Atheists Among Us

One of the best newspaper front pages I've ever seen appeared in the Daily Oklahoman a few years ago. A full-color photograph above the fold showed a pretty, smiling young woman with glasses and blond hair above the portentous headline, "The Face of Atheism in Oklahoma." The story, written in the style of a exposé, described an atheist club that this smiling heathen had founded at one of the local universities, and it went on to incredulously examine the murky world of unbelief that she and her minions inhabited. It was as if the reporter had uncovered a hidden race of aliens living among us, aliens who adopted our language and manners and even our appearance, but who decidedly are not humans and are just waiting for an opportunity to take over the planet.

I was reminded of that story a few weeks ago when I heard that state representative Todd Thomsen, a former University of Oklahoma (OU) football player, had introduced a resolution calling on the House to oppose a scheduled appearance by Richard Dawkins at OU. Dawkins, of course, is one of the more prominent of the current worldwide crop of God deniers and was a guiding force behind the atheist bus campaign in the UK that I discussed some time back. The resolution reads, in part:

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded institution which should be open to all ideas and should train students in all disciplines of study and research and to use independent thinking and free inquiry; and

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma has planned a year-long celebration of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of Darwin's theory of evolution, called the "Darwin 2009 Project", which includes a series of lectures, public speakers, and a course on the history of evolution; and

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma, as a part of the Darwin 2009 Project, has invited as a public speaker on campus, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published opinions, as represented in his 2006 book "The God Delusion", and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma; and

WHEREAS, the invitation for Richard Dawkins to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma on Friday, March 6, 2009, will only serve to present a biased philosophy on the theory of evolution to the exclusion of all other divergent considerations rather than teaching a scientific concept.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 1ST SESSION OF THE 52ND OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives encourages the University of Oklahoma to engage in an open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories which is the approach that a public institution should be engaged in and which represents the desire and interest of the citizens of Oklahoma.

Regardless of your feelings about the whole God thing, the above cannot be otherwise than chilling to anyone with even a passing respect for the principles of democracy and free speech. Denying somebody the chance to speak because his views "are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma"? I don't know what they're teaching OU football players in their civics courses, but clearly Rep. Thomsen has an underdeveloped sense of what liberal democracies are supposed to be doing: you know, things like protecting the views of minorities, not permitting governments to interfere with people's religious practices or beliefs, and other little things that help to ensure the free interchange of ideas. Perhaps the university isn't the ideal forum for such a free interchange of ideas but - oh wait - yes it is.

It's easy to poke fun at small-minded knuckledraggers like Thomsen, and plenty of people have already done so. It's also easy to get angry on learning that after Dawkins did, indeed, give his speech at OU, the OK legislature launched an investigation into the speech and the circumstances surrounding it. It's also easy to shake your head and go tut-tut when I tell you that I've been in OK for several days now and have heard almost no public outrage or even discussion of the issue - it's mostly bloggers outside the state who have dogpiled on Thomsen, while everyone around here seems either oblivious or indifferent to the (to me) rather grave matter of a state government attempting to regulate religious discussion.

But my purpose today is rather different. I recognize that I'm sometimes a little harsh on my home state, and I haven't exactly been doing all I could to challenge certain stereotypes about the bible-humping hicks amongst whom I grew up. In the interests of being a better cultural ambassador, therefore, I'd like to draw your attention to two things. The first is that, just before Thomsen began trying to legislate away religious freedom, the OK Senate narrowly defeated a bill that would have allowed (but not mandated) the teaching of alternative theories of creation/evolution - that is, a bill that would have allowed state schoolteachers to teach Genesis in their science classes. This seems to me rather significant. The second thing I'd like to do is to show you this video of Dawkins' speech at OU, with the purpose not so much of letting you hear Dawkins himself (though his response to his persecutors is quite amusing) but rather of letting you witness the rapturous reception he received in the packed auditorium.

This state may be ruled by a bunch of petty ayatollahs, but I hope it's clear here that there are still plenty of folks around here who refuse to conform to the reigning idiocy. Both of my parents report feeling a lot more embattled, relative freethinkers that they are, in recent years by the forces of willful ignorance that dominate this place, and there's definitely a new shrillness creeping into the conservative ethos of the state that wasn't really there when I was growing up. But as long as some atheists continue to walk amongst us, and as long as they're able to listen to one another and talk to one another and form clubs (even at the risk of legislative and media harassment), all is not quite lost.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Lone Wolf

I think I may have found it.

