Get in my belly

my sister just finished michael pollan’s omnivore’s dilemma, which i had immediately foisted upon her after i read it myself. while she also cares about what she eats, she tends to be more of a skeptic when it comes to the muckraking (fast food nation, for instance, didn’t really stir her into action, since she felt it was all stuff she heard before. and neither of us really can handle eating fast food anyway).

we both agree that corn’s stranglehold on virtually ever consumable (whether edible or not) is scary. and we’re both boycotting it however we can. an interesting email she sent today:

i think if we lived in the US, it would be almost impossible to avoid all
these random corn products [including this, which might just prove to be an extra roadblock in weaning ourselves off corn]. i have never even seen a butcher in st. louis
that wasn’t connectred to a grocery store. the reason the EU bans all these
preservatives and fake food flavouring is that they don’t have any economic
reason to need to sell/move it, whereas its within the US’s ‘best interest’
to develop these crazy ways of using corn.

by the way, this doesn’t make me want to shop at whole foods either. i
bought a chicken at the butcher’s on saturday and split it up into
different cuts, made stock out of the carcass/scraps, shredded the meat i
got from making stock. can you believe that meat/stock from the chicken
has been used for about 12 meals? check out what i’ve made with it since
saturday. then again, it was kind of a big chicken (and it cost €7)

3 x homemade chicken noodle soup

4 x some indian curry (using stuff from the spice box)

3 x salad with chicken, pecans, pumpkin seed, cranberries, apple, and
balsamic vineagrette dressing

1 x chicken leg (thigh and drumstick) with soy/honey/green onion reduction

1 x chicken leg to be used tonight.
if you’ve not already read OD and you eat, well, anything, i urge you to pick it up straightaway.

is it just me, or has the nytimes been especially quotable lately? first that article about colicchio’s departure from GT:

Mr. Colicchio said the tepid critical reception for the Craftsteak
restaurant he opened near the meatpacking district in May “was a
wake-up call.”

“I saw that I needed to pay more attention to what I’m doing there,”
Mr. Colicchio said yesterday on a cell phone from the eighth hole of
Liberty National, a golf course near Liberty State Park in New Jersey.
His fourth Craftsteak will open in Los Angeles in Century City next
year.

and then this.

there seems to be this weird tendency for everyone to avoid making any kind of connection between corsica and sardinia, but having seen both now, i feel like they couldn’t be more similar. they even have virtually the same symbol.

like sardinia, there’s the same sort of harsh mountainous terrain perfumed with all kinds of wild herbs and vegetation (maquis or macchia, depending on your country). corsica is a little less burnt looking and has probably a little more flora. and then

there’s also that predilection for lamb and grilled meat and rustic cheeses. this is at the restaurant niobel in belgodere, near île-rousse in the north, where we were. la planche niobel: figatellu (pork liver sausage) is the dark thing in the back. there’s lamb and pork or maybe beef on here and that slice in the front seems to be a large piece of bacon or something.

called pagliagju (yeah, i couldn’t say it either) in dialect. to the right of the salad, there’s lonzu, coppa behind that, salami further to the right, and cheese beignets on the end.

okay, summer’s not over yet, but the travelling is, more or less. this summer, i went to rome, paris, bern, chiavari, nice, sardinia, sarzana, york, edinburgh and corsica. whew. i don’t think i’m forgetting anything, but it wouldn’t be so surprising if i did. i did manage to take some photos while away.

sarzana, a charming town right on the border of liguria and tuscany (the next town over is marble-capital carrara): i went for some beach time and a party, and of course ate some pesto while there:

testaroli, a stack of thin crêpes, each layer spread with pesto. you’re supposed to roll up each layer and eat it separately. there’s a crazy sarzana-dialect name for this forerunner of pasta that i’ve since forgotten.

in york, we ate like kings:

dave’s mom made connie a birthday (carrot) cake. from a delia smith recipe. i am now officially a delia convert.

and when in york, one must stop at betty’s tea room

for a fat rascal — a monster anthropomorphosized scone.

and you’ve gotta have a proper sunday roast for dinner, with yorkshire pudding (in yorkshire!), natch.
and while you’re at it, you might as well drive out to tourist-choked yet quaintly lovely whitby (past beautiful rolling hills and picture postcard-perfect english countryside) for:

fish ‘n’ chips at magpie cafe. the wait in the takeout queue is really quite remarkable. you can forget about eating in the place itself if you’re impatient. FnC definitely require a generous dose of salt and malt vinegar, i’ve realized.

it’s been a busy summer over here, even if little evidence of that has surfaced on this here blog. in the event that you thought i had abandoned yarncrafts forever or have just been twiddling my thumbs these past couple of months, i give you my latest completed knitting projects:

from interweave knits summer 2005, it’s the dress on the cover (better picture here, halfway down the page). only mine’s a better color (redheads + gray do not a happy combination make). made with phildar licorne on no. 4s. and yes, i got a haircut. reverting back to those skunk stripes i had in 2003. (if you’re passing through edinburgh and need a haircut, i have just the person for you. petra might just be better than richard. but shhhhh, don’t tell him i said so.)

like my buttons?

from interweave spring 2006, the prairie tunic. okay, this one looks better on the ectomorphic model. again, made with phildar licorne on no. 4s.

we’re (or i should say fred is) setting up new digs over at wordpress, and the formatting mess you see here is just a little hiccup we have to deal with before the transition is complete. sorry for the lax posting as well — i have much to relate, but some technical difficulties and serious work dumpage is making it hard to do so. soon, soon. i promise.

w/ my resurgence of nintendo obsession i’ve been thinking about starting a video game blog … and it looks like it’s finally happened. check out: video games rock where you can read all about how cool pokemon on game boy is. (in case you were wondering, geodude is the name of the coolest pokemon.) of more particular interest is the fact that i chose wordpress over blogger. although as far as i can tell you can’t really edit the templates they provide, this is far outweighed by the benefit of having categories and sub-categories for your posts so readers can filter your blog by their interest. and the tags are used by blog search engines (some at least). also, wordpress has RSS feeds for posts as well as comments. i haven’t looked too much into their features for group blogs, but they look good. so how about it, winnie and foo — should we move our little house to greener pastures?