1000

2006-08-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

958. Smoked cod, white sauce, crispy fatty bacon, boiled potatoes.

(This entry reinforces that this list truly is in random order, since a straight, proper countdown would place this meal somewhere in the single digits. It's one of the best possible things I've ever tasted).

(The cod and white sauce are based on finnan haddie, I suppose, and everytime it's been cooked for me, it's been called "finnan haddie," even though it's always been made with smoked cod instead of smoked haddock).

(And I eventually found out that the white sauce could be called Bechamel, although I never heard it referred to as anything else but "white sauce" and I still prefer that title).

When you're a kid, mastering the roux and thinning and thickening is a very important experience. Every step of it is wonderful and challenging: the smell of the foaming, darkening butter and the careful balance as you whisk with your right hand (vigorous but not vigorous enough to knock the pan off the flame) and sprinkle flour with your left hand. Then, another balancing act as the milk is added, making sure it's a little too thin, because in a moment it will rapidly, in a millisecond, slow down and thicken.

Long before the sauce begins, the cod is boiled in a shallow pan, from which the water is poured out and replaced a few time, to defeat the saltiness. Beside the poaching fish, the potatoes are going. They must be peeled and reduced to large cubes, then boiled until a fork into one will split it in half and the general texture is oversoft. And beside the potatoes, there should be bacon crisping in a pan. My dad always used side pork, extra fatty, delicious meat from up around the ribs. I use regular old streaky bacon, or, today, slices of leftover pork belly from the fridge, fried until crispy.

The pale yellow, poached cod goes down on each plate, followed by a scoop of watery, soggy potatoes. Then the sauce, snowblindness white, tongueblistering hot because it prefers not to cool, goes down over both. I hate to see a plate with less than an inch of white sauce covering the fish and potato. The sauce is rich and delicious and equally as important as the fish and more important than the potato. When everything is in place, slip the slices of bacon onto the side of the plate. (A lot of people, when the plate comes down in front of them, immediately set about shuffling all the items together, including the bacon. They are left with a perfect mash of cod and potato and bacon. This is a good method! Personally, I leave everything intact).

The taste is. I can't even begin. I'm bound to fail here. That cod has an indescribable richness to it, slightly fishy, a lot salty, all wrapped up in the sauce, creamy, heavy, five pounds per forkful. Potato and bacon hanging in the background, providing starchy comfort and pork fat richness, respectively.

2006-08-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

959. Pork belly, brined and roasted, with lima beans.

The butcher at Gellinger's remarks that not many people come in for pork belly anymore, people from the country, a bit, but mostly a Chinese place, Jade Treasure (terrible name), who don't even list it on the menu but sell enough of it to old Chinese folks that know the secret codeword. This begins a brief, mild tirade about dealing with the local pork plant, who, he says, only sell to his competitors and ship the rest to Taiwan. To get pigs, he has to deal with a farmer near Caron, just up the Trans-Canada, and a large butcher out of Regina, just up the Trans-Canada again, but in the opposite direction. But he knows the pigs, he says, and knows the farmer, and he knows the guy that slaughters them.

He carries a broad slab of pork out and lifts it up over the counter to show to me, "That look good to ya?" "Yep." He wraps it in pink butcher paper.

The brine and the roasting is from Fergus Henderson, after looking through every Chinese cookbook available and not finding anything just right. The slab of pork belly gets chopped up and submerged. Day one, the brine is crystal clear, bay leaves floating on top. Day fourteen, a week or so after having completely forgotten about it in a corner of the kitchen, the brine is dark, the color of duck stock. It smells like peppery Earl Grey tea, when I slosh the liquid around in the tub and flip the sections of belly over.

It needs to be rinsed quite thoroughly, if left that long in the brine. Treat it like a piece of salt cod, let it sit in a pan of water in the sink and constantly recycle the water with a trickle of cool water from the tap. The first batch I took out of the brine was oversalty because I was scared to rinse it, thinking that for some reason it would reverse the brining process and my belly would become engorged with fresh clean water after weeks of sitting in salt and sugar-- but I don't think that's a major concern. After it's rinsed, dry it off really well: I let it sit in a big towel on my lap for a while, then fired a blowdryer at it.

I took three big onions, white ones, from the Hutterites that set up in front of Peavey Mart to sell their chickens and vegetables, really potent, really sulphurous, chopped them up, made a bed in a deep pan, and laid my belly down on it. In the oven, the top layer of fat turns a beautiful dark brown, crispy and dry, while the lower layers render their fat and gelatin out into the onions.

After it came out, while the belly was relaxing on the counter, a few big spoonfuls of fat (not too much, because the lima beans need to be unsalty for everything to work) and a good amount of roasted onions and some shallots dropped into a pan with some drained lima beans that were being kept warm in their pot by the heat venting from the oven. The beans spill their starch and soften. The pork fat lubricates and the gelatin binds: perfect.

It's beautiful to eat, all the fat brined and roasted into thin sticky layers between sweet pink meat. The top layer is tough and crispy and salty and the meat underneath is moist and stringy. I tear apart the pork belly with my left hand, using a fork in the right to cut pieces free, pop them in my mouth. With the fork, I scoop up a load of lima beans and have them in my mouth before more than a single chew of the meat takes place. The pork belly is fatty and rich and salty and is the perfect match for those starchy, slightly slightly bitter lima beans and the sweet roasted onions.

