The Ramen Project

On my first trip to the Manila Oriental Market in Excelsior last year, I discovered something wonderful-- an entire store aisle devoted to instant noodles. The store offered an impenetrably diverse array of ramens, with flavors I'd never run across, like "cuttlefish" and "pickled cabbage fish". Sarah and I first just tried the ones that sounded best to us and tried to keep mental track of our favorites. It wasn't until I was on my own that I decided to take a more systematic approach to dealing with the intimidating breadth of options. By then it had become apparent that memory alone would not be sufficient to map out the best and worst of instant noodles. At the suggestion of a coworker (Laura Ray), The Ramen Project was born. This post is its ultimate fruit. I bought one of each of about two-thirds of the aisle's offered instant noodle varieties (the poor girl at the checkout looked ready to kill me) and began to work my way through the pile one lunch at a time at work, saving the packaging with brief post-it reviews affixed. After months of careful study, the results are in.

The survey covers 39 flavors of instant noodles, all single-serving with one exception. Prices mostly ranged from 39 cents to 79 cents, with a couple of standouts costing over a dollar. Ramen noodles are generally fried in saturated vegetable fat like palm oil and the broth typically includes flavor-enhancers MSG, Disodium 5'-Inosylate, and Disodium 5'-Guanylate (which is actually a component of DNA/RNA, interestingly). The artificial meat flavor is non-vegetarian, which means it includes animal products and isn't fully "artificial" in the classic sense, but only a couple of brands included such luxuries as straight-up crab meat or beef extract and forwent synthetic flavor enhancers. There's nothing really dangerous or unhealthy about synthetic flavor enhancers, but as a rule I tried not to consume ramen more than once per 48-hour period, as the calories are pretty genuinely empty and it would have made me feel "off". Noodle packages typically included 2-3 packets inside them in addition to the bare noodles, usually powdered broth, garlic or soy-infused palm oil, and freeze dried garnish. The survey includes "glass" noodles, rice noodles and noodles intended to be served without broth, in addition to the more classic ramen noodles.

I've condensed this to the "discoveries" or "best-of", but you can find the complete unedited reviews here. Below are the highlights:

Both Thai brands (ZoZo/Wai Wai and MAMA) were consistently excellent, and the general sour/tom yum genre is pretty solid.
-ZoZo/Wai Wai Sour Soup Flavour Instant Noodles- Good. Spicy, delicious and simple.
-MAMA Shrimp Creamy Tom Yum Flavour- Creamy, delicious, appropriately spicy, and with good texture. This is probably my favorite Tom Yum of the lot. Note that my coworker Jeri's favorite ramen is the non-creamy variant, but I prefered this by a slight margin.

Vietnamese company Vina Acecook has a few brand name titles, including Hao Hao, which was uniformly mediocre, and Daily, which had its moments (see below). Vietnamese brand Vifon was ok, but I wasn't especially fond of the mealy texture of their rice noodles and they didn't quite rise above "good" anyways.
-Daily Beef Ball Flavour- Surprisingly delicious, with complex spicy herbal seasoning.

Both soup type ramens from Filipino brand Lucky Me! were excellent, but the chow meins (served without broth) tended to be rancid for whatever reason. It wasn't the only brand for which I ran across a rancid one, but these were pretty consistently rancid. Otherwise the chow meins were quite good, but I'm only featuring the soups.
-Lucky Me! La Paz Batchoy (La Paz Style)- Fancy! Four packets, including one with little balls of textured soy protein. Rich and garlicky broth.
-Lucky Me! Bulalo (Bone Marrow Soup)- Smells fantastically savory. Great flavor, salty.

Indonesian brand IndoMie's chow meins were excellent and it is the brand I'd recommend for the chow mein style. The process of straining the water from them was a bit tricky to do at work with nothing but a microwave, a fork, and long sweater sleeves to insulate my hands, but the results were great. Note that these and the Lucky Me! chow meins are Sarah's favorite instant noodles.
-Mi Goreng BBQ Chicken- Absolutely delicious.
-Mi Goreng- Excellent, sweet and peppery.
-Soto Mie Flavour- Sesame and chili flavor. Delicious as always.

Unif is a pretty gigantic brand out of Taiwan, with a lot of different packaging configurations. It's offerings range from outright "meh" to quite good.
-Unif Tung-I Chah Chiang Flavor- I believe this is seaweed flavor. Dark, savory and surprisingly unsalty (relatively speaking) soy sauce-derived broth. Would pair well with Californian hops, esp Simcoe or Citra.
-Unif Tung-I Instant Bean Vermicelli Mushroom Flavor (Bean Thread)- Good, interesting nutty mushroom flavor.

As I am sure will surprise no one, the Japanese brands were the most expensive, nutritionally substantial and reliably delicious. I decided that udon took a bit too long to cook to be practical for work.
-Tonkotsu Artificial Pork Flavor- The "nondaily creamer" milk solids make it pretty chill. Nice and garlicky and sesame-y.
-Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup "Gourmet Spicy"- Totally excellent in flavor and texture. Pleasantly spicy, but otherwise fairly normal.

Honestly, the most promising (and as-yet unexplored) frontier in ramen at this point for me is the multi-serving packages. These tend be on the higher end of the price range per serving, include some of the most unusual flavors and the quality has so far been remarkable. Only one multi-serving noodle was included in this survey, and it certainly makes the list. The brand is unclear but it was manufactured by Sichuan Baijia Food Co., Ltd.
-Artificial Pickled Cabbage Fish Flavor Instant Sweet Potato Thread- Unique and utterly delicious. Cabbage and beans and sour and spicy oh my! Note this is vegan and rather oily, with chewy clear noodles

Below is the full array of recommended noodles. Hopefully this will prove useful to everyone who has access to an asian grocery store. It's a great way to keep your lunches at work cheap and interesting.

California Cajun Gumbo

My dad left Louisiana long ago, never turning back after he left for college. Except for pronouncing the word "cord" as "card" he has lost his accent, but he has carried his Cajun heritage with him in the form of his gumbo. He doesn't make it very often and, as I will explain later, his gumbo is not precisely by-the-book. Rather, it is a subtly innovative and rather excellent version of that famous, heavy, and piquant soup. When I say "California Cajun Gumbo", I mean the gumbo style that my dad, my sister and I make. My sister and I's gumbo has begun to deviate from our dad's, but it is just a lazy/embellished take on his model. More on that later. Here is how to make his gumbo:

3 large yellow onions, diced "the size of a nickel"
3 green bell peppers, diced
4 stalks of celery, diced
1 bunch green onions, finely chopped
2-3 cups (1 bunch or less) parsley, finely chopped
2/3 jar (~1 1/2 cups) Kary's dry roux
1 lb/link of double-smoked Cajun sausage, chopped (half-inch slices)
3-5 lbs chicken thighs
paprika, cayenne, black pepper, salt, flour and vegetable oil

Serve with rice

Fill a stock pot ("gumbo pot") with roughly 2 gallons of water and bring to a boil. Foist vegetable chopping on an underling. While the water is heating, pan fry the onions in a bit of oil until they are golden brown. Add them to the pot. Brown the bell peppers the same way. Once the pot is properly boiling, turn off the heat and mix in the roux. Spend 10 minutes vigorously stirring roux, smushing clumps with the spoon and scraping the bottom of the pot (ideally, using a long metal spoon with a flat tip, or "gumbo spoon"). Turn heat back on and add the peppers and celery to the pot. Boil for 40 minutes, stirring every 5-10 minutes.

While vegetables are boiling, get out the chicken. In a large bowl, pour equal parts salt, paprika (with cayenne to taste) and black pepper (roughly 2-3 Tbsps). Eyeball three parts flour and mix ingredients together. Dredge chicken thighs in this mixture and pan fry once again in oil at high temperature. Pull them out when browned on the outside, they needn't be cooked through.

Add sausages after the vegetables have boiled for 40 minutes. Boil for another 30 minutes. Add browned chicken to the pot and boil for another 30 minutes. Pull out the chicken into a large serving bowl. Skim off fat and season to taste with red pepper, black pepper and salt. Boil the pot for another few minutes and then turn off the heat, immediately stirring in the parsley and green onions at flame out.

Serve in broad bowls, putting the rice and a piece of chicken in first, then pouring the gumbo over. Add pepper vinegar (vinegar soaked in hot peppers), tobasco, and gumbo file to taste. Enjoy!


