Fruits I Have Nibbled

• The Softest and Creamiest of All Avocados
• Papaya, blended into a juicy pulp with warm water
• One small, fuzzy peach
• An orange banana, not quite so creamy as the ones I am familiar with, but still delicious within its own context.
• Several very small "apple bananas"
• A cherimoya, which has a delicate skin of mermaid scales and white, floral flesh like pineapple but not so sour. Just as you find in a watermelon, there are molar chipping black seeds that you must spit into your bowl.
• The avocado's crumbly spinster cousin, lucuma, which is far tastier as a pastry filling or an ice cream
• A strange orange fruit that looks apple-esque on its deceptive surface, but when you break open its hard shell the inside is white and fibrous like the gritty substance beneath the peel of an orange and it looks like it might segment like an orange until you penetrate the white layer and discover an egg sack full of gray eyeballs, sticky like fish eggs and clustered like pomegranate seeds. This fruit cannot even be fully understood by means of comparison or even metaphor.
• A perfect, piney mango.

Dirt Candy

My pictures did not come out, but here are four leeks. Or are they scallions? Hmm...

There comes a day in the life of every young woman when she does something absolutely abhorrent to her body in the name of having a cool experience. This is exactly what I did at Dirt Candy, a vegetarian restaurant in New York City that serves whimsical dishes made exclusively of photosynthesizing things that grow in the ground.

When one hears “vegetarian,” one envisions something healthy, like steamed carrots. Dirt Candy wants to shatter that association and melt maple butter all over it. Here are some things that are vegetarian: French fries. Waffles. Deep-fried waffles. Ice cream. Five-cheese ravioli. Speculoos cookie butter. Speculoos butter on a deep-fried waffle.

In conclusion, “vegetarian” and “healthy” are hardly synonyms. I learned this lesson the hard way at Veggie Galaxy in Boston a few months ago as I choked down the last bite of vegan cream cheese waffle and this week I learned it again. I am no stranger to making myself sick with yummy foods. Everything I ate at Dirt Candy was deep fried, slathered in butter, or alchemically transmogrified into cotton candy.

Dirt Candy, it turns out, gets completely booked at least three months ahead of time. I found this out when I tried to make a reservation online. I might have secured a seat sometime in June of 2014. Instead, my friend Abbey and I showed up around the time the doors opened and tap danced in their window until they seated us. (Until someone forgot that reservation they made three months ago.) Every time someone got seated, we hovered in the window with a look of disdain that burned into the very essence of their beings, especially when they sipped a beverage. The unseasonable October heat was oppressive and I was dressed for autumn.

Inside, the seating was intimate. The waitress pulled the table out so that I would be able to squeeze into the bench against the wall. We ordered jalapeno hush puppies with maple butter. We liberally applied the maple butter. Maple butter is a shameful thing to waste.

Everything on the menu was enthusiastically named after its primary vegetable ingredient. Mushroom! Cucumber! Potato! I took my chances the Parsnip! while Abbey asked for the Corn! as her entrée. My dish was described as “parsnip pillows” – essentially, extra squishy parsnip gnocchi. On Abbey’s plate, a tempura-fried poached egg sat atop some very cheesy and savory corn grits.

One of my main motivations for wanting to go to this vegetable alchemy lab was to try a dessert made of vegetables. We wavered between an ice cream bar made of peas and rosemary eggplant tiramisu. We asked the waitress what we should order.

“You want the tiramisu,” she said very seriously.

Of course, the tiramisu was two dollars more than the other desserts. When the plate arrived, we first saw this white fluffy cloud hovering on the plate. The woman next to me leaned in.

“Is that a wedding veil?” she asked.

No, that was the rosemary cotton candy. Resting below the cloud was a 2” by 2” square slice of tiramisu. It tasted like tiramisu, but also like eggplant. Somehow it worked. The cotton candy tasted like rosemary and I haven’t had cotton candy since age ten and probably will not have it again. My pancreas got so angry at me. I can’t believe you've done this, said my pancreas.

As we walked out of the restaurant, I felt like I needed a small perambulator on which Abbey could wheel me through the streets of Manhattan. Instant nausea. Between the butter and the sugar and the creamy sauces and all the disparate food items, I felt like my entire body shut down in order to digest the chaos. I wanted to make words and talk to my friend, but apparently walking and digesting and listening and speaking at the same time was more multitasking than I could manage. I suggested we walk it off, perhaps in the direction of a hospital. The walking did not last long and I ducked out early to go home and recover.

