THE GURGLING COD

Hey, baby...

...it's the 4th of July. An uncharacteristically quiet one here, but I'm grateful for the chance to share hot dogs with my family. Best to yours from ours, and thanks to cinetrix for the picture.

The Great Indoor Fight

There is a receipt contest over at Achewood. So be sure to get your Lil' Nephew Nicoise together before they bring out the Jeeps. But do note that the fine print discourages the Cindy McCain approach to this sort of thing.

Lunched

A combination of not enough internet and too much real life has made posting light for the last week or so, and will continue so to do. Sorry. But you know what's good to eat? Salami sandwiches. You get some decent bread, toast it lightly, spread a little dijon on one side, a little mayonnaise on the other, a thin layer of Molinari salami, esp the fennel kind, thin tomato slices, a little fresh mozzarella or other cheese, and that's a lunch that's pretty hard to beat.

As somone who cares about a) women and b) New Orleans, PETA and the political scientists' professional organzation are on my shit list, but I'm short on dudgeon just now.

Rose's Lime

Longtime commenter and FOC Rose's Lime steps into the blogosphere with a blog of the same name. He'll be tracking what his family does with their weekly share from Steve Parker's farm. Out of the gate, the Calo Verde looks like a great solution to the glut of kale that is often a feature of early-season CSA offerings, so stay tuned.

Stuff White People Like: Tongue in cheek or head in ass?

I have generally avoided Stuff White People Like, on the grounds that it was funnier when it was a book, and it was 1982. Like The Preppy Handbook, from my limited perusal, SWPL celebrates the thing that it purports to satirize. Also, call me a fussbudget, but it's easier for me to laugh at satire directed at a class than at a race. Satire, when done proper, does not simply provoke a chuckle of self-recognition. So SWPL  is not part of my time-wasting routine. But Chow, in a post on menu typos  mentioned a recent entry in a new SWPL feature "White problems," this one being typos on menus:
"The presence of an improper apostrophe on a menu can ruin an otherwise delicious meal for a white person."
Nothing like a week at the northernmost Ivy to get you  thinking about race, but it's hard to avoid the inference that, say, black people are too busy exercising their natural talents for song and dance to let menu typos get them down.

Carbon Footprint

Come for  the hamachi ravioli with quail yolk; stay for the braised Nazareth almonds.

Alton Brown's Gunboat Environmentalism

I think it might be worth taking a moment to point out that Alton Brown is completely full of shit:
Alton Brown’s doing penance: That’s what the Good Eats star tells Grist’s Roz Cummins in an interview; according to the article, “his TV show would begin focusing on sustainability issues: how crops are grown and animals are raised.” Brown says, “I’ve been busy being clever, but now I want to use what credibility I may have to help people think about sustainability.”
Fantastic. Good for him. But:
Brown says, somewhat weirdly, that the police motto “to serve and protect” will be his new approach to cooking and eating. And then, when the topic turns to overfishing, the interview takes a truly strange turn: “Somebody needs to sink the Japanese tuna fleet,” Brown says. “Everyone’s willing to point the finger, but nobody’s willing to pull the trigger.” So Cummins—“[s]urprised by such a rash declaration, and wanting to present a more effective, lasting, and peaceful alternative”—asks him if he’d be willing to crew on a Greenpeace boat. “‘Yes! Absolutely!’ he answered.”

I am confident that the Japanese tuna fleet is perpetrating all sorts of crimes against the planet. But it's convenient for Alton that he chooses an adversary both remote and telegenic, instead of, say, looking in on stablemate Paula Deen's pig hell. Considering his track record as a histrionic scenery-chewer incapable of not mugging, it's not surprising that he went this route. Brace yourself for Alton Brown doing live shots from the bridge of the PT-109 -- I'll be on the porch reading a book.

Justice at Smithfield

I'm not, like, some kind of a social justice nut, but having just returned from camp, job 1(a) is pulling together notes for an enhanced e-book edition of The Jungle. And then my RSS dresses up like Alanis and drops this in the feed.

I guess the Pure Food and Drug Act and two dollars will get these folks a cup of coffee, but it might be hard for them to hold on to it. Short of setting myself on fire in front of Paula Deen's restaurant, what can a Cod do? Seriously.

 

Unfancy

  For those of you overwhelmed by the Fancy Food Show, the Unfancy Food Show comes to, you guessed it, Williamsburg. I am a fan of some of the vendors here, and some of the others sound interesting, but on what planet are craft-brewed ales and hand crafted knives "unfancy"? Perhaps I need a hundred-dollar hoodie and sixty-dollar cargo shorts to understand. As the man on the left would tell you, nothing wrong with being fancy, but pretending like you aren't when you are is Garth Brooks territory.

Click, Click, Boom

Let's hope Bishop Allen has already made their trip to Ko, because from now on, they won't be able to take a picture with their click click click camera, what with Chang banning photography in the reataurant. If Chang's culinary vision extended only as  afar as thawing Salisbury steaks, he would still be a genius at working the publicity machine as it exists in 2008. Ko opened, buzz --  obsessive coverage of the reservation policy, more buzz -- public musing on reform to reservation system. Now with folks running out of things to say about the reservation system, and after most of the big reviews are in, Chang gets the plate spinning again, with a whimsical changes guaranteed to have food bloggers in an uproar. Well played, sir.