Pudgy Carrots

I could not resist these little carrots, because they were so orange and pudgy. Based on their alluring phenotype, I was expecting a bit of torrential hyper-carrotness when I bit into one. Unfortunately, like so much of the expensive, engagingly funky-looking produce infesting high-end grocery stores these days, it tasted like a weed. A disappointing weed, too, not even a spunky weed.

Cobb Salad

The Thistle, Davenport, Austin

I ate this while bitching to my sister about how our father won't butt out of my life. Three hours later I was doubled over with a dispiriting hitch in my gastrointestinal git-along. Coincidence? I think not. My father's ability to control everything, including the peristalsis of those who would defy him, is legendary.

Meanwhile, like all tomatoes in restaurants, the one in my salad had all the esprit of a baseball. Why do people even put those crappy things on a plate?

Salmon "Burrito" With Fillings More Or Less Associated By The Collective American Subconscious With Italy, Basmati rice cooked in mushroom broth, buttered green beans with basil

Man, these tough old green beans were labeled "haricot verts" [sic] in the produce aisle. Pah, I say! I had to mangle'em into slivers just so they'd fit on the plate. I'd been had! They were just regular green beans!

When buying haricots verts, it's best to leave your blindfold and thick rubber gloves at home.

Listen to the Salmon Log Song

Smart Chicken Thigh Pan-roasted with rosemary and lemon, brown rice, cole slaw

I am on record as having come out against the Smart Chicken, because, in concept and in practice, it is disturbingly mutant-y. Then I discovered Smart Chicken organic boneless thighs. For reasons I have spent a lifetime attempting to fathom, dark meat is shunned by the general populus, but the truth is, the thigh is the only segment of the modern bird in which the slightest vestige of poultry flavor remains. If you stretch out a boneless Smart Thigh, and give it a couple of whacks with a rolling pin, it'll beat the socks off one of those pallid hunks of dry old breast meat any day of the week.

Linguine With A Catharsis-Inducing Toasted Puttanesca Sauce Of Sorts

This dish was so exquisite that I wept. I remember vividly and with profound yearning one bite in particular, a sublime and deeply meaningful bite that justified my existence like nothing before it ever had; its harmonious expression of garlic, basil, tomato, olive, vinegar and pine nut was both articulate and breathtakingly lyric.

To make the sauce, I toasted extremely ripe tomatoes over fire, like marshmallows, until the skin turned black and started to peel off. Then I chopped'em, salted'em, and let their precious bodily fluids run off in a chinois. This step ensures concentrated pommodoritude for the melodramatic result. There is nothing less uplifting than a watery tomato sauce.

The wine was a Ritratto Rosso, Vigneti delle Dolomiti 1999, a bottle of which I cannot urge strongly enough that you get your hands on immediately. And by immediately I mean right this minute. Life is uncertain. The risk, however remote, that you might die tonight, without having drunk this, is unacceptable.

Grande Mocha Frappuccino Starbuck's, Arboretum, Austin

A mocha frappuccino is a coffee milkshake with Hershey's syrup. I enjoyed this sugary stimulant after an expedition to the adjacent Williams-Sonoma, where I purchased one of those collapsible, made-in-China vegetable steamer inserts. Why do all the clerks at Williams-Sonoma look like they come from Old Money, yet incomprehensibly, here they are, toiling thanklessly in retail, wearing humiliating green aprons, urging you to register for a free trip to Tuscany? Is it noblesse oblige, a compulsion to bring expensive cookware to the proletarian mall-walker?