As an update to yesterday’s post where I mentioned how good the food that Anthony Bourdain was eating in Ghana looked, I went to my favorite INTERNET and found some recipes, here and here, and oh, here. They look easy enough to make and all the ingredients are either already in myΒ house (peanut butter) or readily available in the grocery store. My feast will have to wait, though, until I can afford more than ramen noodles.
I might substitute rice for the fufu, though.
Do not watch the Travel Channel program Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations when all you have in the cupboard is ramen noodles. There were three episodes on tonight: one in New York, one in Ireland, and one in Ghana. Everything he put on his plate looked delicious, yes even the Ghanaian cuisine. (I’ve already grown up in the tropics, half the ingredients in Cuban food was originally African, so I could imagine myself downing those delicious-looking spicy stew soups — even the one made of some sort of giant African rat. Hey, rabbit is a rodent too. Mmm, Hasenpfeffer!)
My stomach has been growling for a couple of days now. I’ll be sitting there and suddenly what sounds like a creaking door or a particularly irritated Jack Russell terrier will start sounding off from the direction of my bowels. I don’t know why — I’ve cut down on the greasy crap, and have been eating lots of fiber (fresh vegetables, salad, oatmeal). Then again, maybe that’s why. Apparently when you get older your stomach doesn’t digest as efficiently as it used to. But still they tell us old folks to start downing hard-to-digest fiber. Which is why old people fart. Or at least, why I do. That’s probably more information than you wanted about me.
Anyway, over at Rachel’s there’s been a long conversation about how there is no Mexican food in the UK and what is she going to do when she moves there. (Her guy got a job over there and they’ll be moving to Blighty real soon. That’s hysterical to me because of all the people on my blogroll Rachel is one of the last people I would think would end up in Britain. She just seemed so perfectly of her current location, Texas USA. Also she hates the cold, and Britain is apparently over its heat wave and has gone back to being cold and damp. And no, I am not totally seething with jealousy so much so that the green glow from my skin is scaring my cats. So not.)
To continue: her commenters are trying to help out with suggestions and stories or just joining in on the mutual moaning. As for me, I did what I always do these days when I read that someone has made a declaration that I find questionable (here, that there are no Mexican restaurants in England): I go to Google and look it up. I know that Google is a pack of America-hating communist rich jerks from some university, but they’re still a good source of links. Of course I found plenty of Mexican places listed in the UK. I don’t know about the quality of the food — It’s been almost thirty years since my one and only trip overseas, and while I experienced fine Indian and Chinese and Indonesian and Middle Eastern food, we didn’t look for any Mexican places. And of course most people aren’t even reading my link, and are going on and on about how they’ll mail Rachel care packages of tacos and hot sauce, and how there aren’t any Taco Bells over there.
Oh stop right there. Yes, there is a notion in the comments that Taco Smell, as it is known in these parts, is somehow “Mexican” food. As if. I’ve eaten Mexican food, both Tex-Mex and California Mex and “real” Mex prepared by real Mexicans (though not in Mexico), and I can tell you right now that Taco Bell’s “cuisine” is about as Mexican as apple pie. Maybe less so. It’s imitation Mexican, at best. But if you’re at all blocked up in the downstairs region I can recommend a couple of their tacos to break the dam, so to speak. Just be prepared to set a couple of days aside to spend on the commode. Lay up a nice pile of magazines.
As an aside, I don’t see what the big deal is about Mexican food. Just about everyone I know is obsessed with the stuff. “What’ll we eat tonight?” “Let’s go out for Mexican!” Said with the gleaming eyes of fanatics. And then we end up and some Fake-Mex place like Chili’s. But like I said, I’ve eaten the more authentic cuisine (when I lived in Miami there was the little place in Little Havana, of all neighborhoods, which was owned and run by Mexicans from Mexico, stocked with Mexican sodas and all kinds of things, where the food was the real stuff; and it was good too — all at a little hole-in-the-wall place). But I don’t see what’s so special about it. It’s basically the same heavy peasant fare that people eat the world over — meat, rice, beans — tarted up with hot chilis. I think that’s the draw, the hot chilis: apparently capsaicin is addictive, you build up a resistance to it like to any drug and you need more and more to fulfill your cravings. Also it increases endorphins, just like heroin. But it tastes better than sprinkling heroin on your food.
