THE GURGLING COD

Nice Grouper, honey.

Evidently, the oceans are fucked.* On the other hand, plummeting biodiversity opens the gate for all sorts of charming locutions. Having recently attempted in my day job to use taxonomy as a way to introduce the arbitrary relation of the signfier and signified, I was pleased to see a new term for allied species:

Copes, the attorney general’s press secretary, declined to discuss the Fish Tales case. She did confirm that the office has told WingHouse, a popular Tampa Bay area chain, that “it needs to be more precise in describing to customers what it is offering.’’ WingHouse serves a “grouper teammate’’ sandwich that is swai, another Asian catfish.

If only this notion had emerged earlier -- Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan! Relax -- us and the chimps are teammates! With Oscar season rolling around, it does make one think of pairs of teammates that might make for disappointing substitutions-- imagine ordering sliced Brady on a roll, only to discover you were eating a "Brady Teammate," the Vrabel.

*I did not comment at the time, and now the article is reserved for those Times Select high-rollers, and my Lexis-Nexis connection has sand in its cooch, but really now, when the headline is "Sea Sends Distress Call in One-Note Chowders" is it really quite the thing to have an, um, one note chowder receipt tacked on to the article?

Update: Mr. Sorbet Trio conjured a working link to the distressed chowder story.

Bob Mould and Dickie Barrett

Both describe moments of witnessing a performance, (Richard Thompson and Fishbone respectively) that made them resolve to quit or get better. Choc&Zuke's veal shank receipt* gives me the same feeling, though I'll probably lie down until it goes away and go back to the same old thing. Eager to try it, esp since Hugh  "5&10" Acheson recently asserted to me that you can't go wrong w/ Gasconys, and Tariqet is the suggested wine. Presuming I can get my hands on some Tariquet or alternative, and a shank, expect a report imminently.
*Graciously forwarded by Rose's Lime.

New Orleans Beef

Crikey! If you like Of Montreal, make sure not to mention their hookup with Outback Steak House* in front of their frontman, Kevin Barnes:

our show was a lot of fun. the highlights for me were the debut of the three headed tiger bull and the first live performance of "the past is a grotesque animal". the low point was when a group of misguided creeps chanted "steak,steak, steak" after we played "wraith pinned to the mist". it just proves,no matter how much you want to add something positive to the world, there will always be people who try to bring you down. not to say our selling of a song to a corporate steak house was something positive, but sometimes you have to suck a little dick to get by. that's just a hard fact of life. but really, of all the evil organizations out there, it's hard to imagine the thought process behind heckling of Montreal. oh well.

Word. New Orleans Indie types -- please go heckle Freeport McMoRan, or Ruth's Chris instead. Leave self-proclaimed indie cocksuckers alone. George Carlin's character articulates a similar philosophy in Jay & Silent Bob, but I think he was joking. Also, did Elf Power steal your shift key?  More generally, if you want to chant "Steak" at a rock show and not ruffle the singer's.... ruffles, see when you can catch up with the Rev.

ps- If anyone has an mp3 of "Eat Steak" send it, and I'll post it on up. The commercial is here, btw.

*Make sure safe search is on before you do a Google Image search for "Outback Steakhouse."

Update: The Revernend Horton Heat "Eat_Steak" (a tip of the fin to Ms. Fury)

Other Update: Do not watch the clip. You will get the Outback theme lodged in your head like it was Khan. If you find yourself at your local Outback, a Glock in the waistband of your Depends, don't blame me.

Truffled Grits!

Truffles seem to be in the news, thanks to Graydon Carter's Waverley, and his notorious $55 mac & cheese.  If you are willing to travel outside of Graydon's neck of the woods, they pop up elsewhere. Work brought me to Athens, GA, and I ended up more or less by accident at Farm 255. An enterprise this high-minded is at risk of becoming overwhelmingly precious, but they seem a) sincere about what they are doing (I spotted an Emile bumper sticker in the kitchen) b) not dogmatic (the prosciutto is di Parma, [not di Iowa, of which more soon]) and c) they have a sense of humor (at the bottom of the print menu, though not the online one, they namecheck all the chefs, and add "6-packs of PBR tall boys are available to send back to the kitchen").

