I never specified which Wednesday...
Ok so perhaps Wednesday was a bit optimistic. Or rather that specific Wednesday. Anyway, the past month has been really busy at work. OT all over the place. A week ago I managed to work 30 hours of OT. I do not recommend it, the extra money is nice but it kills all joy in the world. Bah. Luckily I've made my most recent deadline so no more big things until July. Also I got my yearly review and was rated as "highly effective," whatever that means. It did come with a pay raise. That's nice, though I'm still contemplating finding a new job. Especially after days like today. I didn't think it was possible for anything to both suck quite so much. I basically got ambushed by every manager in the Test group. The day started off bad and I spent all day shoveling the huge pile of shit that got dropped in my lap. Plus the IT guys upped the security on the sever so none of the ports allow unrequested messages. hence things like IM or streaming radio no longer work. Pretty soon they're gonna board up the windows cut we might waste a couple minutes a day looking out them. Asses. So obviously I'm in a wonderful mood. Luckily April took me out tonight to see Blades of Glory. I wasn't expecting that much, but it ended up being really funny and didn't gets its laughs from making an unending series of gay jokes. Good for them. So a funny movie and a few hours of good company later I'm feeling much better.
So what else has been goin on? Well I've rediscovered my love of sushi. I'm trying to regulate my intake because I can easily eat $60+ of sushi at a sitting. It is a delicious but expensive craving to have. Luckily I'm finding places that have sushi bar happy hours. I've also thrown the restaurant club into high gear, in March we went to Seven Stars Pepper, Earth & Ocean, Brasa, and Campagne. They were all pretty good. The best of all of them: Brasa. The food was great, the service excellent, and everything was just awesome. Seven Stars Pepper is the least expensive of the four. It was good, but just not as high quality as the others, and was kinda bland for sezchuan food. Earth & Ocean was good, but is so expensive normally that I don't think I could afford it without the 25 for $25 deal. Plus they kinda rushed us through our meal. But the head chef came out and talked with us, so that was kinda cool. Campagne kinda sucked. Service was mediocre and the food while well executed was really unimaginative. Most of the stuff I could make, without too much difficulty. Perhaps that's too high of a standard, but their offered menu just seems really simplistic, and they seem to rely on using the french names for food to make it seem fancy. Like Haricot Verts. Green Beans. Beouf Bourguignon. Beef stewed with red wine and onions. Meh it was ok. Not worth the cost in my opinion. Anyway, this month we're gonna be hitting the Harvest Vine and Volterra. Also in this month's restaurant club email I wrote a rather long rant about food snobbery that I thnk came out extremely well. You know how sometimes you try to get a specific tone and flow to the words as you write them. This is some of my better work. I will attach it to the end of this entry.
Bagpiping is also coming along well. I've learned all the notes and embellishments. From now on it's just learning how to play songs correctly and at faster rythyms. That and I need to play on an actual bagpipe. I finally have decided on what bagpipe I wanna buy. It's prolly gonna cost me a couple grand unless I can find one used. Should be cool.
Speaking of playing stuff, due to the constant crashing and general suckitude of the Xbox 360, I ended up selling it and buying a Wii. I couldn't be happier. On the 360, games would crash or be "unreadable" constantly, the wireless adapter never worked, when I could connect to live it would never stay active long enough to play a game, and it scratched any disk i tried to use with it. The Wii works every time, connected to my wireless with ease, and has been nothing more than fantastic ever since I got it. I did a quick poll, and of the 7 people I know that bought a 360, every one of them has had to get it repaired, some of them multiple times. That's ridiculous bullshit right there. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, Fuck You Microsoft! At least until Halo 3 comes out.
I suppose the last thing to mention is that I've decided to move once again. My roommate's (Daniel's) girlfriend has moved into the place permanently. Gone are the girly pictures on the fridge, they've been replaced by a Hello Kitty notepad. Flower candles and other such bric-a-brac spread across the house. Bah. I've done the whole living with a friend and his girlfriend thing and I don't feel the need to do it again. Plus its finally time to get a place of my own. I was always a little scared that if I lived by myself, I'd end up a hermit with no human contact whatsoever. Seeing as how I spend far more evenings going out and having fun than staying in, that no longers seems like a good reason to have a roommate. Plus I miss being able to just go outside and walk to stuff. I miss the urban core. Living at the corner of mug whitey and stab whitey isn't all that fun either. So I'm trying to find a nice little studio apartment that I can afford that's in an area that I like. Top two areas I'm looking at are Capitol Hill and Lower Queen Anne.
