Bemused

Alternate title: Things Which I Have Done Lately For Which I Am Receiving A Baffling Amount Of Attention

Thing The First: Written an article about Anvil Bar & Refuge’s 100 List — a list of 100 cocktails everyone should try at least once — that landed on the front page of FARK.com and received more pageviews than the infamous pizza vending machine post here at she eats., as well as garnering an impressive 55 mostly angry comments at the Press and 77 comments over at FARK.

Thing The Second: Written an article about a bourbon and bacon cocktail at a recent Manhattan contest that I judged, which also hit the front page of FARK and made me briefly consider why I am always chosen for the booze assignments before deciding that I should stop silently complaining to myself. Comment of which I am particularly proud:

The author kept referring to bourbon as an American whiskey. It is a Kentucky whiskey. Period. They don’t make bourbon in Tenn. or Candada or Ireland or Scotland…it’s made in Kentucky with at least 51% corn and pure limestone water. I should know, the Bourbon Trail is twenty miles away.

OH MY GOD SHUT THE FUCK UP.

(Sorry. You know it’s bad when you start begrudging your commenters…)

Thing The Third: You know…it’s just another FARK thing…and it’s not even about food…and it’s frankly inappropriate for younger and/or delicate audiences, so maybe I’ll just let some intrepid reader do some digging and find it.

Thing The Fourth: Quit Twitter. I didn’t realize this was going to be such a big deal until all the comments and emails and DMs and Facebook messages started pouring in. And then the Houston Chronicle picked it up. Seriously…I listen to Kyrie O’Connor all the time when she’s on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on NPR on Saturday mornings. And now she’s writing about me?

<sigh>

I really do appreciate all the kind words. It’s very nice knowing that my random, snarky, occasionally TMI Tweets brighten peoples’ days. And I say that with no sarcasm intended. But…when it’s even extremely minor news that someone — like myself or like a celebrity (Miz Miley Cyrus) — stops Tweeting, doesn’t that just underscore and reinforce the points I made yesterday?

Moonshine in the Afternoon

Ruby Slipper Martini with ruby red grapefruit juice and champagne at Moonshine

I’ve made a few recent weekend trips to Austin — for work both times — but managed to have a little fun on the side while I was there. This most recent trip to the Hill Country was for the Austin City Limits Music Festival (ACL) and just to answer any questions you may have, let me just say this: I saw exactly one band over the course of three days, subsisted on nacho cheese Doritos and Red Bull in the media area and worked for a good portion of the weekend with my laptop in a clear plastic garbage bag to protect it from the torrential rain.

The highlight of that particular weekend was getting fresh carnitas tacos (with pickled habanero peppers!) and elotes slathered with mayonnaise and parmesan cheese delivered to the tent courtesy of an Austin taco restaurant whose name I shamefully can’t remember (I think I was distracted by fighting for the last plug on the lone power strip so my laptop didn’t die). And after the last band played on Sunday night, Groovehouse and I packed our gear, hiked out of Zilker Park and back to our car, where we promptly deposited a heavy load of cameras, lenses, batteries, docking stations, laptops, iPhones, power chargers and all manner of 21st century detritus before walking to Shady Grove for a late dinner.

It was far from the best meal I’ve ever had, but we both dove headfirst into our veggie burgers and salads, clinging desperately to the promise of roughage cleaning out our systems from the trash we’d shoved into it all weekend. I reflected later on the poor quality of my Thai noodle salad and how eagerly I devoured it, thinking that I should never, ever, ever review food when famished.

The trip to Austin before the three-day endurance sport that was ACL was decidedly more relaxed, however. I was in town at the request of Robb Walsh, serving as a preliminary judge for the 19th annual Austin Hot Sauce Festival. I chronicled my misadventures on Sunday in a recent post on the Houston Press, if you care to read about how sick I got somewhere around sampling my 200th salsa. The highlight of that trip was a meal at Moonshine, the pictures from which are below.

And they still look pretty damn delicious, if I do say so myself.

Two Months

I brought you a slice of red velvet cake as a peace offering...

It’s been over two months since I posted here. A lot can happen in two months.

In two months, you can find yourself living in a completely different part of the city, in a rambling old house from the 1920s, devoid of husband or dogs or cat. In two months, you can ultimately find happiness and some measure of comfort in something incredibly painful. In two months, you can turn a hobby in to a more-than-full-time job and find yourself resenting what you used to love. In two months, you can reinvent yourself.

Over the past two months, I’ve been heavily active on Twitter. Who hasn’t…? But I’ve found myself increasingly disillusioned not only with the ephemeral nature of Twitter — the fleeting attention spans, the condensed and often thoughtless coughing up of little blood spatters of information or thoughts or ideas — but with the inelegance of Twitter itself. Twitter is a spasm, a knee jerk, a poorly played game of Telephone.