The Lone Wolf in Amherst is what you might call an incongruous restaurant. Or, better, a restaurant at war with itself. In many ways it's a typical Valley crunchy-brunchy cafe. They do the tofu thing, the vegan thing, and the locavore thing, and they make a point of fancying up traditional dishes with all sorts of creative ingredients, many of them deriving from root vegetables. But the ambience is strikingly at odds with the menu. For one thing, and for reasons that I can't begin to fathom, the decor tends toward the Southwestern-kitschy end of the decor spectrum. I overheard one lady on my recent visit remark that it reminded her of Arizona. Maybe so, if by Arizona she meant a gift shop in the Tucson airport. It's not that I object to the introduction of a bit of Southwestern color to this lily-white bastion of old New England, but there's nothing distinctly Southwestern about the menu. And that seems odd to me.

The other odd thing is that the place is almost always packed with large groups of sweatpantsed college students, instead of the expected Subaru-station-wagon-driving, New-Yorker-subscribing, NPR-contributing, beard-sporting, pipe-smoking, left-wing, middle-aged, middle-class diners that normally flock to places like this. The waitstaff, too, consists largely of sullen college students who are more interested in flirting with one another than with bringing you (and by you I mean me) a timely coffee refill. This shouldn't be too surprising, given that Amherst - home not only to Amherst College but also to the gigantic UMass campus - is stuffed to the gills with students for nine months of the year, and their presence is much more marked than it is in NoHo - with its tiny population of Smithies - which has become my frame of reference for these things. But still, it seems a bit strange.

All that aside, I have never had a meal at the Lone Wolf that wasn't outstanding, or at least very, very close to outstanding. So I was expecting to be impressed by their challah french toast (the only french toast on the menu), but I wasn't expecting what happened to happen. What happened was this:



Do you know challah bread? You don't? Well, you should. Go get some right now - I'll wait.

No, hold on, don't go. I've got a better idea: stop reading this immediately and go book a flight or hop a train or start the car, wherever you are, and meet me at the Lone Wolf by the time it opens tomorrow morning so we can have their challah french toast together. According to the menu, the bread - large and chunky but very, very light and spongy - is dipped in a cinnamon-vanilla sauce before cooking, and, while I didn't taste much obvious cinnamon or vanilla in it, I suspect that these ingredients exert some subliminal influence on the wonderfulness that unfolds when you bite into it. While cooking, the the bread develops a crisp outer skin that cracks, like the thinnest of creme-brulee crusts, under your teeth. And overall, it maintains its spongy consistency throughout, gleefully welcoming the (what I'm pretty sure is real) maple syrup and melty butter like long lost friends, sitting them down, making them comfortable, getting them a cup of tea. And the best part? The part that made me weep with joy right there at the table, while my waiter tried to impress one of the waitresses with his knowledge of Japanese cinema and a nearby table frat boys started hurling spitwads at a hand-painted kokopelli figurine? It was dusted with powdered sugar. Yes, for only the second time since I started this search (the other one being at Amanouz a few days earlier) I encountered french toast in its natural, bespeckled state, and it was glorious.

My only complaint - and this was entirely unexpected, I assure you - is that it was almost too much for me to eat. I soldiered through to the end, mind you, but I don't mind admitting that it nearly got the best of me, and I was forced to take a few breaks before completing it entirely. Which meant that the last piece was pretty cold, which was a shame.

I intend to keep searching, of course - to stop now would be a disservice to all of you who've traveled with me this far. But I would advise you to take a good, long look at the photograph above, for it may very well be The Perfect French Toast.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Amanouz Cafe

Have you ever heard of Mediterranean french toast? Yeah, I hadn't either - until I spotted it on the menu at Amanouz Cafe a while back. Amanouz is a lovely little Moroccan place in NoHo notable for its wonderful selection of soups, sandwiches, and omelets (yes, omelets). I was there buying some I-don't-remember-what (something falafely, probably) the other week when I noticed that they served this thing called Mediterranean french toast, which, according to the chalkboard menu, is served with cinnamon and honey and is also available with strawberries or blueberries. I took note of this intriguing item and waited for an opportunity to investigate further.

