You knows it!

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I don’t want to turn this (or my other) blog into a press release portal, but I have a new dance music release that just hit Beatport, and it is some truly hott business. If you like tech house/electro and have a taste for dirty, twisted tracks, you simply MUST check this out.

Listen and grab it here.

OK, so I’ll add a LITTLE food related content. I went to 99 Ranch market in Daly City last night for some weekend shopping, and really scoured the place for crazy new stuff. I saw two things I’ve never seen before:

Vegetarian Intestines:

…no comment.

Caltrops:

Apparently Caltrops are an evil-looking perversion of the humble, innocent chestnut. Raw, they often contain a very harmful parasite (and are you surprised? LOOK AT THEM!), so they must be boiled into submission, and then opened with an icepick, bowie knife, or the jaws of life. The flesh is described as “creamy”. Mmm hmm.

I bought a bunch of food, including a nice little slab of “sashimi grade” tuna. When I got it home, most of the veggies were far sadder than they looked in their (styrofoam and shrink wrap) packages, and the tuna was several shades past fresh enough to pop in one’s gob uncooked. Miffed but undeterred, I still got a decent meal out of the haul. I even cubed up the tuna, rolled it in sesame seeds and panko, and fried it ’til crispy. Served with a japanese mayo, lime and mustard sauce, it was pleasant, but not quite pleasant enough to keep my mind off the fact that I wasn’t eating it raw.

Such is life. I guess this is why I try to buy stuff at places where the scale of the store allows for better quality control. I don’t shop at Safeway for a myriad of reasons, but that’s one of them.

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For some time, I’ve been a person who is always buying giant armloads of organic/local veggies, sticking to less processed foods, ferreting out fun new things to cook with, having frequent dinner parties, etc. My shopping cart at Rainbow Grocery generally looks like a mobile hill of vibrant greens, reds, yellows and browns when I’m done. I LOVE FRESH FOOD! It’s the centerpiece of my life.

While raw foodism is seen by some as almost ascetic by many, and obviously no fun at all, I normally eat raw food constantly (along with plenty of cooked stuff). My work lunches often used to consist of a box of vegetables, raw as the day they were picked, some miso, and maybe some hummus and some other kind of protein. My contented munching on undressed spinach used to elicit smug titters from my co-workers.

There are also a few competent taquerias and a halfway-decent noodle house about a 10-minute walk away from work, so there was always something decent to eat.

Lately, the pace of my life and work has picked up. The giant shopping trips, the weekend research kibbutzes with co-obsessives, the nice breakfasts and packed lunches on weekdays, and even the safety valve of decent restaurants a short jaunt away have been compromised. Thus springs the trap of immediately available food around the corporate workplace, which generally means: CRAP. Subway sandwiches and Round Table Pizza salads just seem like pale, cruel jokes.

Worse than all of that chain-store garbage, though, is the robot-like entity that recently descended, to much fanfare, in my company’s cafeteria.

Cold Food, indeed. Embalmed sandwiches, interred pizzas, lonely-looking yogurt, bags of tuna salad, toxic muffins. Each week, we’re told “The Machine’s been restocked! This week we’ve got…” as though the makeup of the Costco by-the-pallet astronaut food would change in some compelling way over time.

For god and Grant Achatz’s sake! We’ve invited a robot into our midst that will happily serve us dorm food, forever. Its name is “COLD FOOD”, and it’s here to save us from the drudgery of that one-minute walk. I can hear its wheels and gears clicking together in calm, collected malice, dreaming of fattening us all up for the eventual harvest by its alien creators. “Yes, my pretties. Enjoy your lunch of corn syrup fried in trans fats. The Overlings will be pleased with your girth in short order.”

I’ll never be able to bring myself to support the death-bot, but I’m still being lazy. Every time I find myself biting into another cardboard Subway sandwich when I could have walked a little further and had a really nice torta at Lisa’s, or a bowl of spicy chow fun at TK Noodle, a tiny black cloud forms in my heart, and gray raindrops stream out of it, a cartoon frown forming on its translucent face. A frown that says, “Look how the mighty have fallen.”

Consider this my official resolution, my online point of accountability (hold me to it!) that I will no longer eat crap. That I will take the wheel of my own epicurian 18-wheeler and steer it away from the oncoming ravine. Today I’m taking a couple of co-workers to Lisa’s, so we can all marvel at the rare sidewalk flower that is a great mexican joint in the wilds of Daly City. Next week, the boxes of living, breathing vegetables will be my lunchtime companions again. It’s GO TIME.

