THE GURGLING COD

iJam

If Apple produced and marketed Jamon Iberico. I think these folks spent more time realizing the concept than it warrants. Whatever.

Bracketology

As certain as recorded voices telling you exactly what kind of Christmas to have whenever you leave the house, this time of the year also brings predictable wailing/gnashing about the lack of a playoff system in college football. But those of you who pine for the brackets of March, the play-ins between Creighton and Cal State-Pismo Beach, the total cessation of work at work, there is something to tide you over. Two somethings, actually -- Curbed has the Curbed Cup, an NYC neighborhoods tournament, while some folks in Chicago have the Burrito Bracket. As an enterprise, the Curbed Cup could not be more of a troll if it lived under a bridge and wore a pointy hat, but the Burrito Bracket is exactly what it sounds like, an effort to determine the supreme burrito in the Wicker Park area.

I did the bulk of my Chicago burrito eating back when there was still a reasonable chance that a trip to the Rainbo might well include Blackie Onassis suggesting that one of your party join him at his home for a bath, but they appear to have most of my old favorites in the mix. For eating in, in particular Tecalitlan is an excellent choice because of the remarkable ceiling fresco of a night sky. It's like eating in a van, but the classiest van in the world. My rating system was more of an indifference curve -- remarkably, burritos cost roughly the same throughout this neighborhood, but the key variables of a) size and b) perceived likelihood of finding a severed finger in your burrito varied inversely.

I applaud these efforts, but with 16 burritos and 16 neighborhoods, we only have half of a full tournament. We might want to see the matchup between Ft. Greene and La Pasadita, but that's only half of a final four. If we want to have a real battle of incommensurables, we need two more brackets in order to have a real competition for the Feyerabend Trophy. I like corrupt US mayors/African despots for one, but am not sure of the other. I welcome suggestions.
1) Idi Amin
2) Buddy Cianci
2) Charles Taylor
4) Daley, Pere
5) Daley, Fils
6) James Michael Curley
7) Mobutu Sese Seko
8) Abraham Beam
9) Henry Cisneros

10-16 tk, k?

Calendar girls

A quiz:
                     

TOMATOES IN THE KITCHEN

                         

N.Y.C. LADY CHEFS CAN STAND THE HEAT

Was this a headline
a) an actual headline from Craig Claiborne's immediate predecessor at the Times?
b) on a prop Daily News being read by John C. Reilly, playing J. Edgar Hoover sitting in a taxi on the way to the Polo Grounds to witness Bobby Thompson's "Shot heard round the world," in the 1951 playoff between the Giants and the Dodgers in the adaptation of Delilo's Underworld currently in produtction?
or
c) in today's New York Post? That's right, in two-thousand-and-fuck-me-gently-with-a-chainsaw-seven.
First correct guess gets a free jar of Nair pretty.

                  

In the meantime

No time for PHC today. Go outside and run around, or, failing that, enjoy the Bad Menus fotopool. "Embezzled Eggs" are my favorite.

They're gonna put me in the movies....

The last day before spring break (Whoo!) finds me deep in the grip of Seasonal Affective Attention Deficit Disorder. Madison Park Bureau Chief Addison was kind enough to forward the following from Megnut:

Coming soon to the big screen near you: Julia Roberts as Ruth Reichl? It looks like Reichl's third book, Garlic and Sapphires, about her adventures as the restaurant critic for the New York Times, will be made into a movie. Reichl is an executive producer on the project and is hoping Roberts will play her. That could totally work, especially if Roberts' hair is dyed black. Both have those big curly manes and giant teeth-filled smiles.

I started casting some of the other roles, (Mattthew McConaughey as Johnny Apple, natch) but thought I'd open it up. Beyond Giovanni "Ribs" Ribisi as Mario, which celebs play which luminaries of the food world?

kochen sie in einem Topf wie gumbo

BERLIN- The telephone in Charles Oliver Coleman's spacious office here at the Museum fur Naturkunde, crammed with books, plants, and biological specimens rings constantly. "People ask all sorts of questions," says Mr. Coleman, who curates the museum's crustacean collection, "like how many legs an isopod has. We also get a lot of calls asking about how to cook lobsters, what recipes to use." (From the Chronicle, subscription required.)

Germans.  They give so much , and ask so little:
            "Gunther, how shall we cook these crustaceans you obtained ?"
                "Wolfgang, I do not know. Permit me to call the curator of the crustacean collection at the Museum of Natural History."
                "Very good."

Hey, Kermit!

The frog asks why so many songs about rainbows, but never asks why so few songs about food. An issue that has been on my mind this week, as I endeavored to expound on Joel Barlow's "Hasty Pudding," an ode to boiled cornmeal written by a homesick Connecticut Wit while on a diplomatic mission in France in the 1790s. Thanks to some hasty pudding/Indian pudding recipes retrieved from a now-forgotten source, I decided to make up a batch when I taught the poem, in hopes that eating mush would help the kids understand an ode to mush. Not so much. Did get me to thinking, when I tried to think about analogous moments from more recent culture, as I do when I am at an impasse, and I could think of very few songs about food.  There are the recipe songs, a genre dominated by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, but few about actual foodstuffs--even the recently posted "Bacon Fat" is not about the invaluable foodstuff, but a dance, an unspeakable dance, inspired by it. As I am trying to keep both the music and the food oars in the water, I welcome food-themed song suggestions from readers in the comments. I'll send the contributors the chili recipe that is 3-0 in AFC championship play, 1-0 in the ALCS, and too manly even for its name to appear in print on the Internet.  Meantime,  enjoy Bar-B-Q, by Ms. Wendy Rene, and ask Santa to bring you the Complete Stax /Volt Singles box, for all your R&B pedant needs.
Wendy Rene, "Bar-B-Q" The Complete Stax Singles, 1959-1968, Vol 4