It’s Friday night, and you’re home alone making Nutella. Remind yourself it’s an enviable skill that will add to your dowry and that you will not die alone.
Lunch at the Dutch Haus in Montebello, Virginia. May 14, 2007. One of my favorite meals of all time.
In 1973, Toni and Ria Harting spent a small inheritance on three weeks enjoying 10 three-star restaurants in France.
“My mother was as adventurous as I am. She said to me, just before she died, ‘I don’t want you to put it in the bank. Use it for something nice…something that you enjoy.’ So I thought, ‘I enjoy France, I enjoy food, I enjoy travel, and I enjoy my wife.’”
[via funkaoshi]
Bittersweet Chocolate-Bourbon Pops. I made these this weekend and they are delicious.
Dinner at El Bulli: The Greatest Restaurant in the World. I love the way photos and captions and videos are all blended together here, capturing a 30-course meal at El Bulli. It’s great storytelling + food porn.
The answer is “yes”, if you make it no longer “coffee” but rather some strange liquid dessert/hot smoothie beverage.
Last weekend was a little road trip out to Birmingham. So nice to catch up with a friend that I hadn’t seen for an absurd amount of time, and also make some new ones. I ate at Cantina, where the fishburgers and garlic fries get my hearty recommendation. Also saw Bon Iver (good performance) and Elvis Perkins (really, really good performance) in concert at Workplay. Workplay is a nice open venue that’ll fit a couple hundred comfortably. Wallflowers and concert snobs will enjoy the options: an elevated perimeter of tables that surrounds the main floor and the stage, and then above that there’s an upper deck with more tables and chairs and waiters at your beck and call. Nice. We also stumbled upon the McWane Science Center downtown whilst in search of a bathroom. Looked like there was a “Night at the Imax” sort of event going on for the kids.
I drove over to Charleston, SC for Memorial Day weekend. It was Spoleto Festival season, I finally got to see the Alvin Ailey Dance Company (after a mad dash from the parking deck to arrive in our seats *just* before it started). My favorite piece was Suite Otis, a tribute to the awesome (Georgia-born!) Otis Redding. Later the same day we stumbled upon Theatre 99, where we saw a good improv show by a group whose name I can’t recall. Moving on to food…
There’s good pizza at Social. But the drink (read: beer) list was uninspired (I’m spoiled by living a few steps away from Brick Store) and I didn’t quite fit with the crowd. Ditto Rooftop Bar at the Vendue Inn, but the views are nice. I did like the vibe and the jukebox at Recovery Room. The people at Joe Pasta were very kind and I also liked Monza.
We went to the renowned Hominy Grill but the Sunday brunch line was absurd so we went across the street to Fuel, which has great plantains and an enormous serving of chicken & waffles. If I’m ever there again, I’d like to check out Pano e Vino.
Out on Folly Beach, I recommend Taco Boy and maybe Lil’ Mama’s if you don’t mind a little waiting.
There are small human heads in these heads of broccoli. [via waxy]
I joined rogueApron this past weekend for the soup line. Good stuff all around: welcomed with pumpkiny spirits, fed with a trio of soups and East Atlanta Brewery concoctions, topped off with cupcakes and whiffle ball. More pictures in the rogueApron photo pool.
From an interview with Anthony Bourdain, a passage on those beautiful moments and how they feel kind of sucky at the same time:
IÄôve talked elsewhere about there are times in your life… IÄôll use the example of youÄôre standing alone in the desert, and you see the most incredible sunset youÄôve ever seen and your first instinct is to turn to your left or right and say, ÄúWow, do you see that?Äù Okay, thereÄôs no one there, what do you do? Next, whereÄôs the camera? Look through the viewfinder and you realize you know, what you see through that little box is not what youÄôre experiencing. There comes this terrible moment when you realize well, this is for me. There is no sharing this. Worse: if you try to share it with old friends or someone you love itÄôs almost an insult. “How was your day?” “Well, we did three hundred covers tonight, somebody sent back a steak…” “Well, in the Sahara there was this sunset and you wouldnÄôt believe it.” You know?
RogueApron is Atlanta’s independent speakeasy and supperclub:
Food that’s been cooked with love, for people who are soon to be your friends, in a relaxed atmosphere where your drunken sated contentment is our only goal.
I just heard about it this morning and I think it could be really cool. I hope it can make it to the next dinner. This pairs well with today’s New York Times feature on anti-restaurants.
I spent Saturday night in the woods. On Sunday morning I walked back through a nice stretch of trail with blackberries growing along the sides, just turning ripe. Hiking pace went from 4mph to 0mph. I ate pretty much anything I could reach without having to go into the brambles.
First there was Easy Cheese and now there’s spray dog food.
We often buy ÄúI CanÄôt Believe ItÄôs Not ButterÄù despite its awful name and soul-withering chemical composition. Even the productÄôs faux-entertaining site refers to it as a Äúnutritious blend of oils.Äù… In fact, we just bought the ÄúlightÄù version of it, which is therefore some sort of simulacrum of the original.
There’s some great naming suggestions in the comments.
When I heard that milk jugs are being redesigned for better efficiency, I felt a sort of witless glee. Part of that is my usual response to efficiency. And also because most of my high school employment was in the local Kroger, stores #444 and #432 (I still remember that…?). I mostly did night stock, but also spent one summer in the Dairy section. Although throwing crates around in the heat of the shelving moment is really fun,1 dealing with crates is a chore, every single day. Some days I would have killed for a nice waist-level pallet of jugs, rather than a 7-foot tower of crates. There’s also a good audio slideshow about the square milk jugs and some of the problems the customers are having. [via austin kleon]
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1. Plenty of reasons I really liked stock work (lots of trade-offs, but still noteworthy): I got to work alone, but plenty of joking and yelling back and forth. I could yell or sing when I wanted. I got to walk around. There were very few irate customers at 3am, unlike a Saturday afternoon bagging groceries. There’s also a good bit of healthy destruction involved (wielding a box cutter, breaking down cardboard, tossing damaged product out in the aisles, etc.). And on most nights, things looked perfect when I’d leave in the early morning. I love that severe contrast. Make an absolute mess when I’m working, and then polish it to something where no one can tell it was any different.
King Corn is a documentary about 2 guys that move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn. With today’s agro-tech, the actual farming takes just a few minutes. The bulk of it is their interviews and exploration of the food chain from seed to cobs to cattle to what we get in stores and restaurants. Highlights include some fun stop-motion animated interludes, their really funny interview with a PR flack at a high fructose corn syrup factory (and their attempts to make HFCS at home), and the generally straight-shooting commentary from the local Iowans.
Here’s the trailer for King Corn, and an Boing Boing interview with Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the filmmakers.
Mark Larson 