Category Archives: food

Apr 15 2020
3 Comments
food, offhand

Pandemic blog 14: slimming

I have occasionally worked to lose weight, never too seriously because my weight problem has never been too serious. I used to sometimes do the Scarsdale diet in sync with my dad and once, a few years back, I went six weeks without carbs.

Anyway, a month without restaurant food has gone by and I’m 13 pounds lighter. Even though I’m eating all the cakes and cookies the kids are baking, snacking at night, going through enormous amounts of eggs, doing everything wrong. I looked up the records from doctor’s appointments and this is the least I’ve weighed since 2011. Who knew all it took was an order from the Governor to stay at home and make my own food?

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Apr 01 2020
11 Comments
food

Pandemic blog 10: I’m masked in the supermarket

After thinking it over in previous posts I realized I had no rejoinder to the argument that we should all be wearing masks to go shopping, so I wore a mask to go shopping. Nothing fancy or ultra-filtering, just an elastic paper mask from a box. I worried I would feel awkward, but instead I felt cool, like a bandit. When I last went shopping, 9 days ago, almost no one was wearing a mask; now it’s up to 20 or 25 percent of the customers. Maybe people are reading my blog! I didn’t ask. None of the Trader Joe’s employees wear masks and I wonder whether they’re allowed to.

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Mar 30 2020
6 Comments
food, harvard, history

Pandemic blog 9: The Class of 1895

I was wondering about what the last major pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, looked like in real time, so I looked at the 25th anniversary report of the Harvard Class of 1895, published in June 1920 and written in 1919. To my surprise, the flu is barely mentioned. Henry Adsit Bull lost his oldest daughter to it. A couple of classmates worked in influenza hospitals. Morton Aldrich used it as an excuse for being late with his report. Paul Washburn reported being quite ill with it, and emphasizing that it might be his last report, demanded that the editors print his curriculum vitae with no editorial changes. (Nope — he was still alive and well and banking in the 1935 report.) I thought 1894, whose report was written more in the thick of the epidemic, might have more to say, but not really. Two men died of it, including one who made it through hideous battles of the Great War only to succumb to flu in November 1918. Another lost daughter.

But no one weighs in on it; I have read a lot of old Harvard class reports, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about an early 20th century Harvard man, it’s that he likes to weigh in. Not sure what to make of this. Maybe the pandemic didn’t much touch the lives of the elite. Or maybe people just died of stuff more and the Spanish flu didn’t make much of an impression. Or maybe it was just too rough to talk about (but I don’t think so — people recount pretty grisly material about the war.)

Back to the present. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered all jury trials halted for two months for the safety of jurors, witnesses, and officers of the court; an extremely overwrought dissent from Justice Rebecca Bradley insists that if a right is in the constitution it can’t be put on pause, even for a couple of months, even in a pandemic, which will be news to the people in every state whose governors have suspended their right to assemble.

CJ made a blueberry bundt cake, the best thing he’s made so far, aided by the fact that at the Regent Market Co-op I found a box of pectin, an ingredient I didn’t even know existed. Powdered sugar there was not, but it turns out that powdered sugar is literally nothing but regular sugar ground fine and mixed with a little cornstarch! You can make it yourself if you have a good blender. And we do have a good blender. We love to blend.

Walked around the neighborhood a bit. Ran into the owner of a popular local restaurant and talked to him from across the street. He’s been spending days and days working to renegotiate his loan with the bank. He thinks we ought to be on the “Denmark plan” where the government straight up pays worker’s salaries rather than make businesses apply to loans so they can eventually get reimbursed for the money they’re losing right now. (I did not check whether this is actually the Denmark plan.) Also saw my kids’ pediatrician, who told me that regular pediatrics has been suspended except for babies and they’ve closed the regular clinic, everything is consolidated in 20 S. Park.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about different groups’ COVID projections, claims and counterclaims. I’ll write about it a little in the next entry to show how little I know. But I think nobody knows anything.

