Feeling Venturous

It seems that creativity is often inspired by exhaustion, and late the other night, I was struck by an idea that seemed like a particularly good one. It was after writing the rough draft of the cover story for the Spring Restaurant Guide edition of Where Y'at magazine (which, I'd like to point out with a grumpy face on, I was given a total of TWO DAYS to organize, compose, and submit ... not long at all for a feature story, even less for a cover piece, and a shorter time frame still for someone who still holds a day job and writes in the precious hours between dinner and passing out) that I came up with this, partly thanks to The Boy. As he was urging me to "hurry up" so we could get the burrito I promised him for cleaning the house, I was trying somewhat unsuccessfully to rush through edits.

Editing down my own work is always such a struggle. I tend to be kind of longwinded when I write, as I'm sure you noticed, with many asides and dips into the adjective pool to find just the right way to describe a feeling, a taste, a flavor, or anything at all, for that matter. 1500 words is just not a whole lot when you spend two hours with somebody extremely interesting, and I felt that to cut too much of what we discussed would be an injustice to Tommy Cvitanovitch, that imposing and authoritative managing owner of Drago's here in New Orleans. I didn't want to leave out anything, and was already forced to cut down on my introduction and unable to find the room to describe the utter deliciousness of their famous charbroiled oysters.

I thought, 'well, what if I had total creative control over an outlet and were given the license to fluff and butter as I pleased?'

Fine; I thought it a little less eloquently, but you get the idea.

Thus was TheVicariousFoodWhore.com born.

Basically, the premise of this site is to allow me to "wax poetic and rhapsodize about the food I crave, the dishes I dream of, and the snacks I obsess over, in drool-worthy detail." I mean, I do that on this blog, but to have one unified theme in a central location? Brillz!

So here we go: on this new web site, I discuss the taste, texture, feel, similarities, comparisons, details, nutrition, recipes, and preferences of whatever food item or dish I feel like (including restaurant recommendations), and do it so graphically that the reader is essentially eating vicariously through my description of the finer points of the experience. I plan to write about high end food and comfort food; exotic gourmet and common stock; supermarket brand products and specialty items, and everything in between. High-quality images, including regular photos I take of "Gratuitous Sexiness," which is particularly delicious looking food, further illustrate my points and activate your salivary glands, and I tackle the types of questions that I often research for my own personal edification. For example, future topics include the differences between the cheapo turkey roll cold cuts and oven-roasted twice-the-price meat; the naked steak versus the sauce-enrobed version; and advantage of using lump crabmeat instead of claw, and exactly where it comes from.

The style? Informational, fun, and above all, sensory. The purpose? To inform, share, and reawaken excitement and passion for food and eating, with topics in a spectrum as wide as my experience, which continues to expand.

I hope you subscribe, pass it on, become an official "follower," or just plain like it. Enjoy eating vicariously.

- www.TheVicariousFoodWhore.com

Journalism Jobs - The Great American Paradox

The journalism industry has been a battleground for several months now, but it seems that things are getting worse and worse. Rather than the hiring freezes thawing out (as I had hoped would happen, starting around now as the weather hypothetically thaws out ... in the Northeast), it seems that fewer and fewer opportunities are presenting themselves, and that any contacts you may have that aren't sitting pretty at the top of the masthead are too worried about their own hides to deal with someone they only kind of know through virtual connections.

It was disappointing, to say the least, when I found out yesterday that a magazine I contributed to, Louisiana Cookin', had a full editorial calendar completely booked up for 2009. This is partly due to the fact that a few of the issues are doing double duty on the newsstands, staying up for two months rather than just the one. For instance, this month's issue, the February--a delightful issue, might I add, chock-full of handy recipes from Heart-Healthy Creole (my own article) to blackening methods (written by Bonnie Warren, a legend in her own right with whom I had the pleasure of dining with at Brennan's when researching my dessert cover story for Where Y'at)--became available in mid-January, not to be replaced until mid-March. Next month, my Lenten Light article makes an appearance in this publication, but unfortunately, that's going to be it for me and this beautifully presented regional glossy for the rest of '09.

New Orleans Bride is just a quarterly, so there's not much brewing on that front for a while; and the other magazines owned by local periodical Renaissance Publishing, holder of titles like St. Charles Avenue, Mardi Gras Guide, and New Orleans Magazine among others can easily have their in-house editorial team provide pieces as sizes of publications around town, the dry, politically-leaning Gambit Weekly included, get smaller. New Orleans Living, headed by PR superwoman and managing editor Cheryl Lemoine, is hard-pressed to find pieces for their regular contributors, and Where magazine wouldn't return my calls. Granted, I only made around two calls and wasn't nearly as persistent as I am now, and didn't have the credentials I have now, but still. Same goes for Urban Dog.

So what's a gal to do?

In light of this local drought of work, I've decided to chase bigger game. I sent out some pitches to Taste of the South, a bigger publication similar in theme to Louisiana Cookin' in its focus on Southern food and recipe density. Alessandra Bulow, an assistant to the EIC at Food & Wine magazine in New York, helped me send pitches to the right editors, all of whom are out until ... well, basically next week. Bummer. I still need to buckle down and write the journal pieces for consideration for Southern Living, that warmer outreach of the hard-hit and badly hurting giant Time Inc., so that I can better petition for consideration for a position when their freeze lifts.

The outlook isn't that great, though, for any kind of hiring hold to be loosened at publishing conglomerates anywhere. MediaBistro's Revolving Door, their industry newsletter, grows more and more depressing every week as this web site is axed, that title is folded, and hundreds upon hundreds more in outposts everywhere get their pink slips. Advertising is down everywhere, which means the media industry, on the whole, is suffering in an unholy way.

