Oh, how excited I was to tell him all about my thoughts on this topic! This kind of question is right up my alley! I love eating! I love my neighborhood! I love being helpful! On and on I went, naming several places we’ve tried and loved, then giving him the scoop on a couple of new and highly-regarded places in the neighborhood that we’ve been meaning to try. I talked about what kind of food they had, which ones were more focused on local ingredients, which one had the best burger, etc etc etc. Just when the poor man thought I’d finished, I remembered another place, and then talked about THAT one for a minute or so.

I realized, of course, that this was really more information than my father needed, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I had relevant information and opinions, and I like to help people make informed choices that hopefully they will be happy with, and I would feel lousy if they had a dinner they didn’t enjoy based on my recommendation, so….yeah. I erred on the side of thorough, and was feeling pretty good about my little rundown of the local restaurant scene.

Until, that is, my wedding anniversary a few weeks later, when my mother and father gave me and John a generous gift certificate to….the first place I’d listed in that endless phone call, the one I’d called “our favorite.” The whole thing had been a setup, and my cute dad had just wanted cover for figuring out what our favorite local place was so that they could treat us to a night out there. I actually smacked my forehead with my palm when I figured it out.

Well, it has happened again. I regret to inform you of this, internet, because she seems so nice, but that Jennie of She Likes Purple is a TOTAL SNEAK. A few days ago she emailed me asking about a post I’d written for foodlush during the holidays, listing some of my favorite gift cookbooks, and some that I was hoping to receive. She said she needed a gift for her sister in law, and wanted to know did I actually own the Chez Panisse Vegetables book? Was it really as good as I said?

Oh absolutely, I said, and proceeded to describe, in excruciating detail, the layout and organization of the book, its tone, the level of expertise required, even the mother-loving illustrations. A few minutes later, I got another email asking if I had the fruit version of the same book. “No,” I replied, “but given how much I love the vegetable one, it’s on my wish list.”

Yesterday when I got home from work, what was waiting on my doorstep? Chez Panisse Fruit, a gift from my foodlush Secret Santa, Jennie.

SNEAK!

Um, sorry about that incredibly long and needlessly detailed missive about the Vegetables book, my friend. Thanks for finding absolutely the perfect secret santa gift. And to anyone else who may be thinking of asking for my advice or recommendations in the future, I promise: I’m trying to get better.

My friend and I sat down and were chatting as we looked at the menu, when all of a sudden I felt a hand rest on my back, between my shoulder blades.

I looked up and saw our waiter.  “Ladies! Great to see you, I’ll be back in a second to tell you about my favorites.”

You might think from this that my friend and I are regulars at this restaurant, or that we knew this waiter.  Nein.

We peruse the cocktail menu.  A minute later, there’s a hand resting on my shoulder again.

“Well, what have we decided for drinkies?”

Drinkies?

It continued like this throughout the meal, as he read us the specials “people either love or hate beets but I love them like crazy and the beet salad is just the PERFECT little salad!”) when he brought out our food (“now, this is a rich burger, you might want to cut it in half and save half for lunch tomorrow so you don’t overdo it!”) and when we ordered dessert (“two desserts?  My kind of ladies!”)  And each and every time he came by the table, he placed his hand on my back or my shoulder.  Every time.

Now look, I’ve waited tables.  A lot.  I know that as a server part of the job is to figure out a way to connect with your tables, make them feel well-served.  This can be a challenge- people’s preferences for restaurant service are esoteric.  Where one person wants to hear the waiter’s favorites, another person thinks that’s inexcusable- why should what I order have anything to do with what you like, peon?  Where one person likes jokey banter with the server, another wants the server to be pretty much invisible so the table is free to conduct conversations undisturbed.  It’s a balancing act, I get it.

But when they say that you should “touch your tables” regularly to make sure everything’s going well with the meal, I’m pretty sure they don’t mean that literally.  I walked out of there feeling like I’d been on a bad first date.

(Apparently science doesn’t agree with me: this study indicates that people tip better when the server touches them slightly.  I can’t be alone in this though, can I?  Would you all like your restaurant meal with a side of stranger back rub?)