Was it worth it? Yes. I enjoyed the eating. Can I eat like this every day? No. I felt a little sad after the meal because I don’t get to see Abbey too often and here I was channeling all of my energy into assimilating the parsnip pillows. We made some jokes about the cotton candy being a poodle, but the thing is I actually felt like I ate a poodle. If I ate a small, snooty dog, that is exactly how I would feel. The Dirt Candy experience, although delicious, was a good reminder of why I eat the way I do.

One thing to cross off my list.

Perusing

All I want to do is leave the country. I have been daydreaming about it often since the last time I left the country. On a weekly basis, I torment all of those around me with stories of Romani kids and cheese-toting anarchists in the Czech Republic. Then I think about having another adventure. This all-consuming wanderlust often manifests itself in the form of looking at pictures of rainbow buildings in Argentina or teaching myself useful Polish phrases or reading an entire website about Bulgarian cuisine while at work. My workplace environment only enables me by making it extremely easy for me to spend an entire shift reading about Bulgarian cuisine.

Finally, some real progress. Dave and I are going to Peru in November. I will have someplace useful to channel this energy. Now here is a photo montage of pictures from Google Images!

Ruins!

Alpacas!

Chocolate!

Ceviche!

Wild camelids!

Peru is one country that Dave and I both can agree on. I’ve wanted to visit Machu Picchu since I was a wee beastie. I saw Matt Lauer traveling there on the morning news while eating my Fruity Pebbles and I thought, “Yes. I shall go there.” Last year I met some kids from Lima and got a favorable impression of that city as well. Did you know it is the Gastronomy Capital of the Americas? I’m not sure who has the privilege of awarding such titles, but I intend to find out if it is well-deserved. Peru is a great exporter of cocoa beans, so I can’t help but imagine chocolate gushing from the alleys like floodwater. And if there is good chocolate then I could easily live off of that for ten days (or until I get a chocolate hangover).

But chocolate addictions aside, I may need to start eating fish again to be able to survive in Lima. My last few experiences with fish have involved unparalleled bellyaches. Peru is famous for ceviche, which I tried with Dave several years ago. Instead of cooking the fish, it is prepared with lemon juice and spices. The lemon juice is supposed to kill the bacteria and parasites. We went to a restaurant near our college and ordered some sort of pink-fish-ceviche. It was delicious, but we both felt very weird during the car ride home. My whole body felt loopy. I didn’t know it at the time, but the feelings of loopy-ness were just hallucinations brought on by food poisoning.

I told a friend from Lima about my ceviche experience. “You shouldn't be eating that outside of Peru,” she gently chided.

One night after I came home from work, Dave and I stitched together the skeleton of the whole adventure in one big marathon. Dave found some not-so-expensive round trip plain tickets; I arranged our accommodations. We tried to buy our tickets to Machu Picchu ahead of time. Apparently, it is not so difficult to buy the tickets in Cusco the night before or the morning of the trip.

Huayna Picchu, the misty and impressive mountain peak that one sees in all pictures of the ruins, is a little harder to tackle spontaneously. You need to buy the tickets in a package with Machu Picchu. Only 400 people are allowed to climb it a day and you have to go through Peru’s government website to book it ahead of time. Peru’s website is notoriously screwy, however, so we had no luck in procuring any tickets ahead of time. Officially, it only takes Visa cards. In reality it does not even take Visa cards.

We also missed out on buying our lunch ahead of time from the only buffet-style restaurant at the peak of this precious ancient treasure. I suppose we will just bring sandwiches.

I began to consider what sort of footwear one would wear for the climb. Normally I would wear my barefoot shoes for hiking, but I wondered if something more heavy-duty would be necessary. Google provided us with heaps of wisdom. Some people climbed it in sneakers, others in Teva sandals. One person recommended that we wear two pairs of socks. He said that a friend recommended that he wear two pairs of socks and, though he can no longer remember the excellent reason, he now wears two pairs of socks every day.

While we have the skeleton of the trip pieced together, there are still other important things that need to be addressed. I need to bring my level of Spanish to at least conversational-caveman level in the next two months. I can hardly remember anything from my Rosetta Stone lessons from last year, but I really hope to see some women eating rice in Peru so I can make intelligent remarks. And at least one alpaca, which I will ardently embrace.

Ethiopian Food

I have a list of 24 things I want to do before I turn 24, and that list includes a lot of food adventures. One such food adventure I longed to experience was eating at an Ethiopian restaurant. Dave was my sidekick on this adventure and together we set off to Westchester’s only Ethiopian food restaurant, Lalibela. It was in a little pedestrian shopping strip with brick sidewalks and budding trees.

