Chips ahoy

Last night for dinner I had a handful of Wavy Lays potato chips out of the bag with a glass of cranberry juice. That was it. Nothing else. I think they were stale too. The chips belonged to Scott and were the only thing in the house that was open and that didn't require any sort of procedure to eat. It was late and I was exhausted and overwhelmed. All I could manage was a bag of chips. Sad, I know.

Coffee from the gods

I kidnapped Colin on Monday to help me lug boxes out of my car and into my new house, unbeknownst to him (therefore being a kidnapping). It wasn't really a kidnapping. We were to spend Monday together at Yosh's smelling pretty and I offered to carpool across the Bridge together. And, I thought, since he's in my car and my house isn't that far from Yosh's, maybe he'll help me unload.

He was a good sport about it. And, when we were done, we went to get coffee at the best and most random spot ever! Ever! It's a cart in the front of his dad's workplace on that tiny stretch of Linden between Gough and Octavia near that grassy spot with the wierd-looking temple thing. Our coffee was brewed by a nice, tall man with gray curly hair. He and some other nice man (but who wasn't nearly as tall) chatted with us about bikes and housing foundation.

I ordered a drip coffee and poured in some milk and sugar, which I then regretted. My first sip was divine; it was coffee like I never tasted before. Rich and not at all bitter. I felt bad for messing with its perfection with milk and sugar. What would it have tasted like black? I kept telling Colin how good it was for the next hour and, of course, he knew.

With coffee so good and so close, I might just ditch my organic Mayan beans, coffee grinder, and French press, and take a little stroll every morning, afternoon, and evening.

Milkshake dud

Last night was awkward fun. I had been considering starting a new blog for a while. The concept, simply put, is this: I would post a Craigslist personal ad for myself, go on the dates, and write about it. This would be perhaps a weekly or semi-weekly endeavor. I envisioned it testing my creativity and my writing skills, along with providing amusement (since I assume these dates to be lame) for me and my friends. It would be a social experiment and I would be the next Emile Durkheim, or Max Weber, or Michel Foucault. Okay, or maybe the next Dan Savage, if I'm lucky.

So last night was a test-run. I met this guy named Adam for milkshakes at Fat Apple's on MLK in north Berkeley. Fat Apple's has great milkshakes, malts especially. They're thick as bread and leave you with cheeks so sunken that you'd be mistaken for anorexic. We both ordered chocolate malts, and I thought maybe we could be friends. We shared a fondness for chocolate malts. Briefly put, the malt was awesome but the date not so much.

But I left him and Fat Apple's excited. I now had new Craigslist blog fodder.

Look out for a new blog. I'll keep you posted.

Homerun

I take back what I wrote earlier about baseball games. They can be fun and exciting. But, I found out that it's a whole other ball game sitting in the lower deck and that food discrimination abounds.

Colin and I went to an A's game last night at the Coliseum thanks to his friend Alex and Alex's free tickets. It was exciting. The A's scored four runs in the first couple of innings and Barry Zito was pitching a no-hitter up until the seventh. I found myself cheering and clapping and chanting "Zi-to! Zi-to!" in between bites of ice cream sandwich and wanting the A's to win. We had great seats, 23 rows behind homebase, where I was able to see the pitches being thrown, the faces of the players, and the chub on the Texas team. And, Colin's friend Ben caught the first foul ball of the game. It was awesome.

But as exciting as the game was, I was overwhelmed by the food madness that welcomed us on our way to our seats. I had never been to the lower deck before. I'm used to sitting up at the top in my $2 seats where the only thing I can see on the field are flecks of white pretending to be players. Up at the top deck, I waited and waited for Ice Cream Sandwich Man to come around, I dreamed of churros and believed them not to exist in Baseball Land, I yearned for beer that wasn't Miller Light.

It's a whole other world on the lower deck. It seemed like a mile of food stands stretched before us. And, it just wasn't your usual hot dog fare. There were Bratwurts, fish and chips, pizza, chicken strips, burritos, nachos, who knows what else. And the beer was decent, good even: Sierra Nevada, Guinness, Harp. I ached for nachos and got a huge cardboard container of them smothered in cheese, drizzled with sour cream from a plastic squeeze bottle, topped with chicken, with a side of jalepeno peppers. Colin had a super huge hot dog and a pretzel. And we both had Sierra Nevadas. We picked at the chicken as we walked and it was amazingly good for baseball food; really tender and flavorful.

We made it to our seats with food and beer still in our hands and I was even more amazed. So many men in green neon shirts carrying food, just for us. Round Table on one man. Drumsticks on another. There were so many of them and they came by fast. I gasped and probably clutched Colin's arm when I saw Churro Man. We both wondered if we could stuff half a churro into our bodies after all the junk we had already put into our mouths. We decided it was better to pass on the churros. But, I couldn't pass on Ice Cream Sandwich Man. I was still wanting one since the last time I went to the game just a few weeks ago. I had to fulfill that dream. I did and it was good, sweet and cold with the cookie seeming just a bit undercooked but marvelous.

