Author: zora

By contrast: the New Mexico Diet (TM)

It’s so true: Driving makes you fat.

By the end of 15 days in New Mexico in rented Ford Focus, I felt like a sluggish, sunburned blimp. (The air up there is thin–I got a redneck sunburn on my first long drive, propping my arm on the driver-side window frame.)

Here’s the terrible conundrum of writing a travel guide: I never get to eat at the really good places. I already know that, say, the Frontier is not to be missed in Albuquerque, so I can’t waste my time having a breakfast burrito smothered in green chile stew there. Instead, I have to go the Range, because it’s got mixed reviews but looks cute, and is a little out of the way–is it worth driving to? The answer is no, it turns out, and I waddle to the car just a little more slowly than I did after my previous meal, the third of the day.

I never thought I’d complain about a job that gave me an excuse to eat wherever I want and write it off on my tax return. But I am, and I will continue to do so until NYC bicycling revives my metabolism and stops my gut from looking poochy.

The other weird thing about writing travel guides is that I often end up in situations where I’m thinking, “Um, should I be seeing this?”

I visited this nice little spic-and-span motel on “West Central” (read: the stretch of Central Ave. where no tourist ever goes, so they have to put up big biz-improvement-commission-sponsored neon signs saying “West Central” to make it look important), and ended up getting personal tour of the proud owner’s personal apartment, including his children’s rooms, and the kitchen where his wife was cooking dinner. There was also another kitchen upstairs, he was happy to show me. Along with the laundry room. Being behind the scenes was weird enough, even without counting in the decor: sparkling white shag carpeting, white leather sofas, chrome and shiny black accents (think black glass vase with all-white fake flowers), a spiral staircase, giant photos of the man’s daughter at her wedding (she’s a doctor, doing her residency in California). Glitz-o-rama. But it was sort of sweet that the guy was so proud of his motel (the Sandia Peak Inn, for the record–though it’s nowhere near the mountains) that he couldn’t resist showing me the whole damn thing. And it is a really nice little motel. I urge you to patronize it on your next visit to West Central, Albuquerque.

Another moment where I didn’t know whether to look away or stare in fascination: We’re inside the old Spanish church in Truchas, a tiny village in the mountains north of Santa Fe. This church is rarely open–we’ve snuck in behind a tour group from the folk art museum. The tour leader is up near the altar, talking about all the old folk art, some of which is from the seventeenth century, on display. Some guy raises his hand and asks, “Can you explain why Jesus is wearing a skirt? I’ve never seen that…”

Indeed, there’s a crucifix up on the wall, and it’s dressed in this purple satin full-length skirt, trimmed in gold sequins. The group leader looks, looks again, and forges on: “Well, as you know, the idiosyncracies of each santero [carver of wooden saint figures] are distinct, and this tradition may just have happened in this village as the result of someone’s taste….”

Then, about five pews back, someone pipes up to interrupt the stream of bullshit. It’s the little old lady who’s been taking care of the church for the past 20 years.

“Actually,” she says, “Jesus is wearing a skirt because he has no legs.”

And then she bustles up to the altar and starts pulling up Jesus’ dress. Of course I can’t look away.

Jesus has just stumps–apparently his delicately curved calves and slender ankles were too fragile and snapped off during some clumsy handling or overexuberant procession. (Think how bad the guy who accidentally amputated Jesus’ legs must feel.)

As if that weren’t enough, the woman proceeds to lift the skirts of every santo on the altar, and there are a lot of them: no one is disfigured like Jesus, but there are some pretty nice carvings on Saint Lucy’s and Mary’s nether regions. Who knew? But I don’t suppose it’s appropriate for me to go looking under the skirts of statues next time I’m in church. Better leave it to the experts.

This leads to my next post: pictures that won’t appear in Moon Handbooks Santa Fe, Taos & Albuquerque…

The Amsterdam Diet (TM)

I’m not in the habit of weighing myself, but after ten days in Amsterdam, I’m sure I lost weight. And it’s not an isolated incident: this happens on every trip. It also happens to Peter, who was the first one to identify this seemingly contradictory phenomenon.

