Some Like it Hot

Jess loves spicy food. And I love Chinese food. Which puts Sichuan cuisine in perfect Venn diagram overlap between the two of us.

And though I’ll occasionally make it myself at home, it’s definitely a bit of an undertaking. The dry pot I made last week had no fewer than 15 ingredients in the spice oil alone, and a similar number in the chili paste, even before getting to the main ingredients. As I noted at the time, some dishes are worth cooking from scratch just so you’ll never begrudge money spent ordering them at a restaurant instead.

To that end, I’m extremely lucky to work just a few blocks from Mala Project, which makes perhaps the best dry pot in Manhattan. While hot pot is Sichuan’s signature dish – essentially, a spicy broth fondue – dry pot is, instead, pretty much what it sounds like it would be: all the spices and ingredients of hot pot, but without the broth, stir-fried instead.

It’s an amazingly flavorful dish, albeit an atomically hot one. So, even if you might end up paying for it on the way out the day after, if you’re looking for a quick, delicious, and relatively cheap lunch or dinner in Midtown, I can’t recommend Mala Project (41 W 46th St) highly enough.

In fact, I’m wrapping this post, so I can head there right now, for some take-out to satisfy Jess’ days-long craving. As the Chinese proverb goes, talk doesn’t cook rice.

February 4, 2020

Truth in Advertising

When I was about ten years old, my family headed to Arizona for a cousin’s wedding. And though, at home, my parents strictly limited my and my brother’s TV time, when we were on vacation, all bets were off. So I spent hours at a clip planted in front of the tube, watching whatever I could find on the hotel’s station lineup.

At the time, the Radisson chain was ascendant, and their ads seemed to appear at every commercial break. The spots panned across one lavish hotel room after another, intercut with sparkling pools and polished lobbies, all filled with elated guests. Over which, the jingle crooned: “Why get a room, when you can get a Radisson?”

And, frankly, I was sold. With each repeated viewing, I’d pan around our own fairly shabby and cramped hotel room, before returning my gaze enviously to the screen.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it any more, and headed over to interrupt my mother, reading on the bed.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are we staying here, when we could be staying at a Radisson?”

My mother stared at me blankly for a moment, then replied, “this is a Radisson.”

It’s a lesson I’ve thought about a lot in the years since.

January 30, 2020

Built to Last

This morning, I stumbled across an interesting Twitter thread on the half-life of content on the internet – how long it takes something to reach 50% of its total lifetime engagement:

  • Twitter: 20 mins
  • Facebook: 5 hrs
  • Instagram: 20 hrs
  • LinkedIn: 24 hrs
  • YouTube: 20 days
  • Pinterest: 4 mos
  • Blog post: 2 yrs

I am, admittedly, a bit of a dinosaur. While I’m just slightly too old to be a Millennial, I’ve been online for thirty years, dating all the way back to when that meant dialing in to BBS’s at a walloping 2400 bits per second and risking the wrath of my parents for tying up the phone line. Similarly, I’ve been blogging for 23 years (!!!), 18 of which right here on this site.

So, while I was an early adopter of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, my posting on all three (and a slew of others along the way – MySpace, Friendster, Path, we hardly knew ye) has been spotty at best.

As a content consumer, I actually truly love Twitter; it’s a firehose of interesting links and takes and ideas from people I think are particularly smart. (Even if the signal-to-noise ratio sometimes leaves a bit to be desired.)

But, as a content creator, I just have trouble with the ephemeral nature of that site and the others. Perhaps, as the philosopher Ernest Becker would have it, that’s because my writing is simply a subconscious raging against my own mortality, a drive to deny my eventual death by struggling to create a legacy (even if just of words) that persists beyond me. More prosaically, perhaps it’s a consequence of my painfully slow writing speed, and the disappointment of my posts disappearing in even less time than it took for me to draft them in the first place. Or, perhaps, it’s because I’m far too long-winded to cram my thoughts into the saner word counts that most social media sites’ designs encourage.

Still, whatever the reason, and even after some relatively long hiatuses, I inevitably find myself winding my way back here, to longer-form blog posting. Sure, a lot of my posts are garbage. But it’s nice to think they’re at least garbage that people can find, and slog their way through, years – or, apparently, decades – down the line.

January 29, 2020

Cartio

Despite my crazy work schedule, Jess and I have been trying to cook more. And, living on the Upper West Side, we’re lucky to have a slew of good grocery stores – Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Fairway, etc. – nearby. Or, at least, sort of nearby. While a seven to ten block walk seems relatively quick on the way over, hoofing back ladened with armfuls of heavy bags feels decidedly less so.

At one point a year or two back, Jess did the sensible thing, and purchased a rolling grocery cart. But, in New York, the ability to stagger along with a half-dozen full bags in your hands is an unspoken point of pride. For the most part, you just don’t see anyone below the age of 80 rolling their groceries home.

So, each shopping trip, I’ve let pride get the best of me. I do head out with an empty Go Ruck GR1 backpack, which makes it far easier to handle a case or two of seltzer and other particularly weighty items. And, having switched entirely to reusable bags for the sake of the environment (we’re now even using reusable produce bags, to avoid the piles of plastic we otherwise return home with and quickly discard), I’ve been pleased to discover that totes both hold more (reducing total bag count) and have handles long enough to carry (only semi-painfully) over your shoulders. All of which has made even large, food-for-the-entire-week shops substantially more feasible.

Still, those walks home are inevitably some of my toughest workouts each week. I’ve found I count down the blocks remaining each time I cross a street along the way, so I can will myself the full distance one small chunk at a time.

Which is why, this week, I finally sucked it up, suppressed my ego, and rolled the cart along when we headed to Whole Foods on Sunday. And, frankly, I’m glad I did. Even with its large capacity, we still completely filled two additional totes. And though the cart itself was heavy to drag behind me, and navigating foot traffic, street construction, and winter puddles was a bit of a challenge, it still made for a wildly easier trip.

So, going forward, the cart it is. I’d always heard one advantage of advancing age is caring increasingly little about what everyone else thinks of you. Turns out, for me at least, that’s true. For better or worse, it seems I’m ready to roll.