Plaidophile

If you follow me on Twitter you probably saw some of these get posted when I "earned" them:

• Familiar desparation (eat at a foreign McDonald's)
• That s(t)inking feeling (remember why you never eat at McDonald's regardless of location)
• Dr. Takai, M.D. (Visit a hospital in Tokyo)
• He hits me because He's Lovin' Me (despite better judgment, eat at McDonald's again)

There's a lot of other stuff I should have granted myself achievements for, such as going to the cow-mooing meadow (drink a bottle of Skal) and having a temporary Groundhog Day loop, and perhaps one for being an intense shutterbug.

Oh, and after this week I'm a lot better at reading kana. I'm maybe at a two-year-old level now.

Very few things demonstrate the gap between any two given cultures so well as how one prepares the breakfast of another. Tastes can vary so much that in some cases it seems that aliens from outer space who had never even heard of "break fast" are likely to do a more accurate job.

The Japanese take on an American breakfast is a prime example. What do Americans eat? Sausage, eggs, fruit, potatoes, that sort of thing. What kind of sausage? Well, the most popularly-eaten sausage in America is hot dogs. Oh, and those are often served on a bun with chili and onions. Fruit? How about some nice berries... like tomatoes and bell peppers? Potatoes are easy to cook; here's a nice recipe for roasted potatoes, served with carrots and green beans. And how better to scramble eggs than by making an emulsion?

This isn't to say that any of this is BAD, of course, but if you happen to be in Japan and happen to be homesick for America, ordering a nice American breakfast probably isn't the best way to alleviate this.

Of course, it's hard to fault them for trying. Ask any given American to prepare a Japanese style breakfast and you'll probably end up with wasabi corn flakes.

I just had a rather interesting dining experience at the Shinagawa Prince Annex Tower mall food court.

When you enter, there is a sign saying "this is a self-service facility." There is nothing else to direct you. Looking around, there are a number of stations, next to which there are what look like touchscreen vending machines. You put your money into the vending machine, and make your selections; then it gives you your change and several tickets that you run to the stations. They give you a little call box to let you know when your order is ready, and you get it from the pass yourself. Then when you're finished with your meal, you take your tray to the bussing station yourself.

It all seems very Japanese, and once you figure it out it's especially easy because you don't have to deal with language barriers or whatever (the touchscreen ordering systems have menus in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, although it took me a while to figure out that's what the buttons along the bottom of the screen did - and the English text was pretty minimal, and even the button to complete your order is in Japanese the whole time).

Anyway, I got a Margherita Pizza, which was about the only thing I thought I could stomach (most of the menus were full of greasy fried stuff and rich seafood udon, and even the pizza menu was primarily made of, well, typically Japanese takes on pizza), as well a melon soda, which was very, very green.

おいしいでした。

This morning I dropped an ibuprofen liqui-gel capsule on the floor, so after taking a second one I decided to use the first one to finally answer some burning questions.

1. It is a (very thick) liquid surrounded by a (surprisingly hard to cut) gelatin capsule
2. The liquid itself is transparent and uncolored, not blue
3. It tastes terrible

I just subscribed to recurring deliveries of tasty Indian food on Amazon. Because this is the main reason I ever go to Target anymore and it's a lot cheaper and more convenient this way, and I know I'm going to keep on buying it.

For now I've just ordered 18 packets (one box of each) every 2 months. Because I know I'm not going to want to eat this every day. Too bad Amazon doesn't directly carry my favorites (Bombay Potatoes and Madras Lentils); that seems to only be stocked by third-party merchants with higher prices and exorbitant shipping fees. Fortunately, for those varieties I can just buy direct. (So I ordered a 12-pack each of those two. Which turns out to be a bit more than on Amazon, but it's still a bit cheaper than Target. Go figure.)

Man, modern life, am I right?

In the UK, Smarties (what we call M&Ms over here) used to come in a number of colors, including red, yellow, purple, green, blue, tan, orange, mauve, and fuchsia. it turns out that a few years ago, because artificial pigments are evil and toxic, the Smarties company changed the pigments to be "all-natural," but in the blue one they switched to a pigment made from a CHEMICAL derived from a BACTERIA called "cyanobacteria." So they are feeding our children CYANIDE (cyanobacteria are called that because they are natural producers of cyanide) and expecting you to just accept this! This is an outrage, and another example of BIG BUSINESS trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

We must stop supporting M&M Mars until the day that they remove the blue M&Ms from ALL versions of them around the world.