I could not stay for a full meal, but I did fortify myself for my schmooze with a side of truffled Red Mule grits. In the Southeast, at least, "Red Mule" seems do be to grits what "Berkshire" is to pork, in that if you are in the kind of place that uses the word "dayboat," and they have grits on the menu, the grits will be Red Mule. I am partial to Timms Mill, but the big thing is not Quaker and not instant. Grits are improved by a judicious application of butter and cream, and the Farm 255 kitchen had not stinted, but they had not enriched them to a flan-like consistency, a common pitfall for restaurant grits. Rather than a theatrical tableside grating, a la Graydon,  the truffles come in the bowl, and they add a distinctive and subtle note. You do not get to show chunks of truffle off to your neighbor, but the bowl of truffled grits costs $51 less than the Waverley mac & cheese. That's right -- if you are willing to travel to Athens, you can have your truffled comfort food for four George Washington dollars. To put that in perspective, you could buy a bowl of truffled grits for the active roster of your favorite baseball team for $100.

It is not remarkable that the Waverley makes restaurants elsewhere seem like an exceptional value. (In fairness, you are less likely to bump into Julian Schnabel in the restroom at Farm 255.) This is not the first time that a chef has paired a haute ingredient with a humble southern staple. But I was warmed in more ways than one by my truffled grits. I've had some meals recently -- Savoy comes to mind -- where the provenance of what arrives in the kitchen seems more important than what happens after it gets there. At Farm 255, the eat local ideal is manifest, but they treat ingredients with wit and imagination, rather than reverence.

Poppycock Cupcakes

Evidently, the world pants for news of vegan cupcakes. Has anyone else noticed that the premise of the article is bogus?

Ms. Moskowitz, 34, was born in Coney Island Hospital, lives in Brooklyn, and is a typically impatient and opinionated New Yorker. She can’t stand how slowly most cooks peel garlic, makes relentless fun of Rachael Ray and rolls her eyes at the mention of California hippies.

But as a vegan and a follower of punk music since age 14, she is also part of a culinary movement that helped turn the chaotic energy of punk culture of the 1970s and 1980s into a progressive political force.

“Punk taught me to question everything,” Ms. Moskowitz said. “Of course, in my case that means questioning how to make a Hostess cupcake without eggs, butter or cream.”

The implication here seems to be that it was not possible to question everything before, say 1977. How, say, Darwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine or Margaret Sanger managed without a punk soundtrack telling them to question everything is tough to figure. The narrative gets even more dubious:

In the early days of punk, bands like the Sex Pistols were notorious for nihilism, anarchism and epic consumption of drugs and alcohol — none of which would seem to lead to tofu and chamomile tea. But as punk became more political (and as bands self-destructed) in the 1990s, many punks adopted a more profoundly rebellious stance: against drugs, against alcohol and against the whole habit of mindless consumption.

“It was about purifying the movement, about being poison-free,” said Ted Leo, of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, who led the band Chisel in the 1990s. He became vegetarian in 1988 and has been vegan since 1998. Many punks became vegetarian to protest corporate and government control of the food supply. Veganism takes vegetarianism farther into cruelty-free territory by avoiding anything produced by animals: milk, cheese, eggs, honey, etc.

I am a big Ted Leo fan, but to talk about straightedge asceticism as a stage in the evolution of punk is to construct a narrative that ignores the vast majoirty of that culture. It's like saying that the Protestant Reformation evolved into Pentecostal snakehandling.   (I'll pass on the difficulties that are inevitable in even talking about "punk in the 1990s.")

As such, I'd argue there is nothing inherently or especially punk about  being a vegan. It does not disqualify you, but it does not make you. As such, I take issue with this association of punk with Moskowitz' persona. It seems to be a question of tattoos and band t-shirts. And counterfactual statements: “Besides, eggs are the big lie in baking. All the books say they provide structure, but that’s kind of crap.” Radical! There might be workarounds for eggs in some contexts, but that does not mean that eggs do not do what eggs do. This is not punk as an ethos, but an aesthetic. As such, it has more to do with Hot Topic (the chain, not the song) and the Suicide Girls than it does with the Dead Kennedys or the Slits.

