Tea Leaves

I arrived in Toronto at about 2 in the morning, and the very first thing I did, after parking the car and checking in to the hotel, was to walk down Yonge Street to the nearest street vendor and buy a sausage, slather pickled peppers and mustard and kraut on it, and walk back to the hotel, eating my hot dog, victoriously. Hot dogs taste better in Yankee stadium, or on Yonge street. No one knows why. It’s just that way.

I love Pittsburgh, but one of its biggest drawbacks is the near-absolute lack of street cart or vendor culture. The city council doesn’t just not support it, they actively oppose granting new licenses (and then they write whiny, stupid articles in local papers wondering “Why don’t more people move here?”) Oh sure, there’s the Saigon Sandwich lady on the strip, who makes the best Saigon sandwich I’ve ever had, anywhere, and there’s Dilly and her ribs, but they’re in the Strip District where there’s already a ton of great food. Half the joy of a street vendor is that you can find them in neighborhoods where there’s nothing but overpriced restaurants and banks. Hand them $2, walk away with the best meal you’ll have all day. Other than the strip ventures, there’s a few truck-based places that operate near the University campuses, and one Asian cart on the South Side. That’s pretty much it.
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Note: I originally published this article at Tea Leaves.

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the idea of being able to buy and drink raw milk (or as some would have it, “real milk”) rather than the pasteurized and homogenized product we all know and love. Part of it is the (realistic) fantasy of being able to make real clotted cream and part is the (unrealistic) vision of myself living in the Dordogne making an earthy, runny cheese from lait cru, which I bring to market each week. After the market, I would gather with my fellow peasant workers of the terroir and we’d sit and quietly get drunk on cheap red wine and complain about stupid Americans and the constantly striking truck drivers.

I always assumed that I’d never get the chance to make either of these fantasies come true, but thanks to a well-placed word, I now have a gallon of raw milk. Time to get to work.
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Buying vintage port is like going on a blind date in Manhattan. No matter how many close friends vouch for your blind date, you really can’t know in advance whether it will be fun or a disaster, and the only thing you know for sure is that it’s going to cost a lot of money.

You can’t even count on having a good time if the date isn’t completely blind. Since vintage port is a wine that we often keep for years, it’s not unusual to end up in a situation where one bottle of a given house and vintage is superb, and then the next bottle from the exact same batch is awful, because it has spoiled, because you didn’t rebottle it; this happened to me with a bottle of 1977 Smith-Woodhouse. I’m still recovering from the trauma. There are people who rebottle their vintage port periodically to avoid this outcome. I don’t personally know any. (Pet peeve: if the wine industry would just get over itself and admit that “real” corks are completely inadequate to the job they’re being asked to do, and move to some less stupid technology such as a bottlecap and wax seal, this wouldn’t be an issue.)
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In a wonderful rant, psu talks about the perfect cup of coffee, and how there’s only one place in Pittsburgh — La Prima Espresso — to get it. His conclusion is that it’s pointless to buy an expensive espresso machine like a Silvia because it still won’t be as good as what we can get at La Prima.
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