some ideas you have when you're delirious are actual good ideas.

As I write this I'm half delirious, like Kathy Fagan writing "Little Bad Dream Charm." I haven't ingested anything all day except a few teaspoons full of bittersweet powdered cocoa, and two Dixie cups of white wine. So now I'm sitting here, heart pounding, with a multigrain boule, made into a delicious sandwich with 2% Fage, sliced tomatoes, oregano and olive oil. This sandwich is seriously in the top 5 best ideas I've ever had while out of my mind. Do not gchat or call for the next 30 minutes.

taking food pictures less seriously

Exhibit A: last night's dinner.

There is only so much to a picture of bouchons au thon, you know what I mean, or like, chocolate cupcakes. A premium photograph of a chocolate cupcake makes the cupcake look appealing, resulting in a desire or a small unfettered anxiety about finding said dessert and inhaling it. But what does this cupcake taste like? Yes, I mean the one in your photograph, oh pristine food-photographing blogger. I have seen beautiful chocolate cupcakes before, and I've made them from your recipe, and they tasted like foam, or one time oatmeal. This should never happen and it proves the flaw.

I would rather interpret the quality and taste of food by how it's been written about, versus the aesthetic appeal of the photograph per se. There is something to be said for people who can do this, who can write engagingly about making/eating food, hence making that food seem irresistible. I believe this recipe really worked for them because they are able to recount the feelings they had as they were eating it and making it. Julia Child has done this. Molly Wizenberg has done this. I have respect.

My calculated declination in food photography over the next few weeks will be in effort to improve my own food writing, starting......now, featuring (above) shoddy photograph of what I ate for dinner last night (post haste), including blurry background glimpses of the disheveled laptop-centered life I lead, not failing to include the occasional cameo of a used Q-tip.

The 9G Burrito Cart

It's inexplicable to live at Bard College for a summer and never eat at the Route 9G/199 Burrito camper, which I just learned is officially called Bubby's. I have never tasted a burrito so soft and fat and perfectly crisped and variegated by a charcoal grill as the ones I've tasted here. And I've had a lot of burritos. Like, probably not more than people who have worked at burrito joints but close enough to know those burritos are sub par. They have nothing like the home-made, hand-mashed guacamole the burrito cart ladies mash up a few hours before the lunch hour begins, or the fluffy, basmati rice brought in straight from India, or the salsa verde they make at home and put out in little jars for you to spoon on your tortilla in the little nooks where it folds in above some melty local organic cheese. After being exposed to that kind of salt-of-the-earth enterprise those Other burritos you get from Some Mopey Employee at the chain joint just bring shame to the tortilla-wrapped genre of cuisine, in my opinion, and to the world as a whole.

Today I spent my penultimate $5 bill on what may be my last rice-and-beans-in-foil until I return to the Hudson Valley next summer to graduate with my first master's degree. If I had not waited until the last hours of the afternoon to eat lunch today, a digital memory of the Bubby's cart and all its representative attributes might be pictured here. As it is, you'll just have to take my blog for it.

tahini.

The coup de grâce of anything resembling regular dinner food ever again. Dayum.

Share?

Here's a shot of Obama with my cute friend Kim sharing some tortellini at the beach. More luncheons with the Prez and beach eating on the way.

Cleaning/Shipping out

This is a very exciting week. I'm moving! On Friday! Which means I'll need to clean out my fridge.

This idea excited me very much until I actually opened my fridge to see what was in there. I have no idea how I have this much food.

• half a purple bell pepper (slowly rotting)
• 11 eggs
• 2 sticks of butter
• 3/4 jar Peanut Butter & Co. Dark Chocolate Dreams
• 1 canister Sesame Tahini
• 1/4 cucumber
• half a lime
• 10 oz. fresh spinach
• 6 carrots
• 4 chicken filets
• 1 jar minced garlic
• 1 onion
• 2 bananas
• 1 tomato
• 1 apple
• 1 tablespoon bacon fat which has now probably permanently aroma-stained the mason jar it's in and which I'll now probably have to throw away too, sad face.
  