There are many types of gumbo. The "chicken and sausage gumbo" my father makes is a subtype of the broader meat-and-roux type and is perhaps the most iconic of all Cajun dishes. My dad's version deviates from the most common Louisiana version in the following ways:

-There isn't usually any browning-- none. Dad says it's done for special occasions, like a Christmas gumbo. Frankly, Uncle Pierre seemed pretty baffled by the idea of browning everything-- it's a pain in the ass. He said some Cajuns do it, but it tends to be a family taste thing, not something done on special occasions.
-Sausage is not double-smoked, but rather single-smoked (leaving it more tender and less intense).
-Gumbo is primarily a winter dish-- a hearty soup for cold weather-- so, as my grandmother pointed out, including bell peppers isn't especially authentic to gumbo of 50 years ago, when bell peppers were only available in the summer. Bell peppers are used in Louisiana gumbos sometimes and especially in summer gumbos, but they are not considered characteristic of gumbo.
-Paprika is not used, but rather a local ground red pepper blend. The term "red pepper" is used as shorthand for both sweet and cayenne pepper.

Classic Cajun meat-and-roux gumbo, as it is made in my dad's hometown, is made with: onions, celery-and/or-parsley, smoked pork of some kind (often tasso in addition to smoked sausage), meat from bird or small game (rabbit, for instance), wet or dry roux, often garlic, definitely red pepper, black pepper and salt. It's really a pretty simple, flexible dish, and without the browning step it's not too difficult to make.

Let me return to my dad's recipe-- onions, celery and green bell peppers are the holy trinity of Cajun cuisine and are fundamental to many classic Cajun dishes-- just not gumbo. Bell peppers may be "inessential", but they've always been my favorite part of dad's gumbos, and I can't imagine a Cali gumbo without fresh peppers. The browning step really is a pain in the ass. Though it contributes to a richer and more complex flavor, gumbo made without browning is still excellent. The roux likely contributes the lion's share of browned "Maillard Reaction" flavor in either case. Paprika contributes a certain characteristic bitterness that distinguishes it from Cajun red pepper, it's bitterness complementing the relatively brittle dry roux flavor. My Louisiana family thought the idea of using paprika to be quite interesting, and I think it's an improvement. Dad uses dry roux and double-smoked sausage for ease of transport back to Cali. In Louisiana, wet roux is more authentic (dry roux must be made in an oven, which Cajuns traditionally didn't have) and it is esteemed for its richer flavor, while dry roux is considered to be the "healthy option". I actually prefer dry roux's lighter and perhaps more toasted flavor. It's also easier to make. While Cajuns love tasso and often use it in gumbo, I think we Californians generally think of tasso as second fiddle to sausage and just don't make space for it in our suitcases (after all, it's called "chicken and sausage gumbo", not "chicken and tasso").

Bri and I have been tinkering with our dad's recipe. I've found that single-smoked sausage transports just fine, though I need to use more of it to achieve the same smokiness. I've mostly dispensed with browning, though I've still been browning the onions (browned onions=drool). I'll still dredge the chicken, but I'll be substituting roux for flour so that I'm not skimping on Maillard Reaction goodness (frying breaded chicken essentially makes roux of the flour in Dad's version). I've also started to think about the trinity as a plant-family thing:
Onions- allium genus (garlic, green onions, shallots, leeks, chives)
Peppers- note that even classicist gumbo has a blend of multiple dried red peppers
Celery- umbellifer family (parsley, carrots, parsnips, cilantro, dill, fennel, cumin, lovage, angelica)

Once I thought of the Cajun holy trinity as having multiple participants on each of three "teams", it presented an opportunity to play around. I've switched in poblano (my favorite) and jalapeño peppers for bell peppers in my gumbos. Poblanos have great flavor, but I'm going to add the green bells back for their texture. It also just occurred to me that gumbo would be a great outlet for that smoked paprika I never know what to do with, and for all the interesting dried peppers available in Mexican markets. I've added parsnips to mixed effect-- two large parsnips added fantastic flavor, but introduced a perhaps inappropriate starchy sweetness. I'm going to scale back to just one parsnip. I very tentatively tried adding cilantro. There's a sweet/fenugreek quality to cilantro that worked surprisingly well. It made the gumbo taste vaguely exotic, but still discernibly Cajun. If I run across some lovage or angelica I'll try them for the same reason. They would probably work even better, but are difficult to find. I'll keep my eyes peeled-- I should be able to find dried angelica root in Chinatown. Dill or coriander sound like bad ideas, but caraway or chervil might be interesting. In all, filling out the trinity with Mexican and "northerner" ingredients has been quite rewarding and I hope my Louisiana relatives have some interest in appropriating these experiments or at least find the trinity-as-teamwork paradigm illuminating.

My gumbo has become much more vegetable-forward than Louisianan gumbo (as is only appropriate in this great state). This perhaps, in a bizarre twist of fate, moving it closer towards the "meat to give it flavoring" gumbo of the first half of the 20th century, when meat was considered a luxury.

For fellow Californians looking to make some gumbo, I have some relevant information. Any smoked sausage will work (though obviously it will add its own seasoning to the flavor, so sage-y smoked Italian sausage might be a better idea than cumin-y Mexican). Smoked paprika might also decrease your reliance on foreign sausage for that smoked flavor (who knows, possibly substituting the decreased amount of pork with bacon-grease roux). Wet roux can be made at home, by just pan cooking equal parts oil and flour until milk chocolate brown, all the while stirring like crazy to prevent it from burning (even slight burnage will ruin it). Dry roux can be made in the oven.

Remember, while this may be the most iconic, it is just one of many amazing dishes in the Cajun pantheon. I encourage everyone to check out my distant cousin Paul Prudhomme's most excellent cookbooks as a jumping off point into Cajun cuisine.

Calamari Punch

Sarah and I checked out a Filipino food festival called Kulinarya where, among other things, we discovered a delicious limeade made from the Filipino calamansi lime, whose unique taste can be described as a cross between a lime and a kumquat. This is probably what goaded us into finally visiting Manila Oriental Market down the street. We loaded up on exotic ramens (they had an entire aisle devoted to ramen) and various beverages including a ton of calamansi-ade. The following highball is named after the combination of calamansi and Kraken rum upon which it is based. Kraken has been my go-to spiced black rum since Matt Wingert introduced it to me, and makes a great dark and stormy, though Sarah will insist that a true "Dark 'n' Stormy" is only made with Gosling's.

1 shot Kraken (or other black spiced rum)
 2 dashes Angostura bitters 
3+ parts Calamansi-ade

There's not a whole lot to be said about this drink. It's just good punch, with warm spices and featuring a neat Filipino beverage. Anyone who wants to try to recreate this without an insanely hard-to-find specialty ingredient should substitute limeade with a splash of orange juice (or, if you have it, kumquat juice). Like any good punch, this scales up. My thanks to the Excelsior House Tasting Team (aka Sarah).

Try Anything Once

When my sister and I were growing up we couldn't stand to eat certain foods. Brussel sprouts, onions and tomatoes were a few of my personal enemies. Our parents would good-naturedly lecture us about how as you get older, your taste buds change and you grow to like things you once hated. While they tolerated and accommodated a certain amount of our stonewalling, at least once a year my mom or dad would say, "Just eat one bite. You can't have dessert until you at least try it." Try we would. Then we usually retched, spit it out or just made a horrible face. With parents satisfied, life would go on.

Somewhere along the line I remember my mom intoning with an unmistakable air of pride that we weren't picky eaters compared to most of our friends. We ate seafood, most vegetables and a host of gourmet and ethnic food that our parents had been gradually introducing us to. Among the mythology of my childhood was a story about me as a toddler, picking apart sushi rolls. When my parents were distracted, my two-year-old-self snatched up a ball of wasabi and swallowed it entirely. My dad still loves to describe the look on my face and how, admirably, I didn't even cry.

Dad instilled in me an enthusiasm for spicy food. I originally approached it as a macho thing. I'd sneer at my sister for complaining about spiciness and load my gumbo with as much Tabasco as I could stand. I remember, in a Chinese restaurant, bravely trying one of those Szechuan peppers after seeing my dad toss a couple back. Sometimes Bri and I would dare each other to eat one. To this day I occasionally eat a Szechuan pepper, just for kicks. The sensation is always one of terrible burning, but you never know if your taste buds have changed. A behavioral psychologist would say that in my family the social dividends of brave experimentalism outweighed the danger of an unpleasant taste.

Once our parents divorced, Bri and I's cultivated non-pickiness became tangibly useful. Our bachelor Dad would take us to Costco for a food run. He'd tell us to "get kid food" and we'd come back with boxes of fruit loops, "granola bars" made mostly of corn syrup and puffed rice and veritable tubs of jelly bellies, gummi worms, etc. Dad would buy it unquestioningly. If dinners weren't consistently a family affair of meat and vegetables, we might have ended up inches shorter than we are today. When the "kid food" ran out, as it inevitably did, we resorted to experimenting with Dad's leftovers or tolerating his offered concoctions, even violating the breakfast-must-be-sweet principle universally understood by children across America as sacrosanct.

Thus it was that open-mindedness established itself as not only a source of pride for Bri and I, but as a necessity for survival. Experimentalism became a sort of religion for us, a direct product of our father's influence. Chicken feet, pig's ear, pigeon, escargot, beef tongue, raw oysters (<3!) and all forms of sushi were things we not only ate, but actively sought out to try. By the time I was in high school, our open-minded food tastes were integral to our self-identities and our family culture.