Here are the apparent components of this miraculous weight-loss system:

1) Beer, and lots of it
Amsterdam, like everywhere else until the late nineteenth century, had no reliable drinking water, so everyone drank beer. Looking at the canals today, I’m still not sold on tap water. So, beer it is, with nearly every meal.

2) French fries
Or Belgian fries (vlaamse frites), as they’re called. So good, they’re twice-fried. And served with garlic mayo. Sometimes I get the satay sauce too–y’know, for protein.

3) Herring
The only remotely “healthy” thing in the diet: raw filets of this luscious fatty little fish. If you think herring only comes in pickled, think again. In the Netherlands, you can get it at street carts, served with diced onions and sort-of-sweet pickles, on a squishy white-bread bun. Carb-fearers can go bunless, but it’s harder to get all the things in your mouth together.

4) Fizzy water
OK, I lied. It’s not all beer, all the time. I take an occasional break with Spa Rood (Spa with a red label), the best fizzy water ever because the bubbles are HUGE and almost violent. And maybe they keep me feeling full.

5) Stroopwafels
Feeling low? Give yourself an insane sugary boost with a caramel-filled crispy cinnamon cookie. Then go pass out when the sugar disperses. Or you can keep the high going with a little…

6) Koffie verkeerd
Coffee with tons of steamed milk. I actually can’t drink too much of this because it gives me flashbacks to the summer of ’95, when I nearly killed myself with coffee. I worked till about 2am every day, then shot the shit with my fellow bartender, Ed Coughlin (Ed, where the hell are you?), till 5 or 6am. Then we woke up around 2pm (handily, we were sharing this totally dodgy attic apartment with no bathroom, just two mattresses on the floor and an Ikea leatherette couch we’d scrounged) and drank coffee till 5pm, when we went to work. Oddly, I was nauseous almost every single day. Then one day, I didn’t drink any coffee. And I felt great. Hey, stomach lining: Sorry I’m such a slow learner. But I think I was really skinny that summer, between all that coffee and the menthol cigarettes.

7) Whoppers
Burger King is a Dutch chain, right? I’ve never eaten so many Whoppers as I have in Amsterdam, always in pursuit of the elusive Free Whopper after consuming ten, but always misplacing my punch card. One bite of a Whopper gives me a little Proustian flashback to 1994, when there was still a flower vendor on the Leidseplein, and the weather was bizarrely hot and all I did all day was make sandwiches and try to keep my arm cast from getting wet.

Alongside this daily menu (consume in any order, in any quantity), you must do one thing:

**Bicycle everywhere.**

I think the biking covers a multitude of sins, though why biking should work better to keep you fit in Amsterdam than in NYC (where I also bike everywhere, and for longer distances) is beyond me. Maybe all those little tiny bridges add up to more effort in the long run?

Also, I think it helps significantly if you:

**Sleep until after noon.**

This way, you end up eating only a couple of meals a day, because it’s impossible to find anything to eat after midnight except for at the Texaco (which, for the record, is the only place to buy cans of Heineken in the wee hours…or did Rod say they quit that?).

You may notice that I don’t really deal with pot, which, honestly, is all anyone thinks of when you say the word Amsterdam anyway. Marijuana was an integral part of the Amsterdam Diet back in 1994 and 1995, but now it’s barely a factor. In any case, I think it’s fine to incorporate it into your plan as long as you can be either 1) so jaded about it as to not yield to the munchies (never, ever buy anything but frites from Febo) or 2) high only after midnight, when there’s nothing to eat. As for all the other drugs you think of when I say Amsterdam, they’re all of the naturally slimming variety anyway. Dancing is very, very good for you.

I can’t say I’m proud of the way I eat and drink in Amsterdam, and occasionally I do eat really good and proper meals at nice restaurants or cooked at people’s houses (in fact, there’s a whole book floating around out there with my restaurant recs).

But I can’t argue with weight-loss success. I could publish a detailed book on the Amsterdam Diet, but for you my friends, special price of free. Just let me know how it works out for you.

Fab!ulicious

Just to give you a sense of context, that’s the current motto of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Yes, Fab!ulicious, with the exclamation point. When has an airport ever been so cool?

