Knifed + Spooned

"Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say"

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:05:00 -0400

"Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say":

Headline, pimped.

What the World Eats

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:20:00 -0400

What the World Eats:

Portraits of family dinner tables from around the world. MMMexico.

I started making coffee in the morning, something I’ve...

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:11:00 -0400

I started making coffee in the morning, something I’ve meant to do for a while; MS got me a coffee grinder for my birthday.

Small Thoughts, Large Novelty Checks

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:09:00 -0400

I went to the Lower East Side tonight to see my dear friend JT read one of her stories in a contest (what an awful premise for a contest); didn’t realize until I arrived how long it’s been since I went down there. The only revelation was that the terrible condo buildings cropping up like cornstalks in Greenpoint/Williamsburg actually do not look out of place in the East Village or Lower East Side, for reasons that must relate to density.

Book people are more like theater people than they let on; that’s revelation number two, but I had it at home on my couch, so I’m not sure we should count that. I actually don’t like fiction readings much. With the exception of JT’s, that is! She won! A large novelty check!

Then M’OR and I had ethiopian food. It was tasty but afterwards I think we both wished we had gone to Mama’s, which was directlly across the street. My old roommate used to work at Mama’s, and the sight of it reminds me of that summer and lemonades and macaroni and cheese, the kind where the cheese sauce is thickened with flour then cut with milk.

up from the ashes

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:59:00 -0400

Full moon; high tide; Knifed + Spooned returns.

Stay tuned.

(My old posts are all here in the archives, though a few of the dates are wrong and the formatting didn’t quite stay intact in the move from Movable Type.)

freeman's, food 2.0, odds/ends

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:47:15 -0400

While I generally think it’s bad form to blog about my job, I do have news, which is that I got hired full time. So to celebrate (OK, not intentionally, the plans were pre-existing) my friend J. and I went to Freeman’s and got drunk. Again, not intentionally; it’s just that we had to wait two hours and 45 minutes for a table.

Two hours and 45 minutes. You can drink three very strong cocktails verrrrry slowly in two hours and 45 minutes. Maybe four. Probably four. But at the 150-minute mark, getting a fourth cocktail might’ve seemed like defeat, an acknowledgment that we would, in fact, never get a table. But good triumphed over evil, and we did get a table, and then J., who is really up there as far as excellent dinner partners go, suggested we split a bottle of wine and picked a good one. So we drank that, and then ate the tastiest artichoke dip I’ve ever had (never would’ve thought to order that, but everyone around us was eating it), and then I had pork loin. It was delicious. Granted, anything would’ve been delicious after that much booze. Still, a great time and an excellent, rambling, nook-filled space; no wonder this place is so popular that you have to wait f’ing three hours to sit and eat fancy dip.

Watched the marathon on Sunday. Hung with mom and dad, ate dinner at the Mermaid Inn, more “celebrating” (again, not pre-planned). Finished Petropolis, which I really liked.

Read this about cooking/chemistry in the Times today.

Oh, and — we are on Artnet. Halloween pics. This is NOT my complete Angelina costume, by the way. I opted out of the Billy Bob tattoos and proper orphan slinging that night.

ramencore, continued

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:35:20 -0400

MS and I hit yet another ramen bar on Monday night — Setagaya Ramen, a Tokyo chain — after a stop at Uniqlo. We take the Japan theme very seriously. Anyway, we shared edamame and pickled vegetables; MS hit the regular (hot) ramen in shio broth; I had the tsukemen-style ramen, in which the noodles are served separately, cold, are a little thicker and need to be dipped in the hot broth. Both dishes were delicious, better than Minca for sure, though Momofuku’s berkshire pork ramen is tough to top, quality and tastewise. But this certainly seemed more authentic than Momofuku, less of an ordeal, and cheaper too. And you don’t have to punch someone to get a seat.

highlights reel

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:34:39 -0400

DCA and I tried the soup dumplings at Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown (try the turnip buns). Inspired by this story, I drank real absinthe at MS’s apartment until late, listening to music; a great meal of small plates and sparkling red wine at Il Posto Accanto, in the East Village. The early Thanksgiving dinner that CDA’s (not to be confused with DCA) roommate Ann cooked — more Ann! A post-apocalyptic nautical-themed loft party in Greenpoint. An erotic fictionreading in DUMBO. The entire pan’s worth of brussel sprouts I bought at the farmers’ market and roasted for dinner.

pizza-making effort totally foiled by lazy/rebellious yeast

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:28:19 -0400

I tore into that new Cuisinart to make the fried pizza recipe from Mark Bittman’s column in the NYTimes last week — the first time I’ve ever made dough solo. (I did this in spite of my belief that I’m not temperamentally suited to baking because you need to be so careful and precise upfront, whereas with cooking you can generally be messy and make adjustments as you go.) I was in Carroll Gardens that day anyway and so I went to an Italian grocery (the butcher shop I wanted to go to, the one on Court with the sign that just reads “PORK,” was closed) and bought good prosciutto and mozzarella. There seemed to be something off about the dough as I was making it; turns out the problem was that it was about to refuse to rise. No rising. I cooked it anyway, because my friend V. was over and we were hungry and we’d already eaten the brussel sprouts I’d made. It was edible, but too dense and chewy — almost like Elio’s. My advice to all aspiring pizza-dough makers is to be sure your yeast doesn’t completely screw you over.

possible realization of dinner party dream?

