Meat

Last night, to celebrate the impending end of a good friend’s bachelor status, I went with him and six other pals to Riodizio Churrascaria in Tribeca, one of those Brazilian-style places where waiters bring skewers loaded with meat to your table and keep carving off hunks until you cry uncle. Can’t complain about the restaurant, and certainly not about the portions; I was just surprised by what a scene the place was. Sure, there were a few tables with barrel-chested types who looked like they lived there, but clientele for the most part trended to the young and fabulous. The crowd I was with, by contrast, was working the jeans-and-polo-shirt ensemble, sans rub-on tan.

The height of weirdness came toward the end, when a crew of a dozen or so models showed up and went to their table. We all knew they were professional models because every one of them was 1) done the hell up, 2) very very tall, and 3) EXTREMELY thin. Lame’-clad pencils. Despite the many piggish comments that had gone around at my table earlier in the evening (this is the group that, for brief moments of my life, I get to be a guy with, before going home and putting on showtunes), everyone was weirded out by the latest arrivals, and one guy brought up the Seinfeld episode where George is dating a slender woman who he is convinced is bulemic, and starts to resent paying for meals that he is sure she is throwing up. And indeed, the reference was fitting; the last place one could imagine this catwalk crew coming to eat was a place that served all-you-can-eat bacon chunks wrapped in bacon, smothered in baco-bits and served in a sauce of liquid bacon. It wasn’t hard to picture them lining up to flip their rib-eye, filet mignon, short round et al. into the toilet before the check arrived.

Looking back, I’m almost positive this was some kind of stunt. I should have looked for the hidden camera.

Book Stud will be so sad…

It is with great sadness that La Gringa must report the death of the neighborhood Bullet-Proof Chinese Place. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, this is what Book Stud – and most all New Yorkers – call those little scary hole-in-the-wall Chinese food places where the menu is on the walls in tattered yet colorful laminated photos, and the "chef" is secluded safely behind a counter covered with a large sheet of bullet-proof glass. This is where you place your order. (And possibly pawn small valuable items that do not actually belong to you.)

The food at any Bullet-Proof Chinese Place is never what one would actually call "good". Nevertheless, this particular establishment – which up until about a week ago was located on Broadway between 29th & Crescent – served an important purpose in the life of La Gringa and Book Stud: hot & sour soup, the Chinese version of chicken soup, and a cure-all for everything from hangovers to nasty flu bugs to broken hearts. Book Stud once even came to La Gringa’s rescue with a large container of this magic substance when La Gringa was felled by the Infamous Head-Cold From Hell.

Sure, the stuff looks like boogers in a bowl, but hot & sour soup is damned wonderful and now life here in our little corner of Astoria will be a little less awesome. We will miss you, Bullet-Proof Chinese Place!

Dinnerification of pancakes

From Wednesday’s NYT – this. Is. So. Good.

Korean-Style Crisp Vegetable Pancake (Pa jun)

 
 
 

Time: 30 minutes

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon corn, grape seed, canola or other neutral oil, more as needed
5 scallions, green parts only, cut into 3-inch lengths and sliced lengthwise
20 chives or 5 chopped scallions
1 medium carrot, peeled and grated
1 small yellow or green squash, trimmed and grated
1/2 pound chopped shrimp, optional
1 tablespoon rice or white vinegar
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon sugar.

1. In a medium bowl, mix flour, eggs and oil with 1 1/2 cups water
until a smooth batter is formed. Stir scallion greens, chives, carrots,
squash and shrimp, if using, into batter.

2. Place an 8- inch nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, then
coat bottom with oil. Ladle in about a quarter of the batter and spread
it out evenly into a circle; if first pancake is too thick to spread
easily, add a little water to batter for remaining pancakes. Turn heat
to medium and cook until bottom is browned, about 3 minutes, then flip
and cook for another 2 minutes. Repeat with remaining batter.

