Category Archives: Food and Drink

A modern dinner plus some fallout

Around home, Food and Drink, Steve Stern's Field Notes From A Random Walk Through Life

Our friends Peter Kuhlman and Ophelia Ramirez dropped by to hang out outside for a drink or two and for Peter’s fourth birthday dinner last Sunday evening. They didn’t actually drop by because they now live in Boise and dropping by is hard. We met Ophelia and Peter at Temenos in the early 90s but first knew we were kindred spirits when we bumped into them standing in line for a revival showing of The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s bloody, high-body-count eulogy to the mythologized Old West to quote IMDb. We do miss them.

Anyway, after dinner somebody said something which led to something and so on until we had a question and Michele, Peter, and Ophelia immediately checked their smart phones for the answer.  It could have been anything, How many cars did the original  Delahaye company make? What is gold selling for right now? What is the largest Karst formation, around Yangshou in China or Halong Bay in Vietnam? Was Doug Tompkins the founder of  North Face? Any fucking thing! The answers are right there, on your smart phone, just waiting for us to ask for it.

In this case, the question was about how the rebels are doing in Tripoli. Everybody went for their smart phones, complaining about the bad coverage by CNN. It turned out that all three of them had Al Jazeera apps. More proof of our kindred spiritness. I think that this picture is Ophelia showing me her app while Peter and Michele are still struggling or, and this is more likely, lost in the story.

In the background, behind Ophelia’s head is a handful of thistles. Over the next couple of days, the thistles ripened and turned to seed. Michele thought that it was making a mess, but I kind of liked it. (The lamp, BTW, is a genuine Tiffany – signed, well, with a little stamped plaque – that my grandmother bought at a garage sale for $4.00.)

 

 

 

 

 

I am stunned, this is so far out of my age group

Americana, Current Affairs, Food and Drink, Travel

Shots 

A couple of years ago, Michele and I were in Greenville Mississippi drinking and listening to blues in a local bar when a wedding rehearsal party sort of wandered in. Soon they started drinking vodka-Jello shots and – of course – offered us a couple. I was underwhelmed. Probably because I was about fifty years past the optimum age for any sweet alcoholic drink, let alone a very, very sweet shot of Vodka.

Now I read that a former Wall Street analyst has started a company that provides the modern equivalent of the old time bargirl. These women sell weak vodka-Jello shots and flirt in bars in New York. I was not a bargirl kind of guy the first time around – even in Korea – and this seems even less appealing, but – it seems – there is something for everybody.

As an aside. In Greenville, they served not only the vodka-Jello shots in teeny-tiny plastic cups; but our "bourbon, straight" the same way. When I asked the bartender why they didn't use glasses, he looked at me like I had just asked him to vote for a black guy for president. A sort of What planet are you from. look. Now it seems that the teeny-tiny plastic cups are catching on in the Big Apple. End aside.  

If you still find this improbable, check out the slide show at The Wall Street Journal. To directly quote from Gawker, you could look at photo number three in the accompanying slideshow, and then maybe turn your computer off and think quietly for a while.

A standup lunch

Food and Drink

Yesterday, Michele was in east San Jose for a meeting and brought home this great lunch which we just ate standing up at the kitchen counter. She went into a Vietnamese take out place and got two spring rolls for $2.00 (US). In front of the market (store?; restaurant?)  a couple of guys were selling live shrimp from the Santa Cruz area for $5.00 (US, again) a pound. They said to put the alive shrimp in a pot of boiling water for about one minute – no more than one and half minutes.

We did exactly that and they were the best shrimp I have ever had. In sushi bars, they sometimes call cooked shrimp "sweet shrimp"; now I know what they mean. 

Shrimp

Pork and beans

Food and Drink

Pork and beans must be one of the most natural food combinations around. And one of the most iconic. For me, it brings back memories of movie cowboys sitting around movie campfires, or memories of actual long empty pork and bean cans around actual long deserted mines in the Mojave.

And for me, also, it has an connotation of poverty and low class. Certainly, my family was aware of that: we did not eat pork and beans; we ate hamhocks and Lima beans. It was one of my favorite dishes when I was growing up. Only within the last year did I figure out that hamhocks and Lima beans was, basically, the same thing as pork and beans.

Or that Chinese long beans with pork was the same thing. And Thai stir-fried pork with long beans. Or, with the addition of duck legs, Cassoulet. Or, for that matter, barbecue with beans. 

This was all brought up by our dinner last night of hamhocks and Italian butter beans. Real comfort food.