This blog is dead, obviously. I no longer do bentos, and I haven’t eaten anything that could be identified as “convenience food” for more than a year; which sometimes makes it harder to get the variety needed in a bento. I almost cook everyday, and almost all from scratch, or support moms and pops in hour hood.  I am still plump as a roasting chicken, no weight loss here; but I am happy with the cheap lunch opportunities in town (and none of them are corporate sysco-ed out food). Perhaps you weren’t a fan anyway, but if you were, I wanted to have an appropriate farewell. Now the question is, should I just hack the blog completely, or leave it as it is, as the reminder of my existence in this dead century.

Peace out!

I am too busy eating things that I would never be able to cook on my own. I guess the novelty of bento has faded for me, just like any other thing I started and quit before finishing. I do make some bentos, perhaps once a week; but they are usually boring leftovers and I seem to prefer spending my time eating my food or reading about food than writing about it. Midwest was slow, you could stop and risk taking your time; but when the things are this fast, you don’t want to stop and philosophize about a tiny frozen meatball (I have eaten frozen food just once since I moved, and it was free and tasted nasty). Why should I stop anyway? I might just miss a 3 dollar lunch special because I decided to stay in and blog.

In all honesty, I guess I lose my interest in things way too easily. Perhaps we can meet some other time when I can come up with something that is not written before. It is definitely not going to be a Montreal food blog though; too may of them are around these days and they do this much better than a newbie in town. Perhaps I can come back when I get bored with takeout. Who knows?

So this is a farewell from one of the stinkiest, smokiest and tastiest corners of Montreal, where they know how to make chicken, where people line up at -20 degrees to get their chicken, where real estate values go down, just because the whole block  is covered in heavy, foggy, chickeny, coaly barbecue smoke:

This city spoiled me big time. I am worried that I will never want to move. Or cook…

I am not going to make any excuses for not blogging, because they tend to get lamer every day. But this is perhaps one of the more interesting brown bag lunches I’ve had during these days of mediocrity. More importantly, it incorporates the first crabapple I have ever ate. I know you are not supposed to eat them raw -most North Americans think you shouldn’t eat quinces raw either. Sis-sies!-; but I didn’t know this before getting a tiny basket of what I thought were tiny juicy apples.

Now, I am not a jam-maker kind of person -so crabapple jelly is out of the question-, nor am capable of making braised pork dishes, which was suggested as the best use for this fruit. Goddammit, I cannot even cook pork properly, probably due to a culturally conditioned culinary dysfunction. I am an atheist, so the fact that pork is a big taboo where I came from should not matter to me. I can also cook and/or eat bacon and other cured friends lovingly, but why do my regular pork dishes taste like something you don’t want to eat? Allrighty, this dilemma probably requires another blog entry.

Long story short, with a tiny box of crabapples, and no suitable recipe in hand, I decided to eat them raw, as they are. While the raw crabapple was not mealy or unpleasant, it was sour and tannic enough to be avoided next time. But jolly gosh, isn’t it cute? Well, that was my motive in incorporating it into my lunchbox. Perfect size and shape, and some bonus cuteness factor would make me eat anything. Then I read that it is suggested for “spiritual cleansing” of obsessive compulsives. Who, me?

If only it didn’t get so boring… Well it is not a particularly complex fruit eaten raw. There is the novelty factor, and thats all. I still have two left, and after a week the apples started getting mealy.

Rest of the bento is my attempts to provide myself some proper nutrition, so that I can deserve a plum paczki afterwards. On one corner, I have quinoa and lentil salad from the night before. It is basically a mixture of cooked quinoa, lentils, onions, fresh oregano, lemon juice, olive oil and crumbled feta. Kind of the salad your vegan friend would bring to every potluck; perhaps her version would be without cheese. Next there is an overboiled egg (note to self: get one of those egg timers that you thought were ridiculous) sitting next to some cherry tomatoes. There are pecans, prunes and a couple of tiny biscottis for the afternoon coffee break…What?… Break?

OK everyone, it is time to announce that I now have a coffee break. Well actually more than one. The new work structure is mostly self induced, but indeed I have a formal office life; with the proper attire and all. We also have a water cooler, around which we gather to talk about the Britney comeback. This is everything I dreamt about. “Yes dear, isn’t life swell?”

