jump to navigation

Monkey Monday: knee-jerk reaction edition. 1 June 2009 10:58 am

Posted by Tracy in : consumerism, convenience, cooking, friends, monkeys, people, politics, random, restaurants, work , Comments

Hey! Is anybody reading this planning to go to the Vegan Brunch book party at MooShoes tonight? I’m going to try to make it, but I’m going to have to get Isa’s autograph on Vegan With a Vengeance since my super-lucky copy of Vegan Brunch is still on its way over here (do tell me all about it, Megan!) Okay, now on with the rant.

* * * * *

Disclaimer: Only the last paragraph of this rant (the update) was written after I’d actually read the blog post in question, but I stand by everything that leapt partly-formed from my brain as soon as I saw this headline and summary:

American Dining’s Service Deficit

from The Atlantic Food Channel by Nina and Tim Zagat

About 70 percent of complaints recorded by the Zagat Survey are about service; far more than food. How to fix our service problem.

PAY THEM! I shouted at my computer screen, startling the cat who was climbing around on my desk in a futile effort to get my attention. (more…)

Report: “Room to Grow” mini-conference at NYU, 4 February 2009 10 February 2009 1:31 pm

Posted by Tracy in : agriculture, environment, events, garden, geekery, local food, nyc, people, school , Comments

As you probably guessed from the title of this post, on Wednesday 4 February 2009, I attended the “Room to Grow: Envisioning Urban Agriculture at NYU” mini-conference. It was a great way of getting up to speed on gardening efforts around campus, and inspiring pictures of city farms and gardens always do a Tracy good. Plus I got to plant kale in a nifty newspaper pot (you can bet I snagged an extra to dissect, in the hopes that I can learn the relevant origami), hang out with other NYU gardening geeks, and there was tasty food, much of it locally grown. All told, it was a fabulous evening. (more…)

Foto Friday: Tracy cooks a benefit dinner. 19 December 2008 1:43 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, dessert, eating, friends, people, pictures , Comments

So. Earlier this month I wrote about some fundraisers for Mark Zolun of Iraila Mediterranean Rustica, who has cancer and no health insurance (someday, I will live in a 21st century first world country that does more than pay lip service to its small business owners, but today is not that day). While there’s still a chance I might make it to one of the events in Eugene, in the meantime my mom and I cooked up a scheme to have a little benefit dinner of our own at my parents’ house in Westfield, NJ. The menu: ricotta gnocchi in hazelnut brown butter sauce, with two different kinds of roasted vegetables on the side.

The spread.

I was going to attempt babas au rhum for dessert, but last-minute sanity (and a shortage of flour) prevailed. Besides, I was already tempting fate by imitating one of Iraila’s signature dishes — two would just have been pushing my luck too far. (more…)

A few good causes. 3 December 2008 7:04 am

Posted by Tracy in : eugene, friends, news, nyc, people, restaurants, time versus money , Comments

Eugeniuses especially, take note:

I got some sad news over the weekend and I’ve decided to stop keeping it to myself. Mark Zolun, chef/co-owner of Eugene’s Iraila and all around great guy, has bladder cancer. (Some of you may remember that one of my first TracyFood posts was about my interview with Mark for my first food studies class.) He was diagnosed in September, right after he and his partner Kenne closed the restaurant to prepare for their transition to an exciting new location in Eugene, and the fact that he has this interim period to heal is a bright spot in his favor. Not so favorable is the fact that, like many small business owners, Mark has no health insurance. What he does have, however, is friends. (Some of whom are across the country wishing we could do more, and gritting teeth about being enraged at cancer yet again…. grrr.)

Catering jobs are out as a source of income, but there’s a fund set up in his name at Washington Mutual (again, that’s Mark Zolun, account #3411304029, and donations are tax deductible). More deliciously, there are some benefit events coming up in and around Eugene, and I would love it if anybody reading this checks them out or helps in any other way. (more…)

Foto Friday: back to Nepal 12 September 2008 8:43 am

Posted by Tracy in : breakfast, eggs, nepal, people, pictures, potatoes, restaurants, tea, travel , Comments

I know, you thought I’d forgotten all about the Nepal picture project, and to be honest, for a while there, I thought I’d forgotten all about it, too. But New York’s American Museum of Natural History is food for Tracy nostalgia, and last week Peter and I had a visit from an out-of-town friend who provided me with all the excuse I needed to revisit the dinosaurs of my childhood. Hot diggety have those ever been updated! (Bear with me; I’ll bring this ramble back around to Nepal soon.) Not so very updated but still impressive were all the dioramas, which, as Abi (the aforementioned out-of-town friend) pointed out, are sort of a dying art form but which look very different once you think about all the work someone has to do to create and maintain them. I’d never thought about it that way before, but it made me consider those darkened halls of stuffed and mounted animals in a whole new (if dim) light. The displays of world peoples, however, were still just weird — even weirder now that I’ve seen more of the parts of the world that they purport to represent.

Which brings me to the Hall of Asian Peoples, where I could not find a single reference to Nepal. Lots about India, China, and even Tibet, to the point where I wondered when the displays had been created, and whether Nepal was on some kind of anthropological blacklist then. Next time I go back I’ll try to take notes on the exhibits and try to figure out where they fit on the Tibet vs. China timeline as I know it — they certainly seemed to represent a culture which I’ve learned think of as extremely endangered and better preserved on the Nepali side of the Himalayas. But I digress. The whole “no Nepal in the Hall of Asian Peoples” phenomenon was so weird that it made me want to get back to my long-neglected picture-posting project. So here I go. (more…)