3. As pancakes finish, remove them, and, if necessary, drain on
paper towels. In a small bowl, mix together the vinegar, soy sauce and
sugar. Cut pancakes into small triangles and serve with dipping sauce.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

In vino veritas

At a late dinner last night, annElise expounded upon her theory of sexuality:

The Chardonnay / Heterosexuality Analogue

Chardonnay is the most popular kind of wine. Heterosexuality is the most popular kind of sexual preference.

Now: if you genuinely like and prefer chardonnay (or, as she put it, "if you’re a womans who likes the mens"), more power to you. We raise the glass. Cheers, skoal, l’chaim.

If, however, you just drink chardonnay because you’ve heard of it, you can pronounce it, it’s societally acceptable, and they carry it in every bar… get off your ass and explore the rest of the damn wine store! There’s shiraz! There’s champagne! There’s cabernet! God help us, there is white Zinfandel! * Go forth! Explore! You might find a new favorite.

Thus endeth the theory. We went on to drink a very nice pinot noir, as we are the Van O’ Dykes.

* La Gringa & Co. does not under any circumstances espouse the drinking of white Zinfandel, for the love of Bacchus.

Julie and JuliaA Book Stud Book Review

You probably heard about the events of JULIE AND JULIA while it was happening; a young woman decided to spend a year making every one of the recipes in Julia Child’s opus, MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING. And then she wrote about the experience. She’s not a particularly polite person, or one with whom you can sympathize much; but she is HILARIOUS, and her life parallels my own in ways that strike me as a little creepy. Except that I’m not married and am lucky enough to have a job that I love (and, as SoundGrrl sagely added, "you’re not a psycho hosebeast",) the similarities are myriad; we’re nearly the same age, live within a few blocks of each other, LOVE food, stick to arguably harmful and stupid projects because we’re crazy-stubborn, drink perhaps a smidge more than is strictly good for us, have apartments that tend to blow up every now and then, and some other stuff that I’m not quite willing to admit to in a public forum. So if you’re wiling to read an incredibly funny narrative by someone you probably won’t like very much, I highly, highly recommend JULIE AND JULIA. (I also recommend having snacks nearby.It will make you hungry.)

Julie and JuliaA Book Stud Book Review

You probably heard about the events of JULIE AND JULIA while it was happening; a young woman decided to spend a year making every one of the recipes in Julia Child’s opus, MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING. And then she wrote about the experience. She’s not a particularly polite person, or one with whom you can sympathize much; but she is HILARIOUS, and her life parallels my own in ways that strike me as a little creepy. Except that I’m not married and am lucky enough to have a job that I love (and, as SoundGrrl sagely added, "you’re not a psycho hosebeast",) the similarities are myriad; we’re nearly the same age, live within a few blocks of each other, LOVE food, stick to arguably harmful and stupid projects because we’re crazy-stubborn, drink perhaps a smidge more than is strictly good for us, have apartments that tend to blow up every now and then, and some other stuff that I’m not quite willing to admit to in a public forum. So if you’re wiling to read an incredibly funny narrative by someone you probably won’t like very much, I highly, highly recommend JULIE AND JULIA. (I also recommend having snacks nearby.It will make you hungry.)

A most marvelous discovery

Did everyone else already know about Craisins?

My life will never be the same. O joy! O rapture! Oh wee morsels of goodness that do not require actual baking in a crisp to love! O portability! O high sugar content! YUM.

In other news: is this just me (you’ve caught on that it’s trouble when I begin a sentence this way, right?) or are there others out there who occasionally wish that they lived on the set of Will & Grace?

Perhaps it is just that I heart Debra Messing’s hair – but part of me would really love every other sentence that comes out of my mouth to be a clever wisecrack, and preferably to be able to call all my friends, gay or not, "’mo" or "Mary" and get away with it, because my stomach is so flat it’s actually inverted.