Once upon a time, cocktails were very simple, elegant things with only a couple of key flavors combined in a balanced manner. For example, the classic martini (gin, vermouth, and an olive) and the classic daíquiri (rum, lime, simple syrup) are favorites that will last forever.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, mixed drinks started to become these ridiculously cumbersome things which involved blending and puréeing and so on, and from the 60s to the 80s we started to even see classic cocktails be ruined by this trend (now "martini" seems to mean "any horrible concoction in a martini glass," and a daíquiri might as well be a strawberry smoothie).

With that in mind, I looked at the mixed drink which probably started it all — the piña colada — and sought to reinvent it as if it were a classic cocktail. I served several of these at a small party last night, and they were a success.

I used to eat a lot of active-culture yogurt, but I fell out of the habit a few months ago. But it turns out that it may have been doing more for me than I thought.

So I bought a whole bunch of active-culture yogurt on Tuesday and have been eating two servings a day (one for breakfast, one after dinner) and my ulcer symptoms have already all but disappeared.

So three cheers for this critter and its partner (who, sadly, does not come in a plushie, but looks similarly nondescript).

I think I might start culturing my own yogurt, too. It's fairly easy to do and somewhat cheaper than buying the active-culture stuff at the store.

• Took 101 on the way down. Kept regretting taking that instead of 1. Then I hit LA and traffic got terrible but I repeat myself. I think the extra time for 1 would have made the final part that much more annoying.
• Thursday night went to Tokyo Wako, which is a terrible, terrible restaurant. I was hoping for some simple sushi but everything there was best characterized as "too much of everything." Both rolls I got (one spider roll, one unagi roll — helpfully called "eel roll" instead for us poor Americans) were loaded up with avocado and disgustingly-sweet teriyaki sauce, and the pieces were too large to fit in my mouth and fell apart and so on. It's basically a local chain version of Benihana. NOT RECOMMENDED.
• Friday I went to the aquarium, which was nice, except that it happened to be the same day that a lot of LA elementary schools were taking a field trip, so I had a hard time taking any pictures or reading the signs or enjoying a nice quiet day at the aquarium. So, not very nice.
• Went to Zephyr, had half a grilled tofu sandwich (which was good but I didn't have much of an appetite before my set and after my set it was too late for me to eat anything per GERD treatment protocol), and had a great performance after a couple of false starts. Unfortunately, the stream crapped out just as I was getting good (or at least, I like to think so, but I haven't listened to the recordings yet). Got most of the musicians in the crowd to join me for a rousing chorus of Night Terrors, which was a wonderful trainwreck (in a good way).
• Saturday, wandered around the area near the hotel before going to a barbecue at Ross Durand's house. I showed up early (because traffic was way better than expected), and met his family, and slowly other Song Fight people trickled in, although the two who I really wanted to see again (MintyHandy and Johnny Cashpoint) couldn't make it due to bad circumstances. But that's okay. Got the next fight's title from Spud over the phone, and Alex (of the Seamus Collective) wrote an absolutely brilliant song, which we recorded in bluegrass style. I played cello. We're probably going to collaborate on improving parts of it over the next several days pre-submission (Ross wasn't feeling comfortable enough with his dulcimer playing to record it along with us, for example, and I'd like to record a separate cello part for the bridge and maybe some vocal harmonies) but even as recorded live it was wonderful. I got video, which I will post after the fight goes live.
• This morning, woke up at 5 AM and couldn't fall back to sleep. At 7 AM a badly-organized gay pride parade circled around the lagoon by the Hyatt. There were maybe 20 people in it, and their chant was: "What do we want? JUSTICE! When do we want it? NOW!" and of course it was not in a place that it would be seen or heard by anyone except tired out-of-towners.
• Now I'm just trying to figure out if I want to take 101 back (semi-pretty drive, but I've already seen it), or 1 (very pretty but also a grueling endurance test), or I-5 (a little faster than 101, boring). Will definitely be stopping at Chris's on the way in any case.

Cheap Italian food at 8 PM, followed by some caffeinated peppermints during a long midnight drive home.

Also it turns out that being woken up by a sharp pain at 5:30 AM feels a lot like dying. Enough so that I called 911 and they thought it was necessary for me to go to the hospital, and I had my first ambulance ride ever. My vital signs were fine, and my BP was actually elevated at first (but eventually returned to normal). The doctor on-call (Dr. Chandra, who is not an ostrich) asked me about my history with GERD and established that it was probably just last night's dinner, which was a party for a friend. At dinner I had a feeling it would cause something like this, but I wasn't really thinking straight, and I was afraid of major complications so that helped to fuel my panic that kept me from just going back to sleep.

Well, that and I was feeling drained and numb and hazy and I was shivering like crazy despite my apartment being a rather warm 71°F.

