Posts by krista

Jan 12

Cat Fat Fever

Ok, I love cat crap but I’m no pet blogger. Yet I couldn’t help but be sucked in by a news teaser last night about a stray fat cat who was found stuck in a doggie door. He looked enormous and crazy so I had to learn more. Goliath, as he’d been dubbed, clearly hadn’t been doing without during his six months on the street. His original owner, who lost the cat while in the hospital for a lung transplant, (don't miss the heartwarming tidbit about how the feline would lie on his stomach and play with his oxygen tubes) was reunited after seeing Hercules (his real name) on TV.

The best part of the whole saga, which I later discovered, was where the cat lived: Gresham, Oregon (my hometown). I should’ve known. I’m not sure if this is a tale of NW kindness to the homeless (I’ve always been amazed at the number of panhandlers in Portland vs. NYC and the tolerance level. There’s not a lot of sympathy here—maybe that’s why they all flock to Oregon) or about Gresham generating fatness.

I was baffled that Hercules only weighed twenty pounds. James keeps insisting that my ever-growing feline must weigh twenty pounds and I refuse to believe him. I don’t know what to do with her. We leave the same food out for all of our cats, yet James’s two remain average sized. Why can’t Sukey control her portions?

I really fear that there must be a correlation between owners and pets weights. And the last thing I need is another diabetic cat. James is always trying to capture Sukey in unflattering poses so he can take photos, which while amusing, is mildly cruel. She looks ok when she’s sitting up but when she’s lying on her side she looks like a tubcat in training. At least chubby cats don’t seem to have poor self-esteem.

I bought a scale last week because I’m trying to be more diligent, and last night we got Sukey’s measurements: 21 pounds. What the hell? She was only 7 pounds when I got her (granted, she was still kitten-ish and malnourished). I can’t fathom that she’s bigger than Hercules. This somehow reflects on me. It’s a good thing I’m not a human parent or else my kids would get sent home with bad BMI report cards.

spring 2004

winter 2006

By the way, if you thought I was exaggerating about James’s mom always sending him home with atrocities from Marshalls, just witness these beauties that showed up post-Christmas. Meow.

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Jan 12

What are Words For?

Vocab I really should’ve taken those Reader’s Digest Word Power quizzes (The New Yorker’s got nothing on RD when it comes to hilarious cartoons) I’d entertain myself with while at my grandparent’s house more seriously. It’s starting to dawn on me how vocabularily deficient I am. This first struck me last year when that cat Molly got stuck in the wall of a West Village shop and the New York Times’s account used the phrase, “During the ordeal, the media hubbub grew apace, and cat agnostics grumbled about folderol.” Folderol? WTF? Is that sort of wordsmithery really necessary? And no, I didn’t know that folderol meant trifle or nonsense. I went to public school, duh.

The 2007 me is starting to look up words if I’m not 100% sure what they mean. It’s not terribly difficult since I’m usually reading on the computer and it’s not all that hard to type (or bookmark) www.m-w.com. So far I’ve looked up recalcitrant and I was correct, it’s akin to obstinate. Yesterday, I double-checked picayune and I was pretty right on, though I was thinking more tiny than trivial.

I was feeling fairly adept, and then I was slammed by ukase. I had no inkling. Apparently, it’s an edict or decree. I don’t even think I can or want to use that in a sentence. It sounds a little like urine and ketosis.

I know that my grammar is anything but ace. I mean, I only started using paragraphs last year (here, I mean, in the real world I’ve always used them). But every so often I have shameful realizations. Today it hit me that I’ve been writing hoards for eons when I mean hordes. I found five instances of the vocab crime on this site and changed them pronto, none of that pesky slash through business. 2007 is going to be a busy year at this rate.

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Jan 10

Civic Lesson

I swear I don’t love beating dead horses (even though I’m mildly equine averse) but just a few minutes ago I heard Go! Team blaring from the living room TV while in my bedroom. Lordy, what could they possibly be selling? I guessed car, it’s often autos. It was Honda Civic. Frankly, I’m surprised their bouncy, upbeat sound hadn’t been used in a commercial yet (ah…apparently, Nike and McDonald’s attempted it). I’m totally beyond the whole indie sellout label. Who cares as long as curtails ‘80s worship.

I expect that sort of thing from a car ad, but sports elude me. Sunday afternoon I was trying to tune out some NFL pre-game show but I couldn’t ignore the background music during a montage. You know how you know a song but out of context you don’t always identify it immediately. They were using Voxtrot’s “Missing Pieces.” Yeah, I guess they’re popular. I can’t gauge what’s mainstream anymore, though from flipping through radio stations in the car I can definitely say Voxtrot is not playing in NYC. I hate to admit that even the National Football League knows better than to blast Nu Shooz.

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Jan 9

Where’s the (99-Cent) Beef?

