HIP AND HUNGRY

I believe I’ve found one of the most beautiful dining rooms in the LA area. That isn't it above.

For one reason and another I’ve been spending a fair amount of time at the St. John’s Health Care Center in Santa Monica: the Loved One has been having hip surgery, and all seems to have gone very well indeed, thanks. But of course a lot of time was spent hanging around waiting for something to happen, or hanging round until something had happened, and although there are various places to wait in the hospital, inevitably people tend to gravitate to the cafeteria, which in the case of St John’s is an amazing place. 


The cafeteria opens into a cavernous area called the “Dining Court” a seventy foot high atrium, all smooth white surfaces, wood paneling, skylights, and glass walls with views of Santa Monica, big art on the walls, and seating for I guess a couple of hundred people, though it never seemed to get crowded.  If this were a real restaurant I'd be there all the time.

The room is used by visitors and also by hospital staff, but only rarely by patients, as far as I can tell.  As soon as patients are ambulatory they get sent home, which is obviously as it should be.  On the other hand it seems a bit of a shame that patients don’t get to use this wonderful place, which is certainly cheering, and very probably healing.

Of course, the cafeteria food eaten in the dining court isn’t all that great, and I have no intention of “reviewing” it, but I can safely say I’ve never eaten such an ordinary tuna sandwich in such an extraordinary space.

Heck, there’s even a grand piano.  Nobody played it while I was there, but back in my wife’s room we did get some bedside entertainment.  The Loved One had just finished eating a pretty decent-looking cheese and ham sandwich on marble rye with potato salad, when three extremely winsome young women arrived offering to sing for us.

This promised to be excruciating, like when a Mariachi band or gypsy violinist comes to your table in a restaurant and you’re supposed to smile appreciatively while they interrupt your meal, but these girls were pretty good, and they played the Beatles’ “Come Together,” which is one of my favorite songs, though an odd choice for a hospital you might think with its references to toe jam, shooting Coca Cola, and especially the line, “Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease.”  When last seen they’d moved on to the next room and were singing Brown Eyed Girl.  I hope they got to play in the Dining Court.

LUNCHING WITH LI-LO

I like Lindsay Lohan.  There, I said it.  And I understand that it’s easy enough not to like her, what with the drunk driving and the passing out and the assaulting of an assistant at the Betty Ford Clinic and so on.  But the big thing in her favor is, she seems to really like food.

Now admittedly she doesn’t seem to like good food especially, in fact if the photographs are to be believed she appears to be a junk food addict.  And admittedly her weight goes up and down a lot, which I guess is a sign of a troubled relationship with food, but you know, it can’t be easy to eat well when you’re in and out of jail and rehab.  But the bottom line is, she essentially looks like someone with a big appetite, and who doesn’t like that in a gal?

The folks at Millions of Shakes liked it well enough that they named a shake after her, the Lindsay Shake, and according to the PR she actually “designed” it herself.  I have to say she doesn’t look entirely confident about it in the picture below.

TMZ seems to be an infinitely dubious enterprise but I couldn’t help admiring them when they revealed that turkey tetrazzini was on the menu for Lindsay’s first night behind bars at the Lynwood Correctional Facility.  They also revealed (I mean, who knew?) that inmates could use money deposited into their commissary accounts to buy junk-food gift packs that included Spam, Vanilla Creme Cookies and Cheese Curls.  Quite the home from home for Lindsay.

And since Lindsay’s been in the Betty Ford Clinic of late, I’ve been trying to find out what kind of grub they serve up there.  So far I’ve had limited success, though I did find an anonymous online “Insider’s View of the Betty Ford Clinic” which read, “The cafeteria is like everything at The Betty, clean, well run, and “not bad”. The food compares to a “souplantation” or some such mass produced mall like fare.  It was fresh and well prepared. It is as exciting as a mall court, (but) of course, you’re not there for the food.”

Of course.  And I’ve also discovered that visitors aren’t allowed to bring in any homemade food for the inmates.  It has be factory made and factory sealed.  I guess they figure that granny’s fruitcake might have a little too much rum in it.