It was about that time that my dad organized a multi-week backpacking trip to Wyoming with his longtime friend Jack Kisslinger. For that trip, we treated him as family. In restaurants, when Bri or I requested a taste of Jack's meal, we had no expectation that he might refuse. We took it for granted that everyone was entitled to a bite of each other person's meal. Agreeable Jack gracefully adapted to this after a few nights of confusion. Bri and I would also angrily squabble amongst ourselves and, in the case of Jack or Dad, diplomatically implore about what dish the other person should order. You see, we wanted to maximize the number of dishes we got to taste of the restaurant's. If two people got the same dish, we would only have three unique entrees to try rather than four. So it was that Bri and I would identify the most intriguing dishes and often fight about who got to order the most-desirable of the remaining dishes after the adults' choices (in the most memorable example, this came between meat loaf and baby back ribs, so you can understand the passion). During those next few weeks, Jack's presence and semi-voluntary inclusion into our family culture elucidated our culture's uniqueness to Bri and I, which increased our family food culture importance in our identities.

My dad loved to regale us with his adventures traveling the world. He almost never turned down bizarre local delicacies, but he did tell of one restaurant in China that he turned down. He and his friend looked into the window and watched as a spider monkey was clamped by its head to a tray, the top of its skull was popped off with a knife and its quivering brains were eaten with spoons as the monkey screamed its head off (pardon the pun) and thrashed in evident agony, trying to escape. My dad told his friend, "let's eat somewhere else". Thus did I learn the limitations of my dad's considerable zeal for adventure.

In his stories of travel adventures, I made the inevitable connection between trying food and trying things more generally. The quote, "try anything once" may have originally been made by him in reference to food, but it was a short leap to apply it to everything. "Try anything once" was the refrain running in my head as I ran out of a pool in Utah to roll in the snow, rode Supreme Scream, jumped off a sea cliff, ate a peanut worm whole, hopped a fence to go night swimming in my school's rec pool and consumed enough cyanide to flush my face and quicken my breathing. The principle cemented by that Szechuan pepper a decade earlier became the rallying cry for a broader life philosophy in my late teens. I still remember the look of betrayal my father gave me as I took a puff of his friend's offered Cuban cigar at age nineteen. Evidently, it hadn't occurred to him that "try anything once" might be taken farther than he had taken it.

This isn't to say that I had entirely missed the principles that counterbalanced my dad's experimentalism. I know perfectly well why he, unlike most of his family, didn't smoke, why he refused to join his school football team or was glad to avoid the Vietnam draft. The message that there was a difference between bravery and stupidity came through loud and clear. In college I didn't shy away from trying cigarettes, but I made certain that I would never become addicted to them. I won't ever touch heroin or meth, but it's not because my experimental drive doesn't implore me to try them, it's because they entail unacceptable risk.

Somewhere along the line, my "try anything once" philosophy was augmented by a corollary-- the fact that many tastes need to be acquired necessitates trying some things more than once. I think of this as the "Pixies principle" because it took me many times hearing the Pixies before I started to like them, but they ultimately became one of my favorite bands. It could just as easily be called the "Big Star principle", the "beer principle" or the "scary movie month principle". In all cases, demanding that something be immediately gratifying would have denied me great joy. Patience and an open mind eventually paid dividends.

This principle implies its own corollary, though. You can't appreciate many things unless you approach them with the right attitude, so this principle also necessitates an amount of self-policing. Do you genuinely want to like something? Do you possibly dislike something because you want to dislike it for outside reasons? I mean, how could any hipster honestly say that they don't like Nirvana? Every American our age has been sufficiently exposed to Nirvana, those with a taste for indie and alternative rock styles like the sound, and Nirvana is patently awesome. The best explanation for indie hipsters who claim they don't like Nirvana is that they don't like Nirvana because they don't want to like Nirvana. It's a terrible tragedy for somebody to not appreciate Nirvana, so we must fight this mind-over-matter selectivity in ourselves. Thus we have the "Nirvana principle".

Two of my best friends don't like things for transparently mental reasons. The first, a nonpracticing Jew, hates the smell and taste of pork. The second, an ex-Mormon, hates the smell and taste of coffee. These are intelligent, thoughtful people, but I have never met a single person who disliked pork free of religious or near-religious (aka vegetarian) motives. This is a depiction of the mind's potent effect on our perception of smell and flavor, akin to how a person can't stand the smell of a liquor they overindulged in the night before. When, the day after a night of lots of beer and puking, beer smelled like vomit, I said to myself, "don't be a bitch" and I finished the beer I'd opened in spite of my revulsion. By the next day I could enjoy beer again because I had refused to be slave to my own mind.

I've found that the best way to deal with the open-endedness of the Nirvana principle is to assume that deep down everyone's the same. Of course, we're not the same. To what extent is up for debate, but at the very least we know that some people have or lack specific taste receptor genes. Broccoli tastes qualitatively more heinous to some people than to other people. Some men are wired to be exclusively attracted to men instead of to women, etc. I think that's where our fundamental differences end. I think that, unlike taste receptors, our brains are complex enough that we have the capacity in us to enjoy just about anything. If somebody else can enjoy something, so can I. At the very least, common humanity is a worthy assumption.

But where do I draw the line? Am I obligated to like everything or to die trying to like everything? Well, no. It is a legitimate question, though, and one without a perfect answer. The way we should choose what to try to like lies in practicality. Because my musical enculturation was grounded in classic rock and classical music, it is easier for me to acquire a taste for, say, new wave than for reggae. Assuming that I will derive the same joy from new wave as reggae, it is simply practical to choose the easiest one to acquire. I am also more likely to find friends eager to talk about new wave music, which is again a purely practical consideration.

I'm not arguing that obstacles to appreciating things do not exist, but that such obstacles are quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, that the question isn't whether or not it is possible to overcome an obstacle, but rather how much effort and time are required to overcome something. What I disagree with is the defeatism of "this is just how I am" and "I can't change who I am". Tastes may define a person's persona, but they do not define one's personality. Personality is a far more slippery quality.

For both vanity and personal-compatibility reasons I prefer confident women unafraid to speak their minds. For natural reasons I prefer more attractive women, but nature does not specify what kind of beauty I should like. Most of my preferences for women's appearance, other than attractiveness, exist because they correlate with personal compatibility. I'm more likely to get along with a girl who typically wears little-or-no makeup than one who wears a lot. I'm more likely to enjoy the company of a girl who wears sensible, fashionable clothes than one who wears either tacky or markedly conservative garb. These sorts of judgements are ideally where my prejudice ends, however, because I have a vested interest in considering the maximum range of women for romance. I can be picky later. Sometimes the process of determining my taste involves thoughtful self-analysis. I can acquire a taste for a "type" of woman if I want to and I generally want to if I think it will increase my range of options without significantly decreasing the quality of my options in terms of likelihood for personal compatibility.

Once you realize how very much control you have over your own tastes, you can consciously broaden your tastes to suit your needs. The way to find out to what degree you can is to try. Try not just with your physical actions, but with your mind and soul. Have a little faith in me and a little faith in your common humanity. Remember, there is no specific taste receptor for pork.

It is to my abiding shame that I cannot like raw tomato, but I am proud of having shame for a shortcoming of taste. I suspect it's a result of some rogue taste receptor gene of mine, but I cannot be sure, and every year or so still, I try a bite of good, raw tomato. I haven't yet been able to enjoy it, but I lose nothing in trying it.

All of this is to say, don't be picky. Don't be a slave to your mind, because you can like whatever you set your mind to like (except maybe broccoli or tomato). As important as it is to know your own limitations, it is also important to search out and eliminate false limitations. Open yourself up to the world as much as you can stand and do your best to appreciate it in all its glory. You will be rewarded. This, I promise you.

And when you're eating at a restaurant with me and I ask for a bite of your meal, say yes. Please also ask for a taste of mine. We can discuss our food. It will make me happy.

The Coca-Cola Fiend

Back in the 80's, Coca-Cola tried to change their formula to so-called "New Coke", the fallout of which is why, until the last couple of years, cans of coke were labeled "Coca-Cola Classic". The rather compelling story of "New Coke" can be found on Wikipedia (of all the unlikely places to find a compellingly-written story).

I have said previously on this blog that Coca-Cola is awesome and I am here to say it again. Coca-Cola is fucking awesome. I'd like to elaborate on that starting premise.

Coca-Cola, as declared by a paper airline napkin, is "zesty and refreshing on the first sip and full and rich on the last". It has an impenetrable depth of flavor that, far from being intimidating, tastes easy and approachable even as it dares you to bury yourself in it's complexity. It complements most food and liquor remarkably well (my favorite pairing being with Chinese food). It has mild medicinal effects. In short, Coke is everything I believe a beverage should be.

