new old thing

Going to fly kites. On Saturday my friend I went to Governors Island to fly these kites he bought on the street in Bed Stuy. (From a guy on Broadway, he says). We’re hoping to make them trendy so that we can open a small and extraordinarily expensive kite boutique in Brooklyn selling hand-painted kites in designs more meaningful to our clientele than the usual phoenixes and dragons, such as bodega cats and leaves of organic kale. I don’t see how this enterprise could fail: our kite-buyers would be able to literally fly their preferences overhead, and their friends would have no trouble locating them while waiting in one insufferable line or another. We haven’t gotten started painting the kites yet but by all means feel free to start spreading the word about them (“a potent medium for exploring notions of identity and selfhood,” etc.).

These people could be flying a bottle of artisanal apricot and Gloucestershire ‘Old Spot’ hotdog bitters or looking for their friends (underneath a tin of 19th-century moustache pomade) or their friends’ friends (a jar of small-batch rhubarb-peyote kimchi) instead of watching tacky cruise ships pass by, and if doing so would enrich me why shouldn’t they be?

How cathartic it was to narrowly escape rain — it started coming down just as our ferry departed — and have a restorative Vietnamese dinner in Chinatown, followed by browsing for weird fruits.

unidentified portion of NJ

jackfruit

wax jamboo, coming soon in kite form

up yr junction

My friends are DJing tomorrow (Thursday) at One Last Shag in Brooklyn. Sadly I won’t be there because I’m Doing Other Stuff, but I see no reason why you shouldn’t be there. The flyer says it’s a queer party but they don’t get into scraps with breeders or anything like that. If you request a shit song, however . . . look out!

Update: More info here.

signs and symbols

On Saturday I met a friend at the Met. We I got there late so we only had a few minutes to pop in to the Egyptian wing before closing time, but sometimes a few minutes is enough to notice something interesting enough to mentally chew on for a couple days.

This time it was these two statues, which are of the same guy. He had a little army of them in his tomb, one for each year. Youthful pecs gave way to man-boobs. The older figure on the right also has a longer skirt, more relaxed shoulders, a slightly pouchy tummy, and a shorter stride. Imagine these for yourself!

Hopefully yours don’t appear progressively grumpier with age. Many of mine would have bobbed hair because I started young. No. 35 would be accompanied by an IV drip to commemorate Health Issues, but all my most important scars are invisible to the naked eye. So several of my Madeleinettes would have to wear little badges saying “Ask me about my love life,” etc., if they were to convey anything of their inner state to viewers passing by. Probably this is true for most of us who have not yet reached the longer-skirt years.

Here is yr green drink.

You know, for St. Patrick’s Day. I got my green drinking out of the way early so I can spend the day itself indoors with other green things of my choice, away from festive novelty hats and the fluids so vivaciously discharged by people wearing them.

Anyhow, this drink was one of the nicest I’ve had in a long while. It’s called a Wadsworth and it’s made with gin (Beefeater), Luxardo Triplum, lemon, green chili, and coriander. It’s greener in taste than appearance and very well-balanced, and you ought to go have one. It’s at a restaurant called Gwynnett St. in Brooklyn and I had such a nice dinner there yesterday. The place isn’t new but I hadn’t heard of it before; I was just walking around after a Thing nearby and there it was. I think it’s an excellent choice if you should find yourself hungry and in or near Brooklyn.

I had whiskey bread and chicken. The bread was terrific. I’m not sure I would’ve been able to decide it had whiskey in it had I not known in advance, but it would be interesting to try it again with a whiskey-based drink for accompaniment. I’m not normally an orderer of chicken but I was drawn to this one because ash was listed as one of the ingredients. Our waiter explained that the meat is brined and then coated with a mixture of smoked hay ash, garlic, and (I think) grapeseed oil. I would order pretty much anything with hay in it. It’s lo-fi, and I am famously into that. Hay, leaves, sap, or grasses, yes please. This was very, very good. Smoky, yes, though less so than my friend’s equally-delicious striped bass with smoked oyster cream. The deep garlic savoriness reminded me of Hide-Chan’s black garlic ramen, but it wasn’t pungent such that I felt like I needed to go into hiding afterwards. (Doubtlessly the beet and brown butter vinaigrette helped there). The hay gave it bonfire qualities without the barnyard-y note dishes like this sometimes have. This was more urbane-pagan than chef-daydreaming-of-farming.