2006-08-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

960. Large beef donair from Samir's Donair, Medicine Hat.

Western Canada created its own strain of Chinese food last century, Chinese immigrants that built the transcontinental railway and those that followed them stayed in the prairies and set up every small town's little restaurant/corner store. We invented ginger beef and perfected greasy chow mein. The donair joint's Western Canadian spread is the closest modern equivalent. Within walking distance of the Medicine Hat Greyhound depot, I have the choice of five donair makers (I only choose Samir's because there's a Samir's in Moose Jaw). Basic donair: giant mound of shredded watery lettuce, soft steamed pita, a huge shot of extra sour tzatziki, beef shaved off a tall pillar with a buzzing electric trimmer, uncrispy due to large turnover. I eat it off my lap, back on the Greyhound, mostly pulling the meat out, dipping it into tzatziki spilled inside the tinfoil, still burping donair flavor in Swift Current (gross).

2006-08-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

961. Som tum.

Grated green papaya, grated carrot, roast and ground peanuts, fish sauce, chiles, tomato, lime. I order it out of respect for the restaurant. And it's a good yardstick, a dish with not too many variations-- but it can be horrible and soggy and bland or it can be beautiful and crisp and overpowering. It's a matter of balance and care. Must specify "very hot," so there is no holding back on the part of the cook. "Very hot means that" all the flavors get turned way up to compensate for the laser beam heat. It becomes very hot, very sour, very salty/fishy, very sweet. All the flavors are on full blast, with none really causing itself to stand out. The moisture flicked from a slurped mouthful onto the outskirts of the lips becomes an experience, that hot/sour/salty/fishy/sweet teardrop of som tum juice having more flavor than your last three meals combined.

2006-08-02T21:32:00.000-07:00

962. Carrot, ginger, coconut, lobster soup from Mediterranean Bistro, Regina.

I go for long stretches forgetting that I don't like coconut. Sometimes I can forgetfully eat it and sort of enjoy it. I'll buy a coconut macaroon from a bakery and never realize that I definitely don't enjoy coconut. Then I'll order a green curry on the recommendation of the waitress in a Thai restaurant and get totally grossed out by the overpowering coconutness of it and be unable to eat another spoonful. This was a coconut macaroon situation. The first nine tenths of the bowl, I am in love with the sweetness, that bright orange carrot flavor playing with ginger and soft lobster meat and... something I can't place. I ask my mom, "What does this taste like?" "Carrot." Then I hear the waitress at another table, introducing the soup of the day, mentioning the coconut, and all of a sudden all I can place the taste: coconut flavor scented suntan lotion, coconut macaroons, those Dare Coconut Creme cookies, green curry, red curry.

2006-08-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

963. Carrot cake with cream cheese icing.

While cheesecake needs almost unsweetened cream cheese, extra sour and cheesy, cream cheese icing should be at least half sugar. Second rule, it should be at least an inch thick. Third, make a ring-shaped cake, so you can have icing on three surfaces instead of two (or one). Fourth, the cake should be moist but not too moist and a lot ginger-y and nutmeg-y, but it shouldn't steal the show from the cream cheese icing. I eat a third of a cake at a time, licking the icing off the plate, washing it all down with cold 1% milk.

2006-08-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

964. Prawn curry from Glory of India, Calgary.

The red and the shrimp was decent, just a bit spicy and just a bit sour, tasting mainly of cilantro. The prawns were cooked perfect, just a bit chewy. But it was all setting up for the amazing rice, which came out a minute later, waiting for the red and shrimp to be laid over it. Long grains, slightly off-white. Near transparent onion spread throughout. On top, soft enough to soak up the red. In the middle, firm and moist. On the bottom, cooked until crispy and browned, tasting like roasted almond like the rice stuck to the bottom of a hotpot in a Korean restaurant.

2006-08-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

965. Buttercream icing licked off a beater thing.

For the whole time she spends at our house, she is with me in the kitchen, amazed by simple things like red onions and bamboo steamers. She uses a TV-taught garlic smashing method, throwing coarse salt under her knife and mashing it up, and she runs to get tinfoil for meat coming out of the oven to rest in. I give her her first tastes of: ginger, roe, fish sauce, cilantro, duck, blue cheese, passionfruit, black eyed peas, spinach, lychee.... She's never tasted anything, just seen it on TV. When we make buttercream icing, I sit on the counter and direct, not touching anything. She does everything, creams butter and sugar and whole milk, slicing open a vanilla pod and scraping it out. At the end, we both get a beater.

2006-08-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

967. Pho tai from Pebble Street Pho.

This is my breakfast each morning I am in Calgary. Pebble Street sounds maybe like the name of an upscale souvenir shop or a retirement complex, but inside, it's a grimy, pretty noodle place, usually empty when my mom and I come in for breakfast around nine. We get an apology for "no English" and a sheet of paper to check off our choices. My mom gets a coffee, and a glass of condensed milk and ice. I re-read the pho list until I am told the pho tai is what I need to get, "very good!"

The broth is just clear enough for me, a good sheen of beef fat pearls floating on the surface but not fatty enough to fill your mouth with suet for the rest of the morning. Hidden in the middle of the bowl is a handful-sized rice noodle ball, which unfurls into the broth with a few jabs of the chopsticks. Just above it, the rafts of raw pink beef are just beginning to darken and submerge, soaking up the broth. After the preliminary steps, the greens go in, Thai basil and rau ram and a bit of cilantro, then a few chopstick loads of bean sprouts. I battle the noodles and grab the meat with chopsticks in my right hand and a spoon in my left, twirling and slurping, taking my time. A pregnant woman in a pink sundress comes in, orders a large pho tai fifteen minutes after me, eats while talking on her cellphone, finishes while I am still messily drinking the cold broth out of the bowl.