Deniz’s comment on the Netherlands lunchbox ethic of single ingredient sandwiches made me think about my Tyler Durden side, who is always trying to oppress my middle-class hedonist tendencies. Those who know me for a long time also know how much time I have wasted on trying to reconcile my obsession with food with my left leaning world view. It is not really easy, especially thinking that on more than one occasion, I had been harassed and bullied by my comrades, just because I wanted to write about food and politics at the same time. Apparently you have to be pure and clean of worldly pleasures to do politics right. I tried. I literally spent months trying to get rid of my “sinful” tendencies, but it was second nature to my middle class position. I realized that it would never happen. Then I realized it doesn’t have to happen. The latter took longer than I could have imagined, but well it did happen.

This Friday, I had my first real conversation with my butcher. Bear in mind, he doesn’t know that he is my butcher yet. We have that kind of relationship you have with a high school crush that you think is your boyfriend while he has no idea who you are. I go there every week, sometimes twice, to get something like a chicken breast or a tiny saucisson, or just three strips of bacon. Things I buy are a dead giveaway of my living conditions: one little piece of merguez cry “hey I live alone”. But they don’t complain. They put three extremely thick pieces of bacon inside a butcher paper, write 80 cents on it, and draw a smiley with a “merci!” scribbled next to it.

Perhaps saying that you have a butcher sound slightly pretentious (what next? “my butler”?) but take this: Being friends with your meat supplier also gives you some perks that most people don’t have, such as getting a special cut of meat, or an honest “perhaps, not the lamb today madam” confession. But come on, who has a butcher anymore unless they live in a big metropolitan city? Our meat comes in boxes, prefrozen, preportioned. Our younglings think that chicken grows on styrofoam trays (and only as breasts), and that sausage is a kind of root vegetable. The means of production has shifted in massive scales. No petit bourgeois butchers are in sight in most American cities, because all we have is some poor alienated meat factory worker who actually has no means to acquire the goods he helps to produce, nor has any idea what he is making to start with.

Over the last two-three decade, the culinary traditions of many centuries have reduced into the capitalist agro-industrial complex. As a secondary consequence, one of the biggest cultural creations of humankind has become a ridiculous status game. Labor intensive arts of curing, smoking, pickling, drying, salting cheaper cuts of food as well as game and offal has been pushed into esoterism, just because they are not profitable to sell; and hence became only accessible to upper classes. The food as we know it has been reduced into a meat patty and a blue box, and those who seek further are ostracized as snobs (or god forbid, “gourmets”). Cooking became a tedious and puritanic task. Boil chicken, add rice, don’t put garlic, “it stinks”. Vanity contributed to this decline further. Please. No salt, no butter, no cream. Just “Fat free fat”, a tiny bit. With a tub of olestra on the side.

So how does this rambling tie back to my atrocious fight against my own obsession with the things that taste extremely good but questionably inaccessible to the masses? This Friday, while trying to pick a piece of saucisson (a little dried sausage) and contemplating leftover rice instead, I started a conversation with the shopkeeper whom I learned later was the owner’s relative. He started telling me all the differences between the duck and the rabbit and the turkey sausages and how they are made. My eyes literally started sparkling. That minute, I understood that I wasn’t doing anything wrong by buying something esoteric, in fact it was the right thing to do. Always. Historically. Supporting artisans that make their own food, craft their own food, and most importantly know this food is our only weapon against the fat free salad dressing and the rib sandwich that is not made out of ribs. It is also the only way people could make a decent living just by producing and selling food, like my butcher who also takes three weeks of vacation every year. I wanted to ask him, “when did sausage become decadence?”, but decided to save it for a less busy day.

After this brief episode of mis-enlightenment, I got carried away and bought some duck for my Sunday dinner. I served it over some pureed mashed red lentils that were enhanced by some of the duck’s fat, garlic (yeah it stinks, and it is fantastic) and fresh rosemary from the garden. Then to balance this indulgence I decided to take a simple lunch to work next day. Some salad with leftover lentils and tomatoes, cucumbers and feta cheese was all I needed. I did this not because I wanted to be clean in a metaphoric and spiritual sense, but I realized that all fat and no grains makes missy an unhealthy girl. So, no more Tyler Durden trying to take my butter from me because it is a sin! Only my arteries can tell what I should or should not eat. Afterall, The Fight Club was a juvenilistic and misogynistic attempt of social criticism, and honestly, Tyler Durden was a jerk.