And when has a city ever been so cool as on April 30, Queen’s Day? According to the Metro paper (Amsterdam is so cool, it got this fluffy daily commuter tabloid years ago, well before NYC did), more than 400,000 people came out on the streets in Amsterdam on Saturday to celebrate the queen’s birthday, the Netherlands’ biggest national holiday. That’s more than half the city’s population. Some 160,000 people came in from elsewhere on the train.

Total number of arrests that day: 60.

I don’t see something like this happening in the States, ever–and not just because we don’t have a queen. (The name of the one here is Beatrix, by the way–Trixie, for short.) But in Amsterdam, it’s totally normal for everyone from 3-year-old kids to twinkly eyed grannies to push out into the streets and canals in their best House of Orange gear and party like rock stars. I even saw a Sikh wearing a bright orange turban. (And the Dutch complain immigrants don’t assimilate enough!)

As a bonus–that is, alongside all the public beer vendors, blaring techno and disco anthems, boats full of aging rock stars playing live sets, people wearing orange feather boas and so on–Queen’s Day produces what’s probably the world’s largest yard sale. Something about vendor’s licenses (and a lack of yards) prohibits people from selling their junk on the street the rest of the year, but on this one day, it’s a flea free-for-all. Days before, people start marking out their patches of sidewalk with tape and chalk; you can practically hear people sorting out all their useless crap behind their doors.

I didn’t wake up early enough to see the good stuff, I admit (the night before is Queen’s Night, when everyone goes out to clubs)–but there was something so bizarrely heartwarming about all this optimistic commerce, even at 3pm, when the only stuff anyone had left was totally useless. And in between people selling puffy-shoulder leather jackets and decks of 49 cards and raspberry tarts rendered in ceramic were other entrepreneurs: an 8-year-old girl busking with her accordion, for instance, and a booth selling Polaroid photo ops of you sticking your head out from between Princess Maxima’s legs (Will you be the next royal child?”).

With everyone high on something, or just plain drunk or giddy, all the bizarre street action and the steady roaming around through crowds, it felt a lot like Burning Man. But, and here’s the heresy, it was better, and precisely because money was changing hands. I didn’t think I was much of a capitalist, but commerce honestly did improve the experience, and not just because there was someone prepared to sell me a super-dense and delicious orange-frosted donut or a pancake cut into the shape of a crown and covered in orange sprinkles. (Also, by the way, there was a lot of pumpkin soup and fresh orange juice being sold–because they’re, duh, orange.) Because I could choose who to give my money to, I didn’t have to accept pointless kitschy trinkets with a smile as part of a “gift economy”, as I do at Burning Man. Instead, I could laugh my ass off at some enthusiastic Dutch guy doing his best third-world salesman impression (“You buy! My friend! Special price!”) after we picked over his 1970s Dutch cookbooks and vinyl suitcases and said no thanks. We could give a euro to the accordion girl, and maybe she’d do better in the future. We could stop every two blocks and buy another beer, rather than having to schlep them on our backs all around the desert, or risk dying of thirst. We could nod sagely at the dangers of accumulating too much stuff as a woman ankle-deep in golf balls, hair straighteners, egg cups and other flotsam, wailed, “I can’t give this stuff away!” (And I could buy a perfectly decent pair of sandals from her for one euro.)

I guess it makes me a grumpy, art-hating anti-idealist, but even though I’m fond of the temporary dreamland of Black Rock City, I do like cities the way they function now–especially Amsterdam, which is almost ridiculously too functional. And even when it’s not Queen’s Day, there are enough kooks in the streets and enough do-what-you-want attitude that it’s kind of like BRC year-round. I’ve been going to Amsterdam since 1994, and envying so many things about the place all along (No working poor! Bikes everywhere! Topless women on billboards!), but I do appreciate it more after having been to Burning Man, because it’s comforting to know that this ideal place that 30,000 people strive for every September is at least partially existent over here in Europe all the time. I’m perfectly willing to carry my wallet around for that.