We found the restaurant in a side street, right next to a People’s Bank. There was a trail of petals through the doorway. “Ooh, they’re trying to seduce us,” I said. These petals were the product of flowering trees and spring winds.

Dave and I took a seat at the window and picked an appetizer to share. Ethiopian dishes are presented lumped on an enormous, crepe-like bread called injera, which tastes like a bit like sourdough bread. It’s made from a grain called kamut that is indigenous to this part of the world. We received our appetizer, an avocado salad, heaped onto some injera. There are no utensils. We ate with our hands, pinching up the meals with torn off strips of injera. It was delicious.

Just when you think you’re jaded to the disorienting nature of faraway cuisines, someone takes away your utensils and bids you use your hands. Yes, there is still magic in the world. Like the first time I used chopsticks.

Next came the entree,  a spread of lentils, cabbage, green beans, and collard greens. One mound of lentils was spicy and the other was buttery and mild. I liked them both, but the spicy one was unsurprisingly my favorite. The lentils and avocado salad were the stars of the whole meal, and the injera was very moist and fluffy like a pancake. I found myself at home later thinking to myself, I wish I had some injera now. Sigh.

Now that I have conquered Ethiopian food, I need to cross of Sri Lankan food off my list next. This adventure will take me well out of Westchester, I am sure.

Sushi

Dave’s Christmas present this year was an ultra-romantic sushi-making press called a Sushezi. If I were shopping for myself, I would have gone for the authentic bamboo mat and happily struggled with it, eating my broken rolls with pride. I probably would have also worn a kimono and had dreamy Travel Channel fantasies set in a rural village on the side of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I was, however, shopping for Dave and the Sushezi was the top rated result on Amazon for the keywords “sushi making kit.”  I put it in my cart.

And then, after much anticipation, we made sushi. We went to an Asian grocery store to pick up spicy pickled radish, cucumbers, and sushi rice. We got some pickled ginger and sesame seeds because details are important. Then we went to work.

Sushi stuffing.

We made a veggie roll for me and a Philadelphia roll for Dave. When I look at sushi at this stage of the process, I think sushi is not unlike a sandwich. Only it is infinitely better than a sandwich. That's why we've grafted it into our own cultural palate. The first American to eat sushi probably felt just like Marco Polo eating his first plate of pasta.

In the end, we had a bunch of very pretty looking rolls, and some awkward end bits that were eaten with fingers. Last week I insisted on making pierogi from scratch as well. I'm working my way through the continents.

Boston Highlights

When we arrived at the station in Boston, my stomach growled and my head ached from whacking my head on the low overhang above the Megabus seats (something every Megabus passenger experiences at one time or another). Dave was sniffling from allergies and drowsy from napping in awkward positions over the sound of the archetypal crying infant on a bus. Yet in spite of waiting for an hour behind a sign on the sidewalk that read “Bostof,” we arrived at the intended destination.

Our trip was short – if it hadn't been, we would have been stuck in Boston through the duration of the hurricane. I certainly would not have complained.

Our first night, we went looking for some spectacular clam chowder. Quincy Market was all lit up like a Christmas tree. I described it to Dave as an endless food court with better food.

We found a little seafood restaurant called Boston Chowda and Dave ordered a bread bowl full of clam chowder. Dave decided it was the best clam chowder ever. Clam chowder makes me reminisce about a restaurant I used to go to with my Grandpa where bloated exotic fish blow kisses at you from behind an enormous glass tank as you slurp your soup.

A big sopping mess of chowder.

Dave and I resisted a multitude of candy coated brownies under glass cases and continued to the North End, the Italian neighborhood of Boston.

The main street was bustling, crowded with travelers, accordion players, and a clown twisting balloon animals. We were lucky to find a seat in a twenties-style café called Cafe Vittoria. Dave ordered a cappuccino with a frothy chocolate surface and I savored a square of tiramisu. Beyond the vintage signs and curling gold chairs a football game played in the background, confusing the ambience.

On our way back to the hotel that night we stopped to browse costumes and thrift shop clothes at the Garment District. The costumes were almost cleaned out but for a few mascot heads, fairy wings, and top hats. You could still get any size, shape, and color of fishnet tights you can imagine, but otherwise the Halloween hurricane had already come and gone. Savvy ladies dug through racks of vintage prom dresses and 70s skirts to construct Jackie O and Esmeralda costumes. Sequestered in a musty dressing room with a bulging stack of garments, I found the ideal sweater for a Cheshire cat costume. Halloween may have been derailed, but next year I’ll just need a pair of furry ears.

