Old Spice
ADS is more like a brother than a friend. We’ve been friends for over three decades. Raf I’ve known for almost a quarter century.
Old friends have old stories—tales that get told time and time again. They eventually become legends. Facts can sometimes change, but the heart of the narrative remains the same.
Today with the recent opening of Penzeys Spices in Albany, I’m inspired to share one of these with you from our college days, as it involves Raf housesitting while ADS was away with his folks, and an unsettling discovery Raf made when looking through ADS’ parents’ spice cabinet.
Building the Ballot – Asia
It’s time for another working session in preparation for the FUSSYlittleBALLOT 3.0. It’s coming in April, and it will be here before you know it.
Believe it or not, but we still have a lot of ground to cover.
Before moving forward, let’s remember the purpose of this exercise. Every year the Times Union polls the Capital Region about what’s best in the area. Only a small fraction of residents respond, but their responses help to define our region and continually cast it in a negative light. Smaller but better restaurants get left in the cold as people’s loyalties are split, and mediocrity reigns supreme.
However, if we could all agree to vote on a slate of businesses that may not be our own personal choice for The Best, but that we all recognize are certainly among the best, then a few great places might be able to break through.
Today, I’m going to ask you for your THREE top picks in a variety of categories. And I really need three. Your first choice may not make the ballot, and I want to try and make sure as many people get as many of their top picks on the ballot as possible. It’s about compromise and unity for the sake of the greater good. I do hope you will help me now and then later in April when I ask you to endorse the ballot and solicit the help from your friends and relations.
But without further ado, onto the task at hand: our Asian restaurants.
Eat His Ears
Happy almost Purim. This year the annual Jewish holiday falls on Wednesday night. So why write about it on Sunday? Well, the first of the Purim carnivals is scheduled for today. And I thought I should mention something just in case you are confused by a hoard of costumed kids running around in early March.
Luckily, they are not going to come to your door and ask you for candy. If any of them do happen to show up at your house, they will likely be bringing you things to eat, not asking for something.
Did you know that the things we eat and this entire holiday have a rather savage backstory? In the spirit of cultural exchange, I’ll share the short version, and tell you more about the treats.
On Chains
Chains aren’t bad. I understand the knee-jerk distaste for these identical food-based businesses that pop up all over the place. Occasionally that distaste verges on hatred. And this hatred is blindly directed at anything that’s a chain.
This is not to say that all chains are good. Clearly, they are not. In fact most chains aren’t. But the fact that good chains can exist proves that the problem isn’t in restaurants being chains themselves, but the business practices of certain operations.
The only reason this is on my mind is because irisira brought it up yesterday in her comment about Caffe Vero:
If coffeehouses that have more than one location cannot be chosen for this category, then Caffe Vero is, sadly, out – they have another (actually, the first) location in Lake George Village. They also have some kind of connection to the Chocolate Mill, though I’m not sure if it is a business agreement or if it is more connected than that. If it is just, single location of a certain coffeehouse, whether it be a standalone or a “chain” (2 locations does make a chain, technically), then carry on.
Since this wasn’t a question, it wouldn’t be addressed in the next installment of Ask the Profussor. For the record, I was reading the Best Single Location Coffee Joint as having a single location in the Capital Region. Since the second Caffe Vero location is up by Lake George, I consider it just beyond our boundaries.
Regardless, I contest the notion that two locations technically make a chain.
Soup as Supper
Mrs. Fussy has left the building. By now she is hopefully in sunny California. It used to be that when she would leave I’d make onions. But over the years she has softened her stance on what should really be the state vegetable of New York.
So now I no longer have the wicked desire to eat onions at every meal during her absence. Perhaps some of this has to do with the presence of children in the household and their relative intolerance to onions. Not that they would detect a cooked onion in something and reject it, rather that they would probably be nonplussed with a giant plate of sweet and salty Korean noodles with a mountain of charred and snappy sliced onions tossed throughout.
And I can’t blame them.
You know what else wouldn’t thrill the little buggers? If they knew how much soup I made last night. Seriously, the first night on my own, and once the kids were in bed I started three cooking projects: chicken stock, my take on Braden’s mushroom barley soup, and sweet milk liqueur.
The problem is that I have all this soup now and nobody to help me eat it. But I have an idea for turning soup into a meal that I’m hoping will pass muster with the tikes while momma’s missing.
Grocery Shopping with a Madman
As I try to pull myself out of the winter doldrums I took some friendly advice from Ed. Well, at least I took part of his advice.