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:33:30 -0500

My friend and neighbor CDA’s roommate is an amazing cook — I had dinner at their place on Saturday, and she seemed to have just kind of whipped up squash soup topped a turnip and squash mash, pasta with Italian sausage in a butter sauce, and for dessert, pumpkin cupcakes. I asked if she would someday consider coming to my house and cooking and we can put another table in my dining room and have a big dinner party and mix up the guest list and have some sort of organizing theme or principle and make proper cocktails. Almost like the underground restaurants in last week’s Times. (More almost like our longheld dream of hosting the 977 Discussion Series, hatched when we just moved in, wherein JR, LT, and I were going to email Thurston Moore and Jonathan Safran-Foer to see if they would respond to a request from a group of kids in Brooklyn to attend a roundtable discussion, salon-style, in their apartment. (By “their” I mean “ours.”) )

newest blogject

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:35:10 -0500

My friend and I started a blog for our friend Sarah, who moved to Chicago and is deeply missed, about our doings in New York. It’s called Hey Ramey, and it’s on Tumblr, which I like using. Pics and mundanities, if you’re curious …

Q

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:33:33 -0500

Why am I so drawn to the strawberry pop tarts in the vending machine at work? This is a new feeling.

I haven’t given in yet.

momofuku 2.0 opens next week

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:53:02 -0400

Preview pics are up on Eater. It looks pretty sweet, and the number of seats will double from their current space. Ramencore rages on.

twelve months of shakes, shackburgers, joy

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:27:15 -0400

In the works: Shake Shack, open all year long.

corporate candy overlords tamper with sunshine

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:07:57 -0400

So the reason daylight savings was pushed back a week this year is that the candy lobby pushed for it. The implications of this are kind of sinister, right? (NYTimes CityRoom blog)

god closes door/opens window

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:54:12 -0400

Zen Palate in Union Square is closing today. NM-L and I once had a conversation about how we both thought it was the most overrated restaurant in New York City. But still, something about its closing is weird to me, and maybe even a little sad? Is this because I had dinner there once with my dad? Because I (barely) have more kindness in my heart toward vegetarians? Am I becoming sentimental? Ugghh [dread rattle].

Anyway, other roomie LT and I also got on the subject of restaurants that have closed in W’burg since we’ve lived nearby — Bean, Oznot’s, the L Cafe, Union Picnic, Sparky’s, the Read, Taco Bite — and that, too, was a little sad in its way, even though all of those places were a little wonky in one way or another, and also when I applied for a job at L Cafe — the first job I applied for when I moved to New York — the manager quizzed me on art history and I felt like hating him was mandatory.

But…a taco truck is opening right near the L stop!

exciting new feature on k+s: restaurant mapplet!

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:05:09 -0400

As you can tell, I am jazzed about my brand new RESTAURANT MAPPLET, forever linked on the sidebar to your right. It’s a Google Map marked with places I’ve been and want to go around the city, and would recommend to you if you were to ask me where you should go, which does happen every once in a while though admittedly not very often. Especially useful if you need to pick out a restaurant in a neighborhood you’re not familiar with.

(Special thanks to Michael, a/k/a MS, for implementing this grand-glorious idea.)

complaints i never thought i'd make, vol. 1

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:21:41 -0400

Alice Waters has a new cookbook out, plus the whole locavore/Slow Food thing is gaining traction, and her (authorized) biography came out in the spring. These three occurrences, I figure, must explain her almost bizarre levels of exposure lately. There are the two NYT stories that I noticed — Alice Cruises the Greenmarket and Alice Cleans Out Your Fridge, not to mention her appearance as a writer on their blog and at Farm Aid — plus a feature in Elle magazine and I’m sure countless others (OK, by “bizarre levels of exposure” I meant in things that I read. Still). Look, the woman’s a legend, and I really respect her and want that new cookbook. But this relative juggernautness is kind of weird, right? I mean, what’s next?

modern love

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:50:00 -0400

Upstate wedding/Vassar time this weekend. My best friend LDB (nee LDT) got married. Saw old friends, drank a ton, and somehow ended up at a club at a Holiday Inn in Fishkill, then at the Eveready Diner for breakfast, steaks, shakes. Pics TK.

Meantime, friendlinx: My buddy Alex had the NYT Modern Love column this weekend!

rocktoberfest

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:06:04 -0400

Oh Wolfgang. Were you not making enough money on canned soup, cookbooks, and all those steakhouses of yours in hotels in L.A. and Vegas that I read about in US Weekly, the ones where Dancing With the Star-lets are “spotted”? Did you really need to open an airport fast food chain? I found this one at the Denver airport, where I had an hour layover on my way home from a short trip to the mountains. (Also found: The most Crocs ever assembled in one place.) It was a tough call, but I opted to skip Wolfgang’s Express and instead picked up three soft tacos and some TCBY, as well as copies of OK! and Wired, which I bought to read this story about ethanol. I’d already read nearly all the magazines I’d brought with me, plus half of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, about three generations of lonely women in a western mountain town. “I should’ve left a shotgun out for you!” DCA’s dad had said when I finally put the book down and walked down to the pasture where they were burning big brush piles, on top of the mountain on which he lives.

But back to food. Colorado was not a big eating trip, though we did make s’mores over a campfire, and I confirmed that I eat a lot more and experience frequent snack attacks at high altitudes (I first had inklings of this in Peru). But the trip was historic for me in that it took me to Taco Bell for the very first time. That’s right, I’d never been to Taco Bell, and now I can’t say I’ve never been, which I used to like to be able to say for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint. I had two soft chicken Taco Supremes. They were alright I guess. Since I’m not a Hunter S. Thompson fan I didn’t request a trip out to the Woody Creek Tavern, near Aspen, but dad, who used to hang with HT at the bar, said he was a mumbler.