Blown Away

I’m just blown away. Speechless.

Last year I ran across a website that was offering paintings. Paintings from whatever you wanted.

In about 2003 I’d heard that there were artists in China that were absurdly classically trained; can you say “Oil-paint acrobat”? It was on a 60 Minutes segment, and at the time I wanted desperately to find out who these people were. I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in drawing and I immediately recognised their incredible talents. Imagine having someone take a treasured photo and transform it into a genuine work of art. Not a cheesy knockoff, but something rivalling anything only a truly talented artist could create.

Reimagine it costing only $120 or so for a 20” x 24” oil-on-canvas painting delivered to your door within a month.

Christ alive, I’d charge $1000 just to do a bloody sketch of the thing. Just to LOOK at the thing.

But here it is.

My new best friend is Jack Lee, of Europic-Art.com, a treasure to deal with. He always delivers. I’m on my third painting and I’m far from finished. Below is a picture taken of my parents and the resulting painting, which I requested in an “Impressionistic” style. Bravo, Jack and especially, bravo, one masterly painter.

Food For Space Aliens from Xantha

For some reason or another I haven’t been very hungry recently, and I can’t cook when I’m not hungry. It results in a lot of sandwiches.

But yet again, I was seduced by the photo on a frozen food item in the local Metro. I sincerely regretted it.

There’s a debate about labelling genetically modified foods. I say, let’s just have a label that says “Food” and another that says “Assemblage of Chemicals, Grease and Food Coloring.”

I swear to God, I will never again eat a product that contains “Xanthan Gum.” Because that’s what should have been the name on the box, certainly not “Spaghetti Carbonara.”

Make my life easier . . . please

Speaking of kitchen gadgets, I was able to try out two during my recent trip to California. Who can resist some offbeat invention that promises, in some vague way, to alleviate the stress of some odd but tedious chore that most of us never really remark upon from day to day but actually bugs the hell out of us?

I know I can’t.

The first was the ChopWizard. You know this motherfucker better be good because it has the name “wizard” in it—magic will be performed at the drop of a cone-shaped hat. It better fucking be, thought I.

Plus, these dudes have the gumption to call themselves “Vidalia,” as if they have some magic connection to sweet onions.

Spare me. First, spare me the noisy website, but second, spare me the ChopWizard. They trumpet on and on how you’ll chop an onion in seconds, but frankly, it’ll be the longest, most frustrating seconds of your life; hiring a personal chef would be less hassle.

I placed my half a peeled onion dutifully on the metal grid and did the “quick, forceful chop” that seems to be required.

A fucking elephant seems to be required as far as any chopping goes. I literally had to do a small leap in the air with both hands on the chopping lid to make any headway, then leap again several more times.

The dice that resulted was very nice, very square, but energy expended x trying to clean the fucking thing = goddamnit.

The second device was much more successful: truly one of the most happy kitchen gadgets ever made. This guy should win an Oscar of kitchen devicery.

It’s the OneTouch can opener. Literally, I put this motherfucker on a can, turned it on and walked away and a few seconds later there was a sharp-edge-free opened can sitting waiting for me to deal with it. I can imagine a busy kitchen with a bunch of cans of tomatoes to open just assembling two dozen of these bastards and turning them loose.

Sweet.

Spring 2007 montrealfood summit

Well, the reunion of the montrealfood dudes and dudettes (I just came back from California, okay?) went swimmingly well at RestoSpy’s manse last night. A welcome addition to the fold was Jeremy Cooperstock, he of the Center for Intelligent Machines, a celebrity among his peers. He is not only an honorary member of mtlfood, but is a major contributor to it, quite unwittingly, as he modestly protests, due to his Montreal restaurant “review in a mouthful” site at Jeremy and Vinita's food guide. Amazingly, we get MOST of our hits from his link to us, which says something about the popularity of his site. I particularly like his no-nonsense reviewing style, which includes his “Three Strikes” section—a classic!

He’s far too busy with Terminators Of The Future to write for us, but his esteemed presence is welcome nonetheless.

Ed Hawco, otherwise known as Blork, was invited but he was fighting a sinus infection. We’ll get you next time, Ed!

Barry is also off in the Philippines making a documentary—he was missed.

But we had a great time, with RestoSpy providing a grand spead of Serrano ham and smoked salmon and many cheeses, from Atwater market, and a mind-numbing procession of great wines. I brought a sake that I carried from Japan and a pinot noir from California. Everything was good! We had a serious discussion about adding a French component, and amazingly, it was held in French! Jeremy blew me away with his impeccable French and of course RestoSpy and gorgeous wife were naturals and Shelley and husband André just babbled like they were space aliens from Paris (which they are.) But we’re going to try to get a certain local French critic on the team . . . results to follow.

We discussed the site and its current state and I put forth that we had to make some money from it. I was laughed away from the table, but people, give us money! Empty your wallets for a good cause!

Seriously though, I’m glad that it’s chugging along even after seven-odd years and is not going to go away. With amazing writers such as Barry Lazar and RestoSpy and Shelley MacDonald Beaulieu doing this all for absolutely nothing except a good time, we are truly blessed. Now with Jeremy as a terrific consultant and Blork possibly joining the team at the next bash, montrealfood is becoming truly eclectic. Good people always equal good stuff.

And the next bash will be all about spice; hot hot hot, to be precise. I’m already summoning the recipe for Thai Green Curry in my mind . . .

Will keep you posted. Thanks, RestoSpy, for providing the food and the location, Shelley and André for organizing the event and Jeremy for huffing over on his bicycle.

May we meet again soon!

Mourning Don Ho

I mourn Don Ho. His gentle "Tiny Bubbles" founds its inexorable way into my soul.