Yesterday he left this helpful comment:
If you have the winter doldrums, why not take a ride to the Asian Supermarket and pick up some Asian vegis and make a nice stir fry. They usually have duck legs there which cook up very nicely. You could also pick up a piece of frozen Unagi (fresh water barbecued eel) and make a cucumber salad with seasoned rice vinegar. Winter, even without snow, is a tough time to find variety but you can get some interesting things. Oh, and don’t forget the beech mushrooms.
One of these days I’m just going to snap. There are too many rules and restrictions governing the behavior in my head. I’ll detail in just a moment why I couldn’t take Ed up on the details of his plan, but I did drag myself out to the Asian Supermarket and the Honest Weight Food Co-op. Honestly, I think it helped.
Now what follows is either dangerously honest or incredibly self-indulgent. But it chronicles how I think about food and the conflicts that arise from even the most seemingly benign decisions at a grocery store.
Mushroom Barley Soup
The winter doldrums are here. Although maybe they are not. You see, I have no innate understanding of seasons. Living most of one’s life in southern Florida and Northern California will do that to a person.
But the farmers markets are drying up. Even the carrots and other storage vegetables are getting limp, and tables once full of potatoes are scattered with what’s left from the root cellars. There isn’t a lot of inspiration to be found there.
And I seem to have lost my will to take on new cooking projects. Spring mocks us from just past the edge of the horizon, and I’ve halfheartedly taken on the project of eating through the stored up goodies lurking in the chest freezer. When spring comes, that thing is going to need a good defrosting.
This would probably be a great time to make a delicious soup, if only my kids would eat the stuff. For some reason they don’t actually consider it food, and certainly they don’t think of it as dinner.
Naturally, I learned all of this when I made an extra large pot of mushroom barley soup.
Building the Ballot – Irrefutable
The process of building the FUSSYlittleBALLOT 3.0 has been fascinating for me. Hopefully those playing along at home have found it to be equally engaging.
What I’ve been hoping to do is gather enough information from people about their preferences in each category of the Times Union’s 2012 Best of the Capital Region poll, in a vainglorious attempt to reach some kind of consensus.
This is why I ask for your three top picks, in the hopes that if your first choice doesn’t make the ballot, that you might consider voting for your second or third pick if it means promoting some of the truly best places in the Capital District that might otherwise be overlooked by its residents.
Now in most of the categories, as you all have shown, there isn’t one obvious answer for Best of the Capital Region. But there are three categories where the best of the region are abundantly clear. So today’s exercise is a bit different. It’s not to nominate your three top picks, but try to refute why my pick for the best bakery, health food store, and single location coffee joint are off the mark. Because I don’t think it can be done.
Bob’s Bag at Breakfast
A few Sundays ago I was honored to judge the 3rd annual Market Cook-off at the Schenectady Greenmarket. Not only can you see the full results on the market’s Facebook page, but you can find a picture of yours truly with the other two judges.
The picture could be called, Three Old Guys Eating Soup.
Thank you, I am decidedly less old. But I’m getting older all the time, and I’ve felt like an old man since my late teens. It actually goes back even further than that to grade school, but that’s another story.
What do three old guys do when sitting down to big bowls of soup? They talk about their declining health, and how they have changed their diet in response. As opposed to my colleagues for the day, I’m not fully prepared to give up red meat and dairy. But I’m totally willing to adopt a diet rich in whole oats. Three old men agree: the heart smart will start their day off with a hearty bowl of oatmeal.
Apparently, I’m also willing to do something else. Meet my new friend Bob.
What I Love About Entenmann’s
Here in upstate New York we’ve got Freihofer’s. When I grew up we had Entenmann’s. Maybe it had something to do with living in Brooklyn where the company started. Although my parents both grew up in Long Island where the company expanded. But as long as I can remember, Entenmann’s baked goods were always a treat.
Even when we left New York, Entenmann’s followed us down to Miami. And their donuts, cookies and cakes are an inextricable part of my childhood.
I have fond memories of their chocolate donuts, which were special not because they were chocolate, but because they were covered in a crisp chocolate shell. I loved how the coating would turn the yellow donut chocolate as it was chewed, and how the chocolate would melt on my fingers.
Later in life, I’d find them to be waxy and wholly unappealing. Part of me wonders if they were always that way, and part of me is curious if their recipes changed as the company grew from the regional bakery it was into the international producer it is today.
Recently I came across a box of their chocolate chip cookies, and had to smile. But that reaction has absolutely nothing to do with nostalgia. No. Now instead of loving their product, I love their chutzpah.
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