what a wonderful weekend...filled with things to heart...
heart!
double heart!
TRIPLE heart:
alcoholic heart:
ultimate heart!!
(forget my cynical adult disposition for one minute and melt down to silly teenybopper fangirl mode...drool! is it terribly shameful to be over two decades old and still scream onto the stage "WANG LI-HONG I WANT TO HAVE YOUR BABIES"?)
happy vday!
Drink wine, this is the life eternal.
This is all that youth can bring.
'Tis the season for wine, roses, and drunken friends.
Be happy for this moment,
For this moment is your life.
-The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam
The wine...
The roses...
The drunken friends...
(megan doing the moonwalk)
(chocolate-covered strawberry toast!)
(awww)
This is all that youth can bring.
Cherish this moment, for this moment is your life.
and you've been eating WHAT for the last 7 days?
i've found it, guys...the perfect salad. here's how to make.
Wyndaengel's "Perfect" Salad
1 bowl mesclun mix
1/4 cup corn
1/2 avacado
1/2 cup sundried tomatoes
1/2 cup tomatoes
1 egg, diced
1/4 cup grilled asaparagus
Combine ingredients into bowl, chop finely, mix
Drizzle with Chipotle sweet and sour vinagerette from Chop't
For "Healthier Version of Wyndaengel's Perfect Salad":
Add 1/2 cup diced celery
Only 1/4 cup sundried tomatoes
Replace have of mesclun mix with arugula
Only 1/4 cup avacado
For "Meatier Version of Wyndaengel's Perfect Salad":
Add 1/2 cup fried onions
Replaced grilled asparagus with grilled shrimp/chicken/steak
speaking of over the top...the most amazing meal i've had in ages:
L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon | the philosophy of cuisine
the dream began when i walked past robuchon's franchise in decadent vegas one Christmastime, and my father and i looked into its crazy interior, half opulent crimson and half translucent gold, a melding of culinary temple and contemporary art, a surreal creation of glass vases with vibrantly coloured ingredients sit atop shiny ebony shelves, and wondered.
what kind of cuisine is this? i asked my father, who shook his head and led me away.
expensive food, mei. expensive food.
and expensive it was. the cheapest item on the menu was something like 28 dollars, and that was just on the appetizer panel.
***
there are several rings of gastronomical delights, each ring expanding outwards, each subsequent form of cuisine losing constraints one by one until it leaps, in an unbound and ecstatic little bundle, into a universe limited only by the rarest flavours we can extract from the world around us.
we begin, i think, is the staple foods: your french fries, burgers, lasagne, things that are made from a total of three/four ingredients but hit home, creating nostalgic memories as well as an appeased stomach.
the second ring consists of the more involved tastes that extend beyond the four basic ones of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. food starts to become three dimensional with the fragrance of thyme, the appetizing aroma of basil, a hit of the surprising and the unusual, such as a sprinking of chocolate on a shank of lamb.
the third ring consists of the cultural "delicacies" that are valued sometimes more for their rarity than their good taste. take ostrich meat, alligator tongue, lamb kidney. this is where food begins to lose its way, valued more for either the price or the novelty of it. this is the point that differentiates the naked emperor from one clothed in actual luxurious robes - when you can actually say that the food was divine, absent of Michelin approval.
***
there is the final tier (the promised land of cuisine, if you will) that i hesitate to categorize any particular food/restaurant/chef into, because at this stage things cannot be as definitively described. i have only a vague sense that food of this calibre is simply whole. Joel's fourth course, for example, was quail with truffled mashed potatoes. deconstruction of the sensations into cool or warm, lightly salted or oiled, dusted with rosemary powder or parsley detracts slowly at it, because it can be taken only as a complete entity, a unified experience. my coworker described it as tasting simply like the forest. my l'oursin was similar; the complexity of good uni but paired with a cauliflower cream, set in a gel that suspended the urchin meat on your tongue so that your mind had time to sit back and meditate on it before the morsel was devoured. that one tasted like the ocean. last but not least was something quite ordinary in terms of expense account dinners: a tuna tartar, but done to such meticulous perfection that each cube of tuna was exactly the right temperature to bring out all the taste with none of the fishy tang, coated with a miracuously homogenous mixture of olive oil and unknown spices.
this final tier is hard to describe because there are no characteritics (for characteristics are limiting). it can be as complex as the saffron foam on our elaborate dessert, or as simple as mashed potatoes done to perfection. a true virtuosic chef, i think, can wed the two in flawless creations to which only fine art and music are rivals.