In short, it seems that editorial jobs, freelance or otherwise, are the stuff dreams are made of these days ... more so than they were when I was a kid hoping to grow up and be a writer. Journalism jobs are more a contradiction than a qualifier now; more an oxymoron than a term.

This is a shitty, shitty time to be chasing a dream. But if I don't have a dream, what have I got to live for? It's the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment that makes life life, right?

O, to Eat in Peace

So we all know that my life revolves, unequivocally, around food. Food, food, food all the time. I wonder what I'm eating for dinner as I pour my morning bowl of cereal (if it's a weekday); create grocery lists for fun with ambitions of making something from any one of my dozens of cookbooks (which I then don't follow through on, opting instead for a tried-and-true crave-worthy favorite); I chart out my meals for the week, planning calorie- and indulgence-wise what makes the cut for what day, based on what else I eat that day in question. Everything food, 24/7.

It then pretty much goes without saying that to me, eating is one of the most pleasurable experiences one can possibly go through. A good meal is tantamount to pretty near anything. A cracked peppercorn-encrusted, dry-aged New York strip steak, with a rosy-tinted juice running in rivulets onto a sizzling plate with snapping clarified butter beats the hell out of having sex, and cutting it into small pieces guarantees it lasts longer, too. Roast duck in a fragrant, dried shallot-infused broth with fresh wonton noodles cooked al dente is a powerful bargaining chip if someone ever seeks to bribe me, as my father used to do to get me to the dentist. Even something as simple as my grandma's sweet and puffy battered fried shrimp with a side of garlicky sauteed spinach and brown rice has the power to turn a shitty day into a wonderful one. And a well-crafted whole-wheat burrito with coconut and cilantro rice, fresh pico de gallo, moist steak, ooey, gooey cheese, and slightly charred onions and peppers, flavored with chipotle pepper? The things I'll do for a trayful of those.

And so on, and so on. You get the picture. I secretly ate a really, really fat kid in my past, and continue to harbor those tendencies. There is no satiating the compulsive eater in me. And having an endless appetite? Well, honestly, I kind of love it. The more room I can make in my belly, the more I get to just taste things, one of the most hedonistic senses to awaken. Oh, yum. *Shivers.*

With all that info in mind, I will now launch into my tale of woe and sorrow.

My favorite things to do consist of this:

1. Get in bed with my book of the day, and a good meal, and eat and read simultaneously in clothes I keep aside just for getting messy.
2. Get in bed, flip on one of my favorite sitcoms, and eat a good meal as I watch mindless television programming. This is also done in my "eating clothes."

Therefore, it's all the more tragic to me that I never get a single meal of peaceful eating anymore.

Case in point: Because I'm a fan of the snooze button (it tells me how long I can cuddle my dog for before I have to get up) and have thick, "spirited" hair, I don't have a whole lot of time to get breakfast together in the morning. Usually, bites of Wheaties ('cause I'm a champion) with juicy raisins or Rice Krispies in 1% are taken between packing my lunch, feeding the Lil' B (the puppy), and making sure he pees and doesn't eat his own poo. There is no relaxation time there, and it's go, go, go until I sit down at my desk at the office. This, my friends, sucks. Back in the golden years, during college, I would sit in the sun with my full breakfast and contemplate my textbooks until I had to get dressed for class at 11 AM. The good old days.

Exhibit B: at work, because I like to read and eat at the same time, I hide out in my office with a novel and munch. However, because I'm in my office, people don't seem to realize that I am, in fact, taking my hour lunch. Everyone else plays video games for an hour and a half in the conference room, so it seems completely reasonable that I take a mere 60 minutes to enjoy a break in the day and do something I love. Right? Apparently, WRONG. Since we have yet to replace our receptionist, I--as the lowest-paid non-new minion and general lackey (it seems)--get the unspeakable pleasure of dealing with pissed off orthopedic surgeons and their wives/assistants, who are so tech-savvy that they often attempt to email our web site or call to yell at me for their content-less site not showing up on Google's first page for something as generic as "knee."

Anyhoo, because I take my lunch at my desk, I'm often asked to schedule meetings (ironically, between the person asking that I schedule a meeting ... ironic because it's that person is usually on the phone with the person they are to meet with), answer questions ("What's a browser and where do I buy one?"), or other random things. So then, that meal is quickly shot to hell for enjoying in leisure, as I drip chicken cutlet sandwich all over my keyboard, chomp as discreetly as possible into my phone, and greasify my mouse. Wonderful.

Exhibit C: Now that I live with my fiance, we don't see each other very much. I know--what a paradox. But the thing is, you stop putting time aside to hang out, you each have your own lives to live (his is school; mine is work), and when you do get home, you just want some alone time. Unfortunately, his alone time is during the day and spent in relative leisure, compared to my forced social interaction of the workday. So when I get home, he wants to have the TV blasting on something utterly inane or grisly (The Boy is a sports fan, and also enjoys his TruTV [aka CourtTV]), and tell me completely irrelevant things about himself before I even get a chance to settle down and let the tension in my neck unravel. Before my plate hits the table, and before I even get one paragraph into the book I'm trying to read amidst all the din of that night's football game.

Although I love The Boy dearly, when I get home from work, the last thing I want to do is spend any time with any other person in close quarters. I'm partial to long, brisk walks for decompressing conversation, but the tinny treble of the television set and artificial lighting indoors is not exactly conducive to any kind of significant interaction ... so why bother? If I'm in an environment like that, all I want to do is eat something extremely unhealthy and read a book that may kill as many brain cells as it engages (enter Tweenage Fangirl), going straight to my happy place. No, I don't care about your day. I'm EATING.

For Chrissakes, dear Lord, give me one meal a day that I can indulge in peace my biggest vice: gluttony. For without simple pleasures, what is life?