THE GURGLING COD

Durham Dining Dissent

DI/DO drops a big, sloppy smooch on Durham. The Gurgling Cod has said "yes, but," once or twice. In particular, Watts Grocery in my one visit, was profoundly unimpressive, and raised some unsettling questions. Also, while Moskin gets excited about the transition from tobacco (bad) to strawberries (good),  she is silent on the issue of NC's other major socially malignant agricultural product:

The food at Neal’s Deli is resolutely everyday and American — like breakfast biscuits stuffed with egg and sausage — but the eggs are steamed tender with a touch of pepper and parsley, and the wide, crisp biscuits are mixed from high-fat local buttermilk and organic flour from a nearby mill that’s been held by the same family for nine generations. The sausage patty is from Cane Creek Farm in Alamance County, where Eliza MacLean, an owner of the farm and a former veterinarian, advises farmers across the state on the transition from tobacco to pork. Every bit of that care comes through in the flavor of the finished product, a stunning bargain at $3.25.

There is no shortage of hogs in NC, but very few of them are raised under groovy conditions, so it's hard to feel good about this feel good story without a little bit more reporting. If this is the model for tobacco-to-pork transitions, then huzzah, but if Tar Heel is the model, not so much. 

There is exciting stuff going on in Durham, to be sure -- the limited love for Piedmont, and exclusion of Locopops are unfortunate, for example -- but the article manages to seem both patronizing and symptomatic of the incipient Panisseization of food journalism.

A food bust of C.J. Spiller, or, EDIBLE LIGHTNING?

Don't understand. Don't need to. CJ Spiller is getting the love that eluded him in December, including this:

Via DFIG.

Please buy Lady Gaga an EZ-Pass...

Saturday seems to be the day on the Cod for tracking the vagaries of mascots. The city famous for booing Santa Claus is maybe not the first place a mascot would consider a drag act* based on a hit by a polarizing pop diva, but that's why the Phillie Phanatic has their job, and you have yours:

The Cod is posting largely to give a public place for a prediction of an actual duet between Real GaGa and the Phanatic before the All Star break.

*The gender of the Phanatic is indeterminate/irrelevant, yet dressing up like GaGa is obviously a drag act. Is that because being a pop star is... performative?

This is like Thomas Keller sent the cast of 8 Women to your house w/ the seven layer dip* he had whipped up for you:

This is some serious Dead Sea Scrolls business, but revamped. It's like an app where you can etch your theses directly on church doors. And I learned about it from a lady who wrote a big book for my day job, but now is all about the technology and the humanities, who found it via someone I don't know who found it Via Fab 5 Freddy curating (?) the YouTube blog.

*What would the layers of the Keller seven layer dip be?

Smuggling with panache.

The EDSBS folks will be doing this proper under the auspices of the Digital Viking, but this makes me cry salty tears of joy:

Spanish police say they have seized more than 800kg (1,760lbs) of cocaine from a lorry disguised as an official backup vehicle for the Dakar rally.The lorry was infiltrated into the race, which now takes place in South America, and loaded with cocaine before being shipped to Spain, police said. The final destination for the drugs was the Spanish island of Ibiza, home to a major drugs trafficking ring. Police said the cocaine was cleverly hidden in false bottoms in the lorry.

To review -- some enterprising gents are moved to smuggle close to a ton of cocaine to Ibiza (coals/newcastle, yes -- but they burn a lot of coal in Newcastle, if you know what I mean). To do so, they infiltrate the most dangerous motorsport event in the world (even in its attenuated, South African version), and drive a fake support vehicle in it. So they can smuggle almost a ton of cocaine. To Ibiza.

The needle is already pegged at dayenu, no doubt, but!

The police said they also seized 15,000 ecstasy pills, hashish, guns and 47,000 euros (£41,500; $64,000) in cash.

That's tailgating. Somewhere, Tricky is looking at his bass dispersal unit, and feeling a little small.

Or, are you just happy to see Nigella?

