Thursday, June 01, 2006

STINKY CHEESE

Is it premature to categorize the next few months of 2006 as Stink Summer? Because I have been eating an awful lot of gorgonzola cheese, which stinks both olfactorily and mouthtorily. A good stink. The kind of stink that, in my enjoyment of it, reminds me just how much of an animal I am, though I may walk upright and have opposable thumbs. When I eat stinky cheese I have more empathy for those dogs who dive into the carcasses of dead birds and rodents and rub and roll their necks in the deep, musty, animal stink of corroded flesh. I like that a "bad" smell or taste can actually be quite "good". Gorgonzola cheese sort of exemplifies this. As does an order of "Bad Smell Beans" from Grand Schizuan.

We all come from the Primordial Soup, you know? And when I eat stinky food (not rotten, just stinky) it reinforces my link to that Soup. Which, though I have no proof of it, I'm pretty sure smelled Awfully Delicious.

Monday, May 29, 2006

FAT FAT BO BAT BANANA FANNA FO FAT ME MY MO MAT...I'M FAT!

The suburbs will kill you! They are, without a doubt, culinarily catastrophic. At least MY suburb, the one within which I was raised and fed, is. It's Fat City...if it were a city and not a suburb. I mean, if I lived in my hometown now, as an adult, I would be Large Marge fat. Or World's Fattest Baby fat. Okay, I'll be realistic: if I lived in my PARENTS' home in my hometown, I wouldn't be Mississippian Fat or Texan Fat, I would probably be more like Ohioan or Missourian Fat. But still, I'd be a fatty. Because those people? The ones who raised me? THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO SAY NO TO FOOD, and NEITHER DO I WHEN I AM WITH THEM! It is like a 24/7 buffet, and let me just say that there is NOTHING that is not on the menu.

It started with the ride home from the train station Saturday afternoon. First stop? Trader Joe's! We stopped in to pick up "just some olive oil and orange juice and salad," but ended up buying TWO DIFFERENT KINDS of cookies, ONE GIANT BAG of SALT AND PEPPER POTATO CHIPS (demolished in the span of 1.5 days), FOUR DIFFERENT CHEESES (including St. Andres, a cheese that, if discovered by The Terrorists, will be bad news for the rest of us, because this cheese is a HOMOCIDAL MANIAC, it WILL KILL YOU, it CAN'T HELP IT, it's in its TRIPLE CREME NATURE. But at least you will die happy), and FOUR DIFFERENT BAGS OF NUTS, (including those Thai Spiced Peanuts I'm currently obsessing over AND Thai Spiced Cashews, for COMPARISON'S SAKE). Once home, we ate a little of all of it with a bottle of Shiraz. An hour later, it was time for dinner.

And for dinner? Well, I had Peter Luger's. For free. And for better! See, my dad is kind of a GENIUS when it comes to steak. I'm not being a braggart; it's an empirical fact. He's so good at cooking steak that my mom, who is, like me, a know-it-all-control-freak, refrains from putting in her two cents and actually leaves my dad alone to cook the steak. THAT'S HOW GOOD HE IS. So my dad threw THREE ENORMOUS Strip Steaks on the BBQ and sliced up some giant red tomatoes and sweet white onions and poured Luger Sauce on that and I ate so much of both that I contemplated bulimia for 2.5 seconds. I had food up to my esophagus! But because I was in Fat City and was powerless to resist its bylaws, I FORCED myself to AVAIL myself of the BRAND NEW BREYER'S Vanilla, Chocolate, and Strawberry in the freezer. I mean, it was RIGHT THERE SEDUCING ME WITH ITS ALL NATURAL FLAVORS! And when I opened the fridge, there was a BRAND NEW CAN OF REDDI WHIP WHIPPED CREAM, which is part of the zoning code for Fat City, and in order to stay the night I HAD TO PUT AS MUCH OF IT AS I COULD on my Breyer's.

Sunday I TRIED to be good. I said no to the Bagels-Lox-And-Cream-Cheese Protocol and had a bowl of cereal. And I didn't eat until dinnertime, when, once again, the cheeses and nuts and chips came out, along with a spinach salad tossed with gorgonzola, walnuts, and cranberries. I TRIED to be good, but I ate A LOT of salad, A LOT of St. Andres, and ANOTHER Breyer's sundae. I TRIED to be good, so I also had an ear of the whitest, sweetest, most tender First Corn of the summer, slathered with the whitest, sweetest, most melty butter. I TRIED to ignore the cookies, later on that night, but they sure looked lonely sitting in their clear plastic tins. "Hey, guys," I said, before I murdered them, "want to find out what digestion feels like? OK! Let's DO IT!"

And today, the Last Day Of The Fattening: I had cereal again, TRYING to be good. But see? I can't! It's IMPOSSIBLE! Because there's this AMAZING Indian Restaurant in the town next door to mine called Cormindal and it is Crazy Delicious AND Elegant and they have this lunch buffet that my parents are rather fond of, my parents being rather fond of buffets in general. So I had to try it before coming back into the city. EVEN THOUGH I WAS ALREADY FULL OF CEREAL. But I HAD TO, because Cormindal's lunch buffet is like a miracle on catering trays. You think you know Indian food? You DON'T! Stop being so NAIVE! EDUCATE YOURSELF! Go to Cormindal in New Rochelle, okay?

And now I am five hours away from my last meal and all I can think is: how much does a colonic cost and will it hurt?