That opportunity arose this weekend when Kate and I found ourselves up and about before anybody else in town had begun to shake of their Saturday sleepies. We hightailed it to Amanouz, anxious to get a seat before the deluge began - weekend brunch is always a busy time in the Valley - and were pleased to find plenty of open tables in the tiny cafe. Giddy with anticipation, we strolled right up to the counter and ordered some french toast. And I mean we ordered the hell out of it. I managed to stick to my (gradually wavering) determination to avoid unfair french-toast extravagance by getting mine sans fruit, and Kate ordered hers with strawberries, thereby ensuring that I could still get a glimpse of extravagance, if only to know what I was missing. It's no exaggeration when I tell you that at this moment I felt a little like Gandhi, who reputedly made a point of sleeping beside multiple naked young women, well into his old age, as a way of testing and affirming his chastity. That morning, as I refused the temptation of fresh fruit in the name of scientific inquiry, I was the Gandhi of french toast.

And so, orders placed, we took a seat and looked around.



When the food arrived Kate could hardly contain her excitement, though I remained cool as a Mahatma.



Now, I can't say with certainty that what I'm about to tell you is true of all Mediterranean french toast, or if it's only true of the type served at Amanouz, but here's what I learned that day about this unusual culinary item:

1) Unlike almost every other french toast I've had in New England so far, it's served with a sprinkling of powdered sugar. This, of course, is the way french toast is supposed to be served, so score one for the Mediterraneans for getting this one right.

2) It's served with honey instead of maple syrup. Let me repeat: no syrup, only honey. On reflection, this makes sense, since there aren't that many maple trees along the Mediterranean - at least not along the Mediterranean coast of France, which is the area to which I'm assuming this french toast is indigenous.

3) It's really frigging good. The bread is a sort of sourdough, similar to that used by the Haymarket, which is strong enough to withstand the battering and grilling and honey-drizzling, but substantial enough to temper the overwhelming sweetness of the honey and powdered sugar. That said, it's still very sweet. Imagine a Pop Tart. Now imagine a whole wheat bagel. The difference between those two? That's the difference between Mediterranean french toast and regular old french toast, especially the boring sort that you'll find at places like Stables.

4) As good as it is sans fruit, it's even better with fresh strawberries, of the sort Kate (mostly) had on hers. I know this because I maybe had a bite or two. I know, I know: some french toast Gandhi I turned out to be. But don't judge me too harshly - surely the old man didn't keep his hands to himself all the time.

Looking at People Looking at Art

Kate and I went to New York this weekend to visit some friends/family and to look at some art. I wanted to see the new Brücke exhibit at the Neue Galerie - I love me some Expressionists, and I'd never been to that museum - and we both wanted to see the new Walker Evans postcard exhibit at the Met (a museum I'd also never visited).

(I've been to New York like a thousand times but somehow I never make it to anything cultural or touristy, always finding myself face-down in some dive instead, or recovering from having spent the previous evening face-down in some dive. Last December was the first time I made it to an actual NYC museum, the Guggenheim, and then largely because I was with my mother and grandmother, whose interest in putting their faces down in some dive is rather less than mine.)

Anyway, I'll not describe these exhibits - or the ancillary activities we engaged in, such as searching for whoopie pies in the Village, buying books we didn't need at the Strand, filling our luggage with remarkably stinky bagels in Brooklyn, chatting with cousins, dining with an old friend on the Upper East Side - except to note that they're well worth your time and money, if time and money you have, and especially if you have a thing for paintings with great big vibrant planes of color and/or hand-colored old postcards and vernacular photography.

What I'd like to share with you, instead, are some of my own photos from the Met. I love art and I love looking at art, but I also love looking at people looking at art. So, too, do I love taking photos of perfect strangers looking at art. I didn't quite realize I was developing this theme until I got home and was going through my photos this afternoon, but the results are fairly amusing, and I hope you like them.

(Note 1: One of these people is not, in fact, a perfect stranger - see if you can determine which one.)

(Note 2: Another one of these people bears a striking resemblance to Tony Roberts, Woody Allen's friend ("Max") in Annie Hall - hint: this person may be made of marble.)

(Note 3: In one of these photos the looking-at-art is implied, rather than visually demonstrated - it's something that's already happened, and we're just witnessing the aftermath.)