Foods Jamie Oliver would be ashamed of me for eating, but which I JUST CANNOT GIVE UP ENTIRELY, okay?  Some things are TOO DELICIOUS:

• Circus Peanuts
• Pizzeria Pretzel combos
• Green jello with mini marshmallows
• Cheddar sauce (a la Arbys) on french fries
• Circus animal cookies.
• Those rye chips in Gardettos snack mix
• Cool whip  (I’M SO ASHAMED.  I’ll go turn in my foodie street cred card now.)

What totally disgusting, chemical-laden, embarrassing-to-admit foods do you secretly love?

* Ten points to anyone who remembers this classic quote from an even more classic movie.

Age 11: At a sleepover at a friend’s house, her mom serves us stuffed peppers for dinner.  “They’re my favorite!” she gushes.  As I cut into mine, one side of the pepper splits open and watery tomato sauce and gray ground beef squirt out.  I take one bite and spit it into my napkin.  I tell my friend’s mom I don’t eat meat, and for a month afterwards I don’t, trying to make my lie true by sticking to it.  I don’t eat another stuffed pepper for nineteen years.

Age 16: My boyfriend’s mother is a fabulous cook.  She makes an Italian feast- Bolognese and lasagna and eggplant parmigiana.  At this point I don’t eat meat for real, so I take a heaping portion of eggplant.  It tastes like heaven with the fried and the sauce and the cheese, but an hour later my mouth and throat itch and my tongue feels heavy.  It takes me years of suffering through earnest eggplant-heavy vegetarian entrees for me to realize I have a nightshade sensitivity.

Age 17: The letter arrives in a small envelope, so I’m sure I’ve been rejected.  But when I open it, it says “congratulations on your admission!”  My dad, ecstatic that I’ve chosen his alma mater, breaks open a dusty bottle of champagne, pours a glass for all of us, even my 15 year old sister.  A picture from that night still sits on his desk, me holding a crystal champagne glass from my parents’ wedding, hair in a sloppy ponytail, wearing jeans and a college tshirt from a different college.

Age 18: After a scholastic bowl meet (shut up), my friends go to Panda Express to pick up dinner.   The restaurant’s about to close, so they give my friends whole trays of food they were going to throw out, charging $10 for enough to feed dozens.   My mom’s allergic to MSG so I’ve never had Chinese food, and I mow through half a pan of lo mein noodles, unable to get enough of the new flavor.

Age 20: Once a term, our house hosts “special dinner,” where the house chef cooks nicer food, with a theme.  There is also booze.  After a contentious vote, the house has decided on sushi, so the chef makes dozens of rolls, including many for the house’s few vegetarians, carrot and cucumber and avocado and sweet potato.  I eat a few bites, but the vinegar-y rice tastes odd to me, and I don’t like the warm sake, and I complain bitterly about what a waste of a special dinner it was.  A year later, when I try sushi again and fall in love with it, I kick myself for not gorging that night.

Age 25: Twice a week, after teaching all day, I go to a science classroom in a nearby middle school and suffer through teaching certification classes from 6-10 pm with 20 other new teachers.  We get a 30 minute break for dinner, too short to go anywhere far, but someone discovers Lee’s sandwiches in the adjacent Vietnamese mini mall.  The sandwich with tofu is entirely foreign and entirely delicious, salty and sweet and hot, and for the rest of the year every Monday and Wednesday for dinner I have a $2 sandwich and a strawberry smoothie made with sweetened condensed milk and boba.  I feel profound loss when I move away two years later and for months am unable to find decent banh mi or bubble tea in Chicago.

This weekend: For a friend’s birthday, we go to dim sum. Her husband has researched online all the crazy dishes he wants, and orders for the table.  Dishes start arriving quickly, one after another, and no longer vegetarian, I take some of everything.  Including the pig’s ear.  It was chewy.

Tonight on Iron Chef (the Japanese version) the challenger was “Japan’s only chef trained in Mexico,” who runs a Mexican restaurant in Tokyo.

“Well!” said the announcer, “in order to make this a true, mano-a-mano Latin challenge, we shall choose for him to face…Iron Chef Italian!”

