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!

I flew home to Ohio last night for a week of the

Which some people like to refer to as the “Circleville Pumpkin Festival” or the “Circleville Pumpkin Fair” or the “Podunk Hillbilly Gourd Celebration“.

But they are wrong. It’s a show if I’ve ever seen one.

While there, I plan to

(And more.)

Dr. Boyfriend and I both have birthdays this month, and we want to eat delicious foodz on our special days. For mine, I made us a reservation at The Wright, which is the restaurant inside the Guggenheim Museum. (Click on the link and look at how beautiful it is! I don’t care how good the food is, ’cause I’m going solely for the decor.)

For his birthday, he was thinking about going for an elaborate sushi dinner at the best place in town, but it just so happens that I saw a Momofuku Ko reservation open for that day and decided to snatch it up and try to convince him it was time to go.

In case you’re unaware of the ridiculousness of getting into Ko, it involves logging into a reservation website precisely at 10 a.m. every day, selecting lunch or dinner and the number of people in your party, clicking on every available timeslot, and finding out that they’ve all been taken in the time it took you to move your mouse to them. And you can do this over and over again for weeks without ever getting a reservation. Each night’s spots fill up literally before the clock hits 10:01.

But I got us one! And it’s for lunch, which lasts an extra hour . . . and costs an extra $50! For a total of $175!(!!)

The other ridiculous thing about Ko is that Chef David Chang famously doesn’t allow photos. My blogfriend Chubby memorably drew her meal on a notepad with a Sharpie, but other than that, you rarely, rarely see any of the food they serve. So to be honest, I had no idea what I was getting into.

The website says, “We try our best to serve delicious American food,” which I imagined meant, you know, lots of red meat. But then Dr. Boyfriend IMed me with this:

And then he sent me this photo from VIP in the City:

Which is just mean, right?

We spent the next two days dancing around the issue of me not wanting to eat shrimp heads while I secretly showed the photo to everyone I knew and asked if they thought I could handle it. Their answers ranged from “shrimp heads are delicious” to “those freaky tentacle things scrape the top of your mouth and make you BLEED”, but I kept going back to what Kamran and I always say about challenging foods, which is that anything you’re being served in a fine dining establishment is edible at the very least and more than likely is actually life-changingly delicious.

This morning, Kamran announced out of nowhere in the midst of my watching “The Biggest Loser” before work, “If you’re not going to eat that shrimp head, you can go ahead and cancel our Ko reservation.”

I said, “I’m going to try to eat it! I really want to eat it! But I can’t control the weird things my brain tells me about eating shrimp eyes! An irrational fear is still a fear!”

And he said, “The way you’re reacting to this is making me seriously consider whether or not you can handle what they’ll serve us at Per Se.”

I said, “Don’t threaten me with Per Se! Shrimp heads are objectively gross!”

And he said, “If you feel that way, cancel the Ko reservation. And while you’re at it, cancel The Wright, too.”

So we broke up.

No, just kidding. So I went to work, and we apologized to each other over IM, and he sent me a more recent review that didn’t include any shrimp heads whatsoever. There’s a chance I might have to eat the dreaded SOFT SHELL CRAB, though. I’m so scared.

I saw a great Q&A on Chow.com today entitled “Too Frumpy for the Good Seats?” in which a woman asked if she and her friend were relegated to the old people’s section of a restaurant’s dining room because she wasn’t dressed like a tramp.

This is something I wonder to myself allllllllllllll of the time, because while my boyfriend always pairs snazzy blazers with cute t-shirts and sweater vests and looks better than anyone else everywhere we go, you’ll never see me in a cocktail dress and stilettos. I would hope I still look nice, but my style trends more toward granny-in-pearls than hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold.

So when we got seated in no man’s land at Fig & Olive, for instance, I had to wonder if it was because they were keeping their more drunk, less taking-photos-of-their-food patrons in the front where the expansive windows were. And now I know I was right.

The only time I think I’ve ever asked to be moved was when they tried to seat my friend and me directly in front of the kitchen doorway at Serendipity 3, and even then, I barely cared. If I have a specific seat in mind, I’ll always note it in my OpenTable reservation, or I’ll just put something general like, “It’s my birthday, and I don’t want anyone watching as I consume an entire ice cream cake by myself, so please seat us somewhere private!”

I’ll tell you what, though–I feel pret-ty hot now about the fact that Nougatine put us right in front of their big windows facing Central Park the other night.

Sometimes I feel bad about reviewing food when I have such a huge bias against some major dish components:

• seafood (except crab that I don’t have to pull out of the shell myself)
• mushrooms (except when I can’t tell what they are–like their essence in a foam(!) or tiny pieces of them concealed in a ravioli–because I don’t hate the taste but the appearance)
• tomatoes (except when they’re heavily cooked)

Mostly I feel this way because Dr. Boyfriend refuses to take me to Per Se until I can not only stomach but actually enjoy all of the foods they’re going to serve me there. He’s withheld the place from me for so long now that no matter how good it is, it’ll never be as good as I’ve made it out to be.

But my best friend sent me a link today to an article on The Kitchn asking what foods people have tried to like but can’t.

And I rejoiced! It turns out that everyone hates seafood and mushrooms and tomatoes! And I love the distinction the post draws between not liking something and trying to like something but failing. No one wants to hate certain foods! My life would be a thousand times easier if I could just eat and enjoy everything. But I haven’t been able to yet, and I don’t have to feel guilty about it anymore, and Dr. Boyfriend can suck it!

(But please suck it after you’ve taken me to Per Se, Kamran. Thank you.)