Category Archives: cooking

Stephen and the Case of the Second Most Expensive Frisbees Ever Invented

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So Stephen (you remember Stephen?) he was once even younger, and when he was younger he was, as is the way, more junior, and he wasn’t a restaurant manager at all but instead a busboy on the Princess Something, a Canadian Pacific cruise ship/ferry crossbreed cruising between Victoria and Seattle.

And CP, they had standards. In fact, they could be said to have standards the way the SS could be said to have been strict-ish. And one of their standards was that, by the time they docked in Seattle, every piece of cutlery and every piece of china aboard would have been washed and dried to perfection, regardless of time pressures, or staff would be fired.

And it always was.

And many were the evenings, pulling into port, that Stephen spent at the stern of the ship, gleefully tossing aft the plates that they didn’t have the extra 15 minutes to wash. Puget Sound is lined with CP china and silver flatware, should you ever feel like taking a diving vacation.

Stephen and the case of the most expensive frisbees ever invented

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Eisenstaedt likes the waiters at the St MoritzSo my friend, Stephen…not that one, and not the V for Stephen Steven either, but the other one, that one, he was once young.

I wonder what that was like.

And when he was young, he was employable, and so he went out and got a job, as one does. And his job was as a restaurant manager at a swanky hotel in downtown Vancouver which isn’t there anymore…well, the hotel is, but the company isn’t, if you catch my drift. It’s exactly the same hotel, it’s just the suits have all been changed.

But not the suites; they are all just exactly the same.

Although the sheets would have been changed, I would imagine. If I imagined things about the sheets of hotels which I cannot afford.

Which I don’t.

And one day, the chief restaurant inspector and, indeed, Vice President of the whole hotel company, the Suit di tutti Suits, was visiting, restaurant-inspecting, and, indeed, quite possibly Viceing or Presidenting as well (I didn’t ask; didn’t want to know). And so Stephen NotThatOneNotTheOtherOneEitherButThatOne was showing him around.

And he showed him the restaurant. And he showed him the kitchen. And he showed him the freezers. And he showed him the entrance to the stairwell. And he showed him, because it was there and because the Inspector wished to Inspect simply everything, the basement.

Now, did I mention the plates? This restaurant, it wasn’t just foodie, as many restaurants can often tend to be. No indeedy not. It was not merely foodie: it was artsie as well. And to express its artsiness it had commissioned, at quite a considerable cost and to, naturally, an even more considerable deal of publicity, bone china plates, hand-painted by individual artists. Collective artists were, one supposes, deemed too hostile to capitalism to work on plates for business dinners.

And these plates, they were indeed works of art and priced accordingly. And, as Stephen NTONTOOEBTO was leading the VP-Inspector towards the stairs back up to the restaurant, he happened to look up.

The VP-Inspector, also, looked up.

And they saw a common or garden wheeled metal cart, the kind hairdressers load up with dryers and curlers and sprays and things, the kind that bartenders load up with bottles and glasses and obscure forms of garnish, the kind that kitchens load up with dirty dishes.

It was loaded.

Bearing a Three Kings-worthy load of approximately $17,000 in handpainted plates, it was slowly succumbing to the embrace of an accursed combination of momentum, unfortunate floor slope and gravity. Yes, it was thundering stairward at a pace which was, quite frankly, better than that which your basic VP-Inspektor or, indeed, your basic Stephen could muster on a typical day, even if they had not been a full floor below, staring up the bare concrete staircase at it.

Things looked inevitable, as they inevitably do at some point.

They looked at one another.

They looked up the stairs.

They looked at one another.

The front wheels left the staircase.

They ran.

I never did find out what happened to the cart after that; whatever it was, there were certainly no witnesses.

things I have learned from living with a vegan raw food chef/holistic healer

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This list is not exhaustive, because he hasn’t stopped talking yet. It must be prefaced with the information that I’ve lost 20 pounds since he moved in and he’s a good friend, a lovely fellow, and as delightful a roommate as I’ve ever encountered.

However.

