Now We're Really in Trouble

Recently eaten: garlicky cheese tortellini
Recent annoyance:

Well, the rich folk are really in trouble now. The financial crisis has forced the sale of imperfect produce. That's how bad it is. No more row after row of shiny, beautiful apples. What was once the comestible of the poor and the also-ugly, is now being thrust into the faces of civilized folk. We're ruined.

Europe Relaxes Rules on Sale of Ugly Fruits and Vegetables (New York Times)
Misshapen fruit and vegetables won a reprieve on Wednesday from the European Union as it scrapped rules banning overly curved, extra knobbly or oddly shaped produce from supermarket shelves.

"There'll be no reprieve for you!"

Oh, The Shame

Recently eaten: satay skewers
Recent annoyance:

This is embarrassing for all of us. Chinese cuisine is one of the great world cuisines and they have boiled it down to kung pao chicken? Will they also have their mascot General Tso running around?

China makes kung pao chicken official for Olympics (Yahoo News)
It's official. Hungry foreign hordes craving a fix of diced chicken fried with chili and peanuts during the Beijing Olympics will be able to shout "kung pao chicken!" and have some hope of getting just that.

As it readies for an influx of visitors for the August Games, the Chinese capital has offered restaurants an official English translation of local dishes whose exotic names and alarming translations can leave foreign visitors frustrated and famished.

General Tso says "my face burns with shame."

Preparation H-ott

Recently eaten: tunafish
Recent annoyance: brown bananas

For those of you who aren't into the club scene like I am, you don't have to go to the gym to get those chiseled pecs...just slather on some Preparation H instead. not sure what the side effects are, but they're probably hilarious and terrifying.

Preparation H: "It gets you shredded" (Consumerist)

There Is A God

Recently eaten: turkey burrito
Recent annoyance: AC is blowing HOT air and that's NOT okay

The Grilled Cheese Invitational is a time-honored event going back centuries to the first grilled cheese created in the Middle Ages during castle sieges. Okay, so the pedigree isn't that good. Does it matter? do they use irons to make grilled cheese like in the movie Benny & Joon? It wouldn't be worthwhile unless they had some crazy contraption to make the sandwiches.

Meatwater

Recently eaten: beef noodle soup
Recent annoyance: severe leakage from nose and eyes ( I look like a cocker spaniel)

I don't know if this Meatwater is for real, or maybe it's an April Fool's joke. But, the pages look pretty legit. I think the most beguiling flavor is the Hungarian Gulash. I don't even know what that is. I thought that's where they sent prisoners to break rocks, or something.

Pour One Out For My Homie Egg McMuffin Inventor Dude

Recently eaten: omelette (fake eggs)
Recent annoyance: pollen

Nooooo!

Egg McMuffin Inventor Dies at 89
A Southern California McDonald's restaurants official says Egg McMuffin inventor Herb Peterson has died in Santa Barbara at age 89.
art.peterson.ap.jpg

Egg McMuffin creator Herb Peterson with his breakfast idea in 1997.

Monte Fraker, vice president of operations for McDonald's restaurants in Santa Barbara, said Peterson died peacefully at his home Tuesday.

Peterson came up with idea for the signature McDonald's breakfast item in 1972.

He began his career with McDonald's as vice president of the company's advertising firm, D'Arcy Advertising, in Chicago. He wrote McDonald's first national advertising slogan, "Where Quality Starts Fresh Every Day," and eventually became a franchisee.

Cookie Monster

Recently eaten: bean salad
Recent annoyance: sheet wrinkles on my face

Good Lord, NO!

Tornado Cooks Up Cookie Crisis For Atlanta
The tornado that moved through downtown Atlanta left a group of local Girl Scouts holding the bag for tens of thousands of Girl Scout cookies.

About 36,000 boxes of Thin Mints, Tagalongs and Samoas were stacked at the Georgia World Congress Center when the storm hit last weekend.

The Scouts were planning to sell their famous cookies at the Atlanta Home Show. It was going to be the first time the Scouts tried such a big sale in one place.

"We were going to sell Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then the tornado hit," said Scout leader Valarie Culbreath. "Thank God none of our cookies were destroyed."

The cookies were spared, but with the Home Show canceled because of damage to the convention center the Scouts find themselves scrambling to sell their cookie collection.

