Sighted in the Wild
“Hey, I’ve seen you before.”
I’m standing in a corner of the office elevator, singing the chorus of The Killers’ ‘Uncle Jonny’ under my breath (“Tell us what’s going on/Feels like everything’s wrong/If the future is real/Jonny, you’ve got to heal”), when the man standing in front of the doors turns to me, squints, and says the above.
“Huh?” Momentary panic seizes me. Do I owe this person money? Accidentally bump into him and spill his beer at the Cat last weekend? Am I about to get pummeled? My foggy pre-9 a.m. brain desperately sorts through scenarios…should I launch some sort of preemptive attack here?
“Yeah, you write those restaurant reviews,” he says. “Small plates.”
Ah. Yes. The OnTap restaurant review page, which unfortunately features a headshot of me looking like a chainsaw-brandishing maniac right out of an 80s horror flick – not in any way the fault of the photographer, I hasten to add, but because my natural aversion to having my photo taken often translates itself into a distinctive do-you-feel-lucky-punk grimace whenever a camera is pointed in my general direction.
“Yep!” I say.
Random person nods again and steps off the elevator, leaving me mildly confused. Also present in the elevator: our marketing director, who twists around and says, mildly wide-eyed, “You moonlight?”
Yeah, you could say that.
Bread
In a fit of temporary insanity I decided to make bread over the weekend. It turned out well, actually, for a first attempt. A recipe involving a minimal amount of yeast and a high water/flour ratio, then left to sit, in its covered bowl, for 18 hours. The dough had the consistency of warm glue as I poured it from the bowl into a towel dusted with flour; I poked it into a rough ball and went running (a cold and rainy early Sunday morning, a muck of wet leaves clinging to my shoes and shins), and then came back and baked it on high heat for two hours.
The whole process left me with a faint understanding of why the chefs and butchers in Bill Bufford’s ‘Heat’ constantly refer to their foodstuffs as live things, with their own personalities and fickleness. Bread dough quickly assumes its own destiny – it’ll rise when it feels like it, but maybe not – and depending on which ingredients you use, has its own quirks; just as, I imagine, certain cuts of meat or animals have their own structures and idiosyncrasies that demand the respect from whomever’s doing the cutting. The tragedy of mass-market production, in a way, is that by producing uniform products by the tens of thousands or even millions, all those quirks are stripped away, leaving you with something bland of soul if not of taste.
Oh, great, I’m a friggin’ New Yorker food critic now.
Shameless Plugs
New City Paper piece (City Lights) on Nov. 17; interview with Darren Aronofsky runs in the Washington Post on Nov. 24; Post piece on Internet leagues sometime in Nov.; new issue of OnTap on Nov. 30.
I’m standing in a corner of the office elevator, singing the chorus of The Killers’ ‘Uncle Jonny’ under my breath (“Tell us what’s going on/Feels like everything’s wrong/If the future is real/Jonny, you’ve got to heal”), when the man standing in front of the doors turns to me, squints, and says the above.
“Huh?” Momentary panic seizes me. Do I owe this person money? Accidentally bump into him and spill his beer at the Cat last weekend? Am I about to get pummeled? My foggy pre-9 a.m. brain desperately sorts through scenarios…should I launch some sort of preemptive attack here?
“Yeah, you write those restaurant reviews,” he says. “Small plates.”
Ah. Yes. The OnTap restaurant review page, which unfortunately features a headshot of me looking like a chainsaw-brandishing maniac right out of an 80s horror flick – not in any way the fault of the photographer, I hasten to add, but because my natural aversion to having my photo taken often translates itself into a distinctive do-you-feel-lucky-punk grimace whenever a camera is pointed in my general direction.
“Yep!” I say.
Random person nods again and steps off the elevator, leaving me mildly confused. Also present in the elevator: our marketing director, who twists around and says, mildly wide-eyed, “You moonlight?”
Yeah, you could say that.
Bread
In a fit of temporary insanity I decided to make bread over the weekend. It turned out well, actually, for a first attempt. A recipe involving a minimal amount of yeast and a high water/flour ratio, then left to sit, in its covered bowl, for 18 hours. The dough had the consistency of warm glue as I poured it from the bowl into a towel dusted with flour; I poked it into a rough ball and went running (a cold and rainy early Sunday morning, a muck of wet leaves clinging to my shoes and shins), and then came back and baked it on high heat for two hours.
The whole process left me with a faint understanding of why the chefs and butchers in Bill Bufford’s ‘Heat’ constantly refer to their foodstuffs as live things, with their own personalities and fickleness. Bread dough quickly assumes its own destiny – it’ll rise when it feels like it, but maybe not – and depending on which ingredients you use, has its own quirks; just as, I imagine, certain cuts of meat or animals have their own structures and idiosyncrasies that demand the respect from whomever’s doing the cutting. The tragedy of mass-market production, in a way, is that by producing uniform products by the tens of thousands or even millions, all those quirks are stripped away, leaving you with something bland of soul if not of taste.
Oh, great, I’m a friggin’ New Yorker food critic now.
Shameless Plugs
New City Paper piece (City Lights) on Nov. 17; interview with Darren Aronofsky runs in the Washington Post on Nov. 24; Post piece on Internet leagues sometime in Nov.; new issue of OnTap on Nov. 30.
posted by NiK @ 5:45 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home