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Whately Diner

Until last year I had quite the thing for diners. I never saw any growing up - Oklahoma was never really diner country, even in the heyday of diners, and anything of that sort had been obliterated by fast-food franchises and multi-lane expressways by the time I achieved sentience - so when I moved east I was surprised to find quite a number of them still going strong. I loved them for their authenticity, or what I imagined to be their authenticity. I was charmed by the old-fashioned design of the things, especially the dining-car diners, with their hand-lettered signs and sleek lines and all that chrome. I romanticized the patrons as true, salt-of-the-earth Americans who came to a diner as much for fellowship as for food, persisting in a type of neighborliness that had disappeared from the rest of the country around the time we stopped walking and began sealing ourselves up in steel-and-glass boxes instead. More than anything, I admired the modesty of diners, their defiant corniness in the face of so much fluorescent, national-chain bombast.

And then I moved to Philadelphia.

Now New Jersey, as anyone knows who's spent any time there, is the epicenter of diner culture. The three biggest dining-car manufacturers were once based there, and what new diner construction still goes on these days is almost exclusively carried on there. Philly, of course, is not in New Jersey, but in many ways it's a sort of cultural annex of the Garden State, which sprawls there just across the river, and the city has many, many diners both within its limits and in the surrounding counties. I spent a lot of time in these diners - many of them, it must be said, not of the quaint dining-car variety, but of the glitzy, mega-diner variety (what I called, without much regard to accuracy, "Las Vegas diners") - and as the romantic gauze began to slip from my eyes, I began to realize something as profound as it was troubling: diner food sucks. This may be because diners tend to have vast menus, offering everything from spaghetti-and-meatballs to waffles, and the quality of the food declines as the expertise of the chefs becomes correspondingly diluted. It may be because the patrons - those salt-of-the-earth embodiments of a vanishing America - are the very same people who, on other days, can be found stuffing their corpulent faces at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets or filling up on Saltburgers at the local Cracker Barrel. It may be any combination of things, but the fact is that I have almost never had a memorable diner meal - or at least not one that was memorable for the food.

It took some time for me to come to this realization, but once I had it I began, if not exactly avoiding diners, then at least ratcheting down my expectations considerably. So this morning when I went to the Whately Diner (known officially, if unappetizingly, as the Fillin' Station Diner, but no one here calls it by that name - Whately is the name of the town), I did so more for the sake of crossing another breakfast place off my list than with any great tummy-rumbling excitement. I had been there before, though not for the french toast, and remembered it principally for its unattractive location beside a gas station (hence its official name) and a parking lot filled with eighteen-wheelers fresh off I-91. And sure enough, when I walked in the door the few customers I saw munching away at the counter bore the distinct odor of diesel fuel. A glance at their copious beards and bellies confirmed that these were indeed brethren of the sacred order of the big rig.



I settled into a booth in the corner, ordered my coffee, and waited to order the only type of french toast on the menu: "french toast with bacon or sausage." I decided on sausage. And then I waited. And waited. The two middle-aged waitresses were chatting away about some acquaintance's heart condition, and then about some other piece of local gossip, and, when I finally strolled up to the counter to ask if I could order, they looked genuinely alarmed. And then, when they saw that I simply wanted to place my order and wasn't going to cause them any physical harm, they apologized. Profusely.

"I'm so sorry! I thought you got him!" (looking sternly at her counterpart)

"I thought I had, too! I was up here at the register and completely forgot!" (looking sternly toward heaven)

"We both apologize!"

"It's okay, really, it's fine," I said. "Really, really, it's okay."

While I waited I flipped through the mini-jukebox with which my booth, like all the others, was equipped. Alan Jackson. Charlie Daniels. Lynard Skynard. Eagles Greatest Hits. NOW That's What I Call Music! vol. 19. Grammy Nominees 2003.

Fortunately, my food arrived before I managed to dig out the 50 cents required to play a song (they'd clearly expedited my order to make up for the earlier lapse), and, famished by now, I tucked in with abandon. And maybe this was just my grateful tummy telling me so, but it was really tasty. The butter came in little plastic-and-aluminum cubes, the syrup had to be squeezed from a plastic bottle like ketchup, and the bread was just plain - if rather thick - white bread, but it all worked deliciously. The bread was nice and spongy, the syrup (plastic bottle or not) was nice and sweet, and the sausage tasted like breakfast sausage should - that is, like no other sort of sausage you'll ever have in any other context.



When I went to the register to pay, the waitresses were engaged in a heated discussion about food coloring.