The second day was another food adventure. The Boston Vegetarian Food Festival deserved its own post, you can read about it here.

We walked to Boston Commons and the public garden. As we crossed Boston Commons we passed a man in a Dalmatian costume with three dogs in T-shirts. A one-man-band performed in the public garden, some amalgamation of a guitar, harmonica, drums set, trumpet, and a washboard. Dave fed the ducks in the pond some leftover cracker samples from the vegetarian fest, starting a feeding frenzy. We have more pictures of ducks eating crackers than anything else.

Dave photographed random strangers, perfecting the art of creeping around with a camera.

That night we went to Harvard Square for our next adventure. Our hotel was next to the MIT campus and as we walked around we assumed that every person our age must be someone brilliant studying quantum physics and neuroscience. It was much the same around Harvard, even with everyone dressed up as video game and Adventure Time characters.

We got a latte in the Harvard Coop, which turned out to be a poorly masked Starbucks within a poorly masked Barnes and Noble. In its defense, the coop really did contain real students quietly reading textbooks and looking rather tired.

We found a little shop with an impressive chocolate collection and I stumbled upon something I thought I would only see again in the Czech Republic – Mozart Kugeln. I bought two little pistachio truffles to be enjoyed on the ride home and reveled in Prague nostalgia.

I expected Harvard Square to be filled with shops and restaurants with names that allude to literature and the periodic table. In this I was not disappointed.

Science.

Dave and I had dinner in a bar called Grendel’s Den. Inside, Harvard students in costumes and funny hats drank beer in the reddish glow of the table lamps.

Dave had a steak with a Greek salad, prettily proportioned on the plate. I ordered Peruvian quinoa and got my first taste of chayote squash smothered in warm white cheese - easily my favorite meal in Boston.

Boston Vegetarian Food Festival

Pretty, sugary things from the Vegan Treats Bakery.

I've been wanting to write all week about my trip to Boston (particularly the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival), but I was sidetracked by a certain super-storm. We got very lucky. We only lost electricity and we're just waiting for the power to come back on. I'm writing from Dave's parents' house where I am drinking tea to stave off a nasty cold and nibbling little rectangles of chocolate from the festival.

I first heard about the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival a couple of years ago and our trip to Boston just happened to coincide with the festival. I guess it was meant to be. The festival was held in an athletic center and inside there were rows of tables and a smokey Indian spice aroma. Vendors sold cookbooks, vegetables, vegan pastries, and tee-shirts. We met my friend Liza inside.

At tables cluttered with Beanie Babies, volunteers promoted a vegan lifestyle for the well-being of animals. Sanctuaries that harbor animals rescued from industrial farms looked for sponsors for chickens and cows. And, of course, there were free samples.

I had a plate of kelp coleslaw for lunch.

Fake meat abounded and, although I'm not usually a fan of fake meat, I tried fake sausage and chickpea hamburger. It turns out I'm still not a fan of fake meat, but I could how extensive the science of imitating meat has become when I saw fake scallops.

One of the first tables I stumbled upon was Theo Chocolate - they make my favorite fig, fennel, and almond chocolate that has two squirrels on the label and feels like it was made especially for me.

So much fair trade chocolate.

I sampled some of Theo's newest flavors, like chili and cherry (Dave's personal favorite), vanilla nib, pili pili chili, and sea salt. Proceeds from the chocolate bars support organizations that provide bikes to students in rural Africa and preserve farmland. I bought a couple of bars of my favorite fig, fennel, and almond chocolate and bar of vanilla nib to take home.

A rainbow of new chocolate bars.

We tried various Indian curries and vegetarian restaurant fare. I was curious about the meatless Ethiopian food but as the venue filled up with enthusiastic samplers it became increasingly difficult to access the stands. I was able to maneuver my way to the Coconut Bliss table where tiny sample cups of chocolate coconut milk ice cream were scooped out for the passing horde.

As the crowd grew larger and the heat from the veggie burners sizzling on tiny grills made the gym stuffy and claustrophobic. I found myself in the back corner of the room where some really magical vegan doughnuts and cupcakes were laid out by an open door, letting in a slight breeze.

By the time I reached the other side of the festival, the traffic almost slowed to a stop. I lost Liza and Dave somewhere around the pastries.

The doors of the festival were open to early risers for five dollars an hour before the rest of the public got in for free, and by the time I reached the last row of tables I understood why. I hope that they move the festival into a larger venue as it grows.