Tomorrow it’ll be two weeks since the last time I was more than a quarter-mile from my house. We are told to be ready for another month. It won’t be that hard for us, but it’ll be hard for a lot of people.

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Mar 27 2020
4 Comments
ab, food

Pandemic blog 8: enter the hermit

It’s family blogging time! Since school is out we need some kind of writing activity so we’re all blogging, not just me. I did not require any particular subject. CJ is blogging about the movies he’s watching in his friend groups’ “movie club ” — he has the Marvel bug now and is plowing through the whole collection on Disney+. AB’s blog is called “The Nasty Times: Foods that Were Never Meant To Be Eaten” and each entry is about a food she considers nasty. The first entry was about mushrooms and she is currently composing “Why Onions Do Not Belong in Sloppy Joes.” I know, I know, who doesn’t like mushrooms and onions? Well, me at AB’s age — I made my mom take them out of everything, much to her annoyance. Now I’m getting my comeuppance.

I have two big longboxes of comics in the basement, almost all from 1982-1986, and AB and I spent part of the morning starting to sort and organize them. Perfect example of a task that feels like productivity and is not important in any way and yet — satisfying. Also nice to see old friends again, covers I haven’t seen in years but are familiar to me in every detail. This one seemed fairly on point:

I am still thinking about the masks. Why so unpopular in the US? Maybe it works like this. You are told (correctly) that wearing a mask doesn’t provide strong protection. Let’s say (making up a number) it only reduces your chance of transmitting or contracting the virus by a half. To many people that is going to feel like nothing: “I’m not really protected, what’s the point?” But in the aggregate, an easy, cheap measure that reduces number of transmissions by 50% would be extremely socially valuable.

talk about class of 1895

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Mar 20 2020
1 Comment
food

Pandemic blog 4: food

CJ is eating a sandwich. Strawberry preserves, capers, lettuce, and spicy dijon mustard on whole wheat toast. He says it’s excellent. They say COVID can temporarily disrupt the sense of taste and smell. (He doesn’t have COVID.)

We go through the fresh food pretty fast when all four of us are eating three meals a day at home. Also, that makes more dishes than our dishwasher can really hold. Somebody mentioned spaetzle on the Internet yesterday and it touched off a primal urge for spaetzle in me, so I made spaetzle. It’s good to remember that you can have noodles even if you don’t have noodles. (But we have plenty of noodles.) I used this Serious Eats recipe and fried the spaetzle in a lot of butter and onions. Very good and I’ll do it again.

AB had trouble sleeping the other night and I tried to bore her to sleep by listing all the breakfast cereals I could think of, which didn’t work, because talking about breakfast cereal is pretty interesting. But now I’m craving Raisin Bran which is weird because I don’t even like Raisin Bran.

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Feb 16 2020
1 Comment
food, lists, offhand

The Omnivore’s Hundred

A list of a hundred foods that went around the Internet a while back; the original source seems to be gone. Your score is how many you’ve eaten. Here’s how the family did:

  • Me: 68
  • Dr. Mrs. Q: 41
  • CJ: 38
  • AB: 36

I did pretty well except for the alcohol, which makes sense; I’m always inclined to try a food I haven’t eaten before, but the opportunity to try a new drink doesn’t move me at all. I wonder how many of those 68 I’ve only eaten once? Just glancing at the list again, I see: fugu, haggis, Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, whole insects, horse. I have only eaten at a three Michelin-star restaurant once and the menu was selected for me so I counted that as “tasting menu at a three-star Michelin,” so that too.

The format reminds me of the “Purity Test” that was a mainstay of Usenet groups and, I’m pretty sure, FIDONet before that. Wikipedia suggests the version of the test I saw, like everything else weird on the early Internet, originated at MIT.