I am finally reunited with my childhood tiffin tin. I can’t exactly recall when I took lunch to school with it, but I know it was mine. From the wear and tear I can tell that it was very much used and loved; but knowing that my mom only cooked 3 dishes in her whole life, I am seriously wondering what I was carrying with it. The tiffin is a mystery, an important reminder of of my childhood amnesia and I accept this. When my parents visited me a few weeks ago, the only thing I asked them to bring here was my old childhood tiffin, just for the sake of nostalgia of things I don’t even remember. “There is everything here”, I said. I was lying.

The tiffin is perhaps the most common lunchbox in the planet. Through middle east and southeastern Asia, workers, students, state employees and travelers have used these tiered boxes to take lunches to work. In certain parts of the world tiffins are also sold at roadstops for travelers who are looking for a quick snack.

My tiffin is a part of a forgotten Turkish tradition, a symbol of old world romanticism. There were times the working men and women took their leftovers, or freshly prepared meals to work. There were times all kids were sent to school with a homemade lunch, even if it was a sandwich with a slice of feta cheese. There were times grandmothers made dolma, cold pinto beans in olive oil, and borek for this sole purpose, because they are the most perfect lunchbox foods. There were times, that a cartoon strip depiction of a civil servant wouldn’t be complete without a tiffin on hand, because it was the most recognizable accessory of the man. Well, not anymore.

While the Turks didn’t get richer, for various reasons some stopped taking lunches and started paying for takeout or delivery. Indeed there is still affordable and decent street food, but most people who couldn’t afford restaurant takeout decided to opt for bland cafeteria lunches. More importantly, they never bothered to bring last night’s leftovers. When I was in high school, it was almost an embarrassment to take lunch to school. Cool kids ate out at establishments with questionable food but attractive clientele, uncool kids (like me), ate at the cafeteria and worked out their gag reflex. Noone I knew bothered to bring food from home. Well I didn’t, because there was never food at home (that’s another story); but what about the others?

The tiffin recently became a central metaphor to protest the slow destruction of Turkish culinary heritage. Part slow food organization, part lunchbox activists, the Sefertasi Hareketi (tiffin movement) brought a minority together, those who liked their food to be made of real food. Not many people paid attention. They were too busy with the drama of big corporate chains opening stores in Turkey. Those who didn’t want to throw money on the street, or couldn’t afford a three dollar latte, continued to eat decent-but increasingly homogenized-street food.

I had such high hopes for taking my tiffin to work. But bewitched by $2 lahmacuns and bahn-mis, I really didn’t have any reason to take lunch to work. After escaping the Midwestern casserole-town with only a few dependable cheap eats that are walking distance to school (and most are closed after 5:00 or in the winter anyway), I wanted to eat everything in sight in this city where real people cooked for real people. I was hungry, and there was a buffet the size of a city.

Then I remembered one thing that that no takeout lunch, even the ones cooked by grumpy old Lebanese men, could provide: variety to the extent of decadence, affordable luxuries such as a great piece of chocolate or bergamot “Cyprus delights” (oh oh, here comes another world war). A bento / lunchbox / tiffin/whatever you call it, isn’t just a hunky sandwich, or even some “salad bar” takeout with ostensible variety. It is a small buffet, made by you or someone you know, lovingly. So I promised myself to make a brown bag lunch once in a while, even if it is once a week. With a little box of cucumbers that were bought for a mere 99 cents and a reasonable interest towards cold foods due to summer heat, I decided to make a cold soba noodle salad. I put some grapes, some Cyprus/Turkish whatever delights from a corner store, almonds, and crackers and I was ready to get on the subway with my 20 year old tiffin. And I assured myself that I will look cool carrying it.

Ingredients:

• 1 cucumber, peeled and diced
• Some dried wakame (a tablespoon perhaps). I decided not to reconstitute it in water, because I know that the cucumbers will release some water overnight and wakame will soak it. Next day it will be perfect. At least this is my hypothesis.
• 1 bunch of soba noodles, cooked, washed and drained
• 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise
• a pinch of cayenne, a pinch of wasabi powder (you know, the fake one)
• 1 tablespoon of soy sauce

Mix last three ingredients, well. Add the rest and mix until everything is coated. Put in the fridge overnight and hope that the wakame will be all right next day.

I’m on the subway after a long, hard day in the kitchen, my feet swelling up like twin Hindenburgs; my back killing me; fourteen hours of hot, sweaty, uncomfortable toil and two hundered eighty dinners under my belt; and I want to sit down. There are three seats in front of me in the crowded subway car. Unfortunately, one miserable, fat bastard is taking up all three of them. As he sits glumly but defiantly in a center seat, his gigantic butt cheeks and thighs spill out of the molded plastic bucket onto the seats on both sides, and his beady eyes dare me to try and squeeze my bony ass into one of the narrow spaces next to him.

