Here’s a new short I just shot. It concerns a love that dare not text its name…
This image is completely irrelevant!
SHOOT ME A MAIL
Aug 9
Parms and the Man
Mar 25
The Dawn of Sheep
Who out there doesn’t like a good old-fashioned Bacon Egg and Cheese Sandwich? There’s no tastier way to load your morning belly with simple carbs and saturated fat. Better yet, if you’ve had a few the night before, the salty fat sandwich is the best next-day salve for your headwound of regret.
But have you ever considered re-imagining this mouthwatering sandwich into a leftover pasta omelette? Well I have. So relax, for I’ve done the hard thinking for you.
I’m a manic believer in reviving old, nearly spoiled foods. For instance, who’s to say that your old Tuna Mac & Cheese from Thursday can’t make a great pasta omellete on Saturday? I’ve never said that. Or what about Mommy’s leftover soup? Well, just plop it into a saucepan and slurp it up, ya young one!
So here it is: The Bacon-Flecked Mac & Cheese Omelette. Oh, and there’s also another ingredient, and it rhymes with Barm…
Half Dead
Feb 20
You say tomato, I say ebola.
Last weekend, after making a Chicken Parm meal with a Rigatoni Al’Olio side, I woke in the middle of the night with a swimming head and a stomach of lead. As the hours passed and I grew more familiar with the tiles of my bathroom floor, it was clear that I had caught a stomach bug.
The tragedy was that I couldn’t help but associate the sickness with the sauce. Though this wasn’t food poisoning, my mind had poisoned the pleasure of parm. I ate bread and broth for the next few days. The thought of sauce and cheese only made my stomach hate me anew.
But as time boiled on, the fire in my belly cooled and the memory of the pernicious parm melted away. In fact, last night I made my first sauce in 7 days. Seven entire days! That’s plenty lent for me, thank you.
When this close, you can see parm atoms.
Do The Breakfast Dance!
Feb 10
Eggs in the morning. What could be more apt?
It's brown, so the chicken's ear lobes were red.
This ovate spheroid – an organic jewel encasing the pristine goop of life – is the perfect complement to the dawn of a new day. We celebrate the sun’s rebirth by devouring a baby star. For the new-agers out there – it’s like that “one door closes, another opens” thing you’re always citing amidst the obvious chaos of the living world.
But back to eggs. Incredible? That’s one way to put it. Edible? For thousands of years, yes. Parmible? Well, see now… let me think… it’s actually kind of tricky -- OF COURSE! If it’s digestible, it’s parmible.
Whether scrambled, over-easy, soft-boiled, open-faced, or scatter-brained, parmesan cheese has been helping eggs start the day since Man invented Mixing. For an bouncy example, check out the video, set to A.C. Newman’s “Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer.”
Jarlsberg before bed
Feb 4
I will never do this again.
The Horror.
I returned home last night around 11pm. I was hungry and tired – a perfect physical circumstance to begin my experiment.
MATERIALS
Earlier in the day, I went to the Trader Joe’s on 14th St for groceries. Luckily, I’d arrived at a rare slow moment – I walked a full fifteen feet (!) before filing into their communist breadline. Along my sullen slog through the store, I picked up a wedge of Jarlsberg – the Norwegian cow’s milk cheese. I figured its mild flavor and semi-soft texture would ease me into this cheese-sleep experiment with minimal distress. I’ve never been more wrong.
OBSERVATIONS, VISIONS
I ate about 4 ounces of the cheese less than an hour before bed. Falling asleep was no problem – the dive into the deep black came quick. But lying at the bottom of the dream-well were several bizarre horrors. Without boring you with the sequence of these surreal events, I’ll just dribble in some details: an abandoned New Hampshire mansion; an Asian man with one arm re-installing all the showers; four Care Bear-looking creatures – all living in the dank basement – busily scribing pornographic novellas for children. Particularly frightening was when these tiny, furry things with sewn-on smiles swarmed me for a collective “cuddle”.
