Stockholm Stomach!

So, Sweden!

Let's start with Stockholm. A very beautiful and sprawling city / archipelago, Stockholm has the most varied cuisine we found in Sweden. That's not surprising given that it is overwhelmingly the largest city in Scandinavia.

Today: the Smörgåsbord.

This little joint was actually overlooking a big indoor market sort of in the center of town. Up two flights of stairs and there you are in this big pre-WWI throwback drawing room. small tables are scattered about. MJ and I grab a spot, drop our winter survival gear, and head for the buffet.

And about that buffet... let's just say no one will accuse the Swedes of being closeminded when it comes to all the myriad ways to serve potatoes.

Stewed potatoes. Baked potatoes. Potatoes with cheese. French fries. Something that looked like refried hash browns.

Yup. Potatoes. It's what's for dinner.

There were other things on the menu, though not particularly what I had in mind when we went looking for traditional Swedish fare. Had an excellent curry based around carrots and, um, potatoes.

Did pick up an excellent idea however. One I don't mind stealing. Pitchers of ice-water with sliced cucumbers floating about. Nice touch.

Tomorrow I'll take a look at the market and all the ways to display butchered animals.

Eat More Grease

I'm back. Can't post much at present. Too busy unpacking and getting back to eating grease.

On Tour...

On tour in Scandinavia!

Will post all about Swedish cuisine when I get home and back to a computer in a couple weeks. Til then -- enjoy your food and don't eat with your mouth full.

- Shel

Good Milk

I was listening to an interview with Jim Hightower and was happy to find that he and I drink the same milk! Well, at least I drink it when we manage to get down to the organic grocer.

A lot of people complain about the price of organic milk. Yeah, it's frigging expensive. But you are actually putting this stuff in your body. Isn't it weird that we'll buy name-brand CD-Rs because they are more trust-worthy, but we won't think twice about the utters producing the milk we consume.

And I'm as much a part of this as anyone; the idea of regularly spending $5 on a gallon of milk is appalling. Though I don't blink spending that on a six-pack.

Time to re-evaluate the dairy thing. Have managed to go Stonybrook Farms Organic on yogurt, so that's a start -- and only ten cents more a cup. But milk seems like something that shouldn't cost $5 a gallon.

Of course, milk is kind of like voting. You know all those people who go on about voting 'scientifically'? Like folks who say, "I'd vote for Kucinich, but he'd never win; so I'll vote for someone else instead." Of course, we all know, a vote is a vote and whomever receives more gets the nice tableware. But it's sort of like that with milk. Folks say: "Yeah, organic tastes better, but so few people buy it they have to make the price so high. And I just feel like a putz spending $5 on a gallon of milk." What we need to do is get everyone to buy organic milk so the price will have to come down. Let's put the big commercial dairy farms out of business and let them sell their cows to the organic farms. When it really comes down to the brass tacks, it's only a matter of a few extra bucks a month.

Take It!

The operative word is 'cabbage'.

Nice Can

It's amazing just how much food I grew up on that came out of a can.

From tuna fish (which BTW, is one of the few seafoods that we call by type and species) to SPAM, an aluminum shell was where it was at. And vegetables! I remember all of our veggies came from cans -- from those 'French-style' string-beans to the button mushrooms and right down to canned white potatoes. All in cans.

Thinking back on it, I wonder if this was a cultural thing -- like some by-product of the Cold War. Or my mother's reactivist backlash against Hippie agrarians.

I've got a spot for cans next to the toaster in the kitchen. Mostly kidney beans and tomato paste. The occasional soup.

I can't even imagine how heavy my mother's grocery bags must have been.

Car crashes, hailstorms, and pizza... a day in the life of an independent filmmaker

Been away from the blog for a couple days. Working on directing a new movie. And what a day we had today.

1) An actor went missing in Texas at the last moment [he was supposed to be in Maryland].

2) We got stuck with a hailstorm on what the script called for as a pleasant day.

3) We unintentionally were involved in a car crash en route to a location.

But worst of all: the lunch pizza was kinda lousy.

You see, I've noticed something about being on a film shoot: you tend to eat lots of pizza and junk food. This could help to explain all those hefty directors: Hitch, Peter Jackson, Michael Moore...

My buddy Chris and I decided back when we worked out how to shoot this film that our goal was to finish a full-feature film that would get distributed and make us enough money so that on our next film we could afford a car crash.

Alas, we got the car crash... just not the sort we intended.