2006-08-01T18:21:00.000-07:00

968. Smoked cod, straight up.

Almost the best way to eat smoked cod, right out of the package, cold and unrinsed and never cooked. The texture is uncooked fish, like salmon sashimi but a little chewier. It's fantastically salty, almost too salty to handle, and fantastically fishy, like a teaspoon of fish sauce drizzled on your tongue. But the salt/fish is why it's being eaten straight, with no water to clean the salt off or accompanying elements to soak up the fishiness. The vaguely butter, rich flavor, unique to the fish, which you'll get when it's used elsewhere is protected by that shell of salt/fish. Like a sour candy, persevering through the malic acid coating to the high fructose corn syrup center.

2006-07-31T00:48:00.000-07:00

969. Fourme d'Ambert.

Thick, brown shell, with a reptile scale pattern. Before the wedge is sliced into, the outer layer's veins have turned a sickly grey and become moist. I like it sliced as thin as its crumbly texture allows, then laying each slice on my tongue, letting it melt a sec, then letting it break up as it's moved around my mouth. The first flavor is a blank milkiness, which gives to sweet cream, which in turn surrenders to pungent wet dog/marijuana/foot odor and an aftertaste like bitter green walnut.

2006-07-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

970. Blueberry ice cream.

Not on the menu, but suggested because it's a first batch and they'd like a few people to try it out. We get two dishes, one with a lump of pale red tomato sorbet and one with a lump of blueberry ice cream. The tomato sorbet is okay but the blueberry is crazy. I get three more scoops of it in a deep glass dish, a mint leaf dropped on top. It's dark blue, without a hint of outside sweetness. And all the ice cream mechanics check out with a perfect melt speed on tongue and in dish. Blueberry hide sticks to the fronts of my teeth and I feel the occasional sharp stem just as it leaves the back of my tongue and jumps into the throat.

2006-07-30T22:17:00.000-07:00

971. Duck and kale soup.

A duck, meat torn off, carcass roasted, made into a stock with onion and various vegetable odds and ends, clarified. Dark red duck meat chopped and simmered for a while with carrots and whatnot. Then, ladled into a bowl, kale and breadcrumbs from a three day old loaf tossed on top. While you wait for the soup to cool, it is still working: softening up the kale and turning it from a dusty light green into deep dark green and thickening itself with the crumbs and crusts. Inside the soup, the bitter kale is making the richness of the stock honest and finding a kindred spirit in the thick flavor of the duck meat. The crumbs soak up the pearls of duck fat and make every mouthful just right.

2006-07-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

972. Oysters.

At an Edmonton Trail restaurant, early 90s BMWs and Ducatti bikes parked in the back, discerning funloving yuppies eating seared tombo tuna with questionable wasabi yogurt sauce. A 20something Japanese kid and his girlfriend both drink forty dollar a pour scotch, eating oysters out of the shells with forks. The oysters, six or so breeds, representing a couple oceans, are swimming behind the bar in dishes set in a a rough wood stand. We order them in sets of four, coming out on ice, with a shell of lemon granita and a homemade tomato sauce. Tip your head back, slide them toward your throat: the liquor tastes like the ocean, cold fishy breeze and unfamiliarly tinted salts. One bisecting bites comes down through the oyster's grey skin and the innards spill over your tongue with a taste like a low twang on a guitar, heard from another room, barely audible. And then the whole wet mass is sliding down your esophagus.

2006-07-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

973. White cheddar cheese curds.

Good curds have a holy cleanness to them. They look and feel like a fresh industrial product, a rubbery packing peanut. Clean and bright white. They squeak as you bite through them. When only a few hours old, they taste mild and milky, a bit like bocconcini with just a hint of sour cheddarness. And they need to be fresh, not even a day old, bought right at the dairy. One bag of fresh dairy curds equals an infinite number of bags of sour, strong bagged curds, which shouldn't even be put on a poutine. The portions of curds are always just big enough to make you worry about eating the last four or five and feel nauseous after, while you sip the salty whey out of the heel of the bag. It's one of those basic foods that should be used to judge the quality of producers and preparers, how successfully they can work with this elegant building block, preserving and accentuating its hygienic dairy freshness.

2006-07-22T21:49:00.000-07:00

974. Cold roast pork sandwich.

I eat it at the table on the side lawn, in the dark, watching the moths smash against the streetlight. You are looking at a near ideal sandwich, can't even think of a single improvement. Slightly stale bread, softened with greasy, delicious homemade mayonnaise, raw chopped red onions, covered with a token tear of lettuce. From dinner, five hours prior: soft, sweet pork loin, roasted with onion and sage and a few mouthfuls of red wine and a few awkwardly sliced chunks of pork belly for fresh, clean pork fat. Then, an internal debate about dill pickles or pickled jalapenos. The jalapenos won and got sprinkled with crunchy salt. Nothing else required.

2006-07-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

975. Diet Orange Crush and lumpfish roe on toast.

Diet Orange Crush has rotated in to fill the gap left by Coke Zero, which I was suddenly unable to drink, and Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke, which I haven't been able to find cases of in stores regularly enough. It's ideal for a diet soda, the bitterness of the orange is turned way up and almost covers for the lack of sugar and the Splenda aftertaste.

And.

Dyed black, sold as "caviar," the Sebring Convertible of roe. Ripped up buttermilk bread, toasted, spoonful of roe for each. Don't know why they need to sell it as something it isn't because it's real delicious, salty and fishy and crunchy. I love catching an individual orb on my tongue and chopping it between two front teeth, squeezing out a teardrop of the trapped oil.