That’s not to say it’s all terrible. Twitter can be useful. And entertaining. And engaging (perhaps too much at times). But I don’t like what it’s done to me or the people around me. We’ve found ourselves endlessly checking our Twitter apps on our iPhones at dinner, ignoring conversations with others to scroll through the timeline, thinking of TwitPic’ing something the instant we see it or instantly relaying inane, overheard discussions as OH’s. There is no time to process — only to Tweet. We’ve found ourselves alternately obsessed with ourselves and with people we don’t even know, ignoring our real lives in the process. There is no time to live — only to navelgaze.

I’m guilty of all of this. And I don’t want to be that person anymore. Of course, I can’t get off of Twitter entirely. It’s a large part of my job to be plugged into Twitter at all times as the @HoustonPress. But I’m more or less abandoning @she_eats for now. It’s become too much to keep up with and the intensely private person that I am (truly, although no one really seems to believe this) is exhausted and frightened by people thinking they know me just because they follow me on Twitter. We are more than our Twitter profiles, people.

So for those reasons and many others, it’s back to blogging for me. Equally narcissistic? Perhaps. But that’s not why I got into this game in the first place. I love it here — the words flowing from my fingers to the keys to the peaceful white void of the screen with no 140 character limits or constant need to entertain or be entertained. I feel comfortable here. There is more even footing here. There is more space to explain, to engage, to be useful — all the things that I initially thought Twitter would be better for — but with far more thought and effort put into it.

So with that… I’m off Twitter. And back here (and always at the Press, of course). Hope to see you around…

Osso Buco

Around here, we used to do a fairly regular feature called Food Poetry Wednesday. It isn’t the catchiest name ever, but it was straightforward. Since taking my new job, I’ve had shamefully little time to concentrate on anything else but keeping my head above water. Today, however, found me laid up in the house most of the day with a terrible allergy attack. After a morning of watching World’s Most Shocking Police Videos (or some other such crap) in a histamine-induced daze, I turned off the TV and went back to bed with some books.

One of them was Billy Collins’ Sailing Alone Around the Room, a gift from an old friend upon landing my first job out of college. Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, but before that he was writing the kind of poetry that has always touched me: poems that elevate the ordinary to something sacred, special or simply humorous. He takes the most routine situations — or even thoughts — and puts them into verses that either make you take everything a little less seriously or make you appreciate the small things just that much more, depending upon the mood in which you’ve found yourself.

So in honor of a not-so-special Sunday evening in which I’ve found myself in a fairly rotten mood, here’s a food poem by Billy Collins that gave me comfort in spite of myself. Hope it does the same for you, too.

Osso Bucco

I love the sound of the bone against the plate
and the fortress-like look of it
lying before me in a moat of risotto,
the meat soft as the leg of an angel
who has lived a purely airborne existence.
And best of all, the secret marrow,
the invaded privacy of the animal
prized out with a knife and swallowed done
with cold, exhilarating wine.

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair,
a creature with a full stomach –
something you don’t hear much about in poetry,
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
You know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter.

But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm, heavy paw on my chest,
and I can only close my eyes and listen
to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance
and the sound of my wife’s laughter
on the telephone in the next room,
the woman who cooked the savory osso bucco,
who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.
She who talks to her faraway friend
while I linger here at the table
with a hot, companionable cup of tea,
feeling like one of the friendly natives,
a reliable guide, maybe even the chief’s favorite son.

Somewhere, a man is crawling up a rock hillside
on bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitent
carrying the stone of the world in his stomach;
and elsewhere people of all nations stare
at one another across a long, empty table.

But here, the candles give off their warm glow,
the same light that Shakespeare and Izaak Walton wrote by,
the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.
Only now it plays on the blue plates,
the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork.

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other one will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

Have You Been to Pho Binh?

Pho with brisket and crispy fat at Pho Binh

If you’re a Houston Chowhound or a resident of South Houston, the answer might be a resounding “YES!” But if you aren’t in one of these groups, you’re probably missing out on the best pho in Houston.

The best pho in Houston. That’s a minefield of a statement. After all, Houston’s thriving Vietnamese community means that there are at least 70 pho restaurants in town — and probably far more than the ones I could count in the phone book — which would seem to make choosing a favorite a difficult task. But it’s only difficult if you’ve never eaten at Pho Binh. In the face of its highly fragrant broth with a silky sheen of beef fat floating on top, all other pho becomes a distant and slightly disappointing memory. This is truly how pho should taste.

Jalapenos, limes and bean sprouts for the pho

I’m not the first to write a love letter (or love video, even) to Pho Binh and I certainly won’t be the last. And I certainly can’t claim to have discovered the place. Pho Binh has been a staple of the South Houston dining scene for at least 20 years, according to my friend and area resident David Tong. He seemed shocked to hear that Houston foodies have discovered the little place — a ramshackle pairing of a single-wide trailer and a tumbledown house — and are currently singing its praises far and wide. He half-jokingly told me that people who find the place have a duty as secret-keepers to make sure it doesn’t become too popular. After all, they run out of pho every day as it is.