Maybe we'll make our next goal to hire a catering truck.

Chocolate Jesus

For those of you following the ever-evolving epic of my personal relationship with vegetarian jerky, may I just offer this:

Now that we have Chocolate Jesus, let's put our heads together and forge a lobby to instigate some great and progressive food producing company to take this to the next stage -- Veggie Jerky Jesus.

I'll start working on the song.

Leap Year

I still remember, I think it was at one of my father's company Christmas parties. This was in the '70's.

It was in this big old house and to my eyes everything seemed to be covered in red velvet. I recall a long buffet line with all the classics: cheese fondue, glazed strawberries, a carving station. The '70's.

In those early days, I had awful hair. I still have awful hair. But not like that. I had this big poofy beehive thing going on. It was the kind of haircut where if you catch yourself in between two mirrors in 1979 with your mom making you try on cherry-colored blazers, you just begin to cry.

Here I was, weird hair kid wondering up and down the buffet aisle pilfering deviled eggs. And then I came upon something I hadn't seen before. Amid all the plethora of gaudy decadence and fatty ambivalence sat a sterno-fueled tray of odd breaded smidgens of what I assumed to be food.

Yet everyone passed these smidgens by.

So I walked that buffet line three whole times up and down before finally I took hold of the little courage my beehive offered me, and I tonged a trio of these odd smidgens down on a warm dish.

I began to walk away.

"Hey kid," said the voice. "You know what that is?"

I turned to notice three waitstaff peering in my direction like some ill-willed trifecta. I looked up at them.

"That there, kid," the Antony of the group smirked, "is frog legs."

I let an eye slip plate-ward. "Really," I coyly replied.

"Yeah, kid," his swarmy reply. "So, you really gonna eat that?"

To wit, I looked the man in the eye and replied: "I heard it goes well with cottage cheese."

Sorry. The story actually doesn't get any better than that. Perhaps you'd rather read some other writer describe the witty send-up that arrived on his tongue. But not here. No, the best my single-digit brain could manifest was: "I heard it goes well with cottage cheese."

But you will find, dear readers, that even today amid the hassle of a 24-hour world, that parcel of rebuttle will go a long way. I urge you to try it out first chance you get.

Food Prices Rise in Tandem With Fuel Costs

Yet another reason to skip the meat. [I'm still fuming].

If so, Rage! [an anagram]

Article recently read: celebrates the delicacy of eating the fattened livers of force-fed ducks. Dismisses the opinions of folks protesting the manufacture of these duck livers as uninformed if not uninspired. Complains that said protesters should busy themselves griping in front of big poultry farms pushing dead abused chicken into the American market rather than bother with a few thousand innocent force-fed and killed ducks.

Blog commentors agree with this view by and large.

I go and throw up.

I used to eat meat. I particularly loved chicken livers. They were cheap and tasty with a bit of sage and I really didn't think twice about it. Then, basically on a dare, I became a strict vegetarian. And that -- with the exception of a plate of crabs at a pool-side feast one year -- was that. I never became a vegetarian with any political or social goals. I just figured it wasn't that hard to do and further, I'd save some money and get healthier.

Years pass.

Here I am reading this article and I get the same feeling that I got not long after I quit smoking years ago: it's all marketing. I smoked for years. Despite the fact that family members died of lung cancer. Despite the fact that I kept getting sick. I smoked because I smoked. And that was that.

Until I went cold turkey.

And before long, I started to have these feelings of anxiety. But it wasn't just lack of nicotine. It was the feeling that for so long I'd been duped into buying smokes. I felt like I had been abused by marketing.

And I feel the same way about meat. I quit eating red meat around age seventeen and I cut everything else -- poultry, fish -- from the diet maybe three or so years ago. And reading this article brought back the same feelings that I had when I quit smoking -- I felt like through all those years eating meat, I had been a pawn in a marketing game.

Because we don't need to eat meat. It is, in fact, the ultimate created need. We are sold the idea that we need to eat meat. We are sold the idea that we need to eat the dead flesh of a bird for dinner. We are sold the idea that we have to use our superior intellect to fatten and kill lesser beings for the purpose of giving thanks or fulfilling our culinary curiosity.

Fact is: we pleasure in the death of innocent beings.

And I will not be a part of it anymore. I am made sick by this article I read today. My old leather jacket will become siding. My dress shoes memento mori.

Alas. I am no saint. Who knows how many animals suffer on my behalf. I do my best, but I'm a realist.