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Dec 03 2019
2 Comments
food, recipes

Shocking the carrots

It takes a long time to soften carrots adequately by sauteing them, so a lot of recipes ask you to boil the carrots first or even mix butter and water and cook the carrots in the resulting lipidous slurry. This ends up tasting OK but the carrots never really taste sauteed to me, they taste boiled! I want that sear.

So this week I tried something new, borrowing a technique I learned a long time ago for perfect sauteed asparagus. Put your butter in the pan, melt it, get those carrots sauteing in there. Put in some salt and whatever other seasoning you want at whatever time suits that seasoning. (Dill is traditional, I used nutmeg this week and it was great) Saute the carrots until they’re nicely browned. At this point they will not be cooked enough. Eat one, it’ll taste nice on the outside but still be crunchy and part-raw.

So now it’s time to shock the carrots. Fill a small drinking glass half-full with water. So maybe a quarter cup, I dunno. Throw the water in the hot pan and immediately, as the sizzle kicks in and the steam begins to rise, slam the lid on. It should sound sort of like a high hat when you crash and then right away mute. Turn the heat down and let the carrots steam in there for about six minutes. When you open it, the water should be gone but if it’s not I would just take the carrots out with a slotted spoon. Result: fully tender carrots that taste sauteed, not boiled.

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Sep 28 2019
2 Comments
food, recipes, travel

Watermelon, chevre, piment d’espelette

I spent a little time this summer visiting Institut Henri Poincare for their program on rational points, but this post is not about the math I did there, but about a salad I ate there. Not there at IHP, but at the terrific neighborhood bistro around the corner from where I was staying. I liked it so much I went there three times and I got this salad three times. I have been trying to recreate it at home. It’s good! Not Paris bistro good. But really good. Here is how I make it so I don’t forget.

  • Seedless watermelon cut in cubical or oblong chunks, as sweet as possible
  • Good chevre (not feta, chevre) ripped up into modest pieces
  • Some kind of not-too-bitter greens (I’ve been using arugula, they used some kind of micro watercressy kind of deal) Not a ton; this is a watermelon salad with some greens in it for color and accent, not a green salad.
  • Roasted pine nuts (I am thinking this could also be good with roasted pepitas but have not tried it)
  • Juice of a lime
  • Olive oil, the best you have
  • Piment d’espelette

I had never heard of piment d’espelette! It’s from the Basque part of France and is roughly in the paprika family but it’s different. I went to a spice store before I left Paris and bought a jar to bring home. So now I have something I thought my kitchen would never be able to boast: a spice Penzey’s doesn’t sell.

Anyway, the recipe is: put all that stuff in a bowl and mix it up. Or ideally put everything except the chevre in and mix it up and then strew the chevre on the top. Festive!

Of course the concept of watermelon and goat cheese as a summer salad is standard; but this is a lot better than any version of this I’ve had before.

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Jan 12 2019
1 Comment
food, music

Quad Cities (The Multiple Cat, pizza)

Once I bought a used CD because the name of the band was The Multiple Cat and the name of the album was “Territory” Shall Mean The Universe and just how could you not?  I was rewarded.  The Multiple Cat was a 1990s band in the Quad Cities (Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa, Rock Island and Moline in Illinois, headquarters of John Deere and hometown of Lara Flynn Boyle.)  I’ve never been there but I have listened to this album a lot. It is not quite as philosophical as the name of the band (Schroedinger?) and the name of the album (Wittgenstein?) suggest.  But very richly weird.  My top track:  North? which starts out as a kind of burbly, groovy chat-song and then about two and a half minutes in blossoms out into, I don’t know what, major-key chippy synths start to poke in, there’s a vocal line (“Saaaaay to me”) which I think must be sampled, it becomes majestic.  Hear also: My Year As a Girl, which is not about trans stuff as far as I can tell, but is, whatever it’s about, a real indie-disco stomper from years before Franz Ferdinand was everywhere.