Vegetarian food enthusiasts stand shoulder to shoulder.

Just before I made an attempt to escape the crowd, I fell into the path of coconut milk ice cream once more. I got a taste of pumpkin spice ice cream from FoMu, which had a very impressive range of flavors.

I left the festival with a bag of chocolate, little bags of hemp seeds, and sample bags of Pukka tea that I have yet to try. Then Dave and I left to experience other parts of Boston.

Love and Magic

I had heard about a free play in Central Park and my friend L. and I decided to venture into the city for the day to see it. By the time we found the outdoor theater there was no one around. The chatty employees in matching shirts did not notice us staring into their booth, clearing our throats. Waiting. We noticed a sign hanging above us that leveled our lukewarm hopes:

Tonight’s Show SOLD OUT

A man came around to the front of the booth to put up a poster.

“Excuse me,” I said, “But the sold out sign – is that for the play at seven?”

“Oh, yeah, we ran out of tickets hours ago. People start lining up at six in the morning and wait there until two when we begin passing them out. Then it’s crazy for a half hour and it’s all sold out by two-thirty.”

I sighed. It was about three now.

“If you want, though, you can get in line over there and I can just about guarantee that I can get you a seat when the show starts.”

He indicated a line of people on the distant sidewalk, kept far from the ticket booth. Neither of us felt like waiting in line for four hours and enduring the lethargy that was sure to madden our fragile minds, so we declined and moved on. There was an enormous park before us, several hours of daylight, and a half-eaten bag of truffles in L’s bag for us to feed our sugar highs.

I smelled a delicious smell wafting through the air.

“Food,” I said lovingly.

L. and I followed the path and passed the turtle pond and a little league baseball game. We came to a stand and knew immediately the source of the orgasmic odor.

Waffles.

Waffles.

We inched closer to the waffle stand and read the menu carefully. I wanted to know everything.

“What are you girls doing, standing all the way over there?” a black haired fellow with glasses and a white apron said from inside of the stand. He had an accent that sounded Scottish to me, but I rationalized that he must be a waffle expert from Belgium. “Come closer. Come on.”

We took a few little steps towards the stand.

“Where are you girls from?”

“New York,” I answered, gazing down at the varieties of waffles described below his face.

“Brittany, we’re in New York,” L. said. “Saratoga.”

L. and I did not want anyone selling us anything. We quietly discussed waffles. We wondered what dinges were and how to even say it.

“I think it’s pronounced ‘dingus,’” L. whispered.

“That’s what Dave calls people when their being idiots,” I said. “Spekaloos - what is that? Is that a Belgian thing?”

The fellow behind the counter overheard us.

“Do you want to try it?” he said.

I nodded eagerly. He dipped both sides of a plastic knife with a tan, buttery substance, much like a goopy peanut butter. I took it, licked the knife end, and handed L. the handle. It was warm, spicy, and smooth. She tasted the handle end.

 “This tastes so familiar. What is this made of?” I asked.

“Love and magic,” the man behind the stand said. “What do you think it tastes like?”

“Love and magic seems about right, actually,” I said.

“There’s some cinnamon,” said L, thinking aloud.

“It’s gingerbread,” the fellow in the stand said before either of us could produce the answer.

Gingerbread!

“Oh! Gingerbread!” I cried. “That’s exactly what it is!”

That’s what we were smelling before; it wasn’t merely the waffles.

L. and I whispered about the possibility of buying some fragrant waffles. We had already planned to go to Alice’s Tea Cup and fill our happy stomachs with scones and tea after dinner, and with bellies already gushing with truffles, the thought of waffles seemed over the top.

“Should we go then?” I asked her.

“Let’s go.”

“Bye,” I said to the guy at the stand, “Thanks for all the magic!”

He looked sad. We walked away very quickly.

The Inevitability of the French Fry

I sat wedged between two Turkish students nibbling cheeseburgers in Woodbury Commons. I was the only person outside of the MacDonald’s restaurant without food, daydreaming about frozen desserts.

Usually I do not get paid to peruse discounted brand name merchandise with international students, but the group leader for the Turkish kids flew back to her sales office in Istanbul and left the group unsupervised for the weekend. One girl, Beren, was older than the other students and took charge of the group. There wasn’t much for me to do but make sure they all got to the outlets and back without breaking their legs.

They had already been to the outlets on the fourth of July and now they were just buying souvenirs from friends. When I ask international students why they wanted to come to New York, the word “shopping” is invariably upon their lips. Clothes, handbags, sunglasses, watches – it’s all cheaper in the US.

