100 Food Meme

Seems appropriate for Thanksgiving time, to write about food…  Found this meme at Ahistoricality, the idea is that you set “foods I’ve eaten” in bold, and “foods I’d like to try” in italics.  As I said in comments there, I’d have to add a category for “foods I’ve eaten but not on purpose,” and add another for “foods I make/cook with at home sometimes.”  And maybe one more, for “foods I ate once, but wouldn’t choose again.”  But here we go….to the best of my knowledge…
1.  Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar  (close but no cigar–ha!)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat  (but shouldn’t I get half credit for Korean goat and Nepalese goat?)
42. Whole insects (uh, I was a camp counselor)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis (on our honeymoon, in Edinburgh)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (Nasturtiums, roses, artichokes, lavender)
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

I can claim 54%–pretty darn close to Ahistoricality’s tally, especially if you give me an extra credit for non-curried goat dishes.  (I deserve extra credit for eating huitlacoche last year, too, I think.)   I wouldn’t really want to try too many of the others–they’re either macho/hot/dangerous/expensive foods (yawn) or meats (generally not interested these days), or both.

Smoke

We woke up to blue skies, but the news showed fires inland, in the San Fernando Valley.  By noon, our air tasted wrong.   By 1:45pm, our skies changed color, and flecks of ash began appearing on parked cars.  The light outside is a strange yellow, and my throat is starting to burn.  A state of emergency has been declared, thousands have been evacuated, and hundreds of homes have burned.    We’re in no danger of flames here; just inhaling the particles that floated away.

UPDATE:  For a while this afternoon, the flames were significantly closer–still not in danger, but that might explain the sudden increase in smokiness around here.  There’s definite ashfall outside now, and the sunset was intense around 4:30–that color they call “angry red” in situations like this–might be pretty if not for the circumstances.

The artist and his, ah, friend

J.M. Flagg (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

You just never know what’s going to show up in the weekly batch of flickr uploads from the Library of Congress. The photo above is from this Friday’s bundle of 1910s images–it’s one of three photos depicting noted illustrator James Montgomery Flagg and his life-sized doll. She doesn’t wear clothes, except a big plumed hat.  In one picture, they’re posed holding cigarettes.  Huh.

Flagg (1877-1960) is best known for creating the image on the original “I Want You” Uncle Sam poster.

We’re in the New Yorker–er, kinda…

There’s an old picture of me and Nell dressed as Hester Prynne and baby Pearl from the Scarlet Letter at the New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog–click through the slideshow of literary Halloween costumes, we’re hard to miss!  We won best mother-child costume at our very first MOMS Club meeting in those costumes, in 2000.  The dress on Nell was her baptismal gown; the Scarlet Letter on my chest was embroidered by my mother when I was in high school, which tells you how long I’ve been dressing as Hester Prynne, every few years…

Now it’s real

It wasn’t, not even close, when this spot was made….but it is now. Aaaaaaaaaaaah, I can finally unplug the pollster.com IV and stop worrying all the time.

Report from the polls

LINES at our polling place this morning at 8:15am.  We waited about 30 minutes to vote.  We’ve never seen a line there, in twelve years of voting.  And they had extra booths set up inside, so it wasn’t for lack of preparation.  The weather:  after a dousing pre-dawn storm, we have gorgeous blue sunny skies and 70s at the beach.  It’s a very good day for turnout in Los Angeles.

At last…

Because I’ve still got suffrage on the brain, and because “at last” is a phrase likely to be uttered a lot tomorrow, I share this image of Justice and American Womanhood (both personified as women) embracing, captioned “At Last,” from a 1919 women’s suffrage magazine…