The thing I don’t understand is am I the only person in the universe who looks stuff up? Eighty percent of the people on Rachel’s comment listing simply accepts the sweeping declaration that “there is no Mexican food in England,” with the secondary notion that there is only the horrible English cuisine (which isn’t always that horrible, but I’ll get to it later), and they join in on the moaning. If it were me and my boyfriend told me there wasn’t Mexican food in England — well first, I’d never ask him, because men don’t know things like that. They don’t know any of the gatherer stuff women know — they’re the hunters, remember, programmed to go out and kill animals for dinner, not to look for seeds and nuts and shoe sales. Restaurants, being sophisticated places, come under the heading of “shops” in a male mind, and they don’t know where those places are, even in their own neighborhood. (But for some reason, they know where the bars and pubs are. I guess in prehistoric days herds of beer and whiskey roamed the land.) Anyway, the first thing I’d do is hit the internet — that’s why we have this thing. Or so I thought.
Even Steve is getting into the act. Well, he is a man — I guess it’s not manly to Google. That’ll be the new “asking for directions” — “I don’t need to Google it, I can find it on my own. I’ve got my spear! And I’m a man!” Two hours later you’re lost in a strange neighborhood of porn sites.
There’s also the predictable slams on English cuisine. Don’t misunderstand me, I’ve slammed it too — when I came back home from England I never wanted to see a potato again. (I’ve since recovered.)Β But it’s basically what I call Your Grandma’s Cooking — if your grandma was a WASP like mine was. We’re talking anything made in the kitchen on the stove or in the oven. Roasts, boiled food, fried food. Vegetables are usually rendered into mush, for the comfort of people with bad teeth. The second starch is bread. Bread is white. Salad is a small pile of iceberg lettuce (in Europe, usually served at room temperature), with maybe a few cautious shavings of carrot or purple cabbage, and some bland mayonnaise-y dressing like Thousand Island. The desserts are good, though — mostly custard based, with piles of whip cream.
Someone made fun of the awful sandwiches they serve at British railway stations. I had some of those — mine was the same type of hard-boiled egg sandwich I used to make when I was a kid: slices of thin white bread, butter, one layer of sliced egg. And I had a ham sandwich in a restaurant that was one thin slice of ham, one leaf of lettuce, on a very thin, flat baguette. But the food here at such places isn’t much better. When I took the Amtrak up to North Carolina to get my car, I got a sandwich in the dining car that came in a plastic bag. It was on a white bun, and was turkey, I think — a few layers of thin-sliced meat and one slice of cheese. They did have a full bar, though.
That’s all for now. I’m off to see if I can’t persuade my electric company to give me a couple more days to pay my bill. They refused to give me an extension this time, I don’t know why — unless they’ve changed all their policies for some reason. (The girl told me her computer didn’t give a reason why.) It’s just been one of those months. I am collecting funds, as usual — and no, I won’t be buying booze, that’s just a joke. (I don’t know how winos do it — but then that’s why they’re living on the street.) Changed — booze is fattening anyway. I am thinking of running a campaign like Wikipedia’s — their goal is six million dollars. Mine is a bit more modest, though if you have a couple of million just lying around…
Hey, at least, unlike Wikipedia, I don’t pretend everything on here is trufax. π
It occurs to me that one of the reasons pop culture seems so enervated these days is because we got what we wanted: the alternative is now the mainstream. But what little energy the mainstream got was from weird, avant-garde art, which in turn got its energy from the weird, alternative lifestyles practiced by most avant-garde artists. And many of those artists are, or were, gay, or at least liked to hang around gays for the “different” vibe and conversation gays used to provide. Nowadays it seems that all gays can talk about is the latest boring political movement to force Joe and Jane Schmo to accept their bed habits as being “normal.” But they seem to have forgotten that “normal” is another word for “boring.” I posted the following comment here:
Does anyone besides me and Florence King wonder why gays are suddenly (supposedly) so into being accepted into the mainstream, to the extent that they want their living arrangements to be treated by law just like the living arrangements of heterosexual couples? Back in the “old days” (when I was a young ‘un, cough hack) of the Sixties and Seventies gays prided themselves on being “different” and having escaped the square, dull life of the “straights.” They were also widely regarded as wittier and generally more artistic. Even the loud and trashy drag queen act had that bit of burnish from being “not for everyone” especially the “safe entertainment” sorts. Nowadays, however, thanks to the take-a-mile strategies of the GLBT activists, we are daily presented with the full horror of Gays Are Just Folks Like Us, which means they are just as boring and unattractive and lumpen. Some of them even lack a sense of fashion!