It was perhaps making me feel a wee bit warm ‘n’ fuzzy, thassall. Tumult! Wine! One-liners! Drama! Crazy friends! Crazier family!

Oh wait, that IS my life.

Happy Boxing Day!

Also, happy first day of Kwanzaa. And, if you are of the Welsh persuasion, today would be Gwyl San Steffan, otherwise known as St. Stephen’s Day, a holiday that La Gringa did not know existed until our wee tiny church sent us a Christmas liturgical calendar in the mail last month. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, in Wales of olden days, Gwyl San Steffan was celebrated very much like a messy BDSM play party:

Some activities that took place on this day seem peculiarly Welsh, including that of "holly-beating" or "holming." In this, it was customary for young men and boys to slash the unprotected arms of female domestic servants with holly branches until they bled. In some areas it was the legs that were beaten. In others, it was the custom for the last person to get out of bed in the morning to be beaten with sprigs of holly and made to carry out all the commands of his family.

Yes, well, then. Ahem! It’s probably a foregone conclusion that La Gringa won’t be letting the blood of any fair young maidens today. (Unless they piss her off for some reason.) But we did want to report on our muchly-fun albeit slightly unorthodox Christmas celebration.

On Christmas Eve, SoundGrrl and Book Stud joined La Gringa for a couch potato feast: scads of wine, cheese, rosemary bread, fresh cherries and baked salmon combined with hours of boob tube enjoyment.

The salmon was particularly good, and La Gringa wishes she could tell you how it was prepared but in point of fact, La Gringa cheated with the salmon. Earlier that afternoon, she ventured into Giant Yuppie Food Porn Store (otherwise known as Whole Foods) to do some last minute shopping for unnecessary but very yummy food items. For the day before Christmas, Whole Foods was surprisingly empty. La Gringa wandered past the seafood counter and was suddenly struck with the idea that salmon would be the perfect thing to prepare for dinner…however, we are utterly clueless as to how to prepare salmon. When we asked the nice Mr. Whole Foods Fish Man for advice, he not only gave La Gringa detailed instructions on how to cook the salmon, but he also rubbed the salmon steaks with a fragrant cornucopia of Mediterranean spices before wrapping them in paper. All La Gringa had to do was lay them out in a pan with a little olive oil and pop them in the oven.

SoundGrrl brought over chocolate and lemon tarts from City Bakery for dessert; these combined with the gourmet dark chocolate covered graham crackers that Book Stud brought pretty much ensured that the three of us would eat ourselves into delightful food comas before the evening was over. We watched some episodes of Battlestar Galactica, but because Book Stud is still one season behind, it became a lesson in cruelty to make her try to follow the convoluted plotlines. We then switched to Pay-Per-View and watched a couple of movies: the hilarious teen revenge flick John Tucker Must Die, which is a lot more fun than it sounds, and the nearly incomprehensible moody horror film Silent Hill, a complete disaster of a plot sadly captured forever on celluloid by a producer with more money than sense. Silent Hill eventually proved to be so terrifying that it lulled Book Stud off to a peaceful slumber on the sofa, while SoundGrrl (who works in the motion picture industry) gleefully picked apart the technical deficiencies of the film for La Gringa’s edification.

Great company, good food, bad movies. Like the song says, two out of three ain’t bad.

Christmas morning, La Gringa accidentally slept until nearly 11:00 AM, which meant she didn’t make it to church services. But we got the dishes from the previous evening done in time for new friend Small But Mighty to trek over from the wild of Brooklyn for lunch and yet more hours of really mindless boob tube entertainment. Small But Mighty brought with her a lot of fresh chocolate rugelach, which La Gringa and she then consumed with a pot of Peet’s coffee. SBM suggested we have a real Jewish Christmas and order in Chinese; alas, there are no decent Chinese restaurants in Astoria, so we settled for spicy Thai curries from Ubol’s Kitchen on Steinway Street. La Gringa also received the most hilarious Christmas present ever when SBM proudly presented us with a Boba Fett Pez dispenser, guaranteed (she said) to help La Gringa pick up hot chicks in a bar.

