Either Pulao or I have talked to you about it or, even more likely, you’ve sat at a table there with us. In fact, considering the readership of 12apostrophes, there is a very good chance you were with us at Grand Szechuan last night.

Little Szechuan, in St. Paul, was a magical place. There I was introduced to things that I now cannot live without, like the Dan Dan Noodle, and the Szechuan peppercorn.

I became part of a dozen or so regulars who, in some configuration or another, dined at Little Szechuan way, way too often, and ordered food like we were preparing for an apocalypse, with plates stacked atop each other on the lazy Susan, a one-table buffet, all the better to try a bit of as many dishes as you could, and ensure you’d have some more for one, last late-night taste, and lunch or dinner (or both) the next day.

Then the chefs left.

One day we ordered all our old faves, but it just wasn’t the same. One dish was too salty. One dish’s sauce was too thin. One dish was soggy when it should have been crispy.

It was two months ago but we finally found them. The Little Szechuan chefs started their own place, a new place, called, in a little dig at their former employ, Grand Szechuan.

We drove their last night, nine of us, all the way to Old Shackopee and France in Bloomington. Would it be the same? Was this truly them? We had tried Little Szechuan post-chef-walkout a few times. We had tried Tea House, which we had heard was on par with Little Szechuan in its heyday. Maybe, one of us said, it’s a little like heroin; you chase and chase, but never get as high as the first time.

Let me tell you: Grand Szechuan is the good shit.

Nearing the end of our dinner, when I had abandoned my plate altogether and picked Chung King Chili Chicken and A Choy morsels directly from the serving dishes, I pushed back in my chair, and, Szechuan peppercorns coursing through my veins, sighed the sigh of the deeply content and soon to be fat.

A friend to my right knew this feeling very well, and began to laugh, at which point I began to laugh, at which point people across the table asked, “What are you laughing at?”, at which point I could only answer, truthfully, “Nothing!”, at which point, all nine of us began to laugh.

The food is like that.

I’m torn. I don’t want to disparage my old Little Szechuan; where we’ve all brought anyone who came through town in last two years; where I’ve driven eight miles for takeout, multiple times; where the wait staff is happy to see us, and us them; where the owner confided to us she hadn’t slept since all nine chefs walked out at once the week before . . .

I’ll say this about Little Szechuan: it’s still the best Chinese in St. Paul. Get the Dan Dan Noodles, which got better with the new kitchen, and the Ma La or Szechuan Taste chicken — fantastic dishes you can’t get at Grand Szechuan.

But who am I kidding? I’ll sell all my memories of Little Szechuan for one more hit of the real Ma Po, with pork crumbles and black bean paste surrounding the fresh tofu as your whole mouth tingles . . .

Make the drive to south Bloomington. If you’re an old-school Little Szechuan-er, this is all you need to know: Grand Szechuan is where the chefs went.

As a kid, I helped my cousin in Mississippi get his show cow ready for the fair. “Helped” mainly meant “watched,” as I was a bit of a city slicker, and hadn’t beefed up (sorry!) on my cow fundamentals. But I helped clean and groom the cow, which included a thorough tail bleaching. The tail bleaching, I’ve always remembered, was to counteract the cow’s tendency to get shit all over its tail — a shitty tail, my cousin taught me, a winning fair cow does not make.

As a teenager, when I visited my brother in upstate New York, I made him stop by the side of the highway so I could burn a roll of film on some cows mulling about a field. This was another choice of subject matter, along with my “clouds of the sky” picture albums, that made my dad seriously rethink my filmic allowance.

But last week, when I was in Delhi, I had two things going for me; a 2GB memory card and cows conveniently on the street!

Street cows are not your ordinary everyday cows. They sidle up to you and talk fast; before you know it, you’re the proud owner of a “genuine” Rolex, or you pat your back jeans pocket and realize your wallet’s been pinched.

No, actually they’re exactly like country cows. The impressive thing about cows (besides their immensity and tastiness) is that they are unpreturbable to the nth degree. Cow A (pictured) chewed her cud as placidly, traffic whooshing and honking on either side of her, as if she were in a rolling meadow of flowers. She might have been be too stupid to know that she wasn’t in a meadow of flowers, or else realized that none of the small cars could really put a dent in her.

We only caught the tail-end of Cow B (above). As we passed this street cow I pointed at the window and shot at the head of the cow. But by the time the shutter clicked up and down, we had reached the business end.

Cow C posed very thoughtfully for me in the square of a local market, underneath a sign which, I’m told, is for a stock brokerage. Kismet!

This is what I got:

All right, I thought. I’ll get right on that. I kept the fortune for posterity but I didn’t, you know, do anything with my loose ends.

Next time I had Chinese, I got this:

Oh, God, cookie, I don’t know! I looked over my shoulder for my problem, was it here in the restaurant? An assassin of some sort?

