I’ve been drinking cardamom coffee lately. Why, I’m drinking some now. The stuff at Hampton Chutney on Prince Street in Manhattan is great but homemade can be as good.

For a first attempt, I bought a small bag of whole green cardamom pods from a cash-and-carry among the strip of Indian stores lining Oak Tree Road in Iselin, New Jersey. (Try buying cardamom at your local grocer and you’ll find it’s among the most expensive spices on the rack, right up there with saffron. Seek out an Indian specialty store for massive cost savings; Kalustyan’s is my go-to spot in New York City.)

I poured the hot coffee over the pods in a mug and it was O.K. But after a second attempt, I found what works best is simply adding a tablespoon of cardamom seeds to the coffee grounds then brewing per usual.

Use a dark-roast coffee; I favor Café Bustelo because it’s cheap and readily available. For the true Hampton Chutney experience, stir in a glob of sweetened condensed milk. That’s some good cardamom coffee.

With winter fast approaching, I had a sneaking suspicion the Flatiron Lounge had finally swapped their summer menu for their autumn one and I was correct. When I stopped by after work tonight, I had a Carroll Gardens, Death + Co. bartender Joaquin Simo’s “Guest Mixologist” contribution to the drink-list. Rich, hardy and evocative of the season, as they say, it contained a potent pour of Rittenhouse bonded rye, punt e mes, Nardini amaro and a touch of maraschino, stirred with ice and strained into a coupe with what I believe was a twist of orange peel on top.

I also noticed that with the new menu, all cocktails are now $13, a dollar more than they were when I was there last in October. (For those readers dwelling outside of New York City: yes, people here will pay double-digits for cocktails.) When I asked the bartender, whom I’d never seen before, when they hiked the prices, he said, “Oh, six or eight months ago.”

Bartenders are full of shit.

Later I learned I’d missed seeing a special guest appearance by chef Jamie Oliver by a mere day.

I am glad Allison informed me of New York Craft Beer Week, September 12 to 21, or my mood may have festered into regret. She, Jovito, Laura, Michael and I met, (simultaneously, as it turned out in an odd coincidence) at the Chelsea Brewing Company on Pier 59 for the Manhattan Cask Ale Festival. Around 45 “firkins” of craft-brewed, cask-conditioned ale at cellar temperature were available on a pay-as-you-go basis: at the door, we purchased “bingo cards” for $20. Each square on the card represented 50 cents and depending upon how much the cost of the specific beer or food item (they served satisfying bratwurst and pulled-pork sandwiches), that number of dollar boxes would be checked-off the sheet by the server.

I had a Blue Point Cherry Imperial Stout, from Patchogue, New York, sort of a fruit-beer/imperial stout hybrid that was my favorite. The Livery Herb Superb Black I.P.A. from Benton Harbor, Michigan, was lively with hops.The Brooklyn “Black Ops,” which I fear many people ordered solely based on the fact it had the third-highest ABV on the menu, tasted what I expect used motor oil tastes like. On the bright side, I wouldn’t have wanted to have saved the best for last, so I made the most of it and enjoyed a night of great drink, friends and views of New Jersey from our vantage on the east shore of the Hudson.

Speaking at length with Ryan the bartender at Flatiron Lounge, on account of he and I being the only people in the place the whole hour-plus I was there, I turned the conversation to cocktails and got some tidbits of information and gossip.

1. Flatiron will likely release its Fall cocktail menu next week; they’re having an all-bartender powwow with Flatiron partner Julie Reiner on Tuesday or Wednesday, during which the bartenders get to present new creations; if a majority of bartenders and Julie like the drink, it goes on the menu. Nice.
2. There’s an unused chunk of Pegu Club that Audrey Saunders thought could be a VIP area but it’s been unused since the place opened. There’s a obscured partition near the restrooms that slides open to allow access to this back area, with room for 30 to 40 more seats. Apparently you can see the secret-room windows from Houston but they’re papered over. Secret rooms are cool
3. Beyond the usual suspects, Ryan’s recommendations for great new(ish) places to get cocktails are Tailor and Apotheke, the latter of which is a former Chinatown opium den that is now known for its cocktails made with homemade herb infusions and bitters
4. Ryan confirms Milk & Honey has changed its “secret” phone number for reservations. Reportedly, even local barkeeps were left in the dark and most of them still don’t have it. Although I was thinking, “Maybe it’s just YOU, Ryan, who doesn’t have the new number.”) Or he had it and didn’t want to give it to me.
5. Lenell’s may move to Manhattan. Apparently they’re having legal trouble with their lease renewal. That and they thirst for the big-time of Manhattan. Don’t we all.
6. Lenell herself has been trying to open a bar for some time and it will finally come to fruition in 2009 under the name “Mason Dixon Line” or somesuch. She wants the place to have an herb garden and live hens, so she can use fresh raw eggs in her drinks that require them. Hmm.

I still don’t like Campari.

Allison, who’s reading the new compilation of Kingley Amis’ previously out-of-print essays on spirits in the material world, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, told me he mentions a drink called Evelyn Waugh’s Noonday Reviver. You will agree this is the best name ever for a cocktail; however, you may be in disagreement or disgust over its composition: gin, Guinness and ginger beer.

But it got me thinking: although the U.S. doesn’t savor beer-based cocktails, other countries do.

The one I always think of first is Mexico and its michelada, which is beer and tomato juice or Bloody Mary mix. These were popular among the young natives when I visited Mexico for my previous job a few times earlier this decade. Some of the guys there had even tweaked the recipe to pair beer with Clamato, a blend that Anheuser-Busch began distributing nationwide under the name Clamato Chelada early this year. But at the time, the guys I was with didn’t exactly have a name for it. I’ll never forget this exchange:

Jason

What’s that?

Mexican businessman

Beer and Clamato.

Jason

What do you call it?

Mexican businessman

[brief, thoughtful pause] Beer and Clamato.

I know in Europe, various shandys (beer and lemonade) are popular. Allison reports that there’s a radler (the general German name for shandy) that intermingles beer and 7UP (“disgusting”).

I also recall beer and cider as a popular combination, possibly in Ireland, unless I just made that up.

What other exciting beer combinations have you tried or heard of?

I tried making my first pie from scratch most of this afternoon and I botched it. It was a learning experience and I don’t regret it. I called my Mom twice for advice: my Dough Hotline. I felt I was taxing her because she clearly thought she was better at showing how to make pie then telling me, but I found if I asked her 100 questions I could coax the technique out of her.

First dough batch: Dry and crumbly; could not resuscitate.
Problem: I didn’t use enough shortening and the shortening I did use I didn’t cut-in well enough (nor did I cut it in small enough; it was big ol’ chunks instead of the pea-sized bits it’s supposed to be in my mom’s recipe).

Second dough batch: Seemingly excellent consistency at first. However....
Problem: I didn’t roll it out enough before giving up on it. It kept falling apart whenever I picked it up. Also it was super-sticky—I had put the dough-ball in the freezer but only for 15 minutes; I should have left it in there longer, especially given the high humidity in my un-air-conditioned apartment.

At this point, I had to give up because I’d run out of shortening and patience. I ended up tossing six cups of Gala and Granny Smith apple slices, mixed with sugar, flour, cinnamon and nutmeg. I definitely could have done something with it—bought a ready-made crust, obviously. Mom suggested additional ideas, such as making a sort of apple crisp or applesauce out of it. But I was in an Ultra Mega-Stubborn mood and dumped everything. My garbage smelled great for the remainder of the day.

I will try again. Because although I can be stubborn, I am also tenacious. Next time I will prepare the crust before the filling, while ensuring I have 16 pounds of Crisco and flour on hand.

Since I was there last, Death & Co. has redesigned, reordered and expanded their cocktail menu. It makes more sense now to have drinks clustered by spirit—all the whiskey drinks in one section, all the gin drinks in another, and so on. I forced myself to not order a Double Fill Up (Rittenhouse rye whiskey, fresh lemon juice, pomegranate molasses and mint) even though I really wanted one.

So when they didn’t have the salt necessary to prepare a Cinder (jalapeño-infused tequila, mescal, fresh lime juice and a dash of angostura bitters, served in a glass rimmed with smoked salt), I instead asked for a Range Life. All I knew about it was that it contained tequila, for which I thirsted, and that “Range Life” is the name of a song I like by the band Pavement. I ordered it based on that. Which was a poor idea because not only could I taste no tequila, all I did taste was Campari, which as previously noted, I dislike.

Henceforth I will think twice about ordering drinks named after songs. I’ve got a narrowed eye on you, “Sentimental Journey.”

The place? The 2008 Indy Spirits Expo at Astor Wines & Spirits. The deal? Near-limitless alcohol samples and cocktails for a flat fee of $15. The general trend? Organics. But it was mostly all good.

I drank the Dominican rum only because the distributor lunged at me with a bottle of it and I pitied him; few gathered for his pirate refreshment. But I sort of have a kinship with the D.R., livin’ in Inwood and all.

The rep for a cachaça showed me where the sugarcane for it was grown, shaping the bar towel on her tabletop into an approximation of Brazil and pointing to the vicinity of the Amazon. I nodded and humored her and thought I’d tell her I’d been to that towel before and that the monkeys she was referring to are called micos but I only wanted her for her caipirinha. And I got it, eventually.

The genial entrepreneur of the woodily delectable Hudson Manhattan Rye Whiskey noted offhand that he began merely by owning a mill. His business partner wanted to produce bread in it. But the former convinced the latter otherwise: why not whiskey? Same ingredients, different technique. Good call.

St. Germain, the print campaign for which impresses me, tasted decent until I learned what I’d drank was a lemony cocktail and the stuff straight is sweet and syrupy, which is why I hated the lemongrass liqueur from the exhibitor just to the left, although it sounded tempting on paper.

We drank a lot. Allison favored the cubes of peppery cheese from the “eat something before you get too drunk” nook overlooking East Fourth Street. Jovito managed somehow to ingratiate himself with Colin, a vodka supplier, and in the next moment was standing next to the guy, shaking cocktails before an appreciative crowd. We toasted Jovito’s mixology, drank it, then drank some more.

One of the two scruffy guys peddling vodka infused with huckleberries (“It’s the state fruit of Idaho”) wore a Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars T-shirt but admitted upon questioning that it was not necessarily his favorite Bowie album. “I’m more of a Bowie song guy than a Bowie album guy,” he said, nominating “Bring Me the Disco King.”

Guessing that the young lady at the pisco table wouldn’t have much to say about that brandy (“Pisco is a clear spirit distilled from grapes”), I asked her where one gets the best cocktails in the five boroughs. She warmed to the question, putting in top bids for PDT (which is accessed through a secret door in a phone booth in a hot-dog restaurant; no, really) and the bar at Le Lupanar, at Essex and Delancey. At one of them, she alleged, mentioning her name grants deluxe treatment. I forget which, but tell them Pisco Michelle sent you.

In the men’s room, as I completed a crucial step of the water cycle, a tipsy gent at the Mitsubishi Jet Towel admired the speed at which it dried his hands. With his digits hovering limply in space less than two feet from my urinal, he added, “This is the closest my hands have ever been to another guy’s dick.” And I believed him.

This is what I learned today: a friend who’s dating a Dominican woman told me that Dominicans in general go nuts over concón, the crust of rice that’s cemented to the bottom of the pot after cooking. This reminds me of the “crunchies” my Dad would scavenge from my Mom’s cooking, including the edge-burnt ingredients in baked dishes such as scalloped potatoes and ham; pie-crust runoff; and any post-frying scraps left in the bottom of a skillet.

Oh, you can order your usual mixed drink at Milk & Honey. But why would you? It’d be like having Superman stop by to winterize your living room windows. He’d do it because he’s a nice guy from the Midwest, sort of. He wouldn’t even need to use a hair dryer on the heat-shrink plastic film; he’d just exhale a gale of hot air. But this is a guy who can fly. He can lift a city bus. He can turn back time by reversing the Earth’s rotation. He can outfox Gene Hackman, you fool, and here you have him, in your living room, weatherproofing.

All of New York’s contemporary swanky bars, with their varying degrees of exclusivity and at least one from the same father (Sasha Petraske, who also owns Little Branch), are descendants of Milk & Honey. It’s one of the originals if not the original cocktail speakeasy. It has an unlisted number for reservations that’s rumored to change often. It’s passed down selectively by the city’s bon vivants.

Out front on a grubby Lower East Side side-street lies a heavy steel security door marked with those adhesive metal characters one uses to label a mailbox, spelling “M & H.” There’s no secret knock or password but you have to hit the buzzer, get observed by the security camera and, in our case at least, stand in the rain for a few pregnant minutes before you’re let in. Just inside, through the curtain, there’s a tiny bar with four seats; in the back are three booths for four. The place is smaller than my apartment and lit only by candles on sconces that throw dim light on the tin ceilings and walls. House rules forbid hats, loudness and egregious attempts at pick-ups. A sign in the women’s room lists more no-no’s, including “starfucking.” The credo in the men’s room, above the stack of individually folded linen hand towels, notes that a true gentleman remains so even when drinking.

To order, there are no menus. The server, dressed in nouveau flapper garb, asks what you like. What kinds of liquor warm you with fondness and which disagree with you? What tastes do you favor? Pepperiness, sweetness, boldness, creaminess, spiciness, saltiness, bitterness? Have a favorite fruit? Say it. (Although apricot stumped ’em.)

