A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I have two butternut squashes (hard-skinned yellow squash), delivered to me as an emergency substitution for something I actually like. I can't return them because coronavirus, I don't generally like squash, and my neighbors don't want them.

My exception to the squash hate is when it's a savory dish that tones down the sweetness. The only time I've ever liked pumpkin was a savory dish I had at a banquet in Taipei with, I think, dried shrimp. Please suggest to me a savory dish, ideally some kind of Asian, which I can make with this squash.


I do not have dried shrimp, but I do have fish sauce and furikake. I don't have pureeing equipment.

The New Yorker article.

I'm still heartbroken but after years of occasionally wondering if Anthony Bourdain had been sent that story so often that he wanted to throw things at it, it was great to learn that not only had that not happened, but he read it and actually enjoyed it! I never did get to meet him but I read his books and he read my story: close enough for comfort.

Food, like sex, is the most ephemeral of pleasures. You can return to the same restaurant or cook the same dish again and again, but you can only ever eat that particular one once. Maybe the taco should replace the cherry blossom as the symbol of transience. Or maybe a scoop of sakura ice cream in the summer.

And, like sex, we're taught to fear food. To be embarrassed about food. We're told that eating what we like will kill us. That it'll make us fat (the horror!) and ruin our health (if we're not perfectly healthy, mentally and physically, it's shameful and our own fault). To protect ourselves from blame and, I suppose, to live forever, we must not eat for comfort or companionship or simple enjoyment, but must carefully calculate every bite based on medical recommendations that change every year, but mostly, based on social pressure and shame.

I'm not talking about allergies or other known-to-the-individual actual health issues, but of blanket prohibitions on endless lists of arbitrary ingredients, and a general culture of blame which, ignoring actual causes of poor health like lack of medical care, poverty, racism, and sexism, attaches itself to the eating choices of individuals.

Barring recent terminal diagnoses, none of us know how long we'll live or how we'll die. I would be very surprised if Tony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold, my all-time favorite writer on Los Angeles, didn't often get told that their habit of eating anything that looked interesting and fit into their mouths would shorten their lives and they should stop. (If either of them had been women, I'd be 100% sure of it.) But any connection between their deaths and their love of food is tenuous at best, and most likely nonexistent. What food actually brought them, I think, was happiness, connection, and meaningful lives that made the world a better place.

Everyone takes the risks they're comfortable with, but it's complicated because we can't ever know exactly what the risks are. Stress and unhappiness are bad for us too; will the stress of dieting and the loss of pleasure shorten your life more than eating the burrata or chocolate cake? Is it more dangerous to eat whole foods containing fat, or fat-free, salt-free, cholesterol-free concoctions made of unpronounceable chemicals? Is it riskier to eat the taco from the truck (risk of food poisoning), the kale from the supermarket (risk of E. coli), the heart-healthy salmon (risk of mercury poisoning), or nothing but carrots you grew yourself (risk of turning orange and ending up in the hospital, which actually happened to a friend of my parents)?

I'm not advocating totally ignoring health or ethical issues in food. But I am advocating not going fucking insane over them. I'd rather be more like Tony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold than bust my ass trying to be immortal via carb deprivation or an all-banana diet or a ban on sugar. Who wants immortality without bacon?

If you agree, go eat something delicious you've never had before. And come back and tell me about it.

I am currently creating a website for “The Change,” the series of which Stranger is the first. Food features prominently in the series, and I’d like to have some recipes on the site.

Since I know a number of you cook, I invite you to create a recipe from the book. If you’re interested, pick an item (or as many as you like) from below the cut, create a recipe, ideally photograph the result, and write out the recipe. I will put it on the site and credit you under whatever name you like. I’m fine with multiple recipes for the same dish, so more than one person can pick the same dish. No payment, so only do this if it sounds fun. And please feel free to link if you have friends who might have fun with this.

Depending on how geeky you want to get, this is after the apocalypse in Los Angeles, so in the book, all ingredients are either locally grown or imported from the surrounding area. Rice is a rare delicacy, and tea is not available at all. (Coffee is grown in Santa Barbara, and is moderately expensive but widely drunk.) Local grains are wheat, corn, and barley. You can either ignore this limitation or work with it, up to you.

Note that one of the characters is an experimental chef, hence some of the weirder dishes.