My fascination with Coca-Cola led me to discover that different countries have been permitted to tweak the original formula for local tastes. Despite Andy Warhol's rather inspiring quote, not all cokes are created equal. The Apple House tasting team had one of its more epic sessions comparing cokes from the US, Mexico ("Mexicoke"), France and Spain. I must be getting spoiled by all of the options available to me as a resident of a major US city, because I think there really should be a store/soda bar somewhere in San Francisco that sells Coca-Colas from every country that coke is bottled in.

I'd also love to be able to taste older formulations of Coca-Cola, particularly the very earliest incarnations that still contained modest quantities of cocaine. In fact, crazy as it may sound, I would like to see that oldest formula reintroduced. At low concentrations, there's no reason that such a soda would be particularly dangerous or addictive. Coca-leaf tea is still consumed all over the Andes without causing problems. It is treated like coffee is treated here-- as a mild stimulant to power people through the working day. Of course, I expect that this retro coke would have considerably more kick than the current formula.

Flavor-wise, coke holds up well against craft sodas, though there is a key difference in approach. Like a good second-day gumbo (gumbo is always better the second day), Coca-Cola's flavors are married such that the individual ingredients cannot be parsed out. This is ideal for easy drinking and culinary harmony, but it plays poorly with gourmets who've been taught to pick out flavor notes, as with wine. Excellent craft sodas like Virgil's Rootbeer and Red Bull's Cola make their concoctions' individual components as clear as possible in the tasting. To sip one of these sodas is to take a tour of the ingredients proudly labeled on the back of the container: nutmeg, cinnamon, anise, clove, cardamom, cassis oil, etc. While purported ingredients for Coca-Cola's famously secret recipes are similarly complex and exotic (neroli oil, anyone?), the difference is one of taste rather than of quality. Coca-Cola produces a more harmonious soda while the best craft soda makers sacrifice harmony for a more explicit complexity. With the notable exception of Coke's choice of sweetener, there are no culinary grounds to fault or marginalize the quality of Coke as a world-class soda. Anyone who has, as I have, made a point to compare every available cola must inevitably recognize the resounding excellence of Coca-Cola.

Oh The Humanity: Regarding Foie Gras

I saw this banner on Facebook:

"Humane Foie Gras?

aldf.org

If you have purchased Foie Gras, believing it was humanely raised, we want to hear from you. Contact the Animal Legal Defense Fund."

I figured it merited a reply.
Dear Animal Legal Defense Fund,
I have bought Foie Gras with the knowledge that the poultry I am eating represents some of the most humanely raised meat available for purchase in the United States. I have seen the videos of geese eagerly lining up for their feeding and the idyllic living circumstances of high dollar French foie gras geese. These birds are not suffering. To assert that they are suffering amidst a backdrop of the breathtakingly inhumane treatment of the average American chicken is so absurd as to be motivationally suspect. Does any of your funding come from the poultry industry?

Sincerely,
Max


Dear Mr. Vidrine,
Thank you for your email. I appreciate your interest in animal welfare. I would be very interested in speaking with you further about this issue. Would you be available to speak by phone in the next week, and if so, when would be a good time?

Meanwhile, I will explain briefly Animal Legal Defense Fund’s position on foie gras:

While the video featuring Mr. Bourdain suggests that the conditions in force-fed foie gras farming are humane, it appears that it shows only the early stages of the force-feeding process. Our research has shown that ducks in the mid and late stages suffer serious health consequences as a result of the high-calorie, nutritionally deficient diet they are fed. Aside from the risk of injury to the esophagus from repeated insertion of the feeding tube, ducks develop lameness, bone and skin disorders, respiratory problems, and an inability to groom properly as a result of obesity. Some ducks, unable to walk, attempt to push themselves around their pens with their wings, causing themselves injury. In some cases the excess food leads to aspiration pneumonia. Many ducks develop painful foot infections due to the combination of their increased weight and the wire-mesh flooring of their pens. Finally, the accumulation of fat in the liver interferes with liver function. Many ducks slaughtered for foie gras would otherwise die of liver failure or other conditions brought on by the force-feeding. Based on this information, we do not believe that this production is humane.

You can find more information in an EU study of foie gras production and in a report by the Humane Society of the United States.

Although it is true that some ducks naturally gorge in preparation for migration, the amount of food that is force-fed to ducks in foie gras operations is well beyond what a duck would normally ingest, even while gorging.

Finally, I assure you that Animal Legal Defense Fund does not accept funding from any industry that exploits animals. We are fully in agreement with you that the treatment of chickens in factory farms is unacceptable and inhumane. Addressing those conditions is one of our aims as an organization. The attention we give to foie gras is in no way meant to express an endorsement of other forms of factory farming.

Sincerely,
Michelle Lee


Dear Ms. Lee
After perusing the literature you linked, it seems clear that foie gras production has been subject to considerable rationalization in the last 20-30 years and that it is no longer as uniformly idyllic as my father and Anthony Bourdain would present it.

That said, most of the health consequences you mentioned refer back to the ducks/geese being made extremely fat. I'm afraid I do not find the existence of such health problems troubling. This is because of two things, the first being that fatness is the point of force feeding and the second being that these animals only live in such an extremely fat state for a relatively short period of time before they go to slaughter.

Frankly, as a foodie, being indulged to the brink of death doesn't sound so bad. Furthermore, however rationalized most foie gras production now is, the fact remains that the poultry involved are substantially better off than mainline poultry on factory farms. Also important is the fact that foie gras ducks/geese represent a tiny, delicious minority of all poultry produced and consumed.

Now apart from the humane-ness or inhumane-ness, I dislike foie gras restriction as a political issue. It sits, along with curtailing deer hunting (deer are overpopulating throughout the US without natural predation from wolves), as one of the most misguided routes attempted in the name of animal rights. Don't get me wrong, I understand why it is brought up as an issue: it is both moralist and populist without actually affecting the welfare of poultry in any significant way. It makes activists feel like they are accomplishing something without incurring the wrath of business-conscious conservatives. Imported luxury goods are always an easy political target to raise a rabble with.

Unfortunately, this does nothing to address the very real problem of inhumane living conditions for chickens and other factory-farmed poultry. It wastes political capital on eliminating one of the handful of reasonably ethical segments of the poultry industry. It discourages people like me who eat meat, but would like to see meat not produced in a living poultry hell. It is a slap in the face to gourmets (who, generally speaking, do care about how their food is treated). It discredits animal rights as a movement by giving emphasis to its bleeding heart, little picture, meat-is-murder contingent.

I'm glad your organization receives no money from the poultry industry, but I hope you understand my distaste for foie gras as an animal rights issue. Thank you for bringing me to a better understanding of how foie gras is actually produced.

Regards,
Max Vidrine

Between you and me, I lied about having bought foie gras. I've only eaten it, but now I'm super hungry for some. If only I weren't so poor...

Transmissions from Acadiana

Hey Mom,
I'm fine. Louisiana is nice, I think. I'm mostly staying with Memeem (my grandma), which is going pretty well. I'm enduring her micromanaging and in turn she's been super sweet. Uncle Pierre is a peach. Most of the fun I've had here, I can chalk up to him. Chris (my cousin) has gotten old enough that he's interesting to talk to. I'm totally at peace with the weather, but not the mosquitoes. The food is alternately amazing and, y'know, Memeem's frozen tidbits reheated plus pickled carrots.

I've been going to church with Pierre's family, which makes me a little nostalgic for when we used to go (how much should I give at collections? $5?). The actual work of putting together the family's land records is tedious and organizationally challenging, but it's kind of fascinating to dredge up all the family history.

So that's how I've been doing,
Max


Some anecdotes from my time here:

We shot an alligator that was in our lake. It took a few tries, but the third shot was "Swamp People good" and killed it dead. Unfortunately we fumbled on the collection and the alligator sank like a stone. So, no alligator steak for us.

We cooked half a pig in what is called a "Cajun microwave" (large metal box with coals on top that cooks by radiative heating). I will never forget the image of my uncle Jacques stepping out from under the roof into light drizzle, looking skyward as he very slowly chewed some morsel of pig, an expression of perfect ecstasy written across his face.

I drive my late grandpa's Lincoln town car (executive edition). Yes, I feel like a bad ass.

I listened in on a detailed discussion of how pretty much all animals taste good.

Instead of enduring the heat and humidity, I've mostly been enduring the arctic winter of Louisiana air conditioning. There is no reason for the thermostat to be set at sixty-five, guys.

We picked up some box lunches from a gas station mart that tasted better than any "Cajun" food you can find in California. It's roughly the equivalent of going to a taqueria in SoCal. Pork, beans and (dirty) rice.

Everybody is warm and friendly and knows how to have a good time. The parties are all-ages and always a blast.