The truth is, all Lindsay’s recent problems stem not from food, but from drink not, and they stem specifically from a couple of very public DUIs.  The fact that cocaine was found in her car both times certainly didn’t help.  Now, most grownups have at one time or another driven when they knew they shouldn’t have, and they’ve probably had something in their car that they shouldn’t have, but hell, if I was Lindsay Lohan, I’d just have a standing account with a discreet taxi company.  Either that or just get quietly wasted at home.

Anyway, I do hope the rehabilitation works and that Lindsay pulls herself together.   And if she does I hope she’ll try to eat food that’s a bit more interesting than a bag of Cheetos.  Maybe she’d like an older literary dude as a mentor.  Hey, I’m entitled to my food fantasies.

I WISH I KNEW HOW TO QUIT

In yesterday’s New York Times the blessed Dwight Garner reviewed E. Annie Proulx’s new book Bird Cloud which is her account of building a dream home in Wyoming.  Garner guts the book, filets and flays it, and tosses it into the compost bin.

He quotes this truly remarkable food-related sentence from Proulx: “I like a colorful, handily cluttered kitchen and Bird Cloud’s cabinets and drawers in red, violet, aquamarine, burnt orange, cobalt, lime, brick, John Deere green and skipjack blue inspires stir-fries, osso buco, grilled prawns, Argentinean salads of butterhead lettuce, tomato, sweet onion, roast lamb with Greek cucumber and dill sauce, frittatas, rhubarb sauce with glasses of dry Riesling for the cook. You bet.”

Garner adds, “I’m sure I’ve read worse sentences from a National Book Award-winning writer,” but then he’s definitely read a lot more books than I have.  And to be fair to both of them, he does profess an admiration for her earlier work.  How early I’m not sure.

Proulx is best known, of course, for the short story Brokeback Mountain, but long before she had a reputation for fiction, she wrote a number of how to-books including Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It, and The Gourmet Gardener: Growing Choice Fruits and Vegetables with Spectacular Results. 

There was a profile in the New York Times in 1994 headlined “At Home With: E. Annie Proulx.” Sara Rimer visited her as she was preparing a dinner party.  She cooked a rabbit, and one of the guests brought a homemade flan.  The profile says Proulx published her first short story in Gourmet Magazine when she was in her early 20s, which would date it to the middle or late 1950s, although scholars differ on these matters.  Both a SF magazine called If and Seventeen are also cited as possible first appearances.

The Gourmet story was “The Garlic War” in fact published in 1964 when Proux would have been nearly 30 rather than early 20s.  You can find it online in the Gourmet archives.  I don’t think many writers would want to be judged on their first published short story (if that’s what it is) but it does contain another spectacular food-related line, thus: “… the fragrant aroma of garlic smote Hubert’s nostrils and his eyes flashed wildly for a moment.”

Hubert is determined to give up garlic, but as with the Brokeback boys, some appetites just won’t go away.  You bet.

SKULL THEORY

There seems to be a current theory, not mine, that everything tastes better when it comes out of a skull.  This refers largely to alcohol - beer, wine, and Dan Aykroyd’s needlessly expensive vodka - but not entirely, as you’ll see. 

Personally I don’t need a skull per se.  I’m happier with a vessel that has a skull on the side, say a good cocktail glass or a martini shaker, but I don’t claim to be in absolutely in touch with the Zeitgeist.

The thing is, of course, you can’t drink from the top of an actual skull because the liquid runs out through the various holes.  Those who do use the skull as a vessel tend to slice the top off and use that as the receptacle.  The man below is a member of the Aghori Hindu Sect, and he uses that skull cup not only as a drinking vessel but also as a begging bowl. 

Lord Byron owned a rather more elegant version, of which he wrote “Better to hold the sparkling grape,
 Than nurse the earth-worm's slimy brood,” which is hard to disagree with.  Here’s a replica made by the Alchemy Forge of Sheffield, described as “excruciatingly well detailed.”

But just in case you’re not ready for the real thing, here for you consideration, as Rod Serling, might say, are some silicon cupcake moulds I recently acquired. 

And the first thing to note is that the picture on the box is completely misleading.  That brain-like icing on the top of the cupcake has nothing to do with the mould itself and has been added by some highly skilled food stylist.  For the hopeful child who wants to eat simulated brain this is as disappointing as getting a toy robot and finding that no batteries are included.  Let’s hope his mom or dad is handy with a piping bag.

