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We were half-punked, and the Atlantic was strikingly sloppy. The second half of the quote is his.

Cheesy scrambled eggs on a bed of sauteed onions, tomatoes, and green peppers Homemade blueberry scone Fruit salad of mango, kiwi, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries A perfect start to a perfect day at the ballpark!

Thanks for the advice! I decided to put off making the dough until last night, and I cut them and left them out on the counter for a couple of hours before putting them in the fridge for my all-too-brief five-hour sleep. Baked them from the fridge, and they turned out delicious--very light and crumbly and moist. Lighter and moister, in fact, than almost any scone I've ever had. I [heart] Ina Garten. (I altered the recipe slightly to be blueberry and lemon, rather than cranberry and orange, and mixed it in the food processor as suggested in one of the comments since I don't have a KitchenAid.)

If I were to make dough for scones tonight, would it be okay, raw, in my fridge, until I bake them at an ungodly early hour Friday morning for a party whose theme I'm not willing to admit to?

Anyone else find it conspicuous that he never actually observes how the food tastes? As much as I appreciate him teaching us that razor clam shells are shaped like cigars and the grilled bread looks like rafts, I'd prefer to know whether it's any good.

Daikon?

Lamb kofta Eggplant and chickpea salad Minted garlic Greek yogurt And after a month-long stomach bug (thank you, Asia!), during which I've been too tired to cook or even eat decently, I'm finally feeling human again. I tried both of these recipes for the first time tonight, and they're both winners. The kofta has great flavor and is very moist, maybe partly because of the yogurt in the meat mixture; I added some onions to the eggplant sautee for the salad, and it turned out quite nicely--a great hummos/baba ghanoush hybrid.

I knew I'd been in Asia too long when a cockroach crawled out of the condiment dish and it didn't even occur to me to tell anyone.

When we ate there last week, Kushi was donating all proceeds from the sale of its pork belly to help Japan--all the more reason to order two! It and all our other cooked dishes were good; the sushi was excellent. But I'll be back if only because it's just such a fun place to go, with friendly service and a great show at the bars. Also, four words: sea salt ice cream. WOW. If you're a salty+sweet person, this stuff will knock you out--it alone is worth the trip.

Melange du produce drawer--onions, garlic, grape tomatoes, green beans, and asparagus sauteed with tarragon, thyme, and a bit of smoked paprika--topped with a fried egg Toast with strawberry jam Yum! I'm sick of the same-old, same-old breakfast, so this was something a bit different that filled me up without weighing me down. It's a keeper.

Count me in, please!

Although we only had a planned group meal for 40 at Face (in the gorgeous, private Buddha Hall), I wouldn't hesitate to go back there in a second. I can't believe that I've never had the pomelo salad before, which is apparently as common as the green papaya salad, but which has now edged out the old standby as my favorite Thai salad. This, the whole fish, the masaman curry (not usually one of my favorites), the chicken with cashews, the veggies, the coconut sorbet--everything was top notch, and the service was exceptional. I can only imagine how good it would be if I got to pick my own menu. Awesome.