But it all got me thinking about those people up at the top deck with no Churro Man, no Ice Cream Sandwich Man, and all that bad beer. Did they know what they were missing? And, did the people in the lower deck realize how privileged they were? With a couple more sips of my beer and a couple more bites of my ice cream sandwich I forgot about my socialist ideals, all the Marx I read, and the people up at the top, and happily chanted "Zi-to! Zi-to!" and cheered the A's on. Go A's!

White trash wonderland?

I love Scott. I'd marry him, if only he'd have me. Too bad he won't be leaving the life of men any time soon though. In the meantime, I have to settle with having dinner with him.

I stopped by his house (which he always corrects me in saying "your house too") last night to meet Ralph, who was aptly described as "tenaciously charming." We chatted, drank wine and cheap beer, marvelled in the craziness that is Ralph, and he made us dinner. Or rather, he opened up a bag of salad and put a frozen pizza in the oven. But that's not to suggest that dinner lacked its fair share of glory. The bag salad was topped with pine nuts, a surprising but good addition, and a pretty not-bad blue cheese dressing (when Scott asked if I liked blue cheese dressing, my unenthusiastic response was, "I'll eat it.").

The pizza wasn't bad either. I might actually say it was pleasantly tasty. It was a Safeway chicken and pesto one, popped into the oven for twenty minutes. We sat there in hunger staring at the oven and then watching bubbles form as the broiler was working its magic.

Is my life with Scott going to be filled with Tecate beer and Safeway frozen pizza? Well, at least I'll have a fancy oven to work with.

Tofu leftovers

Breakfast this morning consisted of leftovers: brown rice with my attempt two nights ago at ma po tofu. Wasn't as good as I remembered last making it and definitely not as good as Mom's, although Mom's wasn't even that good.

Lunchtime voyeur

I just got back from lunch at a place called Christopher’s Nothing Fancy Café. I was caught by the “Nothing Fancy” part since I didn’t want anything fancy for lunch and thought that I could probably get a salad or some soup, which I did. I had their Santa Fe salad with grilled chicken, avocado, mixed greens, tomatoes, and cheese. It was a good salad and not too heavily dressed, which is how I like my salads. And, the chips and salsa (I have eaten too many meals lately accompanied by complimentary chips and salsa) were some of the best I’ve had in recent memory, although it wasn’t too smart a move on my part to eat spicy salsa with sharp chips since that just aggravated the cut in my mouth from when I bit my lip last week while having dinner with Jon at a yummy Thai place on Divisadero, a short walk from his house.

But the food wasn’t the interesting part of the meal. The interesting stuff was going on at the table next to mine but on the other side of the large window, where a tiny, youngish-looking black woman went up to an older-looking white man, chatted him up, and then got into his car with him. What was going on? I was so perplexed and intrigued (this was way more captivating than the new fiction in The New Yorker).

I was certain that these two people didn’t know each other, since the woman was sitting next to another older-looking white man when I first started my meal and when that man left she asked this other man if she could join him. The second man readily agreed and they talked about nothing I could hear. He looked mesmerized. He moved from across the table to next to her. And his hands moved from playing with a napkin to playing with her hands and her lap. He let her into his car just as I was stepping out, leaving me to wonder what was going to happen next and utterly confused.

Bad cookie

I just baked bad cookies. It wasn’t my fault, really. I followed the recipe, the same recipe from my Best Recipe cookbook that never fails. It was the oven. I swear. I should have figured out something was wrong when after preheating the oven and opening the door, my face wasn’t hit with an overwhelming burst of heat. Instead, I was greeted by a comfortable warmth, the kind of warmth you’d feel if you were under a fleece throw on a chill night. I wishfully thought, “Hm…odd, but maybe this is what 350 degrees feels like.” I should have known better.

I put the cookies in there anyway and set the timer. Fifteen minutes passed and the cookies were just beginning to slowly melt. I turned up the heat and moved the rack closer to the top, hoping that the rules of physics would cook these cookies. But, nope. I set the timer for another three minutes and turned the heat up to 400. Still not done. Five more minutes and 425. Still a little bit goopy. Five more minutes and up to broil, and the cookies were still not golden brown. They were pale and soft as sponges. They looked like my belly, an unpleasant sight.

Quressa said they should be okay to eat. I was impatient and acquiesced, scraping two cookies off the cookie sheet with my spatula. They were indeed goopy and tasted like sugary butter with a strange gummy texture. Not good at all. And definitely there was no way I could send these to Eleanor at camp. I want my cookies to be the envy of all camp cookies, cookies that will make campers cry that I only sent a dozen. I will try again, once the oven gets fixed. In the meantime, I have four bad cookies with which to figure out what to do. Perhaps cookie sculptures?