MORE SPUD ACTION

 Want to see some potato imagery from the Simpsons?  Of course you do. 

Homer Simpson as a potato man:

Marge and her sack of potatoes:

Tom Wolfe eating mash at the Wordloaf Literary Festival:

And do you want to see a picture of Agnes Varda dressed as a potato?  Sure, why not?

THE MOBY DICK OF SANDWICHES

Regular readers will know about my ambitions to write the 1000 plus page, magnum opus about the sandwich in all its forms, with all its many historical meanings and manifestations.

With this in mind I have a folder on my computer desktop that gets filled up with all kinds of miscellaneous sandwich stuff.  Herewith, just a few of them.

It would be a mighty book, IMHO.  

SIMPSONIANA

Tom Lutz, he of the Los Angeles Review of Books, is in Asuncion; at least if his Facebook page is to be believed.  My schoolboy geography and a quick Google suggests that this is the capital of Paraguay.  The man does lead an enviable and charmed life: something I never doubted for a moment.

Anyway, he posts this image on his page - the Simpson Burguer.

I have always been prepared to eat Simpsons endorsed food products, in order to make Matt Groening and Rupert Murdoch a little richer, but have never been a fan of the Butterfinger, 

and the "Menu Homer" below seems to be a French-only variation.

I guess I'll just have to wait for the Simpsons cassoulet.  Hey, it's "pur porc."Homer would approve of that, right?  

TRIPPING WITH LANA TURNER

My uncle Harold, a Yorkshireman of the old school, who was a steelworker, had two traits that are relevant to this post.  The first, he called everybody “Boss,” except of course for his actual boss in the steelworks.  Secondly he was the most obsessive beer connoisseur that anybody in the family had ever met.  This is one of the pubs he often drank in.  It used to be called the Shakespeare, now it’s The Shakey.  Sign of the times innit?

It was said around the pubs and clubs of Sheffield that uncle Jim should have been a professional.  He brought the same attention and expertise to beer tasting that others brought to the very finest wines.  Uncle Harold died before the Internet really took off and I don’t imagine he’d have been a fan, but these days there are any number of beer-related websites that obsess about beer in ways that even he would have thought were going a bit far.

 Here in the USA, Saturday September 28^th was National Drink Beer Day.  This had very little to do with my visiting Jons, our local all-purpose “ethnic” supermarket, by which I mean it caters for a great many ethne (yep, that’s the plural of ethnos – I just looked it up).  You want half a sheep’s head?  You want some Guatemalan sausage?  You want a vast selection of Arak?  This is the place to go.  You want some Polish beer?  Ditto. 

And so, on National Drink Beer Day I found myself drinking Polish Boss Beer, made in Witnica.  It was a good strong lager, 8.10 ABV, sweet but not too sweet, and although you knew you were drinking a serious beer, you didn’t feel you were going to end up in the gutter, in a stupor.  The people over at beeradvocate.com (should you care about the opinions of beer drinkers you don’t know) are not especially keen.  One of the reviewers says, “Overall, this is quite a poor beer with a really weird pickle-like smell and flavors that make this one a chore to drink.”

Later that same evening I watched the  “camp classic” movie The Big Cube one of those psychedelic angst fests from the late sixties, which takes a fairly ordinary plot and then shoehorns LSD into the scenario.  This one had Lana Turner in it, as the widow who won’t hand over her money to her daughter who wants to marry George Chakiris, and so he doses her (Lana) with acid to make her think she’s going mad.  It’s kind of like Gaslight with ergot.

But, and here’s a thing, and the only reason I mention it, there’s a certain amount of beer drinking in the movie.  People drop sugar cubes into their beer, which is drunk from strangely spherical beer glasses.  You get some idea from this screenshot:

“Sugar in beer, what a groovy idea,” says the ingénue: little does she know.  Well it all turns out sort of OK for Lana Turner, though I must say that by the end I wasn’t following things all the closely.  I did like the look of those beer glasses though. (Forget about the lightweights at the back with the coffee cups).

Anyway, next day, Sunday September 29^th clearly was not National Drink Beer Day (though only another 364 days till the next one) but while at Jons, I’d also bought myself a bottle of Black Boss Porter.  Hard to decide whether that name is politically incorrect or not, but let’s say not. 

It thought it was damn good, and the folks at beeradvocate tend to agree.  One of the reviewers really expresses himself over this one:  “Burnt umber liquid, dark but clear with a thick finger of soapy khaki up top. Sticky fluffy lacing, superior retention.  Melanoidin rich, yet soft malt in the nose with a hint of toasted oats, light chocolate, and tobacco. Clean but inviting. Sweet palate entry with a massive kick of sweet malt and alcohol. An explosion of brown sugar with plenty of fusels subsiding to a slightly dry finish full of black bread with hints of rye, wheat, and pepper. Low bitterness though I can almost detect a hint of chive-like hops in there. Maybe just a whisper of diacetyl.”