The two closest work food options are making me angry. I don’t expect greatness, but I wouldn’t mind a little cheapness.

Wendys Last year around this time I was on a Wendy’s salad kick. That petered out, which is unfortunate since now there’s a Wendy’s in the concourse below my office building. I really felt like junk food last week and half the staff was still out for the holidays so I didn’t feel so self-conscious about smelly food. I thought I’d order value menu small fries and a jr. bacon cheeseburger. Cheap and not too gluttonous.

Now, I swear the Wendy’s near my old job had a 99-cent menu and I know for a fact there are ads currently running that are hyping up the 99-cent menu (heck, 99 is in the URL). So why did my jr. bacon cheeseburger on the value menu cost $1.99? Baked potatoes, chili, frosty–none of it was 99 cents. What kind of Rockefeller Center bullshit is this?

I know they used to (and probably still do) have tiny print at the bottom of fast food commercials where they’d say “prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii” and I’d feel bad for the statehood latecomers, but last time I checked NYC was still part of the continental United States. Ok, the website does say, “prices available at participating Wendy’s.” What’s the point of a promotion of no one participates?

Au Bon Pain has been causing similar pain. One of their only redeeming qualities was the 50% off baked goods after 4pm deal, which isn’t followed in the branch that’s in the ground floor of this same building. We get some sort of discount with our work IDs (which I only figured out a few weeks ago when I saw someone flashing their badge) but that’s not the same as a half off brownie. Whatever, I’m supposed to be cutting sweet junk out of my diet as of today, anyway.

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Jan 5

Jewel-Encrusted Crustacean

I Do(nut), which might seem cryptic at first glance, is the latest to join the ranks of my pointless but must-be-pointed-out categories a la No Fat Dudes and Vomit Watch. It’s documenting absolutely useless crap like this that keeps me sane (seriously, it’s very soothing). The crap in question is when a man (and it’s almost always a man) proposes using food as a vehicle for the diamond (and it’s almost always a diamond) ring. Does this happen in real life? I would just pretend like I didn’t see the gem and put the offending piece of food in my mouth like nothing was up.

I’m no chick flick lover, but apparently James is, he’ll watch the worst schlock and watch it repeatedly. If I’ve seen a film, I don’t want to see it again for at least five years, even if it was amazing. I used to get irritated by his TV viewing habits but I’ve learned to relax and go zen even if it’s the fifth time Batman Begins comes on or something I have zero interest in like Glory appears on screen.

So, the other night he put on In Her Shoes about thirty minutes into the movie and just left it there. It seemed that Toni Collette was fat because she was wearing a heavy coat and her pretty, partying sister, Cameron Diaz called her fat. And then like thirty minutes later she’s thin because she’s not wearing the coat anymore and she finds love and a Jewish lawyer asks her to marry him in a Philadelphia Jamaican jerk shop using a plate of rice and beans topped with shrimp.

The photo’s a little pixilated but that’s an engagement ring gracing the front-facing prawn. Is there anything dreamier than a jewel-encrusted crustacean?

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Jan 4

Hash House a Go Go

1/2 Ok, I wanted to get all of my Las Vegas food ventures written up by the new year, but here’s a straggler that I don’t feel I can just shit can because it’s 2007. I never start with a clean slate until the second week of a fresh year anyway.

Despite the kitschy name, the food at Hash House a Go Go isn’t silly. I only tried breakfast but their M.O. appeared to be creative country style standards, served in enormous portions. We chose this place after getting scared by buffet crowds. I figured that any place requiring a car to get to (and good enough for Martha Stewart) would be wiser.

It’s practically like three buffet trips on a single plate anyway. The dish looks bizarrely flattened and smaller in 2D—the thing took up like half the table. My Andy’s Sage Fried Chicken from the “Indiana Favorites” section, did contain a chicken wing but that wasn’t really the bulk of the dish. It came sitting on a giant pile of bacon mashed studded mashed potatoes that also had strips on top for good measure, and was matched with two eggs, a massive biscuit, numerous tomato slices and the edges of the plate were glazed in a maple reduction. Oh, and there was a watermelon wedge, which I didn’t touch because I don’t eat melon.

I washed it all down with two giant $7 bloody marys, garnished with cornichons, olives and pickled beans. I love green beans in a bloody mary—it reminds me of the days and nights spent at Holman’s in my old Portland neighborhood (I’ve never understood why monte cristos are so scarce in NYC and why they put them on the breakfast menu when they’re sandwiches for any time).

I hate wasting food but it’s just not sensible to wrap up leftovers on vacation. I’ve learned this the hard way many times (for instance, eating cold, gelatinous Sichuan beef and ma po tofu while packing in Hong Kong because I couldn’t bear to toss it out). James still insisted on getting his jalapeno, chorizo hash to go, only to throw it out the next morning. He’s even thriftier than I am.