2006-07-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

976. Braised short ribs, kale, bacon.

My mom's new house is a block or so down from a butcher shop, a relatively tiny place that only does what butcher shops are supposed to do. The counter is covered with fresh pink butcher paper and the heavy, carved up blocks behind it are constantly in use. The temperature inside is at least ten degrees cooler than outside and it smells like dish soap and raw meat. I go in for the first time on Monday afternoon and ask about pork belly and get an apology about not having anything until tomorrow and a suggestion to try the short ribs.

They get browned, soaked in mustard and sour, cheap red wine, a can of diced tomatoes, left in the pot for a day, just gently bubbling, lid on tight. The meat melts off the long bones through it. Each mouthful disassembles itself, the fat separating from the meat. The fat is amazing: soft and sweet. The meat is... beef, that dark, meaty, manure taste concentrated and clean. And kale, fresh from ten seconds in a red hot frying pan with bacon and its fat and a handful of green onion and garlic, bitter, scrubbing the fat off my tongue.

2006-07-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

977. Saskatoon crisp and vanilla ice cream.

On Tuesday morning a little girl came to our door, with her mother waiting in a busted rust/silver Caravan, selling ice cream pails full of Saskatoon berries for six bucks, five bucks if I give the pail back. I gave her a five and a Diet Orange Crush and emptied the berries into a glass bowl in the kitchen. Good deal. So, with a few pounds of fat, leaky Saskatoons, I went to the summer's solution to excess berries, a crisp. Easiest thing ever to make. Get some sugar over your Saskatoons, let them chill in that bowl for a spell. In a big bowl: a big pour of quick oats, a handful of brown sugar, a half handful of flour, nutmeg (lots), cinnamon (a bit), ginger (even less), cloves (barely two taps on the little box), vanilla, then mix four half handfuls of butter into it, until it's lumpy and greasy. Get a pan, throw the berries in, put your dry part over top of them, bake until it's a crisp.

Right out of the oven, three scoops of vanilla ice cream over a fat square of it. Let the underside of the ice cream melt for half a minute, then quickly mix the crisp and the ice cream together, equalizing their temperatures. Body temperature mix of berry syrup, butter, cream, crunchy brown sugared oats.

2006-07-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

978. Bento Box C from It's So Nice.

The same family that owns It's So Nice also owns a restaurant downtown, a super 90s sushi place called, predictably, WASABI. It's okay despite the gay angular blue and green paint job and the piped in trip-hop. The food is sorta okay and the chef works with what's available in the middle of a continent (you can get overnighted fishes from Vancouver for crazy prices, too). But mostly, it's full of yuppies and frat boys with their girlfriends and it sucks. It's So Nice is super 90s, too, but it's in a funny, maybe self-aware way, lots of glittery red vinyl and big red Coca-Cola fountain cups clashing with the unfinished wood tables and messy/cute Crayola marker'd Janglish signs, like a fast food place from a Sailor Moon episode, kinda. You order at a counter and get a tray and the place is full of Japanese students from the university taking cameraphone pictures of each other and getting rowdy. It even has a drive-thru and all the stuff that should be greasy is greasy as hell and everything else is delicious and fast and okay.

2006-07-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

979. A Sunday breakfast of Orangina and pain au chocolat.

Maple Leaf Bakery opens on Sunday for the three churches that face it: a tiny decrepit Catholic church, an Orthodox place with onion domes, and a tiny brand new Baptist place. The pastries and sugar cookies for the afterchurch get-togethers in the basements are all from the joint. And they stay open 'til afternoon to catch everyone walking past, picking up bread or croissants for lunch.

The dough still puffy and complex and sorta light, even though half of each mouthful must be butter. The rod of milk chocolate in the pastry's basement is still sticky and warm from the oven heat hanging on in the center and the sun through the open window, which turns the powdered sugar into a syrup before I am halfway done. For nostalgia point, a tiny bellshaped glass bottle of Orangina, like the ones we trapped wasps in at Karlsruhe Zoo and got with gasthaus meals along with a tall glass with ice at the bottom.

2006-07-12T21:55:00.000-07:00

980. Fried chicken and no-name hot sauce.

Things you can see:
-- five chicken thighs, fried.
-- giant liter and a half bottle of generic red hot sauce, covered in condensation.
-- perfect outer crust, just the right warm brown.
-- oily shine being soaked up with a paper towel.

Things you can't see:
-- chicken is almost raw inside, a faint pink right up against the bone.
-- the chicken thighs soaked in buttermilk all afternoon, relaxing and loosening up.
-- that first tear, the one that's all fatty skin and fried flour and hot sauce... a perfect mouthful. Perfect.
-- the pan of canola oil is still smoking on the stove, filling the house with that fried flour smell.
-- the vinegar in the sauce actually overwhelms any heat and cuts through all the fat in your mouth.

2006-07-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

981. Blackberries, strawberries, cream, sugar.

In Lahr, my mom and sister and I would take walks up past the dreary blocks of beige stucco PMQs, along a dirt path that eventually led to an encampment of Native American hobbyists, fat grey German dudes that built tipis and made warbonnets out of imported eagle feathers, recreating scenes out of Zane Grey-style Western pulp novels. The path was lined with blackberry hedges that were abundant and healthy enough to seemingly always have a supply of fat, sweet blackberries, even after a volksmarch had rumbled down the path and plundered them. We'd collect them in Tupperware bowls, take them home, and eat them with cream and sugar.