Bad Ideas I used to Have:

• eating nothing but oatmeal for an entire week
• eating nothing for an entire week
• mixing chocolate peanut butter cookies with my hands
• eating Boca burgers without cooking them
• opening canned stewed tomatoes with a knife
• Honey Bunches of Oats, Life cereal, Nutter Butter cookies broken up and dumped into a bowl beneath tons of milk
• spaghetti sandwich

the best lunch meat between toast ever, except for that time I added jelly.

For dinner a turkey/artichoke panini from Panera on toasted Foccacia bread, and a giant chocolate chip cookie which did not (and I checked) contain trans-fat. Eaten whilst driving through the traffic light on route 9W on the way back over the bridge, both windows down, with the still, steady August air coming in from both sides, a little of the artichoke/cheese juices going down my wrist. I have never had better lunch meat between two slices of toast in my life. There were no parking spots when I got back, so I sidled up on the grass, not-caring. The post-Barnes and Noble Friday night $9 dinner to go was the best post-Barnes and Noble Friday night $9 I ever spent. (as opposed to the mid-Barnes and Noble $9, which is usually accompanied by a few other digits, and then a guilty walk out the big, smooth, wooden B&N doors, resulting in a typical $9 dinner, according to my track record, which is usually the post-B&N thing that tends to round it all out)

Yerba. No, Yerba.

Coffee is borderline healthy, with positive effects to the psyche and immune system, so it has been hard to shake.

I bought the stuff they sell at Whole Foods in a little container that looks like hot chocolate, something called Teccino, made with figs and nuts and, as far as I could see, twigs and branches and other home-building materials suitable for a vole. But that ended up garnishing my ice cream. What worked for me once, my sophomore year, was green tea, which, after six months (and even before that) really just tasted like a sock. I switched back to coffee after a fateful run to Starbucks that morning, and have since been caffeinating regularly while turning my attention to the drugs, sex, and other related vices of my friends and family members.

A week ago, during my sometimes- routine of drinking cup after cup of coffee and getting really involved in some article or paper such that I forget to eat, I felt heart flutters. It didn't feel great, like the other times when I've had heart flutters. And they didn't go away this time, even after I ate an apple and some toast. Instead, they came back a few times, and I had the distinct feeling like this was bad, like my mind was telling me to stop it. I couldn't sleep at all that night, and the next day, I made one measly cup in the morning out of habit, and just the smell felt like I was forcing myself to do this thing I didn't want or need. I abandoned it after one sip.

I decided yesterday I might have hit a plateau, like I did with alcohol after 9 years of experimenting with my repetitive inability to drink more than one beer. I decided it might be time for a moratorium; time to admit I no longer need the abundance of youth to keep me going.

I think I am OK with it. This tea I'm drinking helps. It doesn't have caffeine, which is amazing, because it tastes like it definitely should, and though it's got a very earthy, dirt-like flavor, it's nothing like the green tea sock.

Yerba Mate, it's called. I like it.

an impromptu road trip.

I drove to Pennsylvania over the weekend -- a good four hour haul down I-78.


I had a lot of work to do, but I felt the need to "escape," i.e. to use a real washing machine, to take a bath in my own bathtub, to drink a disproportionately measured gin and tonic you'd never get in any bar. To spend some quality time with the boys: Joe and Bri, and Dad, to whom the disproportionately measured gin and tonic duties have always been carefully entrusted.

Bri and I are starting to get ready for our big move to New York City at the end of the month, so I also took the opportunity to schlep a few boxes of books and odds n' ends back to my adolescent bedroom; a room which has, for the past few months, served as nothing but a big storage unit. Funny how that happens. Funny how I feel like it means I am at last an adult.

I meant to spend a lot of time in the kitchen while I was home, and so I did. On Sunday, Bri read aloud to me from the New York Times Magazine while I broiled a pork loin, baked a loaf of banana-chocolate bread (from Molly Wizenberg's book A Homemade Life), and prepared a delicious batch of eggplant ratatouille with organic flank steak.





After a long day, we scooted over to a gathering just in time to meet the lovely host of get fork'd, who had just welcomed into her life a delightful little Pomeranian puppy, who may or may not be named Mercutio.