As long as we’re on the subject, I feel compelled to admit — is this why I brought this subject up? — I’ve been thinking about reviving my food blog. There are a number of reasons why it’s sort of a perverse time for me to do so, and yet I think it may be inevitable. I have so many other things I ought to be doing right now (very much including this blog) but I tend to get more things done when I have more things to do. If I add one more to my list, I might be able to finally make some real progress with those other things, along with the new (old) thing. I’ve got a new iPad that was just delivered today, which should be a tremendous help in terms of blog-infrastructure. Things I can do from bed or beside a turtle pond are far more likely to get done than things that require me sat at a desk. I also have a healthy backlog of material to get re-started with, having continued mentally food blogging during the entire dormant period (and having snapped plenty of photos and made plenty of notes too, just in case the secret mental blogging became unsatisfactory). I hadn’t looked at the list of e-mail subscribers to that blog in many, many months until yesterday, and there are now more people on it than there were when I was writing the thing. The newest was from this Tuesday! Knowing that people are waiting around for words I’m not producing makes me feel devious.

UPDATE: If you’d like to see a well-lit, technically perfect photo of that deliciously lo-fi smoked hay chicken, there’s one in the New York Times review of Gwynnett St. that just came out today (April 4, 2012). Wells liked the food a lot but thinks that “[m]ore attention to lighting in the dining room would flatter both the food and the faces.” As ugly as my BlackBerry photos above are, I disagree. I’d much rather have a sexily dim dinner than an easily-bloggable bright one.

turtle yoga

Sunny and 70° F in NYC today, just the sort of weather that inspires the turtles of Morningside Park to take up a fitness regimen.

Actually the photo is from last spring, but I don’t expect to catch them at it this year, not after that big NYT piece about the dangers of recreational contortion. It really made the rounds, that thing, and turtles are notoriously cautious. The ones devoted to retaining their youthful snap will probably have turned their little attentions to the latest algae diet.

meats are murder

Baby bologna, boy or girl flavor, observed in a Brighton Beach grocery. The photo doesn’t really give you a sense of proportion but the tubes are pretty big, I’d say probably 3 or 4 babies in each one.

Sorry it’s been so quiet around here but I’ve been recovering from surgery on the side where my blogging arm is. Found the baby meats while sorting through old Blackberry photos. On Boxing Day we walked around Coney Island and Brighton Beach, concluding with mushroom soup, vodka shots, dumplings and khachapuri in a moderately gaudy Russian restaurant.

One photo I wish I’d taken but it would have been intolerably intrusive for me to do so: the guy Putin-ishly sunbathing shirtless at the end of a long row of mismatched chaise lounges stuffed with elderly people bundled in layers of coats and blankets. I tried to find out what is the Russian word for this phenomenon, but to my complete surprise there does not seem to be a way to say “virile” or “manly” in Russian so how does one poke fun in that direction? Babelfish offered me “mужественно” but when I translated it back into English it said that means “with fortitude,” which isn’t the same at all. Google Translate suggested “mужественный,” but that apparently means “courageous.” Which is also not what I mean; sunbathing when it’s 30°F isn’t courageous. How can a culture that gives us vodka, krokodil, and a frequently bare-chested he-man P.M. who wields perpetual power not have a word for what the guy was doing in his lounge chair? If I’d taken the photo you’d know exactly what I mean.

tomb of the honey children

125th St.

brief blog post infested with pink rats

I met two rats on the 6 train last night, a pink one and a white one with a pink stripe. The white one had crawled into a pocket at this point. Their names are Chatterbox and (I think) Butter. I asked what they dye them with and she said pet dye from Petco. She let it nibble on her sandwich.

Surely related: The New York Dolls.

banana station

The NYC marathon goes past my apartment building. I got out of the house early this morning so as not to be trapped by it. There was a banana station around the corner all set up for banana-grabbing.

the ramen, the ramen, the ramen is on fire

Here’s a rare bit of Lunar Camel Co. news-gathering for you, last night I was having dinner at Chuko in Prospect Heights and it caught fire.

Not flaming fire, but it got very smoky and everyone had to go outside. I think everyone else had finished their dinner but not us! We’d inhaled an order of grilled shishito peppers (so good with lime and flaky salt) and an eggplant bun (crazy thing, tasted exactly like a McDonald’s burger; I have not eaten one of those in at least twenty years but the taste is unmistakable) and our ramen had just arrived.

Our waiter half-jokingly suggested that we take our ramen outside but the bowls were hot so we left them behind. A difficult thing to do. It was kind of late (we’d arrived just in time to order before the kitchen closed at 10) and it was cold outside, and we got there late because we’d just smoked a bowl, and here was steaming hot, seemingly-lovely ramen. Fuck!

What a nice advertisement we would have made, resolutely slurping our noodles on the sidewalk while the second, third, and fourth firetrucks arrived. Alas, we tipped our waiter and took off for Chavela’s, where we had a second round of appetizers, a couple of margaritas, and, at last, dinner (chilaquiles x 2).

I took a sleep-break because I’m an old woman now but I awoke still in serious eating mode. Breakfast did not require planning because Party Lights played Montreal and brought back bagels from St-Viateur (délicieux!), but what am I going to eat for lunch and for tonight’s first and second dinner?