Well, that's pretty much it for me right now. Instead of a quote I'm just gonna post my rant. Take it easy everybody.
Rant follows:
Now with that bit of vitriol out of my system, I can move on to the subject that I really want to cover. The restaurant list was originally created to be a way for me to keep track of restaurants that I hadn't been to yet. Places that I want to go to for whatever reason. Most of them are pretty nice places, but some of them are pretty low brow. A few of you have mentioned one entry in particular and wondered why I would put that on the list of places that I'd want to go and given me a little bit of grief about it. I am of course talking about The Old Spaghetti Factory. I put the O.S.F. on the list because I've never been there and that was the place to go in high school and I suppose I feel like I missed out on a small chunk of my childhood. Sure the food may not be the haute cuisine we all enjoy, it may not even be all that great, but so what? Neither is most of what's out there. We get so caught up in what's high end and well made, we forget to appreciate the simple, if unrefined and over-processed, enjoyments of the majority of food out there.
I'm talking about food elitism here people! It's getting crazy out there in the culinary wilds. It used to be having foraged mushrooms, pork belly, or chevre on your menu was the absolute height of high class dining. You'd have olive oil and balsamic on your bread instead of butter, mashed parsnips instead of mashed potatoes, and a flan instead of ice cream for dessert. Well now the masses are watching a couple hours of food network now and then. People are reading Gourmet magazine and Art Culinaire. They know about all the old stuff and are making it their own. I can get feta and marinated artichokes on a pizza from Dominos now. So to maintain the foody moral high ground we've had to move on to new and ever more rarified things. Now we're all about the house-made charcuterie, artesian loaves, offal, infused spirits, the juxtaposition of sweet and savory, and obscure cheeses made from the milk from a specific sheep in southern Albania, cured with the salt of a specific river from South America. And now even those things are becoming passé. When was the last time you went to a restaurant that didn't have a charcuterie plate or a selection of cheeses? In my relative short time as a foody, I've see the "in" thing go from sauces in squeeze bottles, to foams, to gels, and now to "airs." AIRS!! There's a guy who is printing flavors on sheets of rice paper from a modified ink jet printer. Pretty soon we'll just look at the food and taste it. You just about have to have a degree in biochemistry if you want to be a chef nowadays. Chefs today are so busy asking whether or not they could, they're forgetting to think about whether or not they should! We're walking on the razor's edge of food snobbery here people, the culinary sword of Damocles hangs inches above our heads and we're either unable or unwilling to acknowledge it. We're getting as bad as some of the vinophiles out there that are so concerned with having the "perfect" glass of wine that they've lost the ability to just enjoy it anymore. We're flirting with the edge of culinary irrelevance, when our likes and expectations get so high and hard to meet that it's impossible to please us with anything, so why even bother.
But that's it! I'm drawing the line in the sand here! This far, no further! I love food in all its wondrous glory. I love the good stuff, but I also love the crap and all points in between. I'll eat a lovingly prepared meal of skirt steak in a 74 ingredient mole sauce and then get a Soft Taco Supreme at Taco Bell later the same day. I might be in the mood to eat a chocolate soufflé topped with a drizzle of pomegranate syrup or perhaps I might prefer a Hostess chocolate cupcake and a glass of milk! I'm down with beouf bourguignon or Dinty Moore's Beef Stew out of a can. Perhaps I'll have glass of that Masi Amarone, or maybe I'd prefer some Boone's Farm Strawberry Daquiri. I'll eat a corn dog made out of beer battered foie gras and still enjoy the frozen Foster Farms variety. I love eating. I love eating more with my friends and family. It doesn't matter to me if it's at The French Laundry, a Red Robin, a corner hotdog cart, or in Buckingham Palace dining with the Queen of England. We should know better. We should remember that just because things aren't as good as they possibly could be, it doesn't mean that they aren't enjoyable.