I clawed out of these mental threats and awoke with tight breath. I thought of noting the details on a pad atop my end table, but decided against it. Writing the nightmare down might revive an anguish best left behind.
CONCLUSION
Do not eat Jarlsberg before bed. You may see the devil inside you.
And children: when mother sends you to bed without supper, thank her.
couldn't even make it to the bed.
Resistance! Finally, the ether has pushed back on my ego volcano. Balance is restoring itself, as I’ve been called to task on a flowery jag of mine. In my last post I wrote, of parm, “it makes everything better: pasta, meat, and dreams.” This friend of mine – an accomplished graduate of an esteemed palace of learning – wanted this defended, scientifically. Namely, the effect of cheese-consumption on sleeping and dreaming.
Before continuing, note the study he sent me here.
The “Scientific” Method
So now, I – a middling graduate of an esteemed palace of partying – will undergo a rigorous experiment on myself. Over the next several weeks, I too will consume a variety of cheeses one half-hour before bed and see what dreams may come. I think I can improve on the above experiment, since my testing will proceed with an actual control – me – rather than the British study, which fed nighttime cheeses to 200 different people. I find this approach highly suspect, since each of the 200 subjects brings to dreaming their own unique psychological gunk.
A New, Selfish Approach
To counter this relativistic trap, I’ll simply eat all the cheeses myself! The only lingering gunk shall be my own. For instance, how might a few Jarsberg slices work overnight on my unresolved fraternal issues? Or what might my REM sleep produce from a hunk of Pecorino and a knack for math? Meunster and mother-love?
The results will trickle in. They will be breathtaking and gassy.
To Parm or to parm?
Jan 31
I think in the first flush of generating content for this site, I may have overlooked a crucial point in the ethos of parming it up. One must remember that parming, as far as I know, cleaves off into two major arteries of decadent cooking. So, in order to proceed with any sustainable dialogue on the merits of parming, we must first know of which parming we speak. Let’s here float along these two tributaries off the River of Deliciousness.
Parm as more than parm.
The first method of parming is the kind demonstrated in any classic red-sauce Italian place. When you order your __(food)__ Parmesan at Gepetto’s Ristorante, you’re getting a pure food product (often Eggplant, Chicken, or Veal) that has been battered, breaded, fried, layered with marinara and mozzarella, then baked before serving. This is the kind of parming I took you through in my Pretzeled Chicken Parm. The inherent contradiction within this parming process is the near-absence of actual parmesan cheese. Perhaps, as American palates devolved to prefer blander, chewier cheeses, this famous dish’s very namesake was subverted. So now, any __(food)__ Parmesan dish is a flagrant misnomer lotted with such other culinary hypocrisies as the peanut (it’s a legume!), the egg cream, Grape-Nuts, head cheese, sweetbreads, and the eggplant (rendering “Eggplant Parmesan” a brazen, wholesale deception on par with Watergate and Milli Vanilli). This kind of parming will henceforth be given a capital “P”, since it’s often part of a dish’s title.
Parm as parm.
The second type of parming implies adding the hard, granular, northern Italian cheese to a meal or snack. Since this website’s inception, most of the parming-it-up has taken this second tack (more due to practical hindrances than preferential yearnings). When the cheese is crumbled, shaved, or hunked over a typically modest dish, flavors are enhanced by parm’s inherent saltiness and dry, near-smokey fat notes. Yeah, that’s right. Fat notes. In short, it makes everything better: pasta, meat, and dreams. From here on out, this parming shall receive a lowercase “p” due to it’s majority use as an accent, or supporting player, to a dish’s starring flavor components.
I’m glad this one’s been put to bed. However, if someone knows of another parming implication/application, please post a comment and prepare to defend it.
Savory Oatmeal Parm
Jan 28
Use either fork or spoon for this gruel.
