Not food blogging in Century City

   

   So, let us not become a silly food blogger.  As if 

there were any other kind.  Condemning this, ejaculating about that.  

   But there is a difference between all that pretention and simple retention -- making a little note for no other reason than to help you remember where you've been and might want to return.

   Like BJ's Brewhouse at the back side of the Westfield mall in Century City.  Excellent beer. Flatbread pizza with roasted veggies and goat cheese and fresh basil.  A pleasingly charred bison burger with barbecue sauce, roasted peppers and slaw.  A seat outside in some spectacular Southern California weather.  And a terrific soundtrack.  What's not to like?

   

Meccawe

     I have made my fly-fishing debut, at an historic - if little-known - private fishing club, no less:  the  Meccawe Club, on Meccawe Pond, in the hills above Bridgewater, Vermont.  The first members hauled the lodge house up the hills to the lake with oxen over a hundred years ago.  Calvin Coolidge, from down the road in Plymouth, was a member.  One of his fishing hats hangs on a nail in the great room of the lodge.  One of my partners, John Houlihan, is a member and has been kind enough to invite me up to visit on a day when I can attend a free clinic with the head of LL Bean's fly-fishing school.  I do not make a fool of myself at the clinic, and after, with John rowing us about the lake, I catch three beautiful trout on my new fly rod, all with a small wet fly - a black one with just a touch of red at the butt end.  Two rainbows, about 11 inches each, which would have been stocked this spring.  And a fine brook trout, at 10 inches or so, which John assures me is a native fish.    

     The last fish - the bigger of the rainbows - swallows the fly.  Even though I pluck it out quickly, with just a speck of blood, the fish goes belly up and can't be revived.  And so, along with some terrific memories of a first day with the fly rod, I come home with Sunday's lunch.  

My humble harvest

   Tomatoes, two kinds.  Peppers, two kinds.  Sweet basil, Texas tarragon, and thyme.  

Say goodbye to Paradise (at least for lunch)

    Atlantis.  The destination resort on Paradise Island, connected by a pair of short, steep bridges to the small city of Nassau on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas. 

   It being a destination resort –- full of waterslides and aquariums and fancy shops and restaurants and game rooms and a casino and even an Indiana Jones-like “dig” of “the lost city of Atlantis” –- our group is content not to leave the destination.  Despite my occasional cajoling, no one wants to trek with me across the bridge to explore Nassau for a bit.  And so I go alone.

   I hoof over the bridge and onto the main drag that leads, in maybe a mile, to the center of Nassau.  It’s a strange walk, from the overgrown, rattle-trap, run-down outskirts of town past the occasional modern bank building and suddenly into a thriving, downtown scene of government buildings and luxury stores staffed with impeccably uniformed and coifed and utterly lovely Bahamian women.  I wonder what the little houses look like where they do their hair and makeup in the morning and where they go at the end of the day, after selling $5,000 watches to tourists from the cruise ships in the harbor. 

   Once I’ve seen the center of town, I wander up the hill and around a few streets behind it to see the big pink building at the top of the hill, which must be the governor’s residence, snapping pictures –- since lost –- of the big house and some other bits of Nassau that catch my fancy and my untrained eye.

   I’m not hungry, but the smells –- and my desire to live just a bit of the life of Bourdain -- draw me into a local café, where I have a fine cup of conch chowder, a half-dozen superb and piping hot conch fritters and a cold, delicious bottle of Kalik, the ubiquitous Bahamian beer.  I eat and drink and read the USA Today sports section that I had tossed into Rachel’s backpack along with my light fleece and camera and sunglasses and Blackberry, all of which makes me a bit less like my hero Bourdain and a bit more like the tourists around the corner shopping for jewelry and such.  

   Ah well.  Tony would have enjoyed the fritters, and the beer, and the local scenes on the walk between Nassau and Paradise.

Consider the lobster

   The lobsters, cold and squirming, go head-first into the big pot of boiling water on the stove.  Twenty minutes later, hot and red, the shells are broken open with knives and nutcrackers and our bare hands.  We pull out chunks of white and pink meat from the body cavity and the legs and the preposterous claws, savoring especially the green liver that we find in the bellies and, if you are especially lucky, the chunks of bright red roe. 

   Which lead me to this hypothesis:  If you take a food that otherwise would be considered bizarre, like a bug, and just find one that is big enough, like a lobster, the bizarre part somehow disappears.  You have to break the lobster down and eat it like meat, and so it seems like meat and not a bug.  Indeed, it is a delicacy.

   Rodents are the same way.  Nobody -- at least nobody around here -- wants to eat a mouse or a rat.  But by the time you get to something as big as a rabbit, and certainly venison, it becomes not merely edible but a gourmet food.

   Not a great hypothesis, perhaps, but I stand by it nonetheless.  