A short, squat carton of cream taken from the fridge and poured over a bowl of berries topsprinkled with sugar. The strawberries, which seem to be becoming more watery and pale each time I buy them, soften and soak up the sweet cream, while the blackberries repel it, only able to hold it in their cracks and wrinkles. It's a perfect combination.

2006-07-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

982. Lychees.

Slightly overripe, bought from a tiny walkdown butcher shop/grocery in a Chinatown Calgary strip mall. At the counter, a girl about twelve or thirteen was counting lychees into yellow mesh bags, from a wooden crate. I carried them back uptown on the C-Train, eating them as the train bounced up out of the downtown valley. The grey meat inside the rough skins was saturated with syrupy sweet juice that dripped onto the rubber floor. In my hotel room, I spread the rest of them out over the clean white sheets and took a picture.

2006-06-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

983. Durian ice cream.

Reminds me of a job a few summers ago, trimming thick overgrown branches around big rusted steel pipes at Moose Jaw Asphalt, eating lunch in flameproof suits, breathing the trace clouds of hydrogen sulfide that settle in the valley. We got to hear about hydrogen sulfide switching off your nose to lull you into false safety and then tearing up your lungs. That's my first association as I peel back the lid on a miniature tub of durian ice cream. It's a very faint yellow, a stringy, spittable piece of durian appearing in the spoon every two or three scoops. A generic fruitiness smothered in milky ice cream with sulfur filling both nostrils and clinging to the roof of the mouth and back of the throat.

2006-06-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

984. Homemade galangale.

Get it? Like ginger ale, with a different rhizome in its place. Looks like dishwater, sort of a murky greyish yellow, the occasional piece of unstrained galangal or chile seed floating in it. The taste is perfect as long as you get the syrup:fizzy water ratio right. You want it hot in the back of your throat and the exit of your tongue, like good ginger beer. But also sickeningly sugary, like no-name ginger ale. It's earthy and spicy and the smell of it overwhelms your nose as you sip.

A bunch of galangal, five or six pieces, more than I have in that bowl there.
Three or four tiny, spicy green chiles.
A couple sticks of lemongrass.
Lime leaves.
Lime zest.
Lime juice.
Lime guts, dug out with your fingers.
A smallish piece of ginger.
Everything chopped up small but rough, unpeeled, unseeded. Bend down and stick your nose into the pile of chopped ingredients.
Get a ton of sugar and throw it into a huge pot with a jug or so of water. Throw in all the stuff from your cutting board and make the water boil. Lift the pot off the burner and make it stop boiling, turn down the heat and let it sit at just under a boil for a half hour or so.
Take it off the heat. Let it cool on the stove and then strain it. You now have galangal syrup. Pour some into a glass. Pour fizzy water over the syrup and stir. Maybe some ice.
Galangale!

2006-06-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

985. Bowl of Complete Noodles from Little Saigon/The Donut Shack.

At the intersection of 9th Ave. and, I believe, Saskatchewan St., a miniature stripmall with two joined businesses, Little Saigon on the left and The Donut Shack on the right. Homemade deepfried holeless donuts and noodles. Never had the donuts, only the Complete Noodles, the everything-in-them noodles for five bucks. Comes in a tall, wide, chipped bowl. Dishwater broth, perfectly chewy noodles, then everything else: fatty slabs of beef (or pork?), slices of salty fake chicken, fish balls, squid, little chips of bacon fat that look like browned onions, sometimes a couple shrimp on top but not usually. The first thing you need to do when you get it is pour a ton of chili sauce on top, turn everything in the bowl red. After that, you chopstick alternating loads of noodles and floating items into your mouth, so that the noodle/meat ratio stays the same until the very end. And at the very end, set your chopstick on your napkin, pick up the bowl and pour the lukewarm broth over your tongue. As you've eaten, the broth has soaked up the flavor of the meat and the coriander and the chili sauce and turned from grey and flavorless to red and green and filled with bubbles of pork fat.

A week after I had that bowl of noodles, the signs came off the building and the Times-Herald had a story about the building being sold to a pet store for a new obedience school. If you drive past now, it's gutted and full of orange plastic chairs lined up against the walls. Gee whiz.

2006-06-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

986. Pancakes, bacon, chokecherry syrup from Prairie Oasis Diner.

Prairie Oasis is sort of a truckstop arcology, a strip of different living formats pushed up against the Trans-Canada. Longterm trailer park with broad streets and homemade street signs warning drivers about careless kids + narrow parking space campsites for RVs, an alternative to parking at the Wal-Mart further down the highway + flat blocks of oldschool motel rooms connected to an indoor waterslide complex that every kid in the city goes to at least one birthday party at + gravel parking lot that stays full of trucks, twenty or thirty minimum. All of this crammed together, a narrow manmade lake running through it that gets stocked with fish. The Diner used to be exactly like you'd imagine: carved up grimy tables set so close together it was hard to get in and out, everyone rubbing elbows with each other, bored pretty waitresses, crowd made up of truckers and RVers and people coming in from the country to go to church after their breakfast. But sometime in the past few months there was a bizarre renovation that turned it into something that looks like the dining room of every chain hotel: black plastic wood chairs and see-through tables set with clean modern dishes and a fake flower in black plastic vase. The waitresses wear flat black pants and pressed white blouses that button up to their throats. The surroundings don't make sense with the people eating there and the conversations they're having. The atmosphere is broken. (They are being punished by a mass migration to the other restaurants on the Trans-Canada curve around the Moose Jaw).