Now, for my own part I can let years go by without eating, much less making, a cupcake, and yet it seemed possible, if not necessarily likely, that these moulds make work for Yorkshire puddings.   The pudding would rise at least as well as a cupcake, and some nicely browned batter might look at least somewhat like a brain.  Only one way to find out.

There’s a warning on the box that says the moulds shouldn’t be used in an oven above 446 degrees F, a curiously precise figure.  I cooked my Yorkshire puddings at 400 and although the moulds didn’t melt, they did singe very slightly, so they’re no longer pure white, which arguably makes them look slightly more like skulls.  The end result looked like this:

I think you would have to say this wasn’t a complete success.  They tasted fine, but as you see, they rose unevenly and the overall effect didn’t look remotely like a brain.  But wait, what happened when I took the puddings out of the moulds?  They looked like this:

Now OK, they may not look much (or even remotely) like skulls, but they do look at least somewhat like shrunken heads.  I suspect the  shrunken-head fad may be some years from catching on completely, but if and when it arrives, remember you heard it here first.

TTFN

One of my Christmas “stocking fillers” was a book by Tony Stamolis, titled T&T&A.  The middle T stands for tacos, the T and A stand for exactly what you’d expect.

Stamolis is, I suppose, what you’d call a glamour photographer, if such a thing still exists these days.  He takes pictures of naked women, but the end result is a long way from hardcore pornography.  The girls are an interesting bunch, of the tough, chipped-nail-polish, dodgy-tattoo variety.  Some of them are very sexy-looking and some of them are just plain rough-looking, though perhaps we’d disagree about which are which. 

In either case, there’s something quite special about Stamolis’s photographs. Sure, they’re titillating and meant to be, but they’re portraits as much as pinups.  Stamolis makes the women look interesting, flaws and all. He makes them look like individuals.

But the unique selling point of T&T&A  is that interspersed with the photographs of the women, are photographs of tacos. And of course there’s an unavoidable tendency to think Stamolis is making some visual pun involving food and women; that they’re both fast and cheap and tasty.  Although again, some of those tacos do look a bit unappetizing.

Or maybe he isn’t really dealing in visual metaphors.  Maybe he’s just taking photographs of the things he likes; hot babes and hot tacos.  And it works.  I find myself returning frequently to the book, looking at the women’s piercings and facial tattoos, looking at the guacamole and the shredded lettuce accompanying the tacos.  The appetite does indeed get stimulated.

At the back of the book there’s a list of the models’ names and also where the tacos came from.  Quite a lot of the taco joints are in Fresno, which is, or was, Stamolis’s home town, and inevitably I haven’t been to any of those.  Some are in New York, but I haven’t been to those either, and although a few are in L.A. I’ve only been to one of them, and that’s Machos Tacos, in Los Feliz, tucked in beside a car wash, just off Hollywood Boulevard.  I had fish tacos there, which were pretty ordinary but they hit the spot at the time.

Stamolis did an interview with the Portland Mercury in which he described the reaction of an anonymous viewer who looked at the book and “he didn't know whether to go to the bathroom and masturbate, or run to the nearest taqueria.”  Stamolis adds, “I thought that was kind of ridiculous.”  Ridiculous or not, I think there’ll be a lot of people who find it entirely understandable.

MINCED TRIMMINGS

One Christmas when I was a kid, I woke on Christmas morning feeling really ill.  My family was of the “pull yourself together” variety when it came to illness but even they could see there was something wrong with me.

And as the time for Christmas dinner approached I didn’t feel much better and obviously I didn’t look it either.  Concerned relatives would look at me every once in a while and say, “Well I hope he’ll be able to have some Christmas dinner.  Maybe just a nice piece of turkey without any of the trimmings.”

And this was a problem, because if they’d known me better and if I’d have the nerve to tell them, the truth was I didn’t care about the turkey at all, it was only the trimmings I really liked.  The stuffing, the chipolatas, the bread sauce, these were the things I wanted to eat.  And the roast potatoes, of course. 

Surprisingly little has changed.  I like smoked salmon for the lemon juice and black pepper.  I like snails for the garlic butter.  And when it comes to Christmas pudding, what I really enjoy is pouring brandy over it and setting it on fire.

