Not My Affair

Every single one of The Affair‘s ads features fancy hetero white people enjoying wine or blandly chic food, and this whole thing leaves a terrible, terrible taste in my mouth. I mean, I could ignore it, but their ads are all over the Heavy Table’s website, so what can I do? Someone’s got to call them out, I guess.

Representation is the most pertinent issue here — how can anyone justify the racial content of these ads? The ads are (typically) all about sexual desire, so perhaps the ad agency thought it would be too tricky to throw a racial minority — let alone a brunette — into the mix. Instead, the undesirable physical presence of racial minorities is sublimated onto the food-spectacle, which is the only colored element of the photos. The work of the underclass is presented to the white male to finger, consider, and devour. To put it simply, who’s cooking the food that rich white Americans love? Hint: they don’t all look like Bobby Flay!

I could go on and on about the willful racial ignorance of this ad, but I didn’t want to forgo touching on its sexual dysfunctions as well. The humor in the photo depends on a comparison between a woman and food. Both are presented as sensory stimuli for the man to choose between. And the winner, of course, is food, because it won’t ask you to cuddle after you consume it. We are in truly good company when we’re being compared to cocktail shrimp.

Boo on you, Affair! However, I’m sure someone out there disagrees with me, so feel free to leave a comment and turn this into something more constructive. Should this kind of advertising be shoved into our faces without protest?

Potato, Prosciutto and Gruyere Frittata

Yes, I admit it — I’m a Food & Wine fag.  This magazine is the most bougie of the bougie, the epitome of flaunting it when you got it.  Fragments of old issues clutter up my notebooks like a virgin’s pressed flowers, and they each scream out to me, “This is what you could be eating!”  Skimming through these cuttings, I am ashamed.  I could be using the money I spend on luxury goods like truffle butter and goat cheese to… I don’t know, adopt a barefoot Indian child.  But Food & Wine and the culture of haute cuisine beckon me, and I am ambivalently convinced of the art in epicurean pursuits.

 

So here’s a frittata recipe that I found in Food & Wine.  It was beautiful to eat.

 

Potato, Prosciutto and Gruyere Frittata

• 1 dozen large eggs
• 2 tbsp. water
• salt and pepper
• 1 packed cup shredded Gruyere
• 4 oz. prosciutto, sliced 1/4-inch thick
• 1/4 C extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 lb. Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced
• 2 scallions, thinly sliced

Preheat the oven to 375°. In a bowl, beat the eggs with the water and season with 3/4 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. Beat in the Gruyère and prosciutto.

 

Heat the olive oil in a large, nonstick ovenproof skillet. Add the potatoes and cook over moderately high heat, stirring occasionally, until tender and golden brown, about 7 minutes. Add the scallions and cook for 1 minute. Stir the egg mixture and add to the skillet. Stir to distribute the potatoes. Cook until the bottom is just set, about 3 minutes; lift the frittata to allow the uncooked eggs to seep underneath.

 

Bake the frittata for about 10 minutes, until nearly set in the center.

 

Preheat the broiler. Broil the frittata 8 inches from the heat for 1 minute, until the top is just beginning to brown. Cut the frittata into wedges and serve hot or at room temperature.

I almost tripped down the stairs at Per Se.

I’m going to have to put the Vietnam-related posts on hold because I FUCKING WENT TO PER SE FOR DINNER TONIGHT HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!At the moment, I am incredibly drunk, but I am writing this post now while my memory is fresh so that you can read my drunken ramblings. While normally one has to make reservations far in advance, my mom lucked out on OpenTable.com and discovered an open reservation for 9:45pm tonight. She gave me this wild look and asked, “Are you game, Vy? ARE YOU GAME??” On the way there, it felt like I was going to like, the fucking prom. It felt like one of those monumental benchmarks of adulthood, like getting a driver’s license, but much, much more hoity toity.

At the restaurant, it felt like, I don’t know, like we had snuck into someplace where we weren’t allowed to be. The dining room was full of WASPs in tacky evening wear and I was wearing a frighteningly multicolored sweatervest. We ordered cocktails and waited for Keller’s first attack. By my third sip, I was wasted.

First, gougeres! The little fuckers were like horribly savory Cocoa Puffs; they melted in my mouth wonderfully. Cheese balls never fail to impress. NEVER!!

Following that were these crazy salmon ice cream cones which were just salmon tartare scooped on top of a dhosa-like sesame seed cone. Those were pretty good; they really reminded me of frostbitten Norway for some reason.

Keller’s signature oysters and pearls, a bang-up-the-ass fiesta of caviar, pearl tapioca and Malpeque oysters, was ridiculous, in the way that dropping LSD at the Cirque du Soleil is ridiculous. (Especially Varekai, holy shit.) As I spooned it, bit-by-bit, into my mouth, I couldn’t say anything. I just sat there, going quietly insane.

Okay, this is getting really hard. They kept plying me with wine and now I’m feeling it quite acutely. If you want to see more photos, look here, alright? So I was telling our waiter, who was a stand-up chap, that I was also a waiter back in Iowa, and my mom followed that up by letting him know that I bullshit a lot on the job. For example, she told him, whenever customers ask me to recommend wines to go with their meals, I make shit up. And somehow, they’re satisfied when I ask them about it later! So as our waiter pours my next glass of wine, he spins this crazy tale about how it’s made from grapes grown by a volcano in Italy, and that it’s the oldest sort of wine in the world. And apparently it was mentioned in The Odyssey in relation to a cyclops. So I said, “Dude, the beautiful thing is that you could have made all of that up and I’d have no idea.”

As dinner wore on, I got drunker and drunker and drunker; and subsequently, exponentially more profane. When our waiter unveiled the ultimate, 15th course, I blurted, “JESUS CHRIST!” He looked behind him and he and the other server laughed as if they were suddenly confronted with a 5-year old who has pooped itself. Then I started telling everyone stories about how everyone in the restaurant business smokes weed and/or crack. As we left the restaurant, I noticed that I had innumerable stains of strawberry consomme on my shirt. Distracted, I studied them thoroughly and almost tripped down the stairs at motherfucking Per Se.