Welcome, everyone, to the newest waste of your time…
“How to Make Savory Oatmeal Parm”
Most of us who live in the great American cities – New York, St. Louis, and Omaha - have tasted the Italian dish, Risotto, at least a few times. If you haven’t, make a thought bubble over your head and place within it a creamy bowl of cheesy rice. Imagine it steaming unctously up your wintry nostrils, coating your cracking skin with the savory lotion of buttery late afternoons and leaden-bellied naps.
Now, fast-forward to your twenties. You’re poor, aging, and viscerally aware of your inevitable death. In the middle of a ho-hum day, the cold, black nothing strikes you with a flash and without warning. Your spine shudders in submission and the banal comforts at your fingertips seem to evaporate until all is none…
Time to eat!
Why deal with death right now? Chew on this instead. It’s an easy one-pot meal that unites the Irish and Italian – oat-wise and cheese-wise, respectively. You can call it “Ris-oat-to,” but I won’t.
It only takes this (plus mindfulness):
Water, collected in a marble amphora from a mid-November rain
Irish Oats, steel-cut (if in a pinch, substitute with titanium-cut)
Parm, as much you will find in Slovenia
Olive Oil, drops
Cannellini Mac & Mercury
Jan 26
Cannery in Parma. Maybe.
In the spirit of the recession, I thought I’d share my haute take on some classic American fare. I like to call this food-tangent my “Cannellini Mac and Mercury.” It’s basically a parmed-up version of a simple stovetop Mac & Cheese recipe. The ingredients can be easily amassed with some loose change and spare oil from your roommate’s pantry.
All it takes is a rectangular box of dried mac & cheese mix (I prefer the “shells and alfredo” version because it’s not neon yellow), some olive oils, cannellini beans (Italian for “from the can”), a can of tuna (to fortify it like an old Tuscan town), some milks, and that ethereal singing siren we like to call parm.
So it’s healthy! For just two extra bucks, you can turn this meal into something loaded with protein, fiber, and Omega-3s, Alpha-9s, and Theta-3000s! L. Ron Hubbard LOVED this dish, so you’ve got no choice!
Cast, in order of appearance:
Shells and Alfredo box, from the store that rhymes with “Bold Dudes”
Olive Oil, enough to drown a roach
Tuna, canned in water
Cannellini Beans, canned in bean juice
Milk, 2 splashes
Parm (“parmesan cheese” to novelists), size of a pulverized baseball
Research and Development
Jan 22
Now Arriving, New Heaven Station
Two years ago, after living a series of Manhattan hovels to save money, I’d finally stowed enough sweet cash to visit Italy. Finally, a chance to get up close and personal with parm… in Parma, The City Of The Cheese.
Through some divine luck, both sides of my family hail from this sleepy city north of Bologna. For over a week – a week! – I walked barefoot and peasant-like through the gentle hills. I toured the various curing houses, whispering to the friendly parmesan cows by day, dozing off onto pillows of prosciutto hocks once night fell.
Sleep came quick and heavy while on tour, the demi-gods of Chianti and Lambrusco vaguely chiding me, “Chill out, Johnny Worryface! We Italians ran this Earth for like 15 centuries. Now we get to just relax, eat, and complain. These are spoils, my son. So go spoil yourself.”
It was in those dry-aged dreams where images of a parming paradiso first flashed. And so, in the Italian spirit of “getting to it whenever” comes this website. A full two years later.
Below are some photos from Parma. Keep in mind, each photo was taken while chewing a panini. Andiamo!
The Parmalat plant, eerily situated across the road from my relatives. Nature? Nurture?
Ancientness.
Admirable.
My uncle, appalled by my Italian.
Of The Pine.
Home to Napolean's second wife. This is true.
Eating some street mangia.
Garibaldi Square. Not the Brooklyn one.
I made it rain so this shot would work better.
Constant red-carpet treatment.
Feelings.
Il Duomo di Parma. A gentle reminder of God's sniper position.
Cieling of the Duomo. You can't see from here, but there's a lot of salami imagery.
Road.