What you get is ultimately the bartender’s choice. The four of us ordered three cocktails each without any repeats. We progressed through a wild array of styles and glasses. I started with a festive nutmeg-topped nog made with an egg and rye (or was that rum?). Next was a strawberry Collins, too fruity and carbonated for my taste, a dentist’s-mirror-like steel stirrer-spoon leaning inside the tall glass. Last was a blended Greenpoint, stiff yet smooth with rye, yellow chartreuse, orange bitters and a lemon twist. Other craziness at the table included a drink festooned with more fruit than Carmen Miranda”s hat, a blackberry cobbler, a bramble, a Harvard, and a “breakfast cocktail” made with gin, lemon juice and orange marmalade, which was offered as a substitute for the apricot deficiency.

Postscript. Here are the answers to the unanswered questions of today:

1. Guyana
2. Various Positions
3. Endgame
4. Eartha Kitt

Details are sketchy but robots are mixing cocktails. At first, I thought “Great!” because, you know, robots. Upon consideration, I prefer the human touch in matters of mixology, where creative spark and lack of exactitude result in appealing creations.

Also, I recall the brief scene in The Fifth Element in which a bartender from the future serves Ian Holm’s character a drink:

Father Vito Cornelius

[Confiding to an off-screen bartender.] I know she’s made to be strong but she’s also so fragile, so human. Know what I mean? [Pull back. Bartender is revealed to be a robot.]

Bartender

[Shakes head, “No.”]

Let those clinking, clattering cacophonies of caliginous cogs and camshafts stick to what they do best: welding and destroying Skynet.

Allison and Jovito staged a mini dinner get-together at their apartment tonight, the centerpiece of which was lamb burgers made with fresh mint, cooked and served “Slider-style.” They were amazing, especially topped with the co-op bacon Angela and Chris supplied. Chips and homemade salsas complemented the meal: a black bean variety from Laura and a garlicky mango-guacamole from Angela. For dessert, Chris supplied his patented Rice Krispies Treats made with Fruity Pebbles. How were they? I tasted a rainbow of fruit flavors. “It’s like there’s a party in my mouth,” I said, and Chris completed, “and everybody’s invited.” The rooftop deck of Allison and Jovito’s apartment building affords kick-ass views of the city and environs. If I had a deck like that, I’d be up there all the time, hypnotized by the lazy parade of incoming flights.

No one outside of my regulars has ever emailed me about my blog until recently. Someone Googled a phrase to the effect of “roller coaster wedding cake” and was directed to my post on the wedding of my friends Joe and Andrea, the reception for which featured a clever roller-coaster cake. I enjoyed the correspondence between Shane and Joe, in which Joe reveals behind-the-scenes cake construction details, so I decided to reproduce it here. Next time a “roller coaster fiend” who’s getting hitched wants details on a themed cake, maybe Google will kindly direct her here.

The request:

Hi there! I came across your blog while searching for “roller coaster cakes” and up popped the image from your friend’s wedding. I was wondering if you happen to know anything about who baked the cake or where they got the coaster car and rail pieces from. My fiancé and I are planning a roller coaster themed wedding next June and we’d love to have a cake with similar stylings. If you don’t know but your friend might, please feel free to pass along my email address. It is a gorgeous cake and we’d be so excited to have something similar. Thanks very much and have a great day!

Sincerely,
Shane
Bride-to-be/roller coaster fiend

The reply:

Hi Shane,

Jason forwarded your email onto me. Congratulations on your upcoming wedding.

We are glad you liked our cake. It was a hit at our own very roller coaster themed wedding. I’ve never been to a wedding where there had been such interest in the cake. When they finally cut the cake people lined up from the one end of the reception hall to the other for a piece.

The cake was done by PM Frosted Fantasies which is a local home based operation that we had met during a cake tasting event. Originally the cake was going to be a traditional looking wedding cake with flowers and piping with the coaster around it, but as we continued planning polka dots became a theme and we switched to the dots on the cake, which we think turned out much better.

From my understanding, the cake people wound up with Plan D for the coaster track. I believe originally the thought was to make it out of licorice. The track is actually black pipe cleaner and the supports are wood. The coaster car is rice crispy treat covered in fondant. They took a seated bride and groom statue and cut off the legs. We still have the entire coaster car cake topper sitting on our mantel. The tunnel in the center was a PVC pipe. One of the things we really liked about our cake people were all the flavors they had, and keeping with our theme two of the four flavors were cotton candy and caramel apple.

Some of the other roller coaster touches in our wedding:

Our invitations had a very stylized roller coaster design to them. You can see them on my wife’s knot bio.

Our save the date magnets we made with our on-ride photo from our engagement.

Our signing mat was a caricature we had done of us on the Magnum in wedding attire. We scanned the caricature and made it into our thank-you cards.

All of our tables where named after coasters, which I had fun assigning guests to.

My wife’s brother-in-law manages a restaurant and he and his bartenders came up with signature drinks that we named after coaster at Cedar Point based on their color—those were a huge hit. They had to go out and get more of the ingredients.

Good luck on your wedding and if you have any other questions or would like some photos of things let me know.

Joe

Let this be a lesson should you ever shop for buttermilk: short of churning your own, there is apparently no longer such thing as “buttermilk” available at retail. I needed some for the saag paneer recipe I’m making for dinner tomorrow and I wanted it to be the true full-fat variety, as it and yogurt were the sole ingredients providing the dish’s creaminess—and I wanted it to be super creamy.

After hitting seven grocery stores in my neighborhood, then seven other grocers on the Upper West Side, including New York stalwarts Zabar’s, Citarella, Fairway, Food Emporium and two Gristedes, I can tell you I’m next to certain you can’t purchase buttermilk with milkfat content any higher than 1.5%. The real slap in the face was the label on the buttermilk I settled on, which alleged that it contained 50% less fat and 20% fewer calories than regular buttermilk—regular buttermilk that was nowhere to be found. I just don’t know; maybe full-fat buttermil exists and it's my bad luck or a New York thing that I couldn’t find it.

After work, stopped by the Flatiron Lounge for a few more cocktails. I tried a bracingly crisp Mint Jules (90-proof Buffalo Trace bourbon, muddled mint and smashed limes) and a Ward 8 (rye whiskey, lemon and orange juices and grenadine). Both were deliciously expensive.

I must be getting older or more mature because it used to be, when I splurged at a bar, I’d make the bartender reach a little higher for the whiskey bottle. Lately that’s been replaced with ordering expensive speakeasy-era cocktails that focus on craft.

That’s the deal at Weather Up, which opened in late February in Prospect Heights. Old-timey goodness with new-timey prices! But so refreshing. You can get an aviator for $15, the most expensive drink on the menu (most hit $11), which includes a small-print warning on the menu alluding to its mind-bending potency. I started with a Presbyterian, a refreshing rye and ginger cocktail in a skinny Collins glass that included a candied ginger garnish, a single, long cuboid ice cube and a long metal straw (with a spoon at the tip to aid stirring) that I bit before realizing its composition. If I wanted to buy it, there were unbitten models available for sale for $5, said the bartender, who apparently gets many such requests.

Depending on the drink, the ice is delivered in different forms: a popular form is hand-chiseled and I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a dandy bartender hack away at a chunk of ice with a bar-spoon as James the bartender did tonight. Some dude sitting nearby alleged he was getting hit by the chips.

Like its ilk (Pegu Club or Little Branch leap to mind), Weather Up is quiet and cozy, and but even smaller and more warm: boxed lights glow from the ceiling, and white, rectangular ceramic tiles arc from the walls across the ceiling, which reminded me not so much of New York City subway stations, but those of the Paris Metro.

The Red Hook Park Vendors, which I’ve enjoyed before, have been granted a six-year reprieve from being overtaken by generic highest-bidder food concessionaires, reports Eater today. Hooray!

It appears there will be changes, though, as per the euphemistically worded sentence attributed to the executive director of the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park in the press release:

We have the best intentions to create an even better food market with the assistance of New York City Parks and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

In other words, maybe we, the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park, will no longer knead pupusa dough barehanded and serve slaw directly from open Coleman coolers. Eh, whatever. I don’t know about your body but mine is a versatile machine that can handle all manner of “improperly” prepared foods. It’s all part of the charm and can’t possibly be less healthy than the bathwater hotdogs and horsemeat kabobs you can purchase daringly from any city-sanctioned push-cart vendor here.

My friend Allison is staging a Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, the first of which is a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme, so I figured I’d be spending time at the famous Union Square Greenmarket. But hold on: in Manhattan alone, there are 27 Greenmarkets. (Each is sanctioned by the city to promote regional agriculture and give family farmers the opportunity to sell their fruits, vegetables and other products directly to New Yorkers.) After checking a map, I discovered there’s been one in my neighborhood, on Isham Street between Seaman Avenue and Cooper Street, every Saturday year-round. I didn’t know that.

I walked up Broadway to check it out. Because of its location and the season, it’s small—much smaller than the Union Square version—taking up only one side of a block between an old brick school and Isham Park, where a flock of Canada geese scrounged for insects on a muddy baseball field. There were only seven vendors but each seemed chosen to avoid duplication, so that a creative cook could prepare a largely local meal from the Inwood Greenmarket: apples, beef, turkey, eggs, bread, pies and honey.

After several passes by the vendors, I decided I’d purchase locally farmed apples and eggs and remake that apple cake I first made for Thanksgiving. (At a glance, the recipe seems snotty and complicated but in reality it’s neither.) For the apples, I paid a few bucks for a half-dozen red-and-green skinned McIntoshes from Samascott Orchard, which has been growing them in Kindernook, New York since 1901. Different varieties brimmed in labeled wooden crates, resplendent in a natural glory without the wax, stickers, symmetry and surface perfection found in their supermarket counterparts. I enjoyed a sign on the crate of Fuji apples that blamed a particular hailstorm over the Samascott’s farm in May 2007 for the superficial scars on that variety. The apples were the size of peas at the time yet they carried the battle damage to their fully ripened size. After I had my apples weighed, I added a cup of hot cider to my order, which proved prescient, as a mini snow-squall arrived out of the literal blue shortly thereafter.

I also picked up a dozen large white eggs from Knoll Krest Farm, located in Clinton Corners, New York, where the free-roaming, cage-free hens are fed vegetarian diets free from hormones and antibiotics and whose eggs are “hand gathered.” Yee-hah.

Completing the hippie nature of my travels, I carried my groceries home in my canvas tote-bag from the Strand and instead of further depleting my iPod’s lithium-rich battery by listening to “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, I sang it to myself a cappella.

Bonus mp3: “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau

I’m a total cast-iron skillet convert. Yes, me, the one who thought he’d use it once then leave it to pasture as one would a rinky-dink kitchen gadget. Me, the one who about a year ago wrote:

...cooks are always going on about the miracle of their cast iron, as if it was a particularly dim and stocky yet hard-working child of theirs.

and

For a utensil this rugged, seemingly smithed from a block of iron the size and sturdiness of Chuck Norris, then forged in the fires of hell or South Pittsburg, Tennessee, I expected chuckwagon simplistic care and handling. But its instructions read like a babysitter’s list of dos and don’ts. Don’t use soap. Dry it thoroughly always. Apply a light coat of oil before and after. Store in a cool, arid place. And for the love of all that is holy, do not violate all of the preceding rules at once by sticking it in your dishwasher. In other words, you never want to actually clean it, just gussy it up from time to time, like superficial Stradlater in Catcher in the Rye, spic and span outside, crumby inside.

But I’m now a cult member who anoints his skillet lovingly and on a regular basis with canola oil. I’m using it for everything: pancakes, cornbread, bacon and eggs. I feel I need to do an infomercial and establish an appropriate celebrity endorsement, except that Walter Matthau is dead.

I was extremely close to trying to make apple crisp in my skillet the other night, but it was the same dinner for which I had mac-and-cheese on the menu, and thinking of how they serve it at S’Mac, I tried it in the cast-iron and it worked beautifully. Bubbly, nicely browned edges.

Tonight, I picked up an extra thick shell steak on the way home and some fresh, whole mushrooms. I sautéed the mushrooms in butter in the skillet then threw in the meat, cooked it up a few minutes on each side, added some cheap merlot here and there while it was cooking. Holy cats that was a tasty dinner. You may have noticed I don’t eat meat a lot, which is true. But when I do, I want it done right, and absent a grill, a cast-iron skillet is a handy way to get steak done perfectly.

Looking for kai-lan for that pad see ew recipe, I bumbled around Chinatown this afternoon until I found a store across the street from New Green Bo (which, incidentally, has the city’s best soup dumplings). In addition to fresh, leafy produce, this grocer, 59 Bayard Market, also sold fresh animal life. At the base of the cooler holding the vegetables sat three large, white, water-filled plastic tubs without lids, the contents of each more stomach turning than the one before.

The first tub had a few turtles paddling around in it. O.K., that’s cute. I can ignore the fact that they’re there for eatin’ because the turtle lies in the acceptable range of the Western pet spectrum.

The next tub contained frogs. Not a few happy terrarium-style frogs but a dense, forest-green mass of writhing amphibia, three deep. Entirely uncalled for.