Tell us, renowned 12apostrophes readers, your disconcerting fortune cookie stories.

p.s. Everyone knows that to have good luck, you have to save your fortune cookie until the end of the meal. The very end, mind you. Pick your fill of sesame chicken from the lettuce on your plate before you crack open that fortune and taste the cookie, because there’s no turning back after that, or else you’ll have bad luck. Or a bossy fortune cookie.

Smoking Loon 2005 Cabernet ($7.99 750 ml)

If you’re looking to impress your Three-Buck Chuck-swilling friends with your class at the next party, I’d recommend the Loon as definitely worth the extra bucks.  It’s a dark, opaque purple, concentrated drinking experience, an intriguing, well-balanced blend of potent flavors that can stand up against the spiciest food or the most charbroiled piece of carbon to come off the barbecue.  (Well, maybe not Indian hot, but pretty hot).  My dad recommended this wine, and it confirms my opinion of him as a highly intelligent man with discerning taste and a liking for a bargain.  

A distinguished panel of experienced drinkers (two friends and I) road-tested this wine at a cookout a few weeks ago and in the backyard last weekend and pronounce it highly satisfactory.  The panel: 

Experienced Drinker #1 craves intense tastes: coffee should be dark roasted, opaque, and thick as tar; chocolate must be at least 70% cocoa and not too much sugar in it; barbecued food should have half its exterior surface caramelized and/or carbonized, preferably both.  Food ordered in America should be American hot, though not Thai or Indian hot.   

[Or, heaven forfend, West African hot.  Those people are crazy and their peppers are evil. 

On one occasion E. D. 1 entered a greenhouse where West African varieties of peppers were growing, and was forced to leave by the mere fumes of the peppers growing on the plants.  They hadn’t even been bruised or cut, yet drove her from the premises.  Those are some strong peppers]. 

Experienced Drinker #2 has regularly imbibed a wide variety of wines over the past three decades, as well as being an aficionado of small-brewery beer.  She also enjoys American-hot peppers and intense tastes.  E. D. 2 is also a vegetarian, for what it’s worth. 

Experienced Drinker #3 favors light, fruity wines such as chardonnays and white zinfandel.  She tasted one small sip of the Loon, scrunched up her face, and pronounced it “Very dry.”   This reaction constitutes a recommendation to those who crave intense flavor. 

The remaining members of the panel continued about our serious work of tasting, sipping assiduously until we reached the bottom of the bottle.  We came up with these flavors:

Full-bodied but not overwhelming, dry but not too tannic [to me a mark of too-cheap wine], a nice blend of flavors with no one note overwhelming the rest.  Mainly we got a definite blackberry jam-like flavor, spicy with hints of cinnamon and woodsmoke, with an even slighter dusky flavor of mushrooms and walnut skins. 

Finally, we detected a faint trace of banana oil, otherwise known as fingernail polish remover, but that was when we were almost at the bottom of the bottle.  Anything was possible.   

With a name like Smoking Loon, and a price at $7.99 for a 750 ml bottle, that the damn thing also taste good is almost like icing on the cake [which we did NOT discern in this particular wine, at this particular tasting, anyway].   If you love strong flavors or are going to a place where you’ll be eating carbonized whatever off the grill or spicy foods, bring a bottle with you.  You won’t be sorry. 

We got dizzy the closer we got to the stairwell. Looks like somebody thought the office was empty (or empty enough to get high in) and smoked it up on the stairs. Every day this week.

There’s an alternate theory, though. With the reorganizations going on in my company, the four of us left in the Minneapolis office thought corporate might be trying to get rid of us. Earlier this winter, the office heating mysteriously seemed to die. Could they now be trying to smoke us out?

Man, have they ever got the wrong idea!

I find myself working longer and longer hours — and loving it. I now spend whole afternoons standing in front of the vending machines, savoring all my delicious choices. My productivity is about the same as before. What was I writing about again?

Whatever, I’m going to go grab a snack. Peace out!

[University of North Carolina Professor Barry Popkin] said the “burden of obesity”, with its related illnesses, was also shifting from the rich to the poor, not only in urban but in rural areas around the world.

“The burden of obesity”? Like most white, middle-class Americans, I’ve never not had enough to eat. The most hunger I’ve experienced is between a skipped breakfast and a late lunch. No other class of folk could be so disturbed by a few extra pounds. Ask the rural poor aroud the world: “Will you accept the burden of obesity?” You may be surprised by the answer.

I don’t intend to belittle health problems associated with being overweight. Diabetes is a debilitating, chronic disease and a growing international problem (including, according to the NYT, “developing” and populous nations like India and China). I’ve seen a little of the dangerous, painful effects of diabetes from watching my grandfather, who suffered from it for 40+ years.

But that does indicate something important — unlike starvation, diabetes is a manageable disease. And if more people are dying from chronic diseases, like diabetes, than from communicable ones (as the NYT also reports), then give a shout-out to penicillin, clean water, mosquito netting, and sanitation, that might help you live long enough to die of a heart attack.