The moved the cookies to the Atlanta Volunteer Service Center in DeKalb County and hope to sell them during a weeklong cookie drive there.

There's even a pathetic picture of a little girl

Phoebe Eat World

Recently eaten: dijon mustard turkey
Recent annoyance: not enough hours in the day

Time Magazine put together this mad crazy photo essay of what people eat around the world. I wonder what Phoebe's weekly intake photo would look like? It would have it's fair share of oatmeal packets and bananas. God forbid I did a photoessay of what i used to eat: ramen packets and hamburger meat. Mmmm, hamburger meat.

What the World Eats

This Is How I Feel About My Cholesterol

Recently eaten: ribs
Recent annoyance: early morning construction noise

Taste Test

Recently eaten: rice and beans
Recent annoyance: dropping food on newly cleaned pants

As a lover of all things cheesy and pithy, I don't see what's wrong with these restaurant names.

What's in a name?
Restaurants are often given a bad name. Quite literally in the case of Marylebone's vegetarian Eat and Two Veg. With a name to make even a provincial barber groan, ETV (I refuse to type it again) rather undermines the meat-free diner's attempts at contemporary style. It would seem good food does not equal good taste.

Of course, it's not just vegetarians eateries but all specialist or niche restaurants which seem especially prone to the pun. Could you stomach the Mussel Inn, Thai'd Up or Mad Mex? And could a love affair with falafel survive a meal at Syriandipity?

Puns aren't the only sins when naming a restaurant. Writing in The Observer, Jay Rayner began a review, "Why didn't somebody stop them? Why didn't one of their investors, hearing the name for the first time, say, for God's sake no!" The offending outlet was named Ooze, an onomatopoeic evocation of seeping wounds, ordure and, apparently, risotto.

Personally, I take issue with Café Mao, a popular name for Chinese restaurants; something about dictators and good times doesn't seem to fit. Worse still was the restaurant which opened in Mumbai last year called Hitler's Cross, adorned with swastikas and images of the Führer. A cynical attempt at creating publicity with the weak defence from the proprietor that "Hitler is a catchy name".

For more innocent names to put you off your food, barbecue restaurants are hard to beat, providing horrors even vegans couldn't think of. Take your pick from Bubbalou's Bodacious Bar-B-Que, Hog's Breath Rest or Gassey Jack's Smokehouse Garage, names which make the nose wrinkle and the arteries clog just by reading them. It may go without saying that these, along with the Roadkill Café, are all to be found in America.

Our friends across the Atlantic do seem to admire the wordplay. One of America's biggest restaurant chains is Lettuce Entertain You, though sadly their memorably-monikered eateries Lawrence of Oregano and Jonathan Livingston Seafood are no more. Even staid old Washington DC isn't immune. Wonks can treat themselves at Grill from Ipanema, ThaiTanic, Papa Razzi or Rosemary's Thyme.

Such is the impact of pun-tastic restaurants in America that academia has weighed in. Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois has collected "examples of international onomastic appellation which demonstrate that the names of contemporary dining and drinking establishments serve as semantic and/or humorous reflections of societal mores."

While her thoughts on Pulp Kitchen and Dine One One are intriguing, Westney neglects to cast her academic eye over this little beauty, tastingmenu.com's choice of "worst restaurant name ever".

We all have our own personal favourite best worst eatery names. Can anyone do better than these?

I'll Have Some Food With My Rice, Please

Recently eaten: duck
Recent annoyance: no internet

So the Mom assures me that where we are going in China has no internet. I am not entirely sure about that, but still worried I might suffer the same fate as some Chinese blogger.

Last night all of my Mom's 6 brothers and sisters came from all over for a big dinner. I must have seemed like some poor unfortunate outlander with no knowledge of Hong Kong culture. Had my cousins not been placing food morsels in my bowl, I might not have gotten anything to eat. Having grown up with just 4 in our nuclear family here, the 17 people sitting around the table all jockeying for control of the lazy susan holding the dishes was a little overwhelming.

