Michael Pollan wrote one of my favorite books of all time: Omnivore's Dilemma. When it first came out, I did not do anything for a week while I absorbed his brillant analysis of the food, commodities and energy market of today. If you haven't read it, you should.
So it was with pleasure I opened my Sunday New York Times to see the cover story on the Time Magazine an article written by Michael Pollan. Titled "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch," he explains how we have evovled from watching cooking shows so we can learn how to cook complicated and imaginative foods to sitting on the couch and watching other makes meals while we, all too often, bring home take-out or easy to microwave items. It is a thoughtful article inspired by the release of the movie Julie & Julia this week.
This movie has fixated the entertainment writers for better then a week now. Directed by Nora Ephron -- who brought you When Harry Met Sally -- and starring the incomparable Meryl Streep as Julia Childs -- so many reviews have been written about her portrayal of a woman who happily passed away at 92 in her sleep, it makes me wonder whether our interests are so diluted and specialized that we will rarely have cultural figures everyone would know.
I'm sure I will watch the movie which will be good for me because this past week of gluttonous eating every night has led to my skirts feeling a bit tighter. Instead of going to a restaurant, I am going to go to the movies. Mental candy as opposed to edible candy.
I took a good run this morning to work off the calories of an unexpectedly delicious meal last night. After having running errands for the better part of all day Saturday (This is the part of being a grown-up I absolutely deplore! I swear I will probably, if I ever get married, be the worst housewife ever because I hate to clean, run errands or do anything remotely domestic!), I settled down to a dinner at Chevy's Mexican Restaurant near Pentagon City.
Chevy's is a chain restaurant so you know the prices are relatively cheap. My chicken chimichanga was $9.99, but what was really delicious was the salsa. In fact, their salsa is so legendary, you can buy a bottle of salsa for $7.99. I'm not sure I will accurately capture the freshness and lightness of the salsa. Not purely tomato based, the completely pureed salsa arrived in a glorious mish-mash of color: a burgundy palate with splices of green and black. The chips were essentially salt-less and so airy I ate an entire basket myself.
I should have sensed the salsa was to-die-for simply by the service of the waiter who brought us our own individual bowls of salsa.
Which reminds me. I wrote a review for NBC Washington nearly a year ago which caused quite the rucus because I said Lauriol Plaza in D.C. was the best Mexican food in the city. I still get amused by the fracus simply because I was only choosing a locale in the city -- as opposed to Virginia or Maryland. I'm just a critic, just one person's opinion, so raising someone's hackles is always interesting.
This week I'm excited to go to Texas and get some real Tex-Mex though!