Thus began several minutes of commentary talking about how similar Italian and Mexican foods are! How much alike! Because they’re both Latin!

And John and I are sitting on the couch, mouths agape, like “really? Is there perhaps some fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of foods were talking about here?”  It is true that both the Italian and Spanish languages derived from Latin, but…well, so is French. And Romanian.  It just doesn’t seem like “language of origin” is a terrifically precise mechanism for identifying similarity in foods.

Watching an entirely foreign culture address two cuisines that are very familiar to Americans was a hoot.  The trash talk from the Iron Chef Italian was HILARIOUS.  (“That’s tortellini, and tortellini is better than tortilla!”  “Italian food has complexity and nuance, unlike Mexican food!” “Our flags may look similar but Italian food is light years better than Mexican!”)

The commentary of the Japanese commentators/judges as they watched the chefs prepare was even better. “Is he making pasta?” “No, that’s a tortilla, it’s like the Mexican version of pasta, it’s just sort of…there.” “That’s a mole sauce, it’s used pretty much the same way as chicken broth is used in Western cooking.”  “What is THAT?”  “That’s a chili.”  “But it’s so BIG, how on earth could someone use THAT in cooking?”

This from a culture that considers highly poisonous blowfish a delicacy.

• Bananas.  I’be been buying them in bunches of 5 and eating one sliced over my cereal every morning.  Several times now, as the week has progressed, instead of turning the normal mottled yellow and black as the fruit ripens, the skins have taken on a uniform gray color.  They look kind of sickly, and it seems like the fruit inside doesn’t seem to ripen as much.  What gives?  Banana blight?  Are the bananas still okay to eat?  (More specifically: am I going to die from the one I ate just now?)
• Apples.  For a while, I was bringing apples to work to replace my usual mid-morning snack of rice cakes with peanut butter.  But I noticed that often, when I ate an apple on a near-empty stomach, I would get a rush of intense and terrifically unpleasant nausea 5 to 10 minutes later.  (The first time it happened, I actually emailed a friend in a panic, thinking that such sudden onset nausea must mean I was pregnant.  True story.  (I’m not.  Pregnant.  Phew.)) Am I the only one who experiences this?  Do I have strange sort of temporary apple allergy, or is this a normal apple thing?
• Grapefruit.  So delicious, yet so labor intensive.  I’m considering buying a grapefruit knife.  Should I?

Now, let’s see if I can keep this up on the long winter slog through citrusville until the stone fruits come into season again.  Outlook not so good.

Now, anyone who has ever read a personal finance article will tell you that “those daily lattes really add up,” and “if you just stopped getting your daily Starbucks you’d save hundreds of dollars a year.”  I’m sure this is technically true: I’m just having a hard time deciding if I care.

Some days, when I’m buying my third cafe au lait of the week, I feel a tinge of guilt.  I should be saving this $2.68!  Don’t I want to retire someday?  But just as often, I think to myself: if I refrain from buying a new sweater this winter, I have just earned myself 20 coffees!  Like, doesn’t it seem supremely inefficient to save for retirement in two dollar and sixty-eight cent increments?  Wouldn’t it be better to enjoy your thrice-weekly coffee and save money by making smarter purchases on, or foregoing entirely, bigger-ticket items, like cars, or plane tickets, or elective plastic surgery?

I also rationalize by noting that I save money in many other ways.  I pack my lunch virtually every day.  We only own one car.  I buy the $5 bottles of wine for everyday drinking.  But what it comes down to is this: I derive a lot of pleasure from those coffees, and I think small daily comforts and pleasures are worth something.  I know I’m not the only one who really enjoys a morning espresso drink.  I’d be willing to bet the personal finance advice columnists who scold everyone about drinking coffee probably drink it themselves.  Most of us have neither the time nor the equipment to brew coffeeshop-quality lattes at home.  And while I am all for curbing mindless, unnecessary spending, I am only going to be working across the street from this coffeeshop for a year, and if I want to go there three times a week, I’m going to do it, goddammit.

