Best Meals

#5. Suwun Thai Home Cooking

One of the best Thai joints I’ve ever been to. Cozy atmosphere, authentic food and (this must be an Albany thing) reasonable prices.

#4. Weisswurst from Rolf’s Pork Store

If a place makes their own sausage you know it’s gonna be good. We grilled these and served them with mustard, mashed potatoes and sauerkraut spiced with cloves and cooked with sliced apples.

#3. Mini Hot Dogs at Famous Lunch

A trip to Albany is not complete without a journey to her sister city up the river - Troy, where Famous Lunch has been churning out mini-wienies since 1932. The standard order is to get three with onions and zippy sauce. I’m not a huge hot dog eater so I had just one. We got fries with zippy sauce too. Zippy sauce seems to be crispy meat with tomato paste and there’s a slight Greek taste to it. Perhaps there’s some oregano in there and maybe some cinnamon too.

#2. Pork Tamales at Jack’s Diner

Jack’s serves diner food but their second menu is all about Salvadoran fare. Tamales in El Salvador and Guatemala are typically larger than the ones you find in Mexico and that was definitely the case here. Served with salsa and a slaw of pickled cabbage and jalapeño.

#1. Braised Stuffed Beef Rolls

”Rouladen” is a dish that the American branch of our family has enjoyed for more than a century. Thin cut eye of round pounded out with bacon, onions, carrots, pickles and dijon mustard wrapped inside. Cooked for hours in red wine and served with spätzle.

Worst Meals

#5. McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish® at the Airport

I’ll eat one of these every six months. It was familiar.

#4. AI-Generated Tacos

Restaurants all over the place are making signage featuring AI-generated images of their “food.” I imagine these tacos taste like plastic, silly putty and glue. Did not order.

#3. Hot Dog at Jim’s Tastee Freez

A once memorable hot dog tasted like a chicken beak and pork offal condiment vehicle on a bun. Where’s the beef, Jim? Had one small bite and fed the rest to a crow.

#2. Delta Airlines “Chicken”

Rubber wedding chicken that was not cut against the grain, served with a tablespoon of coconut curry, two red peppers, two mushroom heads and a piece of bok choy. Ate everything but the rice.

#1. United Airlines “Cobb Salad”

Imagine my horror when the meal I selected for my red-eye flight was unavailable and I ended up stuck with a desiccated, repulsive Cobb salad. Not even the rubbery hard boiled egg or the rancid bacon was salvageable.

—Alex

See also: Albany & The Capital Region’s Specialty Dish: Mini Hot Dogs

Are parents pretentious if they give you a hyphenated surname?

Here’s a video showing me at Uwajimaya ogling yellowtail collars that Seattle food influencer J. Kenji López-Alt filmed himself purchasing days earlier. I have a love/hate relationship with Kenji. I admire him and his hard work — filming yourself every day must be exhausting — but I’m also horrified by his occasional cringeworthy lack of class consciousness. And I found his wok book The Wok: Recipes and Techniques to be about a hundred pages too long.

Throwing yellowtail collar on the grill sounds amazing, but three pounds for 54 dollars is probably out of most people’s price range. And it’s not all meat, like, say, a similarly pricey halibut steak. The precious collar meat is still attached to some skin and fins and whatnot.

Food Influencers face sleazy temptations

I’m a fan of chef Kev, a TikTok food guy with stage 4 cancer who works for a sorority. I guess he can be forgiven for slapping his name and likeness on expensive olive oil products that he does not produce, package or ship. This seems to happen to lots of food influencers that I follow and then unfollow.

Nirvana WOK: 2020-2027

If anyone wants a turnkey situation for a possible 501(c)(3) nonprofit (or a restaurant!) with a .com domain name, an LLC and attached bank account and associated social media real estate please let me know. I can’t recall working on any project (other than marriage and child-rearing) that has lasted more than two years, and now it’s time to move on from this one. I have big (top secret) plans for a new direction in 2027 that do not involve a state of enlightenment or woks.

In the meantime I will be posting videos here over the next few months. I’m planning on buying new filmmaking equipment next year - an iPhone. My iPhone 12 (the second smart phone I have owned) needs to retire.

—Alex

WEBSITE: nirvanawok.com
EMAIL: nirvanawok@gmail.com
SOCIAL: Instagram • Twitter • TikTok • Facebook • YouTube
Nirvana WOK MENU
Venmo • Donorbox

Why We Love Seattle Part 1,202

My favorite Thai market/wholesaler Mekong Rainier was having a food festival this weekend. The smell of those Thai ingredients being grilled and fried was incredible.

—Alex

The Atlantic Monthly magazine – owned by a billionaire heiress friend of Ghislaine Maxwell and edited by a guy who volunteered to work in an Israeli torture prison – recently published an embarrassing story about the open air drug market two blocks up the street from Dong Hing. The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs claims that “Policies that gave addicts clean needles and places to use drugs were intended to reduce harm. They created a zombie apocalypse.” A regurgitation of the same ancient right wing trope that providing addicts with anything other than incarceration only encourages them. The person who wrote this article should have examined how successful such programs have been in Europe.

The drug market on Jackson exemplifies nothing more than the typical pattern of gentrification in action - let the neighborhood go to shit to pave the way for development. It’s a long game. The people there are not zombies, they are human beings. And pawns in a real estate scheme.

—Alex

See also:

This time of year if ripe tomatoes suck up that much water in such a short time they are in danger of failing. I’ll steal tomatoes from my secret spot regardless, but it’s good to know I’m rescuing some that will otherwise go to waste.

Shoutout to fan of the Substack Wallis, who has assured me that “gleaning” is a better descriptor than “stealing” when one is appropriating tomatoes that one did not grow.

