Making lunches look cute for children is an art called kyaraben in Japan. But some bento-ists think cute takes too much time.

This statement and more are available in a recent Times article about people who make Bento boxes at home to bring for lunch, Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans.

I have been looking for a way to make my lunches more interesting, this one might be a little time consuming, though.

You can read little gems like,

“Japanese culture here is getting more popular by the day,” he said.

and

“Every evening when I pack our lunches, I get this creative outlet. And if I don’t do something artistic, I might implode.”

and my favorite,

On a more plebian level, Amazon.com said sales of the boxes and accessories like egg molds, rice shapers, plastic skewers shaped like animals or flowers have been growing.

where it is implicitly assumed that if you make lunch boxes you are not a plebe. You don't want to be a plebe, do you?

do you like milk?

I like milk. A lot. That's one really big reason why I like clam chowder. Well, clams are a big reason, too, but I also get excited to drink some salty hot milk.

No wine

in the house at all... except for 3 bottles in the basement. kid ya not. Thats what happens when yer gonna move 2883 miles according to google maps. You have to drink ALL the wine... except 3 bottles of the basement. I love having a little "selection" of beverages for any given evening. We generally have 6-12 bottles, because I have a little wine thinger that holds 12 bottles. So it gets annoying if we have more than 12. Then you have to store some on their bottoms., We are listening to Herbie Hancock right now, The Complete Blue Note 60s Sessions, whichs runs from when he was 22-30, and it rules. Herbie is a cheesey jazz head, but this is some damn damn good cheesey jazz. It has nothing to do with rabbit, either. Its bad to store your wines on their bottoms because then the cork dries out and it don't seal too well, either. But now we have no wine whatsoever... except for the 3 in the basement. Well, that would be like having no money, except for a $20 stuck up your butt crack. We are going to have to get more wine because we don't leave Seattle for 4 days... and the 3 in the basement are for later... and so's that $20 up the crack. Well, I haven't really had anything to say, foodwise, in a few months, so I decided to say this. Go Herbie. We had rabbit tonight, that wasn't a totally random reference. I braised it with leeks. Holy shit, this is even food related. Well, it was braised with leeks and carrots! Rabbits eat carrots, so its really carnal to eat a rabbit braised in its own food. I didn't feel carnal whilst eating dinner though, but if I had I certainly wouldn't tell you. OK, we are going to watch The IT Crowd, now. do it.

Frank talk about tuna.

This is an entry I wrote last year but never released, and now I never even ever think about tuna, so I suppose that I'll never finish it.  I do still like the preserved whole tuna, though.  Hopefully you'll enjoy the videos.

This is a movie of Italians catching tuna. It'll hold your attention, ~5 min. It has some fun facts. Did you know that tuna never stop growing? Ever.



Even if you aren't interested in 5 minutes of fisherman, this is a public service announcement.  I believe that this is a TV commercial from NOAA, its only 60 s long, and pretty funny. (Maybe some of you have seen this before, but I never watch TV, so its new to me).

Last night we ate tuna!  I do not feel guilty about that.  But I do feel guilty about my inability to feel guilty about it.  (Same story with fossil fuels, really.)  I'm sure you are familiar with fresh tuna and canned tuna.   I only recently learned of an additional way to preserve tuna, packed in olive oil.  Its all the rage in Spain.

Would you eat a scone with peas?

I am Wade.
Wade-I-am!

I do not like scones.
I do not like them
Wade-I-am.
I do not like them in the dark.
I do not like them when I fart.
I would not eat one in a tree.
I would not eat one given me.

Okay, okay I told a lie,
I'd eat a scone that is free.
But I would not eat one instead of brie!

I prefer a sconce to a scone
Especially if Côtes du Rhône

Now crispy muffin go away.
While you are gone please change your ways.

hollow out and fry thyself
return to my lips -
filled with wealth
for if cream you have I'll be in luck
you will be my favorite -
a doughnut

The straight-shooter vs the salad shooter.

Maybe I have heard of a salad shooter. I'm not sure. I've heard of salad. I've heard the word shooter. I know what a straight shooter is. So what is a salad shooter?

Earlier today I discovered that train of thought in my subconscious. I know not from where it cometh, but I know wherefore it came.

I was reading an article in The Onion, entitled Chinese Factory Worker Can't Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans, which I quote herein:

"Often, when we're assigned a new order for, say, 'salad shooters,' I will say to myself, 'There's no way that anyone will ever buy these,'" Chen said during his lunch break in an open-air courtyard. "One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless shit?"