I had the pleasure of eating breakfast there last weekend with a collection of some of my favorite food lovers: Misha, Dorothy and David. David, who owns Tuscany Coffee, bragged of eating at Pho Binh at least five times a week when he was working in South Houston and therefore was our guide for the meal. He advised us to get the bo vien (meatballs) and extra fat with our pho. I went with both of those options as well as brisket and crispy fat for my soup. I thought of my former boss, Trang, and how she and her family would eat pho every morning for breakfast (pho is a traditional Vietnamese breakfast, lunch or dinner item — versatile!). If every morning started over a rich, invigorating, slightly spicy bowl of noodle soup with thick cuts of brisket and fat, I feel I’d be at least half as productive as she was. Or not. She had that whole half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese, crazy hardcore Asian work ethic going for her. And…I don’t.

A pho-ntastic meal

The folks who run Pho Binh had just returned from their annual two month trip back to Vietnam. During that time each year, the restaurant is closed. As in, tough luck, go eat somewhere else, we have lives to live closed. I love that attitude, and wish it extended to American culture as well. As a result, the place was utterly packed with happy customers, joyful for the return of their beloved pho. We scored a rickety couple of tables in the single-wide portion of the restaurant, which is technically the storeroom/back half of the kitchen.

As I slurped my noodles and savored each drop of broth, surrounded by boxes of paper napkins and flats of aluminum cans, I thought how odd it was that one of the best meals of my life was being enjoyed in a poorly-lit trailer off Fuqua and I-45. But isn’t that all that we hope for in Houston? And isn’t that what we love about this city?

Chinatown, Summer in the City

Chinatown, USA

Inspired, of course, by the classic Lovin’ Spoonful song.

Despite the fact that we’re experiencing the longest, strongest heat wave since 1980, I decided that today would be a good day to roam around Chinatown and finish collecting information for a Press article I’m working on. So I grabbed one of my trusty partners in crime, Groovehouse, and we hit the streets.

Our first stop was Banana Leaf, one of the few Malaysian restaurants in Houston. I am constantly amazed that we don’t have more Malaysian places in a city like ours (and I’m not the only one). Malaysian cuisine combines the best of Thai, Indian and Chinese cooking into a delicious amalgamation of flavors and spices. You’ll find sweet peanut sauces and tropical dishes alongside spicy curries and mild fish head casseroles — Banana Leaf has something for everybody. On this visit, I had the roti canai (flat, doughy pancakes served with curry sauce), crispy fried tofu with cucumber and bean sprouts in satay sauce, a gingery masak lemak with shrimp, sambal shrimp with mango and — for dessert — more hot roti filled with butter and bananas. I won’t say too much more for now, lest I have nothing to write about later on, but it was one of the better meals I’ve had in recent memory — and that’s after eating at a $600 a night farm-to-table, five-starred restaurant on Wednesday that I thought might be the pinnacle of Texas restaurants. Groovehouse loved it, too.

Afterwards, I took him on a tour of the “new” Chinatown along Beltway 8. Since the “old” Chinatown just outside of downtown off Chenevert has all but dried up and blown away, too many die-hard ITLers are now missing out on one of Houston’s greatest and most fascinating landscapes. I first took him past the little-known Vietnam memorial located on Bellaire Boulevard, notable for the fact that it was financed by local southern Vietnamese business owners to thank American soldiers who tried to help them during the quagmire that was the Vietnam “War.” The memorial depicts an American soldier and a southern Vietnamese soldier fighting side by side and is remarkably moving for a statue located in a strip center parking lot.

Testing the Water

Among the things I now get paid to do (such as make ice cream sandwiches out of Pop-Tarts and eat them) is test whatever makes its way into the Houston Press offices, especially if it seems (a) interesting and/or (b) sublimely ridiculous.  Luckily, the LifeBag water filtration system came to our offices just in time for hurricane season and our editorial assistant, Blake, had the brilliant idea of finding the most disgusting water in Houston and seeing what the LifeBag would make of it.

Our first idea was to take water from Buffalo Bayou and attempt to make it potable, clumps of unidentified detritus and all.  But then we noticed some language on the side of the filtration system that warned against using raw sewage (and seawater, for that matter).  So, obviously, Buffalo Bayou was out.

We didn’t want terribly clean water, though, and set about thinking of the nastiest water we could put into the LifeBag without potentially compromising our health and wellbeing.  We finally settled on the duck pond at Hermann Park, at which point Blake set off to gather water for our test.  A transcript of his conversation with two concerned gentleman at the duck pond, as well as the results of our test, follow here:

The Facts of LifeBag

If the above isn’t enough to convince you to go read the post, here are two added bonuses: (1) there’s video and (2) after the pond water experiment, we tried filtering vodka.

