Some restaurants feature menu copy that was clearly written by a disgruntled niece or nephew; many others don’t even try to fake it. If you’re turned off from dining at a restaurant because its website is shitty, you are probably a douchebag. And that’s OK! Because I’m sure the owner is glad that you’re not showing up in their dining room to lecture them about stuff they’re too busy to deal with.

Reasons why Crescent Moon Bakery’s website is awesome:

• The owner, Meerwais Azizi, is listed as both the founder and “president” of CMB.
• WARNING: UNIQUE TASTE SENSATIONS
• Clicking on a random empty space (for real!) on the front page will take you to the Muslim prayer schedule for Minneapolis.
• 8 robot gifs!!!
• 
• Links to local food media actually just links to their front pages instead of relevant articles.
• All of the tables are different colors and sizes.
• Only 1 instance of Papyrus.

I love you, Crescent Moon Bakery. Never change.

I’m so glad that my (imagined) namesake pastry tastes as good as it sounds. Incredibly, frighteningly flaky, it makes a great accompaniment to the bakery’s fancy, Clover-brewed coffee. It’s so flaky that, like Lovecraft’s geometrically bizarre vision of the ancient city of R’lyeh, it simply defies comprehension. I wanted to grab a baker and demand to know their secrets, but I’m sure that the knowledge would drive me insane.

The custard in the center is topped with half of an apricot. I’m inclined to slather the whole damn thing with jam, but that’s just me trying to make the most of a fleeting experience. I’m dreading the end of this pastry.

<LIFE UPDATE>

I’m still a professional cook, but at a different restaurant in the Twin Cities. I’m also still writing for Heavy Table, but Eat Me Daily is, unfortunately, currently defunct.

I got a haircut. UHHHHHHH

</LIFE UPDATE>

My little sister is coming into town today, so I’ve been buying and cooking up snacks for her to eat while she’s here. I can’t remember what she likes, though. Eggs? Everyone likes eggs! Shit.

I have no bread for toast! I haven’t baked anything for months! And fuck that, I’m not buying the Rustica hype and getting my bread from them! (I think their bread is fine, but I’m kind of over the whole “this purveyor is the Jesus of purveyors” BS. If you do it at home, it will probably be better.)

Mark Bittman’s recipe for French bread is great because all you really need is a functioning oven and a food processor. Mine, a modest 4-cup Cuisinart, couldn’t really deal with Bittman’s original proportions, so I halved the recipe and made two fucking hipster skinny-jean-sized loaves. There are four ingredients in this! Including water! Will the wonders never cease?

My first piece for EMD, a short analysis of a scene from Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I, will be published this afternoon. The series I’ll be working on will be analyses of “food scenes” from film and television. The pieces will be going up every Wednesday from now on, and I hope you guys’ll check em out!

<3 <3 <3

Man! Being poor kind of sucks, guys! But somehow I can still manage to scrounge something good up while still keeping an eye on “SALE” tags. Though most of my food comes from the regular cheapo grocery store, there are a few luxuries that I prefer to get at my local food co-op. (In my case, it’s the Eastside Co-op in Northeast Minneapolis.) That would include my rare purchases of meat, all of my cheeses, potatoes, and eggs.

When I was planning on making this pie, the co-op happened to have put Capriko on sale, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try that instead of Emmentaler cheese. Capriko, as it turns out, is an awesomely nutty cheese that is produced by Nordic Creamery, based in Wisconsin. It hit just the right savory notes with the spinach, mushrooms, and paprika in the dish and made it swoon-worthy.

I adapted the recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, and added some things that I happened to have on hand. The crust was made from 6T local unsalted butter + 1.5C flour + 4-5T milk. I didn’t prebake the crust and it was fine. The mixture isn’t super goopy by any means, so it didn’t hurt it at all. Saute the vegetables first. You probably want about a cup-and-a-half to two cups of filling. I used mushrooms, onions, and spinach, but you can do whatever you want. Then I threw some thyme, Dijon mustard, and cayenne pepper into the mix for spice.

I shredded the capriko (you can use any similarly nutty cheese) and layered that on the bottom of the crust. The eggy part was about 3 eggs, 1.5C milk, and 2T flour. Layer the vegetables on top of the cheese and then pour the eggy stuff on top. Bake in a 375 oven for 40 minutes or so until it firms up. Finish with some smoked paprika salt

We fucking demolished the pie in two days. Definitely a record.

Eating for health is simple, and it’s ridiculous that people even need Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” to tell them what to do. If you’re too fucking lazy to read “In Defense of Food,” or even to glance at the cover of the book, which states his motto, then you’re fucked.

Rather than obsessing over which type or nationality of cabbage you’re eating, how about you put some effort into helping out people who don’t get a choice in that regard? Being all twinkly-eyed and acting like “ooooh local fooooods are so good for me AND my local economy!” and paying out the nose for your CSA while people in your city go to bed hungry every night is a pile of crap, and you know it.

You could, maybe, try to work with local farmers or restaurants to redistribute their excess food — and there is always excess food that is wasted nearly every week — to food shelves and soup kitchens in the city. A big reason why they can’t or won’t do it is transport issues, so why not volunteer to take up that load for them? If you’re not holding your farmer accountable for that sort of thing, what the hell kind of “community” are you purporting to be a part of?

The question of culinary ethicality has been plaguing me since I took a turn toward vegetarianism in high school, and it seems to have rarely gotten a thorough philosophical treatment. (I haven’t read “Eating Animals” yet, but I’m planning on it.) At the moment, I believe that it is most important to consider the kind of labor that went into producing your food.

It’s a consideration that is often eschewed as “too ugly” or “too much trouble” to think about. But you know what? Even the most fuzzy wuzzy-looking CSA could have slave-like working conditions for the people who pick your arugula. As a benefactor of that labor, you have a moral obligation to find out.

I’ve been going on for too long, so I’ll save you the near-obligatory explanatory paragraphs. If you’ve gotten this far, it won’t be much effort to find out what’s up!

1. Bananas

2. Floridian tomatoes

3. Coca Cola/Pepsi products

Further viewing: The Ugly Truth Behind Organic Food, Bananas!, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers

No! NO!!!!!! What a fucking asshole! Even though I have some unresolved issues with the local foods movement, it’s a hell of a lot better than Sysco or U.S. Foods. Is this really what suburbanites want? Really? Are you people so daft? Do you really think that “ketchup is a spice”? Good lord.

Photos forthcoming.

Happy New Year, everybody! Check out that blue moon (but don’t drink Blue Moons because Miller is anti-LGBT)!

See you in 2010,

Vy