Now I've said all this using the word "we" and I don't really mean this group specifically, we tend to be pretty ok in this regard. I'm talking about "we" as in the community of foodies worldwide. I believe that it's important to experience at all levels the food spectrum, the good and bad, the fancy and base, the simple and the complex. I want us all to be as fine with eating rolled up pieces of Oscar Meyer bologna dipped in yellow mustard as we would be eating fresh dates stuffed with Chevre and wrapped in prosciutto. At the very least it'll help us appreciate the good stuff even more. So that's why The Old Spaghetti Factory stays on the list. Because the day may come when I'm wandering around the waterfront and I may decide that I want Italian food with my pasta plain, my sauce white, my wine red, served to me by a 18 year old whose doesn't really know what they're doin, and I don't want to spend more than 20 bucks. And I'll enjoy that meal, especially if I bring my friends along. So the next time you're visiting ol' Aunt Gertrude in Nowheresville, Middle America and she decides to take you to the fanciest restaurant in town, and you end up at the Old Country Buffet by the abandoned bus terminal, and the guy asks you if you want brown or white gravy on your From-A-Box mashed potatoes, I want you to actually have a preference and then go on to enjoy your meal. Cause hey, it's better than nothin. :)
So what else has been goin on? Well I've rediscovered my love of sushi. I'm trying to regulate my intake because I can easily eat $60+ of sushi at a sitting. It is a delicious but expensive craving to have. Luckily I'm finding places that have sushi bar happy hours. I've also thrown the restaurant club into high gear, in March we went to Seven Stars Pepper, Earth & Ocean, Brasa, and Campagne. They were all pretty good. The best of all of them: Brasa. The food was great, the service excellent, and everything was just awesome. Seven Stars Pepper is the least expensive of the four. It was good, but just not as high quality as the others, and was kinda bland for sezchuan food. Earth & Ocean was good, but is so expensive normally that I don't think I could afford it without the 25 for $25 deal. Plus they kinda rushed us through our meal. But the head chef came out and talked with us, so that was kinda cool. Campagne kinda sucked. Service was mediocre and the food while well executed was really unimaginative. Most of the stuff I could make, without too much difficulty. Perhaps that's too high of a standard, but their offered menu just seems really simplistic, and they seem to rely on using the french names for food to make it seem fancy. Like Haricot Verts. Green Beans. Beouf Bourguignon. Beef stewed with red wine and onions. Meh it was ok. Not worth the cost in my opinion. Anyway, this month we're gonna be hitting the Harvest Vine and Volterra. Also in this month's restaurant club email I wrote a rather long rant about food snobbery that I thnk came out extremely well. You know how sometimes you try to get a specific tone and flow to the words as you write them. This is some of my better work. I will attach it to the end of this entry.
Bagpiping is also coming along well. I've learned all the notes and embellishments. From now on it's just learning how to play songs correctly and at faster rythyms. That and I need to play on an actual bagpipe. I finally have decided on what bagpipe I wanna buy. It's prolly gonna cost me a couple grand unless I can find one used. Should be cool.
Speaking of playing stuff, due to the constant crashing and general suckitude of the Xbox 360, I ended up selling it and buying a Wii. I couldn't be happier. On the 360, games would crash or be "unreadable" constantly, the wireless adapter never worked, when I could connect to live it would never stay active long enough to play a game, and it scratched any disk i tried to use with it. The Wii works every time, connected to my wireless with ease, and has been nothing more than fantastic ever since I got it. I did a quick poll, and of the 7 people I know that bought a 360, every one of them has had to get it repaired, some of them multiple times. That's ridiculous bullshit right there. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, Fuck You Microsoft! At least until Halo 3 comes out.
I suppose the last thing to mention is that I've decided to move once again. My roommate's (Daniel's) girlfriend has moved into the place permanently. Gone are the girly pictures on the fridge, they've been replaced by a Hello Kitty notepad. Flower candles and other such bric-a-brac spread across the house. Bah. I've done the whole living with a friend and his girlfriend thing and I don't feel the need to do it again. Plus its finally time to get a place of my own. I was always a little scared that if I lived by myself, I'd end up a hermit with no human contact whatsoever. Seeing as how I spend far more evenings going out and having fun than staying in, that no longers seems like a good reason to have a roommate. Plus I miss being able to just go outside and walk to stuff. I miss the urban core. Living at the corner of mug whitey and stab whitey isn't all that fun either. So I'm trying to find a nice little studio apartment that I can afford that's in an area that I like. Top two areas I'm looking at are Capitol Hill and Lower Queen Anne.
Well, that's pretty much it for me right now. Instead of a quote I'm just gonna post my rant. Take it easy everybody.
Rant follows:
Now with that bit of vitriol out of my system, I can move on to the subject that I really want to cover. The restaurant list was originally created to be a way for me to keep track of restaurants that I hadn't been to yet. Places that I want to go to for whatever reason. Most of them are pretty nice places, but some of them are pretty low brow. A few of you have mentioned one entry in particular and wondered why I would put that on the list of places that I'd want to go and given me a little bit of grief about it. I am of course talking about The Old Spaghetti Factory. I put the O.S.F. on the list because I've never been there and that was the place to go in high school and I suppose I feel like I missed out on a small chunk of my childhood. Sure the food may not be the haute cuisine we all enjoy, it may not even be all that great, but so what? Neither is most of what's out there. We get so caught up in what's high end and well made, we forget to appreciate the simple, if unrefined and over-processed, enjoyments of the majority of food out there.
