I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NADA SURF-Plays Covers on World Cafe (May 13, 2010).

I didn’t even know that Nada Surf had released a covers album (sometimes things slip through the cracks), but when NPR previewed their new song, I learned that they played some covers for World Cafe (not downloadable, sadly) to promote the album. 

So I’m going to be investigating that covers album shortly.  In the meantime, we get this very enjoyable four-song set (three covers and one of their own tracks). 

The band chats with David Dye briefly (about 5 minutes) before busting into the songs (a wonderful explanation of Bill Fox and a mention of reading about him in The Believer).  Their own track is “Whose Authority” one of their many wonderful songs.

The three covers are “Love Goes On” (by the Go-Betweens), “Enjoy the Silence” (by Depeche Mode) and “Electrocution” (by Bill Fox).  I didn’t recognize the first song until the Ba-ba-ba chorus kicked in, although I admit I’m not terribly familiar with it.  Similarly, the final song by Bill Fox is very obscure (as is Fox himself).  Both of these two songs are played with jangly guitars and are poppy and quite enjoyable.

The Depeche Mode song is the one that I already really knew well.  And boy do they make it their own.  They turn it from a somber dirge (catchy but somber) into a more upbeat almost poppy folk song.  It will probably be a polarizing cover (if anyone cares enough about Nada Surf to listen) and while I don’t think it’s as good as the original, it works so well in the context of a Nada Surf show, that it’ hard to argue with it.

Nada Surf is one of the great unsung bands and it’s hard to believe they aren’t more successful.

[READ: October 21, 2011] Mission Street Food

With Lucky Peach, McSweeney’s entered into the world of food publishing.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Lucky Peach.  But when I received Mission Street Food, I was no longer in the frame of mind to get excited to read this book, which, as the subtitle says, promises recipes and ideas.  And when I first flipped through it, I got to the recipes pages and said, well, when will I ever read this?

Then one night recently I couldn’t sleep and Mission Street Food was there, so I read the Preface.  And Anthony Myint has a great writing style, a great flair for telling a story and a wonderful story to tell.  Needless  to say, I read almost the whole first section before falling asleep.  And I was excited to tackle the rest of the book.

I hate to sound like I think that McSweeney’s has changed the way food book publishing is done, because that would be unfair.  I don’t read food publishing as a rule.  I can’t even enjoy looking in my wife’s cooking magazines.  Seeing names of foods and recipes for preparing them just doesn’t do anything for me.  But maybe the narrative of those books is more interesting than I give them credit.  Maybe I should sit down with another foodie book and see what it’s all about.

Nah.

The first part of this book is all about the (surprisingly) interesting and convoluted beginning of Mission Street Foods.  I’m not going to get into all the details, because at this point I’m still confused as to how Myint could have done all of this stuff in the allotted amount of time per day, but I’ll provide a very basic summary.

Anthony and his wife Karen decided to start a business that served good food cheaply and which not only didn’t make a profit, but in fact, turned their profits over to charity. At first, they started Mission Street Food out of a Mexican Food Cart on Thursday nights. 

The story of this four-week saga is fantastic.  And the fact that this brief stint of street-vendor-food brought about all of the following is quite amazing.

After the food truck, Anthony and Karen asked around and were able to use a local Chinese restaurant on Thursday nights (the restaurant part was closed on Thursdays, but the kitchen would be shared because they still offered take out).  So they moved from a tiny taco truck to a tiny kitchen, shared with another chef who preparing Chinese food.  And the restaurant was tiny covered with Chinese paintings (even though Mission Street served all kinds of different foods).

After a few weeks of making interesting and fun foods, often with a themed menu (and what wonderfully themed menus) they started to invite guests chefs (not celebrity chefs, just guests chefs, but many were from locally renowned restaurant) to come down.  The guests chefs would cook alongside the standard menu and all would be served together under the same umbrella.

I love this concept and I totally would have gone there if a) I lived in San Francisco and b) didn’t have children (because there was often a two-hour wait).  I love that you never knew what you’d get on a particular night (well, menus were posted online, but still).  With a guest chef, it was up to him or her to create the menu–and diners never knew what was in-house or what was guest-created.  Even on themed nights, the restaurant was offering up unusual things–(like their PB&J, which was pork belly and jicama).  There was even a special menu “stoner” night.

While this was going on, Anthony and a friend decided to also sell hamburgers.  This time they found another storefront which let them sell burgers twice a week (he wasn’t really cooking at the other place).  I love te picture of them with an eight-foot log of ground beef that they were going to slice into burgers.  So, now he had two enterprises going at the same time, both of them wildly successful and both of them giving a lot of money to worthy causes.

Things proceeded that way for awhile, until things finally settled down.  Now Myint is co-owner of two restaurants, Mission Chinese Food and Commonwealth.  Both are benevolent business models and still donate much of their money to charities (especially soup kitchens).

In addition to this tremendous story (told mostly by Myint but with extensive commentary from Karen–who seems to have run the whole shebang during the early days) there is a cool cartoon version of their original taco-cart exploit (I’m not sure who created it), extensive photographs (from bloggers, fans and the staff) and, as I mentioned, recipes.

The recipes in the book are for MSF’s more favorite food experiments.  Myint talks to us in a very friendly and funny way (with jokes and asides) and infuses the recipes with a sense of fun and experimentation.  And the photos are beautiful in this section. 

Myint talks about meats and vegetables, fish and desserts and while the book isn’t overflowing with recipes, it’s presented more as a foundation course–knowing what to do with these things will help you create better meals.  He offers advice on which kinds of foods to buy and what to do with them when you buy them (helpful charts for beef and for mushrooms and what ways to prepare them).  

Myint is also a fairly fancy chef, (even if he wouldn’t say so himself) so, he embraces things like sea foam or putting crème frâiche and hazelnuts to the top of your brownie.  But he makes it all sound so easy and fun (and he gives approximate prices for each meal too, which is nice) that it all seems within anyone’s grasp.

By the end, Myint tells you what kind of accoutrement you need for a well stocked kitchen.  Although it includes ingredients (bacon!), I’m taking more about the utensils and such.  And I think that Sarah will be getting a few things from this list (not the Vita Prep 3, the $400 3 hp blender which spins so fast you can make hollandaise sauce without having to heat it, although maybe a whipped cream charger).

I’m really surprised how much I enjoyed this book.  It’s a great read for anyone interested in making unusual foods or for anyone who might be interested in the Mission Street Food story.