We had a discussion of how some people in a small subdivision were angry at a black guy for moving in because it would lower their property values.

The clerk of court's office charges $1 per page of legal documents you print out and I've been printing hundreds of pages at a time, but nobody is going to count the pages for you or second-guess how many pages you say you printed. It would be called the honor system if it needed a name here. Have I mentioned that Ville Platte is a small town?

On Macrobrews

In the vocabulary of beer snobs, "macrobrew" is a dirty word. It's shorthand for beers brewed on a massive industrial scale, made with adjuncts (corn and rice) to reduce costs and lighten flavor. Well, mostly just to lighten flavor, but wouldn't cost-cutting make a better story? The style is an American invention that came about between the post-prohibition era and WWII, and befitting its American origins, practically every country in the world's national bestselling beer is made in the style.

The style I'm referring to is also called American Adjunct Lager or American Light Lager. A lot is made of the style's "refreshing light flavor" or, alternatively, it's complete lack of flavor. I'm in the former camp. Not without reservations, mind you, but there's a lot to be said for macrobrews. They're the most flexible food beer I know (anything from curry to fried chicken), crisp and quenching on a hot day and extremely sessionable, which is to say that you can drink a lot of beers without getting sick of them (or too drunk).

Now before you rush off to buy a thirty pack of the first macrobrew you find, I'll give you a rundown on the available brands:

Keystone Light and Natural Ice - These beers fall into a subclass of the American Light Lager family denoted "subpremium" (aka frat beer). This is the beer you shotgunned or beer-bonged or keg-stood in college. While the nature of the brewing business means that ingredients cost little enough that "premium" macrobrews don't really skimp on quality, subpremium macrobrews cut every corner available, including taste. Thumbs-Down.

The rest of the beers reviewed qualify as either premium or superpremium beers. None of them have noticeable off-flavors, which is not to be discounted when brewing a beer with such slight flavor. In the words of my beer professor, you could hide an elephant in the flavor profile of most Stouts or IPA's.

Budweiser - The best-selling beer in the world, Budweiser is the poster boy for the macrobrewed American Adjunct Lager. Budweiser is the biggest buyer of rice in the US, but you can't really taste rice in the flavor profile. In fact, the most distinct thing about Budweiser is that you can't grab onto any particular flavor at all, except maybe a soft sweetness and high carbonation relative to its peers. I can't say I'm a fan of Bud. I find it overcarbonated, uninteresting and I have no affection for the relative sweetness. Thumbs-Down.

Miller High Life - High Life turned out to be the closest thing I've found to what I was expecting Budweiser beer to be-- a light, rice-driven macro with a perfectly clean taste. By "clean taste" I mean that like Bud, there are no specific flavors to latch onto. Unlike Bud, however, it lacks noticeable sweetness or excessive carbonation. I can't say this is a beer I drink a lot of, but purely on the merit of fully realizing the clean, light and balanced archetype, I give this beer a thumbs-up.

Miller Genuine Draft - Miller's Genuine Draft stands in opposition to High Life. This is a relatively strong-tasting macrobrew with notes of rice and especially corn on top of an overall barley flavor. This is among the most engaging and least clean of the macrobrews and among my most-drunk beers. Thumbs-up.

Coors - While an advertising campaign based on their beer's "coldness" hasn't done anything to curry my favor, Coors is a solid beer with a light, clean corn taste. I'm afraid, however, that it doesn't fill a niche that I have much use for. This gets a thumbs-sideways.

Pabst Blue Ribbon - This is another rice-driven macro, but in contrast to High Life and Bud, there's a pronounced rice flavor to this beer. It's clean-tasting, but has subtleties lurking in the corners. I've said before on this blog that I thought there was a note of apples and potentially metal in this beer. I think it's rather fitting that this became the beer of "the scene". Strangely enough, it was also the beer of choice of our working class neighbors at the Kingston Apartments. I almost always buy it when the 12-packs go on sale. Thumbs-Up.

Michelob Ultra - Very clean and very light. High Life is a little asymmetric and overcarbonated by comparison, which is drawing a pretty fine line because High Life is pretty darn balanced. I'll give this a thumbs-up and let you decide whether or not you're willing to foot the rather high price.

Rolling Rock - Tastes like peanuts. Otherwise pretty boring and overpriced. Thumbs-down in general, but thumbs-sideways if you want a beer that tastes like peanuts (Thai food, anyone?).

Moosehead - Usually skunked. Otherwise boring and overpriced. Thumbs-Down.

Tecate - Tastes remarkably like MGD. It too is full of corniness and grain flavor. My preference for this over MGD could easily be psychosomatic. For all the fuss they make over this being imported, the fact doesn't seem to interfere with the pricing or the taste, which fits in easily with the American cadre of macros. Thumbs-Up.

Heineken and Becks - I haven't drunk a lot of these beers, but what I've had has left me unimpressed. There's nothing about these beers that makes them better than their domestic cousins, nor anything that justifies their inflated cost. In fact, because of the green glass bottles and extended shipping time, these beers are more likely to be skunked. If it weren't for the skunking or extraordinary price, I'd consider these beers more carefully, but as it is, they get a definite thumbs-down.

The following two beers don't quite fit the Adjunct Lager category, but this is probably the best place to talk about them.

Corona - This is a clean, astringent beer with a slight zestiness (from the hops?). Frankly, I don't think it's worth drinking without lime, particularly in light of its decidedly "imported" price range. It makes a great canvas for a study of lime flavor, though. The astringency, which is a borderline off-taste on its own, melds beautifully with the citrus. Naturally, key limes are even better in it. Thumbs-up as long as there's a lime wedge involved.

Pacifico - Has a similar clean-astringent profile to Corona, but with a more filled-out malt background. This is a beer that's great on its own and very flexible. It would also be great with lime, but its even better with food. This is my favorite Mexican beer. Thumbs-Up.

EDITS: Check out this interesting article on the same subject. I agree with the descriptions pretty well, but stick to my ratings in cases where we differ.

Trader Joe's brands both get my vehement thumbs-down. They have some great other beers, but Name Tag and Simpler Times are impressively bad.

Olympia is flavorful, a little fruity, and I think it totally works. Thumbs-up.

The Basil Borbeto

I was making mojitos after harvesting Jill's garden with her. I'd used up all my white sugar making a blackberry pie and I was taking advantage of the basil we'd just harvested for the mojitos. I decided to kill the last drops in a handle of bourbon by making a whiskey version for myself. Jack tasted it, exclaimed his love of it "and I don't even like alcohol". He came up with the name you see as the title. So there you go, the Basil Borbeto:

1 Slice of Lime
1 Tbsp Brown Sugar
A few leaves Basil
Ice Cubes
1 Shot Bourbon

Muddle the lime, sugar and basil, then throw the ice and bourbon in and mix. It's kind of like a Mint Julep.

Berkeley and The Lost Coast

I visited Caius for his graduation ceremony and to go on a backpacking trip in the Lost Coast.

I finally got to meet his friend Claire, who's about as cool as I could have imagined. Caius's parents took us out to a delicious dinner and then we went home to Caius's coop and watched Carl Sagan, which was a campy trip. Saturday I had more interesting, thoughtful conversations in one day than I typically have in a month. I could probably write a handful of posts from what I discussed that day alone.

Caius's commencement that morning would have been pretty boring if not for his friend David, who I sat with. We chatted with his family afterwards at the reception. His graduation was extra special for the fact that Caius had dropped out of school for a year with no plans to return. Evidently his dad had promised to quit smoking if Caius ever graduated. Here's wishing him good luck.

That afternoon Caius and I took a nap and did yoga on his coop's roof. We checked out the "free pile" in the basement. We played dress-up for awhile, Caius picked out a shirt and I found a messenger bag in new condition. We also ate greek yogurt with honey in a broken, tilted couch hung outdoors on a rope that was reminiscent of a Dali painting. Caius and Claire and I had indian food for dinner accompanied by an intense discussion about the philosophical contrast between Pilsner and IPA. That night I chatted with Claire for a while and was *gasp* impressed by Stone IPA, which I guess has been due for another chance (John Lazur has called it his favorite beer). I got to meet another longtime friend of Caius's while we packed for our trip.

We left the next morning for the Lost Coast. We stopped along the way at a secret hot spring that's only accessible at low tide. About 500 feet down an incredibly steep bluff later we arrived to find about 35 mostly naked people crammed into the area of two VW bugs. I teetered a little, but I couldn't really imagine letting the opportunity slide, so I squeezed myself in. The spring had been dug out by hand and every day after high tide someone would siphon the cold seawater out. The temperature was perfect and everyone was friendly (you have to be when you're packed bare cheek to bare cheek). To top it off, an old guy passed out chocolate and strawberries to everyone.

