and things on which to spread it

Breads n' Spreads looks on the outside like one of those clinics you can find in a strip mall somewhere, flanked by a Subway and a Baskin Robbins, shoved in beside a Christian bookstore; a clinic lacking insignia save for the hyphenated name of the doctor printed on the door. For those who know the truth about it, though, it actually serves excellent lunch.

After today I write in praise of Brian's turkey and provolone on toasted bread with red pepper spread, and the cold potato leek soup I ordered, which tasted like a hybrid of what I imagine ranch dressing and pure vegetable broth would be if: 1) they were mixed well, 2) if the vegetable broth was made from the juice of the crispest, cleanest, freshest cucumbers and zucchini in the countryside, and 3) if the whole thing at the end was sprinkled delicately with chives.

Brian's sandwich also came with an herbed penne salad, featuring black olives, sundried tomatoes and prettily chopped red onions. My soup came with a warm roll, which I had to eat simply because I haven't received a warm roll with anything I've ordered out, I don't think, since I was eight. We drank rounds of tall glasses of cold Snickerdoodle coffee, trying to bite the ice cubes that floated at the top. The ice really did look delicious; the cubes were made of coffee instead of water, and looked like big bobbing blocks of chocolate. All food was served on the kind of ware you only see in Anthropologie catalogues.

a cement hole with indoor yelling

Moving day is bad for everyone. Moving day with full-stop traffic in 90 degree car with no air conditioning is worse. After enough moving days, you become prepared for it all. The tribulations come less as a shock.

What I was not ready for were Pennsylvanians on the interstate. In New York, if you are standing at the Metrocard machine and your debit card just won't swipe, and you turn around and look whoever it is behind you -- the first person in the traffic jam you've caused-- in the face and give an earnest "I'm sorry," they will give you a nod back and say "it's ok." If you put your flashers on in Pennsylvania, however, or linger in the left lane, they'll flip you the bird, man. They will. It's rather shocking.

It is my fault, of course, that I packed so haphazardly as to allow for a jar of minced garlic to spill all over some box in the backseat. It is my fault that, while driving, I decided to stick my hand back there and try to figure out where it was, which of course led me to find it and then freak. out. when I pulled my hand back and it was covered in garlicy goo, and which of course was the reason that I slowed down in the left lane to a creepy 40, and swerved a bit, too. I know, I am ashamed.

The lessons to be taken away from this are many, including the food-related thing that it's important to take your time -- with cooking, with reading recipes, with sharing meals, with eating them. And when packing to leave a place, keep the minced garlic behind.

Aromatic vegetables etc.

This week's recipe photos turned out great.

tender corners, shaped like washington state

A lot of people have moved to Washington in the past eight years. The 2000 and 2008 census reflect a near 600,000 individual accession, versus Pennsylvania's 167,227 and New York's measly 513, 981.

Sartre's food blog

Our most basic pleasure drives: food and sexual gratification. Thomas Aquinas understood that these drives are in themselves wholesome because they're aimed at what is basically necessary for human life. But Kafka and Nietzsche spoke outwardly of their aversions to sex. And yet, were they not "generative?"

It seems to me there are two ways of being in the world -- I have seen it enough -- those who are born to romp and to eat, and those who find alternative nourishment; those who "regenerate" by contemplation, by asserting a voice into a crowd. It used to seem impossible to exist in both groups when I first came to New York. I became thin and severe, a pilchard sort of fish. But then I found Sartre's cookbook.

a word to the wise.

Omelets should assist rather than hinder the salience of egg. Do not even think of adding meat; it is out of the question. Vegetables, on the other hand, belong to another family entirely, with a different leader. Their leader is neither better nor brighter than the leader of eggs and meat; the two are just on opposite ends of the spectrum. When we have tried in the past to have two leaders within the same family within the same omelet, it ended in bad flavor. Again, so did today's chicken-and-egg experiment, save for the serendipitous pun.

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.