search for pleasure dome 2.

I can't tell what's going on, but this is another kind of home run.

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salmon burger with hoisin mayo, miso butter, roasted sweet potato, cucumber pickles, jalapeno, peanut.

salmon

2 tsp hoisin
2 tbsp mayo
1 tbsp miso
2 tbsp butter
1 sweet potato, sliced like potato chip thin
grapeseed oil

cucumber pickles
pickled jalapenos
peanuts, chopped

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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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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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cue exposure.

Above: huh, I did in fact take a photo of the surprisingly good Szechuan peppercorn/chili oil tofu pancakes last Friday assembled by the lovely and talented KK (don't worry, this is not a photo of eating them: this is preparing them, they have yet to be fried at this point). The fridge still smells like kimchi by the way, which I guess could be a good thing, but yeah it's not.

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So, OK, that took a little longer than I wanted, but shit is done. There's really something perverse about the amount of pleasure I get from not doing "my job", but some of that fucking-off time was spent procuring tyrosine-rich foodstuffs for lunch: steak, avocado, green salsa. Chocolate with almond butter for dessert.

INTERESTING UPDATE: 7 hours later, I feel about 1000% better mentally than I did this morning. Tyrosine, or psychic coincidence?

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Things are getting a little scientific around here, and I apologize, but I'm just trying to make some better sense of everything. I'm going to retreat back to not-so-much-blogging tomorrow, because I've gots other fishes to fry yo and because blogging is part of my obsessive problem, yes, thank you, I know.

But in terms of self-education for non-studying times, there's this, and then I haven't really looked at it extensively, but this Seth Roberts-esque self-research blog has what seems to be a very relevant article on retraining your limbic brain.

And apparently there's a non-chemical-based cure for insomnia. Most believeable sentence: "One of the immediate benefits that patients note is the reduction of “anticipatory anxiety” — the time and concern spent worrying about what the night will bring. Many insomniacs see their bedroom as a prison or place of dread."

Totally true, my bed at night is a tOOOtal fucking place of dread, unless there's a squawking mooperbird in it. But then she has to be awake, otherwise it's back to the squawkless fucking dread.

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OK, back to studying.

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lucky number 13.

Above: I'm listening to a Dutch podcast which is all about cinema, and the episode I checked out last night was an interview with the director of the above film, 170 hz, for which I found the sound design kind of potentially interesting.

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So, sleepless or not, this is one of the few days so far that I have started out as intended, by doing all of the things normal people do at the beginning of the day: make the bed, take a shower, straighten up, etc. It has a certain appeal, I can see that even through my insomniac coma.

Thusly engorged with success, I'm going to now try what for me has become one of the hardest things there is: do one uninterrupted hour of efficient work without stopping to press my completely worn-out dopamine button via any of the tiny distractions that normally end up derailing me. OK here I go wish me luck.

It's 9:49am.

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OK, I did have this one important consideration that needed considering, and I'm wondering how helpful this would be, considering this.

And can someone get to the bottom of the current state of research on THC/dopamine interaction? Opinions seem to vary widely, but as far as I can tell any interaction seems to be related to behavior/limbic reward rather than actual cannabinoid/neurotransmitter shit.

It's 10:17am.

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summer's kiss.

Procrastination afoot. And thus, blogging afoot. But we are fighting valiantly against our baser instincts, mostly b/c we really do have things to be doing.

So, may I present some efficiently-delivered brief notes from the last week of eating:

1) Went to La Perla again, ordered the same food, it was just as good as the first time, kind of unsurprisingly, which was, yes, a surprise.

2) Went to the beach for the first time this year: it was pretty good except for the sunburn, a beach tradition in which I do not normally participate.

3) Surinamese food makes me so consistently happy that I'm forced to wonder why I don't make it more often. It's so reliable in terms of dopamine delivery.

The latest reminder was: a full take-out meal from Riaz on Bilderdijkstraat for the first time in years, and it was...above average. We didn't order a ton of food, but what we did order was interesting and distinctive. Service was friendly if a bit slow and exhausted-seeming, and the prices were pretty reasonable.

Pictured below is my herheri with bakkeljauw, herheri being a mild stew of ripe and unripe plantains, sweet potato, and cassava, enlivened by the presence of spicy salt cod, homemade pickles, and a sambal or two. Unique flavors, and the whole thing felt more healthy than not. We also tried the jarabaka, a kind of dryish catfish masala with rice (jarabaka = pangasius), also good if carefully straddling the too-salty line. Baras were fine but not as good as Hangalampoe, IMHO.

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steve the laser mouse.

Oh, look.

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Mara is cooking tonight, and this makes me happy...it feels like a long time since we've cooked dinner specifically for each other.

I was just reading something random this weekend about the process of deciding what's for dinner, and it made me realize that many, many food bloggers linger on this step when posting a recipe.

But why? Is it just like any other creative activity that you might document, so you give a little back story on your thought process? I don't know, I'm not so sure there's not more to it, something pleasure-related in the recounting of how you decided what to eat, that whole dopamine/anticipation thing. Research this, will you?