Hash House a Go Go * 6800 W Sahara Ave., Las Vegas, NV

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Jan 4

Mancora

Not counting vacations (because I force myself to wake up earlier) I probably only eat breakfast or brunch out like three times a year. But I hadn’t/haven’t gone grocery shopping in over two weeks so the food situation had become dire (sort of, there are two freezers full of things like chicken breasts, pork dumplings, lime and curry leaves, duck fat, Italian sausage, morcilla [I ate that last night with chickpeas, dried cranberries, pinenuts, garlic, parsley and lots of olive oil—so good I’ll eat some more tonight] two whole chickens and short ribs, and a shelf brimming with forgotten dry goods like cherry jam, Jacques Torres Wicked Hot Chocolate, Indonesian krupuk, lentils, black beans, kidney beans, Moose Munch, Iams cat food, four varieties of wild rice, weirdo South American grains and dried corn that never ever get used, rendang in a box, low fat coconut milk, canned turnip greens, decaf Starbucks coffee and way way more) enough to warrant dressing before noon and fighting the Sunday brunching brigade.

I tried to come up with nearby options that might be unpopular yet still tasty. Irish breakfast at the recently revamped Ceol came to mind (as evidenced by my morcilla bender, I’m all about blood sausage). This was the original plan but on our detour to Rite Aid for cold medicine we passed Mancora and were intrigued by the sandwich board advertising a $8.95 brunch with beverage. Peruvian for breakfast seemed about as safe from crowds as Irish, so we gave it a go.
The place was practically empty, save for the Hispanic dudes getting an early start on New Year’s Eve at the bar. Eventually, your classic white guy with his Asian gal came in (all restaurants in gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods must have at least one such couple) so we didn’t feel so lonely.

Where a Mexican place would give out pre-meal chips and salsa, here you get fried plantain chips with a creamy, lightly spiced orange and green dip. We both ordered egg dishes that came with lukewarm, sweet purple rice studded with plantain chunks. It wasn’t bad and I’m a sucker for food in unusual colors (I can see it grossing out people though. I was recently so dismayed to see all these freaks bothered by this emerald green macaroon that I left a pro-green cookie comment and I rarely get involved in these petty matters, and now it looks like all comments have been deleted). I don’t think the rice is naturally purple, despite the fact that purple potatoes and corn do grow in Peru. Maybe it was made with chica morada? I once made purple rice using grape juice, so who knows.

James had a steak and egg thing that came atop English muffins but wasn’t eggs benedict. Mine was more benedict-like but instead of muffins I received eggs sitting on silver dollar sized quesadillas filled with spinach and cheese and drizzled with a chile hollandaise. It was actually kind of creative, more than I’d previously given Mancora credit for.

The food reminded me of the type of fare a chef would come up with (not so much Gordon Ramsey on his Kitchen Nightmares, which appears to be casting in NYC this very second) on Restaurant Makeover to shake up an eatery in a rut and attract new clientele. With a so-so but strong bloody mary (or mimosa or sangria) included in the price, the brunch is a pretty good deal. (12/31/06)

Bottled chicha morada photo from Slashfood.

Jan 4

Nu Shooz Redux

Ringing in 2005, I almost lost my shit at a party when someone put on Nu Shooz (scroll down to 1/2/05–I also just noticed that I resolved to eat more Japanese food in 2005, which I obviously forgot about since it’s been re-resolved for this year). December 31, 2006, The Whispers’s “Rock Steady” pushed me over the edge. This year it was a toss up between Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” and “The Humpty Dance” for the crazy-making award. (Thank god for YouTube—linking to all these random videos used to be impossible. See, ‘00s are better than ‘80s.)

I’m not taking it anymore. There’s a for real 2007 resolution. Seriously, I refuse to attend any more parties playing bad ‘80s music. It’s wrong on so many levels that I shouldn’t even raise my blood pressure over it, but I’m trying to get at the root of why this drives me batshit. And I’m definitely not trying to posit that my anti-‘80s stance makes me cooler than anyone else (though I will say that I thought it was fun and novel to dress ‘80s for a Halloween party…in 1994).

I don’t know that anyone with media awareness actually thinks that NYC is the epicenter of creativity or cutting edge anything. And wretched party music is just one symptom. But there’s still this outdated idea that Williamsburg equals hip. I don’t know why young people who don’t work but have money would be hip but who am I to question the pervasive sentiment.

Admittedly, the New Year’s Eve party I attended had a Madonna theme (which I didn’t realize initially. I blame the dire music situation dawning on me for my weird-eyed photo, but it's all I had to work with since I'm not much of a self-portrait type) so ‘80s music went with the territory. That just begs the question of why a Madonna party in the first place? I did notice that VHS or Beta (an 80’s derivative band) snuck into the playlist so whoever threw this party obviously owned music created in the ‘00s and chose to go with the tried (tired) and true.

