It's Steve (now in blog form)

I’m not sure what this joint is trying to sell me on.  I like hot wings as much as the next guy, but is suicide really a good upsell?  How about a free drink or some fries? That would be nicer than euthanasia I think.

The good- After the rain passes, LA sometimes has moments when it’s crystal clear.  At those moments, it’s really very beautiful.

The bad- I came across this in the grocery store a couple of days ago (yeah, I take my camera everywhere now).  Just thinking about this stuff makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.  First, how lazy do you have to be for the standard mac and cheese recipe to be overly burdensome? Second, bacon flavoring? Take that, middle America.

The squirrelly- I’ve got squirrels in my trash can.  This is a combination of cute and horrifying.  It turns out that the squirrels in this part of LA carry the bubonic plague.  Stupid plague squirrels.

I took the family down the third street today to walk around and return some presents (I you think it might have been something you sent us, you’re probably right). While we were down there I saw some things that I really liked.

Cauliflower is kind of scary- I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about cauliflower. Obviously, it’s more important a vegetable(?) than I had imagined. The farmers’ market down there had types that actually made me do a double take.

Fractals are awesome self-repeating sets.  They are also apparently a flavor of cauliflower.  The guy in the booth said this is a young Italian cauliflower.  I think it’s an orbital fractal. Math types, any help here? Where are you, Kunal?

The purple and orange ones are some sort of crazy hybrid from Cornell in the 70′s.  People did a lot of drugs in the 70′s.  

Who says Hanukkah isn’t fun?- I’m totally bummed that I missed this

I was in Barcelona last week as a part of my Euro travel extravaganza.  It is one of my very favorite cities to visit (Beijing is probably the other in my top two).  It isn’t that there is so much to do exactly.  It’s just a beautiful city with a really cool vibe.  Check out all of my Barcelona pics here.  Anyway, this post is just about the food.  Some of this stuff is just weird.

Tapas?- I go back and forth between loving and hating tapas (Pupus to my Hawaiian friends. For those of you in the south, think hot wings for foreigners).  For the first couple of days, it’s really fun to have meals where they keep bringing a variety of small dishes to sample family style.  After a few days however, I want to punch the waiters in the face for their inability to bring me a substantial dinner that doesn’t look like it came off the kids’ menu.  It’s really a question of timing.

Frigging fish…- Tapas choices one evening included this poorly translated gem: “Frigged little fish in andalusian style”.  I wonder if they have a professional little fish frigger in back, or if they buy them already frigged.

So fancy it hurts- We had a round of tapas at a fancy joint that ran from 8:30 to midnight over 14 courses (hey Amit, this is the place we couldn’t get into last time).  Some of it was very good, but I kept getting distracted as my ass was falling asleep.  Their specialties included gold covered macadamian nuts and gold covered chocolates.  I find this to be a pretty poor practice.  Gold doesn’t taste like anything, and I worry that it won’t digest leading to an eventual “golden egg” on my end so to speak.

They also brought out some sort of goo delicately presented in an egg shell.  I unfortunately tried to eat some of the garnish which turned out just to be a pile of rock salt (I had been drinking).

Screw you, hippie!- Barcelona is a town of meat eaters.  Iberian ham is absolutely delicious.  It would be like prosciutto’s cooler older brother.  They serve it at every meal as best as I can tell.  They also have real butcher shops where you can tell that meat comes from animals the way god intended, rather than giving the misleading impression that it grows in Styrofoam trays wrapped in Saran wrap.

Spain has great wine- Spanish wines are excellent and relatively cheap.  That spells good times in my book.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any pics to show around the wines in Barcelona.  For some inexplicable reason, all of the photos I took while drinking wine came out crappy/blurry.  There must be something wrong with my camera.