But. The food is just as ugly and delicious. Check that out, soft dense pancakes that are dry enough to absorb the butter, the bacon grease, and the chokecherry syrup. The syrup is homemade and comes in recycled Smucker's jars that are hidden behind the counter and revealed when your pancakes arrive. It's sweet and thick but still has that mouthtorturing astringency that makes you regret eating pointless handfuls of them on Buffalo Pound walks.

2006-06-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

987. Curry chicken and rice.

Hockey rink. Forty degrees celsius. Red, wet face. Sweat dripping off the tip of my nose. Patio table spread with oily plastic tablecloth. Wall of tall black speakers set up in a corner, covered in Jamaican flag stickers and each stenciled: BLACK TONY SOUND SYSTEM. Violently loud soca echoing off concrete floor. Old man in Hawaiian shirt and tons of gold standing in front of the DJ, talking over records and giving instructions to the young skinny girls dancing in front of the speakers, occasionally venturing out to awkwardly dance with them. Tiny plates of rice, potato and chicken that falls apart in slimy, delicious yellow curry.

2006-06-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

988. Sticky rice and pork inside bamboo leaf.

Ordered out of the freezer behind the counter at smelly Vietnamese store across the street from a halfway house and a pawn shop. Taken home, warmed in steamer. Salty pork and leathery mushrooms sandwiched between two big layers of sticky rice. Comforting: bland, mushy, salty.

2006-05-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

989. Banana bread.

Memorizable recipe, flour, sugar, eggs, baking soda and powder, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, molasses, walnuts, and four or five of the darkest softest bananas you were using to ripen a few mango in a basket beside the microwave. Bake it, cut it up as soon as it's out of the oven, rip it open and spread margarine on the soft chewy guts.

2006-05-28T20:28:00.000-07:00

990. Mango, sticky rice, and a bottle of milk.

Eaten on a Days Inn bed. While watching The Legend of Drunken Master. Ordered while eating tom yum goong at Landscape Restaurant on 4th Avenue (the prairies are famous for greasy spoon downbeat Chinese restaurants, totally unlike this place, which has the optical illusion waterfall paintings and golden lions), which has a semi-secret Thai menu, as the chef is actually Thai. It asks on the menu to bring your own mango but I ask anyway and it comes by the time I've finished my soup, boxed in styrofoam. The rice, mixed up with coconut milk, long since cooled on the drive to my hotel, hardened into a translucent slab. Tearing off lumps, placing a section of mango on top, lay on tongue, then chew and pour in milk to moderate the terrible, terrible sweetness. Leaned back against a dozen pillows, wrapped in a thin hotel blanket.

2006-05-05T21:11:00.000-07:00

991. Bulla, overripe mango, and a glass of milk.

"Canna find na Vaseline fi moisturize my daughter hair and the bulla price a rise and it a dearer than the pear." Referenced in ten million oldschool reggae tracks but that's Stephen Marley, before Bounty rips the track, comparing himself to Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini, and Eek-a-Mouse does his chuckling cartoon dog ma-moo-ma-moo-ma-mooo-meee scatting between stretched like taffy oldschool samples of himself. Moist and brown with molasses, a bit of palm sugar but barely sweet. Warm ginger and spices taste. Milk poured in after every bite to help moisten mouthfuls enough to be swallowed. Usually spread with salty butter but I didn't have any on hand. Just a mushy, sweet mango, left for a week or so on the counter until clear sap trickles out from around the stem and dries on the dark green skin. A chunk of it scooped up by sticky fingers to chase every swallow of bulla. (Shouts to my man Tony at Tony's Grocery and Ralph's Bakery).

2006-05-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

992. Movie theater hot dog covered in ketchup.

Picked off the rolling grill joint while the bun is pulled from a bag and thrown into a toaster-sized sauna to loosen it up. Accompanied by a bottle of Coca-Cola, pulled with a flourish by the thick, cute concession girl, from a stainless steel tub of ice set into the counter. Photographed as it sat on the prep counter, in front of the rows of condiment pumps and flavored popcorn salts. Each splashes meaty sweat all over your tongue, before being overwhelmed by the tons of ketchup. Bonus: No ticket required. When you are holding a movie theater hot dog and a bottle of Coke, you can self-importantly breeze past the ticket-ripper. If pressed to produce one: stall, juggle the hot dog and bottle and slowly check pockets before protesting that you left it in your jacket in the theater. Once inside, heighten your anticipation by waiting until the previews are done and it's really dark and you can eat in complete privacy.

2006-04-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

993. Homemade tom yum gai.

Fatty, boney chicken thighs and backs, browned in a pan with chilis and garlic, covered in water and left to cook for however long you want-- a half hour? an hour? And then your ingredients are dictated by what is in your cupboard. You put in hot things-- chilis, chili oil, ginger, galangal? You put in sour things-- lemongrass, lime, tamarind concentrate? Do it by feel and promise not to taste it until it's set down on the table and it's cool enough to slurp from the spoon. Shit's gonna taste different everytime, blindingly spicy, almost inedible, or you might end up with something that tastes like lemongrass tea. I like it blaring, on some Kings of Crunk, midschool Lil Jon type of shit, everything in the mix brought up ultrasharp and loud: chewing Cap'n Crunch drums and Ornette Coleman plastic saxophone synth runs woven together. That's my tom yum philosophy. I want it to be so hot I can barely pass it from my lips to throat without breaking down and spitting it back into the bowl and I want it to be so sour that I get that Watermelon Warheads malic acid burn effect. And I want those two extremes to be swirled up in a dark, fishy broth covering a forest of rau ram and coriander, and beaded with glistening orange pearls of chicken fat.

