THE GURGLING COD

Hello, Los Angeles!

And thanks for coming by. And thanks to the estimable Ms. Schrambling for the West Coast love. I would only point out that the Cod is, in fact, an idealist, rather than a cynic, and actually lives at no fixed abode in a motor coach on loan from Dick Cheney. Unfortunately, real life cooking duties prevent me from whipping up tailor made West Coast PHC, but a few LA-related thoughts here.  Make yourself at home, peruse the categories at right, and feel free to have a look at the Sunday Night Soups, where most of the actual cooking happens these days, not counting GCTK. In the meantime, a proposition, and a song for while you mull it over:

Lou>Lucques. Discuss.

 

PS- Did you know that Pete Carroll's favorite food is abalone? It's true! And, he lives in an enchanted grotto!

Taco Beef, Outerburough edition

October is shaping up as a good month for taco beef. The same wizard who blasted Esquina for failure  to keep it real (personally, I knew as soon as I saw the stacks of Taaschen books behind the bar), is back at it:

Now comes a stunning development on the eastern front: in about two weeks a taco truck will be parking on (get ready for it) North 7th Street and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. It will be manned by comedian (and front man of the Jewish) Jeffrey Jensen and Bad Wizard singer Curtis Brown, who conducted research at the trucks on Roosevelt Avenue.                                                                                                                  Brown tells us he's cooking “less skanky” versions of the classics: pulled pork, roasted chicken and beef, Baja-style fish, plus menudo soup (with tripe) and corn chowder for winter.

You may want to let that "less skanky" rattle around your brain for a while. Consulting the Periodic Table of Skank,  developed by Linus Pauling and Appolonia in 1985, indicates that your skank exposure, expressed in parts of skank per million is likely to be at least one thousand times higher  at the corner of North 7th St. and Bedford Ave. than it is at a traditional taqueria. And even if he means skank not in the sense of a PBR-addled Bard 05 alum falling out of her American Apparel tube top, but in the sense of a safe, fun taco, what the fuck is he talking about?  You are less likely to  get a parasite eating food prepared on a truck by the vocalist of a band called Bad Wizard and a comedian than you are in a regular taqueria?

Spoke too soon

Turns out I got your Guiteau right here. In this round of the Neal Pollack Rodeo, I lasted about 1.7 seconds. On the Epilog, TSteel comes with the PHC more regularly than many, but with the expanded roster of authors, clicking on the Epilog is like playing Russian roulette with a revolver loaded with insufferable twee. I'd rather eat at a restaurant that referred to itself as "funky" than read the prose of someone who refers to his spouse as a "hipster housewife." Shit, I'd hang out in a sauna eating durians with Kim Jong-Il, Scott Boras, Henry  Kissinger, Paula Deen, and Larry Barnett, if it meant avoiding a reading from one of Pollack's books taking place in the next room.

Shrimp beef

Certainly, it is no Guiteau Monday, not with so much to celebrate, but even as we stake out the parade route (The Red Sox, the Boston franchise of the American League, recently defeated the National League champions, making them world champions), beef has no holidays. By the Grinder, out of Homesick Texan, news of a Charleston/Houston shrimp throwdown -- a Houston food writer rhapsodized about Carolina shrimp, inciting indignant responses. My experience of Houston cuisine is limited to concourse C of the airport, when I fly to New Orleans, but complaining about a claim  the seafood is better in Charleston than in Houston seems kind of like sending a bunch of purple-vested parveneu Jesus freaks to play in the Fall Classic.

Eat like a champion today

I am not an expert, but these are nice with yellow mustard and a class of Champagne. Talk amongst yourselves while the Cod is on assignment, venturing up the bayous of Louisiana, trying to find out what the hell they fed Jonathan Papelbon.

...I'm just looking for a New Mexico

In case you missed it, DI/DO's  Tex-Mex jawn had this gem:

"When I learned that the government of Mexico flew in the owners of 50 Mexican restaurants in the United States and Canada this summer to teach them what’s authentic and what’s not, the expedition picked up some gravity."