And I am not condemning sustenance. There are people who depend on meat in lieu of alternatives. I have no right to judge and I ask forgiveness from you my friends for being so egotistical.

But where someone makes the effort to order such a dish as foie gras, in light of what that represents -- nothing more than sheer luxury, a created need -- I can not hold back my criticism.

Food should be something enjoyed that nourishes the body and celebrates and sustains the diversity of our ecology. The fattened livers of force-fed birds don't qualify as such.

The Oscars Love Trash

Watching the Oscars. Eating Veggie Jerky. Suffering through the 'Best Song Nominees'.

Life is Absurd, Cruel, but Tasty

Aujourd'hui, le poisson est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile: Poisson décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier.

I haven’t been posting as often as I’d like. Caught up in the burial of Mick, the fish. Mick’s dead. Long live Mick.

So today, I take all three kids to the store. We spend a half-hour picking out a new Betta fish. We name him Gil.

Gil, the fish.

That was two hours ago. It’s now 6:54PM EST.

And Gil, the fish is dead.

Therein lies a tale. Or at least a moral. A maxim, perhaps: DON’T DUMP THE NEW FISH INTO THE WATER WHILE THE KIDS ARE WATCHING. Turns out the fish didn’t take to the water. Sped around like his tail was on fire and then just… pfft.

So we buried Gil. Right next to Mick’s fresh ground. Many tears were shed.

The kids made a memorial for both fish. I went to the beer store.

Brought home the best I could find: Dogfish Head ‘Raison D’Être’ Mahogany Ale and Rogue Brewery’s ‘Dead Guy Ale’. I brought them home, opened two bottles and poured them both in a pint glass. I made dinner and the wife and I spent the night pondering the absurd and nursing pints of our very own ‘Dead Fish Ale’.

Fish License

I'm still mourning.

R.I.P. -- Mick, the Fish -- 2007-2008

I can't believe people eat fish.

I can't believe I used to eat fish. And I used to enjoy it. Alas.

Rest in Peace, Mick. The water was better for having you in it.

Yes, We Have No Bananas

My high school Spanish teacher used to sing this song all the time. He'd sing his heart out.

Chocolate Moose

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day Field Trip

A Valentine's story for the vegans in the audience (and for those who are in love with, but fundamentally misunderstand vegans). Check out my latest article in City Paper and leave a comment!

Olives, Toothpicks, Painful Death

Talking about aphrodisiacs, of course alcohol has long been employed in the service of desire. But it really just don't cut it. Consider the following:

On this day in 1872, Silas Noble and James P. Cooley of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts patented a machine that would produce toothpicks. Toothpicks, as everyone agrees, serve one purpose finer than any other. They make it easy to pry an olive from a Martini without spilling gin all over oneself.

Fast-forward into the more recent past. On March 8th, 1942, author Sherwood Anderson (of Winesburg, Ohio fame) died of a case of peritonitis picked up in the Panama Canal Zone after swallowing a bit of a toothpick stuck in a Martini olive.

Anderson's epitaph: "Life Not Death is the Great Adventure".

Anderson was married and divorced three times, so one might presume he'd pecked a few lusty olives from out a lady's drink.

So there you have it; my next dissertation: "Toothpick of Desire: Totem of the Final Threshold". No, how about: "Toothpick of Lust: Death's Ultimate Weapon".

Hmm. It'll never beat a frying pan. Though it's more difficult to hide a frying pan in an olive.

Brody Kills Jaws

R.I.P.
Roy Scheider

He managed not to get eaten.

And he was among those of us who saw what Iraq was going to be before it became was what it is.

May we not get eaten.

The Truth About Rhinos

Rhino Horn.

Throughout much of the world, the keratin Rhino horn is valued as a phallic enhancer. The aphrodisiac of aphrodisiacs.

The horn isn't bone. It's actually made of very tightly compacted hair that basically solidifies into something resembling bone. The only way to remove it form a Rhino is to kill the animal.

Despite a loose resemblance to the most well-endowed of endowments, the horn -- which is ground into a protein-fueled dust -- does nothing to benefit the ladies’ man. Just about the only thing it fuels is the poaching industry.

And it contributes to the endangered state most Rhinos find themselves in.

Here's some info on helping the Rhinos. And why not you and yr honey skip the chocolate and instead donate to help a couple Rhinos this Valentine's Day; it's the sexy thing to do? Here's the link: http://www.rhinos-irf.org/