The Lost Coast is breathtakingly beautiful. Most of the pictures I've found online were taken when it's sunny, but when we arrived at Shelter Cove, the mountains were wreathed in marine layer. The black sand in the cliffs and on the beach contrasted sharply with the deep green of the mountains. The pictures are courtesy of Caius's friend Kaija and you can find the rest of her photos from our trip here.


The vegetation ranged from fennel and cow parsley in the canyon openings to pine trees, ceanothus and manzanita up into the mountains. I've also never seen so much poison oak in one place. Poison oak was the one common denominator between all of the plant communities we passed through, from ridge-line chaparral to sand dunes. I got pretty good at dancing between branches with my frame-pack.

We were thirteen people, mostly from Caius's coop, Loth. All the food would be vegetarian, and the trip organizers had brought such luxuries as soy milk, broccoli and kale. I should note that every meal we had was incredibly delicious, partly because of the nature of backpacking, but partly because the food was excellent. No matter how crazy it was to bring something like kale or to forgo nutritious meat, our diet ended up being a lot closer to my at-home diet than my dad's summer sausage, nuts and dehydrated mashed potatoes. Also, despite my fears about all of the water and non-calories we were taking up, my pack weight was never enough to bother me much. I had much more trouble with the rocks and sand on the beach.

We camped the first night in Shelter Cove, not too far from our cars. We woke up to the sound of raindrops on our tents. That kind of set the tone for the day. We packed up and started walking down the beach. We found washed-up dead sea animals of enormous size, including an almost-fresh sting ray, two octupus, two chitons, a bunch of starfish and what looked like the remains of a grouper. The ten miles of beach that we planned on crossing that day were impassable at high tides, so we shivered for a couple of hours at a canyon opening for lunch while the wind did it's best to blow rain under our tarp and the tarp into the sky.

Lesson learned #1: It rains a lot in the Lost Coast.
Lesson learned #2: Waterproofed nylon isn't waterproof.


By the time we rolled into camp that night, everything I owned had been soaked through with rain. Actually, one thing was dry. A pair of socks I'd stuffed into my upside down camp cup was the only dry fabric I owned. Words cannot express my joy at finding those socks, which possibly illustrates how thoroughly demoralized we were by the end of that day. We huddled under our tarp, cooked and changed our clothes for any marginally drier ones we might have. Soon we shivered off to our tents and into our damp sleeping bags.

The next morning was cloudy and dewy, but the rain had finally stopped. We hung our clothes on trees that morning in hopes that they might dry, to little effect. Once we got walking, the dew on the grass quickly soaked my already wet sneakers to the point of squelching. We hiked up the canyon and forded the stream a couple of times. Thanks to my coop companions' liberal attitude towards nudity I managed to cross both fords without getting my clothes any wetter than they already were.

The next three miles were about the steepest switchbacks I've ever seen. You had to go slowly so your feet wouldn't slide back. I passed the time with a conversation about agribusiness and human rights (my answer was no, neither food nor technologically advanced seeds are or should be basic human rights).



That night the sky was clear and we crowded around the fire to dry our clothes by. It was pretty cool watching sleeping bags, shoes, socks and shirts all steaming away. A few of us decided to sleep on the ridgeline under the stars (who's perfect glory was only marred by my lack of glasses).


When I woke up, the sky had turned the faintest gray. I wondered if oncoming dawn had already obscured the stars or if those were clouds I was looking up at. A raindrop on the face answered my question. I yelled, "Wake up, guys, it's raining!". We hurried to pack our sleeping bags and scurried down the hill as the drops quickened and thickened. Soon we were in tents and fast asleep again.

By the time we woke up, things had progressed into a steady downpour. The hollow we'd camped in was slowly turning into a pond. We divided up our food for two groups: the one that would continue across the mountains to where we'd parked our cars (including Caius) and the group that had to turn back to get home for things (including myself and three others). Two long Caius-hugs later and the four of us were marching down the ridgeline against driving rain and gales that threatened to throw us off the ridge. Once again I felt the familiar sensation of my rain-jacket hemorrhaging water into my clothes beneath. The four of us tore down that hill at a near-run (quite a feat considering the precipitous angle).

We arrived at our first camp in the early afternoon. By that time, the rain had stopped and our clothes were just starting to dry, though both I and another had slipped in the increased river flow at the fords. Our goal was to camp in a canyon about four miles from where our cars were parked, but we were making such good time we'd started daring to hope we might make it to our beds by late that night. The tide forced us to break for dinner, but the sun came out while we were cooking, for the first time since our trip had started. It was amazing how quickly clothes dried under actual sunlight. The latitude pushed nightfall back almost an hour, but we still had nine miles of cobblestone and sand to cross.

The canyon opening we'd planned on camping in looked like something from a fantasy book in the twilight of sunset. We sat there awhile while the other Eagle Scout on the trip filtered fresh water. The trees arched over the stream to create a tunnel into the increasing darkness of the canyon, while the mist from the waves gave everything a hazy sort of aura about it.

As I think you might already suspect, we ultimately agreed to make our bid for home that night. I was pretty eager considering that my right ankle had settled into constant pain from all the abuse I'd heaped on it through the trip. I passed the time and pain of the final stretch again in discussion with postmodern socialists. By the time it was properly dark we'd finished with cobblestones and the moon had come out, so we never needed flashlights. The last couple of streams were too dark and too wide to completely jump, but we didn't really care because we knew we'd be able to take off our shoes soon enough.

A whirlwind of a car ride later and I was in Davis just before dawn broke. I took a long shower and curled into the warm bed I'd dreamed about all week.

Sazerac Lemonade

Life has recently thrown me a lot of lemons-- literally. When I went home for spring break I did a bunch of yardwork for my dad and he's been using his tree's Meyer lemons to make lemonade. He wasn't doing anything special, he was just mashing a Meyer into his crystal light to give it some sparkle.

I ended up taking a bunch of lemons home to Davis. Howard brought some regular but ginormous lemons back too and we conducted a bit of a trade. Thus, a couple of nights ago I decided to make some lemonade of my own. I'd been thinking about the flavors for awhile and here's the recipe I came up with.

1 Regular Lemon (sliced across the segments)
Sugar to taste
Water
1 capful Pastis (or other anise-based liquor)
3 dashes Angostura Bitters

Muddle the lemon with the sugar in a measuring cup, adding sugar until the balance is about right. Strain out resulting juice into your iced glass, add water to the measuring cup and repeat until the strained lemonade is the right concentration. Balancing sugar, lemon and water can be tricky. I added some commercial lemonade to even things out. If you're going to be drinking this while doing heavy physical labor, add a pinch of salt. Once you've added the Pastis and bitters it is ready to drink.

I love the Meyer lemon, but its warmth and richness doesn't lend itself to the quenching nature of lemonade. Pastis is watered down and sweetened in France as a refreshing summer drink of its own, but I think Pastis is better suited to a supporting role in drinks. That anise comes across pretty strong. Adding bitters to lemonade is nothing new, but I think it provides the accent needed to make the anise work.

You can tell this recipe owes more to my mixology background than a Betty Crocker cookbook. The ingredient list actually bears considerable resemblance to the Sazerac Cocktail. I'm counting this among my drink posts, but the alcohol content is negligible. For those of you who may be disappointed by that, I recommend dolloping in some whiskey. Bourbon would be classic and Rye wouldn't do badly either.

What's Wrong With IPA's?

As a fledgling beer snob with a vendetta against the most popular style of microbrew, I get the question a lot: What's wrong with IPA's? The short answer is that they're pretentious and undrinkable. Now, if you're an IPA fan, you've heard that before. A non-beer drinker could say that.

IPA's are the product of a "logical extreme" paradigm that is uniquely American. You've heard Texans boast that "everything's big in Texas". Well, Texans are just Americans with less class than the rest of the country. The conceit is shared by us all. We want everything to be more intense, more "real".

Have you ever compared British candy to American candy? British candy is weak. It hardly even fries your taste buds. Eating British candy could put me to sleep. Who ever heard of milk chocolate that actually tastes like milk? The British, that's who. Try skipping soda and candy for a month and then having a Coke. It's like you've never tasted anything properly your whole life. It's like a nuclear explosion in your mouth. Without conditioning your taste buds will burn from the intensity of Coca-Cola. And that's just Coke. That's the saleable aspect of American culture.

The story of American food is a story of one-upmanship. You think fried chicken is unhealthy? Try fried cornbread (aka hushpuppies). And if you think soaking something porous in grease and then cooking it in batter just isn't enough, try fried twinkies.

We've applied this "bigger, better, more extreme" philosophy to everything. Not the least of these is our alcoholic beverages. Because when we're pretentious, we like to be really pretentious. And the fact that we only half know how to be pretentious won't stop us (though I'd propose it's secretly one of our strengths).