Twin C’s Passover Treats

From the Polenblog, it’s, uh, a little late, but perhaps for all of those who still have some matzah to use up? I personally have sampled both of Twin C’s tasty specialties, and they’re great:

Work is at its regular intolerable levels. Short day today. Seeing my friend Kara’s dance production at Symphony Space. Then two days of Jewin it up, Passover style. I have to run home and cook up a batch of Chocomatzah, the only way to eat matzah!(TM). Basically it’s matzah with about five gallons of homemade caramel on it, then melted chocolate on top of that. It’s yummy, and pretty easy to make (you know I wouldn’t be making it if it was difficult!). Next week, another batch of chocomatzah, as well as perhaps the most bizarre thing I make – coffee boiled eggs. Two dozen eggs go into a big pan (I usually use a turkey roaster) with a lot of coffee grounds, a decent amount of water, some onion skin, and a little olive oil. This gets placed in the oven at 200 degrees for somewhere around 14 – 18 hours. When the eggs come out, the coffee has seeped through and flavored them, and the onion skins have (hopefully) made really cool designs on the shells. I don’t remember where the recipe comes from – I think it’s Romanian? Sarah Braun told me about it originally, I think.

The egg-boiling thing is used in Egypt as well, for the record, and not just by Jews.

And happy real (Greek) Easter to those who care about things like calendrical logic (how can Easter ever come before Passover?).

I’m in Amsterdam now, and have been practicing the tried and true Amsterdam Diet, which does not involve (very much) pot, as it happens. Yesterday was Queen’s Day, which was insane, raucous and delicious. More on that later, and on the intricacies of the diet, which Peter and I will turn into a book and make a mint off of. (Warning to lazy Americans: it does involve some exercise. But also lots of fried foods.)

Oysterama

Karl’s birthday oysters were so good that I couldn’t really think of a good story to tell about them–no last-second genius rejiggering, no harrowing run-ins with the law, no panicked this-will-never-work tantrums, no fires raging out of control. I still haven’t really drummed anything clever up. Everything went as planned. It was great. Pictures are over on Fotaq.

But it was so dang easy, I recommend it to all, and here’s how:

Ingredients: Fresh oysters. Tons. Some clams? Why not? I bet mussels would work too.

Ours weren’t even as fresh as could be, because we bought them at 2am Thurs night/Fri morn and didn’t eat till Sunday. But they were perfectly good. Store the oysters in your fridge, not in ice–the fresh water drowns ’em. Dapper Dan was speculating that perhaps really good oyster joints store their oysters in big brine tanks, to replicate the sea, because the oysters are so firm and plump and gushing liquid when you get them. So if you have a saltwater aquarium, use that; otherwise, just the fridge.

For cooking, we’d initially planned to lightly steam them over the fire, rigging up a hotel pan with a little bit of water, topping it with a cookie sheet (there’s a pic of me messing with this). But then DD kept saying we’d be much happier if we just put the things straight on the grill. We were. This way, we could feed the fire steadily (we had a bundle of green applewood Ali had given us, which maybe made the oysters taste better…but it sure made the air smell nice). We could also keep an eye on all of them and pull them off as soon as they popped, which only took a couple of minutes. The oysters barely opened a crack, but the clams would occasionally pop wide open–in general, they were easier to spot. Some oysters sat sullenly, not opening, for ages, and then finally would creep open. Some of those I didn’t trust and tossed, suspecting they might be dead already, but the rest we ate, and we were all fine. I don’t think we ended up overcooking any of them. They were also pretty easy to pop open–no hard-core shucking tools needed.

We served them with a mignonette–shallots, parsley, red wine vin and tons of black pepper–but I think they would’ve been just as good with plain old lemon juice and pepper. We also had a schmancy Asian version, with yuzu vinegar and cucumber, but that one needed a little work, I think. The _real_ tasty secret to serving them was that DD was just fishing them out of their shells with his fingers, sloshing them in the mignonette, and feeding them to anyone in range. Everything tastes better when you eat it with your fingers, and it turns out some things taste even better when you use someone else’s fingers.

Apparently, too, you can’t eat too many. Karine said she must’ve served up two dozen at least just to Karl’s brother, and was beginning to feel like the irresponsible bar owner continuing to serve the obviously wasted patron. But no complaints the next day…

The star “side” dish was the pulled pork–just pork shoulder cooked at 250 for, like, 14 hours. Tamara wedged four of them in the same hotel pan, rubbed all over with some redneck-y premade supermarket spice blend (rec’d by a real redneck), and they turned out insanely well. So well that it was all gone at the end of the party, so Tamara had to make another shoulder the next night just to console herself. Strangely, though, it was not as delicious–for two reasons, I think: the pork was not pulled to obsessive fineness by Naomi, who did a stellar job on the first batch, and it was also cooked all by its lonesome, without three other slabs of greasy pig oozing flavorful fat, so it didn’t have quite the same richness and was a tad dry. So I guess the lesson is just to add some lard.