I think it’s all a plot, a plot to destroy gay culture from the inside. Gays should fight back — to have their status as outsiders returned! If I were gay, I know I’d want my closet back after the publication of things like Heather Has Two Mommies.
I think the end started when AIDS came along. Regular venereal diseases were one thing — either you took medicine and recovered, or you went mad and died. But AIDS had no cure, which meant that the culture of diva-ness was merged with the culture of sickness which had been growing in the US since at least the Fifties (when self-sufficient, manly movie stars like John Wayne and Gary Cooper began to be supplanted by neurotic fainting violets like James Dean). The results we see today: no one in an position of authority dares say “boo” to a mouse for fear the mouse will turn out to be a gay lesbian cripple with a stack of hate crime forms next to her iMac. In the meantime, I can’t listen to any songs released after 1992 because all rock bands these days look like the same jeans-clad skinny white boys and all their songs are the same grunge-metal chords and lyrics about bad dorm sex on meth. I never thought I would miss Boy George.
Update: I totally did not see this before I posted.
The only comfort is, most of the appalled turkey-slaughter-viewers will in turn die off in the next great disaster, due to their inability to adapt to harsher (that is, “finding out where your microwaved chicken-and-cheese taquitos come from”) conditions. Which will leave more delicious meat for the rest of us.
The thing about me is when I decide to write something, I always get three or more story ideas going up at the same time. It’s like my mind produces mushroom clusters all over. Which is a kind of way of saying my mind is full of shit. Anyway, here’s a sample of one of the outbreaks. It may or may not develop into a story or novelette. I will give a hint to it’s plot: it’s sort of connected with the current troubles, but it takes place in the near future and isn’t much to do with what is going on in the exact here and now. And the conflict isn’t so much to do with global issues as more personal ones having to do with character and how ordinary people deal with sudden transforming events. I can see the vague outlines of the story as a whole, but I don’t have all the details yet — just atmosphere, and some of the characters’ outlines. I’m still looking for names. (I’m bad at names.)
Update: I think I’ll put all my writing stuff here. It’s a Livejournal site. I like the style of the main page — I wish there was some way to carry over the styles to the individual entry pages and comment pages though. Their default style for those is rather utilitarian. (Full disclosure: and early, pre-blog site is on LJ, though under a different user name. Here are those old entries. Notice the day I didn’t post. I was at my ex-BF’s house, watching the TV like the rest of the universe.)
Wait wait wait — no I wouldn’t. You sick sick people. What the hell, does no one read the internet anymore? Bet you they don’t even know what the It’s Photoshopped joke means. On the bright side: you can still tell these people to google “two girls one cup” and then sit back and wait for the lulz. (Don’t — google that. Trust me.)
(Via Livington’s Red RosΓ© wine — not as bad as you remembered from prom night.)
“Ouch!! I landed on my eight-sided dice!”
(Via. And kudoes to anyone who can tell me the title of the movie that quote came from. Come on, show off your geek cred!)
I’ll start off saying I have never read any of his books that I can recall, but I might just do so now. Just about everything in this interview he says is just so plain and true. What makes me want to cry? The kind of education he got. I’ll bet he didn’t have to do a single poster. I had to do them in college, and it wasn’t for an art class either, but a so-called philosophy class (“Feminist Thought,” it was called — enter your own joke).
I’d say more but I’m tired.
Via Protein Wisdom.
Hey, I opened a Twitter account. Now when I’m at Walmart I can send a text to my page saying I’m at Walmart. Seriously, I get these little thoughtlets when I’m out and about, and by the time I get home and get the computer on I forget them, and I’d like to keep at least some of them. Maybe this will help.