Anyway, The Multiple Cat faded out and songwriter Pat Stolley got involved running Daytrotter.  But now it turns out they’re back!  Have been for a few years.  Their comeback record is called The Return Of.  Not The Return of the Multiple Cat, that would be too obvious, just The Return Of.  Highlight track:  “Vampire Bats, Mall Rats.”

In other Quad Cities news, their microregional pizza sounds pretty great.  On the other hand, the last microregional pizza I made a point of investigating, Old Forge pizza in Northeastern Pennsylvania, didn’t blow me away.

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Dec 16 2018
7 Comments
food, lists, travel

It’s right by the airport

I went to California last week to talk math and machine learning with Ben Recht (have you read his awesome blogstravaganza about reinforcement learning and control?) My first time on the brand-new Madison – San Francisco direct flight (the long-time wish of Silicon Isthmus finally realized!) That flight only goes once a day, which means I landed at SFO at 6:15, in the middle of rush hour, which meant getting to Berkeley by car was going to take almost an hour and a half.  So maybe it made more sense to have dinner near SFO and then go to the East Bay.  But where can you have dinner near SFO?

Well, here’s what I learned.  When I was at MSRI for the Galois Groups and Fundamental Groups semester in 1999, there was an amazing Chinese restaurant in Albany, CA called China Village.  I learned about it from my favorite website at the time, Chowhound.com.  China Village is still there and apparently still great, but the original chef, Zongyi Liu, left long ago.  Chowhound, too, is still there, but a thin shadow of its old self.  When I checked Chowhound this week, though, I learned something fantastic — Liu is back and cooking in Millbrae!  At Royal Feast, a 10-minute drive from SFO.  So what started as a plan to dodge traffic turned into the best Chinese meal I’ve eaten in forever.  Now I’m thinking I’ll probably stop there every time I fly to San Francisco!  And it’s right by the Millbrae BART station, so if you’re going into the city, it’s as convenient as being at the airport.

So that got me thinking:  what are good things to know about that are right near the airport in other cities?  The neighborhood around the airport is often kind of unpromising, so it’s good to have some prior knowledge of places worth stopping.  And I actually have a pretty decent list!

LAX:  This is easy — you can go to the beach!  Dockweiler State Beach is maybe 5 minutes from the airport.  It’s a state park, not developed, so there’s no boardwalk, no snack stand, and, when I went there, no people.  You just walk down to the ocean and look at the waves and every thirty seconds or so a jumbo jet blasts by overhead on its way to Asia because did I mention 5 minutes from the airport?  You’re right under the takeoff path.  And it’s great.  A sensory experience like no other beach there is.  I just stood there for an hour thinking about math.

BOSTON:  There is lots of great pizza in Boston, of course, but Santarpio’s in East Boston might be the very best I’ve had, and it’s only 7 minutes from Logan airport.  Stop there and get takeout on your way unless you want to bring yet another $13 cup of Legal Seafood chowder on your flight.

MILWAUKEE:  I have already blogged about the unexpectedly excellent Jalapeño Loco, literally across the street from the airport.  Best chile en nogada in the great state of Wisconsin.

SEATTLE:  The Museum of Flight isn’t quite as close to Sea-Tac as some of these other attractions are to their airports — 12 minutes away per Google Maps.  But it’s very worth seeing, especially if you happen to be landing in Seattle with an aircraft-mad 11-year-old in tow.

MADISON:  “The best barbecue in Madison, Wisconsin” is not going to impress my friends south of the Mason-Dixon line, or even my friends south of the Beloit-Rockford line, but Smoky Jon’s, just north of the airport on Packers Avenue (not named for the football team, but for the actual packers who worked at the Oscar Mayer plant that stood on this road until 2017) is the real thing, good enough for out of town visitors and definitely better than what’s on offer at MSN.

CHICAGO:  No, O’Hare is terrible in this way as in every other way.  I once got stuck there for the night and tried to find something exciting in the area to do or eat.  I didn’t succeed.

You guys travel a lot — you must have some good ones!  Put them in the comments.

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