Immediately, I had to know what a salad shooter was. Well, I found a picture.  This is a picture of a piece of plastic with radish slices falling out of it. There is a cord extending off to one side: this baby is electric. I can imagine that this device would be incredibly useful to the following groups:

1) Vegetarians with no hands so they can't slice a radish.

2) Vegetarians who are blind so they can't slice a radish.

I want to race. I bet I can grab my chef's knife and slice a radish before you can even get that thing down off the shelf. True, you are less likely to get hurt using the shooter, but if you can't eat vegetables without maiming yourself you need to listen closely.  Listen very closely.  There is a sound from somewhere behind you.  That quiet creeping sound behind you is natural selection, and its coming for you.  You totally have the skills to make food without getting hurt, you know that, you don't need me to tell you that.  So why would you ever want one of those things?

There is something addictive about gadgets in the kitchen though.  I like to buy sharp knives and nice measuring cups, and spectacular cookware.  So I can see where if your idea of a gourmet meal was a sliced radish, then one of these things would be a dream come true.  You could tell ALL of your friends, "I eat sliced radish whenever I want now.  Anytime of the day that there is electricity available, I can have a sliced radish. Power goes out, well, I just got a suffer.  No way to get a sliced radish with the power out. But thanks to modern convenience, I have electricity all the time.  One demand, baby.  We have electricity on demand, and as a result we have the luxury of a sliced radish whenever we want one."

Rules for food.

Today, Michael Pollan has asked readers of the Times to submit their food rules. He's looking especially for generational or ethnic wisdom. The prophet Muhammad, for example, always used to say that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink and one-third air.

I posted my rules on his page, (although they are pretty loose rules, I think of them more as advice):

1. "Eat until you are not hungry anymore, not until you are full."
   That rule is something that I do more or less subconsciously.
2. "Do not buy any food in the grocery store that you can't see first."
   This means don't buy foods in packages that aren't transparent, otherwise, you are buying on a "picture" of the food, not based on what the food itself looks like. This includes boxed crackers, chips, cereal.
   
3. Everything in moderation, including your moderation.
   That includes the first 2 rules, so, a couple of times a year I'll eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's in an evening. And I'm proud of it.

Do you have any rules? Let Michael know, and post them here, too!

Do you like to consume meat?

I like to consume meat.

On average, American's consumed 222 lbs of meat each in 2007. That's 87 lbs of chicken, 66 lbs of beef, 51 lbs of pork, 17 lbs of turkey, 1 lb of veal, and 1 lb of lamb.

222 lbs! That's almost 10 oz / day. Plus you have to consider vegetarians. So, if you ate any meat at all, you probably ate on average more than 222 lbs. Probably on average.

In 1950 Americans ate only 144 lbs of meat each, but we each ate 7 lbs of veal. Talk about quantity over quality these days.

On that same page you will find a link to egg consumption. We each ate 259 eggs in 2007, but in 1950 our ancestors ate 380 eggs each. Butter consumption fell from 11 lbs each to 5 lbs, and cheese consumption practically quadrupled from 8 lbs each to 31 lbs.

I definitely like cheese.

Restarant Reviews Telogram

Our far flung restarant correspondent Mirna has recently sent us a telogram.  These are 11 restaurants in Seattle that she thinks are the best.  Well, I've been to numbers 3, 7, 8, 9 and those are all great.  In fact, 3, 7 8 and 9 are definitely 4 of my favorite restaurants in Seattle.  I might rate the latter 3 as 8, 7, 9.  But that is a nit I don't want to pick here.  

Next about the 6 that are rumored to be wow.  Well, Le Gourmand is almost certainly the best restaurant in the city.  I've heard that from so many people I know to have some impeccable tastes.  in food.  Never been there though.  I could walk there from here.  Its expensive.  Really, we never quite think of it, that's all.

旨味

Elyse and I were talking about 旨味 last night because Elyse had toured a chocolate factory during the day. She had a lot of fun, although she was dissappointed that the Oompa-Loompa's weren't around. Personally I'd feel gyped if I didn't get to see any kind of fantasical midget at a chocolate factory, but then again, the tour didn't require a golden ticket. Apparently, 旨味 came up during the tour.

旨味 is a topic that was either undiscovered when I was in elementary school, or they didn't teach me, or I just forgot. As you may or may not know, there are five basic flavors that your tongue can detect; sweet and salty near the tip of your tongue, sour on the sides, and bitter and 旨味 near the back. 旨味 taste buds are essentially protein detectors.

