Gastronomic Regurgitations

            I’ve had a stew of different topics slow cooking in my head for a while now, all of them dealing with food in some form or another. So for the sake of freeing up some space on my mental hard drive, I will serve up my paella of home cooked thoughts on the topic of gastronomy.    

I’m not sure if culinary students need to write thesis papers, but I’ve been mentally drafting mine for years. Chocolate and Bacon is my masterpiece, the culmination of a young lifetime of food experience and exploration. If you’re standing at your computer reading this, you should probably sit down so the sheer force of its genius and simplicity doesn’t knock you on your ass. I submit for your contemplation, my pièce de résistance, that there is no food that cannot be enhanced for its betterment by adding chocolate or bacon. When you stop hyperventilating and the room is no longer spinning, I’ll give you the thought equivalent of another swift kick in the nuts. The penultimate food, given the brute logic of the thesis, is simply chocolate covered bacon. Maybe if Ben and Jerry weren’t too busy fishing for each others trouser trout’s, they would have developed Chocolate Salty Balls by now…bacon bits covered in dark chocolate, swimming in chocolate ice cream. Good night sweet Haagen-Dazs.

Wherein Chocolate and Bacon is a study of the happy marriage of two foods I love, Paninis and Burritos is a sordid tale of two ethnic foods struggling for relevance. The panini had its 5 minutes of fame but alas, its time in the spotlight has faded. I’ll always think of it as the unfortunately un-aborted result of that grilled cheese sandwich machine they sold by the truckload at Costco in the 90’s. You know you had one, don’t try and deny it. “Holy shit, a sealed pocket of scalding hot cheese, coated in spray on butter, made with a machine that will be a huge pain in the ass to clean and put away, I’ll take it!” I’m pretty sure panini’s became popular so douche bags with spiky hair, wearing those ridiculous looking gold sperm necklaces that you ginzaloons love so much, could feel cool ordering Italian sounding food in delis everywhere. “Ciao, can I get a prosciutto and mozzarella panini on ciabatta bread?” Hey jackass, you’re in Newark not Tuscany and I’m pretty sure you’re Puerto Rican anyway. Counter to the decline of the panini; enter the utilitarian workhorse of foods, the burrito. Street food, restaurant food, breakfast, lunch and dinner; like the essence of the Mexican day laborer, burritos will do anything for meager pay. One need look no further than Steve Ellis, that thin-lipped, smarmy, smart-ass, Tim Gunn lookalike, founder of Chipotle, to understand the success and appeal of taking basically anything, wrapping it in a tortilla and calling it a meal. The appeal must be real, because unlike the trendy Italian inspired New Jersey culture that we’re idolizing right now, thank you very much yet again you assholes at MTV, nobody is ordering guacamole on their burrito because they want to sound like an authentic Mexican.

Lastly, I want to give a brief shout-out to Anthony Bourdain, just because I think he’s a wicked cool guy. Please excuse my absolute lack of content here except to proclaim my budding bromance with Tony B. The guy is a hell of a writer; his show, No Reservations, is top notch entertainment. I made room for him at my roundtable dinner with people I think it would be cool to hang out and drink with, assuming he doesn’t Bogart all the booze. I’m keen on asking him if there’s anything he won’t eat. Once you’ve seen a man enjoy eating a sheep’s asshole, petty things like mushrooms and split pea soup don’t seem so bad anymore. Counterpoint to Anthony Bourdain is Jamie Oliver. I really have nothing to say about him either, other than I don’t like him and I’m not sure why. I appreciate his message, which he spreads like a jack-knifed manure truck on the Santa Anna spreads stink, but the delivery is lacking for me. Filling a school bus with sugar and dumping chocolate milk on everything he can get his tiny little British fists of fury on, just makes my inner Willy Wonka cry. His stupid brand of sensationalism seems kind of wasteful. Obviously, he’s not championing the much less glamorous, Feed the Hungry campaign. He fancies himself as a “shit-stirrer”, his words not mine. Maybe he needs to take a page from Bourdain and start eating assholes, and stop being so much of one.