And in the third tub: eel. All the nastiest characteristics of a fish and a snake in one monstrosity! I’m not a fan. They floated darkly in the bottom of the tub; one occasionally twisted his slick, featureless body to poke his head above the surface. “Come closer,” he seemed to be saying, “that I may bite you.” If there isn’t a male version of the vagina dentata, I nominate the eel. I grabbed my broccoli and got out of there.

The recipe turned out O.K., but I had sauce and noodle issues. I don’t think I used enough of the sweet soy sauce. And I used dry rice noodles (instead of fresh, which I definitely want to try next time). They stiffened and clumped after I’d revived them with lukewarm water. It’s possible I didn’t leave them in there long enough, but I didn’t want them to get too soft before tossing them in the wok. Then because they clumped together and stayed that way in the wok, they cooked in masses and got too crispy. So they were too wet; or I should have tossed them with oil before adding them to the wok; or just used fresh noodles. I don’t know but it’s something to iron out next time.

Other than the chewy noodles, the pad see ew was delish. Wok-cooking was new for me and I confirmed that it was wise of me to have to have everything prepared and measured in advance because everything happens so quickly and I’m not the fastest cook on the block. I even had my bottles of sauces, oil and vinegar lined up in correct order to add at a moment’s notice.

One of the monkeys in the production department agreed with me that a morning show on cable-access TV during which we would discuss our favorite childhood beverages would be a blockbuster. Although we would speak often of “fruit drinks” and use slang like “bevs” for beverages, we agreed the name of the show will be Juice Talk. We would sit on an orange couch and sip the bevs about which we’d riff. Sample promo voiceovers for our show would include “Wake Up to Juice Talk!” or “The Juice is Loose!”

We developed a preliminary list of childhood beverages, each of which could comprise an episode of Juice Talk.

• Capri Sun (Careful! That straw is sharp!)
• Hawaiian Punch (“Go Hawaiian!”)
• Hershey’s syrup in milk
• Hi-C (Ecto Cooler! Flavor mixing! The pre-sweetened vs. non-sweetened debate!)
• Juicy Juice (The rich-kid juicebox of choice!)
• Kool-Aid (Hey, Kool-Aid Man!)
• McDonald’s orange drink, dispensed from those orange and yellow plastic coolers
• Nestlé strawberry-milk powdered mix
• Nik-L-Nip (What was that fluid?!)
• no-name sodas, like Faygo
• Slush Puppies (they always beat out Slurpees; also, at my local childhood swimming pool, I could request “a suicide,” which was code for the Puppie vendor to mix all of the flavors together into a bruise-colored fantasia that was like a party in my mouth to which everyone was invited.
• Sunny Delight (Wrong on both counts!)
• Tang
• those 25-cent multicolored drinks in squat, translucent plastic barrels topped with a foil seal
• those steel cans of pineapple juice with peel-off tabs
• Yoo-hoo

I ate rabbit nachos today for a lunch appetizer today at Rae, a restaurant attached by causeway to Philadelphia’s famous rail hub, 30th Street Station. As I told my luncheon companions, I don’t think I’ve ever used or heard the words “rabbit” and “nachos” in the same sentence. The nachos were O.K.; a bit smoky. Rae also serves $2 martinis for lunch, which must get more questions than any other menu item, rabbit nachos included. “What’s the deal?” we asked our server. “Are they served in a shot glass?” No, she told us, they’re regular, full-sized and -strength gin or vodka martinis. We ordered a round for our table. I would have had another but that would have been déclassé.

That’s quite a feat.

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite Thai dish is pad see ew, and the idea had been bouncing around my head that I should make my own, when I serendipitously came across a tempting recipe, so I set off for Chinatown after work today for the ingredients and implements.

First stop, the tiny but well-stocked Bangkok Center Grocery, which specializes in food from Thailand but also other parts of Asia. I purchased sesame oil from Japan, rice vinegar from Taiwan, black soy sauce and dry rice noodles from Thailand, and my favorite, hailing from Bangkok itself, Squid brand fish sauce, the large bottle illustrated with a vibrant yellow squid but actually made with anchovy extract, sugar and salt. (“Salt crystals may appear naturally in high quality fish sauce,” notes the label. “These salt crystals are harmless.”)

By coincidence, when I’d told a coworker of mine earlier today where I was headed after work, he revealed he was preparing a highfalutin buffalo wing recipe for a Super Bowl party and was having trouble finding sriracha, a popular Thai garlic-chili red sauce. So as a favor, I picked him up a bottle of Thai-authentic Sriraka Panich brand. (“I like that the word ‘panic’ appears in the name of a hot sauce,” he told me later.) If I hadn’t boned-up on sriracha at Wikipedia beforehand, I’d have mistakenly instead bought the best-selling U.S. brand, Huy Fong, which is made here, doped with preservatives and apparently considered ghetto-fabulous by Thai people. After ringing-up my purchases, the clerk individually wrapped my bottles in pages from a Thai newspaper.

A short walk up Mulberry Street and I hit the Asian food and houseware emporium New Kam Man (200 Canal St.), where I’ve shopped before for tea and quirky mugs. It’s a far less touristy and more practical version of Pearl River. Upstairs is dedicated to food, mostly packaged goods, although if you’re in the mood for whole dried shark fin, there are several large glass apothecary jars, nestled on a high shelf, filled with this cartilaginous treat.

Here I bought the recipe-recommended brand of oyster sauce I couldn’t find at Bangkok Center, Lee Kum Kee. I’d have chosen a bottle of this regardless. On its label, a smiling Chinese mother and son row a canoe across a lake, only the boat also contains a small bounty of oysters, each the size of a Radio Flyer wagon. On each side of this scene, a posse of uncaught giant oysters rears from the water, shells parted as if to shriek, “You’ll never make it to shore alive!”

I also bought a cylindrical tin of Roland brand grapeseed oil hailing from France. I thought the mention of this oil of which I’d never heard was a “foodie” pretension of my recipe until I did some research and learned that the oil has a high smoke point and little aroma which makes it a prime candidate for hot wok action.

Which brings me to my final purchase, a wok, which I selected from the wok aisle downstairs at New Kam Man in the midst of all flatware, glassware and teapots. I selected a no-brand steel model with sturdy handles, deep and measuring about 14" across, for a mere $10.50. While I was down there, I grabbed a box of five pairs of lacquered wood chopsticks in vibrant colors and cheesy geisha illustrations for $4.95.

Now that I’m prepared for pad see ew, other than buying an egg, garlic, Chinese broccoli and pork loin, which can be more easily procured uptown, you should be reading soon how the recipe unfolds. Excitement!

Pax, the breakfast/lunch chain store off the lobby of my office building, is expensive and its morning lines long, but I’m lazy and want a muffin and a hazelnut coffee, so I frequent the place anyway. Usually it’s a busy but orderly scene. This morning, however, the woman at the front of the line was complaining about the price of her bagel with egg whites and tomato.

It was something insanely expensive, $8, I think, partly because it was an off-menu item and partly because this is one of the most costly cities in the country. She insisted on continuing her complaint (“It’s a bagel with egg whites and tomato. Eight dollars? That’s insane!”). I don’t know what she expected them to do—give her a discount because she deserved it?

No, instead, the manager strode over briskly, literally snatched the order away from her and said, “If you don’t want it, you can leave. You’re holding up the line.” She sputtered something about attitude and stormed out. The line shuffled forward as if nothing had happened. In the silence, I felt like chirping, “Ya know, in Latin, pax means...” but I didn’t want my muffin seized.

I took an A train down to the Village this morning to purchase a pound of cheese for the Amy Sedaris Cheeseball I plan to sculpt when my sister’s in town next week and realized that Murray’s has the best cheese descriptions ever. Here’s an example from the cheese I bought today, Taylor Farm Smoked Gouda; it’s from their website, which features longer descriptions than at the shop on Bleecker, where they’re not as consistently funny by nature of their brevity. This one’s good enough that I can almost overlook the mangled punctuation (and that fifth sentence, which is a run-on). What sells it for me are the hinted-mockery of typical cheese-shops and descriptions, the lovely phrase “a wedge of wet autumn,” and especially referring to a cheese as a “husky lad.”

A few years ago we would’ve sneered, Smoked gouda? Try the supermarket. And then Jon Wright of Londonderry came along with this husky lad. All good cheese deserves a chance, and this is the best smoked gouda we’ve ever tasted. Vermonters are a hearty bunch, ice fishing, sugaring, running around in the snow, they need a hearty cheese. This is one you can sink your teeth into, heady with real smoke (not some Liqui-junk in a bottle), like a wedge of wet autumn. For cheese guys, there’s always the need for the perfect nosh on Superbowl Sunday, poker night, or while waiting for dinner. As comfy with Newcastle as a drunk guy in a jersey.

Back when I was interested in meeting people who shared my interests in fine conversation and whisky, my friends Samantha and Iggy supplied some great advice: sign-up on the websites of various whisky producers to get invited to free tasting events. I signed up with a favorite, Laphroaig, which netted me a small plot of land somewhere in Glasgow and a certificate stating this fact, but little else. Then today I got an email promoting a “live online whisky tasting.” Which as near as I can tell does not involve drinking whisky but instant-messaging about it. That’s like giving a starving man a cookbook.

In addition to not telling a girl, “I didn’t realize you were that old” upon learning her age, or commenting “I like your new haircut” when you’re uncertain whether it’s merely windblown or a month old, I have learned it is also unwise to ask, “You’re not really going to eat all that cheesecake, are you?” Although it did net me a mangled half-slice of raspberry swirl Junior’s from my disgruntled coworker.

When I think I have it bad with my peanut allergy, I only need to think of Tyler Savage, a 12-year-old British boy who I read an article about today in the Evening Standard. Apparently he can eat only chicken, carrots, grapes, potatoes and apples; everything else makes him spew violently from one or more orifices. The minerals and vitamins he doesn’t get from his five foods are pumped directly into his stomach by tube. This news coincides with the fact that more and more children are developing food allergies; the public is better educated about such maladies so more are being reported, but other than that, there are only guesses as to why so many people these days are allergic.

Best snack ever? It may be the Eden brand “All Mixed Up” nuts and dried fruit mix I bought from an upscale bodega and ate recently while waiting for the A train at 14th Street. It’s a resealable foil package containing a pleasing mix of roasted pumpkin seeds, almonds, dried cherries and raisins. Sweet, salty (but low-sodium), filling and moderately healthy, it hits the spot and is something that I suspect can be made in large batches on one’s own much more cheaply than the $3.99 I spent for a four-ounce bag.

Megan, Katie and I convened on the Lower East Side at Counter for what was hopefully billed as the city’s “first annual” Organic Beer Bash. It was set up like a wine-tasting, only featuring organic beers and ciders. At nine tables stood representatives from organic brewers across the country who would pour a sample into a non-biodegradable plastic cup (whoops) while describing the drink and fielding questions.

Stouts were in short supply, though I liked the Butte Creek porter, hailing from Chico, California, which featured a rich choc lately tang. And Wolaver’s, of Middlebury, Vermont, which was proclaimed to me the best organic beer brewer in the country by reps at two competing tables, had a deliciously dark oatmeal stout with nutty, cocoa notes. My increasingly sloppy annotations to my program indicate “goes well with fries” (they were made from chickpeas and beer batter) and “bitter, like Katie,” which I think was a joke because the beer actually was bitter. Wolaver’s Wit (wheat) beer sort of exemplified most of the other lagers and IPAs (India pale ales) I tasted today: a might too light with lots of conflicting, astringent flavors, often due to the utilization of a specific type of hops. In the case of the Wit, it was coriander and orange peel, but I think I merely need to develop my palate and appreciate these beers since I’m not used to tasting anything in a light beer but the sickly carbonated sweetness presented by the average American mass-market brew.

By now, you’ve probably heard of this study from the Stanford University School of Medicine in which preschoolers overwhelmingly declared that McDonald’s food tasted better than the same food placed in plain wrappers. I await the follow-up study in which preschoolers declare poster paint “delicious” and reveal that the Gorton’s fisherman hides in their bedroom closet at night.

Of course most kids are going to say McDonald’s food tastes better. They’re also going to claim Coke tastes better than Sam’s Choice Cola and that Honey Nut Cheerios taste better than the store-brand equivalent (“Sugar-Shellacked Oat Tori”), because they believe commercials, because they watch too much TV and because their parents buy them the scrapple they clamor for.

I recall junk food advertised more heavily when I was a kid, but I think I escaped most of its charms because, at the risk of making my family and I seem even more like colorectal Family Values politicians, my parents laid down the law, reserving fast food meals for special, occasional treats, and limiting commercial television consumption.

As hinted here before, as an impressionable youngster, mainly I watched commercial-free shows on PBS such as All Creatures Great and Small, 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, as well as cuddly family-fare sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Murder, She Wrote, which may explain why I didn’t have many friends as a child, seeing as I was unable to chime-in on playground conversations about who shot J.R. or the coolness of the newest Duran Duran video. And although I did get my fair after-school share of G.I. Joe and Transformers, I also got a healthy jolt of classic Warner Bros. cartoons, which opened my eyes to cross dressing rabbits, pigs that sing “Moonlight Bay” and shotgun-toting hunters with speech impediments. (I must say, I’m a more confident New Yorker having been educated early by Looney Tunes about life’s grotesqueries and idiosyncrasies.)

