Tag: englishman in new york

Brit-food

As I wait for my mum to arrive (having just landed at Newark) I contemplate the shared arrival of fresh supplies of British snack food. I just made a leek pie following a Floyd (British TV chef) recipe that relies on having the best tasting butter, not the weird foamy/waxy yellow substance that claims to be butter in American supermarkets. Consequently it tasted a bit weird, to say the least. It’s things like this that can really get to me sometimes – why is it so different? How much variation can you put into making butter? I suspect the American substance has never even been near a cow, let alone anything as wonderfully unhealthy as cream. Although I am sure that whatever faux-cream substitute has been used is infinitely worse for you than simple cream.

Even with the crappy butter I had a lot of fun cooking, though I seriously need to practice at making pastry before my next attempts! Plus I need to get hold of some scales so I don’t make approximations that are so far off. Working from a non-beginner’s cookbook was also interesting. Sizes were not fully specified and entire steps were left out. Instructions like “make the pastry” don’t really help when you’ve no clue where to start. This is in stark contrast to most books on computer languages which seem to always start with an explanation of the most extreme basics – the cooking equivalent of “carefully open the salt container, measure out 0.5 cubic centimetres of salt and sprinkle evenly over the surface” rather than “add a pinch of salt”.

Last night I ended a week of not drinking with a few glasses of wine and a superb blue sky martini in Marions on Bowery. The drinks there are amazing and very cheap ($6) but the food doesn’t live up to the same standard unfortunately. Having written my last plea for a loss in weight I seem to be fully ignoring it and going full steam ahead to bloat-dom. Sigh. Why are New York restaurants so nice??

Life thru a lens

Had a classic New York night. Was planning to go see Zoolander, a piece of movie fluff involving Ben Stiller. Instead ended up going and seeing Mulholland Drive – the new David Lynch movie and the movie equivalent of a pan galactic gargle blaster.. Whoa! It’s two hours long and like Memento but different and more arty – very bizarre but some good random lesbian sex scenes. Still not quite sure what the movie was about.

Anyways – we all went to Von after the movie for a drink (which turned into many, for a change) when this guy leans over the bar to get his bike helmet. He seems vaguely familiar and progressively more so as he walked around the bar to get his helmet. He looked almost exactly like one of the guys in the film, the director (played by Justin Theroux). So he wanders out and I ask the barmaid if he works there, she says no, he’s an actor, just in the David Lynch movie… Bee-fuckin’-tsar! The fact that the movie was so surreal and disjointed just meant that we felt we’d become part of it. New York, eh.

So anyways I’m now dealing with a massive hangover as a consequence…

+1 month

Hard to believe it’s only been a month since it all happened. Everything seems pretty much the same as usual – apart from everyone saying “well, I’m sure it’s not anthrax” every time someone says they don’t feel well. The towers still aren’t there, although people are talking about putting up temporary replacements in the form of large beams of light. That would be cool – like the gel light I saw down at Tribe last night (St Marks and 1st), which, for a mere $1,500, produces an effect not unlike flames licking over the wall (or water if it’s projected blue) – incredibly hypnotic and beautiful.

On a more random observation note, more in keeping with how New York life really is… How come in New York bars you can, in fact you must specify the brand of vodka for your drink, but you can’t ask for Pepsi or Coca Cola rather than crappy post-mix no-brand coke?