I woke up to this this morning:

Caught the great Jay Z/Justin Timberlake concert at Yankee Stadium the night before. Some notes:

First: There are two scenarios in which a New Yorker’s throat can’t help but get a little belumped hearing “Empire State of Mind,” even if it’s for the 27,000th time:

1. When you’re in another country and you hear hundreds of non-Americans belting out the chorus and think: sheeeeit, they’re singing about my hometown!;

2. When you’re in Yankee Stadium, and Alicia Keys gets introduced, and they turn the volume up to 11, and she belts the hook into the summer night. That was a moment.

Second: strange things are afoot on this tour.

This is a list of cities privileged to host humbly-named Legends of the Summer concert series:

Toronto: largest city in the second-largest country (by land area, anyway) on Earth.

New York, NY: Largest city in the US; home to Jay Z. Aside: has anyone’s hometown ever been hyped more than Jay Z’s? I mean anyone, in the history of Earth? I can’t think of anyone. In fact, I’m not sure it’s even a close contest.

Los Angeles, CA: Second-largest city in the US. Mass media entertainment capital of the world.

Chicago, IL: so we’ve banged out the USA’s big three cities. OPRAH!

Vancouver: third-largest metro area in Canada. Within spitting distance of Seattle.

Detroit, MI: Admittedly this would have made more sense were this 1985, but still a huge city, and one of only two midwest stops on this tour. Somehwere, Axel Foley is psyched.

Baltimore: home of the Barksdale crew. Guaranteed to pull in a strong DC audience as well.

Boston, MA: Seminal city in US history. Home to the Tea Party (the original one, not the wingnuts). Fenway Pahk.

San Francisco, CA: one of the five most important cities in the US, massive metro area.

Philadelphia, PA: Fifth-largest US city; home to Rocky Balboa.

Miami, FL: Massive metro area. Scarface, favorite movie to a shocking percentage of successful rappers, is set there.

Hershey, PA: um, say what?

What are JT and Hova doing spending one of their only 12 stops in central Pennsylvania?

Well… Hershey is in the Harrisburg/Carlisle metropolitan area, which… exactly. And Harrisburg is the capital… of Pennsylvania, and has a population of 49,673.  There were more people in Yankee Stadium Friday night.

Hershey is host to Hersheypark, an amusement park that draws a good number of people each year and includes a stadium for sports and concerts. So that’s something. And Hersheypark Stadium has hosted some big names over the years – Whitney Houston was there at the height of her powers in the 80s, Britney at the height of hers in 2000; Bob Dylan is going there soon (which would have been a much bigger deal 40 years ago, but still)… on the other hand, Lower Dauphin High School plays home games there. Can you imagine the Bronx High School of Science rolling into Yankee Stadium to host a hotly-contested Public School Athletic League game against Hunter? Me neither.

So until I hear different, Timberlake has a massive, unslakable Mr. Goodbar habit and cut a shady side deal with Hershey for Sexyback in exchange for a lifetime supply. It’s the only explanation.

And who could blame him? Chocolate is delicious. And by chocolate I mean dark chocolate – milk chocolate is mostly sugar, and white chocolate ain’t chocolate (my feelings about white chocolate are not to be confused with my feelings about “White Chocolate,” one of the top NBA nicknames of all time). And as desserts go, for you paleo eaters it’s reasonable sweet tooth fix. If you’re in the market for chocolate, I recommend making a beeline for Jacques Torres, where amid the awesome chocolate confections they sell chocolate bullion – the pure. Not only is the chocolate as good as you’ll find anywhere, it’s about a third of the price of the top-end brands like Valrhona. If you live in NYC (let’s hear it for NEEEEEWWWWW YOOOOOOORRRRKK!) you can get it at their flagship store on Main Street in Brooklyn; if you don’t, you can order it online here. Either way, it’ll only set you back $25 for a four-pound bag. Buy more than you think you need – I usually buy eight pounds, use two to cook with, and eat the rest in 2- or 3- disk installments in a shockingly short period of time.

The most difficult thing about my speed climb of the 4,884-meter peak Puncak Jaya, the tallest and most technical climb in Indonesia, was not repelling the near-constant sexual advances of climbing partner Rosario Dawson.

Neither was it managing to keep  my custom-made climbing tuxedo, made entirely of technical fleece and waterproof soft-shell material and stitched together by the reanimated corpse of Ermenegildo Zegna himself, looking crisp on the ascent.Read More

Say this about headcheese: it’s the worst-named food of all.

