30.10.17

search for pleasure dome.

Well, your host is having some kind of pharmaceutical problem again that is only made marginally better by pushing a pleasure button, when he can manage to locate one. Believe you me we will be launching a Nostromo-like salvage mission to go in there and methodically detail the recovery process should there be one and maybe even learn something from it this time, but for now let's just thank our lucky lucky stars, shall we, for in a moment of true inspiration/desperation I have found/developed a super surprising, healthy-ass pleasure button. Check this shit out. I think it's "Southern food". Maybe it would need to be trout or catfish or catfish instead but you feel me.

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blackened salmon with kale and sauerkraut slaw + blue cheese and peanut.

4 x 125g salmon
2 1/2 tbsp paprika
3/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt

2 cups of shredded kale
1 cup fresh sauerkraut
2 scallions, diced
1/2 cucumber, sliced
3 tbsp cider  vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp Dijon mustard or piccalilli
1 or 2 tbsp agave syrup
I guesss you should probably put some mayonnaise in here, but we'll try it without

the necessary amount of blue cheese, crumbled
a handful of dry roasted peanuts

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21.10.17

romantic + vegan + food.























I actually Googled this the other day because nothing was immediately coming to mind. Oh I know romance isn't about the food it's about the beer, joking, but certainly we can all agree that there are foods that are more romantic than others, for example poor broccoli, jeez. Smoked mackerel. Turnip.

I think the dish in the photo above would satisfy just about anyone's ok I didn't realize this sentence was going to sound so half-assedly perverse if I started it that way. I'm trying to say this was a really good date night dinner. It is this carrot osso buco + these roasted garlic mashed potatoes + this rosemary gremolata (plus pine nuts). The gremolata would be good on just about anything. The carrot itself is sweet but has been braised in a broth of  red wine and mushroom powder for a long time and has totally absorbed those flavors. The potatoes are, well, garlic mashed potatoes. Vegan mods include oat milk and olive oil in the potatoes instead of milk and butter, and oh two strips of lemon zest in the carrots, which I guess is just a mod isn't it.

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19.10.17

bless your heart.























I have other things I should really be doing, but felt compelled to share. So I was out on TripAdvisor for a moment because tomorrow La Nelson is visiting Amsterdam, where I myself am for a few weeks visiting creatures like the above cuddly bundle of joy, and you know I just wanted to you know brush up on what's what here since I imagine I haven't had a restaurant meal in the city in a long while I think.

So I'm checking out some nearby places that are pretty unique to Amsterdam that I used to go to and I'm brainstorming a bit and whatnot and I think, oh yeah, wonder what ol' Japanese Pancake World is up to these days. Case you don't remember they serve okonomiyaki, a much-loved substance of this blog's earlier days, sometimes debatably referred to (is it wise to highlight a word your spellchecker disagrees with, wtf "debatably", that's a word you asshole) as the Japanese equivalent of pizza, not because it tastes anything like or has a single ingredient in common with pizza but because it's all over the place and comforting and commonly eaten late at night after drinking, like dude omfg I'm wasted i need a slice or something etc. In any event, it almost always contains seaweed and/or optionally, dried fish. It will definitely remind you of the ocean, which come to think of it is not even really La Nelson's bag in the first place so it probably shouldn't even be on the list in the first place.

MY POINT BEING: the second TripAdvisor review out there could almost be a troll/parody but I'm pretty sure it's not, the reviewer is from Atlanta after all where, bless their ignorant fucking Trump-voting little hearts, by and large they know absolutely fuck all about the rest of the world (thinking about, among many other things, last November's visit to L5P, where we met a lovely young man who was pretty sure Holland was in Norway or Denmark, despite our insistence to the contrary).

By the way sometimes you just have to love Urban Dictionary's succinct and vulgar accuracy, describing the so very Atlantan colloquialism of "bless his/her/their heart" as "(...) the most Southern 'fuck you' there is. Can be put at the end of a phrase to nullify any cruelty." I guess the trick to said nullification would be to not insert additional cruelty between the "bless" and "heart" portions of the euphemism. Ah well.

Anyway, TripAdvisor review. Here it is:
We went here because it was rated one of the top 5 pancake restaurants in Amsterdam. It's a nice little place, but the food was horrible. So bad neither of us could finish ours. First of all, the pancakes we got smelled like dried fish even though we did not order any seafood on our pancakes. This was very weird and unsettling. Second, the pancake was mushy, more like dough then a cooked pancake. They had way too much ginger on them. The flavors didn't meld. They were terrible. I lost my restaurant-choosing privileges after this meal. Avoid this place, the food is horrible. 
First of all, I have eaten these pancakes and they are 1) large and 2) not cheap. I would looooooved to have seen rob1270's face after he took his first bite, chewed like 1.5 times, maybe 2 times, and then slowly looked down at the enormous rest of the pancake he had on his plate.

And this is why not to have a restaurant. And this is why some people shouldn't leave the house. Thank you rob1270, that will be all: absolute shittiness of people and the diabolically cruel double-edged-swordness of the Internet that I helped give to everybody confirmed for the quadrillionth time this month.

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16.10.17

inspirrring?

In an effort to increase my dopamine levels, I'm looking at burger porn. Well that's not the whole story, I plan to be eating more protein and yeah just wandered off into the dangerous part of the internet where they have pictures of protein between two pieces of bread.

Well OK, it's just that after so much goddamn experimenting with trying to make a truly delicious veggie burger that felt decadent, I look at this list and I see one thing that compels me to make a note. Well two things. OK three: 1) cheese, 2) sauce, 3) onions.

Here's the list, good luck. And remind me to steal some ideas from Block 16. And Mott Street. After looking at this i just grabbed whatever and made a curry-rubbed steak burger with hoisin-aoili, pickled jalapeno, galangal creamed spinach.....just go mess with your forgotten Asian condiments.

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