The weather chased me outside today. Somehow I thought it was warmer out there than in here. Oh yeah, icebox kitchen. Several birds with that cold stone. But did I enjoy a Sunday downtown? I didn’t mind freezing with A waiting for G keeping warm in a Chinatown secrets shop. What do you do with salt dried sea cucumber? And I can appreciate $1200 a something for Chinese ginseng roots. The Italian cheese shop somehow didn’t make me want to mangi and spend what I haven’t got on marinade mozzarella and torone treats. I suppose A thought he made a friend in one of those from the on timers club in me. I believe he may be sorely mistaken. Today was an anomaly of fact. But we all laughed and G ordered too many dishes as usual. We must place more stringent rules on that one’s ordering. No double orders, for parties of three, no more than seven dishes, and no sneaky orders of suspicious dried fish of unknown origins sure to slice the throat of the Other.

So today was a freezing version of any typical old days in Gotham. Arriving for dim sum after one is still not happening. You must be there before noon. The backup was one of those a table of three Gotham kids the past couple decades would opt for. Sorry, I never know names of places in Chinatown, except for Pearl, Pearl Paints, the lighting store, the electronics store, the corners for lechees, cherries, homemade tofu, beans sprouts ag’d in some Chinatown basement; my favourite warm or cold coconut with taro root and tapioca pearl drink is gone, or it’s been moved somewhere and I haven’t been snooping to locate its whereabouts. Chinatown is driven by pigeon navigation—the way it was introduced me many moons ago.

Classes begin Tuesday. I remain a happy grad student; theoretical perspectives in food is a Monday class,—G was right; it’s not a Tuesday class, that’s food history—does not begin until next week, and therefore I have until then to read the first two hundred sixty-nine pages of the twenty-one texts and uncounted articles we’ll be munching on the next fifteen weeks. Upshot, I hear it tends to be a social class and folks grab drinks allover town after with the professor. I’m game. I admit I crave academic camaraderie. And I’m feeling the love after cocktails Giuseppe invited the kids out for at his new place dell’anima. Made a perfect flint to warm up the start of a freezing spring term. Here now is a plug for my colleagues—and friends—G and C. Click on their initials please to read the good food they tap keys for. These women know their cena and where to eat it. That’s why I let them pick the family styles.

Tonight’s pr’ack is brought to you by Fairway pepperoncini’s, Cabot eighteen month cheddar, Ryvita rye and oat bran, and both halves of the tiniest, most precious aguacate from my CA heart Farm Fresh Produce mashed with jus de meyer lemon of same origin, sel, piper, crp.*

Buen provecho y buenas noches comaradas..

*No, these folks are not sponsoring me, yet. But if you’re from their marketing departments, feel free to slice a piece of your ad pie for a starving prandium writing grad student.