Christmas mince pies, however, seem to fall into a different category.  They really do fill me with a deep and intense nostalgia.  I always say I love them and that they’re part of what I miss most about not being in England for Christmas. My mother made a pretty good mince pie, but more than that, in England, several varieties of mince pie can be found in every corner shop, whereas in LA the mince pie seems to be a rare gourmet treat. Or, of course, people just find 'em disgusting.

And you know, sometimes I’m not sure if I actually like the taste of mince pies, or whether I like them because I’m just associating them with a search for lost time.  So, since, this has been a jelly-positive year, I decided to make a dessert of mincemeat jelly.

We didn't do anything very clever, just crumbled a pack of None Such “condensed” mincemeat into a pan, and rehydrated it with hot water in which a pack of orange flavor Jell-O had been dissolved.  Bompas and Parr, I know, would be horrified, and subtler versions are obviously doable.

I still haven’t committed to acquiring some really good jelly moulds so I used some martini glasses and plastic cups.  You don’t have to turn them out, but it’s more fun if you do, even if they look like this.  Do click on it to get a close up.

I’m sure I can't be the first person to have tried this, but it’s a new one on me, and in the Nicholson household it amounts to a brand new nostalgia-free, Christmas food ritual.  Or it will if we do it again next year.  Hey, and believe it or not, they taste absolutely great.  It seems I actually do like mincemeat a very great deal.   Happy Christmas.  May your eating may be merry and bright.

PIG LEGACY

And speaking of Jeff Bridges, I just saw him in Tron Legacy, a movie that’s simultaneously very stupid and quite a lot of fun.  Oh wait, that’s a description of ALL Hollywood movies.

The blogosphere seems to be alive with whining about the movie’s many improbabilities, which of course is pretty much everything in the movie, but a lot of people seem to be fixated on the roast suckling pig scene, and I admit I’m one of them.

If I understood the plot correctly (and I’m definitely not sure that I did) Jeff Bridges has become trapped in cyberspace, aka the Grid, and is living with a hot virtual girl – Olivia Wilde.  It doesn’t seem such a bad life, but now a portal has opened up allowing access back and forth between the Grid and the real world, and Bridges’s son has come through more or less by accident, and now wants to take dad back with him before the portal closes. Clearly there’s some ‘splaining to do and they do it over dinner in Jeff’s gleamingly austere dining room.

We don’t get to see the entire menu of what they eat, but there’s a suckling pig set right there in the middle of the table.  It looks completely untouched but presumably it’s not just a table decoration.  Quite how a pig got into cyberspace is a matter for debate.  Is it a cyber pig?  An algorithm?  We don’t know.  Neither do we know what the blue stuff is that they’re drinking.   Curacao spritzers?

I guess Tron Legacy is taking place in the present rather than the future, but the Bridges pad does have that stark, unlived-in minimalism that the movies used to associate with the future.  I’m thinking of parts of  2001- A Space Odyssey for instance.  I guess it was Bladerunner (1982) that persuaded us the future might be even messier than the present.

A curious footnote for psycho gourmets: the star of 2001 (to the extent that it had stars) was Keir Dullea – that’s him, or at least his character, in the bed below.

Keir has had a long and interesting, if patchy, acting career.  But the movie he made, or was at any rate released right after 2001 was a little thing called De Sade, in which he played the divine marquis.  I admit I haven’t seen the film, there are some poisonous reviews floating around, but if you ask me, any movie that can produces a still like the one below, in which at various women are trying to pour wine down the man’s undies, can’t be all bad.

I DON’T SEE ANY CONNECTION TO VIETNAM, WALTER.

 What kind of psycho gourmet would I be if I went into the Food 4 Less supermarket in Yucca Valley and passed up the chance to buy some exotic booze I’d never tasted, or even seen or heard of, before?  The booze in question was ChocoVine, “the taste of Dutch chocolate and fine red wine,” and 14 per cent proof by volume, according to the label, which also promised “grape wine with artificial flavor, cream and artificial colors.”

I take that to mean the wine is real and the chocolate is fake.  And since it claims to have a shelf life of six months after it’s been opened, I’m guessing the cream may have some artificial enhancements too.

