Weekend Report (Extra Lips, Hold the Buttholes, Please)

On Sunday, B & I attended the James Beard Awards a Lincoln Center. That morning, I joined a classmate in getting on line at 9:30am for the 11am sale of student tickets. We were first on line, and it's fortunate -- they only had 50 student tickets for sale, each person could buy 2, and there were more than 25 peeps on that line by 11am. Student tickets were $50 a pop, which sounds like a lot, but being that a full-priced ticket is $500 and includes an all-you-can-eat-and-booze gourmet buffet, it's actually quite a deal. And I got to walk my lady down a red carpet, something a dude should do for his wifey at least once in a while. I searched Flickr for some porny food shots of some of the stuff I ate, but only found red-carpet shots....with me right in the background! I'd post them here, except I'm anonymous, remember?

Oddly enough, our student tickets put us in a box very close to the stage with an excellent view of he proceedings. Three hours long, it was a bit of a snooze fest punctuated by some sincerely beautiful clips of old-school American restaurants and their owners, and some interesting speeches from writers and humanitarians, and the Godfather of French cooking, Jaques Pepin.

Once over, I rocketed out of the gate with an appetite to seriously eat, and was handily defeated by waaaay too much good food everywhere. So this is how rich people eat. More details below.

On Saturday, I got in spandex and on the bike and threw my yoga mat on my back and made it up Central Park to practice yoga with the HVS, where she was doing an outdoor class. It was nice and refreshing to stretch out in the park, and made me look forward to seeing the effect of a yoga class right before a formal ride. Rode home, picked up my friend E and we did a loop around the waterfront of Brooklyn, spending some time on the beach in the Rockaways. We ate at Nathan's in Coney Island -- not much of an ass-meat eater anymore, but that stuff just tastes right. Not the greatest bike food, though.

On Monday, I slept in for the first time in a long time, waking up at 8:30am, not hungry at all. The scale says I'm 224 for a third week in a row, grrr. I almost want it to say I'm heavier to motivate me to do something more aggressive. I shaved off my beard yesterday, and the deep slope from my chin to my neck is a reminder why losing a few more pounds wouldn't hurt.

Recently subscribed to a journal called Meat Paper and got the first issue. Really interesting articles about urban farmers, pork in Israel, the magic of food-styling meat for the camera, as well as some....odder bits.

SATURDAY
BREAKFAST: 6:30am, granola with skim milk, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
Out of the good milk, used some of the grass-fed, organic skim milk that B got at Fairway last week (it's homogenized and pasteurized, so it can keep for a month, instead of the week the good milk gets.) It had a creepy bluish tinge, and tasted and felt similar to water in my mouth. More importantly, the granola which I usually love kind of tasted...bland. The granola is pretty low-salt, but eating it with this milk without the fat to kinda louden the flavor, it just tasted a bit dead and sawdusty. Huh.

AM SNACK: 11:30am, homemade powerbar, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
On bike ride.

LUNCH #1: 12:00pm, 1 hotdog with kraut and onions, a handful of cheesefries, water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
When E asked me what I wanted at Nathan's while we were in Coney Island on our bikes, I said one hotdog, extra lips, hold the buttholes. Hotdogs are nasty things when you think about it, but it's a traditional Brooklyn food in a traditional Brooklyn place, so no harm in a small indulgence. However, the toxic yellow goo called 'cheeze' on the fries...

LUNCH #2: 3pm, onion bagel with lettuce, tomato, onion and butter, small packet of sunchips, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
At the Bay-Gull store in Broadchannel.

PM SNACK: 5:15pm, small cup of homemade chocolate soy icecream, .25 cup, hunger 4/5
It would of been more if B hadn't eaten the entire container except this sliver.

DINNER: 8pm, rigatoni with meatballs, bruschetta, bread, 1 beer, water, 2.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
With B and her friends in Tribeca. Pasta sauce horribly sweet, too hungry to pass it up, though.