My TV intake was leavened further by reading. Oh, I was a precocious youth, reading as a Kindergartner, volunteering at the local library in grade school, and plowing through perhaps hundreds of books. At home, in addition to Highlights (“Fun with a Purpose!”), my magazine reading included my Dad’s copies of Consumer Reports, the theme of which is that food and other objects in name brand packaging is not necessarily as good or as price-effective as similar items in other packaging.

But enough about me. This story has a happy ending in that, as most parents will tell you, it’s easy to play off preschoolers’ small minds in a positive way, like how you can tell them that their dead hamster is in heaven and that cursing is “wrong” because “I said so.” For you see, the Stanford study found that fruits, vegetables and milk in McDonald’s packaging also tasted great to kids. Under fire for peddling crap to kids, McDonald’s, realizes this as well, and now only heavily promotes Happy Meals that contain fruit and food with fewer calories and less fat. Now all the company needs to do is brand exercise with its golden arches so kids think that’s cool, too, and we’ll have the Childhood Obesity Epidemic licked.

Cherries ’n Cream Stewart’s soda, which I drank for the first time this afternoon, tastes just like cherry pie filling, which tastes just like Haribo Twin Cherries, which taste just like a dessert my mom used to make for my birthday called Cherry Parfait, which was essentially cherry pie filling spread atop French vanilla pudding. I like cherry pie filling flavor. It may be my favorite artificial flavor.

Dr. Mohamed Ahmedna, a food scientist at the North Carolina A&T School of Agriculture and Environmental Science, has reportedly developed a “simple” yet mysterious process to produce allergen-free peanuts.

Along with tree nuts such as walnuts and cashews, peanuts rank among the nastiest food allergens. I’ve been allergic to peanuts since I was a kid and my revulsion to them is such that I don’t think I’d want to eat an allergen-free peanut even knowing it wouldn’t make my throat swell shut. But I’m still intrigued by Dr. Ahmenda’s work; he sounds like a modern-day George Washington Carver, having developed “a process to remove a common mold toxin from peanuts, a low-fat, high protein meat substitute, an infant formula, and antioxidants from red peanut skins.”

If you’re ever stuck eating at a Don Pablo’s, as I was tonight in Orlando in the middle of a thunderstorm that lashed the restaurant windows so fiercely it was as if the building was moving through a giant car wash, the best tip I can offer you is this: although the $7.49, 27-ounce Lotsa Rita margarita seems a better bargain versus the $7.00, 14-ounce Pablo Rita house margarita, it’s not.

When I asked about the difference between the two, my server, Antwon T., revealed that both drinks contain the same amount of tequila. “It saves you the headache from all that ice and sweet-and-sour mix,” he said, recommending the Pablo.

Point taken. Plus the jumbo-martini-style glass of the Lotsa Rita is kind of fruity. But what really sealed the deal was that I was dining early enough, I received the buy-one-get-one-free special, the only caveat of which was that my server said he was required to bring both drinks to the table at the same time, so I appeared to be some sort of lush-in-training with my jumbo glass goblets of alcohol.

The toughest element of the again-languishing 52 Meals Project is that it’s just so easy to return to a familiar restaurant for familiar, comfortable food. Sometimes I just want food I know I’ll like because I’m not up for the crapshoot challenge presented by a new place. Though I didn’t regret stopping by the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market tonight for an open-faced toast sandwich with cheese and sliced sturgeon because the counterguys were jiving to a lost funk classic from 1975, “Bouncy Lady,” by a group called Pleasure, apparently obscure enough to not even have their own Wikipedia entry. I had to ask the Blue Ribbon guys what song it was because I’d never heard it. I agreed with them that few groups other than one named Pleasure could extol the virtues of a bouncy lady.

There are these Indonesian candy chews I enjoy, Ting Ting Jahe, that are really nothing more than ginger, sugar and starch. They’re chewy, very spicy and refreshing and are individually wrapped in a distinctively bright white paper wrapper with blue checkerboard edging and a disturbing illustration of a sprouting ginger root. Because they’re so gummy, they used to be wrapped in corn-starched waxed paper underneath the white paper wrapper to prevent the transfer of stickiness.

After I opened a bag purchased recently from an Asian food store near Astor Place and removed the outer paper wrapper from my first piece, I was surprised to see not the usual waxed paper but what appeared to be a tenaciously clingy variety of cellophane. I spent the better part of a block trying to pick it off, but it kept breaking off in brittle bits. I threw out this first candy with the aborted wrapper and it wasn’t until I was halfway through picking the cellophane off the second piece that it dawned on me that it wasn’t cellophane at all but an edible starch-based film. Genius! Although when I first put it in my mouth, my tongue and brain conspired to produce a reaction along the lines of “Ew! Cellophane! Spit it out, you nimrod!” Seconds later, the wrapper melted away.

I ordered a Lodge cast-iron frying pan and it arrived today via Amazon, crammed in a cardboard box and cradling a Haruki Murakami hardcover like literature destined for deliciousness. I ordered the book partially because I wanted it and partially because it tipped my total order into free shipping territory, saving me a good $15 on a utensil as dense and weighty as a bowling ball. The pan I ordered because I always sort of wanted one and because the Times magazine last Sunday ran a bewitching recipe from 1966 for something called David Eyre’s Pancake, a cross between a crepe and a flapjack. And, you know, cooks are always going on about the miracle of their cast iron, as if it was a particularly dim and stocky yet hard-working child of theirs.

For a utensil this rugged, seemingly smithed from a block of iron the size and sturdiness of Chuck Norris, then forged in the fires of hell or South Pittsburg, Tennessee, I expected chuckwagon simplistic care and handling. But its instructions read like a babysitter’s list of dos and don’ts. Don’t use soap. Dry it thoroughly always. Apply a light coat of oil before and after. Store in a cool, arid place. And for the love of all that is holy, do not violate all of the preceding rules at once by sticking it in your dishwasher. In other words, you never want to actually clean it, just gussy it up from time to time, like superficial Stradlater in Catcher in the Rye, spic and span outside, crumby inside.

The thing has the heft of a deadly weapon, perhaps literally, as Andy Capp’s wife taught me. Since my Amazon orders arrive at work, I had to haul it home in a bag. I kind of hoped I could have prevented a mugging by winding it up and clocking someone with it.

Soon after my friend Jimi moved to New York City, still in the initial grip of its charms, he told me he was fascinatated that he could buy a Big Mac any time he wanted. He wasn’t addicted to fast food, merely relaxed in the confidence that should he require a Big Mac at four in the morning, one could be readily procured at McDonald’s Times Square.

New York provides. Your want of any thing isn’t limited by what’s available because everything’s available. The only concern is, “Can I get it delivered or will I have to pick it up?” Earlier this year, for instance, I was convinced I needed a six-foot sheet of translucent Colorplast for a project and sure enough, a store on Canal Street sold just that.

To my dentist’s chagrin, I also want soda made with sweet, superior sugar. When I wrote excitedly last summer of finding Coke in San Francisco made with sugar instead of the high fructose corn syrup it’s been made with domestically since the mid-’80s, I had assumed it was the most conveniently available source. For shame. I should have checked New York first. Even more reliable than finding gray-market Mexican imports of sugar-Coke at local bodegas, I learned this weekend of a more consistent and legal stock bathed in semisecrecy.

According to a frequently bandied-about statistic, the New York metropolitan area is home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel. Chametz, a law of Passover, dictates that certain grains cannot be consumed during the holiday, in some cases including corn, the source of high fructose corn syrup. So in order not to lose a segment of potential consumers, Coke adds a kosher-certified variety of its namesake beverage made with sucrose (sugar) in the weeks leading up to Passover, from mid-March to early April.

Compounding this small window of opportunity, availability is limited. In cans and two-liter bottles, you can find it in New York and a few other large metropolitain areas, which according to the Orthodox Union include Boston, Baltimore-Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Kosher Coke made with sugar can be spotted by a telltale yellow cap printed with a Hebrew phrase and the OU-P symbol (as well as sucrose in the ingredients listing).

Soda connoisseurs perpetuate and fret over the hoarding and small stocks of sugared Coke, but by merely striding toward the beverage aisle at an Upper West Side Gristedes, I noticed about half of the two-liter bottles of Coke on the shelves were topped by yellow caps. It’s interesting that they weren’t segregated or designated kosher/made-with-sugar by a sign or display. Possibly only observant Jewish folk, sugar-soda lovers and readers of certain blogs know the secret.

I got off work today for President’s Day. Other than thinking about cleaning my apartment (but not actually doing anything about it), the highlight was making some soup, inspired by the shipment of fresh vegetables at my local grocer: green beans, zucchini, carrots, leeks. They still can’t secure decent tomatoes out of season, though: the ones on display today were pencil-eraser pink and non-resilient, those classic warning signs of flavorlessness. Fortunately, I’d say the overall most useful non-condiment ingredient in my cupboard is canned diced tomatoes, which I stock up on whenever I have a chance. They’re useful for a multitude of recipes, including sauces, soups, pasta dishes and salsas. They’d pretty easily sneak into my own top-ten base ingredients to have on hand at all times. Anyway, it was a bright, tasty and nutritious soup for a lazy winter day.

I drove by this sign in Atlanta this afternoon, amused by the cocktail-napkin-quality cartoon of the half human/half burrito “fast taco.”

Sweating with fear or exertion, he’s wrenched his head around to steal a bug-eyed glance back. His sombrero just popped off but there’s no way he’s stopping to retrieve it. He will move as fast as his little green cowboy boots will carry him.

What are you so afraid of, burrito man? Who or what are you running from? An anthropomorphic hot dog? Your bratty enchilada children? Wolves? A drunken fraternity? A menial life in Mexico? The INS? Or are you merely making "a run for the border" in a lunch patron’s gastrointestinal tract?

The mind boggles.

Last weekend, someone asked me how I find the restaurants I eat at for my various failed and ongoing meals projects. I have three primary sources: advice, serendipity and media.

First, the advice of friends and coworkers. Hey, they wouldn’t be my friends if they didn’t share at least some adventure for experiencing exciting new dishes and places to eat.

Second: serendipity. The average block in New York City must contain about seven eating establishments, so I’ll merely walk around an unfamiliar part of town to spot new places to eat at.

Third, and my most common source of inspiration, is local media. I find dining leads in locally produced blogs and city news pages online. I discovered my most-recent 52 Meals Project restaurant on some New Yorker’s Flickr photostream. More often, my leads stem from commercial media sources. The online edition of New York magazine contains my favorite and most fruitful restaurant write-ups. Overall I find the magazine’s content too glib and targeted above my pay grade, but I respect most of its themed food listings and capsule reviews, especially within the “Best of New York” section, which are pithy and accurate.

I enjoy the 500-word “Tables For Two” review in The New Yorker, although each week it makes me wish the magazine would include more than one restaurant write-up per issue. Time Out New York is another classic source, especially its annual Cheap Eats issue. And although I don’t consult its restaurant reviews regularly, I find gold in the occasional “100-best” lists featured in The Village Voice.

For Samantha’s birthday party celebration last night, a group of friends met at the rooftop bar of the Library Hotel. I arrived early and before I entered the hotel, I noticed it’s catty-corner from Park Avenue Liquor so I stopped in. Yow! I need to frequent this place.

In addition to a representative bank of liquors for mixed drinks and a robust wine selection, this place has the largest mass of single-malt scotches I’ve seen. A friendly salesperson handed me a brochure the shop produces quarterly, listing all single-malts they carry, and it enumerates 162 distinct varieties from Speyside alone. In addition, representing the highlands, there are 39 varieties from the north, 22 from the south, 19 from the east and four from the west. The lowlands have 20 selections, 59 more are from Islay and more than 50 combined represent a few other smaller regions. Prices range from a piffly $28 for a Glen Moray 12-year-old 80° to a 50-year-old Macallan bottled in a Lalique decanter for $9,000, the availability of which is so exclusive, according to a recent Times article, it’s exceedingly tough to come by, even if you’re a bonus-flush wanker from Goldman Sachs.

I favor the peaty Islay Laphroaig and before I visited home for the holidays, I asked my folks to try and track down the more exclusive 15-year variety but it was not to be found in Cleveland. Happily for me, it was right there on the shelf behind the counter at Park Avenue Liquor, snuggled between the 10-year variety I’ve been drinking and a 30-year-old for a cool $250.

I bought a bottle of the 15-year and can report that it’s lighter in color and cleaner tasting than the 10-year. I also found the finish to be more astringent than the 10-year. The aftertaste was oddly olive-tasting, like that of a dirty vodka martini. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been drinking the 10-year for years that I think it’s better, but I think I’ll stick with it. Or better yet, as Samantha and Iggy mentioned at the party, I need to get in on the free whiskey-tasting events held in the city. One way to get invited is to subscribe to the emailing-lists via the websites of the whiskey producers. Will do!

From the “Tables For Two” restaurant review of Boqueria by Leo Carey in the December 18th New Yorker:

The deep, vinegary tang of a lentil stew is heightened with ingeniously thin round crisps of Serrano ham—porcine Communion wafers—and poached egg.

