Calamari Please Hold the Ketchup

In the last few weeks I’ve been hit with an overwhelming craving to eat calamari, aka “fried calamari in the typical fashion." To me that translates to breaded rings and tiny tentacles of squid that are deep-fried and served hot and crispy. When I refer to calamari I am never referring to grilled calamari on top of greens or that newish fad of calamari sticks—a stack of breaded calamari planks that when picked up flounce up and down like a rubber pencil. Nope, those latter types of calamari are just not for me.

Calamari is one of those proteins in which I suspend my disbelief about 80% regarding what I’m actually eating. What can I say, I could barely look into the famous and breathtakingly gorgeous jellyfish tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and while I know that jellyfish are not quite the same as squid, still, this type of creature is not what I like to imagine ingesting with full cognitive awareness. Calamari is squid after all, and personally I do not find squid attractive to look at or think about chewing. That said, the tiny tentacles pieces on a typical fried calamari plate is pretty much the squid sticking its tongue out at me proclaiming, "See, how could you NOT know you're eating me, the squid." Alas, how true, and that is likely why 20% of my brain always gets that eating delicious fried calamari equals eating pieces of a once squiggly, icky squid.

Salty & Sweet

Food and Wine's milk chocolate tart with pretzel crust a la Marly

Now that this blog's grad school hiatus is officially over, I can tell you about one of my all-time favorite pleasures. It is the taste of salty and sweet on the palate, and here are just a few of the ways to enjoy this:

• the Canadian tradition of dipping bacon into maple syrup
• a cheese plate with wine and some salty & sweet accoutrements  
• adding plain M&Ms to movie theater popcorn (some prefer M&M peanut)
• the trend of adding salt to caramel and other desserts: 1) here is a recipe for a caramel sea salt tart from Saveur magazine in 2009; 2) you can buy bittersweet sea salt chocolate chip cookies online now from Saint Cupcake in Portland, and you should! One of the best cookies I ever tasted.

Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries...

“Cough," I said. "Cough cough.” It seemed natural enough to cough my lungs up at Rite Aid, where I arrived much in need of some cough syrup. Not even a week after the big spider bite (consensus says it was most likely a black widow), I had picked up my first case of bronchitis, and who knows if this was due to my body fighting off spider venom or because of several hours spent in the most crowded and poorly managed ER in Los Angeles County.

The coughs notwithstanding, at least I could still roll my eyes at the typical drug store scenario of each and every bottle of cough syrup being cherry flavored. Cherry flavored? How come the children's cough syrup is grape flavored? Adult cherry cough syrup is so vile that pharmaceutical companies must clearly only take pity on coughing children since they're the only ones given a less repulsive flavor option. As an asthmatic child, I was in need of cough syrup often and it was always cherry flavored and thankfully my parents usually bribed me to take it down with a YooHoo chaser.

Toffee Love

Candy lovers are people I can really relate to, ahem, because I'm one myself. One thing about candy lovers—besides their need for dental work—is as much as they get excited by all kinds of candy, there’s usually one sweet in particular that rocks their world. For instance, my sister is drawn to caramels. Another friend of mine loves sour candies. Others love licorice. Candy lovers usually have at least one must-have item in a candy store, and for me that has always been toffee.

No, not taffy or that kind of thing; I’m talking about traditional English-style toffee, with its sunburnt golden hues, slicks of chocolate on one or both sides, and some kind of nut sparingly integrated throughout. Toffee should be lightly crunchy and even a little gritty when chewed, not sticky or gluey as can be the case with peanut brittle. A good toffee is dental-work safe! It will crunch and then soon dissolve once bitten. Overcooked toffee is a sad thing, stuck in a candy purgatory between what toffee should be and peanut brittle, and that's no good.

Danish Red Pesto & Fried Bacon (or Pork?)

While studying in Aarhus, Denmark for three weeks this summer I pondered the possible titles for this upcoming blog post:

"Starving in Denmark" (so expensive to eat there, which is why the photo above is of a cheap meal I made at home), "The Land of Leggings" (de rigueur fashion element for women of all ages), "World Wide Web" (so many spiders and their webs!), or "Allergies my Allergies" (they owned me and my puffy face).

But, since this is a food blog it made more sense for the title to refer to the two regional food items I loved most on the trip:

It's Time To Eat the Doughnuts!

A "30 Rock" episode from a few years back really illustrated the show's pulse of the times when Alec Baldwin's character brought Jennifer Aniston's character up-to-date on the latest in New York. He said, "Welcome to New York. Let's see, we're using credit cards in cabs now, all the galleries have moved to Chelsea, and we're off cupcakes and we're back to doughnuts. Would you excuse me for a moment?" (He probably ran off to get some doughnuts.)

When cupcakes hit New York there was some dabbling around in it by all. When doughnuts hit, that was better. People can make a great cupcake in their kitchen, but a doughnut? Nope, when doughnuts were back in vogue Krispy Kreme was the one-stop shop. One tiny bundle of glazed "hot now" did the trick and gently wafted in memories of sugary childhood delight.

Foodie Redemption

This past Friday I had the pleasure of dining at Shahnawaz Restaurant with a group from the USC Office of International Services. It was the last meeting of the OIS Diner's Club for the year, and also the last time one of its leaders—@MarciaonTour from Project Quinn class—would have the chance to host such an event at USC.