Regardless. Tonight we had fish defrosting and we wanted something comforting. To me, fish and comfort do not necessarily belong in the same sentence unless possibly it's a sentence about something other than food, but there's this one thing Mara makes that we both seemed to be gravitating towards: she does some kind of stuffed fish a couple of times a year, and it's always good, but we never write it down, so this is tonight's attempt. It contains the controversial fish and cheese combo, a controversy that I don't totally understand because they always seem to taste pretty darn good together. Maybe more cheese = more comfort.

I filed this under Southern Cooking because it reminds me of something you'd see in a Louisiana kitchen (kidding, more like this or this), maybe even a Louisianan Italian one, except they'd probably use cream cheese somewhere, and pecans instead of pine nuts, and scallions somewhere, and of course there'd have to be shrimp or crab in the stuffing or on top...all of which sounds pretty good.

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baked fish stuffed with spinach, pine nuts, and raisins. 

4 tbsp butter
4 fillets of catfish, tilapia, cod, etc.
a bag of fresh spinach, WASHED (ahem)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
3/4 cup or less pine nuts, toasted
3/4 cup or less raisins
1 tbsp Cajun seasoning (or substitute, say...cayenne, garlic powder, onion powder, and thyme)
1/4 cup or more Gouda, shredded
salt
pepper

Melt butter in small saucepan, add raisins, let sit, possibly transferring to a smaller bowl if butter does not cover raisins. Your goal is plump raisins.

Butter a baking dish. Saute spinach and garlic in oil with salt and pepper to taste. Add the butter-soaked raisins (reserving the butter), the cheese, and the pine nuts to the spinach. Stir to combine.

Roll the spinach mixture up in the fish fillets. Pour the reserved butter over the fillets and sprinkle with cajun seasoning. Bake for 20 minutes at 200C.

the hedonic value of sucrose.

Above: Lanskroon tabletop.

One of the things I've been missing over the past few weeks is what we 'mericans would call ketchup. In non-dieting life, I don't necessarily eat a lot of candy or dessert, but I do favor condiments from the sweet 'n' sour side of the tracks. I had been doing pretty well, but Week Three of Serious Dieting proved to be too much for my dopamine receptors and I went a bit sugar-mad. I ended up keeping it together, but it was tough work. Apparently I have my reasons.

So I'm working on a sugarfree ketchup. What I'm finding with stevia is that it's possible to minimize your disappointment with its non-sugary qualities if you's a crafty mother. I have some theories that involve acidity, tongue distraction, bitterness, and taste buds, but I need to see if someone else has written about them before I do any real work.

First batch of ketchup was tonight, a bit too spicy. More in a bit.

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spicy 'mater ketchup.

4 canned tomatoes

1/2 cup apple vinegar

1 onion

1 tsp garlic powder

tiny pinch cinnamon

tiny pinch allspice

tiny pinch cloves

some amount of stevia

some amount of Surinaamse x-hot sambal

salt

pepper

life in the fast lane.

AAAAAAAAAAAahahhhahahahahahahahahahahahhaha. Thank you, we're here all week. Seriously, get used to these fast puns, I'm going to try to keep them up for the next 10 days, assuming I still have enough energy to move my limbs once The Deprivation occurs...

OK, so I'm beginning my Top Ten Sucky Things About This Fast list as of about an hour ago. Not that I've got a bad attitude about this whole "no food for seven days" thing: au contraire, I'm actually looking forward to it quite a bit. Nevertheless I did have a moment this morning where I realized that it's not going to be a non-stop dopamine fest. 

So, Sucky Thing #10: The Fish Food. 

Three times a day I have to take these spirulina tablets which are exactly the same spirulina tablets that I had to break in half and stick to the side of the fishtank (um, yes, the inside) when I was feeding our neighbors' aquatic friends last summer. It has a very distinctive smell, equal parts seaweed and damp vegetation, yes I realize those are the same thing it's a joke. Bottom line: spirulina in tablet form smells like the Forgotten Bag of Salad in your refrigerator. But at least it tastes great! 

No, it doesn't. But whatever...I'm pretending that I'm a sickly gray Pac-Man, and every spirulina tablet I waka-waka is skewing my hue in a greener healthier direction.

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Above: homemade lemon meringue pie from Mara's grandmother, thousands of miles away from Mark' Fish Food Emporium. 

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OH YEAH: I played Guitar Hero for the first time on Friday night. The verdict: pretty awesome, maybe the best video game ever b/c it's possible for girls to like it too. The downside would have to be that I have Sweet Child O' Mine, Surrender, and War Pigs on constant rotation in my head. Also, I should file under Upside the very nice piece of salmon that HP dished up, it was just what my doctor would've ordered if she'd known I needed anything. 

OH, WIKIPEDIA, STOP IT: After I followed my own link to Wikipedia, I found this bit of hilarity: 

"Guitar Hero and the way it is used have been a focus of intense study by sociologists across the country. Most notably, a group of Duke University cultural anthropologists undertook a study of video game culture and preferences amongst undergraduates. The study concluded that Caucasian males were more than ten times more likely to enjoy Guitar Hero than EA Sports Madden football. On the other side, African-American males almost exclusively played Madden when given the choice between the two games. The study cited Duke's Psychology center at 723 9th Street as a crucial force of inspiration for the topic. The scholars admit that they have no clear conclusion as to why the results were so lopsided."