***
anyway, back to my dream. in it, i grew up, donned a blazer and heels, and awoke one day to lead a group of discriminating palates to the culinary palace that is Robuchon's L'Atelier.
i was a little nervous as the youngest of the crowd, since organizing such a thing is never a guarenteed crowd-pleaser. an idiosyncratic revulsion to a particular ingredient, or wayward omnivore in a "vegetarian mood" can ruin an afternoon. at first glance, however, the place was much more impressive than i had bargained for.
service was en pointe. my brother once said in his delightfully un-PC way "you know you're in an expensive restaurants when all the waiters are blond." interestingly enough, L'atelier's wait staff was populated not by displaced wasps, but by indians who, in light british accents paired subdued elegance with meticulous attention.
and the food...well, the food i've already described.
was the restaurant a success? my coworker claimed to feel "unreal," "dreamlike" and "high" after the meal (as evidenced by him randomly picking me up on Park Avenue as i flailed about from 54th to 52nd street, aghast), which proved that they were no match for Joel.
over.the.top.
reason #280 you don't want to date them golddiggers....
and for those of you hopeful dieters, an interesting finding linked to the recent Superbowl...
Researchers Have Come Up With 1 Way to Avoid Pigging Out When the Pigskin Flies
Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD, Friday, February 02, 2007
Feb. 2, 2007 -- Super Bowl food may spike your diet this Sunday unless you have a good game plan.
Enter Cornell University's Brian Wansink, PhD, and Collin Payne, PhD. Their latest study provides a simple strategy to tackle mindless eating during the big game: just look at how much you've eaten.
The researchers found that students invited to a past year's Super Bowl party ate less if the evidence of their gobbling wasn't immediately bused away.
"In general, it is important to have some idea of how much you have eaten," Wansink says in a Cornell news release.
"Serve yourself onto a plate, and then stop when the plate is empty. This is the best strategy for unintended overeating at your Super Bowl party," Wansink says. "Dish it out, eat it slowly, and stop."
Wansink directs the Cornell Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. He's also author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.
Fowl Ball
For the study, Wansink and Payne invited 50 graduate students (34 women and 16 men) to an all-you-can-eat sports bar for a Super Bowl party.
The students were randomly seated at 21 tables and were able to help themselves to as many chicken wings as they wanted during the game.
Wansink and Payne had instructed the waiters to regularly clear leftover chicken wing bones off half the tables, and to let them pile up on plates on the other tables.
Students at the tables where the bones piled up ate fewer chicken wings (five wings per person, on average) than those at the bused tables (seven wings per person, on average).
Seeing the stack of chicken bones pile up on their plates may have been a visual cue to the students at the tables that weren't bused that they'd had enough.
But the evidence was whisked off the bused tables, possibly spurring those students to eat more chicken wings, the researchers speculate.
It's also possible leftover bones were simply an unappetizing sight, or maybe the students were embarrassed by their bone buildup, note Wansink and colleagues.
Say When
The bottom line from the study: If you have some visual report of how much you've eaten, you may slow down instead of doing an end run around your diet.
The same strategy may also work with drinks, say the researchers.
If your empty drink bottles or cups are left on your table, you might be more aware of how much you've had to drink than if empty drink containers are cleared away.
"This is one ally in the fight against mindless eating or drinking" in a distracting environment such as a Super Bowl party, write Wanskin and Payne.
Their study is due for publication in an upcoming issue of Perceptual and Motor Skills, according to the Cornell news release.
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