The phrase is superfluous but “porcine Communion wafers” might be so bad it rounds the circle to goodness again.

I laughed at a quote by Taco Bell president Greg Creed in today’s New York Times (“E. Coli Sickens 39 in New Jersey and New York” by Robert D. McFadden). Addressing the E. coli outbreak of food poisoning traced to his company’s chain, he said, “Health officials have indicated that there is no immediate threat and whatever may have occurred has most likely passed through the system.”

Aside from the intense vagueness required by the corporate catastrophe first-response playbook (indicated, no immediate threat, whatever, may have and most likely), I was struck by the phrase passed through the system. Ha ha! When you’ve made your customers shit blood, you may want to watch your double entendres, Greg.

I’ve had the worst luck with corkscrews. Granted, the first one I bought upon moving to Inwood was from the local dollar store. The screw on that one, which I swear was made of plaster, snapped off on the first cork I attempted to pull. For good measure, I cut my hand on it. What did I expect for a dollar?

So I laid down multiple dollars for a nicer model, I believe from KitchenAid. Last night, uncorking some shiraz, the screw somehow came unattached from the rest of the corkscrew mechanism. I was able to pry out the cork very slowly using a can opener that made distressed scraping noises and flaked bits of silvery grit under the unnatural exertion.

Seriously, what’s the deal? Isn’t the [cork]screw the most trustworthily elemental of machines, up there in the trophy case with levers and inclined planes? Is my technique unsound? Do I need to buy a designer corkscrew with sleek German engineering and Powertrain warranty?

The Fancy Restaurant Club had its monthly gathering at the Carmine’s off Times Square tonight and it was O.K. but it’s another joint I’ve been to before. In honor of having been the first of the Club to buy and bring along the just-published Zagat 2007 New York City Restaurants, I was persuaded to choose next month’s restaurant.

I like some of celebrity chef Danny Meyer’s restaurants, especially Blue Smoke and the Shake Shack (others, less so), so I selected new Zagat entrant and 16th most-popular restaurant in New York City, The Modern. I’ve been to the casual side of the Modern before; it’s called the Bar Room and it’s fancy, but compared to the Modern proper (known as the Dining Room), it’s supposedly like eating at the kids’ table.

I was hesitant in my decision, but the sign arrived that I’d made the correct one when on my ride home late on the A train, the woman in the seat directly across from me was reading Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, Danny Meyer’s new book. This was hard to miss because she was reading it like she really wanted everyone on the train to know she was reading it. Somehow she was single-handedly holding the weighty hardcover raised to her face, the cover splayed so I was looking into the PhotoShopPhotoshop-smoothed face of Danny, his elbow resting rakishly on a tabletop draped with white linen, as if to say, “Come, bask in my dining experience, Fancy Restaurant Club.”

My company conducts a semi-monthly raffle for which an employee can receive two tickets to a Broadway show or dinner for two at a fancy restaurant, tax and tip not included. Odds have it that the winner will be among the 300-some lawyers and lawyers’ minions who toil in our flagship Park Avenue office, not one of the 35 folks here on Eighth Avenue. But today I was selected for the dinner-for-two and the amount of praise and congratulations I received from my coworkers for doing nothing was on the par of winning a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Nobody here likes lawyers, much less lawyers’ minions.

Immediately, too, I was besieged with offers from lady coworkers to step in as my dinner companion. I am not a shallow man but I don’t want to dine with someone I work with; I get enough of them here at work. Plus, I guess I am a shallow man because several suitors would appear to rank eating within their top-three hobbies.

So I turn to you, my beautiful readers and allied tradespeople, with an offer to dine with me. Explain why you think you should be the one to join me at March or San Domenico. Reviewing your entries, I will ignore the fawning, select whomever I want and alienate most everyone. It’s all in good fun!

But first, a little about me. What should you expect from Jason as your dinner companion? All of this writing about meals here and you still may not have a clear picture as to whether I’m an Andre or a Wally when the dinner bell rings. Here are the facts:

• Don’t be concerned if I eat little. I don’t exercise so I don’t eat much, a health philosophy practiced by four other people in America.
• I have no idea how to select a wine, which will be fun because the price-per-bottle limit of my dinner-passes is $100.
• I will drape my napkin upon my lap prior to dining but during the meal you will catch one or more of my elbows resting on the table edge.
• I usually chew with my mouth closed and I don’t gesture with my utensils when making a point.
• Why, yes, I will try some of your entrée.
• Yes, it is delicious.
• Favored topics of conversation include current events, Manhattan news, celebrity sightings, movies, books, poetry, photography, art, music, computers and Cascading Style Sheets.
• If you’re going to discuss who got voted off the island or America’s top model or whatever it is TV fans are always going on about, I will feign interest but actually I will be gauging the symmetry of your eyebrows. Alternately, imagining you naked.
• I enjoy vicious racial humor, but only in the company of the race that’s being mocked, only after at least a two-week familiarity with that person and only if it’s reciprocated with a good cracker joke.
• When conversation lulls, I will ask my dinner companion to select and rank the most attractive people in the restaurant.
• I carry exact change and my Visa card has a reasonable credit limit so you should not be alarmed that it is illustrated with a photo of Lake Erie.
• For digestif purposes, I’m a Scotch man. Cognac is for rappers and pussies.
• As I’m leaving the restaurant, I’ll load-up on the free stuff at the register—mints, matchbooks, business cards, unguarded menus, little boxes of crayons—but I’ll try not to make a big deal about it.
• I may insert a toothpick into my mouth, but only after I have exited the restaurant and only because I think it makes me look tough.
• If pressed to complete the phrase “dinner and ------,” my first five free-associations would be “a movie,” “conversation,” “dessert,” “dancing” and “casual sex.”
• I like long walks on the beach. I usually take these alone at Coney Island, barefoot and head down like the “Jason is Sad” montage of my biopic, but really I’m just scanning the sand for broken glass and stingray barbs.

So what do you think? Who’s hungry?

I suspect that I would eat better if the America’s Most Wanted-style counterguys at the bodegas where I buy my dinnertime Pringles and Campbell’s Cup-o-Salt Soup were replaced with concerned matronly types.

“You need to get some fresh fruit instead, dear,” they’d tell me, refusing to ring-up my quart of Cookies-n-Cream Häagen-Dazs. “And for only twice the cost of that malt liquor you’re planning to purchase, you could make yourself a hearty vegetable and pasta soup at home.”

Jessica Simpson looks weird. It’s like her head was squashed in a vise, spreading her eyes and mouth to nonstandard widths. And her breasts, at least in Employee of the Month, which I saw tonight, are unnaturally spherical and thrust upwards, just sitting there like two lead shot on a salver. Then there’s her skin, which has the peachy-orange hue of Barbie plastic.

Her personality is pleasant enough, and she’s of course the love interest in the film, competed for by two buffoonish employees of a Sam’s Club-like warehouse store in a race to prove their worth by winning Employee of the Month. Their good deeds are rewarded by management with a gold star stuck to a chart in the break-room and when scruffy underdog Dane Cook got his first star, our group lead the theater in a round of applause over this ridiculous formulaic plot development.

There are a few laughs here and there, some fun physical comedy of people getting injured and a cool clubhouse where Dane and his friends drink and play cards. It’s hidden way up in a hollow among the stacked, cube-like pallets, accessible only by forklift.

Afterwards, Jimi, The Man and I headed to the Film Center Cafe to see if it had reopened from its renovations. It has and now it’s annoyingly fancy, with a DJ booth and resulting DJ-style music, too-bright lighting and waitresses dressed like those girls in that Robert Palmer video. Gone is the dim atmosphere and the large sturdy tables good for groups. Our sever messed up the order and the food was only O.K. Worst for me, Guinness has been taken off the drink menu.

Does anyone really know what a good wine tastes like?

At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got screwcap hobo juice and wine-in-a-box that tastes like melted plastic. Everyone knows it causes macular degeneration, but they drink it anyway because it’s handy for picnics and fishing trips and those sorts of parties where at least one person ends up passed out in the bathtub. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got super-expensive wine. Everyone knows that tastes good because it’s super-expensive.

But there’s a great gray swath of middle ground littered with wines known in the trade as “sorta expensive.” It’s so subjective and anyone’s best guess or personal choice as to which of these taste “good.” I usually choose my mid-priced wine by identifying the best-designed label. Or I try to track down the $14.99 bottle that Robert Parker has anointed with a 90, only to find it has been sold out and the other vintages taste like feet.

Tackling this pressing issue with gusto have been some Japanese scientists who embrace my philosophy that robots are the answer to many of the world’s problems. Think of the Sony AIBO, which keeps us company and performs synchronized dance routines to Madonna songs when no one else will. Or consider the iRobot Corporation, whose robots clean our floors and help our armed forces kill swarthy evildoers in foreign lands.

The team of researchers at NEC System Technologies and Mie University, according to an AP story yesterday, dedicated two years of their lives to design a robot that can “taste” and identify wine, just like a sommelier, but with less condescension. Apologies if I’m venturing into the land of stereotypes here, but I was not surprised to see that this robot appears to hail from Super Mario World.

This eye-candy design masks what’s really just a computer-backed infrared spectrometer. The way it works is you place your wine up against that sensor, the robot zaps out a beam of infrared light, then the liquid’s chemical composition is analyzed in real time.

When it has identified a wine, the robot speaks up in a childlike voice. It names the brand and adds a comment or two on the taste, such as whether it is a buttery chardonnay or a full-bodied shiraz, and what kind of foods might go well on the side.

The robot can even be “programmed to recognize the kinds of wines its owner prefers and recommend new varieties to fit its owner’s taste.”

But the best part of the article is near the end, where it is revealed the robot can sense whatever is placed before it, not just wine.

When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

Don’t panic; have a glass or two of full-bodied shiraz. But keep your eye on the robots. They’ve got a taste for flesh now.

My mom mailed me a shoebox containing a bubblewrap-swaddled gallon Ziploc freezer bag full of homemade Snickerdoodles.

Does any cookie have a more stupid name? No. However, there are also few cookies as delicious.

Donny: Those are good burgers, Walter.
Walter: Shut the fuck up, Donny.

I did some stereotypical San Francisco sightseeing today. I hiked up Telegraph Hill to see Coit Tower and a prime view of Alcatraz Island. I browsed the stacks at City Lights, co-founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore and publisher to the beat poets. Fisherman’s Wharf, which I also stopped by, is the Times Square of San Francisco: chain restaurants, dreary hotels, questionable entertainments, beggars, tacky T-shirts and trinkets for sale, and fat people clearly not from the city waddling about. This photo of a seagull in a shitstained landscape, eating what appears to be a bun, just about sums it up for me.

I salvaged my wharfwalk somewhat with a planned visit to the Musée Mécanique, a collection of antique mechanized penny and nickel amusements, including viewboxes for 3D photos (“See what the belly dancer does on her day off!”), player pianos and orchestrions, photobooths, fortune-tellers and palm-readers, love-testers, mutoscopes and slot machines.

It’s too bad it’s not a true museum but a bunch of stuff some daft old bastard collected and threw into a warehouse on Pier 45. There are very few placards describing who made these Wunderkammern and why, how popular they were, or how they work. Or course, there’s also no admission fee to the Musée, so I can’t complain too much.

One of the two most popular attractions was Knock Out Fighters, a primitive precursor to Rock’em Sock’em Robots. They’re these articulated, marionette-like boxer figurines, made in 1928 by a St. Paul-based scale manufacturer, that are completely mechanical and use no electricity. The arms of each player’s boxer are moved independently by two triggers on the gun handle-style “joystick.” A direct punch to the chin of an opposing boxer pushes in a pin that causes the figure to collapse in defeat. The other crowd-favored game was this mechanical test-your-strength arm-wrestler in a luchador mask, favored by gentlemen wishing to impress their ladies.

I also enjoyed this amusement park model fashioned mostly from toothpicks.

Nearby was an intriguing text-and-photo-based history of the roller coaster and the magic year of 1884, when LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a crafty inventor from Ohio, installed the first, the 600-foot Switchback Railway at Coney Island. It topped out at six miles-per-hour and required passengers to exit their car at the halfway point to switch to another track. But even that couldn’t hinder thrill-seekers who waited up to three hours in line to pay their nickel and take the wild ride. That same year at Coney Island, San Franciscan Philip Hinckle installed the first power-chain operated lift-hill coaster, while in San Francisco, two “continuous oval-track gravity coasters” opened, one at Ocean Beach and another at Mission and Eighth. Here’s the text of an ad from that year promoting the latter coaster:

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
A Sled-Ride Down Hill Without Snow!
GREAT SPORT!
PHYSICIANS RECOMMEND IT. * OPEN DAY AND NIGHT.
The CALIFORNIA GRAVITY RAILROAD CO.
Cor. Eighth and Mission Sts.
ADMISSION FREE. * FIVE CENTS A RIDE.
Bring your family and enjoy yourselves.
Polite Attendants. Electric Lights.

There are newer exhibits in the Musée as well: about a dozen old video games plunked way in the back. I was disappointed that the only inoperable machine was one of my all-time favorites, Tempest (1980), and to read the instructions revived fond memories. This game was easier than Old Maid:

TO PLAY:
Shoot the approaching enemy and enemy charges. Player loses a life when:
* caught by an enemy
* hit by a charge
* skewered by a spike

Wrapping up a fine afternoon on my long walk back to the hotel, I was able to score some Mexican Coke. No, not the Lindsay Lohan kind. Check it out, baby: hecho en Mexico.

