Just jammin'*

More food talk. Even when I'm in the doldrums food can still get me excited. I went to the Farmers Market out in Corrales. It's just a small market compared to the ones in Albuquerque and Santa Fe but that's a good thing because otherwise I might not have found Heidi and her raspberry jam. People always say you can taste the difference when something is fresh, local and organic. Perhaps this is why her jam tasted so damn good. I don't know. It just tasted damn good. Like raspberries, not just sugar or cornstarch. I don't know how else to describe it, but according to her web site, she uses four different varieties of raspberries grown in Corrales. (I can't believe you can grow raspberries in Corrales). A lot of people at the market were selling fresh, organic eggs as well (which harkens back to the cover of this magazine, which I devoured from cover to cover) but since I already had eggs I decided to pass.

New Mexico is so dry and arid you wouldn't think there'd be much locally grown anything, but there's quite an abundance. There are a whole bunch of foodies out in Santa Fe. I swear you couldn't walk a block in Santa Fe without tripping into a pothole and landing in an art gallery or restaurant/cafe.I think Deborah Madison (author of The Greens Cookbook, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and proponent of the Slow Food Movement) lives in or near Santa Fe. Hey, I just googled her and found her blog.

Off to stuff more jam in my mouth.

*Sorry for the lame title.

Evil eye

Summers in New Mexico are hot. It sucks. However, I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't out-glare the desert sun.

All the way here in the desert

Guess what I found at the local Asian foods market? Poi. It was frozen solid and stacked next to the frozen fish. So excited. I'll have to call my mom for her lomi salmon recipe or maybe this one will do. Hmmmm. On second thought, I don't remember there ever being pineapple juice in lomi salmon. I might have to do a more thorough recipe search.

Person 1: You should feel sorry for me.

Person 2: Why?

Person 1: I'm a victim.

Person 2: Of what?

Person 1: Unemployment.

Person 2: How are you a victim of unemployment?

Person 1: I was just walking along, minding my own business one day when -- fooomp!-- unemployment swooped down and socked me.

Person 2: Actually, I bet that's how a lot of people feel.

Overheard at the office

A lady in production, reading an article by the food writer:

"'Chocolate versus sex, that's a tough choice.' Not for me. I'm one horny bastard."

Speaking of fish...

Oh, one more thing. All this talk about fish reminds me of the time Chris and I used a gift certifcate to Outback Steakhouse and spent most of it on the seared ahi appetizer because it reminded us of home. They served it with this mustard/wasabi sauce and forgot to give us utensils. That was fine. We just ate with our hands. Then Chris asked the server if he could find plain wasabi in the kitchen. And also utensils. The server just laughed and said he noticed we didn't have utensils and felt bad we were just using our hands. He also said he'd been trying to convince more patrons to try the seared ahi but no one in Albuquerque seemed to want to eat fish.

Their loss, I say.

I gave in, but hey it was the lunch special

I ate fish tacos for lunch yesterday. Tilapia tacos to be exact. I felt a little bad about my earlier post/rant. Besides I grew up in the Spam capitol of the world (or is that now Guam) so who am I to turn up my nose at crappy food? I got the tacos at a burrito place that has proven to have decent enough food.

Thoughts? Well, tilapia tastes a lot like ruffey. Chris' boss gave him some frozen ruffey that she wasn't going to eat and he grilled it with some tobasco sauce, butter and other spices and it was OK. However, both fish are a far, far, far cry from, say, ahi. Or even salmon.

So there you have it. Not disgusting, perhaps, but not particuarly impressive or memorable either.

Kids say the darndest thing

Chris' boss invited us to a family dinner at a fancy restaurant at a fancy resort. (There was a chocolate fountain involved) As we made our way to the buffet the boss' 12-year-old son asked me if I'd eaten there before. I told him no. Then he told me he'd eaten there before and also at the resort's bar.

"But I couldn't drink anything because I was too young," he added a matter-of-factly.

"That's probably all for the best. Someone had to drive your family home safely," I replied.

This kid is a pretty cool kid as far as kids go. He doesn't swear or throw food or call you stupid or give off any type of offensive attitude. He does, however, talk a lot. And since I was sitting next to him he talked to me a lot. Sometmes he'd run out of things to say and he'd resort to repeating, "It's really nice eating dinner with you. I've never eaten dinner with you before."

"Well, thanks, it's nice eating dinner with you, too," I replied.

He also asked, six or seven times, if he could play with Chris' dog.

"Hmmm, maybe," I replied. "We'll have to see, hmmm?"

The kid was dogged, though. I doubt he's going to forget.

He also brought me a chocolate cheesecake from the dessert buffet by the chocolate fountain. That was nice. I kept smiling and listening politely to him and out of the blue he told me I had pointy teeth. He's noticed it before, apparently.

Gross...

I was at the Burrito Co. in Santa Fe some weeks back and fish tacos was the lunch special. The fish was tilapia. The description made it sound like this would be a delicious choice but I am from Hawaii and I'll tell you now: Kamaaina don't eat tilapia. We look at tilapia the way the rest of the mainland looks at Spam. It's junk, it's gross, it's crap. Now here I am at a Flying Star in Albuquerque and tilapia is on the menu again. This cracks me up. I think I need to do some googling and find out if anyone who grew up near the Pacific Ocean actually likes tilapia. I suspect it's a land lubber's fish.

I sank into a pothole and ended up here

One of the car-driving questions my dad always asks me — besides whether I've changed my oil, rotated my tires or checked my wiper fluid — is the condition of the roads here. I never bothered paying attention to the state of the roads until he asked. But come to think about it, my grandpa always comments about that too. He always complains once the roads start to get the teeniest bit bumpy and worn. But wait, he complains about construction crews too.

Well, I can tell you that the roads in Santa Fe are by far the most pothole-ridden roads I've had the misfortune to drive on. That's a negative spin, I know. I'm trying harder: Someone should market the roads in Santa Fe as "modern cobblestone." It's not terribly unkept, it's part of the local character...

It feels like a workout but I'm not losing any weight

I'm editing a informational manual about the city of Santa Fe. It's part of a project one of the newspapers there does annually and the editor hired me as an additional copy editor. This is, by far, the most copy editing I've done in one sitting. I never really realized that copy editing could be full-time work, heck, a full-time workout. I'm used to copy editing being part of a larger job — smashed between fishing wire copy and laying out a newspaper page. But boy, by noon the words were beginning to blur together and there was no end in sight. By 2 p.m., I was stumped. Was it pickup, pick-up or pick up? Well, process of elimination. Pick up is the verb. So is it a pickup game or a pick-up game? Well, according to the publication's style it's pickup, one word. And this was hours after I realized one of the writers had a habit of capitalizing the word "city" when referring to the city of Santa Fe and the two other writers did not. Which was the correct style? Well, apparantly not capitalizing. Even though "legislature" retains its capitalization even after you drop the state's name.

I think I made the mistake of saving the government section, by far the most tedious section, for last. By the time I got around to it, my blood sugar level was low and I had to make a quick iced latte break. Unfortunately the only iced latte joint within walking distance was overpriced and the latte was watered down.

Random Santa Fe thought: Why does everything look the same in the City Different?