With little money and a lot of time, I followed Beren and her young friend, Pinar, through the Gap and Armani Exchange and gave bad fashion advice with the best intentions. I couldn’t remember the last time I went shopping with girls.

“Which of these shirts do you like better?” asked Beren, holding up two white American Eagle shirts with red logos, one of which was slightly faded. Squinting slightly, I pointed to the brighter one. I watched them try on tee-shirts over their tee-shirts.

After, Pinar and I dug through a bin of underwear labeled, “4 for $10.” In spite of my resolve to spend no money, I started picking out pairs of cheap underwear. At least I’m not spending frivolously, I thought. Underwear is a necessity of life.

“Where can I go to a Victoria’s Secret?” Pinar asked, tossing aside a pair of extra-large lace-backed panties.

“Just so you know,” I said, “Victoria’s Secret is still pretty expensive here. You can spend, like, forty dollars on one bra there.”

I lifted my breasts slightly as I said the word bra because I find that communication goes more smoothly when I talk with my hands.

“What was that word you used?” Pinar asked.

“Bra,” I repeated. “Bra. But really, they’re, like, forty dollars.”

My mind simply cannot justify forty dollar undergarments.

“Bra,” said Pinar.

“I want just one to take home,” said Beren. “I will buy.”

Among Turkish ladies, I discovered that “I will buy” can be a complete sentence.

“The Gap tee-shirts are eighty US dollars in Istanbul,” Beren explained, contemplating shelf of twelve dollar tees. “I will buy.”

After many hundreds of US dollars were dropped on watches and shoes and handbags, I followed Beren and Pinar to the food pavilion. The word “pavilion” might indicate an establishment that is just as sophisticated as the designer outlets the pavilion keeps company with. Inside, we found pizza, tacos, and Au Bon Pain. This food court fare did not interest the two girls and they went to MacDonalds. We joined the rest of the group at a table outside of the MacDonald’s joint. The Turkish language reigned supreme and I had no idea what was going on.

“Kdeiomcr erjkwjhod kdjsjoe System of a Down adfadewtn,” one girl said.

Okay, they’re talking about music, I thought to myself.

“Please, Brittany, have a fry,” said Beren, pushing her large box of fries towards me. “Please.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“You have nothing,” she pouted. “Please. I beg you. It’s potato, Brittany.”

“No, I know what it’s made of. I’m okay. Really.”

“But it’s so much food,” she said.

No matter where you’re from, you must know what you’re getting yourself into when you order a large fry in America. You made your salty, deep-fried bed and you can sleep in it. She dipped a fry into a white sauce and I asked her what it was.

“People here usually dip fries into ketchup,” I said.

“This sauce… this is good. You must try it, Brittany,” Beren said.

I’m usually inhumanly immune to peer-pressure. Some combination of curiosity and a desire to not be offered any more fries compelled me to take the smallest one and dip it into the white sauce. And… disappointment. I tasted ranch dressing and salt.

“Thanks,” I said with lukewarm enthusiasm. I hadn’t eaten a MacDonald’s French fry since I was sixteen. I left the group for a moment to purchase a salad from the Au Bon Pain and rethink my life.

In the car that evening, Dave lectured me on the inevitability of the French fry.

“You thought you could avoid MacDonald’s for the rest of your life? You can’t. I predict that someday, before you die, you will eat another MacDonald’s French fry. Someday you will be traveling and you will be starving and after walking for miles you will come to a MacDonald’s restaurant. You will buy fries because that is the only food for miles around and you will eat those fries whether you like it or not because you need that food to live.”

Let's Learn Spanish

I want to live in the world of virtual language learning software – a Garden of Eden full of Spanish-speaking families, running horses, and women eating rice. Some of them live in apartments; some of them live in houses. Some of them live near the street and some of them live far from the street. They are all happy, regardless. They play a lot of soccer with children and go bowling with their families. There is no friendlier sub-species of Homo sapiens than the people who populate the world of language learning software. A man can simply walk up to another man who is sitting on the hood of his Cadillac and say, “Hola. You are a man.”

Thirsty people of all ages, races, and nationalities sit around the dining room table together, thoroughly enjoying tall glasses of milk. They relish in each other’s company so much that they laugh in every frame. And let’s not forget the rice. People in language learning software love rice. Nothing gets their horses running quite like it. Bowls of white rice consumed with dexterously maneuvered wooden chopsticks are the social lubricant of their utopia.