One cousin noticed my poor shrimp peeling abilities (I kept quirting the brains everywhere when removing the head) and peeled a small mountain for me. another cousin noticed my chopsticks weren't fast enough or adept enough to pick up the food I wanted before it whizzed by to the other side of the table. And the ultimate humiliation, my Mom still had to remove the bones from my fish for me like a baby. I am pretty sure that this is rite of passage is like a Chinese barmitzvah. Once a young person is able to eat whole fish and remove the bones without choking on them, only then are they able to say "Today, I am a man." Even my youngest cousins stared at me like I was some backwards country bumpkin that had never seen the right side of a piece of duck before.

So expect radio silence for the next 7 days. I'll be in the wilds of an internet-free China.

I'll Be The Fat and Red-Eyed one

Recently eaten: fish balls and pig skin
Recent annoyance: smog makes my eyes dry

Full day number one in Hong Kong. I slept about 4 hours last night...

This morning, the mom and I woke up starving at around 7 AM. She sent my uncle, and her younger brother on his bike to find us some food...and quick. Thank goodness for my mom's seniority in the family. He returned with a morning favorite: little rolls made of rice and water in soy sauce and peanut sauce. See pic below.


Mom and I are staying in a house that my family built when my grandfather was still alive. Most of the houses around here are mostly made of concrete and tile. Seems as though most houses are constantly in a state of either construction or repair. One nice change is that there are many fewer stray dogs running around. When I visited as a child, one of my greatest scares came from stray dogs running through the streets between the houses and barking ym cousins and I. I was probably about 13 or 14 when I found out that you could thoroughly confuse a charging dog by opening an umbrella in its face.

After our early breakfast, Mom, two aunts and an uncle went to dim sum. if you've never been, there is an art to it and especially in Hong Kong. Dim sum may be eaten at almost any time of the day, although the earlier yoou go, the older the crowd is. When you sit down you get one pot of tea and an empty pot. The empty pot is for the tea yoou use to wash your plates, bowls, cups and chopsticks. This is not considered rude, but a necessity in a aplce where the running water is not sanitary. The plate is for your cup of tea and any bones or wrappers you discard in the course of the meal. And for god's sake, do not leave your chopsticks crossed on the table or stuck in the middle of a plate of food. It is all right to use hands for buns etc. but you should grab that with your chopsticks first. These rules can be more lax when dining with family.

Eating in Hong Kong is like a religion. There are as many if not more small cafes and restaurants lining the streets as shops and stores. My mom asked me if I was full after brunch, but noted that we would probably just eat later before dinner anyway. Sounds about right.

I also snapped a pic of this odd toilet in the tea house before we left. The toilet seat had an automatic system to put a seat cover on it and it was possible to have the seat heated. Pretty posh.


We stopped at the train station to get some fare cards and I noticed this disturbing ad for a weight loss system of some sort.
I'm not exactly sure if the weight is in pounds or kilograms or whatever, but if I weighed 120 anything, I'd be jumping for joy. 120 stone, 120 bags of flour. I have already been referred to as "big-boned" numerous times by my relatives and my mom. Apparently, I am quite the oddity. My cousins noted my "broad shoulder" but stopped short of calling me fat. Nice to know that I would have to get down to 105 boxes of butter before I could fit into any jeans sold here.

While walking back from our afternoon snack of sweet tofu and fishballs and pig skin, my mom saw a bird she had never seen before. She asked my aunt what kind of bird that is, to which she replied, "the kind that tastes good in soup." Gee, I wonder where I get it.

Hot Potato

Recently eaten: saltenas empanada
Recent annoyance: my hands smell like bleach

I was drooling this morning imagining how tasty this little treat below would. Sold in Korea, it's an entire potato, cut open and deep fried then sprinkled with some sort of cheesy powder. It's simple, ingenious, and fried. What else is there?

Go ahead, because you're worth it!

Another Victory for Nontraditional Medicine

Recently eaten: so much meat
Recent annoyance: mad at the world

Funny, my doctor has yet to prescribe this kind of medicine for my high cholesterol.

Former premier recovers with greasy breakfast
Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad, 82, reached a new milestone in his recovery from heart surgery last week -- he ate a greasy breakfast.

Mahathir, who had suffered two recent heart attacks before undergoing bypass surgery, chose roti canai, a popular dish of oily, fried bread and curried gravy as his first full breakfast.

He also drank high-energy milk, said a statement from Kuala Lumpur's National Heart Institute where he is being treated.