         The woman at the Food 4 Less checkout asked me rather sternly, “Have you had that before?”

         “No,” I said. “Have you?”
         “No,” she said, with finality and that was the end of the conversation, but  I think she was expressing disapproval rather than curiosity.

         It was a brutal night in Yucca Valley as the fog settled, the wind howled and the sky dumped a winter’s worth of rain.  There were worse places to be, than in a motel room with the Loved One and a bottle of ChocoVine.  Here's a motel room still life.

ChocoVine, I can report, tastes like a very slightly grown up relative of Bailey’s Irish Cream.  Sweet, of course, and essentially bland, but the fact is wine and chocolate (even artificial chocolate flavors) go pretty well together, which is not to say you mightn’t be better off with a glass of cabernet a bar of Toblerone, but it was definitely the right thing at the right time.

Now that I’m home the ChocoVine seems considerably less fun.  It actually looks as though I’m keeping half a bottle of cold coffee in the fridge.  Naturally I started to think of ways of livening it up, using it in a cocktail for instance, adding something sour: tequila or bitters or even lime juice, but then I noticed something else on the label, “Do not mix with acidic drinks.”

So then I headed to the Chocovine website which, as well as the usual flannel about awards and what a quality product it is, has some cocktail recipes.  These include Pure Bliss - ChocoVine plus hazelnut liqueur, the Treasure Island - ChocoVine with banana liqueur and coconut rum, and Lady’s Night - ChocoVine plus raspberry liqueur.

It dawned on me that I’d been knocking back (omigod) a GIRLY DRINK.  Whew.  What next?  Before you know it I’ll be drinking Cosmopolitans and Appletinis. It’s just as well I’m very, very secure in my manhood.  Even so I felt I had to manly up my ChocoVine with a good healthy slug of vodka. It looked like this, though to be honest it looked much the same before I put in the vodka.

 It’s not quite a White Russian, as drunk by the Dude in the Big Lebowski, but as he might well say, “Hey, careful, man, there's a beverage here!”

A MAN'S GOTTA LIVE, A MAN'S GOTTA EAT ...

So it’s goodbye to Don Van Vliet, who in a sense said goodbye to his own musical alter ego as Captain Beefheart nearly 30 years ago, and became a painter.  But that doesn’t mean people have stopped listening to or being influenced by his music, and I don’t imagine they will now.

Elsewhere in Psycho-Gourmet we’ve celebrated such Beefheart songs as Hair Pie, Kandy Korn and Big Eyed Beans from Venus, but in searching around his various obituaries and appreciations I’ve discovered he had a certain amount to say about food, much of it eccentric if not exactly psychotic.  Such as:

In a 1971 interview, "Why would (anyone) want to label themselves?  I say, ‘Lick My Decals Off, Baby!’ I'm not interested in making any new mustard or ketchup. I make very good mustard." That's the Lick My Decals Off band below.

At the time of the moon landing he said, "They're about to poke their genitals into our cream cheese moon right now. “

In 1973 he expressed disapproval of putting whale meat in dog-food. "Dogs don't want to eat whale meat. [They] can't go on the ocean."

That same year, in Oui magazine, he said of himself, “I was like an egg rolling through time until I was 24. Then the egg cracked and I popped out."

He also famously locked the Magic Band, Trout Mask era, in a house in Woodland Hills (that's it above) and deprived them of sleep and food until they played the way he wanted them to.  I always thought that sounded apocryphal but it seems to have been more or less true.  The band shoplifted food, and Frank Zappa helped them out occasionally, so the depravation can’t have been total.

We all know that musicians tend to be intransigent types, but I’d have thought that a sleepless, hungry musician would be less rather than more likely to follow instructions, but what do I know?

I haven’t been able to find a good picture of the Captain eating anything.  There he is above on the cover of Bongo Fury, and I guess there must be something consumable in that paper cup but who knows what.  Here, not much better, is the great man posing with a coffee cup.  Maybe there’s even coffee in it.

Oh and of course, I almost forgot (how could I?) it was Beefheart who said, "There are 40 people in the world and 5 of them are hamburgers."


And above all of course, of course, "I may be hungry but I sure ain't weird."