  • milk equals pus. It doesn’t matter if you know the cows from birth and milk them by hand. Milk equals pus. All cows are walking petri dishes of mastitis. This and all tenets of the raw food vegan bible are, like all fundamentalist commandments, neither examined nor reconsidered, ever. They are only repeated from memory. At. Length. For another example, ask any Scientologist about psychiatry and watch the hours fly by!
  • that vegetable that you like? It’s poison!
  • ditto fruit
  • all food needs to come with a lecture. A meal without a lecture is like a day without sunshine!
  • it is the fault of the Bavarian Illuminati that you are unhealthy and eating a crappy diet. They put many resources towards preventing the world from knowing the truth and full health.
  • your colon and 9/11 are interrelated.
  • it is all the fault of white men. It’s particularly amusing to get white vegan men to lecture on this topic, because self-awareness is, apparently, entirely prevented by eating a raw food diet.
  • no matter what’s wrong with you, tweaking your diet can fix it. Missing a leg? Got AIDS? Born a thalidomide baby? A few smoothies will put you right.
  • everyone, even raw food vegan chefs, loves pizza, perhaps the most perfect food ever invented (just don’t ask a raw food vegan chef for his professional opinion. He’ll give it to you and then you’ll think “well that’s three hours of my life I’ll never get back”).
  • If you have problems with your digestion, the way to fix that is to stop digesting. Throw all the foods you were going to eat anyway into a blender and process them until they’re an indistinguishable sludge, then drink it. Keep doing that until your digestion problems stop, which they will, since you’re not actually digesting anything anymore.
  • they may like their food raw, but they prefer their intoxicants smoked. Often. I used to torture the vegan chainsmokers at Greenpeace by yelling “Cigarettes are tested on animals” as they took their smoke breaks.
  • washing salad ingredients prior to eating them is nothing more than discrimination against Microbe-Canadians. This position is not reconsidered, even after a violent round of E.Coli poisoning involving the carrying of large bowls to the bedside and the equipping of the night stand with tp, bottled water, a smoothie, and a book which requires little mental acuity. The solution is (see above) to consume exactly the same foods, in the smoothie form, which is as fundamental to vegans as the solid form is to physicists.
  • meat is not just evil, it’s poisonous. Most foods, in fact, are poisonous, especially the tasty ones. I should take him to Salt just to freak him out; they serve nothing but meat and cheese.
  • vegans eat more salt and sugar than any other group of persons on the planet. I used to refill the salt grinder once every two months. Now it’s once a week, unless we run out of soy sauce, when it’s once every two days. And I’m going through a kilo of sugar a month, easy.
  • they also drink more green tea than any other group of people on Earth. It’s raw, you see, unlike black tea, which has been processed. If only it were also cheap; a $24 box of Formosa Oolong used to last me six months. Now it’s one month. I might as well inquire about wholesale rates.
  • if they leave their fruit smoothie for too long and something starts growing on top of it, they will peel off the fuzz and consume the smoothie, nattering on about the benefits of fermentation. Speaking of which,
  • they love Jack Daniels. Which alone gives me faith in them as a species.

Quick filler boogie post

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I am, thanks to the crisis-aversion actions taken by, respectively in order of the order they action-took, devblog, Sean Heather, and The Sister, getting my groove back, somewhat. Sean also stuffed me with exotic meats and cheeses (a godsend to those of us who live with raw vegan chef-types; my cholesterol count was getting dangerously low) while Kurtis plied me with succulent sherry so rich and voluptuous that Jay-Z tried to chat it up. Ah, I love working for the hospitality industry!

In any case, here’s a nice ten-minute Mylene Farmer megamix to both express the return of my groovitude and uh, fill the blog up and hold you until I write something better. And now I’m off to hit the grocery store like Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Oh, there will be Brie on the ceiling by the time I’m done with it, you wait and see! I am the Sam Peckinpah of shoppers!

Will it Blend: Chuck Norris edition

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“There are only two kinds of bad guys. Live bad guys, and the ones who’ve met Chuck Norris.”

This has got to be the single best blender marketing video the universe has ever witnessed, and if you doubt it, click for yourselves.

We’ve really been struggling to find something that could challenge the Total Blender’s blending capabilities. What could we blend that’s stronger than anything we’ve ever blended?
Then it hit us like a roundhouse kick to the face…Chuck Norris!

Hat-tip to Stiletto, for the inspiration to post it.