Anger Burger

This is the exact kind of thing that Mike the Viking goes totally berserk over.  The blander and dryer the biscuit, the happier he is.  I suppose in this he’s the most British man I’ve ever known, possibly more even than actual British men.  I mean, it’s not a contest, everyone relax.

So: Welsh cakes.  There are many recipes¹ for them and if you’re interested, I encourage you to make them.  I’ll get around to it sometime in the next couple of months, just as soon as I have a kitchen again.  (Sorry, give me a moment while I clear the snot bubbles off my keyboard.)  Anyway, they are actually griddled, like a pancake.  But in flavor and texture they are closer to a sweet American buttermilk biscuit, or even a soft scone.  Very strange!  Really, you should take a whack at it.

Mike saw these in the package from Wales and threw his axe between myself and them, thus telling me to keep my hands off them.  I waited until he went out to fight jötnar and sampled one for myself.

To our great surprise, I really liked this version, and he was not wild about them.  He actually said they were too dry, which shocked me.  I mean, yes, they were very dry.  Which is normal, I think – don’t inhale while taking a bite from them or you’ll get crumb lung – but he said that homemade ones were better.  All I know is that these were surprisingly rich and buttery tasting, and despite needing to drink a glass of water, I couldn’t stop eating the one I had intended to take only a nibble from.

Truly, it rekindled my interest in a treat I had written off.  The world is a strange and confusing place.

¹ Just Google it, I don’t actually have a favorite recipe.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m going into the crazy-laugh stage.  I drank four or maybe five beers in about three hours last night, I can’t really remember, and then I made a grilled cheese sandwich and watched House Hunters International while vowing to cut the ears off of people who remark snottily that the master bedroom is a little smaller than they “thought it was going to be.”

You see, we’re leaving the Guacamole House.  Our beloved Guacamole House.  But it’s okay because we’re moving to be near family, and that’s good, but then there’s this part in between where we have to play possessions-Tetris.  And I fucking hate possessions-Tetris.

I hate it so much that my breakfast today is Excedrin, super-mega-C and some 7-Up because that’s what my stomach can handle.

That’s not entirely true, I also tried these cheese-flavored oatcakes from Wales because the interior package was busted open from the hilarious packing job.  I pushed the paper box back into shape to take the photo, but it was gruesome.

I like oatcakes already, and these with cheese were totally tasty, as you might imagine.  I had to look up Caerphilly cheese to see what it was supposed to taste like, and there are few descriptions outside “salty” and “mild” which is good, because that’s what the oatcakes tasted like.  So, success, I suppose.

Apparently the slang for Caerphilly cheese is “the crumblies” which is entirely too accurate for what happened to the oatcakes.  ALSO.  The town of Caerphilly has a festival called The Big Cheese, which as near as I can tell is a Renaissance Fair with cheese, and I honestly can’t think of a better time unless there’s also a Firefly/Serenity convention there at the same time.

My friends Leesa and Aaron just came through L.A. on their way to live in a new city, and after having not seen them for years it was too little crammed into too short a space of time.  But at least they are on the west coast, so now there’s a chance we can be in the same tribe after the apocalypse.

First night of dinner we had salad, garlic bread and a chowder I cobbled together from potatoes, fresh corn, salmon and shrimp.  It was tasty, though I left the shrimp whole and regretted it when no one could actually maneuver a shrimp onto their spoons without either cramming the too-large hunk into their mouth or by biting at it, getting chowder all over their faces and then dropping the rest back into the bowl and splattering themselves with blow-back.  And by “no one” I mean me.

Waffles for breakfast, dur.  What else?

It totally incapacitated me.  I normally make waffles for dinner so it’s not such a big deal when I pass out afterward, but having them for breakfast means I struggled to remain conscious for the entire rest of the day.

I’m genuinely getting sleepy just thinking about it.  I don’t know what it is about carbohydrates in the morning, but they’re basically a date rape drug for me.

The Thing That Lurks helped me make up the spare bed:

I’m not sure how else I would have gotten eye boogers and mystery dirt inside the fresh sheets otherwise.

When we first moved to Los Angeles we fell prey to what I briefly and angrily called “Mexican Fake-Outs.”  They would appear to be Mexican restaurants, and with names like “Los Burritos” you’d be a fool not to expect burritos, right?  But of course not.  Inside you’d find a sort of peculiar, vaguely Mexican breakfast and burger joint.  A diner, sort of.  With some Mexican foods on the menu of course, and staffed by Mexican people, and frequented by Mexican patrons.  But if you actually wanted to eat Mexican food, you would not pick these places.

It wasn’t until Mike the Viking christened them “dinerias” that my brain re-oriented itself.