• extra sharp cheddar cheese and triscuits
• english toffee
• fresh tortilla chips and guacamole
• an entire pan of rice krispie treats
• sauvignon blanc
• lemon bars
• mashed potatoes made with lots of cream and butter
• dark chocolate m&ms
• a hot dog at a baseball game
• warm chocolate chip cookies
• gingerbread lattes

Not worth the calories:

• cheesecake
• white sauces on pasta
• Kahlua/Baileys
• KitKats
• potato chips
• sweet and sour chicken
• big sweet muffins at the coffeeshop
• Italian beef sandwiches
• american cheese
• mochas

As with the others, I imagine these are highly personalized lists.  What are yours?

Rice Krispie treats, it seems, are one of my “trigger foods”.  (Isn’t that the term? I try to stay away from diet books and diet lingo after a protracted period of overdieting in high school, but I think you know what I mean.)

Like go-to pantry items, I think each of us has individual taste when it comes to foods that you just can’t stop eating.  You know the type: food that turns you into a mindless overeating robot and your stomach into a bottomless pit.  I, for example, can leave ice cream alone, am not overtempted by tortilla chips and salsa, and have no problem saying “no” to a second brownie.  On the other hand, I am apparently incapable of stopping myself from eating the following unless I physically move them out of sight to some deep forgotten recess of our kitchen:

• Rice Krispie treats
• sharp cheddar cheese and triscuits
• cookie dough (homemade)
• green grapes
• pretzel thins and hummus
• cherry tomatoes (Helpful tip: do not eat an entire quart of these  by yourself for lunch.  Trust me.)
• Swedish fish
• popcorn (especially kettle corn. Good god, when the movie theater near us started serving kettle corn, that was the end of me and my foolish attempts to avoid the extortionate pricing of movie-theater snacks.)

Please tell me I’m not alone in my lack of willpower around certiain highly-desirable foods.  What are yours?

I am not particularly a fan of JohnMay’s music, but if you read gossip magazines (and I do, people, I do.  No shame in my game!) it’s hard to avoid his rotating famous-lady girlfriends, his practical joke antics, his narcissistic fan cruise.

JohnMay is ALSO famous, or so I’m told, for a particular face he makes while performing:

John, let me tell you: you’re lucky that your “lost in the moment” face is what it is, because just one twist of the mouth and you could be toiling away in obscurity.  Why? Read on:

This weekend, I donned a blue pageboy wig (sweaty! And also itchy!) and got on a trolley with 15 other wig-wearing girls to fete one of my best childhood friend’s who’s getting married.   We did all the bachelorette party things (Drinking! Pictures! Flashing the 17 year old boys who mooned us from the window of their  hotel across the street!)  (Wait, that’s not a normal bachelorette party thing? Yeah, I was the one at the back saying a silent prayer “please let them be of age please let them be of age I really don’t want anyone at this party facing charges for doing naughty things to a minor please let them be of age.”)

We went dancing, of course, at a club featuring a DJ backed up by a live bassist and drummer.  It was kind of odd, but it worked.  You felt for the live musicians, though – the  DJ was clearly the star of the show, and they were just playing along.

The drummer looked for all the world like he spends his days working as a CPA.  Pleated khakis, polo shirt, ear-protecting headset, semi-bored expression.  Good for you, dude, getting your musical kicks on a Saturday night.  The bassist, though.  Oh, the bassist.  He had long, 70s southern rock hair, and not in an ironic way.  He writhed and flailed and just generally gave the impression that he felt like this was IT, man, this was ROCKING OUT, despite the fact that he was essentially just mimicking the baseline of whatever the DJ threw down.  But the best was his face.  Instead of a JohnMay-style O face, we had the wince-grimace.  Seriously, I tried to get a picture of it, but the club was too dark.  It looked like he’d just been hit in the nuts, hard.  Seriously, like this:

Except somehow even more wince-y and pinched looking.  It was…kind of hard not to laugh, to be honest.  And as I sat there, throwing stones from my blue-wig-wearing glass house, it occurred to me: this guy could be the best bassist in the history of TIME, and he would still have trouble booking gigs because of that face.  That face may be the only thing standing between him and a real rock n’ roll career.