Category Archives: Features

My Three-Day Juice Cleanse Experiment

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I’ll try anything once. (It’s true, ask my high school boyfriend.) So when my friend suggested I take part in a juice cleanse at her yoga studio, I said, Sure! I said, Sounds like fun! It took a week for the realization to sink in: No food. For 3 days.

I like to eat. As a kid I would go to parties just for the cake. I’d take my piece to a spot in the corner and eat it alone, like I wanted to give it my undivided attention. I once convinced a bouncer I was hypoglycemic so I could bring a bag of cookies into a club. But I’d heard a lot about juicing, and I was curious. I’d just never been brave or motivated enough to try it.

I knew I couldn’t trust myself to get in the kitchen and make juices everyday and not eat, so I went with a prepackaged cleanse from Juice Hugger in Brooklyn. For $45 a day, you get six juices per day (one for every 2 hours), already bottled and numbered for you. Each day includes a mixture of juiced greens, fruits, and veggies. The juices were surprisingly tasty and varied enough to keep it interesting. The second day—usually the most difficult for people—featured a tomato soup, sweet potato juice, and a lentil mixture, all of which could be heated and placed in a bowl to simulate the act of eating. (I personally found sipping juice from a spoon to be even more depressing than drinking something called “Lean Lentils.”) Below is a day-by-day blow of my experience.

Day 1

All I think about is food. Not because I’m hungry, but because I know I won’t eat for days. I try to read a book but the main character is painstakingly describing his mother’s job at a bakery, where the doughnuts “roil” to life in grease. I mark the next time I can have a juice, 2 hours from now, on my bookmark.

My neighbor burns toast and my mouth salivates like Pavlov’s dog.

Two hours crawl by. I take small sips of the juice, wanting it to last. I cross out the hour I’d jotted down on the bookmark and write the time for my next feeding. I’m reminded of a prisoner counting down his days.

I clear my fridge of anything chewable and put away the dishes on the dish rack, as if to rid myself of the notion that cooking can and has happened in my kitchen.

My stomach snarls at me. I can’t help it; I start seeping gas. I make a note to leave the house as little as possible. Continue reading →

Popcorn, Mon Amour

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popcorn cart

"Better make that a double; I'm going to see Die Hard: With a Vengeance."

I was sitting in a darkened theatre on Saturday, munching handfuls of popcorn, when suddenly the entire tradition of movie popcorn struck me as absurd. In Brooklyn, so much as whispering through a movie would probably get me punched in the face, but I am allowed to eat the loudest, smelliest snack possible a mere two feet from another patron’s head, and no one is allowed to say anything. I think this revelation was spurred mostly by the fact that we were watching the dismal and quiet French film Amour (spoiler alert: unhappy beginning, unhappy middle, unhappy ending, followed by me extacting a sworn statement from Jason that he would never smother me with a pillow, diapers or no), but even so, I couldn’t help but consider the weirdly powerful love affair between celluloid and popcorn. After all, potato chips and corn chips and pretzels have the same salty-oily-crunch factor, and though those snacks are more popular in virtually every other venue (including the realm of house cats), cinemas are the domain of popcorn alone.

Apparently, like any number of romantic pairings, the match between popcorn and movies began because both parties were in the right place at the right time. The portable popcorn popper and the nickelodeon were bright young things together in the late 19th century, and it didn’t take long for popcorn vendors to start parking their carts outside the theatres to take advantage of the crowds. Later, the popcorn moved inside to boost theatre profits during the depression. Not even war could tear the two asunder: sugar was rationed during World War II, so candy disappeared from concession stands, but the War Department gave the official go-ahead to theatres to continue to serve popcorn. Continue reading →

What Will Oscar Eat?: Discriminating Palate Edition

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The Tomato Slayer has, in defiance of all that I have known of him up until this point, begun to show a bit of discrimination.

Those of you who read PitchKnives regularly or know us personally are aware that Oscar is generally a cut-rate food whore, though one capable of strategy.  He’ll eat constantly and is beyond tubby, but also has the sense to wait patiently until our backs our turned to go cheerfully push Bruce out of the way and go to town on his food.  He is in general our trash compactor: if there’s a crumb of kibble or a slight slick of canned food left uneaten in a bowl, Oscar is on the case.

 

Until Saturday, that is.  After going to see Amour (meh), we decided to bring home the remnants of our popcorn.  Surely Oscar would be partial to junk food above all other kinds.

Au contraire.  In a shocking display that turned conventional wisdom on its head, Oscar sniffed at the bag, only to turn away in favor of double checking that no scrap of breakfast remaining in his bowl had escaped his attention.  No amount of cajoling or enticement made a lick of difference.  Just look at Shannon.  She’s bereft!