Really??????? No clear conclusion. Care to hazard a guess? I mean, could it have anything at all to do with the number of real-life African-American guitarists out there playing classic rock, grunge, and nu-metal? Probably not. I also understand there are currently quite a few African-American football players in the NFL....but that's probably unrelated as well. Scholars! Bite my hirsute ass. 

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...as well as my nuts (repost).

This is going to be a reposting of a rather old bit (April 2005) that deals unironically with Nut Health. I'm going to re-tweak the writing and generally trick it out with photos from our 2001 Sicilian vacation during Carnevale. Right now the writing is still 2005-style.

A word about the chickens. We went to Sicily in 2001 immediately after Mara's life-changing run-in with the exotic and deadly Guillain-Barré Syndrome. It seemed that some relaxing islandy sun might be a good antidote for sleepless weeks in the hospital, plasmapheresis, and nerve conduction studies (where basically they electrocute you "just a little" to see if your nerves are still working).

When we arrived, we (duh) found out it was Carnevale, which meant parades, costumes, and general drunken revelry. 2001 was also the year that "mad cow disease" was dominating the media, and in response to this a certain faction of the Taormina celebrants had dressed up as chickens, in drag of course. On several floats, there were crossdressing chickens cooking actual chicken and throwing it into the crowd:

















It was yet another example of that wonderful Italian tendency toward serving tasty food where you least expect it: bus stations, hospitals, and yes, parades.

Throughout the cooking process, the chefs had been taking long pulls from a suspicious-looking bottle of what must have been Boogie Juice, because it wasn't long before the chickens began boogeying down unstoppably. They also had their eye on Mara, and soon she was in their clutches. And me with no chicken repellent.

































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Riiiiight, time for a Nut Roundup. During my most successful "weight management interludes", nuts have been my primary dessert substitute and snack. Turns out, though, that not all nuts are equally beneficial to the rest of your body. There are some well-known standouts from a health perspective, the point of this post was to look at my faves and see how good or bad they are.

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ALMONDS. Good news! In 2003, the FDA added almonds to the list of "tree nuts that may help reduce the risk of heart disease." I'll quote from the link above, from Western Farm Press:

"A clinical trial conducted at the University of Toronto found that women and men who ate about one ounce (a handful) of almonds each day lowered their LDL cholesterol by 4.4 percent from baseline. The study showed an even greater decrease of 9.4 percent in LDL cholesterol in those who ate about two handfuls of almonds a day, indicating that almonds' effect increases with increased consumption."

Great news. One ounce of almonds = 24 almonds = 164 calories. Time to bust out the ricciarelli. They don't even look that bad for you.


PINE NUTS. You'd think that this study/statement above from the FDA would include pine nuts. Well, when the FDA mentioned tree nuts, they added that they were disqualifying four kinds of nuts ‑ Brazil nuts, macadamia nuts, cashew nuts and some varieties of pine nuts because they exceed healthy saturated fat levels.

Thus, an occasional treat. And that should render this slice of pure uncut dopamine even more occasional.


















PISTACHIOS. Ah, Sicily. In Taormina (pictured above), after stumbling down the nearly vertical hill from our hotel into the center of town, I was wandering around comparing bakeries, and finally settled on one with an array of nut-bombarded cookies in the window. Pistachio, pignoli, and almond, studded with tooth-defying amounts of sugared nuts...we went back for seconds within the hour.

Well, this is coming from the California Pistachio Commission, but in light of everything we've already uncovered, we can assume that the word "nuts" in the text can apply to "pistachio" as well (they thought we wouldn't notice that they don't actually use the word pistachio?). Verdict: as healthy as almonds, and one of the lowest-oil-content nuts.1 oz. pistachios = 47 kernels = 158 cal.

HAZELNUTS. A very European nut, one that I liked in America when I came across it (mostly in Frangelico or European chocolate), but I didn't begin truly jonesing for filberts until we lived in Italy and they were everywhere. My most indelible hazelnut experience came from a street vendor in Bologna who was selling warm, fresh hazelnut brittle. When i say fresh, I mean that not only was the brittle fresh--you couldn't hold it upright because it would ooze/droop over--but the hazelnuts were extremely fresh as well, not these gnarled, dry things you sometimes come across. Totally perfetto.
Also: here's a nice little paper from Univ. of Arizona with some cholesterol-lowering tips.
So hazelnuts...they're as good for you as almonds are. Here's the Hazelnut Commission's promotional info. Not that this is the info that I'm basing my results on...the hazelnut details are already covered in the FDA links for almonds and pistachios.
1 oz. hazelnuts = 178 calories. pretty high in fat.
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CONCLUSION. Good: walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios. Baddish: pine, macadamia, cashew, Brazil. Neither: The peanut. As far as I can tell, there's no non-partisan document that says that peanuts lower anything beyond what any monounsaturated fat would do. They're just extra fat. So, if you feel like a nut, it'd be wiser to go with something that actually does you some good.
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