Salute.

(more…)

Okay, got a mouth-watering food blog for you guys to check out: Last Night’s Dinner.

This girl’s got it going on.

Peace to Dimelo for hipping me to this: Say word.

One of my favorite places at the Met:

A real head-nodder…

I had dinner with a friend last week and asked him, “What’s your favorite vegetable?

“Asparagus,” he said without flinching.

“Really? You don’t mind that it makes your pee smell funny?”

“No, I love that, man.”

Go figure.

For the longest, I didn’t dare try asparagus and funny-smelling pee was the least of it. But I’ve learned to like asparagus in spite of that peculiar side effect. So I was eager to try a slow-cooking method that I saw in the Times last week.

I made it last night and it was tasty. Props to Melissa Clark for the article.

[Photo credit: Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times]

It’s a lovely spring morning in the Bronx. Today gives NBA playoffs and baseball, lots more baseball.

Yanks go for the sweep against the Rangers.  Here’s hoping for a good day. In the meantime, some Sunday soul.

Eh, what’s one more just for the hell of it?

Staying with the theme of big and bad, dig this picture by Frank Frazetta:

Not  a lot of laughs in ol’ Frank’s work, but it sure am Bad.

It’s the new style:

[Photo Credit: Leah Nash for the New York Times]

Sh*t-kicker Friday:

A Smoke Backstage, By William Harnett (1877)

You want great Sichuan? Then take the train (take the train) to Flushing and look no further than Spicy and Tasty.

Hell, let’s make it an ass-kickin’ two-fer:

In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

I’ve long considered cilantro, what we used to call coriander, to be the Steely Dan of herbs–you either love it or hate it. For the longest, I didn’t dig it at all, but since I’ve learned to appreciate and desire Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican cuisine, I’ve also learned to appreciate, and even crave, cilantro as well.

There’s a fun piece in the Times today by Harold McGee about how cilantro: 

“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with,” [Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies how the brain perceives smells] said . “But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.”

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

[Photo Credit: Pinch My Salt]

Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, By Pierre Bonnard (1930-31)

What else?

[photo credit: yehwan]

Love this bass line, man.

The classic is still classic even if modern editions don’t include the recipe for simmered porcupine.