GET YER FRITAS OUT

Photo by Luna Goodyear Smythe

If Santa’s going to bring you a stocking filler, what could be better than a large quantity of potato crisps? And if they come in an elegant tin, then so much the better.  Of course it would be a mighty big stocking that could accommodate such a tin but that’s the magic of Christmas innit?

It’s a serious business, as you see from the photo above at the top, but open the can and things cheer up considerably.

These in fact are Spanish crisps or, to get bilingual, ‘patatas fritas’ and they’re fried in 100% olive oil (aciete de olive) – there’s sea salt in there too.  In general I think the best crisps (chips) are fried in lard and usually come from Pennsylvania (op cit elsewhere in this blog) but the Spanish result is pretty great; light and crisp (as is only right) and very satisfying, by which I mean that you don’t have to eat a ton of ‘em to feel satisfied (depending, naturally, on how easily you’re satisfied).

The company that makes them is Bonilla a la Vista.  Their website says ‘DEVOTION IS OUR MAIN INGREDIENT - Bonilla a la vista is always with you during your daily moments of enjoyment: after work with your friends, with some beers at the pub, during a youngster’s birthday celebration, when you sit in the sand and feel the sea breeze after a session of surfing… special and unique moments.’

I shall keep that in mind after my next session of surfing.  In the meantime, this is a picture of their factory, a little less artisanal than I’d imagined, but evidently none the worse for that.

Also it appears that Bonilla a la Vista has friends all over the world, or at least in South Korea.

IT'S FOOD (BUT IS IT ART?)

Food photography, it’s a funny old thing isn’t it?

      Here’s a rather wonderful picture of the “Housemade Potato Chips - gorgonzola and calabrian chili dip, parmesan, black pepper” at Stella Barra Pizzeria on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles.

I didn’t take that picture, although I was there, and I did eat some of the chips.  It was taken by Lisa Jane Persky who’s a "proper" and very accomplished photographer.  And I know that if I’d taken took a picture of those chips, they just wouldn’t have looked that good.

Here is what photographer Ellen Auerbach had to say on the subject: 

And here’s one I did earlier, when I was trying to become the “Cheese and pickle doostep sandwich” at The Royal Oak Inn, in Woodchester, Gloucestershire in England.  I guess I failed in my becoming.  On balance I think that was probably for the best.

MORE SAVORY ADVENTURES – SOME OF THEM POTATO-RELATED

-->

 If you like potatoes and peanuts – and I suspect you do – then you’re probably going to enjoy these exotic-seeming satay flavored potato chips, bought at the local Thai supermarket, complete with Thai script and all.

They tasted fine, but only vaguely of peanuts, and the list of ingredients simply specifies “artificial flavors” so you can make what you like of that.  And then despite the apparent exoticism, you’ll see they’re made by Lays, a company owned by PepsiCo, which of course doesn’t seem exotic in the least.

                                             *

These, bought at a supermarket in Little Tokyo, seemed rather more outré,:

 I wonder if that’s meant to say ridge cut rather than rich cut, but I’m not sure, and certainly I liked the salt and seaweed, whether “the Japanese” or not.  And they tasted great.  The was plenty of “mouth feel” and after I’d eaten them my lips felt both tingly and a little bit numb.  I suspect this was not because of the salt or seaweed but rather the MSG and chili powder.  Tree nuts were in there too, according to the label.

*

And then there are these little suckers:  “Kasugai Peanut & You.”   Me?  Well sure - I was mostly attracted by that image of the shrimp on the pack. 

I will say this for Japanese snack-makers – they’ve really got that whole CRUNCH thing down.  Here there’s a brittle, more or less spherical shell that’s sweet, salty, with the taste of shrimp a long way back in the mix, the flavor comes from “shrimp powder,” and there’s a peanut loose at the center of the shell.  Is it just me or do they look like very, very small potatoes?

I suppose exoticism is always a movable feast.  No doubt the Kasugai company doesn’t seem all that exotic if you’re in Japan, in fact they seem to specialize in gummy candy.  Well, I suppose somebody has to.

THE SQUID AND I

You know me, I could eat potato chips all day, and if there’s beer as well I could eat them all night as well.  In fact, sometimes I feel I’m so addicted to them that I look for a salty snack that I like less, just so I eat less.  Salted nuts don’t work because I can actually eat just as many nuts as I can chips, and they’re higher calorie, higher fat, and at least as high salt.  Pretzels work to an extent: there’s a limit to how many I want to eat, but that’s only because I don’t really like them at all.

So when I was in downtown Los Angeles last week, I went to the Nijiya Market in Little Tokyo and bought a bag of amiyaki surume.  Now that’s a sentence you don’t get to write every day.