"What makes green? Blue and yellow?"

"Yeah, but just use a little bit of blue, otherwise it'll look too dark."

Oh yeah. Today was St Patrick's Day.

"Are you trying to find something you can turn green?" I said, as I handed over my check.

"Yeah."

"Green eggs and ham?" I suggested.

"We tried that a few years ago. It doesn't look too appealing. Maybe we could do mash potatoes. We did that a while back. HEY GEORGE! Can we do green mash potatoes? What? Why not? What about for just some customers? Aw, c'mon!"

"Thanks," I said, and stepped out to the car.

And then I began getting excited about diners again, if only a little.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Haymarket Cafe

The Haymarket Cafe is the beating heart of NoHo, but, if you're not looking for it, you're very likely to walk right past it without noticing. Sandwiched between a couple of other businesses in a downtown block dating to 1868, the Haymarket's storefront is barely wide enough to accommodate its door and a tall window. Blink and you've already strolled by it. Instead of blinking, though, you're much more likely to be distracted by the hippies and buskers who congregate around the benches along this stretch of Main Street, singing Jewel songs and stroking their pet ducks. If, that is, your eyes aren't stinging from the smoke of clove cigarettes that assails them as you mosey by.

Should you manage to find your way inside, however, you will immediately see that you've stumbled upon something special. For one thing, the place will be much larger than you expected - not exactly capacious, but certainly cavernous, even commodious, especially when you spot the stairs leading to a lower level. In this way it will remind you of certain pubs and restaurants you've encountered in Europe, the sorts of places that look teensy from the sidewalk but that open up into grand palaces once you're inside, much of the space having clearly been gobbled up from adjacent establishments in some earlier age. Another thing you'll quickly notice is that the walls are painted with bright, just-shy-of-whimsical designs and adorned with antique prints, lithographs, and mirrors whose relationship to one another is purely circumstantial. Which is to say they don't match, but that doesn't really matter. Scoot further inside and you'll spot two display cases offering pastries both hearty and decadent. If it's still morning you might opt for an oatcake - though I'd recommend one of the moist, soft fruit-and-nut bars instead, if they've got them - and if it's afternoon you'll probably spring for a cupcake or two. You'll also notice that, in addition to the usual range of coffee products, the Haymarket is an honest-to-goodness juice bar with all sorts of ways to satisfy your juice jones.



If this is a normal day, by which I mean a day in which you didn't come to the Haymarket for french toast, you'll get your coffee/juice and oatcake/cupcake and grab a seat upstairs, if you can find one. You'll settle into your seat and look around. And then you'll notice that the the Haymarket is a buzzing microcosm of NoHo life, the patrons and staff a virtual cross-section of the local citizenry. There are the burly, friendly lesbians behind the counter, with their tattooes and flannels; there the placid lesbian couple with their Asian baby. There's the guy with the long, permed hair who looks like he used to be in the J Geils Band and whom you're pretty sure is a professor at Smith; here, indeed, is a table full of his probable students, chattery young Smithies wearing Uggs. There's the young, punky guy with three (three!) eyebrow-rings and close-cropped hair knitting (knitting!) some sort of pink baby sweater; there's the group of sweatshirted grad students you always see pecking away at their laptops. Here's someone doing some sort of complex graphic design and taking a phone call a little to loudly. There's a bearded guy who just stumbled in with a beat-up guitar case looking for the bathroom. Behind you you hear a conversation about academic politics or, possibly, plain old politics politics. Here comes a handful of blinking tourists. Oh! And there's the guy you privately call The Highlander, the one you see stomping around town in his green kilt and multicolored knitted cap with earflaps and strings that sway to and fro above his shoulders as he barrels past you. Man, that is one fascinating dude.

As you can probably tell, I spend a lot of time at the Haymarket. It's one of my standard coffee-shop haunts, the place I go on those mornings when I manage to get out of my pajamas before noon (after noon it gets much harder to find a seat there, and I usually end up at the less-popular Yellow Sofa instead). I've even had quite a few meals there - downstairs they serve delicious soups, sandwiches, and salads - but until recently I was completely unaware that they serve french toast as well. Well they do, and it's among the best in the Valley that I've had so far.

