Meat cake

It's meat cake day! No winter birthday celebration is complete without a layer cake in meat form. I formed the patties with a divot in the center, so when meat cake puffs up in the oven, we will end up a flatter top instead of the usual dome that would need to be trimmed off for cake duty.

Ta Da! Meat Cake. Frosted with mashed potatoes. With bacon roses. Thank you sous chef MK for wonderful chopping and shopping skills.

We would have encountered fewer structural issues had we used instant mashed potatoes and a more traditional dry meat loaf recipe. But we wanted a tasty moist meat cake instead of 15 pounds of novelty meat brick. A turkey and mushroom layer on top, a roasted veggie beef layer on bottom. And instead of the usual ketchup, there's a sun dried tomato and olive pesto in between the layers. Delicious meat cake.

And that's not all. Fish in cake form.

And veggie cake. Eggplant and squash with 3 kinds of puree filling. Sweet potato, celeriac, and garlic russet potato. Topped with a parmesan crisp.

And mushroom cake. (I know. stretching it. turn your head sideways.)

And butter in cake form. Thank you Stuart for assorted sodas that don't taste like sodas. Such flavors as cucumber and rose petals and espresso.

Somebody ate a mouthful of butter thinking it was cake! Ha!

Fudgie the Whale Carvel cake makes an appearance. Ice cream in cake form! The fluke and blow hole was especially delicious.

And to finish up Winter Birthday Celebration 2008, Megan brings red velvet cupcakes in entree form. Go Megan! The butter is a starburst candy.

Hari-kari

While having my coffee at the dining table this morning, I see out of the corner of my eye a brown blur aimed squarely at my noggin. Feeling like prey first thing in the morning wakes you up much better than any cup of Costa Rican. The labrador retriever in Preston wants to fetch the dying kamikaze dive bombing hawk that smacked itself against the window. This appears to be a somewhat endangered-like sharp shinned hawk. Can any of the bird watchers in the audience identify this one? If the other hawks are similarly prone to committing suicide with windows, they'd be extinct soon.

Unagi from the frozen section of Mitsuwa Marketplace. These are surprisingly good for frozen food that takes seconds to heat up. It has umami.

Winter stores

It's the tomato sauce time of the year. This year's Summer of Garden Neglect has produced much less bounty than last year. But we will make do and be grateful for with what we have. Thankfully, supermarkets and Costco have been invented so I'm in no danger of starvation this winter.

I went totally nuts at the Super H Mart bulk bins. All sorts of flavored and dried and pickled fish products. The octopus jerky and candied anchovy snacks were especially delicious. All you pasty white people gagging right now need to get over your food prejudices and keep an open mind. Delicious is delicious in any culture.

I only bought this because she reminded me of those WW2 Rosie the Riveter "We Can Do It." posters. I had no clue what these were when I threw her into the shopping cart.

Tomato sauce. And crimini mushroom tapenade. If I had a basement, I'd totally have a giant freezer chest. And I'd buy an entire hormone free grass fed cow to fill it.

I made Nancy chocolate toffee chunk cookies for Greg's party tonight. I even followed the recipe. It was painful to do so.

Spicy death

Tuna green curry. Post-travel laziness and a disgusting plague caught from snotty disease ridden children calls for throwing the dregs of the pantry and refrigerator into a pot with something strong and spicy. We will battle the plague with spices and fish sauce.

Pop wrecks

Hannah doing her best Britney on a Starbucks run. Bring on he papparazzi!

Lullaby Bunny plays Rock-A-Bye baby, vibrates, then puts you to sleep when you tug on the handle between the legs. I practiced some self restraint and did not point out some of the disturbing connotations of Lullaby Bunny to the harried father.

A rare quiet moment for Naomi. The camera does not capture her devil child tendencies. How could something so small be so loud?

Hannah and I got tattoos like drunken sailors on shore leave. Though I doubt drunken sailors would specify Finding Nemo tattoos. Britney might though.

Slow Fasting

Bakeries remind me of my failures with all things yeast. But I will not give up! I will learn to bake yeast breads in my lifetime!

Hurry Up Slow Food! Waiting in line with Jenne and Aaron for the Slow Food Nation festival makes me impatient for the deliciousness inside. The food may be slow, but I want it now now now!