Dream sequence: I’m on a packed commuter flight and we’re going down for a forced landing in a Midwestern cornfield. Engine one is on fire, the cabin fills up with smoke, panicky passengers overturn their meal trays as they rush the emergency exits. The pilot manages to plow the plane belly-down onto soft earth, but the the plane - in flames now - comes to a full stop and the emergency doors pop free, the three-hundred-pound ectomorph in the window seat becomes lodged firmly and inexorably in the small doorway. At the dead of the aisle, another giant fuck collapses wheezing onto the floor, blocking egress. As my hair catches fire, the last thing I see is jiggly, crenulated back fat.

Whose fault is it? Who made my fellow American obese - if not morbidly obese? How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin? In whose evil snail tracks across the globe can we watch thighs expand, bellies pooch out over groins, so that fewer and fewer every year of the flower of our youth can even see their own genitals without benefit of a mirror? Who is making each generation from once normally proportioned countries swell up like grain-fed steer?

We know the answer. America’s most dangerous export was never nuclear weapons or Jerry Lewis - or even Baywatch reruns. It was, is, and probably always will be our fast-food outlets.

The Evildoers of the major chains live nowhere near their businesses. Like crack dealers, they know what they sell is not good for you, that it makes neighborhoods uglier, contributes nothing but a stifling sameness to society. Recently, with Eric Schlosser, the author of the brilliant and terrifying Fast Food Nation, I debated two representatives of the fast-food industry at a “multi-unit food service operators” convention in Texas. Our position, unsurprisingly, was that everybody in the room basically sucked. The opposition countered with tortured reciattion of numbers and statistics, mostly to do with what a valuable service their industry provided, employing - for a few months at a time - hundreds of thousands of people who (they implied) might otherwise be sticking up liquor stores, setting fires, and sodomizing pets. They neatly deflected Schlosser’s own accurate and sobering numbers, mostly to do with workplace injuries in the meat-cutting industry, average length of employment, bankrupt “nutritional” value, the quantifiable path of balooning thighs following in their businesses’ wake across the globe, and so on. But when I asked these folks, one by one, if they would live anywhere near their own overlit, maniacally cheery looking restaurants, I got, more often than not, a stunned look and a “Fuck, no!” When I mischievously suggested (opportunistically taking advantage of the current fervor of flag waving) that their chosen enterprise was basically unpatriotic; that they were deliberately targeting children with their advertising, then knowingly raising them to be no-necked arterially clogged diabetics who’d “never in a million years make it through basic training. God help us if we ever have to hit Omaha Beach again, those doughy overfed punks’ll drown like rats!” - they looked, actually…guilty. They know, you see. You think they eat their own gruel anywhere near as frequently as the average rube? I don’t.

But is fast food inherently evil? Is the convenient nature of the beast bad, in and of itself? decidedly no. Fast food - which traditionally solves very problems of working families, families with kids, business people on the go, the causally hungry - can be good food. If you walk down a street in Saigon, or visit an open-air market in Mexico, you’ll see that a quick, easy meal, often enjoyed standing up, does not have to be part of the hideous, generic sprawl of soul-destroying sameness that stretches from strip malls in San Diego, across the USA, through Europe and Asia and around again, looking the same, tasting the same: paper-wrapped morsels of gray “beef” patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavored-sprayed chicken nuggets, of “milkshakes” that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of “barbecue” that has never seen a grill, “cheese” with no cheese, and theme monstrosities for whom food is only a lure to buy a T-shirt, is not the way it has to be.

There is delicious, even nutritious, fast food to be had in the world - often faster and cheaper than the clown and the colonel and the king and their ilk produce. In Japan (and increasingly in the West), there are quick, affordable sushi joints. In Tokyo, you can purchase yakitori, small skewers of grilled poultry and meat, from yakitori vendors clustered around business districts to serve executives looking for an easy after-work snack. In Spain, tapas (or pinchos) are served standing up; you grab something good at one tapas joint, then move over to another, a movable series of snacks, inevitably delicious - and again, usually good for you.