Now it’s time to create a map of good local restaurants and stick it on the robot, perhaps with a subtle warning, like this:

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Not a ton of content today, just a friendly reminder to be your own private chef. Wake up with a hard-to-satisfy craving? (no, not that kind) Just call on your internal private chef to whip you up a bespoke meal. All it takes is a little lazy preparation. it helps to do a little experimental shopping here and there.

See a vegetable someplace that you’ve never eaten? Grab a few. See a sauce that looks good but has no english on the package? Pick up a little bottle. Once you’ve done this for a few months, just when convenient, you’ll have a much more solid idea of the things you love and what they’re made of, or what they *could* be made of, in a pinch. Just take a chance- most of the most interesting stuff out there is cheap as chips, and that’s cheap, jackson!

This morning, with a fridge full of next to nothin’*, I unearthed a lonely king oyster mushroom, a nub of veggie chicken, some snap peas, the last of a sad bunch of cilantro, and a little scrap of pancit noodles.

This all went into a smoking hot frying pan with a couple of fine-chopped thai chilies and 2 cloves of garlic. Finished off with a sauce made from peanut butter, kimchee starter (my new fave thing- I’ll post about it once I get a little more info), china hot oil from the Dol Ho dim sum place in Chinatown, and a little lime juice and Maggi.

A few minutes later, a full-color version of the dish above was ready and waiting, along with a pint glass of Blue Bottle coffee, dripped from a Melitta cone. I couldn’t have bought this dish anywhere in the city. Making it it took 5 minutes, and was no harder than: Choose stuff, chop stuff, cook stuff, mix sauce, stir fry stuff in sauce, eat. Needless to say, it was just what the doc ordered. The smell even roused my hung-over housemate from his bed of pain.

…and just think what I can whip up once I actually restock the place!

* I realize that a lot of people wouldn’t call having all this crap “next to nothin’”, but what I want to foster in folks is a certain element of constant exploration, where you might be picking up random food items regularly enough to find yourself having bottomed out your fridge with a few things like these still hanging around.

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A totally underrated yet magical fruit that you should use more of is something I have only recently come to cherish. It is the Meyer Lemon and I am in love. I moved into a house with a tree brimming with such sweet/tart fruits right when it was in the peak of it’s season. Some weeks I had to pick close to 20 lemons, just to keep them from falling off and rotting on the ground. I would have offered them to my neighbors, but it seems that they are a common addition to every yard on the block. Saddled with an abundance of fruity goodness I set out to explore the numerous ways I could use the lemons. The results were interesting, varied, always tasty and eventually so plentiful that my husband asked if we could take a break from the lemons for a while.

The meyer lemon is an interesting lemon, because it is thought to be a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange. This gives is a slightly rounder and sometimes more orange outside than a normal lemon would have. They are also sweeter and slightly less acidic, traits I accidentally discovered on my first adventure with them: Lemonade.
Now, with normal lemons you have to dilute the juice with a larger ratio of water and sugar. With the meyer lemons, I tried to use my normal lemonade ratios, and resulted in a watered down sugary sweet mess. I think the meyer lemons are best left to cooking and baking, and lemonade is best left to the original with it’s super tartness and pucker.

My favorite use of meyer lemons is in a modified lemon curd, which can be used for everything from filling cupcakes to baking tarts. Lemon tarts are particularly delicious when made with meyer lemons, although any dessert with them is great. Meyer Lemon sorbet, meyer lemon bars… the list is long (and I got through most of it). I even experimented with making gluten-free crusts on the tarts. They weren’t as flaky and buttery as a normal tart crust, but they were passable. It seems with so many lemons to spare, any dish was a possible canvas for lemon.

In cooking, and citrus marinade is fantastic. I’m a fan of citrus marinated tilapia over quinoa with green beens.

For salad dressings squeeze a little together with some olive oil and a champagne vinegar black pepper and other seasonings to taste.

I won’t go into too much detail on the specific recipes, but just know that these are a great addition to your grocery list to experiment with. A little zest or scraping in a cocktail, a little squeeze over some pasta… it can be your secret weapon (or as in my case, your little love affair).

The season has dwindled for now, but I’m looking forward to fall when I can start my day with a meyer citron presse (hot water with a squeeze of lemon) and end it with a slice of meyer lemon tart. Life does give you lemons sometimes and it is the best thing that could have happend to me.

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STROOPWAFELS. (def. from Wikipedia)
A stroopwafel is a very small, very thin waffle made from two thin layers of baked batter with a caramel-like syrup filling in the middle.

The batter for the waffles is made from flour, butter, brown sugar, yeast, milk, and eggs. Medium sized balls of batter are put on the waffle iron. When the waffle is baked, and while it is still warm, it is cut into two halfs. The warm filling, made from syrup, brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon, is spread in between the waffle halfs, which glues them together.