They are not Mexican restaurants.  They are diners run by Mexicans.  And they are everywhere.  They are more prevalent than 7-11s.  They are the bodegas of Los Angeles, except you can’t buy cigarettes or beer or anything.  But you can get pastrami burritos.  I swear it!  I’ve never ordered one, but almost every dineria has them.  Also what many of them refer to as “California Burritos” which are burritos with french fries inside.  Mike swears by these, but I still have dignity so I haven’t eaten one.

Anyway, the menus are expansive and confusing and it’s often best to order without even looking at them.  Our favorite of the dinerias is Tom’s #7, also referred to by us as “Crash Test Tom’s.”

Their menu says that you can only have breakfast until noon, but we know better.  Last time Mike was there in the afternoon he ordered a burger, turned around to leave and saw a man eating a delicious-looking chicken-fried steak.  Aghast, Mike asked the man “You can order breakfast after noon?!” and the man shrugged and said, “I did, yeah.  I drove all the way¹ from Studio City for their chicken-fried steak!”  Mike says he didn’t even remember how his burger tasted because he was so sad he didn’t know he could get chicken-fried steak.

It may look a little pedestrian, but it’s a solid specimen.  The gravy is not gluey-tasting, but sausagey, peppery and milky.  The eggs were perfectly cooked, the hashbrowns good enough, and the steak itself was very tender.  It had a cornmeal crust on it that I found disappointing because I dislike cornmeal crust, but Mike enjoyed it and that’s really what matters.

His hot sauce application cracks me up.

My avocado burger was excellent.  It’s nothing special, but it was precisely how I like it.  The bun was perfectly toasted, there was just the right amount of sauce and there was at least a half an avocado on the thing.  I have simple wants when it comes to avocado burgers, and that’s it.

It’s a great relief knowing that Tom’s #7 exists.  Anyone who has ever had a hangover knows that nothing cures like having both huevos rancheros and a chocolate milkshake in the same place at the same time.
¹ “All the way” makes us laugh because Studio City is maybe 4 miles away, but Angelinos are funny about distances.

I invited myself and my visiting dad over to my friend Hatherly’s house on Friday, and we’re going to be grilling up some vegetarian feastery.  So here’s the thing: I don’t know shit about grilling, I really don’t.  It confuses and infuriates me.  When anyone mentions meatless grilling I can only think of those really dry, bland kebabs formed of mushrooms, onion pieces and possibly some withered, almost bitter bell pepper pieces.

SURELY THERE ARE BETTER PLANS.

Oh yeah, and I think everyone eats fish.  So seafood ideas are also acceptable.

In unrelated news:

This was my dinner last night.  I’ve been horribly recalcitrant in recording my dad’s visit here in Los Angeles, and I’m vowing now to try harder and document that this shit is really happening.  I’d also like to point out that we busted out the big plates last night.

Well, I’ve finally done it.  I’ve grown a goddamn passion fruit.

I’ve been eyeing them with increasing impatience over the last few weeks, since they ostensibly turn dark before falling off the vine and then have an additional ripening period after that.  I mean, I don’t want to tell them how to do it or anything, but I’m pretty sure they’re taking too long.

And then!  This morning!  This one was totally green about three or four days ago and slowly started to turn ruddy.

This morning it was laying on the ground, which is apparently normal: they fall, you pick them up.  Another reason to love passion fruit.  Laziest harvest ever.  Bitchin!  Now it sits in a windowsill and waits to turn wrinkled, at which point it is done and we will fall upon it with the torpid bloodlust of a morally obstinate vampire finally allowed to marry a teenage girl.

Speaking of predatory!

He’s really slow and we named him Time Warner!

Our last morning at Cannon Beach found us in a sit-down breakfast joint that helpfully reminded me: it’s easy to hit mediocre waffles with a magic wand ♥bink!♥ by heaping them with fresh fruit and an entire bowl of fresh whipped cream.  Whenever in doubt, pile it on.

For my birthday this year, my step-brother married a Japanese woman¹.  We immediately enslaved her.

These are probably her plans to escape cleverly disguised by being written in Japanese.

I don’t even know if she likes cooking, and it doesn’t really matter.

She should have thought about this all before she agreed to marry a poor student in New York.  She should have speculated that he’d have a family of grabby, gluttonous, conspiratorial women who would steal her away and never let her leave the kitchen.

It’s not my fault that she wasn’t familiar with our ways.

To her credit, she took one look at us and then reasoned that we’d need about 40x more tempura than normal people would.  The photo below is merely one of literally – and I mean literally – about twenty batches of fried vegetables.

And then we made her make sushi.  Ha!

She brought her own apron.

Because my step-dad doesn’t really eat raw fish, she made cooked beef sushi with avocado, cream cheese, radish sprouts, carrot and shiso leaf.  It was so seriously fucking good that I called immigration and told them to block Eriko from leaving the country.  They hesitated, but then I told them about this sushi and they agreed.