Thankfully Dylan, the dimmest of the bunch and equally food-focused, was there to pick up Oscar’s slack. Continue reading →

The Secret to Fresh Pasta

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pasta

A recent haul from Caputo's

There are many reasons I like Roger. We often agree about books and movies and music. He was once the state Monopoly champion of Rhode Island. He knows all the best puppy videos on YouTube, and though he is my boss, often shows them to me while I’m on the clock. But I think that the reason I like him most of all is that he is the one who told me about Caputo’s.

The topic came up because we were talking about making pasta. Roger, a bit of a foodie, makes his own noodles from time to time, and though they are tasty, it’s a time-consuming enterprise. “Really,” he said, “for four bucks, why wouldn’t you just buy it at that little Italian place on Court Street?” He meant Caputo’s, and he sent me the address. Regular readers of this blog will already know that I believe there’s value in knowing the long way of doing something; making something from scratch is a pleasure in itself. But even I have my limits. The secret to fresh pasta is this: you buy it at Caputo’s.

Caputo's Fine FoodsCaputo’s has an unassuming storefront in Carroll Gardens. It is one of those places that looks old, in a good way, as though maybe it staked its claim when Brooklyn was still a forest and the neighborhood simply grew up around it. In addition to the refrigerator cases of fresh pasta and sauces and soups, there is an olive bar, a cheese case, bins of glistening homemade mozzarella, shelves of dry pasta and bread and tiny jarred wonders, and freezers of pizza dough and cannoli filling and always, always, more pasta. It is all heaven-help-me groan-worthy. My Caputo’s shopping trips end only because of the limits of my wallet and my refrigerator. I have always said that if I could choose only one cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Indian or Mexican, but now I need to add a caveat that I would choose Italian, provided that all of the ingredients came from Caputo’s.

But the food, glorious though it be, is not the only attraction. Continue reading →

Thrill of the Hunt: My Addiction to Menu Competition

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I admit that I can be a tad on the competitive side. Once, when Jason and I were first dating, we got onto long parallel escalators in a PATH station. When I saw Jason start to trot a few steps forward on his escalator, I thought we were racing and jumped forward like a runner off the block. When I got to the bottom, flushed and slightly sweaty, and looked back up at Jason, he was scowling. “I was just trying to catch up to you enough that we could hold hands across the banister,” he said. “Also, I think you might have a problem.” I, of course, denied that enjoying a friendly escalator contest should be magnified to a DSM-IV kind of issue. And yet, a dinner last week made me reconsider the charge.

We were eating at a restaurant about which I had heard quite a lot in advance. It’s the sort of small-joint-makes-a-reputation-for-itself that I usually love, so the fact that I was disappointed in my meal was all the more crushing. But worse still was the fact that Jason’s choice of entrée was truly fantastic. I had to listen to him making happy sounds of enjoyment the entire meal while I pushed my gloppy sauce around on my plate. The reason we were there in the first place was that I was taking him out for his birthday, so I tried to reason that it was only fair that he liked his meal more. But the truth was glaring: he had won. I can’t help it; I love it when we’re eating out and we taste each other’s meals and Jason says something like, “Mmm, mine is good, but yours is great.” It makes me feel like I have accomplished something, however small. It makes me feel like I have managed to raise the act of ordering off a menu to an art worthy of competition. Maybe I do have a problem. Continue reading →

Wanted: Columnists

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thoughtbubbleHave you ever been browsing through PitchKnives & Butter Forks and thought to yourself, “I could do that”? Well, you probably could. In fact, now’s your chance to prove it. We are currently seeking new writers willing to commit to a regular monthly or bi-weekly column. Aspiring columnists should have a theme and an idea of how to sustain that theme over numerous posts, though topics could fall anywhere within the larger categories of food, drink, cooking or gardening. We cannot provide payment, but we do provide access to an instant audience of foodies.

If you’d like to see an excellent example of format and style, click on the Just Add Beer button to the right and check out the posts by our resident beer maven Llalan Fowler.

For application details, please contact us at submissions@pitchknives.com.

Grocery Shopping for Good Fortune

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black-eyed peasHere we are, staring down the barrel of a new year, a suspended moment that can feel both hopeful and intimidating. Luckily, our forefathers have left us traditions of “lucky food” to bolster our fortune for the coming year and to give us something to chew on besides our fingernails as we contemplate the uncertain future. And so, a rundown of some essentials for this weekend’s grocery list:

Sauerkraut: I thought everyone ate pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day, but when I Googled it to find the backstory, the first thing to pop up was an article called, “Why do Ohioans eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day?” So maybe it was just us, all along. Even so, Tuesday’s feast wouldn’t be complete without a healthy dose of the German cabbage staple. Roots of this tradition are vague, at best, though I think I was told as a child that cabbage is green and represents wealth. I also have a sneaking suspicion that all those Cleveland Germans were probably just tossing together what they had left in the pantry after Christmas. By far the most creative answer, though, was one I found on Yahoo Answers that posited that people eat pork because a pig roots forward with its nose similar to the way we forge into the new year. Even if it’s not true, I like the idea, so I’m going to get some soy sausage to complement my kraut.

