Food, Glorious Food

These days, at our age, it’s all about weddings and funerals. The weddings of our friends’ children and the funerals of our friends’ parents, our own parents or, heaven forbid, our friends. Recently John attended a funeral while I went to a wedding. And you end up hearing a lot of stories that you knew about, but a bunch of stories that you didn’t. John suggested this as a topic for a comic. For instance, I learned of the random arrest of a kid who was buddies with one of my kids (what did he get into and was my own kid involved????), acts of surprising kindness and charity, and in the case of a funeral, you can also be surprised in ways both good and bad. John said he learned some surprisingly good things at the funeral of a friend’s parent—that the parent had fought in a couple of big battles in WW II. Who knew? Not John. At any rate we decided to play this out in a funeral parlor, after debating doing it in the deli where Sal actually worked. It would have looked a lot like Katz’s because we’re both native New Yorkers and Katz’s is the last of the old-time delis still standing. Some of the old faithfuls remain, but in vastly different locations. For instance, the famed 2nd Ave Deli, spelled with English letters that resemble Hebrew letters (famously designed by my former art director partner, Mark Shap-may he rest in peace) is now no longer located on 2nd Avenue. Go figure. But back to the comic, it’s fun to hear about people you thought you knew well. The positive stuff, but also the negative stuff that makes you raise your eyebrows silently (even if we made it all up).

Now our next comic also has to do with food and this time it’s something John experienced and I read about. Molecular gastronomy. Food is all about experimentation. And as the world becomes flatter, we frequently mix different cuisines to produce new flavor combos. I once went to a sushi restaurant in Madrid where one of the courses was a mini cheeseburger, cut like a piece of sushi, atop a small bed of rice. Pretty damn good if I say so myself. But these wildly innovative chefs are constantly trying to experiment and the pressure must be enormous. For instance, John and his wife once visited WD-50, which sounds like a motor oil but stands for the chef, Wylie Dufresne. I’m sure we all remember past cooking techniques, like “tall food” where your plate was stacked high, one ingredient atop the other. Trouble with tall food is that once you cut into it, it all fell down on the plate and it wasn’t so tall anymore. Well, Wylie ushered in a technique called molecular gastronomy. I mean, who wouldn’t want liquid nitrogen sprayed on their chicken paillard? What is a dish without foam and fog? According to John, everything they ordered looked nothing like it was supposed to but tasted exactly like you thought it would. And because of its tiny size, it was packed full of flavor. The only thing that wasn’t miniaturized was the check, and there came our punchline. Sadly (or happily if you’re me) this fad faded as less accomplished chefs tried their hands at it. As Alex Stupak, Dufresne’s pastry chef put it, “It’s like pyrotechnics at a Kiss concert. Take that away (the smoke and fog), take your face paint away and you suck.”

That’s all she (or he) wrote this week. Next week the surgically repaired half of The New 60 (the Andy half) will try next week’s blog but who knows what kind of drugs I’ll be on? One thing’s for certain, like molecular gastronomy, it’ll be an adventure.

Andy and John

Too Much Info (TMI) 10/16/2020

We all know about TMI, too much information. It’s like when a little kid asks, “where do babies come from,” and you tell them the real truth, “You see the man sticks his…” that’s classic TMI. All the kid wants to hear is, “The stork drops them off through the chimney,” or some similar nonsense. But this tendency to divulge too much happens in all aspects of our lives. Note the endless shows about politics and what this crucial decision means moving forward, but if each state can do “x”, than that will result in “y”, which will overturn our entire system of justice and our democracy will be at stake. Both John and I have inquired about participating in making phone calls encouraging people to get out and vote. And we got to wondering, how would those phone calls be received by the people we were calling? There are actual training sessions available teaching you how to deal with the recipients of said calls. “1) Engage their level of interest, if it’s high go to b) if not, revert to point a). Nowhere do they tell you what to do if the recipient of your call tells you to go f#*k yourself, which we imagine might occur on a fairly regular basis. Now of course, we are both from the New York area which might account for our cynical views, but it formed the basis for the first comic today. It’s another example of the cliche, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Next up came from a trip my family took a couple of weeks ago to Portland, Maine at the same time John’s family went to Cape Cod. Several good ideas for future comics came out of these mutual trips, but today’s emanated from a Sunday morning visit to Holy Donuts in Portland. I have a very good friend who has a wicked love for donuts. To make you hate him even worse, he’s really thin, not an ounce of body fat on him. But man, does he love donuts. So when we told him we were heading off to Portland, he said, you’ve got to try Holy Donuts. They’re made with real Maine potatoes. Now what is a potato doing inside a donut? I don’t know and I don’t care but it tasted great. Like the best donut I can ever remember eating. But back to the TMI thing. Me, my wife, daughter and son-in-law stood outside the line debating what to order. There were more flavors than I ever knew existed. What happened to the glazed cake donut, or the chocolate donut with icing and sprinkles or, heaven forbid, the old-fashioned jelly donut? When we approached the counter, we read the menu. And not only were there choices like lemon zest or coffee cake or maple-glazed with bacon, there were all those versions in gluten-free or vegan varieties — not the bacon one, of course, which is what I ordered—but all the rest. And lest I forget , one of the flavors I requested was sold out, however if I wanted the sweet potato donut version as opposed to the regular potato version, I was welcome to order it. I declined. But it made for a pretty funny idea for a comic. I have one question about the whole experience. Was the line so long because the donuts were so delicious (they were everything my skinny friend promised they would be) or was it so long because there was too much damn information about the myriad number of donut choices available? Verdict, I don’t know and after my first bite, I no longer cared.

Thanks for sticking around to read the blog and if you like reading it as much as I enjoy writing it, then please tell your friends about it. Thanks and we’ll see you next week with two new ones.

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John

Relations in the time of Corona 5/15/2020

So you’ve run through 6 seasons of Breaking Bad, 3 seasons of Ozark, the NFL Channel’s Best SuperBowls of all time, The NBA channel’s Best Game 7’s, Covid extravaganzas with stars singing from home, Homeland, Better Call Saul, Marriage Story, and let’s not forget a replay of Linsanity for you Knick fans longing for 2012, and the question is…now what?

With less to occupy people’s time, some folks take to reading recipes. Inventive recipes with, shall we say, exotic ingredients. Said exotic ingredients are easy to copy down from a recipe onto a shopping list, but they prevent an altogether different challenge for the person who does the grocery shopping. What on earth is tamarind paste (found in a recent recipe for bbq ribs)? Do you find it in the ethnic foods shelf? Or is it in produce? Can you use a tamarind instead, and what the hell does one even look like? Who do you bother to ask, “Uhh excuse me, do you know where to find the tamarind paste?” The guy stocking the shelves? The person at the information counter? Dilemmas like these formed the basis for our first comic. And just so you know, Andy went through all this only to discover he doesn’t much care for the taste of tamarind.

The second comic in your scroll comes directly from the first paragraph of this blog. After watching every single show your friends have recommended, now what? Board games? When’s the last time you played one? And which ones do you even have anymore? And you mistakenly left Monopoly at the beach house you rented last summer, didn’t you? John instantly recalled the “Hungry, Hungry Hippos” game and the incredibly silly commercial featuring animated, rhumba-dancing hippos and we had our second comic.

We will be back again next week with two new ones that explore our rapidly decreasing worlds. I mean, how many comics can you come up with about staying at home, grocery shopping, binge-watching or a trip to the drug store? Stay tuned and we’ll let you know.

Have a great and safe weekend.

Andy and John