Author: zora

Krispy Juniors

“Holy crap!” is not really the polite way to greet a coworker, especially one I haven’t seen in months, early in the morning. But she had this little packet of doughnuts bearing the distinctive Krispy Kreme font. After my eyes stopped bugging out of my head at this wondrous baked good before me, she explained that she’d just bought them at the vending machine on our floor.

“They go fast, though,” she warned. Was that her just protecting her snack-donut turf, or pointing to a legitimate floor-wide Krispy Junior obsession that I hadn’t heard about? The latter is totally possible, since I only ever leave my desk to use the bathroom, and never chat with anyone, even though I’ve been showing up for work here every so often since 2000. (Ah, the joys of freelancing.)

Anyway, I just hustled down and bought me a pack of these Krispy Juniors before said coworker got them all herself, or whatever it is that happens to them. I have such a soft spot for mini donuts. Although I’m sure they would taste wretched to me now, those chocolate-covered ones with the bright yellow cake were really the best treat ever when I was young–I think they were only, like, 40 cents in the high school snack bar, which to me seemed like the most sugar for your dollar, and an intriguing texture sensation to boot. The “chocolate” coating was so waxy that it would leave unsightly brown flecks on your front teeth if you weren’t careful. The powdered ones were good in a pinch.

But enough reminiscing, because I’ve got this nasty taste in my mouth, and I won’t get up to get some water until I’m done typing this.

See, I just ate a Krispy Junior. It sucked. About two-thirds of the way through the tasting experience, it gave off some hideous chemical flavor, and it still hasn’t gone away. I guess the solution would be just to eat another donut. Because at the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. They’re the cinnamon-sugar variety. So, OK, a little dry, dusty, cinnamony at first. Then some cakiness–but very dry cakiness. Not the glaze-sodden glory of a fresh KK cake donut. Then that hideous chemical explosion. Ack. Coughing. At least I won’t be eating the whole package (6 mini donuts total) and then feeling gross about the hydrogenated fat. (My bad cholesterol is precisely 100, I just found out. One point higher and I’d be in big trouble, apparently.)

Putting the Krispy Kreme label on these donuts–which clearly come from some sub-par donut factory in Kazakhstan using cast-off equipment from the Hostess plant–reminds me of some Oscar de la Renta luggage I owned many years ago. Like, why would that guy, the king of evening gowns, be designing luggage for me? Especially luggage that I’m buying at T.J. Maxx? KK had better watch out for brand dissolution. I’d muse further, but I’ve got to get a glass of water.

Crass Commercialism

Check out the links to my books at right, kiddies. If you click on those links and buy ’em, Amazon will send me 3 cents! If you search for things via the Amazon search box over there, and then buy them, I might get a check for even more cents! It seems a little tacky, but it also seems silly to put links to my books and not get any kickback. With this attitude, I should do well in a third-world country. Or New Mexico.

And I’m not kidding about emailing me about the Amsterdam book. It’s solid, but boy, a lot of things have changed. I saw somebody reading one recently, and I really wanted to go over to her and yank it out of her hands and start advising her right then and there, but I was afraid she’d think I was weird. Now she just hates me because the Stedelijk Museum was closed. Honest, I do this job because I can’t help giving advice.

(Oh, and you can email re: Mexico too. Hurricane reports on the Caribbean coast so far are not as terrible as US papers and TV made it seem. Of course.)

Dream Dinners?

I can’t decide what I think about this. The premise, before you click away: harried women (maybe men) convene at a storefront, walk around a room assembling ingredients for 6 or 12 dinners. Everything’s pre-cut, measured, etc. They take the stuff home and fridge or freeze it. Then, when they arrive home from their harried lives, they pop one of the things in the oven and sit down to a no-fuss dinner with their families. The ingredients for 12 dinners costs $200, and of course you get the recipes and the social time with all the other harried women (and lost single dads).

I know they mean well, but mostly, I just think, “Pussies.”

OK, no. Presumably, these people will learn a wee bit more about cooking through the process, and will appreciate that these dinners are better than some Stouffer’s business, and eventually they’ll come to value food and eating and cooking more. But the reliance on boneless, skinless chicken breasts and the prominent link to nutrition info depresses me.

I really have never bought the “I just don’t have time to cook” argument. Or the “Yech–it makes such a mess” argument (especially because the latter is always coming from people with dishwashers and/or housekeepers). But maybe I’m just rigid and live in a blue state and don’t have any kids or a demanding job. I mean, I ate dates and peanut butter for dinner the other night, standing up in the kitchen, so my cooking success rate is nowhere near 100 percent, and it’s a hell of a lot lower than it was a couple of years ago, when I was just treading water as a freelancer, rather than keeping actually busy with work.

Getting over my crankiness, I guess this is all good. Whatever gets people to the table. Next time I’m in Albany (what looks like the closest one), I’ll have to check it out. Maybe I can slip big pats of butter in everyone’s baggies while I’m at it.

Banh Mi

Oh yeah–and I had a Vietnamese sandwich in San Fran. Of course it wasn’t as good as our regular joint, because it didn’t have the crumbly pork sausage, but it was still damn good for a corporate catered lunch situation (the situation I was in last week). I got a little worried when “soy sauce” was listed on the possible condiments NOT to include, so I wrote “extra fish sauce, please” on my order, in hopes of encouraging authenticity. Who knows if that had any effect, but I was pleased with my sammie, and filled with envy that a Vietnamese sandwich was even on the corporate lunch menu–they’re so not on the radar here.

The excellent, recently noticed blog Daily Gluttony also has a very good report on banh mi.