2006-03-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

994. Bacon sandwich from Al's Lunch.

You'd absolutely drive past it if you didn't know it was there, 'cause it looks like-- shit, you can see what it looks like. Shutdown carwash with a miniature diner tucked into what used to be the office, just recently painted that grim shade of green. The same group of trucks will always be outside, all contractors' trucks.

There are five or six booths inside, a table for the self-serve coffee and a narrow walkway with a grill and a counter. Doris takes the orders, Al is the guy working the grill. The menu is on hubcaps on a wall. Ham Sandwich, Bacon Sandwich, Eggs, Hot Hamburger Sandwich, Fries. There's sometimes a special, usually just a cheeseburger or a grilled cheese with bacon, but sometimes you get perogies or bratwurst and sauerkraut, but the hubcap items are what you want to stick to.

Three twenty five for the bacon sandwich. Doris takes a handful of salty, fatty bacon from the sizzling mountain on the grill, puts it between two slices of margarined white toast.

2006-03-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

995. Lab nua from Nit's Thai Food, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Down at the end of Main Street, between River Street and the block that burned down a few New Year's Eves ago, exposing more of the secret tunnels used by Chinese immigrants evading the head tax levied after the railway was finished and we wanted rid of them, leaving stone ruins that haven't been touched in years and grow green weeds all over them in the summer.

Inside, it's ghetto as fuck, walls and ceiling stained dark yellow from cigarette smoke, nasty old tables the same color. It's got the same feeling as all the shitty restaurants up and down that shitty end of Main Street, with the addition of portraits of the royal family and a spirit house with chopped hardboiled egg and bananas being offered.

The main weekday crowd is dirtbag locals like me, who don't even have to look at the menu anymore. Some dude with a Tough Duck coat on and a CP Rail vest comes in, orders a Blue and a number sixteen, medium hot, extra sticky rice. But on the weekend, the place is filled up with yuppies that read about the place in the Prairie Dog and drove the 45 minutes to ask way too many questions and be disappointed by atmosphere: no corny embroidered tableclothes with scenes of elephants and the Buddha, no traditional music played at a tasteful volume, no Thai waitresses They keep the gooks in the kitchen and homely white girls with country accents take your order, bring you your can of Diet Coke, and the radio is always on the Cowtown Country Countdown, the Heartland's top five requested songs of the day.

If you'd like to, you can ask your waitress if you can go back and see the kitchen, and watch your food being made. The kitchen is amazing, steamy and filthy and busy and loud. The cooks, dressed in full white, are supervised and directed and shouted at by an old frizzy haired Thai woman named Nit, rocking cokebottle glasses and a frumpy brown cardigan. Her husband, a slouchy bald white guy with a baggy face floats around the restaurant, refilling cups of water.

That's number thirty four on the menu, lab nua. The beef is pulled out of its marinade in the fridge, layed on a real charcoal grill in the kitchen, cleavered up, then mixed in a stainless steel bowl with handfuls of chopped herbs and chilis and onion and toasted ground rice, thrown in a tiny frying pan for a few seconds, tossed with oil, then slid out onto the plate.

When it comes out, the waitress scolds me for using a fork-- "Use your hands!" But I persist, dumping lumps of sticky rice on top of the beef and trying to mix them in equal amounts. The beef tastes like a laser beam. Raw flavor focused in one stream. Food you can't sleep-eat through, shakes you the fuck up. It's ridiculously spicy (if you ask for it that way, "mild, medium, hot, or hot hot"), makes your whole mouth feel like it's buzzing, humming. But equally sour, and every bite is full of that vegetative pungency. It tastes like another world, some science fiction food, all those flavors that are still so unfamiliar to me, alien, Other, eaten at a carved up nicotine yellow table under a nicotine yellow ceiling at a comfortingly squalid restaurant.

2006-03-21T00:26:00.000-08:00

996. Beef heart stew, from a recipe in an old cookbook bought at a used book sale.

Taken from a recipe in Weyburn Rural District Cook Book, from 1941, stamped by the Weyburn Regional Public Library, Saskatchewan, sold at a Friends of the Library Autumn Used Book Sale in Moose Jaw, sixty one years later. Crumply blue book bound by string through holepunched slots on one side. The stew recipe is between a recipe for butter biscuits and walnut cake.

Outside Moose Jaw, and surely outside Weyburn (home of the Weyburn Red Wings, nonfiction setting of W.O. Mitchell's short stories, the riding Tommy Douglas represented as an MP), you can still find the houses built by homesteaders (free land, settlers pour westward, get to keep the land if they can make any use of it) and you can still talk to people who lived in sod houses, people who were born in sod houses. It feels historical somehow to cook a recipe like this: very few ingredients, very simple ingredients, easy to picture simmering on a cast iron stove.

Recipe says cubes of fatty bacon, I had strips, cut up. Pot heated up and the pieces of bacon thrown onto the bottom. One huge white onion and a full head of garlic. Didn't let the bacon really get crisp, still lots of fatty pieces floating around and ready to be turned into butter by six hours of cooking. (The smell of onions and garlic and bacon cooking in a deep pot is the most important smell in the world).

A fat stack of fatty bones, chopped up enough so that they'll fit in the pot and brown just a touch on the bottom.

Two, maybe two and a half cups of water, whatever. Put the lid on and let it cook two hours or so.

Get a big fat beef heart, cut it up. It's a giant chunk of dense, bloody cardiac muscle. Get rid of the fat on the outside and any of the tubing that doesn't look good to you. Get any cheap fatty slab of beef, cut it up. Toss both sets of meat in the pot, put the lid on, cook for three hours.