Thai Jarearn Express

   I am, if nothing else, a man of simple pleasures.  Witness the spicy bowl of udon noodle soup (on the menu, it comes off as spicy "uduong" soup) at Thai Jarearn Express on College Street in Lewiston on a cold sunny day in January. The chunks of chicken are tough.  The carrot slices and few bits of broccoli are irrelevant.  But the noodles are pleasingly al dente, not overcooked and mushy.  And the hot, spicy red broth -- well, that's what it's all about.  

For the first few bites, it is overwhelmingly spicy.  But I forge ahead and it starts to taste better, maybe I'm numbing to it a bit.  And then, maybe a third of the way into it, I pass some sort of barrier, like a runner whose muscles start releasing the right chemicals, and the flavors become blissful.  The heat is there, but now sitting lightly atop some deeper range of flavor.  The undertones seem, to my untrained palate, to taste of peanuts.   I slurp away on the broth, plucking out the noodles with my chopsticks, warming from the inside out, feeling the lightest sweat break out on the top of my head.  I can't get enough of it.  Happy and warm, smiling like a child with a new toy.  

Megan laughs and takes my picture.  

I'll be back.

One for dinner

   Ah, the glamour of business travel, manifest this time in the dinner I have scarfed at the Chinese restaurant at the Marriott Residence Inn in White Plains.  I have complied with the good traveler's rule never to eat at the hotel unless absolutely necessary only because of the absolutely necessary part, as I need to take only a quick break for fuel before getting back to my room and my work.  The food is decent -- a little plate of pickled cabbage, a small bowl of hot-and-sour soup, a plate of stir-fried shrimp and vegetables -- although I  could have done without the adjoining table of mom, dad, three very small loud and whining children, and mom's parents.   Grandad:  "Jimmy went pee-pee today for me, and showed me his big boy underpants!  High five!"  Grandmom:  "I think my lower lip went numb."  And so on.

   On the way out, I see a woman about my age sitting at a table just behind the hostess stand, across from the obligatory fish tanks.  By herself.  Another road warrior.  It should be rude of our innkeepers not to at least have suggested we sit together rather than dine alone.  It should be rude of me not to at least stop and say hello and make some small talk, rather than just leave her sitting there by herself, looking adrift and uncomfortable.  But instead, in this so-called modern world, the opposite of these things is true.  

Eating Japan

   Some of what we ate in Japan: 


   A bag of little dried fish chips. 

   Freshly made rice crackers dipped in soy sauce at the market in Asakura.  

   Sweet black beans and tiny dried fish in the open market, and then a terrific sushi lunch, around the corner from the Tokyo fish market.  

   A bento box lunch on the train from Tokyo to Nagoya, with sushi and bits of cooked shrimp and eel and noodles and pickled vegetables.  

   A can of melon soda.  

   Three hot, steamed buns from a small shop in Takayama, one with beef, one with red beans (so much better hot than cold), and one with pumpkin.  

   Also in Takayama, a perfect cup of sake sherbet, maybe the single most surprising and delightful thing we ate the entire trip, unless it was the Japanese marshmallow, a warm square of meringue, which we got from the vendor along the river the next day.  

   At the ryokan in Takayama, the simple, soothing, hot, green tea we were served in our room when we arrived and two enormous dinners featuring slices of tender, fatty Hida beef, which we grilled ourselves on the petals of the shabu-shabu pot in the middle of our table in the tatami-matted dining room, and corn, onions, peppers, greens, three kinds of mushrooms, four kinds of picked vegetables, a giant raw sweet shrimp, two kinds of raw fish, a small curious dish with chopped mushrooms and walnuts, soba or udon noodles, miso soup, rice and a desert of strawberry mousse; and a breakfast at the ryokan with its own array of small bites, and grilled trout instead of beef, and a perfectly poached egg. 

   In Kyoto, in our own little dining room upstairs at a restaurant on Pontocho Street, overlooking the river, sukiyaki for the three girls, which we cooked at the table, and eel, more eel, for me.  

   Chocolate croquettes at the Nishiki food market in Kyoto.  

   The satisfying pancake-noodle-cabbage-egg-sauce mash-up that is okonomiyaki, first in Hiroshima and then in Osaka.  

   One of the plums that Noburo and Akiko had put up in a jar, soaked in strong sake.  

   A fine kaiseke dinner in Himeji, which featured a blissful soup with corn tofu, and a warm-potato-salad-stuffed eel –- better than it sounds, and indeed, one of the best dishes on the trip.  

   And everywhere the different styles of little monju cakes and the essential vending machines with their cold, little cans of sweet iced coffee, and cold bottles of water and tea. 

   The crowded McDonald’s on the Ginza is a sad sign of things to come in Japan.  It seems will take their sushi and green tea (and excellent cars and electronics) in trade for our hamburgers and heart disease (and washed-up baseball players).

   

Time to make some tea.