I'm talking about food elitism here people! It's getting crazy out there in the culinary wilds. It used to be having foraged mushrooms, pork belly, or chevre on your menu was the absolute height of high class dining. You'd have olive oil and balsamic on your bread instead of butter, mashed parsnips instead of mashed potatoes, and a flan instead of ice cream for dessert. Well now the masses are watching a couple hours of food network now and then. People are reading Gourmet magazine and Art Culinaire. They know about all the old stuff and are making it their own. I can get feta and marinated artichokes on a pizza from Dominos now. So to maintain the foody moral high ground we've had to move on to new and ever more rarified things. Now we're all about the house-made charcuterie, artesian loaves, offal, infused spirits, the juxtaposition of sweet and savory, and obscure cheeses made from the milk from a specific sheep in southern Albania, cured with the salt of a specific river from South America. And now even those things are becoming passé. When was the last time you went to a restaurant that didn't have a charcuterie plate or a selection of cheeses? In my relative short time as a foody, I've see the "in" thing go from sauces in squeeze bottles, to foams, to gels, and now to "airs." AIRS!! There's a guy who is printing flavors on sheets of rice paper from a modified ink jet printer. Pretty soon we'll just look at the food and taste it. You just about have to have a degree in biochemistry if you want to be a chef nowadays. Chefs today are so busy asking whether or not they could, they're forgetting to think about whether or not they should! We're walking on the razor's edge of food snobbery here people, the culinary sword of Damocles hangs inches above our heads and we're either unable or unwilling to acknowledge it. We're getting as bad as some of the vinophiles out there that are so concerned with having the "perfect" glass of wine that they've lost the ability to just enjoy it anymore. We're flirting with the edge of culinary irrelevance, when our likes and expectations get so high and hard to meet that it's impossible to please us with anything, so why even bother.
But that's it! I'm drawing the line in the sand here! This far, no further! I love food in all its wondrous glory. I love the good stuff, but I also love the crap and all points in between. I'll eat a lovingly prepared meal of skirt steak in a 74 ingredient mole sauce and then get a Soft Taco Supreme at Taco Bell later the same day. I might be in the mood to eat a chocolate soufflé topped with a drizzle of pomegranate syrup or perhaps I might prefer a Hostess chocolate cupcake and a glass of milk! I'm down with beouf bourguignon or Dinty Moore's Beef Stew out of a can. Perhaps I'll have glass of that Masi Amarone, or maybe I'd prefer some Boone's Farm Strawberry Daquiri. I'll eat a corn dog made out of beer battered foie gras and still enjoy the frozen Foster Farms variety. I love eating. I love eating more with my friends and family. It doesn't matter to me if it's at The French Laundry, a Red Robin, a corner hotdog cart, or in Buckingham Palace dining with the Queen of England. We should know better. We should remember that just because things aren't as good as they possibly could be, it doesn't mean that they aren't enjoyable.
Now I've said all this using the word "we" and I don't really mean this group specifically, we tend to be pretty ok in this regard. I'm talking about "we" as in the community of foodies worldwide. I believe that it's important to experience at all levels the food spectrum, the good and bad, the fancy and base, the simple and the complex. I want us all to be as fine with eating rolled up pieces of Oscar Meyer bologna dipped in yellow mustard as we would be eating fresh dates stuffed with Chevre and wrapped in prosciutto. At the very least it'll help us appreciate the good stuff even more. So that's why The Old Spaghetti Factory stays on the list. Because the day may come when I'm wandering around the waterfront and I may decide that I want Italian food with my pasta plain, my sauce white, my wine red, served to me by a 18 year old whose doesn't really know what they're doin, and I don't want to spend more than 20 bucks. And I'll enjoy that meal, especially if I bring my friends along. So the next time you're visiting ol' Aunt Gertrude in Nowheresville, Middle America and she decides to take you to the fanciest restaurant in town, and you end up at the Old Country Buffet by the abandoned bus terminal, and the guy asks you if you want brown or white gravy on your From-A-Box mashed potatoes, I want you to actually have a preference and then go on to enjoy your meal. Cause hey, it's better than nothin. :)