Go.  Read.  Now.

Battle Michelada

The ballot and the remains

Even though our own Plinio Sandalio once competed on Iron Chef (Battle Mango, alongside Chef Robert Gadsby), those guys have nothing on our boys and the Battle Michelada.

An impromptu michelada throwdown was organized on Twitter within the span of a few days after a fellow food blogger mentioned that she couldn’t find a good michelada in Houston. Before long, the discussion had evolved into a full-blown showdown between three of Houston’s best culinary talents.

Read all about it here to find out who won and to watch the video of the contest (which yours truly narrated, National Geographic-style).

Bacon vs. Tofu: The Battle That Never Was

I am particularly proud of this morning’s bacon-related item in the Houston Press, a blog post and an accompanying slideshow of the 11 reasons that tofu is not the new bacon. It’s heretical to even suggest otherwise.

Check out the blog post first and then check out the slideshow.

A preview: “Tofu is one of the most peaceable objects on earth: mild, unobtrusive, yields easily and has no real qualms about taking on the flavors and textures of other things. That’s why no one will ever make an automatic weapon out of it.”

You know you want to read it.

Austin In My Rearview Mirror

Back from a very short weekend in drizzly but gorgeous Austin, which has somehow become the size of Tokyo since I last laid eyes on our little capitol city.  What happened?  Where did all this steel and glass come from?  Have the Highland Park and Midtown folks in Dallas and Houston abandoned their posts for the Hill Country?  Sadly, it would seem so.

Despite that, Austin is still gorgeous.  Sprawling and covered with yuppies (yes, I realize they were always there in some quantity, but now moreso than before) but gorgeous.  The wedding was on the lush grounds of Laguna Gloria, a Spanish-style house that’s part of the Austin Museum of Art and overlooks Lake Austin.

The bride (from West Virginia by way of Texas and Georgia and Connecticut and now living in Washington – this is important in a second) and groom seem to have suffered a bout of culinary schizophrenia while choosing the menu for the night, since it included tamales, sushi, Thai noodle salad, cheese biscuits, guacamole, brisket, chicken satay, tuna tartare and grits (which were covered with roasted red peppers and balsamic vinegar – please, do not ever attempt this at home – in fact, no one should ever attempt this abomination ever again), among other things.  But I love them.  And I loved the food, all 600 square miles of it.  So, really, what does it matter?  Eat what you want at your wedding, folks.

We had brunch this morning at Stubb’s BBQ on Red River, in downtown Austin.  Their famed gospel brunch was packed tight with squirming Austin families, gawking tourists and nearly everyone who had attended the wedding the night before, most of whom were shaking off the effects of the afterparty with Stubb’s build-your-own Bloody Mary bar.  The gospel music was incredibly loud but the food was good enough to endure the screams and wails coming from the stage.  More grits were in order, since it’s not a Southern brunch without grits.  Grits twice in one weekend makes me a fat, happy little Texan indeed.

Meanwhile, back at the blog, I wanted to call your attention to the fact that some more Houston food blogs have been added to the blogroll to your right.  Houston has always been an underground food town, and I’m constantly pleased when new blogs (sometimes “new” only to me) crop up to cover all the thousands of food facets this city has to offer.  Check out the newbies below:

Chili Bob’s Houston Eats: Chili Bob eats at – as he puts it – “Houston’s great diversity of eateries, with an emphasis on ethnic cuisines and peasant food, as opposed to haute cuisine, and places that are new to me.”  His posts cover a great variety of restaurants that most other bloggers never even venture into (or, if they do, we just don’t hear about it) and are an absorbing read.

Dirty Kitchen Adventures: Also known as @treelight on Twitter, this blog is more personal and occasionally includes divine-sounding recipes, like the recent ginger-vegetable soup entry which made me nearly choke on my own saliva.  Mmm…ginger.

Houston Uncorked: Although not updated very often, this is nevertheless an entertaining and easy-going blog on wine and the state of the wine community in Houston.

The Grub Junkie: On name alone, this food blog has the market cornered. I love this name. So much. Yet despite the name’s promise of things like greasy burgers and Frito pies, the brave blogger has recently embarked upon the Martha’s Vineyard Detox Program.  Follow along if you’re brave or thinking of a detox program yourself (or if you’re just voyeuristic, weirdo).

Houston Wok: Another misleading name. No, this blog isn’t all Houston Chinese food, all the time (although with two Chinatowns and about eleventy billion other Chinese restaurants in town, that wouldn’t be hard).  This relatively new blog does cover a lot of Asian food, though the author isn’t picky about which kind of Asian cuisine he’s eating that day, which is good – and enlightening - for us. But he also covers burger joints and lobster macaroni and cheese.