Odds and Ends

A little later I'm going to blog about beer, but first I want to mention a few other things that don't merit posts of their own. Call it a Blog Tartare Casserole if you like.

Osaka - Neil and I went there Friday night with a group of friends. I like Osaka well enough but it's not my favorite sushi place (that honor goes to Sakura Blue). It is, however, my friend Tabetha's favorite, so we eat there when she's doing the organizing. Osaka was slammed Friday night and it took a loooong time to get our food, but they gave us complimentary edamame and dessert (red bean ice cream, I believe), so we didn't mind a bit. And someone in our group subsequently decided to have her birthday party there next month. Good job, Osaka!

Sweet Surrender - We're Sweet Surrender fans in part because we're friends with the owner, but we'd love it even if we weren't. The friendly folks there didn't bat an eye when our party of 9 wandered in after dining at Osaka. We enjoyed uniformly delicious desserts and one of the employees made sure that we were all signed up to receive coupons for free cake on our birthdays. Several of the people who were with us hadn't been there before and were quite impressed with the food.

Wild Eggs - This is the hot new breakfast place in town, and I ate there yesterday for the second time. I had the Farmers Market Skillet, a dish full of various veggies topped with cheese and two fried eggs. It didn't blow my mind, but it was a perfectly good breakfast. It came with an Everything Muffin; these muffins are inspired by "everything" bagels and are really, really good. I really like Wild Eggs and thought that our 20-minute wait for a table was reasonable. If the wait were much longer (and I suspect that it was by the time we left), I'm not sure I'd find it worth it. (To be fair, I am extraordinarily impatient when it comes to restaurant waits.)

City Cafe - Ah, the Russian roulette that is the City Cafe specials. Sometimes they're great, and sometimes they're... not. Neil and I went last night and both had extremely mediocre meals. I had salmon with a dill cream sauce and Neil had teriyaki flank steak. My meal was mostly devoid of flavor aside from the unappealing fishiness of the salmon, and Neil describes his meat as "blah and frighteningly pink in some places." Blech. I remain loyal to City Cafe though because the stuff on their regular menu is so good and their specials are too, more often than not. Just not last night.

Books - I've been on a big food book kick lately and yesterday I picked up The United States of Arugula (which I'm reading now and quite enjoying), Heat, and In Defense of Food. I'm excited about all of them and will report back as I read them.

Bagels - Earlier today I said to Neil, "Remember those really good bagels we had in Montreal?" Just now I realized that there is such a thing as a Montreal-style bagel. Who knew?

Julie & Julia

The full title of this book is Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living. You might think that a book that needs both a subtitle and a sub-subtitle needs a lot of explanation, but it doesn't, not really. Julie Powell set out to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking within a year. And she blogged about it. And she got a little famous from it and got a book deal. This is the book.

I finished reading this book several days ago and I put off writing about it because I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it. It wasn't quite what I expected, but I'm not sure I can exactly put my finger on how.

Let's start with the obvious criticism. Before she started her blog, Julie Powell was not a writer. It shows. The writing isn't bad by any means, but it's sometimes hard to follow, and at times I got the sense that she was trying a little too hard to be clever. I was also vaguely put off by all the potshots she takes at Republicans; lord knows I'm a bleeding heart liberal, but I find that sort of thing irritating when it doesn't really have anything to do with the story.

Anyway. Julie started the project as she approached her 30th birthday and found herself living in New York City, being told by doctors that she'd better hurry up and get pregnant if she wanted any shot at having kids, and working temp jobs with no clear direction in her life. She started the Julie/Julia Project on a whim, but it quickly took over her existence. She found herself scouring the city for obscure ingredients, cutting up live lobsters, and dining on brains. The surreality of constantly cooking and eating such foods was compounded when the media started paying attention. She wrote about all of it for her fiercely loyal blog audience. The book recounts the whole thing; the cooking, the blogging, and the rise to (moderate) fame. It really is a fun, quick, and interesting read.

I think the thing that caught me off guard about this book is that Julie is bitter, misanthropic, and neurotic. I expected the story to be more beautiful, not laced with curse words and sexual innuendo. This didn't bother me, of course; I love curse words and sexual innuendo! It just wasn't what I expected. And I felt like the cover was misleading; it seems so gentle! Julie's story is anything but; she is not a happy person, and the recipes in MtAoFC are a source of torment at least as often as they are a pleasurable creative outlet.

Still, crankiness aside, it is impossible not to like Julie in the end. It might be stereotypically Generation X, but I can't say that late-20s ennui is something I haven't experienced. Julie attacks it head-on and in the least likely way. She's dark and funny but in the end, also deeply reverent. "I have no claim over the woman at all," Julie writes upon Julia's death, "unless it’s the claim those who have
nearly drowned have over the person who pulled them out of the ocean." That we get to read about this rescue is a pretty great thing.

Garlic and Sapphires

Neil and I drove up to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving and, as usual, picked up some audiobooks to make the 12-hour drive a bit more bearable. Among the meager offerings at the public library was Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl. Reichl, now the editor of Gourmet, recounts her experiences as the restaurant critic for The New York Times. In an effort to find out what dining was like for the average Jane, she donned an elaborate series of disguises for her restaurant visits. Unsurprisingly, the difference in the way that she is treated while in disguise is striking. But the book is more than just the story of her undercover dining adventures. We're also made privy to the politics of the mid-90s New York dining scene, and you can't help but smirk in satisfaction each time she awards two stars to over-hyped, unimpressive restaurants (much to the chagrin of many Times readers) or cheer each time she lavishes praise on outstanding, but overlooked, ethnic eateries. We also see Reichl grapple with the meaning of restaurant criticism and the implications of her various alter egos. The book is in turns poignant, mouthwatering, and uproariously funny. We had a fantastic time listening to it. It turns out that this is actually Reichl's third memoir; she also wrote Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table and Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table. I can't wait to read them both!