If you wonder what my fuss is about, you are no soda connoisseur. Here’s part of an Associated Press article from 2004:

[D]iscriminating shoppers [...] say the cane sugar sweetener used in Mexican Coke has a sweeter, cleaner flavor than the high-fructose corn syrup in the American version. Many are willing to pay $1.10 per 12-ounce bottle for the imports, even with cans of American Coke sitting nearby for 49 cents each.

I’ve since read not all Coke in Mexico is made with sugar, but I trust that mine is because there’s an official label stuck to the oldschool green-tinted glass bottle by the importer with sugar listed as the second ingredient after carbonated water.

If you believe a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which doesn’t offer any hard data to back up its claim, you can find Mexican Coke “just about everywhere in Latino communities across the United States.” But most of the officially sanctioned product here is found in Texas and Southern California, two of the largest Mexican markets in the country. The rest of the country’s Mexican Coke may be “grey market” stock brought over the border by third-party distributors or retailers. See, the Coca-Cola Co. limits official imports of the stuff because U.S. bottlers don’t get any money from Mexican Coke and that makes the U.S. bottlers sad.

One reason U.S. Coke isn’t made with sugar is that domestic sugar prices are artificially inflated to several times of those anywhere else in the world in order to help poor Florida sugarbeet farmers buy another Olympic-sized swimming pool for their second house.

So drink Mexican Coke and not only is it tastier than “the real thing,” you’re screwing over sugar farmers, the Coca-Cola Co. and its bottlers. Amazing how quickly an American icon can turn renegade. I’m going to lug my bottle back to New York and store it in a cool, dark place. As is done with Dom Perignon, I will save it to drink with a special someone for a special occasion.

Because people have been more leery than normal about eating it, there’s currently a glut of meat on the U.S. market, according to a Reuters article last Thursday.

Fears over bird flu have hurt the profits of [hog and pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc.] and other meat companies, including industry leader Tyson Foods Inc., as overseas demand for chicken slumped sharply, leading to an oversupply in the United States and pressuring prices for other meats, like beef and pork.

Poor meat. It’s always been saddled by ethical and religious considerations. Then it was health issues over what it contained, either inherently, such as fat, or additionally. Now it’s growth hormones, carcinogens and brain-melting diseases.

But the busy bees in lab coats are skirting these issues by growing meat in labs, the same way tissue can be grown from stem cells. Here’s William Saletan, a national correspondent for Slate.com, writing about lab-grown meat late last month:

Researchers in Holland and the United States [have] grown and sautéed fish that smelled like dinner, though FDA rules didn’t allow them to taste it. Now they’re working on pork. The short-term goal is sausage, ground beef, and chicken nuggets. Steaks will be more difficult. Three Dutch universities and a nonprofit consortium called New Harvest are involved. [...]

Growing meat like this will be good for us in lots of ways. We’ll be able to make beef with no fat, or with good fat transplanted from fish. We’ll avoid bird flu, mad-cow disease, and salmonella. We’ll scale back the land consumption and pollution involved in cattle farming.

This is as eerie as it is fascinating. I’m aware lab meat is, like, Year 3000 stuff, but if it ever caught on and became cost effective, could whole species, like pigs, become extinct? After all, what use would we have for them if they’re not going to be reared solely for sausage and bacon? Could lab-grown beef still be called beef or would it be LaBeef or Beef-Eeze or some other ridiculous name trademarked by ConAgra? Could those lab guys get some Jurassic DNA in the centrifuge and whip up some dinosaur grill patties? Suddenly I’m hungry.

I was in the area of Madison Square Park early this afternoon, so I stopped by the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, the event I missed last year. Land sakes! I was deterred by the long, unorganized lines, and they had sold out of fast passes, which I would have been wise to have bought in advance. I sour-grapesed my way out of it by noting that I’d already sampled the wares of all three of the locally based vendors, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Blue Smoke and R.U.B., and that I’d only get sunburned and cranky in line.

Ah, the mojito: first trendy drink of the 21st century, yet so refreshing I must forgive it its trespasses and have several per sitting. I set off for one today after work, now that summer is official here in the city, with its tidings of vengeful mugginess and steaming garbage odors.

I went to Little Branch, on Seventh Avenue at Leroy Street, which I’d selected earlier as a location convenient to pre- or post-Film Forum drinks. The bar, which opened a year ago, makes a triad of entrepreneur Sasha Petraske’s cocktail kingdom, joining Milk & Honey and The East Side Company. Sasha’s gotten less wankish with each of his speakeasy hideaways: reservations are required at Milk & Honey, with its unlisted phone number and waiting list. The bustling East Side Company features a DJ booth. Little Branch is open to all without reserve. It has a piano, a pressed tin bar at which one may stand, and a dozen or so tiny, intimate booths.

The front door, adjacent an unassuming West Village intersection, is marked only by a small metal plaque. Go down a flight of stairs and you’re there, in the windowless dark under a low corrugated steel ceiling, light from white candles placed on the tables. Scratchy pop hits from Prohibition play in the background. Textures abound: ridged paper napkins, wire-glass tabletops edged in metal, tall wooden seats at the two-person booths upholstered in leather.

And a $12 per drink cost seals the overly trendy deal. I will allow this inflation on occasion. Premium prices are understood on small luxuries in North America’s most expensive city. What irks me more is uninspired restaurateurs profiteering by means of small entrees on large plates, or those deceptively shallow soup bowls. This extends to drinks that appear to contain more ice than liquid, so I was suspicious when my mojito arrived as such, in a glass frosty from the Sno-Cone clump of pea-sized ice pellets rising above the rim.

But the ice style resulted in little melt and an expertly cooled beverage, so the true test was the drink itself. The perfect mojito shouldn’t taste too rum-punchy, nor should it be too sweet. The mouthfeel should be slightly “thick,” from the sugar, yet effervescent, by way of the club soda, a balance Little Branch has achieved. The sugar, the glow of rum, the green snap of the mint, all superchilled by the ice, combined to form near perfect refreshment. I sat there for some time afterwards contentedly crunching my ice. I could have gone for another, but I would have been wiser to have chosen one of the tantalizing specialty drinks containing, say, candied ginger or fresh squeezed fruit juices. Or I could have quizzed the suspendered bartenders’ reportedly encyclopedic knowledge of drinks both popular and archaic. I shall return.

Two of my favorite brands are getting huge boosts for their popularity. Modo & Modo, maker of Moleskine notebooks, is putting itself up for sale because it no longer has the capacity to meet demand. Last year, it sold 4.5 million notebooks worldwide, more than half of those to the U.S. market, according to the London Daily Telegraph. And the company currently only has 13 employees!

On the local front, Daisy May’s BBQ, known by regular readers as a general favorite of mine and the first meal in the first 52 Meals Project, has recently expanded its dining arrangements. Previously, there was nowhere to sit inside, just a narrow lunch counter to stand at; fair weather would bring a blessed few picnic tables outside on the sidewalk. Now the place has been expanded inside to include cafeteria-style service within a pinewood dining room housing 48 seats at communal tables. They have also begun serving whole pigs.

Kudos to these establishments on their continued success. In both cases, I think the goods are slightly more expensive than one would expect to pay, but worth it because of the quality.

Remember that Simpsons where Homer’s on a diet and Marge gives him rice cakes (“You can put a little something on top for flavor”) and he stacks a bunch of food on top one of them and microwaves it?

Coincidentally, I watched that episode a day or so ago, and I was just looking at the packaging for my Quaker Salt Free Rice Cakes (“Satisfying Whole Grain Crunch!”) and in blue capital letters on the back is the warning DO NOT HEAT IN TOASTER OR MICROWAVE.

As I have neither a microwave nor a toaster, I can’t test this warning. So, what happens? Someone needs to try it for me, like that time Dave Barry put Pop Tarts in a toaster and held down the lever until they burst into flame.

Do rice cakes catch fire when you toast or microwave them? Do they get laser-hot, or a slightly less Satisfying Whole Grain Crunch, or what? The suspense is killing me.

The soda bread I made last night for our perpetual Patty’s Day party at work today was a hit. The photo above depicts what remained of the spread at 12:45 p.m., after the locusts had descended. What’s left of my soda bread is sitting on the tinfoil in the foreground. Many people said they liked it, but I think that was because this mouthy girl I work with kept telling people it was I who had baked it, after listing all the ladies who had made stuff, as if it was by some miracle that a guy could cook. Also, I don’t take praise well.

So thanks to Dana for the recipe, and happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. Drink a Guinness for me.

Without too much trouble, this should be a finalist for Most Unnecessary Foodstuff of 2006. First off, there’s only one cookie in there. Why cookies on the label, plural? It’s like the opposite of Triscuit.

And to state the obvious: cookies for breakfast? How about some Cookie Crisp? Or, dude, just grab some Chips Ahoy! and a fistful of vitamins. Yeah, each Quaker Cookies has five grams of dietary fiber; however you’ll also note it’s not a low or reduced-fat product, because if it was, it’d be the first thing you’d notice on the label, not the impish grin of a porky Christian.

Combining elements of a cafeteria with a vending machine, entrepreneurs Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first Automat in 1902 in Phiadelphia, following it with New York City’s first such restaurant ten years later on Times Square.

The concept was simple. Small, glass-doored comparments lining the walls were chilled, heated or neither, depending on the single serving of food nestled inside. Each compartment had a corresponding coin slot, and patrons shuffled down the line with a tray, inserting nickels to unlock the doors and remove the food of their choice. Unseen staff working on the other side of the walls refilled empty compartments. Coffee, tea and other beverages were dispensed by placing a cup under a spigot, then inserting a coin. Customers with laden trays then gathered silverware and seated themselves. Automats were fine places for quick, cheap meals and to overhear snatches of only-in-New-York coversation among the establishment’s thrifty patrons.

Automats hit paydirt during the Great Depression, by which time there were more than 42 in the city, collectively serving hundreds of thousands of meals to cash-strapped patrons daily. Irving Berlin wrote two odes to the Automat in 1932: “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” which became a jingle for Horn & Hardart, the chain name now synonymous with Automat, and “Lunching at the Automat,” which imagined New York’s social elite reduced to rubbing elbows with commonfolk at mealtime:

Times are not so sweet,
But the bluebloods have to eat,
So the best of families meet
At the Automat.

. . . .

The Morgans and the Whitneys
And the other big shots
Change dollars into jitneys
And drop them in the slots.

Although meals could be had for nickels, grifters paid even less with substitutes ranging from slugs, purchased 15 for a dime, to foreign currency valued at far less than five cents but equal in shape. Five-pfennig and two-sou coins worked well.

In 1936, Berenice Abbott photographed the dessert section of the Automat at 977 Eighth Avenue just south of Columbus Circle, popular among area musicians, cabaret-goers and other nighthawks.

This Otto Soglow cartoon published in The New Yorker a few months later suggests how the Automat had worked itself into the popular imagination.

For World War II rationing efforts, Horn & Hardart hired “Sugar Girls” who doled out the sweetener that used to be kept in bowls at every table. Customers purchasing coffee or tea had to tell the Sugar Girl how much they wanted, limited to a maximum of two teaspoonfuls per cup.

Automats began to disappear during the following decades as fast food chains rose in popularity and inflation made nickel-only purchases obsolete. By the early ’60s, there were only six items at the Automat that still cost five cents: three varieties of buttered roll, servings of buttered bread or toast, and a doughnut.

While campaigning for Nixon’s 1960 presidential bid, multimillionaire New York governor Nelson Rockefeller showed he was a man of the people by lunching on a cruller and coffee at the Automat on Union Square. I like to think Irving Berlin got a kick out of that, just as he would have been saddened to hear that the city’s last Automat, located on Third Avenue and 42nd Street, closed in 1991.

Garlic is highly hygroscopic, which I know because whenever I need it for a recipe, the cloves are bloated and spongy, lurking in the dark of my cabinet like plump maggots. Eww. So I stopped by Williams-Sonoma tonight and asked the greeter, an overweight woman with a high-pitched voice, where to find “one of those ceramic things you put your garlic in.”

“Actually, sir,” she said, “ours are terra cotta. They’re in the far back on the right.”

As I passed the KitchenAid mixers, Le Creuset cookware and gleaming stainless steel implements, I wondered how sexy Williams-Sonoma could make a garlic cozy, or whatever they might call it. Well, I can tell you without a doubt that Williams-Sonoma’s garlic cozies exude less style than most any other item they carry, including their coasters.

The cozies sat in a row on a low shelf near some bland salt and pepper shakers. They’re tiny terra-cotta pots, unfinished on the outside, glazed on the inside and topped with an ill-fitting lid. Three holes have been added to the face in an uninspired fashion. They reminded me of miniature versions of those pots designed for planting Hens and Chicks. For $10, I demand more flair from my garlic cozy. I recall seeing glazed ceramic ones shaped like garlic bulbs. Where can I get those, anyway? Target doesn’t have them, and now I know Williams-Sonoma doesn’t, either.

As I was leaving empty-handed, the greeter asked, “Oh, were we all out?”