Headcheese needs a new marketing department. Really? We couldn’t come up with a better name than “headcheese?”  I did a quick search to see what the French had come up with – surely, they’d come up with something a little more, how you say, sophisticated.  Suprisingly, they came up with fromage de tête – literally, “cheese of head.”Read More

Last night I was on Janette’s Show on SiriusXM. The show’s host, Janette Barber, is an Emmy-winning producer, writer, and stand-up comic. And she is lovely. We covered lots of ground over about 20 minutes and she has a great touch with a radio newbie like me (this was my first time in a recording studio since I was mixing KC and the Sunshine Band instrumentals with Spiderman spoken-word adventure stories at my college radio station).

The best chocolate cake ever was discussed (recipe available here).  We also enjoyed Moroccan-style lamb tagine, whose recipe follows.

MOROCCAN-STYLE LAMB TAGINE 

Serves 12

5lbs lamb stew meat, trimmed of fat and cut into 1-inch cubes

8 cups chicken stock

2 cups chopped onions

4 teaspoons ground black pepper

2 tablespoons grated ginger

2 cloves chopped garlic

1 tablespoons salt

Take ingredients and put in a heavy-bottomed pot. The lamb should be covered in liquid; if it isn’t, add some water. Bring to a simmer on the stove and put in a 300-degree oven. Cook for two hours, stirring occasionally.

 

12 ounces chopped pitted prunes

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

Add to pot and cook for 1 hour more, stirring occasionally.

 

You’d think bacon and chocolate would be the best combo ever.

You’ve got the sweet-and-savory thing going on. And, of course, there’s the matter of  the resulting combination BEING MADE ENTIRELY OF BACON AND CHOCOLATE.

Vosges makes a chocolate-bacon bar, and I don’t like it.  I wanted to like it; however, it just doesn’t deliver the goods. I always attributed that dislike to the company’s use of milk chocolate over dark (almost never, in my opinion, a good idea). So the idea remained pure: Bacon and chocolate. Chocolate and bacon. The holy two-inity of lusted-after foods in this country.

By happy circumstance last week, I had a strip of awesome pastured bacon left over and a freezer full of flourless chocolate cake squares. So I could put the combo to the test with no excuses for poor choice of chocolate, or ingredient quality in general.

It disappoints.

You’d think this would be a synergy-type situation, with each flavor getting on the other’s shoulders for a complementary boost.  Instead, it’s like the two flavors are in a Thrilla in Manila-style brawl, beating the hell out of one another only to emerge, forever changed for the worse. The bacony bit tastes not as good as bacon, the chocolatey bit not as good as chocolate.

So stick to this method to make chocolate cake, which is the most addictive thing since… well, something really, really addictive.

Don’t get any porky ideas.

SELL-YOUR-MOM’S-TELEVISION CHOCOLATE CAKE

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

1 1/4 lbs dark chocolate (I use the 60% Jacques Torres disks, available at their place in Brooklyn; Valrhona at about 65-70% also works wonderfully and is much easier to find, as is Lindt at 70%).

5 oz. coffee

Melt the chocolate completely in the coffee. Use a covered heavy pot over the lowest possible heat.

6 eggs

1/4 cup sugar

Beat together (I use a hand mixer) until eggs are pale yellow and doubled in size.

1 cup heavy cream

Beat until soft peaks form.

With a rubber spatula, fold together the eggs and chocolate.  Then fold in the cream until the mixture is a solid color.

Line a 9×13 baking dish with parchment paper and oil or butter it up lightly. Pour the batter into the baking dish and smooth the top flat.  Place the baking dish into a larger dish; fill the larger dish with water so it comes up halfway up the sides of the baking dish.

Bake for 45 minutes. Remove baking dish from larger dish and let cool. Run a knife around the side and invert onto a cutting board.  And hello, what have we here?

You’ve been warned.  In the headline, no less. If poo and the discussion thereof makes you uncomfortable, please check out a more wholesome blog entry, like this one or this one.  Still with me?  In that case, great – let’s move on.

About half of my business is making meals for people following the Paleo Diet.  The Paleo Diet’s basic premise is this: don’t eat anything that wasn’t available to your ancestors before the advent of agriculture. Vegetables, meat, nuts, fruit, eggs. The logic goes that the 10,000 years since man first dipped his toe in the non-hunter-gatherery waters of an agricultural society is no time in evolutionary terms, and man’s gut has not figured out how to handle other foods properly in that time.  By contrast, man has had millions of years to adapt to eating paleo foods.Read More

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about beef.

Not the beef you eat (we will get to that, though). The beef you have. Read More

I got a can of black truffles as a gift.

Truffles may be the most expensive canned thing in the world. Read More

In the Uri’s Favorite Rap Album Olympics, Raising Hell, Paul’s Boutique, and The Chronic are on the podium in some order.

Which of the three would bring home the gold? Read More