For dessert, we had red velvet cake and ice cream from Mary’s Dairy–turns out the owner is semi-related to Karl. As if Karl wasn’t a keeper enough.

I’m already in a swoon from describing all that salty, slippery, fatty goodness–and I didn’t even get to the crab cakes. Holy shit, they were awesome. As Peter promised, I have a whole new outlook on the whole crab cake genre. And like any really good drug, just after I had the last one, I found myself plotting how I would get more: probably will go to DC next month…so I could stop off in Baltimore…take the streetcar…Chris could meet me…we could drive back. I’m hooked. If you see me panhandling under a bridge this time next year, please give crabs and butter.

Field Trip to Fulton Fish Market

Last night, in anticipation of Oyster Fest 2005, we trundled down to that venerable NYC establishment, the Fulton Fish Market–which hasn’t yet relocated to the Bronx, apparently, despite the countless nostalgic column inches already dedicated to its impending demise. (July, maybe even September, was the estimated move date somebody gave us last night, with a shrug.) But good thing we got our asses down there anyway, because the Fulton Fish Market really is a hell of a lot more than a bunch of concrete open-sided buildings filled with styrofoam boxes of fish and ice.

Part of the thrill is that it’s the middle of the night (we aimed for 1am, but in fact most vendors don’t start selling till 2am), and we’re in this fantastic marriage of grim and glorious urbanity: a dark, sketchy two blocks under the rumbling FDR, where the asphalt has gone to seed and the only lighting is from the glaring fluorescent-lit concrete bunkers that house about half of the vendors. But immediately to the east is the Brooklyn Bridge, all aglimmer, with the Manhattan Bridge right behind; lights are twinkling off the dark, slippery river, and it feels incredibly calm and gorgeous–if you can screen out the armies of guys shouting, and trundling right toward you on those little pallet tractor things. (All you “warehouse club” shoppers: This is the real deal!)

And it’s a bad idea to gawp at the river view because these guys are also wielding sharp knives and hooks. Hooks like I’ve only ever seen in On the Waterfront. I thought this genius tool had been rendered extinct by shipping containers, so it warmed my heart to see there’s still some commerce in America that requires the loving, individual attention of a big guy’s meaty paw and a nasty sharp hook. One guy we passed was gesturing wildly with his hook in his hand; he apologized when he saw us tourists coming through, because we’re the types who might end up with a hook in the ear if we’re not careful.

The market is not a consumer-friendly place–there are no signs telling you where to park, and it seems impossible to get past a phalanx of refrigerated semis lined up to the north. There’s no cheery market agent, as at the Greenmarket, say, to ask for guidance. We parked in a seemingly random spot by some overpass pylon and hoped for the best.

But it is a surprisingly friendly place overall. It did help that one of our company was a bodacious, outgoing redhead who was genuinely fascinated with these guys’ work. When a sweatshop full of filet-ers noticed us peering into their little aisle workroom, they waved us in, encouraged us to squeeze down the little aisle between them (it was a disassembly line: guys on one side filleted, slipping the carcasses into silvery, squishy heaps at their feet, while guys on the other side skinned the filets) and stare and chat and take pictures. “You’ve had a couple beers?” the Mexican guy I talked to asked me, assuming, I guess, that the only people who would stumble in here at 1am would be drunkards with nothing better to do. No, darlin’, I’m drunk on the beauty of wholesale commerce, I wanted to say, as for once I was genuinely sober.

This was still early, before the market really opened. Quite a lot happened in the hour we whiled away at the Paris Cafe bar (where everyone had been quick to direct us, natch), and when we came back, the bustle had doubled. It was short work to buy 200 oysters and 200 clams, then cart them back to the car, dodging pallet-tractors and hooks all the way. We took another quick stroll around before we left, to see a gigantic plum-red tuna being hacked apart, gold-pink snappers, shad roe (which looked like agglomerations of the lungs I’ve pulled out of quails) and lots of crabs, all rolling-eyed and foaming at the mouth out of panic. I pet some of the crabs on the head to calm them, but crustaceans don’t really respond to that the way mammals do–all the more reason to eat ’em.

