i am a country bumpkin
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“The Hundred-Foot Journey” Made Me Want to Eat and Cry
I entirely understand why the marketing team for Walt Disney Studios and Dreamworks Pictures invited me to a screening of The Hundred-Foot Journey starring Helen Mirren, Manish Dayal, and Om Puri last week. Even as a food-obsessed avid moviegoer, I wasn’t planning to see the movie in the theater. I wanted to watch it eventually, sure, but it looked like one of those feel-good, fun-for-the-entire-family films that I could enjoy from the comfort of my living room while also browsing Twitter. It was feel-good, and your whole family probably will like it, but it’s so, so much more than that. It made me feel so many feelings. I had tears…
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The Columbus Food Adventures Short North Tour
I usually like to stick to NYC foodstuffs on donuts4dinner, because anything anyplace else has, NYC has it ten times better, right? Well, not when it comes to food tours, specifically the one I enjoyed with Columbus Food Adventures while visiting my family in Ohio earlier this month. Not only did we have a progressive meal that started with snacks, dabbled in small plates, and then finished with a full-on entree and dessert, but it was clear with every stop that the company has a real connection to and love of the Columbus food scene. Unlike the NYC food tours I’ve been on, where we were stuck outside while the…
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Caffe DaVinci and the Only Pizza I Ever Need
My best friend‘s husband is one of the pickiest eaters I know. He claims an allergy to all vegetation, likes all of the most boring items from chain restaurants (the Mr. Misty at Dairy Queen, chicken nuggets at McDonald’s), and so has to be in the mood to eat that his favourite chocolate bar is kept in the freezer because the mice would feast upon it in the months it takes him to consume it all. But he loves Caffe DaVinci in the Upper Arlington neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Every time I go back to my home state to visit my best friend, she and I try to convince her…
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The Time I Threw Up in a Restaurant and Everyone Saw
I mentioned in my review of the chef’s omakase at Yasuda that despite my overall excellent showing in an all-seafood meal, there was one slip-up that night. My boyfriend was taking notes at Yasuda because he’s an encyclopedia of fish names, and I was no doubt going to be writing down things like “Motown shrimp” instead of “botan shrimp”. Well, at this point in the notes, he writes, “Katie loses her shit.” Let me explain first that I’ve been having trouble with oysters since about my second one. The first time I tried one, at Momofuku Ko, I didn’t even think about it; I just gummed it a little, swallowed…
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Celebrities of the Chefing World
I truly, legitimately thought on my way to my boyfriend’s from work a few weeks ago that I was about to come face-to-face with super-studly chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernadin fame. I realized I had no idea what to say to him and quickly started trying to think of some food-related witticisms. “Don’t tell him you don’t like seafood!” I reminded myself. It turned out to be some other super-studly man with gleaming hair, and I was off the hook, but it got me thinking about how weird it is that even I get a little excited about food celebrities. Understand that I don’t care about movie and TV…
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Brownie Batter: Decadent, Shameful
On my last night of Christmas vacation in Ohio, my best friend, Tracey, and I invited my cousin Bethany and our friend Michelle over to her house for cards, videogames, boytalk, and other things girls in Ohio do. Tracey and I decided to make brownies for the occasion, and by that I mean we poured a box mix into a big bowl and added an egg. Tracey kind of hinted that she wasn’t entirely interested in actually cooking the brownies, because like cookie dough and oysters, brownie batter is best eaten raw. I said, “Well, maybe we can separate half the batter and only cook a small batch.” And she…
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Just Another Thing to Be Snooty About
I just saw a review of a restaurant in which the woman complained that her server didn’t know to bring her a black napkin to match her black pants. Pardon my ignorance, but is this a thing? Should I be embarrassed about the countless times I’ve sat with a white napkin on my black pants? Should I also be expecting restaurants to have a stockpile of sequined and gold lamé napkins, too? Seems a little ridiculous to me, but I am a farmgirl.
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Why You Don’t Want to Eat Your Vegetables
I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life right now, and OMG, you guys. It is wonderful. My eyes have welled up with tears so many times over the way we treat the people who grow our food and the way I myself left my family farm to move to NYC. Here’s my favourite discovery from today: Our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we’ve…
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Eating My Weight in Fryer Grease
I flew home to Ohio last night for a week of the CIRCLEVILLE PUMPKIN SHOW! Which some people like to refer to as the “Circleville Pumpkin Festival” or the “Circleville Pumpkin Fair” or the “Podunk Hillbilly Gourd Celebration“. But they are wrong. It’s a show if I’ve ever seen one. While there, I plan to EAT EVERYTHING I ATE LAST YEAR ALL OVER AGAIN. (And more.)
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Shrimp Heads as Homewrecker
Dr. Boyfriend and I both have birthdays this month, and we want to eat delicious foodz on our special days. For mine, I made us a reservation at The Wright, which is the restaurant inside the Guggenheim Museum. (Click on the link and look at how beautiful it is! I don’t care how good the food is, ’cause I’m going solely for the decor.) For his birthday, he was thinking about going for an elaborate sushi dinner at the best place in town, but it just so happens that I saw a Momofuku Ko reservation open for that day and decided to snatch it up and try to convince him…
