Baaasil, dill, cilantro*, and miiint.
And besides, parsley, sage, et al are winter herbies.
*Not pictured.
From a kids-eye view, this is the best thing on the planet. Eating dinner tonight at a family-owned restaurant, I watched the actual family have their meal along side us. A table in the restaurant, the same as all the others, except it was like that little island was their dining room.
Mom and grandma and grandpa, and the grandkid in small kid glasses, sat and passed platters — it makes sense. If you’re at the restaurant at dinner time, there’s a kitchen right there, you have family dinner at grandma and grandpa’s restaurant.
Except. Then. It gets better.
After dinner, the kid climbed down from the table and ran over to the corner, where this ice cream freezer stood and picked his treat. Can you IMAGINE if your grandparents had an ice cream freezer at their house for FREE?
It’s like literally the coolest thing ever.
I have never laughed out loud at food before. Not even if the banana was just the peel and there was a clown slipping on it, would this be funnier.
Here. Have some HamBananas. BRUNCH.
photographyprison:
Ham and Bananas Hollandaise. Just like mom used to make.
Ruth Reichl, food writer whose books should be read by all, tweets her food. But it’s not the “Double Double Animal-Style NOMNOM!!1!!” that those people requiring unfollowing, post. Her food is the Garrison Keillor of vittles. Her eggs are always “softly scrambled” and her cheese is always “sharp.”
Color-drenched morning. Deer nibbling emerald grass. Ruby red sugar-tossed rhubarb. Sheep’s milk yogurt. Blood orange juice. Happy.
I wish someone would start an anti-@ruthreichl twitter. Mostly this person would have to follow me and transcribe what ends up passing for meals.
Mild skies, mix muffins lazily vegan-adapted, gummy & stuck to the paper; purple slug of grape jelly on the counter.
Her meals never contain realistic details like, “eaten out of the carton,” or “consumed quickly before it went bad,” or “stuffed into face standing in the corner so no one could see how gross it looked, plus BBQ sauce.”
This is quite a shame.
Pictured: Saturday night sushi ordered by trying to translate Japanese to Italian, aforementioned muffins from the recipe entitled “Conduit for Condiments” and one of two bunches of white asparagus, purchased from a stand beside the road last night, and waiting for Ms. Reichl to come over and show me how to fix them so they are worthy of a tweet.
(Though who needs Ruth when there’s a Toni in the house? “Toasted bread, fava or white bean spread, thin diagonal slices drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with a touch of sea salt.”) YES.
“Huh. I haven’t eaten cheese in six years.”
“I’m sorry.”
I’m not. It’s the easiest thing in the world, a decision I made six years ago today, and arguably the one practice an individual can undertake that has the greatest impact. Sure, vote, volunteer, do all that — but changing what you consume, reaches WAY beyond yourself.
Need more reasons to join me? Here’s five (give or take an archive):
- You’d Rather Eat Food Than Poop and Suffering. When Burger King acknowledges that the farming practices that supply their restaurants are bad enough to change, can you IMAGINE the rest of the stuff you’ve put in your mouth? Try it. Look here, then look at your scrambled eggs.
- You Will Not Feel Deprived. How could you possibly when you can make your own falafel and Ethiopian red lentils from scratch? “So what do you eat?” “Everything.” Animal products aren’t even a sliver of the pie chart of consumables. Mmm. Pie. (Yep, you can have that too.)
- You Enjoy a Habitat That Supports Carbon-Based Life. “More than two-thirds of all agricultural land is devoted to growing feed for livestock, while only 8 percent is used to grow food for direct human consumption…the global livestock industry uses dwindling supplies of freshwater, destroys forests and grasslands, and causes soil erosion, while pollution and the runoff of fertilizer and animal waste create dead zones in coastal areas and smother coral reefs.” Hey, if a 12 year old can understand and articulate the impact, how about we help out and not flood our planet with manure bogs. Unless you like that sort of thing.
- It’s Hard to Find a Reason TO Eat It. When the New York Times has to run an essay contest to come up with an ethical argument for eating it, isn’t it way easier to shun it than to try and justify your nugget? (I justified wearing this shirt today to celebrate my vegiversary on account that it’s true in a sense and also funny.)
- You Feel Like Not Being Sick. I am not allowed to donate blood. I am healthy with an often-needed blood type — but no one can benefit from it l because I lived in the UK after 1980. Mad cow. So, you can’t give blood if you have AIDS or if you’ve eaten beef. And yes, it was a dairy cow they found this week, but holes in your brain v. hamburger… Not to mention all the good fats, the good cholesterol, the actual fuel your body needs, don’t get spelled E-I-E-I-O.
- Honorable Mention: Vegenaise. Game, set, mayo.
There’s a book that proclaims to contain a Magic Pickle. The book is wrong, because the magic pickle lives at the the pretzel carts in the Frankfurt Airport. It costs one mere Super Dollar, isn’t dill and isn’t sweet, still kind of tastes like the cucumber it once was, and is possibly reason enough to fly through.
And hey, if they’re good enough to hang on a Christmas tree…
(Not my sausage thing. And I’m also not the only one to pay reverence to the pickle.)
(By which I mean to say, I’m in Germany. Possibly just for their pickles.)
“You’re kidding, right?”
“What? No. I really want to go.”
“Okay, but you can’t tell anyone. I mean it.”
I have been to Hard Rock Cafés twice. Once in Madrid when I was 16, and once when my brother was 16 and he came to visit me in DC. It seems to be about the right age to truly appreciate the phenomenon. But I had dragged Ryan out in the rain dress shopping, and dinner was his request.
Confusingly, at first.
I take great pride in living here and not feeling the need to make it like the US. It’s not, and dragging all that “I wish restaurants weren’t closed between 2:00 and 7:00, and I miss Target,” over here misses, well the target. The point. And so I don’t. I don’t go to restaurants with translated menus or franchises from home — except the Subway at the PX has avocados and you can’t get a ripe one to save your soul here. Exceptions are always made for avocados.
And I’d always wondered about the Americans who felt the need to go to a Hard Rock when my God — you’re in Italy. I think the food is a thing here.
But Ryan wanted to go, and I’m snobby, but not unfairly so.
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only place I can get a real hamburger and it tastes like home.”
Oh. It’s a fair point. I’ve been here a year and a half, he’s been here seven. (Nine? He says he’s been saying seven for a few years.) He’s been here long enough he’s never heard of Crate and Barrel. And then I went and snobbied all over his treat.
And you know what? Watching concert videos while someone else makes you a veggie burger*? Not half unenjoyable. And the side of home kind of hit the spot.
But seriously.
Don’t tell anyone.
*Not pictured. Pictured is the most American plate I’ve seen in a while.
I made an “Easter” (read: excuse for using all of the sprinkles and food coloring in the house) cake with Fruity Pebbles in it (read: I am an AWESOME and NUANCED chef) and just realized—
Cereal. There’s cereal in and around it.
Therefore this cake may be resurrected as breakfast in a totally legit fashion.
Today, was very good mail. Especially since I can use all the Life Advice* and cookies from Mom I can get right now.
*What will happen to my dreams if I’m reading Hunger Games 2 and Kevin Smith concurrently? NOTHING GOOD, I’m sure.
