gastropoda

Just saw The Cat WCTLWAFW licked the jerk duck skillet. So I’ve put the WSJ section with Shelby Steele’s “why the left is consumed with hate” next to the bed to catch the inevitable hork.

No one talks about the real problem with having white supremacists in the White House: They’re doing their damnedest to keep refugees and other immigrants out when the melting pot needs regular re-seasoning. America can’t live on burgers alone. Didn’t Jesus say “no guacamole for immigrant haters”?

We bought “leather milk” to resuscitate two geriatric chairs. It’s the first fake stuff in this house. And it came with a joking warning not to “drink it or use it as a dairy product.” Nut “milks” should carry the same.

Online menus with no prices send a clear warning: steer clear. // Not sure “it’s tiki time” is the wisest subject line for flack pitch these days. // My inbox is a chronicle of food pages foretold. Spoon-fed stories are always the most filling. // Friend has booked a swanky hotel in NZ that describes itself as “the personification of luxury.” I’d be wary of the breakfast sausage. // Phone changed Puligny to Puking. But that liquor I can hold.

In an ideal America I would wake up every morning (or every week, at least) and update my website and maybe make some mockery of the 1968 blender cookbook passed down from my in-law equivalent. But we don’t live there anymore. We were promised taco trucks on every corner and instead have to fantasize about developing hemlock cocktails.

Still, slowly, working out my thoughts on the biggest loss of the year, but I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised by the pissing on the urn. Once there was elation that it was playing out like some sort of Lysistrata. Now it just seems to be the Trojan Mare.

Summer’s other sad news reminded me of a coworker at a certain big media outlet who mocked a certain food&word genius for “showing up at the White House looking like an unmade bed.” In retrospect, maybe DC needed more like him and fewer of the polished but incurious.

So one night we all really don’t want to go out for dinner but I feel too guilty about ramming pasta down our throats, so we three go out for dinner thinking at least it’ll be at a sidewalk cafe and at least it’ll be a chance to check out a place we’ve never been. An hour and $$$ later, we’re trudging back home wondering if a flashy restaurant that is mostly empty is actually a front for the types of people who laundered money from Russian catering halls. And why are three profoundly mediocre “Italian” restaurants each only one avenue apart?

I had a book client sorta recently who never mentioned his mother without noting that she was looking up at us at that very moment. I always laughed, cuz I definitely know the feeling. Which makes me almost more amused than pissed that strangers would find a dusty ol’ website and choose the famously departed as excuses to fire off hate email to someone who has always been 50,000 leagues from stardom. The first decided she knows exactly why my biggest fan called me a bitch, and she is damned if she’s gonna waste any time on me. Hitting send musta been like an orgasm (and waiting for a response must be like blue balls). And the second was such a devoted, dedicated fan of Julia he had no idea she was singular. I look forward to looking up at ‘em both one day.

Otherwise I really do not know what to say. Working on it, tho. No. One. Like. Him.

Nothing makes me feel older than watching the savagery directed at the Forelock a full 14 years after I was making my slow way on broken-femur crutches down Columbus Avenue when a then-very-influential flack crossed my path and yukked: “Oh, they got you, did they?” I was once a queen bee of bitchery. Today I’m a ladybug.

Relatedly, it seems like only yesterday the hometown paper was assuring us the Molto Ego I was always accused of maligning was busily and blithely plotting his comeback. Now it looks as if he could be heading Weinstein’s way. How did they get so suckered? Musta been flack magic.

Also will always be mystified by cookbook reviews that buy into the illusion that the name on the cover did anything more than lend their name and throw a few coins to a plethora of collaborators. Especially those by reviewers who really know how the andouille is made. #howdidwewindupwithaconmaninchiefanyway

Things I coulda gone to my urn without hearing: “How do you know a restaurant is safe to eat it in? By the smell. It’s just like a nursing home.” Oh. Kay.

Pretty rich to see Panchito denigrating an actress for having the audacity to run for governor without working her way up from UWS coop board. Wasn’t his experience at being the new Mimi mostly having eaten at the McD’s at the Spanish Steps?