Get in my belly

Awesome:
You go local in Berkeley, you’re gonna eat. I had been curious to see what might happen if you tried to squeeze food out of what looked mostly like bricks and steel girders and shoes in trees.

AG goes on to name-drop all the major local players. And I mean local. Dude, I want my own chicken.

Read it here.

Apparently.

In order from more recent to less, more or less:

Yes, I was one of the lucky sons-of-bitches that got to go to Meatopia IV. Post-mortems can be found here and here, and if those aren’t enough, get a load of the video too.

Hopped on the F out to Jackson Heights last night for a Deshi extravaganza. My favorite was the mashed potato fritter with hard-boiled egg hidden inside. Someone should come up with a concept restaurant where eggs (hard-boiled, poached, fried, whatever) are hidden in everything. That would be totally awesome. And I would go. A lot.

Missed a couple weeks of CSA because of Kenya and Canada, but here’s the most recent haul. It just keeps getting better and better. I still can’t stop myself from dropping by the Union Square Greenmarket three times a week though — those lima beans! Heirloom tomatoes! Melons! And I’m a sucker for drupes at their peak.

My extremely handsome and incredibly brilliant and talented lawyer buddy Jeremy invited me along to dinner at Anthos. Which looked like this. And actually looks better than it tasted. Which is to say, it looks pretty awesome, doesn’t it? It was good. Maybe even very good. But not awesome.

Dinner a couple of weeks ago at Yeti, a Nepalese-Japanese restaurant in Sunnyside. I really like this weird rice flake thing. Don’t get the sushi.

And here we are, a week further back in Belfast, Maine, at Chase’s Daily. Now this place is what I call awesome. I would go here every day if I lived in this town.

This is what real Maine lobster rolls look like. No binders, just lobster meat. Mayo or drawn butter on the side. From Red’s Eats in Wiscasset. I really like saying “Wiscasset.”

Wild blueberries from a roadside stand. Maine is a great state for eating.

Poutine at Duckfat in Portland, Maine. Just you wait, I’m headed up to Montreal for Labor Day Weekend and you best be believin’ that I’m headed straight to Au Pied du Cochon. And yeah, you’ll get all the dirt when I get back.

August is also for travelling. And after getting back from Kenya, I thought to myself, “Screw it — who needs to get over jetlag?” and went to Vancouver/Whistler, which looks like this:

and this:

And Wiscasset at sunset looks like this:

Alright, September, bring it: I’m getting kinda hungry.

passion fruit. Which I can’t get enough of. This might be my second favorite fruit, after mangosteen. Good with yogurt for breakfast, but I like scooping their juicy innards and seeds directly into my mouth with the aid of a spoon. In Tiwi, they had this yellow variety that were racquetball-sized and twice as delicious.

Kenya also tastes like the best avocado you ever had, times five. Plus, avocados here cost maybe 10 cents each.

And Kenya tastes a little like ostrich (which is to say surprisingly tender and beefy). I had some of that at Tamambo, the fancy place in Nairobi that specializes in Kenyan cuisine (though somehow I think kachos, or the Kenyan nachos on their menu, might not be traditional.) And Kenya definitely tastes like samosas (more on those later).

Tiwi (near Mombasa, in the south) is actually where we did the best eating. The beach house we rented allowed us the option of hiring a cook. Every day, the locals would walk by to sell us whatever they caught in the ocean that morning. Ali worked his magic and made us stewed octopus (Ali and the doomed cephalopod above, pre-stewing), as well as

fried fish (with sauteed chard and boiled potatoes)

(which we ate, like all our other meals, on the porch, right by the beach. As you can see here, I also drank plenty of Stoney, the local ginger beer. Tangawizi = ginger in Swahili.),

chile-ginger crab (with avocado salad, more chard, and fries),

chapati [There's a woman who wanders past the house every morning carrying a basket of samosas, coconut fritters, and chapati on her head. We had been planning to get some chapati on our last morning at the beach, but, luckily for us, she ran out, and we discovered that Ali's cooking skills extend to chapati-making as well. Best chapati ever. Hands-down.

A samosa aside: the sizeable Indian population in Kenya seems to have made samosas ubiquitous in the country. You can get them everywhere, from the basket on some lady's head at the beach to the airport snack counter.]

with scrambled eggs for breakfast,

and shrimp, fried and with tomatoes.

to fresh lima beans (I get mine from Maxwell’s Farm or Yuno’s at the Union Square Greenmarket), shelled and boiled in (very) salted water for 10 minutes. I HATED lima beans growing up because we only had the disgustingly mealy frozen kind. These are a totally different bean altogether. They have that wonderful slight resistance to your teeth when you bite into them and they taste like green, in the best possible way.

[Baby giraffe at the Giraffe Center in Nairobi.]

[Sunrise over the Indian Ocean on the beach in Tiwi, near Mombasa.]

[Starfish in Tiwi.]

[Market in Nairobi.]

[Near Dandoro, the dump in Nairobi surrounded by 700,000 slum-dwellers.]

Okay, that’s it. I’m officially boycotting Whole Foods. Project Goldmine?!

[Posting on Kenya later today. Promise.]

It’s going to take me a while to organize all my Kenya photos, upload them, etc., so in the meantime, I offer you my very first YouTube video. At our campsite at Samburu, the preserve where we went on safari, there was an overly friendly band of baboons that, along with a small family of vervet monkeys, lived maybe a couple dozen feet away from where we were sleeping. By the outhouse/shower just up the hill from our tents, there was an enormous pit, probably 8- to 10-feet deep. We surmised that the baboons and monkeys had gathered up any and all refuse that campers had left behind and chucked it in the pit, where they could then play with, chew, and eat all this crap to their heart’s content.

The baboons are nasty little fuckers and will definitely steal your breakfast (and garbage) if given the opportunity. We had to arm ourselves with a baboon stick, in fact, since they tend to be more aggressive than the cute little vervets (who, let’s be honest here, aren’t any less culpable when it comes to breakfast-stealing). Anyway, in the early mornings, the baboons would all gather around the pit and get all crazy. For example:

I could watch them for HOURS. (This one’s especially fun to watch if you’ve been drinking.)