SUNDAY:
BREAKFAST: 7am, carrot and celery sticks with hummus, piece of edamer cheese, water, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

AM SNACK: 10am, literally 1 bite of good donut, hunger 3/5
In line for student tickets for the James Beard awards, started talking to some students from the C.I.A., all young n' chirpy and psyched to be there (they travelled down from Poughkeepsie to get on line.) I couldn't help but share 2 of the best donuts in NYC with them.

AM SNACK: 12 noon, Boylan's Grape Soda, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
This grape soda is the soda of my youth. Sweetened by cane sugar, the grape flavor has absolutely nothing to do with what a grape tastes like, but a very interesting idea of what "grape" is. I suspect this flavor is what turned me off most fruit to this day -- the fake thing just tastes so good. Makes me think I should force myself to eat more fruit and retrain myself, as I'm not 10 years old anymore.

LUNCH: 1pm, home made pizza, water, hunger 4/5
Had two pieces of dough that rose for a second day in the fridge. There was a farmer's market on my street, very small, but they had a cheese-monger who was selling artisenal low-moisture mozzarella, so I picked up a bit. Through a can of tomatos in the blender with olive oil, garlic, salt, sugar, balsamic and a dash of herb to create a fresh raw sauce, and prepped some garlic slices, basil and baby tomatoes for topping. The second day of rising made all the difference, the flavor of the dough was perfectly yeasty, puffed up nicely on the edges, and took on char in all the right places.

PM SNACK: 4pm, homemade power bar, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Napped for a couple of hours before heading out to the James Beard Awards

PM SNACK: 6:30pm, caramels, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
The award's sponsor, Lexus, gave away really gourmet boxes of caramels before the awards, which was clever, as you need something to get a few thousand hungry wealth people through 3 hours of awards. They had me fill out a survey on how I felt about the Lexus brand, which I can sum up as thus: I'd rather be on a bike than a yuppie land boat.

DINNER: 8:30pm - 10:30pm, James Beard Awards Buffet, 3 bowls, hunger 4/5 at the beginning, 1/5 by the end
The lobby, balcony and entrance floor of Avery Fischer Hall in Lincoln Center was set up as a huge gourmet buffet, and once the ceremonies were over, we hit the food as hard as possible. It was quite easy to eat more than $50 worth of food. I can't recount everything I sampled, but a few stand out above the other. Easily the best were one table that was doing duck sliders and lamb sliders, two meats I've only come to appreciate since starting c-school. There was a hazelnut pork terrine that looked like slabs of marbled and squared poo that not many people were eating, but tasted fantastic. Small rounds of fresh pasta in a nutty, woodsy walnut pesto just screamed. One table which had the longest wait was corn masa tamales topped with a fragrant lima bean salad and chopped grilled and cured pork, absolutely gob-smacking. Green & Black had a tasting table of organic chocolate, where I greedily tried each one of their flavors without fully cleansing my mouth before the next bite. Soft shell crab on an avocado couli, a few different cheese tables with all sorts of handcrafted goodies, rhubarb gelato with strawberry compote, buffalo empanadas, amazing smoked cod chowder, razor clam butter soup YUMM, avocado sherbet. There was free flowing champagne, wine and mixed drinks, but all the food kinds of locked me down. I could name the stuff I DIDN'T eat because I was too full by the end. I kinda wanted to hang out, but my stomach demanded me to leave.

MONDAY
LUNCH: 1pm, rigatoni with sun dried tomatoes and shallots in olive oil and white wine reduction, topped with fresh moz and parm, 2 bowls, water, hunger 4/5
Slept in, just not hungry after last night's feast. Just through in what I had on hand, turned out ok -- sun dried tomatoes are an overpowering flavor, next time I cook with them I'll be a bit more conservative.

DINNER: 7pm, grilled jumbo tiger shrimp marinated in butter and garlic, roasted broccoli in panko, boiled corn on the cob, large green salad with olive oil and vinegar, half pint of cashew-cream gelato, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
It's not so bad spending most of the days indoors in a stupidly hot day when you can cook fun food. It was a bummer, however, when B came in while I was eating, and freaked out about all the smoke and excess heat in the apartment. I was enjoying my food too much to notice.