When Sierra Nevada came out with its pale ale, it was one of the bitterest beers on the market. It has an IBU of 37. It was revelatory that a brewery could successfully market an overtly bitter beer. It was a slap in the face to mass scale breweries that kept hopping low to make their beers as innocuous and "drinkable" as possible. Bitterness, gravity and high alcohol became the standards borne by the American microbrew movement. Samuel Adams keeps breaking its own record for the world's most alcoholic beer (their Utopia has 27 ABV).

But any boorish lout can appreciate a beverage that will fuck him up. Ultimately, it was bitterness that became the ideological rallying cry of craft brewing. Just read any diatribe on the back of a Stone Brewery bottle. Bow down and worship at the feet of almighty Bitterness! It's true that hops have complex flavors that sparkle in interesting ways at high concentrations. Bitterness is both daunting and artistically redeeming. The drinker must be willing to suspend expectations of instant likeability and instead struggle with a flavor that confronts and baffles, ultimately to reward.

Of course, the equation Pain=Artistic Merit is so tired and postmodern as to make me sick, but it's not like there aren't legitimate precedents. John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is a rubbed-raw bender of an album. I myself prefer Nirvana's dark and twisted In Utero to their more pleasant Nevermind and the Velvet Underground's raucous anti-beauty White Light/White Heat to the radio-ready Loaded. Burn-out albums are a wonderful thing. However, they have a very defined and limited place in art. They aren't the sort of albums you'd listen to every day.

But the sense of self-righteous warfare against complacency, aspiring pretension and the mindless pursuit of logical extremes has elevated a beer as boneheaded and specialized as India Pale Ale to the top of craft brewing. Typical American IPA's (India Pale Ales) frequently have IBU's of 60 to 100 (100 is roughly the human taste threshold) and an ABV between 7 and 10. They are crushingly bitter and dangerously alcoholic. Make no mistake, this is a critics' beer. But this is about the most boneheaded critics' beer imaginable. Lots of flavor, lots of alcohol (but not enough to mess up the foam) and lots of malt. IPA's are absolutely interesting, but they ruin the palate and are almost impossible to drink.

This brings us to a cardinal rule of cuisine. Good food and drink ought to be appetizing and complementary. Expensive wine is imminently drinkable, because it tastes delicious and delicate. It is flexible enough to go well with many foods and while it doesn't shy from asserting its beauty, it can also play a beautiful supporting role. This is not the case with IPA's.

Anyone knowledgeable about beer pairings will tell you that IPA's go well with Indian food. That's because Indian cuisine is one of the few foods strong enough to not be overwhelmed by an IPA. However, the best beer to drink with Indian food is not an India Pale Ale (the word India actually has nothing to do with IPA being made for Indian food, btw), because IPA's march to their own tune and don't bother to try and complement anything. That Indian food had damn well better play along.

The best beers to drink with Indian food, I've discovered, are Indian lagers like Taj Mahal. This was my first and most powerful practical lesson to drink a country's beer with its cuisine. Indian lagers are dark, sweet, and vaguely floral. Rather than competing with curry to be the strongest taste, they play a support role, adding another, interacting layer of nuances and subtleties to an already complex curry.

So IPA's aren't food beers (because they're willful) and they aren't session beers (because they're difficult to drink). They are tasting beers, and nothing more. They fill a minor niche well and with panache, but their eminence in the world of American beer-snobbery is as unjustified as it is predictable.


As a sidenote, the two occasions I drank primarily IPA turned out very badly. Some people might think it's a good idea to order a keg of Racer 5 or consecutive pitchers of Arrogant Bastard. It's not. It's really, really not.

On Vegetarianism

I should warn you that I am a cold-hearted bastard and I would like to remove sentiment from all but my most personal interactions. The following was originally written as a response to Rob's post Tony the Tofurkey.


I am among those who asks each vegetarian I meet why they are vegetarian. There are many reasons, and some are more justifiable than others. It allows insight into the minds of people in addition to being fun to discuss.

It's true that most people couldn't kill a chicken set before them. I could do it, but I'd have a hard time. After all, I've never done it before and I've had chickens as pets. I interpret this reluctance as weakness, as disconnection from our roots. In times when food was less abundant, people had no moral quandaries about killing for food. Evolution and culture discouraged cannibalism but they couldn't deny the practicality of a nutrition-rich food source like animal flesh. I can't either and I have the additional concerns of cuisine. Chicken is delicious.

The apparent hypocrisy of a woman eating a hamburger with her precious dog in her lap troubled me for a time, but I've realized that the worth of anything is determined by our emotional attachment. I don't care much about far off murders or grandmas dying of cancer. I care about my grandma and my people. That other grandma is a statistic to me, as are far off murders. Those deaths represent tremendous loss to someone, but when diluted by perspective, how could I care? That's not my job. I will deal with my tragedies as they come and I will help those I know or meet with their tragedies.

That is to say the dog in her lap is worth more than enough to her to justify her protectiveness. Neither human life nor animal life has any intrinsic worth. It should be unsurprising that from a singular perspective different lives should merit different worth. The chicken on the farm is worth more dead than alive and thus we kill it, or pay for it to be killed.

I know I and everyone else is perfectly capable of slaughtering a nameless animal. Our grandparents were certainly capable, and I can find no fault in their actions. We just don't have opportunity or incentive to. I don't mind other people doing my dirty work for me, because I don't think it's "dirty work" in the pejorative sense. I will jump at the opportunity to kill an animal for food, with the greater motivation being intellectual curiosity and the second motivation being a desire to overcome my own resistance to what I am already comfortable with in theory.

Regarding the trophic level issue, first of all, chickens require 3 pounds of grain for one pound of meat or egg. That can be lower grade grain that we would not eat, which explains the fact that grain at the store can cost as much as chicken per pound. Furthermore, man can not subsist on bread alone, as we well know. Do you sincerely think that the hoops vegans jump through to meet their nutritional requirements are free? Do you still think it inefficient to eat some chicken with your rice? Furthermore, I thought it was widely known that human starvation is a problem of distribution and overpopulation, not supply. The food you don't eat will not magically find it's way to that starving child's hands.

Food Pairings: A Pauper's Pretension

I recently went morel hunting with the Davis Mycological Society in the low Sierra. After arriving home with my quarter pound take, I searched recipes to make with morels looking for an easy food pairing to create a meal for friends. To my disappointment, the reams of morel recipes that I found were uniformly built around college-unfriendly ingredients like foie gras, veal and caviar. The very idea that morels might fall into the hands of a pauper like myself seems to have escaped the folks at the Food Network and other recipe sites.

My haul:

The gourmet revels in the delicacy of outlandishly priced ingredient paired with still more outlandishly priced ingredient, but I was taught a different sort of gourmet; a gourmet more in keeping with American ideals. Brilliant food pairings are not limited to gourmet ingredients and establishments. Ratatouille is a peasant dish highly regarded by the culinary elite (notably in the movie of the same name), built around the synergy of bell peppers, squash and eggplant. So too with the Cajun "holy trinity" of peppers, parsley/celery and onions. That world-class food can only be had at world-class prices is a myth of gigantic proportions perpetrated by ignorance and pretension.

Great cuisine is simply about food combinations that sing. They are frequently as simple and ordinary as peanut butter and jelly or Santa's favorite midnight snack, milk and cookies. Too often do people forget that they need not look far to find grace and delight in food. I'd like to share with you some of my culinary discoveries that have brought me cheer through my college career.

While the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is already an American classic in its own right, there's nothing like washing it down with tea to add another dimension to your next noon banquet, as I discovered last summer. I particularly enjoyed "natural" peanut butter, apricot preserves and whole wheat bread with earl grey tea. I like that "natural" peanut butter doesn't have any sugar added and that whole wheat isn't overtly sweet in conjunction with the extra-sweetness found in preserves, because it emphasizes flavor separation. The apricot is brightened by the citrus oils in earl grey, and the tea complements the nuttiness and dryness of the peanuts and bread. If you normally freeze your bread, you'll find that toasting it also adds to the ensemble's flavor.

The single most important dish in my college diet has been potatoes with cheese. I take one large or two small russet potatoes, poke fork holes in them every inch, and nuke them 4-4.5 minutes one side and 2-2.5 on the reverse. I slice about 3 slots into them and insert slices of medium cheddar cheese (pregrated cheese won't smell as good or layer heavily enough). I add cheese until its about 2/3 the volume of the potato. I nuke it again until the cheese is gooey (about one minute). The dish goes great with beer. But beware, the combination has proven to be a powerful narcotic. This sort of lunch almost invariably ends with deciding to take a nap.

A classic meal passed down from my Wisconsin heritage is beer and bratwurst with rice and sauerkraut. I get my bratwurst from the Davis Meat Lab when I can, because it's great value. I brown the sausage in a pan for a couple of minutes, then add a can of beer. I check back to replace water and turn the sausage every fifteen minutes or so until they're cooked through. Ideally, I let the beer cook boil down to a thick goo and use it on the sausage and rice. That stuff is delicious. Serve it all with another beer. I've found light lagers to work best.