“Nah, I just didn’t like them,” I said. “But they were right where you said they’d be, so in that sense, your help was a success.”

I hadn’t meant this to be funny, but she laughed this high-pitched laugh as if my response was the funniest thing she had heard all day. Or she was just humoring me, another potential customer leaving without a proper garlic storage device.

I went out for a short spell with my mom to see if we could capitalize on any post-holiday sale specials. We drove out to Beachwood Place and Golden Gate Plaza in Mayfield Heights. True to my fashion, I only ended up buying some used CDs at the Half Price Books at the Plaza, where everything in the store was 20% off.

For dinner, my mom made meatloaf using one of the KitchenAid silicone loaf pans I got her for Christmas. They’re the consistency and comical red color of a clown’s rubber nose, but the time-tested recipe turned out great. I’ve seen and heard that a lot of kitchen utensils and wares are now made from silicone, but I read a level-headed mini-report in Consumer Reports that mentioned there really aren’t all that many true benefits to using silicone. I suppose you get easier release on your muffins if you bake them in silicone trays, but you still have the usual prep time, cooking time and cleanup.

After dinner, we retreated to the living room, where I built a cheery fire, we uncorked some wine, and watched a terrible episode of CSI: Miami. The wine helped dull that pain a bit, but not too much.

Dana called to tell us that in honor of St. Stephen’s Day, she willingly ran into the ocean. There’s no telling what those crazy Irish people will do next.

Using my new Calphalon, I cooked a pot of my favorite soup, Gypsy Soup. My grocery didn’t have fresh yams/sweet potatoes, despite a produce section well stocked with coconuts, baskets of chilies, cactus, yucca roots, guanabana and other botanical mysteries of Spanish cooking, so I got some cans of cut yams.

Whereas my grocer seems to have poor or absent selections of many items I would deem basic, it excels in stocking foodstuffs I consider blatantly unnecessary. Chief among these can be found in the meat department, where my supermarket sells chicken feet. Batches of them are shrink-wrapped to small white foam trays as if they were no different than ground chuck, except that they resemble mutant miniature starfish.

Anyway, the non-fresh yams substituted well, although I had to rinse off the sugary syrup and add them to the pot later in the cooking process on account of their precooked softness.

I also used canned whole tomatoes, which I chopped and de-seeded. The recipe calls for blanching fresh tomatoes, but the ones at my grocery had the color, texture and likely taste of a #2 pencil eraser, so I passed. The canned versions not only saved time, I didn’t notice a taste difference.

What a fine stomach-warming and heartwarming soup!

McDonald’s Corp. will start printing nutritional information on its packaging starting in February, according to a Reuters news story today. It will be similar to the Nutrition Facts tables found on packaged foods in stores, so consumers will be able to tell in a pig-eyed glance that they’ll be ingesting 47 percent of their total recommended daily fat intake by inhaling that Big Mac. It’s great to hear McDonald’s is taking this step, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with building defenses for itself against tobacco industry-style litigation.

Over the past few years, the nutritional research community, chiefly in the firm, warm embrace of large campaigns and grants from major chocolate manufacturers, has been touting the benefits of chocolate because it contains flavonoids, molecular mysterions that have been granted benefits ranging from antioxidant to anti-inflammatory. Never mind that the flavonoids are found in cocoa, one of several ingredients in chocolate, so the actual number of flavonoids in the average highly processed milk chocolate bar can be slim.

Now a report from the October issue of The Journal of Nutrition reveals that such flavonoids can bind to and inhibit a protein in the intestines called CFTR. What does this mean? According to the study’s co-author, “fluid loss by the intestine can be prevented by cocoa flavonoids.” That has to be my favorite euphemism yet this year; in other words, the scientists are telling us that cocoa flavonoids can help prevent diarrhea.

Diarrhea! Diarrhea! It’s O.K. to say it, people.

Now we just have to wait for the candy community to tell us how chocolate can help prevent “fluid loss by the intestine,” or better yet, “fluid loss by a portion of the alimentary canal,” because no one wants to see the word “intestine” in food-related public relations, much less “diarrhea.” And because as every mother knows, when her five-year-old is violently expelling waste from one or more orifices, chocolate is the solution.

For dinner, I stopped in for cheap tacos at my favorite neighborhood taqueria, the Great Burrito, and noticed a laminated sign affixed to the counter explaining that “due to increases in costs, we are forced to raise our prices.” The message concludes, “Sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for understanding.”

Prices are up across the standard dinner menu items, ranging from 25 cents to a whopping 90-cent increase on items including the onion steak burrito. The heartiest overall price hikes were a full dollar on some sides-menu items, like the homemade flan, which jumped from $2.50 to $3.50. Either that’s some top-notch flan or Madre was holding out for more money to whip up a batch.

Thankfully, my beloved black bean soft tacos only inflated by a quarter to $2.25. That’s still pretty cheap for tasty Mexican grub.

What does New York have against honey-roasted cashews? As you may know, I’m allergic to peanuts, so my typical alternate is cashews or almonds. More often I crave that sweet-savory combo found few places in nature than glazed nut products and honey-BBQ ribs.

I prowled the streets of the city tonight for a good 45 minutes in search of honey-roasted cashews. I left disappointed from many establishments, including:

• Gristedes and Food Emporium, Manhattan’s most prevalent grocery chains
• popular local pharmacy-store chain Price Wise Discount
• the East Coast’s largest drug chain, Duane Reade
• Broadway Farms, our neighborhood grocery
• and no fewer than three bodegas and mom-and-pop grocers

It wasn’t just an out-of-stock issue. I sheepishly admit I’ve made these rounds before in search of my sweet, nutty booty, only I couldn’t recall which of the above stocked what I was looking for. Let it be noted here for future reference: none of them. This despite otherwise embarrassingly thorough nut selections: nuts in bags, nuts in cans, nuts in glass jars, nuts in plastic snap-top tubs. Planters, second-tier brands, no-names. Salted, lightly salted, no salt, smoked. Mixed nuts, beer nuts, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, macadamia nuts, even—and this was a true stab to my heart—pignolia nuts. But no honey-roasted cashews. The closest I got was a cashew-peanut honey-roast mix from Planters, and of course plenty of plain-ol’ honey-roasted peanuts.

I was nearly ready to throw in the towel when I tried one last place: CVS. Jackpot! A can of CVS Gold Emblem Fancy Whole Honey Roasted Cashews, one of two left on the shelf, was mine for a reasonable $4.39.

In a delayed reaction from July 4th, I had a sudden craving for a hamburger this evening. I waffled for a solid hour on whether I should buy one at a restaurant or make one myself, eventually deciding on the latter because of the cheapness and ingredient control. By that I mean that I made blue-cheese turkey burgers on rolls that were billed as low-carb, but that I bought because they were foxy looking.

I learned I’m better off sprinkling crumbled blue cheese atop the freshly cooked and still hot hamburger, letting it melt into an unappetizing-looking but ultimately tasty goo. Initially, I had crumbled the cheese into the raw meat before cooking, but it evaporated in the process.

Andie and I have been known to knock back a martini or two in our day, so this extended holiday weekend, she purchased a handsome stainless steel cocktail shaker from Williams-Sonoma, along with the celebrated ingredients for success depicted here, including gourmet olives, not those nasty jarred ones with reconstituted pimento.

After a previous violent experience with gin, I prefer vodka martinis, but when one is offered a complimentary martini, one does not complain.

Delicious!

I don’t regret much in life. But I regret missing the 3rd Annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, which was held at Madison Square Park this weekend. Damn and blast! When this rolls around next year, someone remind me, please; there’s a rib in it for you.

Have you tried these Hispanic Kool-Aid flavors? They don’t seem to be new (I believe Kraft introduced them in 2001) and they may only be available in areas with a concentrated Hispanic population, but I hadn’t seen them before.

I tried Jamaica, named after a Mexican beverage made with hibiscus petals, and it has a dark, tannic-fruity taste. I’d recommend it. I would not recommend the pineapple because it tastes much like I thought it would: watered-down pineapple juice, without the pulp or “bite.”

I haven’t bought the tamarind, mango or tangerine flavors yet, but I’ll let you know when I do. In the meantime, enjoy this obsessive Kool-Aid FAQ.

The Munson Diner, which served up food for 50 years on the West Side of Manhattan, closed last summer. While walking to work, I would frequently pass it, at the corner of West 49th Street and 11th Avenue, the windows and doors boarded over, a small color-sapped poster advertising gyros still taped behind the window of the front door.

The diner itself finally came up for sale early this year after the Volvo dealership next door decided to expand its showroom onto the spot. When I write “the diner itself,” that’s literally what I mean. The Munson is one of those super old-school diners, mostly chrome, glass and neon, the size and general construction of a double-wide mobile home, that can be transported on a flatbed tractor trailer. It’s what Bill Bryson, in his essay “In Praise of Diners,” calls a “classic” diner, noting that their transportability was a key selling point: if business was bad, the diner could simply be moved elsewhere.

And that’s more or less what happened. Yesterday, as shown in my photo, workmen were clearing space around the diner and dismantling various things. By this morning, the diner had been completely uprooted, like a tooth, a sad debris-filled hole in its place. According to a blogger who was there when the diner was spirited away, ’round about midnight, it’s on its way upstate, to Liberty, in the Hudson Valley.

Happy trails, Munson Diner.

As an average American, you’ve probably heard by now, probably on the local news while you were eating most of a bag of Lay’s KC Masterpiece BBQ Flavored Potato Chips, that the USDA has issued a colorful new food pyramid to recommend the sorts and amounts of foods we eat.

Back in 2000 or so, the last time the USDA revised the pyramid and the accompanying recommended dietary guidelines, I was working for the candy magazines and got to experience the intense lobbying by the various food industries that goes into constructing these things.

The cattlemen want meat emphasized. The grain farmers would like to regain a shred of their pre-Atkins glory and are recommending running over the cattlemen with their combines; also, eating a diet rich in hearty whole grains. The pistachio growers, who throw great parties, are pointing out the tasty benefits of nuts. And the candy industry’s mantra is that its products can be a part of a balanced diet. No one wants anything in the guidelines that’s the slightest bit negative about their food interest. Believe me when I tell you that the food industries are the architects of the pyramid or, at least, the shady subcontractors who install inferior drywall, to overextend a metaphor.

So the food pyramid and the dietary guidelines are a joke. But I don’t despair because all I need to know about diet and exercise I’ve learned from observing Katie’s cats.

Ariel gets plenty of exercise, speeding around the apartment and rebounding off various pieces of furniture. Even with this active lifestyle, she eats sparingly. She is as streamlined a kitty as you’ll ever hope to see. In fact, she looks more like a meerkat than a cat, particularly when she hears someone out in the hallway and she sits up to listen more intently.

Lily, however, who Katie told me is two pounds overweight, has a more relaxed lifestyle. She prefers sitting to moving and when she does move, it’s usually slowly, with frequent breaks, much as a teamster might move. I try to get her to move about by playing with her using one of those string-on-a-long-stick cat toys, which sort of works. She rises up on her haunches to lunge and bat at the string, reminding me of those burly gentlemen in pro football—linemen, I believe they’re called—who rear up like grizzlies and attempt to swat down field goal attempts by the opposing team.

She is intensely interested in eating, thinking that every time I make a move to the kitchen, it just might be to get her some food, despite repeated evidence to the contrary. When it is feeding time, she gets very excited, meowing and trying to trip me up, presumably so I drop her bowl full of food that it might reach her faster. She chows down with vigor while stealing glances at Ariel’s bowl, like it’s a race to the finish. But Ariel never finishes her food, just a few quick bites, then off for more darting about. I must remove the uneaten portion or else Lily snarfs it down.

So there you have it: eat less and exercise for better health. It works for cats, so I can only assume that with some limited testing on a group of human subjects, we can prove it can work for them, too.

While Jimi’s in Williamsburg, Virginia for the Candy Hall of Fame this weekend, I’m watching his cats, so I stopped by his new apartment after work today to pick up the keys.

We ordered delivery from Daisy May’s BBQ, which was the first entry in the 52 Meals Project. At that time, I tried one of their sandwiches, which was great, but for dinner tonight, both Jimi and I got an order of the sweet-and-sticky Kansas City pork ribs. They were amazingly good; I tend to like my ribs super-saucy and these fit the bill. They were well-trimmed, meaty and filling; both of us were too full to finish our full order. Of course, we also got the mashed potatoes with red eye gravy and the peaches in bourbon, which I heartily recommend. I was also highly impressed with the delivery time; granted, it was only a Thursday evening, but it only took 20 minutes and the food was still piping hot upon delivery. Highly recommended!

I have re-evaluated Edgar’s Cafe, which was a recent entry in the 52 Meals Project. I wasn’t impressed with the place because my lunch there was bland and overpriced. I theorized the place was better suited for coffee and desserts, and after trying out that combo tonight, I must say it ranks more highly with me.

I went there with Andie and Eric, and Andie’s friend Mickey and a friend of his. We all tried something different (cherry pie, chocolate cake, gelati), and we all enjoyed everything. Especially noteworthy was the frutti di bosco tart that Mickey ordered. While he was eyeing it in the glass display case soon after we walked in, an Italian woman standing nearby pointed out that Edgar’s actually flies their version of the wild berry treat directly over from Italy. We all tried a bite and agreed it was excellent, while we entertained notions of the tiny dessert buckled snugly into a first class seat for its flight to the states.