"After breakfast he had a full shower and was taken on a gentle ambulation around the bed," it added. "He will continue with intensive physiotherapy."

Cause for Pause

Recently eaten: greek salad
Recent annoyance: pens that seem like they are running out of ink, and then write fine

I have had a real tough time cutting seriously high-cholesterol foods out of my diet. Ever since they told me that Crisco runs through my veins, I have tried every mental tactic in the book to stop eating bacons and eggs. Well, I think I have discovered the best dieting tool ever.

Behold, the Bacon Tomb
This is what happens to bacon and eggs over 2 years...

START

FINISH

It's Time to make the Doughnuts and Run a Half Marathon

Recently eaten: lasagna
Recent annoyance: wrinkled skirt

Is it just me or is a doughnut with hidden capsules of caffeine that will dissolve in your stomach kind of creep you out? Do they also tell you that doughnuts have always had little capsules of fat that will make your behind big?

Science serves up super snacks
Now you can one-hand that coffee-and-doughnut breakfast.

Robert Bohannon of Environostics, an R&D firm in North Carolina, has concocted a caffeine-laced doughnut that packs a jolt equal to two cups of coffee.

Normally, caffeine in baked goods imparts a bitter taste. Bohannon has concealed the drug in tiny, edible capsules that dissolve in your stomach, not in your mouth. Look for caffeinated snacks within six months.

Bacteria could soon add "freshly squeezed" taste to processed juice. Scientists at HortResearch in New Zealand have identified the genes in apples, kiwis and berries that encode for flavor and spliced them into microbial DNA.

The modified bacteria churn out concentrated flavor chemicals identical to the natural versions. These can be added to drinks to replace the real fruit flavors that evaporate in the juicing process.

Roughly three million Americans suffer from peanut allergies. Now University of Florida researchers have taken the first major step toward creating a risk-free peanut. They've identified a key mutation that renders one of the worst peanut- protein allergens harmless.

The goal is to selectively breed the mutant peanut or engineer a hypoallergenic nut that won't turn your face into a big red balloon.

Un-break My Heart

Recently eaten: salmon, artichokes
Recent annoyance: people in grocery stores who cannot drive their carts properly

What kind of competition is this? I mean, it's not exactly hard to make a little baby cry especially if you look big enough to eat one of them. Is sumo wrestling so commercialized that instead of actually competing in the sport itself, they have taken to making little babies cry? Well, I wholeheartedly support this new direction that the sport is taking.

Sumo wrestlers making babies cry

"If I had to guess, I'd say female."

Panic Monday

Recently eaten: chicken parm
Recent annoyance: people who refuse to move when walking three-across on the sidewalk

It's going to be one of those weeks, so posts might be few and far between. To entertain you in the meantime, check out my new widgets in the sidebar. The clock is for obvious reasons, and the little robot dude is for you other nerds out there that might want to throw a Beef in the city blog widget on your own site.

Yeah, shameless self-promotion.

And here's a link to someone who baked a red velvet cake to look like the Death Star.

If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Rotisserie

It occurred to me today, that if rotisserie chicken is a drug, I need to go to rehab. I've had a long history with rotisserie chicken. My mother used to bring one home from the supermarket for my brother and I to tear appart on Saturday afternoons. No squabbling over the leg meat, my brother ate dark meat, and I stuck to the white.

Since moving to D.C., the rotisserie chicken is just the right size for a single lady. I have enough for one meal and leftovers. Although I have noticed that when I buy a chicken, very little of it actually is left. As soon as I get that juicy, steming chicken out of it's little plastic dome, I start picking until there's nothing left but a tiny fowl carcass.

Don't be fooled. The rotisserie chickens at the Whole Foods are total bunk. Dry, barely seasoned, and no crispy skin. The best chickens can be found at Giant. Highly recommended. I ahve yet to break open that spit over at Eastern Market, but from the smell of it, they know what they're doing.

Get out of my dreams, and into my car

So, Sumo

I just had to share a quote from this strange article I read in the Washington Post on the rise of sumo wrestling in the United States.

Middle America
On the women wrestlers, the article reads: "There were matches on Saturday in which the combined mass of the two wrestlers topped 800 pounds. And the sport, which has Olympic aspirations, also includes women. Six competed Saturday, and they fought like well-fed tigers."