If you ran into a man and woman sitting on logs at a camp in the woods – a common occurrence in the world of language learning software – you would casually join them upon that log. They would introduce themselves and tell you they are from Italy. They would give you water. They would give you a bowl of rice. They would take you back to civilization on horseback and many old men on the street would stop and pet that horse and say with great satisfaction, “This is a horse. I am a man” The couple from the woods would introduce you to everyone they know. “This is my mother. This is my sister. This is a police man. This is a Russian. This is a baby.”

You would struggle to figure out what ending you’re supposed to use to address someone new when you say, “Enchanted to meet you.” You would regret leaving your Rosetta Stone lessons to gather cobwebs for five months and mix up the verbs for eating and running. You gloomily recognize that you still can’t make that double-L sound as impeccably as the charming Spanish man who does the voice-over.

But you know it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, you know all of the Spanish you need to thrive in the world of virtual language learning software. The man, the woman, the Russian, and the grandmother will still be smiling when you use the wrong verb tense. If they are aware that you’ve made a mistake at all, they don’t have the words to express it anyways. The world of language learning software is a far simpler one than ours.

Confessions of a Fire-Breathing Brontosaurus

I used to be obsessed with hot wings. I would order them at the highest level of spiciness offered in a restaurant, usually extra spicy with fire sauce, a side of death, and a stack of napkins to cry into. The waiters always raised their eyebrows and asked me if I knew how powerful extra hot really was, to which I would arrogantly respond, “I think I can handle it.” My personal chicken wing philosophy at the time: If it doesn’t make you cry, it’s not worth it.

In high school, one of those school magazines that recognize precocious young artists printed a poem I wrote, a passionate sonnet to the chicken wing called “Chicken’s Kiss.” My passion wasn't limited to tasty birds, however. I had an impressive assortment of hot sauces lined up in my refrigerator, like Dinosaur Duels the Devil hot sauce. The label depicted a fire-breathing brontosaurus sword fighting Satan. Sometimes I dribbled hot sauce on a bowl of ice cream because I liked to eat my pain for dessert.

In college, I stopped eating meat. Hot wings were removed from the dietary equation, but my cravings for foods that burn only multiplied. I couldn’t even take a whiff of the dining hall air on Wacky Wing Wednesday without my mouth watering. I flipped open a Thai food takeout menu searching for answers and discovered drunken noodles, a sort of string bean and bell pepper stir fry with a spicy sauce speckled with Thai chilies.

Every Thai restaurant menu has a spiciness scale of one to five chilies, with one chili representing mildly spicy (or American spicy, as Thai folks surely call it) and five chilies indicating Thai spicy. One might notice, scanning through a menu, that there are no more than two chilies in a row beside the titles of spicy dishes. Sure, two chilies on the scale of one to five (Mexican spicy?) is pretty hot, but it seemed important to experience the particular burn of five chilies for myself.

The Thai food restaurant in the area where I grew up used to employ a totally Thai staff. Smiling Thai women in traditional Thai garb used to pour our Thai tea and bring us complementary Thai soup. Then all of the Thai ladies were slowly replaced with white guys in button-up shirts. One day, while out to lunch with Dave, I asked one of the waiters if I could have the drunken noodles at the highest level of spiciness.

“Are you sure?” he asked wryly. “That’s really hot.” I assured him that I could handle it.

When my meal arrived, I ate half of the plate with my eyes streaming and lips burning. I must have downed five or six glasses of water. It was glorious.

“I hope you’re enjoying that,” Dave said, watching me sob into my napkin.

Homemade salsa became another source of spicy indulgence. My brother and I would stay up late chopping up tomatoes from the garden and variety boxes of hot pepper from the farmer’s market. The first time I cut a jalapeno, I ingeniously used my bare hands. The acid got under my fingernails, singed my skin, and sizzled into the wee hours of the morning.

Following advice from a forum I found from a Google search, I soaked my hands in straight-up white vinegar, scrubbed them with dish soap in the hottest water my hands could stand, and washed them in ketchup. In the end, I drifted into an uneasy sleep in bed with plastic baggies full of ketchup tied over my hands.

It’s funny to think that a jalapeno, barely spicy enough to tickle my taste buds, could cause so much agony on my skin and I can only imagine what hot peppers do to my internal organs. Why do I eat these things and why do I enjoy them? There certainly is a hint of masochism to adoring spicy food.

Last night, Dave refilled our jars of curry and red pepper flakes while I did the dishes. He peered into the enormous bag of red pepper flakes and took a sniff.

“Red pepper smells really weird,” he said. He brought the bag to me. “Smell this.”