Patrice and George love Stroopwafels! You can’t get true dutch specimens outside of the Netherlands too often, but when you do… YUM! Trader Joes have started carrying the above more often. Today they’ve augmented a housewarming soiree, pairing beautifully with BBQ, but we suggest warming them over a mug of coffee before dipping and dispatching them.

Stroopwafels- truly a cosmopolitan and continually enjoyable snack.

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Hi, everybody! There’s some exciting new things afoot at this long-neglected blog. Since I last wrote, my fellow fashionistas and I have started a new record label/art collective/party crew called, appropriately enough, Dinner Party Records. The label sprang from a series of Friday-night gourmet potluck dinners that segued us into the weekend’s craziness. We had great musicians, producers, artists, web developers, marketing people and business-minded folks in the group… Why not take over the world, eh?

The first product our new label will be selling is my new solo album, The White Pinecone, the making of which is what caused a break in my writing here. The music is some really fiery electronic/rock/dance/synthpop stuff. Check it out at the link above or click here for the Myspace page. I’m really excited about it, it’s some of my best work yet.

Dinner Party Records also contains a number of high-powered foodies and cooking obsessives like myself, and you’ll start seeing some contributions from those folks pop up here at feeding//fashionistas. In the meantime, I’m going to be reposting some of my very first pieces I wrote for this blog, just to get the jus flowing, so to speak- a series of articles on lovely/essential tools and ingredients with which to outfit your kitchen in serious style, for champagne cuisine on a Pabst budget. The first is from all the way back in October 2005, and it’s all about tools.

Cheers mates, get cooking!
-GC @ ff

—

This is the first installment in my short series on inexpensively outfitting your kitchen for total culinary dominance. Where would Batman be without his utility belt? Where would Elvis be without his guitar and hip pads? Where would Paris Hilton be without her purse full of nasal drugs?

Nowhere, I tells ya.

This time around, I’ll be covering the bare essentials. The BASICS. I will be naming brands, and maybe even stealing a couple of images from manufacturer’s sites- but if you find something in your local store that seems to fit the bill and doesn’t align with exactly what I’ve outlined here, go for it. This stuff is cheap enough that you can afford to make mistakes.

1.2.
3.4.

(more…)

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Sorry for the unexplained break in updates here- I had a bit of a bicycle accident last week. I banged up my knee pretty good, may have cracked or bruised a rib, and crunched the primary computer that I edit photos and update f // f from..

Oh PowerBook, you’ll be mourned evermore.
(excuse the bad cam photo, I’m an injured man!)

*sigh*

Well, that was last week, dear friends- As of yesterday I’ve got a new compu-pal (ThinkPad!) and my bod, too, is on the mend. There will be new content here with the quickness, I promise. Thanks much for your readership.

-gc

Me in hospital,

..wishing to heck
I were blogging

P.S. - WEAR YA HELMETS, YOU LOT! Mine now has a rather large dent in it. My head doesn’t. There’s something to be learned, there.

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Well, the new cam has arrived (as you can probably tell), and while I haven’t come close to figuring out how to get great shots out of it, I couldn’t exactly wait to try shooting a few pixes, could I?

..of course not.

Incidentally, the food is from an utterly nondescript mexican joint near my work that just happens to make decent seafood tacos. It’s pretty much the closest thing to edible food I can get to for lunch. Man, do I need to start packing my own lunches again! The fountain is an artifact of our being situated in a charming concrete corporate park. It’s got so many anti-skateboarding metal fixtures all over it, it may as well be a water-spouting cylindrical porcupine.

..and you know I can’t stand those!

More later,
-GC

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So, now that I am fully addicted to writing food tutorials and briskly chronicling my tasty adventures for y’all, I’ve realized that a real camera is in order. To whit: I have finagled an insane deal on a new Canon A520!

*drool*

Fancy it isn’t, but it’s got lots of manual control, a good macro mode, 4MP and 4x optical zoom. Not bad for (a lot) less than $200! Anyway, I will now sit on my hands and fret petulantly until it arrives. In any case, what this advancement means is..

Fewer dumb stock photos, less nasty phonecam shots, and a far higher food-pr0n quotient in future posts. I hope to see this gleaming device within a week and a half.

In more minor news, I’ve migrated feeding//fashionistas to a brand-spanking new URL of its very own, www.feedingfashionistas.com. Please update any bookmarks or RSS subs if you like reading f // f!

Later today I hope to post my recipe for Thom Kha Het, or at least my bastardized version of it, which combines vegan sensibilities with… Fish sauce. (Try as I might, I’ve yet to find anything non-ichthyological that can replace it)

In any case, if you can put aside your fish-fancier side for a moment, there’s no yummier soup in creation, IMNSHO.

Cheers,
-GC

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