A snack I've enjoyed since I discovered prunes has been eating them with superdark chocolate. You can buy canisters of store brand prunes for cheap, and they have better flavor than the expensive ones you find at the farmer's market. You can find cheap superdark chocolate at Trader Joe's in packages called "Pound Plus". Seventy percent cocoa solids is the way to go. Just take a nibble of each and let the magic unfold.

I've also found that coke goes phenomenally with coffee. Pepsi Kona and Coca-Cola Blak are testaments to industry's awareness of the synergy, but both products failed to catch on in the US. I like to alternate sips of coffee with coke. Hot quenched by cold, bitter by sweet and vice versa. Their dark flavors meld beautifully.

Most recently, I discovered the wonder of anchovies on pizza. No frozen brands sell anchovy pizza, so I keep my cupboard stocked. The true wonder of anchovies is their interaction with pepperoni. The similar flavors expand on each other and set off the pizza at large.

The Beginning of Summer, The End of Spring

I caught a couple of deals on fruit this weekend at the grocery store that had the distinct whiff of summer.

Ever since my time at Albertsons, I've eagerly awaited the few weeks of early summer that raspberries are sold for under three dollars a pint. This was the first of those weeks and once more I reveled in the delicacy of my favorite of all fruits. I also bought some mangos on the cheap and made a mental note that strawberries have hit their bottom-out price of a dollar per pound.

Lastly and perhaps most significantly, cherries all over Davis have acquired the red hue that signals the conclusion of Spring Quarter. I took as many cherries as I could carry back from my Gardening, Orchards and Land field trip today, stuffing my belly, my pockets, my camera case, and my pant cuffs with the rosy jewels.

I associate this time with my homeland's May Gray/June Gloom, about a month of overcast weather that once signaled the end of school and the coming of summer. The end of school season has always had a grim psychological potency to it, but that's true now more than ever.

I graduate June 12th and a million pop culture sentiments about the mixed emotions that come with graduation swirl around in my mind (The Graduate cheif among them). I missed the application deadline for graduate school, so I've decided to find a lab tech job in Davis to support myself for the year and apply to grad schools this fall. I just resigned my lease on Saturday with my roommates. I picked up tickets for my family to attend commencement last Wednesday. I make a final presentation of my lab research next Friday. I wrote up my Curriculum Vitae on Tuesday.

Damn, graduation's scary. I need some cherries.

25 Facts About Max

Like so many things, my first reaction to the "25 Things" meme was haughty but after a few weeks continued exposure to people's various lists I came around. Without an obvious route to entertaining the audience I think writing about oneself is poor form. That may come as surprise considering my particularly intense self-love and the very fact that I write a blog. However, I feel that, properly done, blogs manage to entertain while simultaneously wallow in self-absorption. It's become apparent that "25 Things" share that quality. Thus, I present 25 Facts About Max:

1. I am didactic. I'm always explaining things to people whether or not they're curious, because if they aren't curious, they ought to be. I'm enriching their lives!

2. I am a critic. Like a movie critic, except of everything.

3. I love to argue. Or at least I have a hard time not instigating arguments and a hard time extricating myself from them. I enjoy the exchange of ideas and the friendly competition.

4. I love getting schooled in an argument. Of course I'm disconcerted at first, because that rarely happens, but it's nice to be reminded that I still have things to learn. Props to Aaron Robinson for schooling me in history this past October.

5. If I thought I had the talent my ideal job would be writing.

6. I'm so sick of hearing about and seeing Obama everywhere. Stop beating him to death! Nobody can hold up to these obscene expectations. He is not Jesus.

7. I bicycle everywhere and almost always take the stairs. This is motivated by impatience rather than by health or environmental considerations.

8. Apparently I have a bit of a lisp. I had no idea until this past summer when I was listening to a recording of my radio show and I mentioned to Brandon that it almost sounded like I had a lisp, and he was like, "Yeah, you do a little."

9. I'm an Eagle Scout. Everyone seems surprised to hear that one. Go figure...

10. I was taught to try anything once. I think my parents meant food, not everything. My dad was pretty disconcerted when I took a puff of his friend's cigar when offered, like I'd transgressed some bond of trust. I'm just extending the rule he taught me so well.

11. That said, addictive substances scare the crap out of me. It has only recently occurred to me that a coffee addiction might be a net positive.

12. I approach my life very analytically. I approach my politics very analytically. People tell me it comes off cold when I approach lifesaving legislation as a numbers game, who knew?

13. That said, I believe logic to be a flawed system. Socrates is a douche.

14. I am a moral relativist and do not believe that any principle is absolute.

15. I consider creativity to be a major component of intellect and I consider intellect to be the most important quality in a person.

16. I grew up in a household culture where we constantly made fun of eachother's quirks and flaws. I love people who can take that sort of abuse and I love still more those who can also dish it out.

17. In the early stages of my music obsession I sold my soul to allmusic.com for it's wisdom. Even now, you'll find my opinions of albums and artists to suspiciously mirror star ratings found on the site.



18. I'm fascinated by the androgyny of glam rock. I think it'd be totally badass to dress like the New York Dolls.

19. Four staples compose the majority of my calorie intake: frozen pizza, potatoes with cheese, chili with rice, and beer.

20. Freshman year I was named "honorary asian" by a group of asian kids on my floor, cause I was better with chopsticks and ate weirder stuff than they did. Later they revoked it, but it was for personal reasons. They just didn't like me anymore. Or maybe I sucked too much at Smash Bros...

21. I grew up helping my dad make wine, yet I prefer beer. Oh the shame. But wine is such a heavy drunk.

22. I own 31 vinyl LPs because it's trendy, but I don't even have a record player.

23. I think we are in the midst of the greatest golden age the world has ever seen.

24. The justification for every financial corner I cut (and I rarely buy required textbooks) is that I am saving up to travel.

25. My first kiss was within the last six months.

Odds and Ends of Summer's End

There's been a noticeable cooling recently. The days are getting shorter and the air is getting gusty. Peaches are finishing up and apples went on sale at Safeway this week. It's become painfully obvious that summer is coming to a close and, as much as I have enjoyed the season, I feel ready to embrace the hustle that characterizes fall quarter.

I'm retiring my radio show for the next quarter. I don't have any new bands to play and I won't have the time to find them. I will make a point, however, of cohosting a Halloween show and a Christmas show. After all, it's my last opportunity to do so and I've been dying to do a holiday broadcast. Last year the Christmas music started in October at our house.

I've been getting some extra exercise lately. I keep finding myself on course towards our old apartment. Two weeks in and my subconscious still hasn't managed to internalize that I don't live in the ghetto anymore.

Similarly tardy is our DSL. When Howard called AT&T on the thirtieth, they said it would take them a week and a half to process our request and turn on the internet. So when the internet didn't start working last Tuesday, I called them to find what was up. I was met with a labyrinth of automated questions and confusion on the part of the tech personnel. This process repeated itself the next night and on Thursday they said there's a technical problem and they'll send out someone to fix it on the twenty-fourth. With luck, we'll have internet inside of a month since requesting the switch...

This misadventure has highlighted the fact that the internet permeates every aspect of my life besides sleeping, showering and pooing. It isn't just me though. The world expects you to have use of the web. AT&T referred us to a website that explains how to get your internet working. Think about that for a second.

Without internet an astonishing array of things have gone by the wayside, not the least of which is this blog. I played catch up on the train home and I have a bunch of posts in the works, but I don't think I'll be able to sustain the rate of posting that I kept once classes kick in.

Davis Farmer's Market

Farmer's markets are a wonderful thing. My first encounter with them was in French villages and the piles of vegetables, homemade foie gras, massive rounds of cheese, gnarly hand-sculpted olive wood bowls and etched faces of French farmers added up to make an intimidating point of comparison.


I have attended American farmer's markets in Louisiana, Wisconsin and San Clemente and I am here to tell you that the Davis Farmer's Market is the one to see. There is always live music and a wide variety of stalls hosted by farmers, bakers and restaurateurs in the city's central park. A significant portion of the town attends and more come from Sacramento and other areas. Local politicians chat up constituents at the far end and families sit in the grass listening to music and playing in the fountain. It is among the town's most revered institutions and in the summer, of course, it is at its peak.


The produce prices range from fair to expensive, but there are always a few amazing deals to be had. Right now melons are in season and Saturday I found a stand selling ambrosia (like cantaloupe) and orange-flesh honeydew for a dollar apiece and the reddest watermelon you've ever seen for three. I got four peppers for another dollar and two bags of summer squash, paying a dollar for each. I decided to make ratatouille so I got some Japanese eggplant too. I sampled the peaches from a dozen stands before I bought the sweetest, juiciest ones and for a second time in a row, the best were at the last stand I tried. I have stopped buying finicky produce from grocery stores because there is nothing like free samples for quality control.