At the five hour mark, add potatoes, carrots, celery, cook for another hour or two. When everything is just right: "Put flour in lukewarm mug of water, beat with fork. Stir into stew." Let it cook for another five or ten minutes. You're done.

The meat from the heart is still dense and together after all that cooking, while the rest of the meat has broken down completely, saturating every spoonful with tender threads of beef. The bacon and onions have disappeared for the greater good, leaving only the occasional buttersoft piece of fat or paper thin onion blade. It's thick and velvety and really fucking good. Get a slice of Wonder Bread and a tub of margarine, put on Will the Circle Be Unbroken, eat in reverent silence.

2006-03-16T21:55:00.000-08:00

997. President's Choice Spicy Beef Chili.

Look at that. Has to be eaten cold out of the can with a plastic spoon. Sounds like some grim, trill reference out a Z-Ro verse. "We was steady out here doin' bad, you motherfuckers wouldn't give a damn what we was doin'. Like Spice 1 say, y'all wouldn't give a damn if I was pissin' on myself and shittin' off a bridge," eatin' cold chili out a can with a plastic spoon. "Fuck you niggas, fuck you hoes." (I know that was Trae talking at the end of that track). Shit looks like dog food but it's near perfect. I used to eat it in my car on the way to work in the morning, tossing the can and spoon out the window before rolling up at my boss's house or wherever we were working, felt in sitting in my belly and holding me down all morning with slowburn legume carbohydrates and beef protein. Kidney beans with leathery jackets and mashed potato guts. Billions of miniature clumps of textureless meat. And you eat it unheated so the dark red sauce is almost gelatinous, thick and ice cold.

2006-03-15T20:44:00.000-08:00

998. Peppermint Aero.

I like the slogan, "Big... on bubbles." (I don't understand the ellipsis there. It seems almost self-deprecating. "Big"-- "Wait! This chocolate bar is small!" "On bubbles!" "Ah." And bubbles are blank space, so it seems even more contradictory, since when you say "big," you are probably thinking of "big" in chocolate bar language, mass-y, wide, thick). I like tearing off the shiny green wrapper. I like the cheap dusty milk chocolate coating that you can peel off in thin slabs. I like the commercials, where people eating Aero bars are commanded by friends to STOP and LET IT MELT, FEEL the BUBBLES, and that's what I do: let the naked chunks of light green peppermint chocolate melt on my tongue like a chunk of bacon fat in a frying pan, sizzling as the bubbles pop and letting the juices run down under my tongue.

2006-03-13T19:29:00.000-08:00

999. Ngoy Hoa homemade chili oil.

From the lower half of a middle shelf in the cramped Vietnamese store, itself stuck on the lower half of a middle shelf of downtown Regina, 11th Ave, between pawn shops, barber shops and ghetto pharmacies with bars on the windows. 11th Ave is one of two streets in Regina's Chinatown, and one of the last vestiges of real Asian ownership or residence in the Core, which has been reverse-gentrified over the last ten years. The main business is native kids, who know they can buy cigarettes without ID at chink stores, and shy rich Chinese girls from the university buying rambutan candy and tea. The jar's label says CHILI OIL, gives a local phone number, and the price ($5.85).

When I leave the jar open on the counter while cooking, the smell of the chili oil can fill up the whole kitchen, overwhelming big smells like garlic in a hot frying pan or spices toasting. It smells fucking horrible. Pungent and fermented like kimchi, makes you cough when you lean in.

From the picture it looks to be more chili than oil, and the mashed up crunched up chili and seeds can be thrown into things by the spoonful, but the key is the actual oil. It's transmission fluid: dark reddish brown and slightly syrupy. It tastes like liquid smoke and getting punched in the nose. I save it for after things are really cooked, drizzled over top like some extra virgin olive oil.

2006-03-13T14:06:00.000-08:00

1000. Raw beef tenderloin.

-- Several filets of beef tenderloin.
-- Salt shaker.
-- One pair of Levis.
-- Two cans of Coke.

I remember eating raw venison tenderloin cut out of deer that was still holding onto its bodyheat. Unattach the guts, drag it in the snow, put it in the box of the truck, twenty minutes later it's hanging in buddy's garage, and he pulls the ribs open wider, reaches in with a knife, cuts through the thin transparent fat wrapper on the tenderloin and cuts off a chunk. It either goes onto a pan on top of the old cast iron stove (along with some key gut items, if buddy comes hunting with us-- gotta bag up the kidneys), or it gets eaten raw in tiny pieces ripped off the chunk with dirty fingernails. It's bloodier (still warm from having blood pumped through it), tougher (nigga wasn't standing around in a feed lot eating grain for months, doesn't have any veins of fat in it), got a different taste.

It's real good but oh man, this shit is crazy. Like a big meat marshmallow, soft and just a bit chewy. Cut off a chunk with a dirty knife, cover both sides in a few layers of salt, pick off the bluejean fluffs. It's got that buttery copper clean pussy taste (I keep sniffing my fingers) and it disappears in your mouth, leaving soft strings of fat that you can drain down your throat with a swallow of Coke.

And, jeez, it feels like you're eating real honest-to-God meat, chewing up another animal. Reminds me of: the smell of butcher shops and menstrual blood, hot blood showers while working at the beef plant (had to change my plant-issued sleeveless cotton shirt three times a day before I got the hang of staying out of the waterfall of hot blood that falls out of a cow that just got hung upside down and its head sawed off) and the hanging sides of beef that came out the back end of the plant to be loaded into trucks.