I should have known that there would be some sort of catch to an email that began "have Nigella in your pocket" Turns out it's for an iPhone app. Even for five quid, I'd hoped for a little more. Still, it's a more appealing concept than the Put Prudhomme In Your Pocket app.

Sifton Soundtracks: Nello b/w Sonic Youth, "Personality Crisis"

With two weeks in a row of reviews where food seems to be a tertiary concern after the people and the room, Sifton raises suspicions that he is trying to reboot Ward McAlister's  The Four Hundred for 2k10. At the very least, in finding places that evoke one kind of grim hauteur or another, Sifton is doing an exellent job of stumping the Cod's self-appointed task of finding soundtrack's for Sifton's reviews. The thing about Nello is that the food sucks, but the other thing is that nobody who eats there cares. It's also very expensive, but also nobody who eats there cares.
Passages like

One night at dinner, there was a very tall woman in elegant clothes, with skin stretched tight over her face in unnatural ways and glasses the size of salad plates to magnify that. She was eating with a small red-faced fellow with dark hair in a center part, who was wearing an ascot and green Tyrolean coat. A cartoonist might render them as an awkward French giraffe and a mischievous Austrian chimp.

suggest maybe a B-side from that vanity disco album Brooke Astor cut would be the way to go, but the willful shittiness of the food :

Vitello tonnato, meanwhile, looks good enough straight from the kitchen. It tastes like sliced shoe, though, against a tuna sauce that carries a Miracle Whip tang. It’s grim, especially at $32.

suggests something more smug. Like, say, indie rock legends with a throwaway cover of punk rock pioneers:

Ramp Ramp (what it do)

The Gurgling Cod is in the lonely position of being ramp neutral. Not as excited as those who treat them as if the swallows had been breaded w/ panko, panfried and seasoned w/ yuzu before showing up back at Capistrano, but also puzzled by the virulence of the ramp backlash, which seems disproportionate to the actual disruption that ramp enthusiasm causes anyone. That said, this is going too far:

One of those "N"s is for "News"?

The Cod, heroically, is restraining self from making Alice Waters/edible jailyard joke here at the expense of CNN:

For a crop of Florida inmates, green acres is the place to be. Five days a week, a vanload of inmates in blue jumpsuits makes a 15-minute trip to the University of Florida's West Florida Research and Education Center from Berrydale Forestry Camp, a low-risk satellite facility of Century Correctional Institution. The program took root in 2009, when the 650-acre publicly funded research farm faced some harsh state budget cuts. Short on hands and strapped for cash, the research center decided to reach out to an unlikely source: the Florida Department of Corrections, said William Wendt, the Alternative Crops Program manager at the research farm. As for the inmates, they most certainly reap what they sow. In the winter, it's collards, cabbage and turnips. Spring brings snap peas, sweet corn and tomatoes.

They reap what they sow! Get it? Me neither. Also, this is news? They have been using convict labor to grow crops at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, aka Angola, aka The Farm, for more than a century. But Florida vs. Louisiana? Hey kids!  Let's put some bleachers out in the sun and have an all Ess-Eee-Cee convict 4H show! What? We already do?* Kind of? Cool!

Similarly, the Woodward and Bernsteins at  MSNBC have uncovered evidence of the popularity of bacon. Also popular? Naps. Fucking. Staying hydrated. Baby animals. Stop the presses.

*I'd never wanted to get involved in the hospitality industry before, but seeing these posters suffuses me with a calling: a calling to open a gay bar and decorate it exclusively with prison rodeo posters. Maybe a chain, even? Kind of like a gay Applebee's? I could call it... Gay Applebees!

Oh, Colonel -- must you play blackjack with my heart? Or, the only Double Down post you will see here

The extent of Doubledownapalooza snuck up on me while the Cod's corporeal host was busy elsewhere. I don't have the heart to round up the links, other than to observe that Sifton likes to dress like the math teacher at a boarding school when he eats fast food. But let me explain. This sandwich is the Two Girls, One Cup of fast food. It exists simply to provoke a reaction, not to generate or satiate desire. It is, the future of fast food marketing in a post This Is Why You're Fat landscape.