I mentioned in my review of the chef’s omakase at Yasuda that despite my overall excellent showing in an all-seafood meal, there was one slip-up that night. My boyfriend was taking notes at Yasuda because he’s an encyclopedia of fish names, and I was no doubt going to be writing down things like “Motown shrimp” instead of “botan shrimp”. Well, at this point in the notes, he writes, “Katie loses her shit.”

Let me explain first that I’ve been having trouble with oysters since about my second one. The first time I tried one, at Momofuku Ko, I didn’t even think about it; I just gummed it a little, swallowed it, and put a gold star on my shirt. Every subsequent oyster has given me pause, though. I actually like the flavor of them, which is the really maddening part, and I don’t consider their texture snot-like or anything along those lines. Something about them, though, just subconsciously goes to work on me, and I have a hard time keeping them down.

Well, at Yasuda this night, I actually didn’t keep mine down. We told the chef to give us whatever he wanted, and he started us slow with progressively finer tunas and then moved into some more adventurous clams and shrimp. I’d heard that the oyster Yasuda serves is this giant, sprawling thing that they slice smaller pieces off of, but I didn’t think that bothered me. And the actual appearance of my oyster was like a nice, creamy alfredo sauce. There were some black, stringy parts, but it’s not like I haven’t seen that before.

So I downed the thing like usual and immediately knew it was going to give me trouble. I gagged a little but told myself, “You ARE going to eat this oyster.” Like there was any alternative. So I took a swig of water to force it down, and instead, a bunch of rice came back up. It felt like all of the rice from all of the previous pieces of sushi, each grain still fully intact. I buckled down and again told myself that I was going to swallow it again, laced with bile as it probably was.

And then I just full-on vomited into my napkin.

I held it to my mouth in an attempt to disguise what was going on, but I’m sure it was pretty obvious to everyone as I abruptly stood up, all wild-eyed, trying to remember where the bathroom was from my only other visit years before. A server rushed over to pull back my chair for me, and I’m sure I looked like an idiot still holding this napkin up to my mouth as I ran to the back of the restaurant. I felt like all eyes were on me and that they all saw the creamy oyster bits dribbling down my chin.

It was such a traumatic event that I can’t remember if I threw my napkin in the bathroom trash or if I tried to salvage it and nonchalantly bring it back to the counter with me, but I hope for everyone’s sake that I didn’t carry a bunch of vomit back into the restaurant. My boyfriend just told the sushi chef that I must not have liked oysters as much as I thought, and I felt up for anything again once it was out of my system, but for the rest of the night, the chef would ask, “Is salmon roe okay? Is eel okay?” before serving us anything remotely adventurous. And I felt like a dumb white girl from the Midwest.

I thought the experience might ruin me completely for oysters and was really troubled to imagine a life in which I not only don’t ever get to enjoy that briny, fresh flavor but in which I also have to annoyingly ask that chefs leave the oysters off of my dishes. Luckily, I’ve had two since then and have just learned to chase them immediately with a glass of water. Which sort of defeats the whole purpose of eating them for the flavor, but hey, at least I’m eating them.

I truly, legitimately thought on my way to my boyfriend’s from work a few weeks ago that I was about to come face-to-face with super-studly chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernadin fame. I realized I had no idea what to say to him and quickly started trying to think of some food-related witticisms. “Don’t tell him you don’t like seafood!” I reminded myself.

It turned out to be some other super-studly man with gleaming hair, and I was off the hook, but it got me thinking about how weird it is that even I get a little excited about food celebrities. Understand that I don’t care about movie and TV stars at aaaaall. I keep a list of celebrities I’ve seen while living in NYC on my personal blog just because I like the stories behind my interactions with them, but I don’t read celebrity gossip magazines, I’m scared that shows like “TMZ” exist, and I have no idea why anyone (my boyfriend!) would watch a single moment of the Oscars or the Emmys, especially to look at the clothes.

However.

I got off the bus at 14th Street on Monday to walk the rest of the way back to my boyfriend’s apartment in my quest to work off some of these tasting menus, and a few blocks later, I came upon wd~50′s Wylie Dufresne with a little boy sitting on his shoulders. (I assume it was his son, but you can assume whatever you like.)

I immediately pictured myself marching up to him, hand extended, and saying, “I named yours my absolute favourite NYC restaurant the other day. Your foie gras filled with passion fruit still comes up in conversation between my boyfriend and me about once a week. I think you’re the most inventive chef in the entire world. Here’s the link to my blog. Do you do wine pairings? I suggest your dessert tasting to new foodies all of the time. Do you hate the word foodie, too?”

And then I realized that wow, Wylie Dufresne does not care about any of that stuff. So I kept on walking. But of course I immediately called my boyfriend and squealed.

this is how Wiley looks if you stop him in the street
and try to make pointless conversation

I guess I react toward chefs like most people react toward moviestars. And I guess it’s little sightings like these that make my boyfriend’s tiny Manhattan apartment and what he pays for it worthwhile.

On my last night of Christmas vacation in Ohio, my best friend, Tracey, and I invited my cousin Bethany and our friend Michelle over to her house for cards, videogames, boytalk, and other things girls in Ohio do. Tracey and I decided to make brownies for the occasion, and by that I mean we poured a box mix into a big bowl and added an egg.

Tracey kind of hinted that she wasn’t entirely interested in actually cooking the brownies, because like cookie dough and oysters, brownie batter is best eaten raw. I said, “Well, maybe we can separate half the batter and only cook a small batch.” And she said, “. . . or we could not cook it at all.”

And so we didn’t. We scooped the batter into sundae glasses, put them in the refrigerator to chill, and decided not to tell Bethany and Michelle what it was until they’d taken a bite, lest they think us gluttonous freaks and not give it a chance. Of course we got too excited in the end and had to tell them it was brownie fetus, and they reacted to it quite well, considering. We all sat around Tracey’s kitchen table for hours, playing Euchre and watching the batter stick to our upside-down spoons.

Referring to it as “pudding” made three of us feel much better, but Tracey had no shame, and neither does Faith of An Edible Mosaic, who shares her recipe here.

Photo by An Edible Mosaic

I just saw a review of a restaurant in which the woman complained that her server didn’t know to bring her a black napkin to match her black pants.

Pardon my ignorance, but is this a thing? Should I be embarrassed about the countless times I’ve sat with a white napkin on my black pants? Should I also be expecting restaurants to have a stockpile of sequined and gold lamé napkins, too?

Seems a little ridiculous to me, but I am a farmgirl.

I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life right now, and OMG, you guys. It is wonderful. My eyes have welled up with tears so many times over the way we treat the people who grow our food and the way I myself left my family farm to move to NYC.

Here’s my favourite discovery from today:

Our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.” You’d think we cared more about the idea of what we’re eating than about what we’re eating.

And it hit me–this is probably why I like vegetables so much better in a restaurant than at home. I always figured I was just a simple woman too easily won over by the charms of being cooked for and served to. The tray of plain steamed vegetables at Yakitori Torys (now sadly closed) literally made my mouth water, and the all-vegetarian meal we had at Kajitsu is still one of my most memorable.

I never cared at all that Tocqueville bases all of their dishes on what they can buy at the Union Square Greenmarket, but I’m sure now that a good part of the reason I want that $25 prix fixe of theirs every weekend is the fresh vegetables.

I guess the moral of the story is that we should be growing our own food, directly supporting the people who do by buying from a local farmer’s market, or at least only buying foods we know are in season in our areas. I’d love to hear about it if you’re doing any of these things!