Please do not confuse the two Mason jars in our refrigerator. They contain similar-looking thick, rich, viscous brown fluids: one of them is home-made chocolate syrup, to satisfy a recent spate of cravings for chocolate egg creams; and the other is two cups of roux, for a several-days-late gumbo in honor of Mardi Gras.

An egg-cream made with roux would probably be terrible. I don’t even think I’ll try it for science.

• Tasting notes on the egg cream: a quarter-inch of chocolate syrup, a half-inch of milk or your milk-analogue of choice [hemp milk, in my case, and QUIT SNIGGERING] and seltzer the rest of the way up the glass. Stir. Watch out for foam.
• Cooking notes on the roux: takes a long freakin’ time to get it dark enough to have good flavor. Has to be stirred every 15 picoseconds, or it’ll taste burnt. Is probably horrible for you, but man: gumbo is awesome.

And then Piper decided to wake up earlier than usual and demand the bottle of milk we’ve been denying her for 36 hours. We’ve been waiting to return her to dairy products until she stopped casually yakking up random bits of food and beverages, so giving into the hostage-taker’s demands and giving her a full bottle of warm milk while she sat in the middle of our bed felt a little like handing her a goldfish bowl full of grenades and live snakes and asking her to keep it upright.

I figured I’d treat everyone and make some quick pancakes, but because of Kate’s eyes, I kept most of the lights off and cooked by the faint crepuscular glow available, which meant that I was stumbling around the kitchen, too, while Piper pointed her hand at … something on the table, we’re not sure what … and yelled two syllables we’re hearing a lot of these days: “DA-WA!”

Unlike “GAT” and “TUCK” and “DOG” and “CAR” and “ANANA” and “BAH-BREES” and “SOX” and “SCHOOSS” and even “DAH-WOK,” all of which come from Piper with clear ASL signs and well-known translations (cat, truck, dog, car, banana, blueberries-for-the-love-of-god-people, socks, shoes and music, respectively), DA-WA has become a generic and oft-repeated entreaty for whatever she’s pointing to, thinking of, or has seen recently. Woe betide the slow-to-comprehend parent who can’t intuit what she means! Even those who, on two three-hour chunks of sleep neatly divided in the middle by an orange cat who insists on feezling his whiskers around one’s nose, mouth and ears while one sleeps, feel like they’re doing pretty well just to be vertical and not falling asleep in the pancake batter. Or on the stove.

Anyhow, there we sat, eating our breakfast in the near-dark, Kate wearing Matrix-style wraparound sunglasses and wincing at every photon and Piper demanding who knows what. A return to the gold standard, maybe, and a little goddamn comity in Congress. Me, I just ate four pancakes with grapes and almond butter and maple syrup and told Kate she was pouring soy sauce on her breakfast.

I'm in Chinatown, on my way to somewhere not Chinatown. Chinatowns, in whatever city, or China-strip-malls, in whatever small city or town, are a great place to land before going elsewhere, because they are a zone that exists outside of the context of the neighboring contexts. Good for a deep breath. I take the opportunity to grab a plate of fried dumplings, or “dollar dumplings” as I call them, because in my Chinatown they cost a dollar. They are fast and cheap, plus also they are more delicious than they have any right to be. It's a dumpling house in a quiet corner, and it's a beautiful evening, with the setting sun just so and a volleyball tourney on the school tennis courts across the street just wrapping up, and I wonder to myself, “Should I Tweet how awesome this is? Should I Yelp this particular dumpling shop? Do I Digg it?” And before I can swallow what I'm chewing (awesome delicious fried dumplings) I check myself: “And ruin it?”

This is a tiny philosophical problem: when you find the hidden treasure, the off-the-beaten-path-gem, and you are a digital citizen, do you pimp the hidden treasure, or do you keep your trap shut? The cost/benefit analysis is not clear-cut. Publicize the hidden treasure, and you benefit the proprietor of the hidden treasure, but you run the risk of the hidden treasure, through success bought with this publicity, losing some of its hidden-ness and eventually some of its treasurability. Withhold the information, and then you get to have the hidden treasure to yourself, but the proprietor, who surely could benefit from an elevation from hiddenness, does not benefit at all. Plus you pass up the opportunity to claim to have discovered a hidden treasure.

…

via The Dumpling Effect: The Trouble with Coolhunting your Dinner – The Awl.

I really, really need to nip my own reaction in the bud, here. It’s way too easy for me to get caught in the minutiae of a single meal, instead of backing off and remembering: we offer her a wide variety of (mostly) healthy foods, and she picks and chooses and doesn’t ever go hungry. And if she doesn’t eat food X today, she might tomorrow (and, gallingly, vice versa).

Control issues around food: never a good idea.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/12/anthony-bourdain-war-fast-food

…

And since then it’s all been about the little girl. Because I am acutely aware of the fact that she’s a blank page, her brain a soft surface waiting for the irreversible impressions of every raised voice, every gaffe and unguarded moment.

I’m not against hamburgers. But I believe that a burger should be made of “beef” (not necessarily the best beef, but definitely recognisable as something that was, before grinding, mostly red, reasonably fresh, presumably from a steer or cow, something that your average doberman would find enticing). I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria.

It is repugnant, in principle, to me – the suggestion that we legislate against fast food. We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we are infantilised to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers out of our hands. It is dismaying – and probably inevitable. When we reach the point where we are unable to raise a military force of physically fit specimens, or public safety becomes an issue after some lurid example of a large person blocking a fire exit, they surely shall.

But if you are literally serving shit to children, then I’ve got no problem with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I’ll hold the spoon.

In this way, me and the PETA folks and the vegetarians have something in common. They don’t want us to eat any meat. I’m beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat. PETA doesn’t want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle deep in their own crap, because they don’t want any animals to die – ever – and basically think that chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat.

…

This week: squash blossoms sauteed in butter, with salt and pepper. I’ve had’em stuffed with goat cheese, but doing them this way was way simpler and let us actually taste the squash flavor. Tasty.

Via the inimitable Warren Ellis, of course.

“Rubberbands sauteéd in gasoline and misery.”

This is the lid to a food processor. Note the teeny hole in the center of the, er, plug piece. If you put an egg yolk and a squirt of mustard and some salt and pepper and a scant tablespoon, combined, of lemon juice and vinegar and maybe a smashed up garlic clove into the food processor, turn it on, and then pour oil — a nice light grapeseed oil, say — into the plug piece with the device whirring merrily away underneath, the teeny hole will stream the oil into your nascent mayonnaise at just the right rate to not overwhelm the emulsifying power of the egg yolk. And assuming you stop pouring in oil once the texture is to your liking, you’ll wind up with about 3/4 of a cup of mayonnaise, which is plenty for a household where one member doesn’t like mayonnaise and makes “yuck” faces at the very thought of it.

You could use this hole to drizzle oil into the mayonnaise you’re making, too, but this top for the food processor is more of a pain to clean, so why would you dirty it unnecessarily?