We’d seen all we could see (even the truck from Taverna Kyclades, the fish resto near my house, arriving; I have fresh respect for them), and the guys had gotten as much of an eyeful as they wanted. (“I’ve never really noticed Katie’s ass,” Peter said as we walked behind her and heard the whoops of praise from either side, “but in this setting, I somehow have a fresh appreciation for it.”) Oh, and we’d eaten a mysterious chicken-sandwich-in-a-plastic-bag–funny, there were no fishy foods on offer. So we got in the car and drove home, dropping Peter at Penn Station to catch his 3:15am train to Boston. I haven’t been up that late and roaming around without the aid of drugs since I can remember.

So now I know you can get 400 shellfish for little more than $100, and be generously and graciously complimented on your physique and charm by men in rubber bib overalls at 3am. But of course, this is all set to change, and we know that change is bad. The Fulton Fish Market is essential, the seafood hub for not just NYC but a lot of the Northeast, and its social value is measured precisely by the prime real estate, with its gorgeous river view, it sits on. When it gets shunted up to the Bronx, I imagine these guys will feel more than a bit marginalized. But who am I to say? Hunts Point will be indoors (it was pissing rain all last night), and air-conditioned. And it will be closer to my house. Throw in a bushel of crabs, and maybe I can handle a little change.

Food Porn Watch and Pret a Manger

Clever. For those really fishing around for distraction whilst at work, this site is very good at redirecting your attention. Although too much of it can make you feel a little queasy. Just like food. And porn, for that matter.

Stopped in to Pret a Manger for a chocolate croissant the other morning, and it’s been insanely redone: tri-tone brown curvy seats, wavy white paper chandeliers and this awesome chocolate-brown-and-silver paisley wallpaper. It must’ve just happened, because the staff looked pretty dazed by it all. I told the counter guy I liked the wallpaper, and he just shook his head and said, “You _do_?” Minimalism is dead. Rococo has risen in its place. Which means, Tamara pointed out, that fat girls will be back in style any second as well.

By the way, the Pret chocolate croissants are pretty good, far better than Au Bon Pain, if we’re choosing among office-worker bakeries. I only discovered this because one morning I’d picked up a chocolate croissant from my Italians at Ditmars, and it was all nice and warm and probably oozing trans fats (I don’t think they’re very Old World there), and then it managed to fall right out of my bag somewhere along the way to work. I sulked and sulked, but then I passed Pret, and then actually felt I’d made a big trade up. The nice thing about their pastries is that they’re small. So even if it’s not the pinnacle of butteriness (though still not bad at all, and flaky too), you at least haven’t wasted crucial stomach space on it, or eaten so much of something mediocre that you then feel sick and self-loathing.

The latter is what always happens to me with Au Bon Pain and other stuff that looks nice on the outside but is just American 150%-scale nastiness, where you eat and eat and keep eating, always hoping that your next bite will actually have a bit more flavor. I think this phenomenon can be blamed for a portion of American obesity. A steady diet of rich, spicy, crazy-savory things–that’s the way. And how convenient–that meshes precisely with my current lifestyle. (Coming this Sunday: oyster roast for Karl’s birthday.)

I heart NYC

I just heard a little promo for my local station that just gave a me a little twinge of aaaawwww. This woman says why she likes New York City, after describing all the wacky people she saw on the blackout day in 2003: “I’ll never be bored, I’ll never be lonely, and I’ll never have to own a car.” Amen. But drat–I guess I’ll actually have to give money to public radio now.

If it’s worth doing…

Know thyself through StatCounter:

The other day I went to wallow in the puddle of which-100-people-have-loved-me-most-recently-and-why, and discovered that Roving Gastronome is the very first result when you Google “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” I have succeeded in this world. Now I just want to know: who was doing the Googling?

(Also, I’ve noticed quite a lot of people Google “shrimp tacos.” Smart cookies.)

Oh crap: real-time disappointment. I seem to have lost my position. It’s like I never existed. Was it all just a dream?