Get in my belly

Jeremy has this amazing post about a fellow passenger on his airplane.

But dude, check this out:

(Thanks, Ryan.)

The happiest ending I could have come up with.

Tosci’s, saved.

When I go to Kiriko, I often find myself thinking of this. I don’t really have anything more to offer on that point. Here’s some fish porn instead:

Quite possibly one of the most beautiful specimens of uni I’ve ever seen. And put in my mouth.

I was going to post photos of the bamboo (another one of the highlights), the crab three ways, and the sashimi (not quite as successful as the foregoing, but a notch or two above solid), but my sea urchin gonads deserve to stand alone.

At Pizzeria Mozza the day after, we recounted this omakase to new friends we made at the very convivial bar, and they said we absolutely had to go to Mori and Sushi Sushi. Next time.

There’s no other US city that has better Asian food. (I should also be getting a Mexican and burger fix while I’m out here, but my GI system can handle only so much input.)

Daikokuya is among the most highly regarded of the ramen houses, and its ramen isn’t bad. Their house ramen has a shoyu-pork bone broth with not particularly springy noodles. Also, not so good cold overly hard-boiled egg. Great kurobuta pork slices though. Tasty and big (if you like that sort of thing), and worth a 15-minute wait (apparently the line can get pretty bad; I don’t know that it’s worth more than that). The best part might be the place itself, which has a great neighborhood diner-y feel. And Little Tokyo is a cool neighborhood, what with a Murakami exhibit at the MOCA, a Kinokuniya bookstore (with an excellent DVD selection), and a Japanese supermarket with crazy toy miniatures.

A few years ago, Joyce introduced me to the red bean doughnuts made at the bakery across from the huge Galleria supermarket in Koreatown, where they have an entire aisle devoted to kimchi. The doughnuts are invariably warm from the fryolator and have a pleasant greasiness to them that’s the perfect accompaniment to a stroll through the aisles sampling pollack roe and cuttlefish. DELICIOUS. One is plenty.

While at the Galleria, we picked up some prepared food for dinner: Bi Ji is a kind of seasoned (the ingredients list pork and beef, I think, but I’d be hard pressed to identify where any of that is) mashed tofu that you mix into rice, seasoned (chile paste-coated?) cuttlefish (the red strips), daikon kimchi, and “Korean sausage,” which is a wonderful creamy blood sausage filled with potato (bean thread?) noodles and rice.

Off a Rameniac tip, we paid a visit to the Santouka stall in the food court of the West L.A. Mitsuwa supermarket. Now this is more like it: like Setagaya, their specialty is shio ramen, and theirs has all the sweet porky essence coaxed out of a shit-ton of pig bones, it seems like. I mean, just look at this broth:

Not only does it have the milkiness of my mom’s pork-bone broths, it actually has bits of pork bone detritus (marrow, probably; not actual bone, dummy) floating in it. I could eat this ramen weekly. Setagaya has better noodles and tastier pork and a soft-boiled egg (where’s the egg, Santouka?), but it’s been a little off lately in terms of soup temperature. This stuff was steaming, tongue-burningly hot, just the right size, and good to the last drop.

Kiriko sushi post tomorrow or the day after, once I get home and can get to a faster connection. And yes, we also ate some other, non-Asian stuff too. Mozza coverage later this week. But don’t you want some noodles now?

This sounds amazing.

Name: Anonymous
Age: 60s [I think. --Ed.]
Occupation: Food writer
Grocery shops: Frequently. Sometimes several times a day.
Cooks: Frequently
Eats out: Frequently
Favorite beverage: Diet Coke

Besides the Ronnybrook milk, Stoneybrook yogurt, cream cheese, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and various kinds of butter I see in there, there’s also Ziyad brand butter ghee (of unknown age), 18-year-old Vermont maple syrup, Tête du Moine on a Girolle, homemade gravlaks (made in late Oct/early Nov), and 3 boxes of Medjool dates from Bautista farms hidden in the back.

There is A LOT of ice cream in the freezer. Some homemade (some of those made with liquid nitrogen), some not. Is that goosefat in the jar at the bottom? This freezer is definitely at a very precarious equilibrium. One more frozen pea and the whole thing’s gonna come crashing down.

And yeah, that’s duct tape holding it all together.

I had this idea a couple of years back to document people’s refrigerators. (Other people like to peep into bathroom cabinets, I prefer the vegetable drawer — what can I say?) If people are what they eat, then what do their grocery shopping, leftovers, and condiment collections say about them? The images would be well shot, displaying all the contents within (or not), and I would pick up enough Web 2.0 skills to make rollovers for a sort of Pop-Up Frigid-O feature. But time passed, I’ve still got circa-1999 HTML-tagging skills, and I’m too lazy to drag the Canon Rebel XT around, but I’ve lucked into some interesting fridges recently, and I figured there was no time like the present to embark on this little anthropological experiment.

This one might look familiar from a recent post, but I’d left out all the important information.

Name: Matt
Age: 28
Occupation: Mortgage trader
Grocery shops: Never, unless you count beer as groceries
Cooks: Never
Eats out: Every meal
Favorite condiment: Mustard for sammies and hot dogs
Favorite beer: Harpoon IPA
Favorite takeout: Whole Foods
Grossest thing in there: N/A

I know. Everything I make from that Indian cookbook sort of looks the same. That’s probably because I tend to gravitate toward certain recipes. This is butternut squash, cooked with turmeric, chana dal, onion (my addition — I am, as ever, terrible at following recipes to the letter), mustard seed, coconut, and cumin. I would make it again. (And will probably have to, given how much dal, frozen grated coconut, and turmeric I now have.)

Ganda knows how to tend to a girl’s broken heart. I mean, it’s not patched up, but I was briefly distracted and most definitely comforted by that elusive yet familiar flavor (turmeric? cumin? Wikipedia, you’re no help. “Curry mix”? Pfffft.) that’s the backbone of Japanese curry. I’ve only ever made Japanese curry from the Golden Curry mix, which is apparently the gold (sorry) standard Ganda shoots for when she makes hers (from scratch). I much prefer Ganda Curry to Golden Curry.

The Wangs have instituted Foovie Night in Hong Kong, where they gather a group of their friends to watch a food movie and make food from the movie. First up, the timpano from “Big Night”. Color me impressed. Joyce W has become quite the cook. Nice photos, Austin.

If it weren’t for Marisa, I’d probably just be reading about all the food-related happenings that go on around town, but thanks to her, I got some Meatopia action, I’ve been to openings and restaurant anniversaries, and last night I took part in this mini-festa di carbonara.

We were surprised that Cesare Casella uses bacon — especially when all everyone’s been talking about lately is guanciale — but I, for one, am glad he does. It’s what I usually use at home, and his sauce has a creamy consistency like mine (really, few things are grosser than those scrambled egg carbonaras. Eccchh.). There is something about bacon that imparts a sourness to the dish though. I used guanciale all the time in Italy, since that was easier to get, and you get much cleaner, sweeter flavors. Also, I love bacon, but there’s something disturbing about all the charcoal dust that settles out when you render it. You never get that with guanciale.

Speaking of cured pig jowl, I totally double-taked when I read Florence’s piece on guanciale. What? It means “pillow”? I don’t think so. That’s like saying the sound a dog makes means “covering of a tree.” (I’m sure there’s a better example, but that’s the only one I can come up with right now.) Jeremy, of course, does a fine job sorting it all out.