Kaboom!

Independence is a lie. But that’s a topic that I covered back on July 4, 2011. Last year on Independence day I rallied against the idea of apple pie on the Fourth of July. In 2009 and 2010 I used the holiday as an excuse to take the day off from posting, and just linked to relevant articles from the past.

Maybe you’ve noticed this, but I’ve been slacking off. Most Sundays lately I haven’t been putting new content up. And I have also been running more guest posts lately. So today I’m not feeling nearly as burnt out. Although I am a bit distracted from food matters as I focus on packing for New Jersey.

As a side note, I just have to tell you how much I love my climate controlled storage unit. Stacking all of the boxes in the space is like my own personal life-size game of Tetris. It’s awesome.

Like I promised the other day, I’m still not going to weigh in on your holiday celebrations. Instead I’m going to talk about fireworks. Not the fireworks my kids insist they want to see (even though I suspect the cacophony will haunt their dreams). But these are the fireworks that you eat.

Spicy foods.

Upstate New York isn’t lacking for spicy food. Buffalo style wings are everywhere. Bottles of Frank’s Red Hot dot the landscape. Sriracha is popular, as is Tabasco. And I’ll never get over the fact that one of the fanciest restaurants in Albany even has an appetizer that contains pepper jack cheese.

New World Bistro Bar, which recently was voted the Best Restaurant in the Capital Region, also specializes in spicy dishes. Their spice scale goes to a nine. And Steve Barnes, who is one of the more influential food writers in this town, is a big fan of fiery foods.

Amazingly, we don’t have an authentic Szechuan restaurant.

This is one of the things I miss about living in the Bay Area. There was one great spot in the East Bay and another one in San Francisco’s Chinatown. And these were places that I could go for dishes swimming in chili oil, buried in mounds of dried chilis, or laden with numbing spice. The special seafood soup with hand pulled noodles at China Village was so infused with hot peppers that you had to sip the broth slowly as so not to start a coughing fit.

Sweating was a routine part of a good meal.

As far as I can tell, there is no real Szechuan food in Princeton either. But there is a place in the town of Hamilton that Google tells me is just a fourteen minute drive from my new home. Kaboom!

I’ve come to realize that I need to look beyond Princeton proper and really take a good hard look at Trenton, as it’s really the closest city of any size. Things are starting to look up. Although it still seems like a trip to Philly is required should I want good Ethiopian food. So that will be happening as well.

Hopefully I can find a way to exercise during the sabbatical so that I too don’t explode.

Speaking of things that go boom, be safe out there today. Don’t drink and light explosives on fire. And enjoy your American celebration of armed insurrection. Although to be fair, while the Declaration of Independence doesn’t paint the most flattering portrait of Native Americans, the King of England was being a complete dick.