Melanoidin? Fusels? Diacetyl?  My uncle Harold would have had a fit.  Has this guy taken acid or what?

GIN & IT

A while back in this blog I wondered whether Matt Groening was a foodie.  I still have no absolute proof either way, but my spies tell me that on the very night that the 500^th episode of the Simpsons premiered Matt G was eating in a Korean restaurant with Jonathan Gold, scoffing clay-roasted duck stuffed with ginseng.  Then they went across the street for grilled pork neck and beer, and Matt gamely tried the grilled intestines when they brought them out to go with the drinks.  So if nothing else he’s certainly a willing experimentalist.

There’s also evidence that somebody else on the Simpsons crew has the Psycho-Gourmet spirit.  In the episode Once Upon A Time in Springfield (actually episode 450) the one in which the Krusty the Clown Show gets reworked to attract girls.  Somewhere in there Krusty is seen sitting next to a dumpster pouring “cheap gin” on bread to make a sandwich, which I think is as close to genius as anyone could demand. Thanks to faithful reader Bruno Fiuza for bringing this to my attention.  I'd seen the episode, but somehow I’d missed this perfect moment. 

Actually the cheap gin sandwich doesn’t seem such a terrible idea, if you ask me. Vodka goes great on sorbet, kirsch goes well with pineapple, a red wine marinade is common enough on beef.  So why not gin on bread?  And of course there is the example of Canned Heat aka Sterno, a denatured and jellied alcohol, that is (allegedly) drinkable when passed through bread, using the bread as a filter.  

In this scenario the bread isn’t supposed to be eaten, but my wife’s brother didn’t know that.  He just spread Sterno on bread and ate it.  My wife’s brother was a complicated character.  I never got the chance to meet him.

GORGING WITH GROENING

So the Simpsons reached episode 500 on Sunday, which calls for more than a small celebration, and if the Simpsons no longer holds the central place in the culture it once did, well what the heck does?  We were having small bets here at Psycho-Acres about who the show’s guest stars would be – my money was on Lady Gaga – oh me of little faith.   It was so much better than that.  It was Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame.

It’s hard to imagine that Assange is much of a foodie, though the story goes that when he was in the middle of writing his autobiography for Canongate he talked about writing a whole series of books including a cookbook.  The mind reels.

Sunday’s LA Times ran an interview with Matt Groening, conducted in “a Oaxacan restaurant south of Hollywood not far from where he lived in the days before the series made him an international household name.”  Well, “south of Hollywood” is a pretty vague description and I certainly don’t know where Groening lived in his pre-household name phase, but I did know, and this interview repeated, that he used to eat at Astroburger on Melrose Avenue.

In the interview he says, "I had this vague idea of invading pop culture.  I remember hanging out, just down this street, in Astro Burger with, Gary Panter and Byron Werner and scheming how to do it. Gary had written an art manifesto about it and Byron said, no, that we were sell outs, as we split a burger three ways."  As you see, the question of whether Astro Burger is one word or two remains contested.

Anyway, if “this street” is to be taken literally then the restaurant has to be Antequera De Oaxaca, street parking, no alcohol, quiet noise level, according to yelp.com.  Perhaps they’ll erect a small plaque, “Matt Groening ate here on the occasion of Simpsons 500.” Or not.

I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody somewhere is writing a Ph D on the Simpsons and food (Ph Ds seem to have been written about the Simpsons and all kinds of things) what with the doughnuts, Krusty Burger, the Gilded Truffle, the Frank Grimes lobster dinner, Lard Lad, the episode where Marge was a food blogger, “oh no she’s making him a sandwich,” and hundreds of other incidents.

And of course there’s the episode when Homer became food critic for the Springfield shopper, and he and Lisa went to the Springfield revolving restaurant, Sit-N-Rotate.  In fact we’d seen the restaurant before in the episode when Seymour Skinner took Patty on a date there.  Ah, seems like a million years ago.

Since Springfield can and does contain just about everything it’s hardly surprising that it contains a revolving restaurant, and as regular readers of this blog may know, we Psycho-Gourmets have a special fondness for restaurants and bars that revolve.  Yes, yes, I know, all restaurants and bars revolve if you stay there drinking long enough.

And it seems that Matt Groening may be a fellow enthusiast.  Here he is again in that LA Times interview. "Once at Fox 20 years ago, they asked, 'What would you like to see? We'll do anything.' I said, 'Well, how about a 600-foot-tall statue of Homer Simpson in West L.A., and at midnight he tilts his head back and laughs uproariously all over Los Angeles?' And you could eat lunch in his head, which would turn 360 degrees. They said, 'Be more realistic.'”

A cartoon show that runs for 500 episodes – now that’s what you might call unrealistic.

Now I’m not absolutely certain that Matt Groening’s a foodie, but there’s some circumstantial evidence here.  Ferran Adria’s forthcoming book El Bulli: Food for Thought, Thought for Food has a cover image drawn by Matt Groening.  That’s got to be good for a few free appetizers, though not at El Bulli, alas.