I wonder if I'd get kicked out if I took a bite.

The charcuterie pavilion. The bunny and pig feet terrine was surprisingly good. Mmmm... Pork. If I was a pig, this is how I would want to end up. Sadly, the line was insanely long the rest of the day, one can never have enough cured meats. There is such a thing as slow food that is too slow. Now now now!

The honey tasting section! Coffee infused honey was very interesting. Would be great with ice cream. I spent many minutes commiserating with the bee keepers about bee colony collapse disorder. But then ADHD distracted me with fishies.

Fishies! We learned about white and marble fleshed salmon being underutilized and generally wasted because people aren't used to the color. But this is totally just a marketing problem. All that is needed is to stop treating it as a genetic anomaly and position it as a rare delicacy. If I was Dictator of the World, I'd hawk marble salmon as a super high-end choice and charge twice what normal pink salmon goes for. Trademark a new made-up vaguely Northwest Indian tribe sounding name for it and before you know it, what was once fertilizer and cat food becomes the new regional specialty. Rather than try to sell it to supermarkets, I'd start evangelizing the high end restaurants to build awareness and set the notion of a high end price in the marketplace. Just need a few PR tricks to get some buzz and awareness in the dining and wine media. Yuppie foodies will totally fall for this ploy. And since traditional grilling and pan searing salmon preparations don't highlight the marbled and mottled coloring, I'd shift the emphasis of the marble salmon recipes towards things like cured and smoked salmon to emphasize the color difference. Marble colored lox would totally be awesome! All it takes is a little bit of imagination. But I'm not Dictator of the World yet, so I won't be able to profit from this. 

Lots of pickled things, but I didn't see any Germans.

Smoked beer. Like combining cigarettes and booze. I can tackle two vices in one!

Native American foods. Bison stew delicious! Now I want to go hunt me some Bison. And by "hunt," I meant getting back in line and getting another helping.

The Ice Cream pavilion. The yogurt and salty caramel ones are my favorite. My little Costco ice cream maker will never make ice cream with this smooth texture. If I was Dictator of the World, I would have a few PacoJet's at my disposal to make ice cream. And I would have Oompa Loompa's to help with labor.

Plane crazy

The airport "limousine" is optimistically named. Sigh. Less than 3 days on the ground, and I'm heading back to California already. I'll just have to squeeze all my restaurant hopping in the limited time I have at the airport. 

Korean draft beer is good.

So-so bulgogi. I guess most airport food is of similarly overpriced quality all over the world.

I found a gelato stand in Korea! Black sesame and yogurt flavoured gelato. Surprisingly good. And the yogurt gelato texture was spot on. I got two spoons so I can share with myself.

Black bean tea tastes like dirt. The dirt that the beans grew in. Blech.

Colonel Sanders looks Asian. I'm not sure this will go over well in Kentucky.

And one last fiery seafood tofu stew pot. Then onto the airplane for the 12 hour flight back to LA! Aie! (And yes Meg, I did eat all that.)

Cold feet

It's the start of wedding season. Wedding season pains me because I'm always tempted to open the boxes to play with the toys.

Crazy 95+ weather this weekend. I had a giant list of gardening and household tasks to do, but I'm just going to sit in the pool all weekend and marinate.

So hot even the new fishies are hiding.

And so hot that the fava beans are flowering too early.

And so hot that the angels trumpet flowers aren't so fragrant anymore.

So hot that the shrimp plant has turned completely pink.

Preston trying to cool things down.

Capered crusader

Pan seared red snapper with lemon caper butter pan sauce. Very nice. Very very nice.

Seeing red

Lilypads! Cross your fingers, maybe the water lily will flower this year. Will it be red? Or yellow? Or white?

Warming temperatures make cannas more colorful. I totally want a necktie with this color scheme. This is one of the few non-edible plants left in the backyard.

This is kind of scary looking.

Chorizo black bean molé chili. I wish there were limes on the tree. This could use a touch of lime juice and queso fresco.

2 lbs of lentils for 50 cents! Some mirepoix, chicken stock, a smoked hamhock, and bay leaves. Lentil soup warms the soul.