旨味 is also what separates your homemade stock from store bought stuff. Taste the store bought stuff and you'll notice a real kick at the front of your tongue, along with a fairly intense smell of chicken. Near the back of the tongue - nothing. I have never figured out how the store bought stocks smell like chicken, but seem to contain very little protein. Anyway, a homemade stock won't hit you with the salt, nor will it smell chickeny in the same way, but you'll notice the hearty protein content, which will come through when you use it as a soup base, or reduce it for a sauce.

I first learned about 旨味 while reading an article in the New Yorker about ketchup, by Gladwell, back in 2004. Apparently Heinz ketchup hits all 5 tastes in some sort of magical proportion, which is why they are the only brand on the market. This is opposed to, say, mustard, which has many varieties. The article blew my mind because I had never heard about 旨味! Probably some of you have had your mind blown today, too. Even if you have heard of 旨味, the article is fairly interesting, covering a little bit of the science of taste, and the history of ketchup. You can read the article here,
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/06/040906fa_fact_gladwell

Finally, I would like to point out that 旨味 (pronounced umami) is also noteworthy because we don't use many Japanese words in English. The words that we do use tend to be names of foods, like sushi, or sashimi. 旨味 is food-related, but not a food itself.

Cooking videogame review. Seriously!

Recently I discovered that there are a lot of cooking video games for the Wii.  Order Up!, Cooking Mama: Cook Off, Cooking Mama World Kitchen, Hell's Kitchen, and Cake Mania: In the Mix!.  It's surprising enough to find out that there are any cooking games, let alone a whole genre.  

My first instinct was to buy them all and the write a detailed review of everything.  But, then I realized that my second instinct was that these games probably suck.  So I decided to buy just one.

I did a little research.  It all started with the first Cooking Mama game, which sold 1.6 million copies.  Pretty good, for a cooking game.  Those results spawned all of these other titles.  And, according to the reviews on gamespot.com, all the new ones are worse than the original, except Order Up!, which is supposed to be a little bit better.  Almost all of the games are $20, except Cooking Mama World Kitchen, which is currently going for $47 on Amazon.  That is the same price as Zelda, Twilight Princess, I might add.  These cooking game writers have some balls, you have to give them that.

I camped out all night outside of Best Buy, so I could be the first in line when they opened.  Turns out they don't even carry Order Up!  Jerks.  Well, even if these games aren't universally available yet, they are available.  I went home and ordered it from Amazon.

I really enjoyed this game, far more than I should have.  In Order Up! you aren't just a chef, you are a restaurateur.  You need to go to the market to buy spices and learn new recipes.  You can order from a special ingredients guy, and you must clean the rats out of the kitchen, wake up your helpers when they fall asleep.  You can even push the paperboy off his bike, and if you pick up all the papers, he'll pay you.  Just like in real life.

All that stuff is OK, but the real fun is in the cooking.  Now, don't expect to learn anything about cooking from this game.  After playing Zelda, you aren't truly skilled in the art of magical-flute mediated time-travel and rescuing princesses.  The same is true here.  In fact, the only aspect of the game that is really engaging is something you don't often encounter in your home kitchen, but is a huge factor in the restaurant kitchen (like I even have a clue), you need to time everything correctly.  Yes, that's it, the most fun aspect of the game is timing the dishes so they all get done at the same time, so none get cold while you finish the others.

That is an oversimplification, it actually is fun learning to maneuver the Wii remote to slice prime rib and chop up a chicken.  And its even fun adding spices to the dishes, and learning that the guy from Texas will give you a bigger tip if you put BBQ sauce on everything. 

Should you buy the game?  Well, maybe, if you are tired of killing terrorists, and see video games as more of a 30-minute diversion than an engrossing life experience.  You should probably like cooking, too.

Wine entry.

Tonight we went to a wine tasting at a store in Fremont. Elyse is on the mailing list, and that's how we knew about it. We learned a lot. There were 4 wine aficionados there: the local wine maker, a French wine maker, the owner of the store, and a chef who apparently works there selling wine. We spoke with each of them for about 10 minutes.

The first thing we learned was a question that has been burning on my mind since I first didn't know the answer to it. On Thanksgiving I decanted a Pinot Noir that Scott and Christy had made. I decanted it simply because we wanted to use the decanter which we had received as a wedding gift. Somebody (and I totally forget who) asked if there was any reason for the shape of the decanter. At the time I was like, "naw", but I remembered the question. In fact, we registered for this one because it looks nice. gawd what a couple of amateurs! Well, tonight at the Fremont Wine Warehouse John Bell, the very nice wine maker, explained that there are two reasons to decant, and therefore there are two main decanter shapes.