I now understand why people find it so hard to provide specific recommendations on Bali: because everything fades into a spectacular haze of sun, sea, bright green flora, and stunning beauty. On Seminyak we stayed at Villa Kubu, the nicest place I've ever stayed before, and possibly the nicest place I will ever stay again, in my life. The daily breakfast (cooked in the villa, choice of American [eggs, toast, and meat] or Asian [nasi goreng or mee goreng]) was lovely, and the room service was pretty damn good--honestly, maybe the best chicken quesadilla I've ever had, below average rendang, excellent curry. Otherwise, Seminyak was just okay. Made's Warung ('warung' is basically any local place where they sell stuff--retail shop, restaurant) is recommended by everyone, mostly because it's a tourist joint with dance shows. The food was good for a tourist joint, though the prices were pretty high. Gado gado is one of my all-time favorite dishes, and I was psyched to try it in Indonesia for the first time. Everywhere you eat it it's prepared differently, and here it's almost a stir fly, but it's pretty darn good. The waitress tried to warn us off the pepesan ikan, saying that it was a traditional Balinese dish, and even as a traditional Balinese lady she didn't like it, but my dining companion insisted. It was essentially a tuna pate/meatloaf, steaned in banana leaves, served with coconut vegetables and rice. And it was SPECTACULAR. The spicy-sweet-starchy interplay was fantastic, and our waitress was decidedly surprised how much we loved it (if not exactly impressed). We also got the cap cay, which was a semi-dull veggie stir fry. The location of Cafe Seminyak can't be beat, as it is right next to the grocery store. And it's mostly outdoor and makes for great people watching, but don't eat next to the street unless you want your meal constantly interrupted by shills. Here, the gado gado is served WIERD: with all the ingredients rolled tight in lettuce leaves like a summer roll, with a drizzle of the peanut sauce on top and the eggs and shrimp chips on the side. Still, yummy. It was in Ubud where we found the meal of the island: Murni's Warung. I've had a lot of bad luck choosing restaurants abroad lately, and got pretty nervous when assigned to pick for my one night in Ubud. But oh mama, this place was off the charts. First, ask to sit downstairs. The restaurant goes down four flights, including the bar and a private room. The bottom flight is the best restaurant seating, with a shrine overseeing the small deck, which hangs on a cliff over the river that you can hear rushing below you during the pitch dark. By far, one of the best dishes I've ever had (EVER) (EVER, EVER, EVER) was Tuti's Tutu Ayam, chicken braised for eight hours in "Balinese spices" and served with spiced vegetables. This thing was just off the charts. Despite my repeated (charming!) requests, I could get nothing from the waitress about the recipe and had to resign myself to dreaming about this chicken for the Rest. Of. My. Life. No joke. The gado gado was the next best dish, and the 'award-winning' fish ended third, probably only because the chicken and gado gado were so damn good. Dining as I was with expats, they insisted on getting 'grandma's apple pie' for dessert, and damn if it wasn't a really freaking excellent and delicious rendition--no holding back on the clove and cardomom here. Really, I can't recommend this place more highly. It's a bit of a walk out of town, and it's got a bit of touristy to it (not one but TWO gift shops), but the food is just out of this world. A few other things I learned: Mind the fruit. You'll find the pineapples at the grocery stores to be quite small. Consequently, I also found every piece of pineapple I ate to be dull and immature. Same with the watermelon. But the star fruit was the best fruit I've ever eaten, and the papaya was playing above grade. DO NOT DRINK BALINESE WINE. I cannot possibly stress this enough. Wine is really, really expensive in Bali, but no matter how much you're trying to penny-pinch because you've spent too much on your villa, don't drink Balinese wine. Just DON'T. If you must go cheap and your companion won't drink beer, just drink the Balinese rice wine. Yes, it tastes like MD 2020, but it still tastes better than the wine, and is cheaper. Drink the beer! Bintang is a fine yellow beer--the same yellow beer (as I've posted in several threads) that exists in every tropical country. But take the extra effort to seek out Bali Storm. It's surprising to find a beer this well crafted in a tropical, remote locale, but they've done a really good job. We tried the Golden Ale and the Pale Ale and were impressed by both. Air Asia sucks. That is all.

Tuna and potato galette Meh. I think the biggest problem was that my tuna (Starkist packed in veg oil) was inordinately fishy. I love tuna, but when I opened this can, wow, it was something else. I used shallots instead of scallions, which turned out really nice, and the texture of the filling was good. But they specifically said to use a prepared pie crust, and I think it was just too sweet.

Rats. I'm really sorry I only saw this now. I hope I can join you next time!

This morning I had a Grannysmith apple and a slice of cake. Does that count?

Michael Pollan volleys back in an interview in the Globe and Mail.

Still valid! If anyone is in the area today seeking the sacred meal,* consider Ebbitt. It was a fantastic lunch, and I'm once again bereft that I only get it once a year. They shredded the cabbage this year, which I didn't really like or understand, but that's just a few points off an otherwise winning dish. *Does anyone else call it this, or is it just my family?