LaLoo’s

I got so caught up in the fascinating world of my health crisis that I forgot to mention this yummy goat’s milk ice cream I had in San Fran. I only had a couple of spoonfuls of the “Molasses Tipsycake” flavor, but it was super-intense. I’m not sure what the “tipsycake” part was, but it basically tasted like the hot milk with molasses my mom used to give me before bed. Except, of course, it was cold. It did have a noticeably goaty aftertaste–which the Mado stuff in Istanbul didn’t have. I like goat’s milk and goat cheese, but this stuff might be a little hard to take if you’re just expecting a sweet treat. I also imagine, as the stuff is “slow farmed and kitchen fresh” (whatev), that product consistency might vary–goats and lambs taste very different depending on the time of year. But gosh, they sure are cute all the time–adorable pics on LaLoo’s website.

Only in Marin

To borrow Heidi’s quip, only in Marin County can you be sitting in your own car, parked by the side of the road, enjoying an impromptu picnic of Vietnamese chicken salad and grilled beef, and some bouncy baby boomer will seek you out to tell you that eating meat is bad for you. Thanks, healthy dude. You’re 50, and I’m not. (Heidi and I were suitably unimpressed–I kept gnawing my beef chunk while Heidi shoveled down her salad, saying “Uh-huh. Yeah. Cool” to all his proselytizing about the “liquid body” health program that “honors and respects” the fact that our bodies are 70 percent water. Fortunately the guy thought we were lesbians after a bit, so he jogged off.)

On the other hand, for all that I snark about the California “I hear you” culture, I did get some excellent medical care–or at least some medical care that didn’t make me feel like I was just a pain in the doctor’s ass, which seems to be standard NYC style. I still have no idea why I had a fever and my leg started hurting like crazy, but at least it wasn’t deep-vein thrombosis, which really would’ve thrown my whole travel-writing career into the shit. I got the chilled-outest ultrasound ever, complete with candlelight and ambient whale noises, and then this buff, tan doctor looked thoughtful and asked me lots of relevant-seeming questions and confirmed that I was not crazy for coming to the ER. That makes up for a lot of mysterious pain.

Maybe I _should_ stop eating meat, or at least start drinking a lot more water? Arg. I would respect and honor my dehydration, except my bladder is so small.

Portland, City of Dreams

Everywhere I turn recently, it seems that something cool is happening in Portland, Ore. Tasty coffee. Cool bands. Cool people–including the owner of Queen’s Hideaway, a brilliant little lo-fi resto in Greenpoint. Hip online CD stores. Countless magazine stories fawning over the hipster city’s delights. And now there’s this: Extramsg.com: Culinary Blog and Portland Food Guide. It’s got the Mexico connection too.

Coolest of all, of course, is our friend and Sunday-night-dinner guest par excellence, Portland native Dapper Dan. He sent me the link in the first place–all part of a subtle propaganda campaign for a DD-guided Oregon excursion. I think it’s working. Wait for me, Portland, city of morels and renegade winemakers!

Pret a Manger, you are dead to me.

I’ve been mentally composing a post with this title for more than a year now. Pret a Manger helped me through some desperately poor months in London, when I’d get a £1.50 egg-salad sandwich and go sit in the Tube station to eat it during my lunch break from The Economist (uh, The Economist bookshop, that is). So I was excited when Pret came to the States a couple of years ago, as I was still quite poor then too. But the U.S. managers managed to jack everything up.

First, it was the switch to inferior chutney in the “Coronation Chicken” sandwich. Then they stopped making that really good raspberry bar (they have one again now, but it sucks). Then it was their scaling back even farther on the mayo, even on sandwiches that needed it, like egg salad. Then it was the realization that all their slicey sandwich bread is really just hideous and gummy. Uck–then it was those weird images they started putting on the sandwich boxes–like those little baguettes with shoelaces drawn on them? What’s the point of that pointlessly whimsical exercise? There’s some weird text with it, but it makes no sense, so of course I forgot it. Especially lame, considering how bad the bread is.

But, but, but… Every time I was about to chuck out little PaM just like a lover who crossed the pond and then turned out to be not so great on my home turf, something reeled me back in. First, of course, is location–one above-ground just outside the Time-Life building, and another down in the bowels of Rock Center…and that one gives you a discount if you have a Rock Center tenant ID.

Then they redid the place with that groovy wallpaper. And I discovered their breakfast pastries–well, really only the pain au chocolat–were pretty good. And their baguette sandwiches are a big improvement on the sliced-bread sammies, as long as you can block out the image that you might actually be eating shoes.

When I was just in Heathrow, I went to the Pret a Manger there and surveyed the offerings. Many of the sandwiches were marked “low mayo.” So I guess it’s a global problem, this mayo-loathing. I couldn’t hold it against them. And they had bags of parsnip chips. They were fantastically sweet and delicious. But of course they’ll never sell them here in the States, because people get turnips and parsnips mixed up, and parsnips smell like pee when you boil them anyway.

Then, the clincher: I stopped in the other morning for a pain au chocolat (at the aboveground store, on 50th St.), and the new manager personally welcomed me. I’d normally think that was lame and smarmy, but the new manager was hot, all with a Latino accent, a silky ponytail, Euro-look square glasses, and very, very intense eye contact. He had on a groovy shirt too, which kind of went with the wallpaper. He looked as though he’d been beamed from some lefty-bohemian coffee shop in Mexico City or Buenos Aires–a lefty-bohemian coffee shop that Believed in The Revolution, but didn’t take itself too seriously, really–straight to Pret a Manger. And he looked happy about it.

If this is PaM’s latest attempt to pander to the American consumer, I’m buying. But if he gets fired, then, really, that’s it, for the last time: dead to me.