In Vietnam, fast food is everywhere, right out in the street: freshly made, brightly colored sandwiches on homemade French bread; steaming bowls of pho, noodles served from a portable kitchen carried on a yoke on the proprietor’s back; grilled shrimp kebabs skewered on sugarcane; tiny bundles of rice and pork wrapped in banana leaves; spicy calamari; crispy little birds; hunks of jackfruit; caramelized bananas and mango - all of it made and served by individuals, lone entrepreneurs for whom pride is not a catchphase or a slogan but an operating principle. In Mexico, one is likely to find happy swarms of people slurping posole, a sort of soupy stew, or menudo, a similarly delicious concoction, around primitive cars right out in the street, electric power provided by a chugging gas generator. A few pesos and a few seconds and you’re eating better than at any place run by evil clowns or steroid-overdosed action movie front men. Turn right and there’s an old woman making absolutely fresh quesadillas of zucchini flowers and farmer cheese, turn left and a mom and pop are slicing up a tender head of pork and rolling it into soft tacos with salsa fresca so fresh and wonderful you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. Total time elapsed from time ordered to actual chewing? About twelve seconds.

Even in Russia they’ve got blintzes and piroshkis, served on fire-engine-red plastic trays - in the worst American tradition - but again, made by a human, fresh, on site, from real, recognizable ingredients, not shipped in frozen, pre-portioned vacu-seal bags from some meat-extruding facility near a far-away turnpike. And that cherished idea of the Russian as stocky, Krushchev-like babushkas is way wrong, friends. Most of the Russians I saw recently? The guys all looked like Dolph Lundgren and the women were tall, slim, and hard-looking enough to handle themselves in a street fight.

In Cambodia, a desperately poor cyclo driver, munching on a crispy little bird at a market, engaged me in conversation. “Is it true,” he asked, “that all Americans eat only hamburgers and KFC?” He looked truly sorry for me.

I wouldn’t really care what they put in those burgers - if they tasted good. And though I do care that the rivers of Arkansas are clogging up with chicken shit to satisfy the world’s relentless craving for crispy fried chicken fingers, I don’t believe that we should legislate these cocksuckers out of business. My position is kind of the Nancy Reagan position on drugs: “Just Say No.” Next time you find yourself standing slack-jawed and hungry in front of a fast-food counter - and a clown is anywhere nearby - just turn on your heels and head for the lone-wolf, independent operator down the street: the pie shop, a chippie, a kebab joint, or in New York, a “dirty-water hot dog,” anywhere that the proprietor has a name. Even that beloved British institution, the chippie, is preferable to the the clown’s fare; at least you are encouraging individual, local business, an entrepreneur who can react to neighborhood needs and wants, rather than a dictatorial system in which some focus group in an industrial park in Iowa decides for you what you will or should want. Deep-fried cod or plaice with vinegar, haggis with curry sauce; these may not be the apex of healthy eating, but at least they’re indigenous to somewhere - and washed down with enough beer or Irn-Bru, they’re quite tasty. The kebab shop makes food that is at least fresh, and a beef shawarma does not require the addition of beef flavor to make it taste like food.

Whenever possible, try to eat food that comes from somewhere, from somebody. And stop eating so fucking much. A little portion control would go a long way in slimming down our herds of heavyweights in their tent-like T-shirts, Gap easy-fit pants, and baggy shorts. (Apparently taking body-sculpting cues from some of our more humongous rappers, these guys ignore the fact that many of their heroes probably have to wash themselves with a sponge at the end of a stick.)

You may as well stop snacking on crap while you’re at it. You don’t need that bag of chips between meals, do you? You’re probably not even enjoying it. Save your appetite for something good! Take a little more time! All that rage and frustration, that hollow feeling so many of us feel - for so many good reasons - can be filled up with something better than a soggy disk of ground-up assholes and elbows. Eat for nourishment, yes, but eat for pleasure. Stop settling for less. That way, if we ever do have to get in there and “smoke the evildoers out of their holes,” at the very least, we’ll be able to squeeze in after them.

from The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006: Bloomsbury Publishing):

I know it’s been a while and I don’t yet have the energy to do the full bento post ritual, listing the ingredients and giving you the recipes; but hey at least I am brown bagging my lunch for the first time in months. This is particularly challenging because not only I moved to a much bigger city with way too many restaurants for me to try, but also my food budget has increased dramatically. The above meal didn’t even start with the idea of taking lunch to work, it was simply a rare homecooked dinner of pasta and roasted fennel. But suddenly it hit me. It was time to start lunchboxing.