Anyway, I'm sure the real pain will be when I get the bill from my insurance.

So, now that I have a nicely-rebuilt balcony, I decided to get an electric grill. (California fire codes ban the use of charcoal, propane, or other combustible-source grills within 10 feet of a combustible wall of a multi-unit building.) There are a few models that I was looking at, but based on what I read online, the Weber Q 140 seemed like the best bet. Of course, all the online purchase options would have cost just as much as just buying it locally, so I decided to go to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy it.

BB&B didn't have the Weber in stock, but they did have the Sanyo HPS-SG3 on sale for only $40 (same as Amazon's price, although obviously I had to pay sales tax this way), and the helpful sales associate who pointed me to it spoke very highly of it (and apparently America's Test Kitchen reviewed it very favorably), so I decided to buy that instead.

It is basically just a heating element integrated into a cooking surface (in an extremely well-designed manner), a plastic (but also well-designed) stand, and a metal drip tray. I don't expect the plastic stand to really hold up very well, though. I'm already thinking of making some sort of metal stand for it (maybe by adapting a cheap charcoal grill ) that would allow me to also put a lid on it (some of the Amazon reviews recommend using an aluminum baking pan as a makeshift lid, but I'd be worried about that melting the plastic base immediately) which would then also make it suitable for smokier cooking.

At the very least, this electric grill and a Stovetop Smoker together cost less than even the cheapest electric grill+smoker I could find (and most of them cost at least twice that).

I will be sure to keep people apprised as soon as I have a chance to actually cook with this thing (which will not happen until I get a sufficiently-large patio table and an extension cord).

I also realize how silly it is to take an item that is supposed to bring an outdoor cooking technique indoors and then immediately try to make it an outdoor thing.

Per my not-very-scientific test of MSG sensitivity.

So, ever since college I've been living with the belief that I'm MSG-sensitive, due to a not-very-controlled-but-good-enough-at-the-time series of observations about migraines and tactile hallucinations, which seemed to coincide with eating MSG-rich foods and which stopped when I stopped eating them. A recent forum thread (which I alluded to in a previous blog entry) led me to finally question this assumption; several peer-reviewed controlled studies have been done on MSG sensitivity and nothing found any rhyme or reason or consistency to an MSG response.

There are a few possibilities which came up; I came to the conclusion when I was going through a pretty stressful time in my life and had terrible dietary habits, and it could have been the combination of MSG and salt, along with being in a perpetual state of dehydration, for example, and perhaps this led to a taste aversion to the flavor of MSG itself.

Since I figured out the sensitivity, I always responded to the flavor of MSG with a prophylactic migraine protocol — aspirin, caffeine, and water. I would also often still develop a migraine (but not the hallucinations) anyway, and that could very easily be a psychogenic response. (Pain is one of the hardest things to measure objectively or repeatably — even the mere suggestion that a change in pain response is being measured is enough to completely change the way the pain is responded to.)

So, I decided to try eating some MSG-flavored food. Not a controlled double-blind study or anything, just a simple test to see if I can eat MSG without ill effects. Of course, I won't be able to draw any useful conclusions from it, aside from whether I actually need to keep on avoiding MSG (regardless of what the real underlying cause is).

It took me a while to figure out which food to use as a test, though. I didn't want to buy something I wouldn't normally eat anyway (such as Doritos), and I didn't want to buy MSG as a raw ingredient since even if I'm not sensitive to it, I wouldn't be using it anyway. My basic criteria were: decent-quality food that came as a single serving which I would normally eat (regardless of MSG content) but which happened to contain MSG. I finally settled on clam chowder as such a thing, since every time I've wanted clam chowder, every store-bought brand has been rich in MSG.

So, of course, imagine my surprise that pretty much every brand of clam chowder is now MSG-free, which I would have never known if I was operating under the assumption I couldn't have MSG. (Which is a bit ironic since a big reason for this is so that I can relax about what I eat and actually enjoy things again, without needlessly constraining the people I'm eating with.) I still ended up buying a brand with MSG — but it actually took me a while to find one!

Anyway, I haven't eaten it yet - I'll probably try it tomorrow night.

There seem to be three camps in the ongoing debates about MSG as a cause of migraines:

1. Zealoty MSG-conspiracy folks who think that any form of glutamate (bound or unbound) is WRONG WRONG WRONG and all MSG in all its forms should be stamped out FOREVER
2. People who are out to disprove the MSG-conspiracy folks, who use any use of "I am MSG-sensitive" or "MSG is one of my migraine triggers" as evidence that someone is in camp 1 who are all experiencing psychosomatic/psychogenic symptoms and are WRONG WRONG WRONG
3. People who have MSG as a trigger for migraines, usually among many other triggers

I just realized I neglected to post this here: lately I've been experimenting with homemade soda. I had a few really bad results the last time I tried this (a year ago) but I decided to try Alton Brown's ginger ale out. After I assembled it all, I felt like experimenting with my own base as well. I'd been thinking of making root beer, but then had a flash of inspiration and decided to make chocolate mocha soda.