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected Smucker Co.’s efforts to patent its process for making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Smuckers argued that its crimped-crust method was one-of-a-kind; examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office disagreed, citing pie crust and ravioli.

Take that, Smuckers!

There’s an amusing article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the efforts of J.M. Smucker Co. to uphold its method for making “sealed,” crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a technology it uses for its Uncrustables brand. A federal judge will decide this afternoon if the method is worthy of legal protection.

Make sure you glance at the original patent for the sandwich, which includes an excruciatingly technical description of how a peanut-buter-and-jelly sandwich is made, as well as some gloriously robotic factoids, such as:

Many individuals enjoy sandwiches with meat or jelly like fillings between two conventional slices of bread. However, some individuals do not enjoy the outer crust associated with the conventional slices of bread and therefore take the time to tear away the outer crust from the desired soft inner portions of the bread.

I’m not up on my patent law, but the technology for making sandwiches of this type has been around for a few decades at the least. When I was a kid and our family went camping, we had these cast-iron tools, with long handles like fire pokers and at one end, a saucer-sized, UFO-shaped clasp. You’d make a regular crustless PB&J sandwich (or in my allergic-to-peanuts case, a jelly sandwich), butter the outside of it, open the clasp and smoosh the sandwich inside, close the clasp, and cook it over the campfire. The result was a treat resembling the deep-fried McDonald’s pies of yore. Maybe whoever made those sandwich-fryers should get after Smucker’s for stealing their idea.

I’m cooking dinner for Sherry tomorrow night using the Crock-Pot slow cooker I got for Christmas. The meat selections at the chain grocery stores in my neighborhood are appalling, so I figured, what the hell, I don’t go to McDonald’s here when I’m hungry—New York’s got everything and I should be going to a butcher. I asked Jimi for advice and although he’s never been there, he recommended Florence Meat Market, at 5 Jones St., a stone’s throw away from his West Village apartment. To know what to ask for, I boned up beforehand on a helpful Cattlemen’s Beef Board list of beef cuts and one of those slightly eerie jigsaw-puzzle cow diagrams of where each cut comes from. (I’d never really bought a cut of meat before and had no idea what the differences were among the roast types.)

I went to Florence after work today and the place is seriously old-school. It’s narrow and small and the front door is painted with layer upon layer of vivid dark green paint. Inside, the linoleum floors are scattered with sawdust and behind the glass-front counter, stocked with assorted sausages, is a line of old meathooks, upon which are hanging handsaws, shopping bags and rubber bands. Clustered on the walls behind the counter are dozens of old framed photos of the shop’s butchers throughout the years, and photos of their kids, taken when they were very young, or at their First Communions. A tinny portable radio was playing religious choral music and the three small butcher blocks in the back were each staffed by a white-smocked pro.

I ordered a three-pound boneless chuck roast and my guy fetched it from a walk-in cooler through a heavy, white ceramic door. With bare hands, he deftly pared the fat and tendons from the cut using an astoundingly sharp knife. It was strangely relaxing to watch. I sat on a low wooden bench across from the counter to watch and pet a calico cat that wandered in from the back room where I could occasionally hear a circular saw. When the butcher was done trimming, he bound the roast in string—across, then lengthwise—then swaddled it in thin slices of beef fat, binding it again, then double-wrapping it in stiff waxed paper. He weighed it on an ancient ceramic Toledo scale. At just under $19, it was steep but worth every penny for the experience.

Afterwards, I stopped at Jimi’s (his leases overlap, so he effectively has two apartments this month) and we took a cab uptown to his new place to check on the painters’ progress. It’s the first time I’d seen his new apartment and it’s amazing. It’s a second-floor walk-up in an old building on W. 53rd St. just off 9th Avenue. It has hardwood floors, new doors, cabinets and fridge/microwave/range; nearly 10-foot-high ceilings; track lighting in the main living area; two bedrooms; and four windows. There’s not an incredible amount of closet space, but Jimi didn’t seem concerned. The building is amazingly quiet (Friday nights are a good test of this) and the neighborhood itself is low-key hip and much more silent than any given part of the West Village on a weekend night.

There are many fine eating options within a short walk. After rejecting two places because of longish wait times, I picked Arriba Arriba, which I thought I could use for the 52 Meals Project until Jimi pointed out I had been there years and years ago when I was staying at Katie’s and visiting the City. Oh, well; it was good, regardless. Jimi had a burrito and I got the shredded pork tacos.

Eric cooked up some tasty stir fry for him, Andie, Katie and I to eat while we watched The West Wing tonight. It featured tofu, noodles and had lots of fresh vegetables, including zucchini, carrots and broccoli. Hooray for antioxidants!

You know what’s delicious? Ben & Jerry’s Oatmeal Cookie Chunk ice cream, which was designated a full-time flavor recently after serving as a limited-edition flavor in 2003. It’s like eating a stick of butter wrapped in a giant oatmeal cookie, somewhat like Homer’s out-of-this-world space-age Moon Waffles.

Food, glorious food! Inspired by “once a week for a year” resolutions like this guy’s 52 books project and a desire to get out more, I’ve resolved to eat a meal from a different restaurant in New York every week this year.

My only limit will be avoiding really expensive and obnoxiously trendy places. Restaurants featuring waiting lists and/or Paris Hilton, for example, are unlikely to benefit from my patronage.

Other than that, anyplace is fair game. In fact, I plan to be flexible with the definition of both “meal” (I rarely eat that much, plus I’m cheap) and “restaurant” (“eating establishment” is more accurate, but too bureaucratic-sounding).

I’m allowing, for instance, food via carryout, or from street vendors, stadiums, delis, bars, coffee shops, cafeterias and people’s homes. As long as the food is served from a place in New York I’ve never been before and it’s substantial enough not to be termed snack food, it’s cool. Chain restaurants, taboo for me since I moved here, are also fair game. Don’t pray for my soul just yet, because I’m not talking about Applebee’s. For example, I've been wanting to try Gray’s Papaya and Hale & Hearty Soups for awhile now. So far as I know, they’re both located only in New York, but they are both chains.

Can I keep it up for a full year? Hey, I never thought I’d end up writing this stupid blog daily, and look how that turned out.

Naturally, you readers out there from New York (and you readers of New York magazine) should feel free to send eatery suggestions my way.

Here’s to a tasty 2005!

Update: As you may have noticed, the 52 Meals Project rapidly dissolved into an exercise of “review a meal whenever I eat it,” instead of this original one-per-week idea. I’m still aiming to eat 52 meals at new places this year, likely with much cramming, literally and figuratively, near year-end. Stay tuned.

For lunch, I’m a basic eater. Lately, it’s been a bagel, although I’ve got the sneaking suspicion that my Middle Eastern buddy at the local deli has been ripping me off to the tune of $1.50, even though his bagel does have a slather of cream cheese and is tightly enclosed in cling wrap for my protection. So on the way home from Lee-Ann’s party Sunday, after watching with amusement no fewer than two traffic accidents resulting from the frozen Broadway pavement, I stopped in at the original H&H Bagels at W. 80th Street for a half-dozen onion bagels. They cost about $5.50, but they’re fresh and as big as a baby’s arm. H&H has been a New York institution since the ’70s, despite having what is possibly the world’s ugliest logo—Is that a shopping bag? A liquor flask?

I sealed a few of them in a Ziploc freezer bag and brought them in to work yesterday and I must say, they emanate the most powerful onion odor I have ever had the honor of smelling, and bear in mind that I’ve not only chopped fresh onions, but have been inside mens locker rooms. Craftily, I wrapped the Ziploc bag in a KMart bag, then the KMart bag in a Fairway bag. For good measure, I put the Fairway bag in a small corrugated cardboard box, then closed the box in a desk drawer.

I came in this morning and the onion smell is just as powerful as ever, perhaps more so, as if it gained momentum overnight. I am concerned people will think it is me emanating this odor, particularly my boss, who as I’ve mentioned before, is usually keen to track the source of mystery smells. But if she’s smelled it, she hasn’t said anything, at least to me. After all, if I can’t shave properly, what’s to say I’m familiar with other tenets of basic hygiene? If you concentrate real hard in the vicinity of my cubicle, you can almost make out wavy lines arcing from my desk drawer, kind of like Peter Parker’s Spidey Sense, only smellier. Andie insists I am mistaken, but I think the smell resembles that of a dead mouse; you know, one that’s been caught in a trap for a week or so behind a bookcase. Perhaps there really is a dead mouse in my cubicle. But if so, I’m betting on the onion odor to win out in the end.

I just tightly wrapped the whole box-bag mass in two more bags and fear I may have to allow for extra time at noon to painstakingly de-mummify my lunch. I imagine that refrigerating or freezing these bagels might cut down on their scent, but I prefer to eat fresh bagels and don’t want to contaminate any other lunches in the office fridge. It is but a small price to pay for some cost-effectively delicious bagels, although next time, I will consider purchasing the sesame seed variety instead.

According to the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, New York City has more than 15,000 places to eat, and Andie & I tried one tonight, the Hi-Life Bar and Grill on Amsterdam. Both of us had walked by the place on numerous occasions, noticing the enchanting 1950s-style neon signage of martini glasses and letters spelling out “COCKTAILS,” in case you’re not paying close attention, but neither of us had eaten there until tonight. We had a martini each and found them pleasantly dry and tasty, shaken but not stirred, adorned with three olives and served in glasses that enabled both of us to spill at least a bit on ourselves in a comical fashion. Andie had the roast chicken and I had the crab cakes and they were yummy.

When I returned home, I decided to look up the place in the Zagat Survey to NYC restaurants I got earlier this month, just to see what they had to say. Since I got the guidebook, I’ve been looking up my favorite places, as well as new ones, usually after the fact, because I don’t need some anonymous yahoo telling me whether or not I should enjoy a restaurant.

I’ve quickly discovered that the Zagat NYC guide is nowhere near inclusive (the Hi-Life, for one, isn’t covered). The nearly 2,000 restaurants taste-tested in the 2005 edition only lightly dent that 15,000 figure. Of course, that 15,000 admittedly could be padded with fast food chains, bagel stands and shish kebab carts, but needless to say, it’s not an exhaustive guide.

I’ve also noticed the reviews in Zagat slide towards trendy locales. The majority of Zagat’s 30,277 NYC surveyors are in their 30s and the top-50 most highly rated restaurants are located mostly Downtown, on the East Side, and typically no more than a block off Broadway on the West Side. So a lot of my hole-in-the-wall favorites get no play. But then, that could be for the best, keeping the well-dressed riffraff away from my cheap BBQ and taco treats.

Zagat works by having thankless editors boil down the thousands of surveys, the most annoying aspect of which are the “write whatever the hell you want about this restaurant” portions that end up as random, two-to-five-word quote fragments scattered throughout the book like hamster poop pellets.

Not only are the quote marks unnecessary, the quotes themselves rarely reveal anything useful, seeing as how they are the experience of one of thousands of survey-goers who may have only visited the restaurant once, and not multiple times for various meals, as you’ll notice the best restaurant reviewers do. So the French Roast, well documented on these pages as a favorite, gets:

Visit “Paris (in a Disney kind of way)” via this bistro duo serving “fair” “faux French” fare to “youthful” types lured in by its 24/7 open-door policy; though roasted for “glorified coffee shop” looks and “doing-you-a-favor” service, at least they’re “cheap and cheerful.”

Yeah, I like the place already, so I’m biased. But to lump two locations (one up where we live, one way down on Sixth Ave. and 11th St.) into one mini-review can be misleading, especially considering how different in character the two neighborhoods are.

I also find it funny that the Zagat review for Artie’s Deli, another favorite that’s only a few blocks down from the French Roast, is described as “Disney-esque” (clarified as “lots of kids and strollers.”) Are these reviews by the same vocab-impaired penman? And while we’re at it, dear editor, if you’re going to write “Paris (in a Disney kind of way)” your “‘faux French’ fare” is unnecessary, unless you peed a little in excitement at laying down that alliteration super-combo.

Other faves of mine are anointed with more positive reviews by the sassy surveyors. Minado is “eye-popping” and “surprisingly fresh,” Cowgirl is “festive,” and Republic is “always-good” as one of the “best bargains on Union Square.” Paging through the guide, I’ve noticed the least snarky reviews are reserved for overrated celebrity chef restaurants and/or places that won’t be placing a cretin such as yourself on their gilded waiting list anytime soon.

In short, Zagat is “flawed,” “skewed” and can “kiss my ass” and I will continue to find restaurants I like by “listening to the recommendations of friends and coworkers whose opinions I value.”

Andie’s chili recipe includes cashews. Does that strike you as strange? They’re not bad, but tend to absorb the soup’s moisture and expand, like they do in leftover Chinese food.

We discussed this and she usually adds them later in the cooking process so they stay firm, but that still doesn’t account for the cashews present in the leftovers, which happily expand within their snug Tupperware containment. Maybe if the cashews were not included in the cooking process at all and merely added at the individual soupeater’s discretion, as one might add crumbled saltines to one’s soup.

On the other hand, that’s some tasty chili.