Is there really nothing more pressing on the Mexican agenda that making sure the moles in Kansas City and Hamilton are properly pestled? Seriously? This was twerpy when the Japanese were  doing it, but the taqueria summit seems sort of like six year old who trips if his food touches other food, but on a global scale. Tune in next week, when a team of elite French commandos infiltrate Southeast Asia, systematically dismantling bahn mi.

Gastro distress

If stupid were a home run, this would be over the train tracks and bouncing on the Mass Pike:

Kids used to whip up culinary delights in an Easy-Bake Oven or a Snoopy Sno-Cone machine. Today, they're more likely to pull a quiche out of Mom and Dad's Viking.
<snip>
"I call them gastro pups,"* says Rozanne Gold, author of Kids Cook 1-2-3. "They've developed in large part through the influence of the Food Network. This is the generation that grew up with the Food Network, and they are smitten. Why wouldn't they be? It's food and cooking as entertainment, as discovery, as travel."**

Evidently, the millennia of human civilization where families cooked, and parents taught their children to cook, was an anomaly, and as a species, we have been waiting for the Food Network to free our children from their nonage. And those disadvantaged kids, like in Appalachia or on Indian reservations whose parents can't afford Viking appliances and have to make do with Kenmore or whatever? Fuck 'em, I guess. I was incapable of reading the full piece, but it also exhibits the baffling logic of inflating  a  pair of culinary LeAnn Rimeses into a trend:

And some, such as the Gerasole sisters, Isabella, 11, and Olivia, 9, host cooking shows, write cookbooks and win culinary prizes. Last year, they won for best webcast in the prestigious James Beard Foundation awards, becoming the youngest recipients ever.

My guess is that these kids flamed out on the pageant circuit, and this was mom's fallback plan, but  in any event,  it is hard to see how this qualifies as a widespread growth in interest in food among the tweens. It's nice to imagine the utes doing something other than stuffing their faces with Cheetos, but I dread the prospect of a fourth-grader's birthday party unraveling over the failure to use single-estate chocolate in the cupcakes. As is so often the case in stuff having to do with kids and food, lots of room in a sane middle ground, and crowded out at the ends.

*This term must be nipped in the bud. In a world where parents like Neal Pollack are free to roam the streets, this is not the kind of thing to be encouraged. May I suggest "insufferable twerp" as a replacement?

**By this logic, we can look forward to a story about teenagers who, having grown up with the Spice Channel, are keen on sex.

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.

                  

Rock out with your wok out

Racing down bobsled tracks in modified woks? Sure. But Germans? Via Deadspin.
 

Beef is in the air

The previous went up in haste, as I had pressing forelock-tugging business in the real world. If I'd spent longer, I might have dialed back the Cheesecake Factory rhetoric, though the larger question seems to be why a paper like the NYDN needs to have its critic review a place like Tailor. Not to say that RG should confine herself to restos with a Giants in HD on demand and without apology policy,* but to drop a bad review on a spot like this on the grounds that the food was not normal enough seems as if it must be a way to respond to the (perceived) tastes of NYDN readers.

But I digress -- far beefier is the big old brisket the lads at Eater and Bun publicist Steven Hall are batting back and forth. First the lads drop seven tips for having a party (like the one at Bun last night) not suck, then Hall comes through with a point-by-point rejoinder.** Scholars of the Reformation might recall that the Catholic Church did not come back with interpolated responses to Martin Luther's 95 theses -- they stat back to let the whole thing blow over, and if it were not for that pesky invention of printing, it might have. By way of analogy, probably a better bet to let the conversation drift on to Momofuku 3: Reloaded, or whatever Chang has up his sleeve this week, than to keep the thing in the air. As Juvenal once observed, "who handles PR for the PR guys?"

*Never fear -- such a spot exists not far from Tailor. You need look no further than Ludlow Street for safe space to watch the antics of the younger Manning, in an environment free of miso butterscotch and cider braised artichokes.

**Don't miss the comments, either, where the c-word is used. Zomg!