In conclusion: happy birthday to me.

¹They weren’t married this year and he thought of me 0% when marrying her, but you know how my brain works.

I’ll make this short, because you’ve heard me grouse about this before:

• Christopher’s Big Cherry
• Twin Bing
• Chase’s Cherry Mash
• Cherry Blossom

So, a few weeks ago commenter David Farris Creations mentioned on Anger Burger’s Facebook profile that he saw this cherry-peanut confection and offered to buy me one.  I demurred and then regretted it but that is what it is like to be me.

So, near Cannon Beach is the psychotronic terror-zone of Seaside.  In Seaside are several massive candy stores that specialize in regional,  “vintage” and strange candies, where I looked for a Owyhee Cherry Cocktail and immediately found one.  I had my doubts since it’s made by the Idaho Candy Company, makers of the Idaho Spud a.k.a., what would it taste like if we chocolate-coated a latex camping pad?

The Cherry Cocktail falls into the category of “Obviously Formed with an Ice Cream Scoop” candy, which also doesn’t inspire confidence.

But guess what?  I think this is my dream candy.

The Cherry Cocktail is packed with peanuts and ONCE AGAIN I’m sure I taste coconut but it isn’t listed on the ingredients.  The center is actually maraschino-flavored instead of just being a glacé cherry, and the whole thing is in perfect proportion to itself.  My sister and mother both had a bite of the Cherry Cocktail and each agreed: not too sweet, decent chocolate and good fresh roasted peanut flavor.  There really was little to be improved about it, save making an actual homemade gourmet version with premium chocolate.

Now I can rest easy.  Minus the part where I can’t find them back in Los Angeles.

West siiiiide, bitches.

I’ve decided to give up thinking I could ever live on the East Coast.  Me and the West Coast are best friends for ever and ever.

This is my first visit to Cannon Beach, Oregon, and I’ll be back.  It’s a little busy for my taste, but the town is tooth-ache sweet and dangerously easy to exhaustedly stroll around while cramming fresh made you-name-it into your mouth.  So, so unlike my usual camping trips up the Washington coast line, where roasted hot dogs without ashes stuck to them are haut cuisine.

I risked some pizza covered in fresh tomato slices last night, and my colon was too distracted by the pound of saltwater taffy I put in it to notice.  It happens sometimes, and it’s hard to explain even to myself, but I went a year being hypersensitive to both tomatoes and sugar, and the day I gorge on both I felt great.  Sand between the toes imbues one with powers of supernatural strength, I guess.

This is about a restaurant, but it also isn’t.  In fact, it mostly isn’t.

Friends of mine are soon moving to Olympia from Texas, and I’ve been walking around town with fresh eyes these last few days.  I wonder if everyone views their own hometowns with the eye of retrospect.  Was it better 10, 15 years ago?  It would take me weeks to draft only the beginning of a rant about this town’s charms and flaws, but the older I get the more I find myself not caring as strongly as I used to.  It’s just a town.  Full of busybodies.  It is familiar to me and therefore comforting.

An entire microcosm of this was walking to Old School Pizza with my dad on a recent evening.  I’m sure my friend who owns OSP would be horrified to see me tell you that I’ve been eating at Old School since I was 15 years old, but there it is: for 17 years, this pizza has been my pizza of choice.

There’s a lot of legitimate dislike for OSP, and not even because of the pizza.  The restaurant is loud, visually cluttered and occasionally sticky to the touch. The young workers behind the counter are too cool for school and are likely to pop their gum in your face.  Woe is to any poor bastard who needs to use the restroom.

But none of that really matters, because there is pizza.

Not just any pizza.  The pizza that for whatever reason, floats my boat.  I know plenty of locals whose boat is decidedly not floated by this pizza, and I respect that in the distant way of people who fancy themselves fair and thoughful but are actually judgemental.  I’ve had a lot of really excellent pizza in my life, but none of it has filled the space where Oldschool goes.  Nothing else has the hot summer afternoons, the unfulfilled crushes, the woozy bar-breaks, the rainy day depressions, the sudden and total need to leave the shop before your heart breaks under the brittle but relentless weight of all time that has passed.

But, shake it off.  Because there is pizza.

See that cheese pizza up there?  It irritated me because the slice on the right was unusually small and slightly under-cheesed.  And I hesitated at the counter for a moment, holding it, wondering if I should say something before realizing, this is just the way it is.  Just because I revere this as an unmoving monument to my own adolesence doesn’t mean it’s without reproach.  In fact, the opposite may be true: that little runty slice is there to slap some sense into me.  Don’t be such a shmoopy old lady, it says.  Quit it with the rosy watercolor memories.

Because there is pizza!