But it didn’t stop there. Somehow I later ended up at Royal Oak, which has pained me on numerous occasions with crap like The Pointer Sister’s “Neutron Dance.” Before I could even get a drink, Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams” came on and I was like, “we need to leave now.” I was mildly hearted to see a decent proportion of thirtysomethings at Pete’s Candy Store around the block. The vibe was a little more inviting, and then, I shit you not, Eurythimics’s, “Love is a Stranger” started playing. I was practically bawling as the music progressed into U2 and Europe.

How can it be that Outback Steakhouse (Of Montreal), Sears (Spinto Band—I can’t find a clip of the commercial but the song used is “Oh Mandy”) Payless Shoes (Sambassadeur—also no clip, the song is “Kate”), Geico (Röyksopp) and countless others use cooler music to sell mediocrity than with-it people play in their own homes? People mock THIS type of music as Indie-Yuppie, crap Seth would love on The O.C. (I've never watched an episode in my life, yet I somehow know that this character is known for his adorable indie tastes. And yes, I know the show was just cancelled like today) or Zach Braff (don't watch Scrubs either) would put on a mixtape. I’ll take it. Please, just stop playing “Thriller.”

If youngsters have nostalgia for bad radio music, they should just go full throttle and blast 4 Non Blondes, Spin Doctors, Presidents of the United States of America, Blind Melon and Lisa Loeb. Stuff I wouldn’t go near last decade, but apparently the blinders of time make everything cool. Do you think that in ten years someone who was born in 1982 instead of 1972 like me will be subjected to Top 40 ‘90s music at every party and bar?

Of course there’s the strong possibility that I’m so freaking lame that I only frequent even lamer parties and bars. Please let me know where the secret parties and clubs are that play music created in this millennium, ok? And I don’t mean reggaeton, jeez.

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Jan 4

Hairbrained

I really hate it when I get sucked into those teasers on the Hotmail homepage. Today, Women: is his gray hair sexy? Grabbed my eye and I clicked before I noticed the his part. Fuck that. I won’t stand for old looking men to be sexy until old looking women are accepted (just like no fat dudes should be tolerated by decent women). Of course, the story is illustrated using a couple with a “silver fox” and a blonde wife. While I’m at it, I also hate old men having babies. You waited until you were 50+ to settle down? Well, too bad, now you’re childless. (Oddly, Anthony Bourdain fits both of these profiles and I generally find him entertaining. I guess there are exceptions to every pet peeve.)

So, it turns out I have to color my gray before Monday, as per my half-baked resolutions. Against my better judgment I applied to one of those blind write for us ads off Craigslist last month and it turned out to be a legit publication. While trying to not-so-successfully digitally capture the 40% premature (I think premature—I don’t know anyone near my age with even a few white strands except my sister) gray stripes popping up all over my head, I managed to take one of the most disgusting borderline obscene photos ever (I've made the thumbnail tiny because it's so gross). Who knew that innocent unbrushed hair and scalp could look so gruesome?

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Jan 3

Food Felons

— Petit_fours I can totally sympathize with this “Sweet Tooth Bandit” who spent nearly $700 at Swiss Colony using a stolen identity. I used to become desperate and tormented every holiday season when the unsolicited Swiss Colony catalog showed up on the mail. I would longingly page through the wish book, coveting the petit fours with all of my grade school being. I never ever got a single item from Swiss Colony and now that I have free will (and better taste in confectionary) I feel less compelled to order anything. If there’d only been an internet in the early ‘80s, who knows what havoc I might’ve tried to wreak.

–It’s not every day that fried chicken brings out the firebug in people. I do love the NYC brand name bastardization process. Somehow Kentucky Fried Chicken (don’t forget the Kitchen Fresh Chicken fiasco) becomes Kennedy Fried Chicken and then JFK Fried Chicken emerges.

I discovered the regionally confused chicken Maryland when I was in Penang. I never ordered any, but it appears to be fried chicken served with fried bananas, fritters, fries and sometimes sausage or bacon. Does that scream Baltimore to you?

The unanswered question in this arson case is why a Twin Donut would be selling fried chicken at all. Franchises are so renegade in NYC–I recall there used to be a Blimpie that sold Thai food on the side and a Chinatown Popeye’s that hawked pork dumplings under the counter. I’m sure there are countless other examples.

–Ok, malnourishment isn’t a felony but if your eating disorder fucks up my commute something criminal just might happen.

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Posts by krista

Cat Fat Fever

What are Words For?

Civic Lesson

Where’s the (99-Cent) Beef?

Jewel-Encrusted Crustacean

Hash House a Go Go

Mancora

Nu Shooz Redux

Hairbrained

Food Felons

Featured

Occasional Instagramming

Yes, it’s come to this

My Other Blogs

What?

The Past Will Haunt You

Pigeonholing 101