I'm currently stranded in Bangkok due to a cancelled flight home that was to transit through Tokyo yesterday. And while I'm drinking, as always, to my extraordinary aid colleagues who are scrambling to assist the Japanese people, I'm mostly thinking that there but for the grace of god go I, as my folks say. We can live in Japan, among the most advanced societies in the world, or we can live in Haiti, among the least. But we are still vulnerable to forces greater than ourselves, no matter how well we plan. I'm thinking of those we have loved and lost, and those we have loved and found. I am hoping for some comfort for all.

I might suggest that one of the problems with developing a solution to this problem is the response to this single sentence I posted. What false dichotomy did I bring up? I was genuinely asking for how we might accomplish this. If defensiveness is the only reaction, I'm officially worried. I was, in fact, referring to the United States because that's the issue we're talking about, not because it's the largest or most important issue. (God help us if every conversation had to always expand to encompass the weightiest possible angle on a subject.) If you want to go into world nutrition, sure. As a result of the Green Revolution there are fewer famines and they affect fewer people. Period. It's irresponsible to conflate "famine" and "starvation" with malnutrition, undernutrition, or food insecurity, which still persist to an unacceptable degree. But they are not famine. I cannot, off the top of my head, even think of many recent famines. Sudan 1990s? North Korea? But neither of those was a result of production issues. (But I'm tired and I'd love to hear if I'm missing any.) And while the Green Revolution has undeniably saved millions of lives in Asia, its lack of success in Africa cannot be attributed to fundamental wrong-headedness, but rather a swarm of mitigating circumstances, including abysmal governance, persistent conflict, environmental factors, disease, and lack of infrastructure. Even so, as Steve Radelet illuminated in Emerging Africa, if we can endeavor to unbundle Africa from a monolithic entity to its 47 discrete countries (in the same way it's counter-productive to assign generalities to "the poor"), the so-called "emerging" countries are overcoming a lot of these obstacles and making real development progress that may in turn improve lives in neighboring countries. In any case, coming back to the United States, I'd say that any progress toward sustainable food production is doomed to failure as long as an anti-obesity campaign can be nonironically referred to as treasonous and, as stated in the original article, "ethical" meat and veg remain prohibitively expensive.

I am interested in hearing details about how to feed 350 million people, 44 million of whom live below the poverty line, from small farms that have no detrimental effect on the environment.

At the Amman Four Seasons, I ordered a manhattan and got a snifter of warm, rail scotch with a lemon. To be fair, I learned a valuable lesson: craft cocktails are not one of the fortes in Muslim countries.

To the Libyans. Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Moammar.

The Moral Crusade Against Foodies is a review of five relatively recent food books* that is also used as, essentially, a treatise against the hypocrisy, lack of ethics, and general insufferability of the food obsessed. Choice quotes (or at least a few that resonated with me): *The CAFO Reader, Best Food Writing, Blood, Bones, and Butter, Spoon Fed, and Medium Raw

That chivito is one damn fine sandwich. The first one I had was better than the second, but I still can't think of a better sandwich I've had in the city... can I? ... No. I got nothing. It's a creative meld of ingredients, each of which is prepared well individually then compiled into a sandwich with surprising structural integrity (seriously, this thing could be a mess, but it's NOT) whose sum is much greater than its parts. (Think BLT. Steak and cheese. Liver and onions.) And this is a new combination--at least around these here parts--that by the third bite became something that made me a convert who now twitches the twice a day I have to ride by that place on the bus. On top of it all, it's one of those things that requires so many different, well-made components that it's better to buy the thing than try to make it at home. (Central's lobster burger. Sushi. Pete's Apizza. McDonald's french fries.) No, it's not going to change your life. But it is one Damn. Fine. Sandwich. The cubano? Eh. The components are very good, especially the roast pork, which is not sliced but pulled (big chunks, not fine). But it needed more acid--the pickles were too mild, as was the mustard--and was just okay. I will explore the rest of the menu, but probably will not go back to the cubano. But let's please take that with a grain of salt, as 1) it was tasted alongside the dreamy chivito, 2) it's still probably a lot better than most cubanos in the city, and 3) I bought it AT A GAS STATION.