More confusing episodes of Battlestar Galactica ensued. At one point, SBM posited the idea of a special "continuity spaceship" peopled by magical leprechauns that followed the TV spaceships around supplying things like cosmetics (cos the Cylon chicks all wear an awful lot of make-up), satin sheets (again, only to the Cylons), and hair gel. We finally gave up on Battlestar Galactica when both La Gringa and SBM were reduced to fits of giggles by SBM’s spot-on mimicry of the guy who plays Galactica’s one-eyed XO Saul Tigh. It was utterly ridiculous.

We then watched our share of bad movies. First we attempted to sit through Behind Enemy Lines II. Ouch. Bad idea. When an entire hour had gone by with nary an explosion, we decided to try another movie. the second movie we watched was called 5ive Girls (yes, that’s 5ive), your typical reform school girls trapped in a haunted house with Satan kinda film. (The actual tagline for this film is "Five girls vs. 2,000 demons. You do the math.") We started re-writing the film in our heads (out loud, of course) and re-naming the characters, placing bets on which of the nubile young things would get offed first. SBM though that the token lesbian character (whom we named Dykey McCargopants) would be the first to go, but La Gringa felt that this character would secretly be shown to have a heart of gold and ultimately save the film’s heroine, the slightly clueless blonde that SBM named Buffy McNot-So-Much. Sadly, the Buffy character got whacked in the end (along with Ron Perlman as the good-hearted priest, who is stabbed to death with a bazillion crucifixes) but hottie Dykey McCargopants strolled off into the sunset (covered in blood and gore, of course), and the direct-to-DVD film industry was saved once again.

A most unorthordox La Gringa Christmas, indeed.

Frakkin’ A! Starbuck finally gets her stud back on!

What happens when you get five female die-hard Battlestar Galactica fans in one room and ply them with Spanish wine and  fragrant teas and prodigious amounts of Greek food and chocolate truffles and toffee cake? Well, lots of things. Mostly, a lot of food gets eaten. Secondly, you discover that even the straight chicks all have a thing for Katee Sackhoff. Thirdly, Stinkyboy gets an awful lot of feline lovin’.

This evening, Sloppy D, SoundGrrl, Small But Mighty and SoundGrrl’s pal Aussie Grrl all ventured into the wilds of Astoria for a marathon four-episode Battlestar Galactica foodfest. Also, we paid homage to the fact that A.) it was Guy Fawkes Day (we all voted NOT to build a bonfire in the living room, incidentally) and B.) Sloppy D’s thirtieth birthday (well, technically, yesterday was her birthday, but we felt it was prudent to keep the festivities going).

There was wine. There was much bonding between Sloppy D and La Gringa over our mutual taste in nerdly literature as well as our shared admiration for Grace Park, the comely young woman who plays Boomer on Battlestar Galactica. There was enthusiastic petting of Small But Mighty’s head, which was freshly shaved in a sort of baby-Marine do. (Really, she was purring. It was ridiculous.) There was a deadly amount of chocolate. There was hard core knitting by SoundGrrl. There was feline investigation of said knitting. There was good natured mocking of Aussie Grrl’s accent. (After which Small But Mighty and La Gringa felt it incumbent upon themselves to whip out their former South Jersey accents. Then Sloppy D began to speak in an truly frightening Chicago accent for the remainder of the evening.) There was the (polite) manhandling of Sloppy D by both Aussie Grrl and SoundGrrl, who were determined to investigate the rumored heterochromia of Sloppy D’s eyeballs. There was an absurd amount of Greek food. There was hootin’ and a hollerin’ and fist-shaking when Starbuck finally did cut off the long girly locks and got her stud back on. (There was an equal amount of hootin’ and a hollerin’ when Adama finally shaved off the lamentable Johnny Holmes moustache, lest you think it was an entirely gyno-centric gathering.) There was shouting of the incomprehsible Dutch word ontheffin! (Yes, it needs an exclamation mark.) And last but certainly not least, there was a dramatic reading by SoundGrrl of a chapter from Small But Mighty’s intimidating tax law textbook.