I know all the words, I and my mum used to watch the show.

He will be missed.

Happy Easter

Random ramblings: Things I'm thinking about: The relentless mediocrity of youtube; . . . that motherfucker Goebbels murdered all his six children . . . what a motherfucking coward; . . . what makes people in power so stupid? Jean LaFleur somehow thinks he can get away with bilking Canada for millions of dollars. Where does that streak of idiocy come from? He could have been so comfortable on his regular salary. He should stick to his hot dog empire; . . . considering how easy it is to stay out of jail, why are our prisons packed to capacity? What makes men think they can molest/harm children/women and get away with it? What is wrong with the male mind that they do these things? I know what’s in my male mind, and it’s lock them up and throw the key into Hades where they can retrieve it later; . . . Ahmadinejad triumphs again, but the lives of cabinet-dwelling Dictyoptera are notoriously robust but very short; . . . Peter Lorre did not say "Don't let them take me, Rick" . . .

Easter Greetings.

This is Why

This is why I adore Montreal. This is why I will live in Montreal until my last dying breath.

Kill Chef Woo

Like most, I suppose, I like to have on hand that emergency snackin’ thang that, way after dinner, in a manner reminiscent of Hoppy Hankerings, calls one’s appetite to short order.

So if I’m equipped, I guess having a couple of packets of ramen or a can of condensed Campbell’s vegetable soup is a good thing. (Yes, I was a child once, and Onyums and Spaghetti-Os and Froot Loops did make up a large part of my diet. Got a fuckin' problem widdat? Okay, maybe not Froot Loops. Alphabits.)

So when I was shopping the other day, I saw among the instant noodles that old siren, Chef Woo baked (baked! only 1g fat!) Thai instant noodles (just add boiling water.)

I think this is the third time that fucking package has waylaid me, except my pathetic brain never remembers. It looks like an awesome, noodle-filled paradise with vegetables and maybe little chunks of chicken? in a THAI soup! Yes, THAI! How much better can instant noodles get? With one gram of fat! So I always fall for it, because I’m invariably hungry when I shop.

So I made it, a couple of hours after an awesome BLT (I’m not smoking anything, just recovering from an emaciating voyage to Japan) and it was the most horrid dreck I ever have tasted. Gummy, salty, chewy, watery, fake-lemon-grass-coconut chemicals, NASTY-ass shit and I swear, this time, really, is my last.

May Chef Woo be barbecued in sesame oil in a large polystyrene vat in a Hunan garden.

Pizza Test #1

I tried the broil-method pizza today. In case you haven’t been following, it’s an effort to get one’s home oven as hot as possible without breaking the lock on it and entering the 800-degree “clean” cycle (from which there is no return.) Then, one puts the pizza on a preheated stone as close as possible to the elements on 550-degree heat to try to duplicate the blast-furnace temperatures of coal and woodburning commercial pizza ovens.

Today’s experiment was a success. Not a resounding success, but a success nonetheless. The remarkable thing about the whole thing is its simplicity. I’ve mentioned that the way I used to make pizza, I’d par-cook the dough so it would support the ingredients better. This is because recipes I used to follow actually recommended cooking the pizza at 425 degrees! Or less! This is like boiling your spaghetti in hot tap water. The entire pie, if one loaded it with the usual ingredients, was one soggy mess. Thus, the pre-cooking.

What came with that was docking, or making holes all over the dough to prevent bubbles. Now I know that we want bubbles. Just that we want them only in certain places, namely, the outer crust.

One glaring limitation of the home oven, in addition to its lack of heat, is its narrowness. You won’t be baking any 18” pizzas any time soon.

The max seems to be 14”, so that’s what I aimed for. This, however, proved to be a mistake; hence, the not-a-resounding-success part. You’re already pushing it to expect to make a New-York-style pizza in a home oven. Trying to make a big one is an even bigger mistake. But I digress.

I have a pizza stone called a Hearthkit. It’s a blah-blah-blah make your oven a professional one blah-blah-blah. It seems to help a bit but I’m sure any pizza stone will do.

I positioned it on the top rack of the oven, as close to the elements as possible while still having access to it, and preheated the oven at 550F (broil) for 90 minutes.

I used frozen pizza dough from Pain Doré (I will get around to making my own dough as soon as I establish this method of pizza making as the right one.) Since I wanted to make one large pie instead of two medium, I lopped off about an 8th of the dough and used the remainder to make the pie.

I brought it to room temperature; after that it was fairly easy to manipulate.

You will have your favorite method of shaping the pie. I used a combination of a roller, the knuckle method and the steering-wheel method. It was good enough. The pie came just to the border of the cutting board — maybe 14”.

I loaded it up with the sauce — Aylmer whole tomatoes, tomato juice discarded, garlic and basil added and puréed with a hand mixer — and Mozza di Bufala cut into chunks. I’m a bit of a glutton and I like lots of toppings, so for me Kalamata olives, green pepper, red onion and Rosette de Lyon salame was showing restraint.

Once the pizza was assembled, there was no way I would have been able to get it onto the stone in one piece without this marvelous pizza peel (pictured.) Or gotten it off, for that matter. The pizza slid effortlessly onto the peel, soggy and all, and perfectly off onto the stone.

Cooking time was about 4 minutes — not bad for a home oven. The crust was crisp almost all the way around, my mistake being to try to make too big a pie. The very middle was still slightly undercooked. Next time, it will be two pies instead of one.

The pizza was lissome, crispy-yet bendy like NY-style pizza, thin, and very tasty. When it comes out of the oven, be sure to put it onto a wire rack instead of a cutting board or plate; this will prevent it from steaming where it sits.

I’m very impressed with this method and the pizza peel and will most definitely try to perfect it very soon.