretty much any other celebrity chef or group of chefs out there is that the Test Kitchen approach cooking less as a matter of taste and more as a matter of science.

At the beginning, a chef is assigned a recipe to perfect, no matter how “basic” or homestyle the recipe (a plus considering making recipes from other cookbooks can be an expensive affair). The chef then either concocts a trial recipe based on his or her own experience, or studies several recipes and amalgamates the most promising ones into a cohesive starting point. The recipe is then made, and tested by a dedicated team of taste-testers. Based on the comments of the testers the recipe is refined (sometimes dozens of times) until it comes out foolproof. Before each recipe in the book is a short synopsis of this process, detailing what worked and what didn’t and explaining the fundamental breakthroughs that led to the dish as presented, including some realizations or breakthroughs that are to the untrained eye completely counterintuitive. The extra information is illuminating, but more than that it details a dedication to the experimental method that will appeal to those of us following the scientific disciplines.

The end result of the laborious efforts gone to for each recipe before presenting it to you to read is that each recipe is essentially foolproof and almost guaranteed not to fail or disappoint. As soon as I started cooking out of this cookbook I essentially haven’t cooked from any other, or even looked anywhere online for any recipes. The comprehensive and reliable quality of this gigantic tome is such that it easily eclipses the need for anything else save for the truly exotic or specialized recipes (it doesn’t, for example, carry a recipe for a favorite of mine, ropa vieja (rob will either correct me or cry quietly on the spelling here)).

The only real knock against the book is that it follows the traditional America’s Test Kitchen/Cook’s Illustrated reliance on Wall Street Journal-esque woodcut-style illustrations rather than actual photographs. Thus, when preparing a meal there is no visual cue from the recipe to let you know if you’ve gotten it right. It’s really a small detail, though, since for the most part you’ll know you got it right simply because the recipes are so hard to get wrong.

I think whoever makes the decision about what new flavors of foods to put out must somehow be telepathically linked to me recently, because right after seeing the aforementionedly delicious chili & lime almonds from Blue Diamond, I saw these chips in the grocery store yesterday. I guess they’re trying to be all classy or whatever with the limón instead of just saying “lime.” In any case: these things are pretty much just glorified barbeque flavor potato chips, a flavor for which my antagonism is already well known.