All food mentioned in the book is below the cut-tag; spoilers if you think that’s spoilery. ( Read more... )

I normally dislike icing. It's too sweet and tastes like nothing but sugar. However, I recently made honey spice cakes and iced them with Martha Stewart's lavender icing, and it was delicious and easy to make. I think I could adapt the same recipe to make any sort of herb/spice/floral icing.

Suggest to me tasty combinations of cake and herb/spice/floral icing. What other flavors go well with lavender? What goes well with basil? What about something like tarragon?

Note: I hate anise and bananas.

ETA: Honey cakes (modern) Definitely do the "soak in honey." I took them to a party, and people fell on them like starving direwolves. They were taking thirds and fourths.

I am right now preparing Crispy Pork Belly (Siu Yuk), to be eaten with rice and sauteed ha choi. While I'm doing the parboiling, I am watching Nyesha kick ass on Last Chance Kitchen.

Also, I have ( pretty Parisian shoes. )

Snow falls in utter silence. Today the sun is shining, and all the melting snow makes a sound like rain.

One of the guests brought Trader Joe's raw puff pastry sheets for a dessert she ended up not making, and I repurposed them. The resulting turnovers were so delicious that I and my parents fell upon them and devoured three each in a mad fit, and had more for breakfast today.

Peel and chop cooking apples. I used Granny Smiths and some from the apple trees on the property. Mix in a bowl with brown sugar, lemon juice, a pinch of salt, and optionally cinnamon and/or vanilla.

I also made some with fresh blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and various mixtures of berries and apples. For the berries alone, I used less or no sugar, and no cinnamon.

Cut each sheet of puff pastry into fourths. Pile the fruit on the pastry squares, top with a small chunk of butter, and seal the pastry. Bake at 400 F until the bottoms (not just the tops) are browned. It took me over 30 minutes, but this is high altitude, so play it by ear. The package suggested 15.

Here, have a totally inappropriate icon.

This morning the cable guy arrived to turn on my internet (long story), saying, "This will take 20 minutes!"

It took him two and a half hours. Including crawling around in my basement AND my closet. Poor guy.

I now have to buy charoset ingredients. Anyone have a favorite recipe? (Ashkenazi tradition, probably - I don't like raisins, figs, or dates.)

While house-sitting, I attempted a brine recipe for pork chops from the Lucques cookbook. It calls for dissolving 1/2 cup kosher salt and 1/3 cup sugar in 2 cups hot water, then adding three quarts cold water and various spices, then soaking the chops overnight.

I just broiled a sample chop. It is nearly inedibly salty.

1. What happened? The only alteration I made, other than omitting some spices I didn't have, was to use powdered rather than granulated sugar as the house didn't have granulated.

2. How can I salvage the remaining chops soaking in the brine? I don't want to throw them out. Should I rinse, then soak them in cold water? Or rinse, then soak in water with just granulated sugar added to try to make up for the part that didn't work?

Yesterday I baked a berry pudding cake from this recipe. Crisp top, juicy bottom, fluffy cake in the middle: OM NOM NOM. It's also very pretty when you pour on the boiling water - why is that done, does anyone know?

I used only half the amount for the sugar topping, and it was still very sweet. I might use 1/4 in the future. I also substituted a thawed frozen mix of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries for just blueberries. I might try adding some cornstarch to the berries to try to thicken the juice, which in my version was very liquid.

1. I am doing some teaching, which involves teaching some elements of grammar. I do have coursebooks and don't need that.

What I would like are sentences which are funny because they are ungrammatical, and cease to be funny when the modifiers are put in their proper places or whatever.

These sentences need to be comprehensible and funny to teenagers who may not have excellent vocabularies. Books like The Transitive Vampire don't work because the vocabulary is too hard and the humor is too adult.

Types of errors that I'm looking for (only one per sentence) include faulty modification, misplaced commas, illogical comparisons, tense errors, subject-verb errors, redundancy, singular and plural, and pronoun confusion. I am not looking for advanced or controversial stuff like split infinitives. For instance:

"Running leashless through the park, Jason finally caught his dog."

"This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

"The snow in Colorado is fluffier than California."

"Emily put the bowl of water on the floor for her dog Julie, and she slurped it up."

2. I dreamed last night that I was eating a very moist (but not soggy) yet fluffy sweet cornmeal cake. The texture was halfway between pudding and cake. I can make a cornmeal cake, but it has a normal cake texture. Does anyone know how to make my dream cake? If so, please point me toward a recipe.