Black-eyed peas: While I was munching sauerkraut in Ohio, Jason spent the New Year’s Days of his childhood eating black-eyed peas with stewed tomatoes. This is typically considered “a Southern thing,” and there’s a Civil War story that goes along with it, in which the modest pea was the only thing left in the fields after Sherman’s notorious march to the sea, and the Confederate soldiers felt lucky to have them that winter. True? Well, maybe. Continue reading →

Holding Fast

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water glass

Lunch.

At the moment of typing this, I haven’t eaten for about seventy-two hours. I actually feel a little better than at hour twenty-four, when I couldn’t read or watch TV for the fear that a character might have the audacity to eat something in front of me. But more about this later. First, I should mention why someone who loves food as much as I do would ever consider embarking on a fast.

1)    Foremost was the notion that a relatively brief fast might help my turbulent stomach return to its usual steely resolve. I’m not sure why it’s been in such a huff lately, but not much seems to soothe it, and I was reminded of a friend who fasts about once a year mentioning that it helped her sort out the foods that she can’t tolerate. If you clean out your system, she said, you’ll know immediately when you start eating again if there’s something you should avoid. I liked this idea of a gastric reset button and decided that this might be a way to clear my stomach’s fog of confusion.

2)    Although it’s far from a proven fact, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that fasting might benefit you in the long run. An article in Harper’s magazine explores the possibility that simply not eating for a few days might help patients undergoing anything from epilepsy to chemo. The problem is that not doing something doesn’t really benefit anyone financially, most obviously pharmaceutical companies, so fasting hasn’t received the funding for rigorous testing. At any rate, I do recall being scared a few years ago by some news article that likened burning calories to putting miles on a car—eventually, the engine, or the body, just wears out. Yikes, I thought. I eat way more than a lot of people. Maybe I should give the engine a rest for a few days.

3)    There was a chance, however remote, that fasting might bring some sort of clarity and insight. People describe having this sort of experience on a fast, and I thought that perhaps I was missing something. Flaubert ate virtually nothing while writing his novels (though if you’ve ever seen his portrait, you can probably guess that he gorged himself as soon as he delivered a manuscript to the publisher). Maybe the next Madame Bovary is lurking within me, blocked until now by food. Continue reading →

The Audacity of Restaurant-Closure Denial

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wally's square root

Happier days: a photo of Wally's from their website

According to the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross outlined, I am still in the first stage: denial. I know this because when Jason told me that Wally’s Square Root Café had permanently closed, I asked him several times if he was sure and then, in my heart of hearts, decided that he must be wrong. I know this because I hopefully check their still-intact website and have several times dialed their phone number, even though it has clearly been disconnected. I know this because I can’t quite bring myself to walk by its shuttered storefront.

Wally’s was a diner near the Pratt campus in Clinton Hill. It was a little rough around the edges, with mismatched furniture and modern proverbs scrawled all over the walls and a slightly dazed-looking waitstaff and strange aging artifacts, like toy slot machines, sitting around.  But I, for one, found all of this rather charming, and the food was heavenly, making Wally’s one of those neighborhood ace-in-your-pocket places that you keep at the ready for guests or for a lazy Sunday morning. The pesto-laced Green Eggs and Ham was a wonder on a plate, and they could make it vegetarian in the blink of an eye. The potatoes were crisp little nuggets of pure joy. And the Dirty Mac—I can’t even describe it for fear that I might begin to weep. It might have just been a hole in the wall, but it was my hole in the wall.

There is a particular kind of restaurant grief that overtakes me in situations like these—situations in which not just an eating establishment but an entire series of unwritten future experiences are shut down forever. I know that things change and that neighborhoods evolve. I have been guilty of rolling my eyes when Jason speaks with a kind of nostalgia about the liquor stores and fleabag hotels that have all but disappeared from our neighborhood. But I would be lying if I really care about that at the moment. What I really care about is the lemon-ginger sweet tea at Wally’s and how I will never drink it again.

I can think, really, of only one semi-comparable experience: Continue reading →

Community New Update: The House and Arsenic Rice

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This photo came up when I googled "super rice."

On October 8th, I wrote about the Consumer Reports investigation that revealed dangerous levels of arsenic in pretty much all the rice we eat.  In that post, I also mentioned that there are currently no federal laws governing how much arsenic is permissible in food.  The FDA regulates arsenic in bottled water, but that’s it.

Turns out three House Democrats (Conn. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, N.J. Rep. Frank Pallone, and N.Y. Rep. Nita Lowey) have introduced a bill—The R.I.C.E. Act—that would require the FDA set a legal limit for arsenic levels in rice.  Continue reading →