1. Should chili have beans?
2. How strongly do you feel about this?

So, lately I've been using my soda siphon again, especially at parties. A soda siphon is a little pressure vessel that takes a liter or so of water and a small CO₂ cartridge, and combines them to make fresh seltzer at home. They are best known as a classic prop comedy device. They are also much more convenient than bottled seltzer since you can keep about a hundred liters' worth of CO₂ cartridges in the space of about one 1-liter bottle, and they're also much more environmentally-friendly because you're just using municipal water, and the shipping of the cartridges takes very little fuel (I'd estimate at about a 300:1 ratio compared to the premade equivalent), and the discarded cartridges are 100% recyclable aluminum (unlike plastic drink bottles which degrade very quickly in the recycling process). Also, if you can get a good deal on cartridges, it ends up cheaper (or at least no more expensive) than the bottled stuff. The main downside is that the resulting seltzer isn't as bubbly as commercially-prrepared seltzer, but it still has most of the mouthfeel (especially when it's fresh and made with ice-cold water in an ice-cold siphon).

Since people have been interested in getting their own, there's not a whole lot you need. There are several soda siphons available (I have the iSi Soda Siphon Brushed Aluminum 2248), and then as far as cartridges go, you can often find them at restaurant suppliers or wholesalers (e.g. Cash and Carry). My most recent shipment came from Creamright, which specializes in these things (they also have N₂O cartridges for making whipped cream and/or getting high); I just use their generic CO₂ cartridges. They also have slightly better deals on siphons, too.

Anyway, the other part of the equation is that after you have a source of seltzer (and this works with bottled seltzer too), you can make your own soda with Torani syrup, which comes in a bunch of flavors, and is sweetened with sugar instead of HFCS (and they also have diet versions). I just buy that stuff at BevMo.

If you want soda that's brewed in a more traditional way, there are plenty of recipes out there for home-brewed ginger ale and root beer using a fermentation process, or you can cheat and get (or make) an appropriate syrup and mix it with seltzer (typically by making simple syrup and combining it with a flavor extract). That does generate a slightly different flavor, though, and a fermentation approach also produces a bit of alcohol (not enough to get drunk, but enough to cause problems if you have an alcohol-sensitive medical condition).

So, I finally got myself one of the portable hand-crank burr grinders. It does in fact make a much nicer grind than the mill grinder, although there's still enough powder that there's a bit of sludge at the bottom of the cup (when using my current filter setup). It's not nearly as bad as it was with the mill grinder though.

I do still want a better filter than the Finum Teeli filter I've been using. The mesh holes are fine for tea but they're a little too big for coffee. Still, it makes an excellent brew. Maybe I'll try bringing my French press in.

We did start getting pre-ground coffee at work, but I'm still using my burr grinder and beans from home, because the pre-ground coffee is terrible (not to mention WAY too finely-ground for anything other than paper filters).

Martinis: It was fun to make these for people, having practiced quite a lot lately. Not only did we finish off my bottle of Tanqueray, but we put a decent dent into the 1750mL bottle of Sapphire. Highly recommended. A+

Lately I've been drinking coffee a lot more, and experimenting with different brewing techniques. The ones I like the best are a French press, and (my current at-work favorite) a Teeli brew basket, as they do a much better job of extraction than paper filters (not to mention are easier to deal with and a bit more environmentally-friendly). The problem, of course, is that with a mill grinder, either my grind is too coarse (and so it doesn't extract properly), or there's enough powder that I end up with a thick layer of sludge at the bottom, and so drinking my cup of coffee becomes like a game of chicken.

Supposedly a burr grinder eliminates this problem because it crushes the beans down to an exact size (in a manner not dissimilar from rock-crushing equipment) rather than pulverizing it randomly, but burr grinders start at $80 for extremely basic (and not very trustworthy) models.

There are apparently some hand-cranked burr grinders out there, and I wouldn't be opposed to trying one of those, but finding specific ones seems to be a bit of a challenge. The two I found on Amazon seem decent but they come from third-party merchants and so I'd like to be sure I'm getting something worth the inevitable hassle. REI sells one of them that's intended to be portable (always a plus) and supposedly pretty good, so I could probably just swing by REI on my way home someday. Has anyone used that one?