For the uninitiated, such as myself, amiyaki translates as seasoned, and surume as squid, so what I bought was just a bag of seasoned squid.  I love a good squid and I like dried fish, and you see the picture on the packaging of a little man with a squid hat, and what looks like a tankard of beer.  Worth a try, no?  Worth a try, yes. 

I fact I looked at other squid snacks in the supermarket and many of them involved a lot of sugar, which I didn’t like the sound of.  The top three ingredients in the pack I bought were squid, salt and monosodium glutamate, which would seem to guarantee something suitably savory.  And although many of the ingredients sound pretty inscrutable “glycerin esters of fatty acids,” for instance, there was also citric acid.  What could go wrong?

Well, in fact nothing went wrong at all.  The seasoned squid was very good in its way.  The seasoning was subtle, if perhaps too subtle.  The overall effect was of eating a slightly salty, and (despite everything) a very slightly sweet, piece of fishy rubber: the tentacles were tastier than the body.   True, the Loved One had a taste and began a mime of uncontrollable wretching but she is a sensitive and dramatic soul.

Seasoned squid goes down very well with a beer – and yes, there’s a real limit to how many I’d want to eat at one session.  On the other hand it did kind of leave me craving some real potato chips, preferably salt and vinegar.

A LOOK BACK: SOME THINGS I ATE AND PHOTOGRAPHED IN 2011

Actually it was the other way round.  I photographed some things, then I ate them.  Eating them and then photographing them would be just weird and disgusting.

Early in the year I had an “art idea.”  I realized that I eat a sandwich for lunch pretty much every day of my life.  Occasionally I eat out or buy a ready-made sandwich but more often than not, since I work at home, I make my own.  Here from the beginning of January, for example, is a tuna sandwich on sourdough with cornichons.

I eat a lot of sandwiches that look like that.  Not very visually exciting, so to make life a little more interesting, I made an open-faced egg mayonnaise on pumpernickel with anchovies. 

It tasted pretty good but I realized I was only doing it for the sake of the blog, and that’s no way to live. Then later in January, the Loved One was briefly in hospital, and here’s picture of a ham and cheese sandwich on marbled rye, which she was served there.  Of course it was definitely her sandwich rather than mine, but since she didn’t have much appetite I ate some of it, and it wasn’t at all bad for hospital food.

By the end of the month I stopped photographing my sandwiches, having realized that most of the ones I eat look very much the same.  Of course a part of me thought that could have been the whole point.  This could have been a beautifully minimalist art idea; 365 sandwiches all looking essentially the same but with the minutest variations. 

Anyway, I had other things to do with my life, but I continued to eat a lot of sandwiches, though I only photographed them once in a while.  For instance, later in the year, when I was in Minneapolis, I ate lunch at the cafeteria in the Mill City Museum, and had this sandwich:

To be honest, at this point I don’t really remember what was in the sandwich; ham and cheese again, I think, but I actually took the photograph because of those Rachel’s Gourmet Kettle Chips – “Made from the Heart.”   Not sure if I want heart in my kettle chips, but I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned.

In London, for one reason or another, I found myself in Dollis Hill in Gladstone Park, named after William Gladstone, and I was in need of something to eat.  Now, cafés in English public parks are places where historically you’ve found the kind of terrible food that has won England its reputation for low cuisine, but no longer. 

Here was the Karmarama Café housed in an old stable block and the sandwich was terrific: smoked salmon with red onion and capers, and I ate sitting in the cobbled stable yard, while a Rufus Wainwright album played in the background, and I thought good lord, things have changed for the better in the old country.

It must have been round about this time that I heard about a book titled Scanwiches, by John Chonko, published by Powerhouse, and also a website, naturally:  a wonderfully obsessive project of cross sections of sandwiches, as seen on a scanner.

This is not quite the sandwich book I had in mind (it’s certainly less minimalist) but it’s near enough, and in fact it’s a good deal better than I’d have come up with, so I’m glad I hadn’t put too much energy into my project.

In December we made one of our desert road trips and returned to The Astro-burger at Kramer Junction, on the outskirts of Boron.  We went there originally because of the sign, but we returned because the food was so damned good. 

That’s a patty melt on the left which the Loved One swears is the best ever, and that’s an astro burger on the right.  How could you go to a restaurant called The Astro-Burger and not order the astro burger?   You might argue that a burger isn’t really a sandwich, but I wouldn’t.

It was a good year for potato chips as well as sandwiches.  I rounded off the year with some Granny Goose potato chips: "Quality family snacks for over 60 years.”  That's them above.  I suspect that the gourmet food gods do not entirely approve of potato chip sandwiches, but then I suspect the gourmet food gods disapprove of quite a few of my activities.