You decant a young wine because you want to 'blow off the sulfites'. As you probably know, sulfites are an (all natural!) additive to wines which act to preserve the wine in the bottle. Well, sulfites also bind to "flavors". Because they are jerks. Sorry to get all technical on you there, but my memory of my 2 quarters of organic chemistry aren't enough to really go more in depth. Sulfites are also powerful anti-oxidants, which means that they bind to the O2 in the air like a son of a gun, and release "the flavors". What this means is that for a young wine you want a decanter that exposes the wine to a lot of air, like the one we received for our wedding, pictured here. The wine spreads out over a large area, allowing a lot of interactions with the air.

Over time, the sulfites also release the flavors in the bottle. I really don't know why, we all soften with age. If you expose an older wine to air, you just lose your wonderful flavor to the wind. But you often need to decant an older wine because there is sediment. (I'm going to guess that sediment results from the sulfites binding to the tannins, because I have heard that wines become a lot less tannic with time, too.) You might decant an older wine in order to leave the sediment behind in this bottle. Decanters for older wines are shaped a little like a wine bottle so you don't get so much air exposure.

Our general rule is to decant only when we don't like the wine... in that case, it can't hurt.

We also learned, from the French guy, that Cabernet Sauvignon is a horizontal wine, and Merlot is more of a vertical wine. Horizontal and vertical in flavor, not in space. I think that Elyse should explain that, because it went a little over my head.

The French guy also told us that many winemakers add artificial sweeteners to there wine. I have a feeling that if you spend under, say, $7 per bottle, that you have some sweeteners in there. I personally have found that all cheap wines taste more or less the same, and this sweetening might have something to do with homogeneity of flavor.

I asked why cheap wines give me a headache after 1 glass, while spending just $10+ allows me to drink half the bottle without getting a headache. Apparently this is because cheaper wines often have more sulfites. I didn't ask why they have more sulfites. But apparently they do.

As you can tell, we really became major experts tonight.

One of my favorite things that the French wine maker said was that Americans generally lack an appreciation for blends. Most French wines are blends. A red Bordeaux, for example, is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot. I have to agree with him. I tend to like blends better. His explanation was that you get a horizontal and vertical wine with a Bordeaux. I'm not quite sure I can get my tongue around that answer, but it seems to be similar to cooking. Yeah, I like to eat, say, pineapple (one ingredient), but I really like to eat, say, crème brûlée (many ingredients). I guess when most of us go to a store, and we see "merlot" on the label, we know that merlot is a type of grape, but if we see "Côtes du Rhône" on the label, well, what the heck is that? You don't even need to know that the wine is from the Rhône valley, and it is a blend of Grenache Noir, Syrah, Cinsault, Carignane, Counoise and Mourvèdre, you just need to know if you like it, and that wines from that place will be similar.

We have become big fans of the Fremont Wine Warehouse and of Michael Cawdry, the manager (owner?), because he knows a lot about wine, and keeps it real. A lot of wine talk seems like B.S. to me, I mean, I do not need a different shape of glass for each type of wine I drink. Do I?! But that is not what the Warehouse is about. It is about good wines at reasonable prices. We live in a time and place where people have the opportunity to indulge the senses to their heart's content. To me, enjoying wine is about learning to appreciate each bottle to its fullest, with all of its complexities, without going crazy about the food pairing or the shape of the glass. (But still caring about the shape of the decanter - because apparently that one's key. I'm sure of it now.)

Crème Brûlée

I always get crème brûlée when a restaurant has it.

Elyse and I were at a great Japanese restaurant tonight, and one thing we had was an asparagus gratin. Yes, you read that correctly, gratin. Well, the restaurant was so good, and here I am, a franco-food-a-phile at a great Japanese restaurant, gotta get that. And it was amazingly good. It was gratin all right, but so Japanese.

How was it Japanese? Well, it was the absolute minimum amount of creme and cheese without us thinking we were getting ripped off, and no where near the amount that would make it heavy, and it was still totally satisfying. And the asparagus was steamed perfectly, and the French wouldn't steam asparagus for a gratin. And the steamed asparagus was really good, too. At least those were the reasons that Elyse gave. I just shoved it all into my pie hole asap.

And then there was crème brûlée on the menu!

And I got it.

I already have to get it, anyway, but it was already this other event had just happenstanced. So I was was chompin at the bit, for sure.

The crème brûlée was very good. I loved it. The only scene in Amelie that didn't totally make we wanna wretch, was the scene where she breaks through a crème brûlée with a fork, and her description is spot on baby. I love that scene.