Yes, as professor Popkin suggests in the BBC online article, let’s subsidize fruits and vegetables in the U.S. But first throw a party. There is less hunger, and more people around the world have enough to eat.

(If you need another reason to celebrate, consider that a top fashion show in Madrid just enacted the first-ever ban on unhealthily thin models, in an effort to stop promoting heroin chic as the ideal to women around the world who have ever seen a magazine cover. Woo-hoo!)

No, I’m saying that I bought my OWN bag, and slowly ate them, and really looked at them before I put them in my mouth. And what I want to say is, as tasty as they were (and they were), they were alarming.

What’s with the colors? And why don’t more people talk about this? They are the brightest, brashest purples and greens and blues and yellows I’ve ever seen a food item be. Food isn’t those colors. The only thing that’s any of those colors and edible is… M & Ms. Why is this? It felt like I was eating tasty Fisher Price toys, or very yummy legos.

And I could get used to this–I like bright colors a lot, and chocolate even more. But it seems so unnatural. That part’s obvious, but it got me wondering if I could somehow connect crass-looking, overly colored American candies to American culture. Yeah, that’s where I’m going with this…

I also want to be  sure everyone knows that M & Ms are actually a rip-off of Smarties, which is a Canadian, I mean originally English candy. A member of the Mars family saw some English solders eating Smarties (apparently ‘melts in your mouth, not in your hands’ was a helpful war tool) and proceeded to lift the idea. I ate Smarties in Canada when I was a kid and missed them when I couldn’t find them in the U.S. years later.

Come to think of it, Smarties were obnoxious colors too. So I guess that blows my “crass America” concept. Well, insofar as being able to use candy as the symbol, anyway.

Is 21st century culture too obsessed with weight/nutrition (3 out of my last five posts have been about food and weight) or are we, as a group, so lackadasical about fitness that we’re now endangering the truly innocent?

So why did I think it would be a good idea to subscribe to an organic farm?

Maybe because I’d only be getting one-sixth of the bounty.  I’m splitting half a summer-long subscription with my roommate and her boyfriend.  Maybe because I ought to eat more vegetables.  That’s why I was excited that we’d be getting everything from arugula to zucchini.  But also, in some abstract way, I think cooking is a good, nurturing, responsible activity, and that I should do more of it.

That didn’t happen.  There’s something about being faced every week with that boombox-size box of grubby wholesomeness that turns me off of food entirely.  It doesn’t matter if it comes filled with beets (which I don’t like) or tomatoes (which I love); I just don’t want to deal with it.  I…kind of let the veggies sit in the fridge until they’re rotten enough to pitch.  I feel guilty about this, but my roommate, who does like to cook, is even having a hard time getting rid of her share.  She started throwing dinner parties just so she can fob off our unwanted food on someone else.

Plus today I tried an ear of corn and it tasted like a baked potato.  I’m never doing this again.

The chicken was dry, true. But even as we must value taste most when it comes to food, surely a good meal appeals also to our eyes, our sense of smell, and the texture of it on our lips? The beautiful plates that the food at Puerto Azul came on, the wonderful sensation of a liquid mango salsa on a meatier chicken breast, the chatter of forks and knives touching their plates all around me—all these added to the sense of the meal.

What occurs to me more and more is my growing anxiety about food. Not in the calorie counting way, which obviously has taken over the world, but more in the “what does food mean to me” sort of way. I love to cook, and I love eating, and even my moniker is really a sort of rice dish (the source, by the way, of the subsequently bastardized “rice pilaf”). But I often wonder, what should I cook? How should I make it? When I have friends over to dinner, am I obligated to cook Indian food? When friends ask me for a recipe for something I’ve just cooked and hasn’t followed a set of instructions itself, and I give said recipe to them, am I then responsible for what unfolds in their kitchen?

In some ways, these anxieties remind me of my mother. For a period of about seven months, my father was in England, my brother had just started college in Mississippi, and my mother and I were by ourselves in Delhi. Many mornings, my mother’s first question to me would be what I wanted for dinner. I laughed at her then for making me think about meals so far in advance, and now I ask my husband Kris days ahead of time what he might want for dinner, and find myself sorting out leftovers in my mind, and mentally organizing ingredients in my pantry and fridge into meals.

Two other things about food:

A) There’s a great story by Kazuo Ishiguro called “The Family Supper” (listen to it here) that not only makes food literally an issue of life and death, and not in the obvious food-is-nourishment sort of way, but also has it stand in for cultural alienation, sibling rivalry, and other good socio-psychological stuff.

B) There’s a word for an attitude like mine. This is from OED:

foodism, n.

orig. U.S. Brit. /fudz()m/, U.S. /fudz()m/ [< FOOD n. + -ISM. Cf. FOODIST n.]

A keen or exaggerated interest in food, esp. in the minute details of the preparation, presentation, and consumption of food.