Dave accidentally squeezed the bag and a red pepper flake popped into my eyeball. It felt like fire under my eyelid. Wailing, I ran to the bathroom and doused my eye with cold water to get the pepper flake out, but the burning sensation lingered. Once my eye cooled down enough for me to see, Dave consulted the internet, finding amusing anecdotes about people burning themselves with hot peppers and how to keep cats out of your garden with a barrier of red pepper flakes. The burning stopped before “how to get red pepper flakes out of my girlfriend’s eye” turned up with any useful answers.

Somehow, after all of this, I’m not in the least put off by hot peppers. I’m am no less interested in a plate of Thai food or a salsa that needs to be chased with twenty gallons of cold water. Recently, I read in a nutrition book that cold-blooded, reptilian monsters like me crave spicy food to warm our bodies and increase circulation to our extremities, which explains a lot. But it doesn't explain why I’m drawn to food that makes me cry.

The Scoby Delivers

Man, last night was crazy.  I drank, like, three bottles of kombucha.

Voila, three utterly perfect bottles of kombucha. If I was disease ridden before and did not know it, I certainly must be healthy now, for we have emptied every one.

The original scoby became a mother and produced a baby, which we put to work when we began to brew two jars at once. Our refrigerator currently contains six bottles of kombucha. Two are fermented with pomegranate lime juice, two have some grated ginger stewing at the bottom, and two are original scoby-flavored. The juiced-up kombucha doesn’t taste any different from the unflavored version. This makes me sad. The ginger flavored kombucha is epic, like what ginger ale would taste like if it was actually made of ginger.

Two new jars are brewing in the corner and should be fully fermented this weekend, which means we are going to have to chug an enormous amount of kombucha or make new friends with indigestion. Dave now has a great deal of confidence in making things in jars and took up pickling. I'm still not quite sure how he did it and believe that some wizardry was indubitably involved. It's much prettier than a jar of bacteria pancakes.

Raw Chocolate Experiment

For the past few days my brain has been very adverse to copywriting, so I suppose I might as well do something productive and write about chocolate.

Dave gave me a Mayan Magic Chocolate Making Kit from The Chocolution this past Christmas. He may know me too well. I finally used it this weekend to make a tiny batch of Mayan chocolates with cayenne pepper.

I boiled a tiny pot of water and put a ceramic bowl on top to form an arguably hazardous double boiler. Once the water came to a boil, I turned off the heat and emptied a bag of raw chocolate and chunks of cocoa butter into the bowl. As the chocolate slowly melted into sweet lava, I impatiently prodded it with a fork.

With the chocolate completely liquefied, I squeezed a bag of agave nectar into the bowl and mixed the concoction together. I made a split second decision to spice it up with some cinnamon and cayenne pepper.

As I stirred in the towering pile of spices, I realized that the chocolate was changing phase, solidifying into what looked like brownie batter. I could hardly complain about that. I tried turning the heat on low again, but the ball remained defiantly dough-like. I mushed balls of warm, doughy chocolate into the tiny cups, flattening the tops with a spoon to make them look a little more presentable.

Brownie bites? Nope.

Presentation aside, the chocolates turned out delicious and I think this is surely a sign for me to become a chocolatier for the blind. When it comes to chocolate, it’s the taste that counts most anyways.

Pepto-Bismol Suitcase

Image from www.werewolves.com. No, really.

I love traveling, but it always makes me sick. No matter how many times nausea strikes my gut at an inconvenient time, I somehow never seem to lose my enthusiasm. I did not regret my trip to Boston even when I was curled in a ball on my bus seat squeezing my knees to my chest and chewing a chalky disk of Pepto-Bismol. I had a sheet of it tucked away in my bag and by the end of the bus ride it was nothing but shredded plastic.

I’ve learned to prepare for the inevitable lurch after lunch – a chocolate chip scone and fudge brownie shortly before my departure was a probably culprit. I got sick in Prague during my first week and I got sick leaving Prague for the United States. I also fell ill in Berlin and Cesky Krumlov and almost every time I’ve ever chugged into New York City on the Metro North.

If I were really practical, I would religiously pack a medium-sized rolling suitcase full of Pepto-Bismol for every voyage. I would fold up an enormous sheet of Pepto-Bismol tablets as small as it would go, like a pink polka-dotted pool tarp. I would pack the neatly folded antacids into the Pepto -pink suitcase, sit on the flap to flatten the air pockets, and zip. I would wheel the onerous load behind me like the queer biological baggage that it is and hoist it onto the next step of the escalator.