Speaking of Substack - Nirvana WOK has been on here, as our official website, for six years. During that time Substack has never done anything to promote the Nirvana WOK website other than provide free hosting. I approve of that hands-off approach. Nirvana WOK will never go to a paid subscription tier and has never grown beyond 50 subscribers, which means Substack’s business model has failed in our case.

I also have done nothing to promote Nirvana WOK other than posting stories here. And I like it that way.

—Alex

I was deeply offended by the way Shelley treated me but told myself I’d wait a year before responding.

That was exactly one year ago.

“In the Nightwatch Kitchen” was just published in Barn Sour - a newspaper that celebrates mutual aid. Shelley is mentioned.

Part 2 of In the Nightwatch Kitchen (coming in the Fall edition of Barn Sour, issue #4) will concentrate on the positive side of my time at Nightwatch and will include a proposal to buy them a much-needed tilt skillet.

An open letter to the Operation Nightwatch Board of Directors will be sent in 2027.

—Alex

See also:

—Alex

Belgium defeated Senegal 3-2, continuing a long tradition of Europeans getting the better of Africans. The Belgian genocide in Congo comes to mind. Belgium’s French-speaking neighbor, France, continues their colonial domination of Senegal to this day. You could call it imperialism light, I guess. Less murder but lots of economic exploitation.

And yet all that bad blood is forgotten during the World Cup. Football/Soccer is truly the world’s game and is the only thing that every nation on Earth has in common. I’ll admit I’m an American football kind of person but it’s great to see football/soccer become so popular here as of late.

The Seattle Police Department wrote an imbecilic piece about the World Cup called OMG! OK, IT’S HAPPENING. EVERYBODY STAY CALM which reinforces every stereotype about Americans not understanding football/soccer. “Football vs Football - I’m as confused as you are. Let’s break it down.” I have despised the Seattle Police since winning my lawsuit against them for a false arrest in 1991. And I was lucky - their abuses are legion.

I encourage you to support DivestSPD - Seattle's grassroots police watchdog.

Viva Mexico! That game was incredible and it has filled me with joy to say that to groups of Mexican tourists today. Also … Mitch McConnell is at death’s door, the corporate centrist Obama/Biden/Harris/Cuomo Democrats are getting WIPED OUT by progressive/DSA candidates … Trump has congestive heart failure and lots of other diseases. A better fucking world is coming.

—Alex

See also:

DivestSPD

Day drunk gang cop found 'slumped' in his truck

Seattle police sergeant Jeffrey Page was found passed out at a red light in Monroe last fall, according to investigation documents DivestSPD obtained…

Read more

4 months ago · 3 likes · DivestSPD

Sometimes humor is the best vehicle for building awareness about a serious issue.
—Alex

—Alex

See also:

For lunch have corned beef and cabbage. (Not shown: a rich broth, mustard, etc.)

For dinner: take-away from that new neighborhood Mexican place, El Rinconsito.

—Alex

Lam’s in the International District resembles a market you’d see in the Global South more than a sterile American place, especially in the Seafood section. Their much larger new space on MLK will probably look more like their store in Tukwila.

Since Viet-Wah closed my go-to neighborhood place for fresh herbs and vegetables has been Mekong Rainier, but they recently stopped selling fresh meat and shrimp. This multi-generational family business is an importer and distributor too so I’m not gonna feel bad when Lam’s becomes my new spot and they lose my business.

—Alex

I found this picture of her late dog Chichi recently while looking through some old files. I thought it was lost but no - Chichi now lives on forever in the digital ether.

—Alex

The first two ingredients in Good Crisp Company’s Outback BBQ potato crisps are dried potato flakes and palm oil.

These are inspired by Pringles, another processed potato snack product served in a tube that would not exist without marketing. Nobody asked for it and if they stopped advertising it it would go away.

Condiment of the year (of the horse)

Laoganma spicy chili crisp is the best version of chili crisp you can buy in a jar. It goes well on almost everything, especially ice cream.

Dried fermented black beans, an ingredient not always found in chili crisp, make this version into an incredible umami bomb.

—Alex

As usual, the game was boring, the commercials were offensive and the halftime show was spectacular. An added bonus: this year the halftime performance became a big fuck you to senile racist criminal pervert Donald Trump and his dumbass group of murderous losers.

I teach our children to not have regrets, but I must admit I am constantly regretting not going all-in on the domain name business. In the 90s I ended up making a small fortune by accident by selling top level .com domains, but if I had raised even ten thousand dollars in 1995 when I first started buying names for my own projects and just used the cash to pick off valuable domains at twelve bucks apiece … sigh.

—Alex

See also:
AI.com domain name sold for record-breaking $70 million

Well no more!

Recently the much-maligned US Foods restaurant supply store offered up 50 pound sacks of pristine russet earth apples for ten dollars, none of which ended up weighing less than a pound.

Also picked up a sack of onions for the same price. Obviously, our family will not be able to use all these before they start to turn, so the plan is to donate some to the food banks.

—Alex

See also:
Del Christensen and Sons
”Grown in the warm, sandy soil of the Columbia River Basin in Washington, these potatoes and onions develop under a long growing season with pure water from the Columbia River.”

Two articles from this issue are available online:

THE SEATTLE RESTAURANT WAGE AND TIP THEFT HALL OF FAME

FIRLAND SANATORIUM’S FINAL SOLUTION FOR SEATTLE’S WHITE PLAGUE

—Alex

—Alex

Barn Sour is a comics newspaper about mutual aid.

Underground comics. Indie publishing on newsprint. Mutual aid. A trifecta of things I have been interested in for half a century.

Had to look up the phrase Barn Sour and yeah that’s equine terminology for a horse that refuses to leave the barn because they’re too comfortable and cozy in there.

Barn Sour

—Alex