Beyond what Moskowitz has to say for herself, there are some real headthumpers in Moskin's text:

The charm of Ms. Moskowitz — in person, in her cookbooks and on her public-access television cooking show, the Post-Punk Kitchen (theppk.com/shows/) — is that she makes even the deprivations of veganism and the rage of punk seem like fun. Like feminism that embraces makeup and miniskirts — the frivolous bits — Ms. Moskowitz’s veganism embraces chocolate, white flour, confectioners’ sugar, and food coloring.

I've been back and forth on whether this is an insult to vegans or feminists, and I think I have to give the nod to feminists. Are makeup and miniskirts the frivolous bits of feminism? Does being a feminist, like being a vegan, involve various deprivations? I had been under the impression that the whole point of being a feminist was the idea that not being a feminist produced various deprivations. As the Grinder pointed out, it is nice to see a change from the too-frequent articles on how hard it it is to get someone to fix the Viking range in your country home, but if this is the best DI/DO can do with La Vie Boheme, then I hope they stay in the Hamptons.

Play us out, Poly:

X-Ray Spex, "I am a Cliche'," Germ-Free Adolescents, 1978 (CD Reissue Bonus_track)

K-F'ed-up

Because there is quite literally nothing more important happening, consider this:

NEW YORK - A leading restaurant association has called for the cancellation of a TV commercial featuring Britney Spears’ estranged husband, Kevin Federline, as a failed rap star working in a fast-food eatery.

In a 30-second ad for Nationwide Insurance, Federline is shown dreaming he is a rap star but then snaps out of it to face reality — he’s working at a burger restaurant.

The commercial is due to be aired Feb. 4 during the Super Bowl, advertising’s biggest televised sporting event of the year. Last year’s Super Bowl drew more than 90 million viewers.

Like most sensible Americans, I plan to spend Feb 4th locked in the basement watching Warhol films, and hoping against hope for some outcome that will make neither the Mannings nor this guy happy, but this is kind of a puzzle. To equate working in fast food with failure as a person is a ubiquitous a trope as to equate the idea that having a daugher who is a stripper with failure as a parent.* In my day job, I routinely face the concern that English majors will end up "flipping burgers." More immediately relevant, in one of its Hemi ads, John Reep (thank you internets) daydreams at the drive through window while his hemi driving patron demands his food. (Here, at the 17 second mark.) Not a peep, as far as I know.

But now, "the National Restaurant Association’s chief executive, Steven Anderson, has written to Nationwide saying the ad leaves the impression that working in a restaurant is demeaning and unpleasant, and asking that the commercial be dumped."As a refresher, the National Restaurant Association does not mean some kind of grange hall where, like, Gabrielle Hamilton and Judy Rodgers trade ramp receipts. No,  this is the trade organization that warns of minimum wage hikes, and gave us the truth about Fast Food Nation:

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser is one individual's biased attempt to convince the American consumer to stop eating food from restaurants they enjoy frequenting. In addition to acting like the "food police," and trying to coerce the American consumer to never eat fast-food again, the author recklessly disparages an industry that has contributed tremendously to our nation by providing millions of consumers the option of choosing a range of high-quality food items that they love, providing tremendous job and career opportunities and boosting the national economy.

So you might want to take what they say with a grain of salt, or, 1040 mg of sodium, if you prefer. Once again, the fast food industry sets up shop in the realm of simulacra. After all, why make working in fast food less "demeaning and unpleasant" when you can just throw K-Fed under the bus?

*See?

Once again

Achewood kills it, this time on the subject of molecular gastronomy.

But wait

I must break my promise to be reticent for the rest of the day. Having recently mocked the notion that food bloggers had some sort of power -- other than getting Sirio to kiss their mom's ass, I mean -- I must recant. Even in this lowly forum, I need only ask, and I shall receive.  Flush with this success, I am making the following requests:
1) Bob, Greg and Grant -- please reunite.
2) Israelis and Palestinians --  please work it out.
3) Cast of 8 Women -- please come over for some cassoulet.
4) Doctors -- please cure AIDS. And cancer. And heart disease.

Tide you over.

Other challenges intervene, but two gems from Onstad:
1) Unrequited desire in the aisles of Whole Foods.
2) A theological speculation on The Jesus Quail.

If you are curious, the utes and I will be talking about this:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many.  Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider'd, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable.  But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well.  I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you."  So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Joltin' Jules has left and gone away?

Where have you gone, Jules? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.