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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!

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?

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?

Tom, In Wednesday's Post:

...

Thus, patrons can get their spaghetti dressed up with both crab and sea urchin, the latter of which is beaten to form the pasta's rich "sauce." And short ribs, so tender you can cut them with a spoon, sport a designer tag (Kobe) and beige clouds of mushroom foam. A light launch comes by way of razor clams, removed from their cigar-shaped shells and served crudo-style with olive oil, citrus and ginger plus rafts of grilled bread.

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.

I also really liked the duck tacos on was it a radish wrapper, it seemed a little large for radish, but don't know what else it would be.

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.

Make that 3, maybe 4 spots available - I just got another cancellation in email. Any last minute help out there?

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.

IB: What do you make of the complaints of B.R. Myers, who has aesthetic and moral objections to foodies in the latest Atlantic Monthly?

MP: His aesthetic problem is an ethical problem, and that’s that he’s a vegan. And if you look at the way he writes about these issues...everything he dismisses as gluttony always involves eating an animal. So there’s a few agendas mixed up in that, and he’s not completely open about what they are.

One of the things that strikes me about foodie-ism, to use a term that I really despise, is that it is ethically inflected in a way that other forms of past interest in food have not been. And I’m sure you noticed this amongst the chefs you were with. What’s very striking about the current interest in food is that it’s not purely aesthetic. It is not purely about pleasure--people are very interested in the system that they’re eating from. And they’re very interested in the way the food was produced and the story behind it. People are mixing up aesthetics and ethics in a very new way, that some people are uncomfortable with, frankly. The idea that you could take any pleasure from politics, that you could mix those two terms, is a very un-American idea. We see it as you’re either indulging yourself, or you’re doing the world good. The fact is, slow food and other elements of the food movement are proposing that the best choice, the most beautiful choice, is often the most sustainable choice. It might be more expensive, and that’s a problem that we need to work on. But I think the industry is feeling very threatened right now by the fact that so many people are asking hard questions about their food. And so there’s an effort underway to discredit the food movement.

Thanks to catherine's recommendation, I had a late St. Patrick's Day lunch at Ebbitt's bar yesterday--and it was so good I'm tempted to go back today... The corned beef platter was a mound of simply boiled meat, potatoes, and cabbage, with a bit of the pot juices ladeled over, and a side of horseradish cream. No fancy-shmancy bells and whistles, just simple, traditional, well-executed fare. It would have put either of my grandmothers over the moon.

And the bartender was just great too. Friendly, welcoming, chatty--but not too much. After I finished my meal, I saw some soda bread arrive in front of a neighbor at the bar. I asked if I could buy some to take home and she said "Of course not!" and wrapped me up a huge portion--with a little cup of butter included--to go. Nice.

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?

To Japan, especially the wonderful people of the Tohoku (northeast) region. Minna-san, ganbatte ne!

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 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.

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):

IT HAS ALWAYS been crucial to the gourmet’s pleasure that he eat in ways the mainstream cannot afford. For hundreds of years this meant consuming enormous quantities of meat. That of animals that had been whipped to death was more highly valued for centuries, in the belief that pain and trauma enhanced taste. “A true gastronome,” according to a British dining manual of the time, “is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.” But for the past several decades, factory farms have made meat ever cheaper and—as the excellent book The CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] Reader makes clear—the pain and trauma are thrown in for free. The contemporary gourmet reacts by voicing an ever-stronger preference for free-range meats from small local farms.

The same goes for restaurant owners like Alice Waters. A celebrated slow-food advocate and the founder of an exclusive eatery in Berkeley, she is one of the chefs profiled in Spoon Fed. “Her streamlined philosophy,” Severson tells us, is “that the most political act we can commit is to eat delicious food that is produced in a way that is sustainable, that doesn’t exploit workers and is eaten slowly and with reverence.” A vegetarian diet, in other words? Please. The reference is to Chez Panisse’s standard fare—Severson cites “grilled rack and loin of Magruder Ranch veal” as a typical offering—which is environmentally sustainable only because so few people can afford it.

But food writing has long specialized in the barefaced inversion of common sense, common language. Restaurant reviews are notorious for touting $100 lunches as great value for money.

One must never spoil a dinner party for mere religious or ethical reasons. Pollan says he sides with the French in regarding “any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.” (The American foodie is forever projecting his own barbarism onto France.) Bourdain writes, “Taking your belief system on the road—or to other people’s houses—makes me angry.” The sight of vegetarian tourists waving away a Vietnamese pho vendor fills him with “spluttering indignation.”

That’s right: guests have a greater obligation to please their host—and passersby to please a vendor—than vice versa. Is there any civilized value that foodies cannot turn on its head?

The more lives sacrificed for a dinner, the more impressive the eater. Dana Goodyear: “Thirty duck hearts in curry … The ethos of this kind of cooking is undeniably macho.” Amorality as ethos, callousness as bravery, queenly self-absorption as machismo: no small perversion of language is needed to spin heroism out of an evening spent in a chair.

*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.