Chefs play this game, where they ask each other, “What would your last meal on death row be?”
--an ad

I suspect this game is just an exercise in culinary one-upmanship--(fois gras omelette? oh yeah? i'd have it with PLATYPUS EGGS)--but I can't help wondering what mine would be.

Probably a bowl of Lucky Charms and a glass of 1/2% milk sitting by myself at a table somewhere. It's been the official meal of loneliness for me for a long time. Late at night, in Austin, once my parents fall asleep and I give up on the Internet, I can sit upstairs at the dining room table, eat Lucky Charms, and read. It's comfort food for the same reason that I listen to sad songs when I'm sad; it doesn't jar with my sensibility and it's somehow soothing.

Gee. Juxtaposing this entry with the one before last makes me seem all melancholy and LiveJournal-y. I ain't; but I've had neither the balls nor the brass to write the long entry cycling through my head right now. Maybe when I get home.


From NY Times:
In the meantime, all the attention being paid to temperature and laboratory precision has pushed chefs in more creative directions. When Grant Achatz built his new restaurant Alinea in Chicago, thermal circulators from PolyScience, a laboratory-equipment manufacturer, were part of the kitchen design. To these, he has added a 40,000-r.p.m. homogenizer (what Philip Preston, the president of PolyScience, calls a ''coffee grinder on steroids'') -- for making the world's most emulsified vinaigrettes and confections like carrot pudding made with carrot juice, cocoa butter and grapeseed oil -- and an entirely new mechanism they're calling the Antigriddle, which has a surface that chills to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), allowing you to freeze food in the same way you would saute it. A dollop of sour cream becomes brittle on the bottom and stays at room temperature on top.

This reminds me of my brother and I, freezing various things (orange juice, chocolate, a banana), in order to make popsicle thingies. And we kept opening the freezer door to see if they had frozen yet. They never had. I really wanted a freez-o-wave that would work like a microwave.