All in all, a frakkin’ awesome gathering! (So say we all.)

I prefer Cool Ranch Doritos, myself.

Today I had what I can safely say is the most peculiar experience I’ve ever had in a public bathroom.

Wait! Where are you going? Come back! This is after-lunch-safe, I promise.

So I was in a restaurant with two unisex one-room bathrooms. I opened the door to the first one, and because of the way the door swings open I didn’t realize until I was two steps in that there was already a gentleman in there, luckily completely dressed and futzing with the paper towel holder, his back to me.

"Oh gosh, sorry!" I said and hastily stepped backwards to leave.

As I was shutting the door behind me, I heard the man say, quietly but clearly: "Did you bring the Pringles?"

Now, it is certainly possible he was talking on the phone, cleverly making efficient use of his hand-drying time.

But if he WASN’T. Oh, if he wasn’t. That means that the door was unlocked on purpose, and that this gentleman had arranged some sort of assignation in the bathroom of a Korean restaurant. An assignation that, in some way, involves Pringles.

The mind boggles.

Is you is or is you ain’t…?

Baby Crumpet is, in fact, my favorite baby in the world, and Big A is lucky I didn’t abscond with her.

Am in Seattle, ensconced in Coffee of Doom while Chip, a dear friend from high school, is off doing important law-related things (i.e. work). Due to an extraordinary burst of exhaustion-fueled productivity, I am actually DONE with all the work I brought with me, leaving me a blissful day alone to mill around looking important and/or winsome, drink massive amounts of coffee, and inundate my poor benighted friends with e-mails. (Laptop! WI-FI! Life is so so good.)

Spent two lovely days being ferried about by Big A and Da Mao, bless their generous hearts, and seeing the sights; of course, these being reasonable folks, the sights consisted mainly of places where we could stuff ourselves silly with food. Thus far maple doughnuts, wasabi tuna, salmon in abundance, and a delightful delicacy known as “shaven noodles” have all been sucked into the legendary gullet of Book Stud; I can’t button my jeans without jumping up and down, but I’m HAPPY.

Baby Crumpet immediately proceeded to destroy every preconceived notion I have about babies, particularly for those values of “things I don’t like about”; she was quiet, adorable, and  beamed away like someone was paying her to do it. She doesn’t seem to have quite grasped the difference between fingers and Slim Jims, as she spent a good chunk of time trying to gnaw my fingers off my hand – babies, dear readers, have KILLER jaws – but she did it in a sort of endearing, affectionate way, so I could hardly fault her.

Tuesday night found us invited to dinner at the house of two authors I adore ludicrously; I somehow managed not to go embarrassingly fangirl on them [note: this is a lamentable falsehood]; the better part of a bottle of wine did not help. Pray that I escaped with the feeble detritus of my dignity.

And yesterday – PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN PART TWO!!! Brilliant. Brilliant! Far too much excitement about CGI – how many shots of Big Tentacley Thing did we really need? – but anytime the camera’s on Johnny Depp, you could just about die laughing – he’s raised foppish slapstickery to an art form.

Aaaar, Johnny. Yer my boy.

Alky Seltzer

Went for a run in Prospect Park just now and almost didn’t make it all the way around.  Who knew that the previous night’s combo of cognac, Senegalese curry, popcorn, chocolate layer cake, raspberry dessert wine, and a couple of beers to chase it all down could have such a dangerous effect–and why isn’t the government doing something about it (aside from Borough Prez Marty Markowitz)?

The evening ended with Gringa coldheartedly stealing my last sliver of cake.  You’re on notice, pal.