To get it I had to take a seat downstairs (under a black-and-white poster of Emiliano Zapata proclaiming "Tierra Y Libertad," at a table sporting some faux-naive-arts-&-crafts-movement stenciling) and let myself be served by what I can only call a waitress - table service is unusual in coffee shops of any kind, and the Haymarket provides it in the morning only, downstairs only. Unlike the menu at Stables, which offered a dizzying array of french toasts that put me in a bit of a moral noose, the Haymarket offers only one variety of the dish, the "bourbon french toast," and so I was free to indulge my growing desire for the fanciest, schmanciest french toast I could find - and to hell with science. So order it I did. It looked like this:



Served with real maple syrup, a handful of fresh fruit, and some creme fraiche dotted with candied pecans, the toast itself could have been bland as butter and the meal still would have been delicious. Fortunately, the toast was also quite good. I didn't taste much bourbon, but with the syrup and creme and pecans more flavor would have probably left me feeling overwhelmed and confused. The bread itself appeared to be a kind of sourdough, the sort of bread that would be crusty (on the outside) and rubbery (on the inside) if eaten dry, but, having been dipped in egg stuff, fried, and slathered in sugar and cream, it acquitted itself quite well, retaining remarkable structural integrity when many lesser breads would have disintegrated into porridge (I'm looking at you, Stables). That said, a heartier bread - something whole-grain, maybe, with lots of oats - would have been even better, and it's this slight reservation that's preventing me from declaring this the early, odds-on favorite to win the title of TPFT. Right now, though, it's the one to beat.

The ante has just been upped.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Stables

I've complained several times in this blog about Route 9, the main artery that connects NoHo to Amherst. It's the part of the Valley that looks like it could be anywhere in America. Apart from a few farm stands and the occasional glimpse of distant hills across tidy farmland (oh, and a bison ranch), it's all big box stores, strip malls, prefab motels, gas stations, and chain restaurants. I spend a lot of time driving up and down this road and sometimes run a few errands along it - a visit to Trader Joe's for some reduced-fat brie, a peek inside Marshall's in search of cheap jeans - but I rarely think of Route 9 as somewhere to go in search of a pleasing dining experience. This is probably grossly unfair to Route 9, for nestled in amongst the Chilises and Applebeeses are some genuinely interesting-looking local establishments, but it rarely occurs to me, when food is on the agenda, to brave the traffic in search of them.

Stables is one such establishment. I'd often noticed it squatting there, a bit too far back from the road, behind a rutting parking lot, looking like an old red barn. It was the kind of place that, had I spotted it on a road trip, would immediately have caught my eye as a place where I might see some of the natives in their natural habitat, if not exactly as a place likely to serve memorable food. I pictured lots and lots of country-style crafts adorning the interior. You know the sort of thing: cute signs with homey sayings stencilled onto them, cross-stitched scenes of cows and windmills, hand-painted wooded chickens, lace curtains. The food would be serviceable and salty, the servers boisterous and friendly and maybe a little salty themselves, and the clientele would be well-rounded (in a purely physical sense) and well-aged (in a life-span sense). Had I encountered Stables on a road trip I would have looked around a little for something a bit more exciting before circling back to it. Which is probably why I didn't get around to trying it out until last weekend, and then largely at Kate's suggestion.



On entering, I was pleased to see that my (hasty, ill-informed, potentially unfair) assumptions about the place had been more or less accurate. There were the cute country crafts, there were the salty waitresses, there was the menu promising food that was certain to make you full but unlikely to change your life. The only large point on which I was in error had to do with the patrons - rather than being a gathering spot for elderly townies, Stables appears, at least on weekend mornings, to cater primarily to college students and their parents. The place was packed with them - so packed, in fact, that it enabled us to play a rousing game of "guess the college," in which players attempt to determine, based solely on the (hasty, ill-informed, potentially unfair) stereotypes attached to each of the area colleges, which school a given group of students attends. This is one of my favorite games to play in this college-stuffed valley, and on this occasion we were able to determine without much fear of contradiction that most of the students were from UMass, dressed and groomed, as they were, like conventional frat boys and girls (ball caps, fleeces, absence of facial hair, pajama bottoms). There was one group of dredlocked white kids who were definitely, definitely from Hampshire (the undisputed hippie college of the area), but on the whole this was a UMass crowd - there, no doubt, for the copious amounts of food that could be had for a relative pittance. But then, aren't all pittances relative?




Settling onto our stools at the counter, Kate and I were surprised - and I somewhat alarmed - to encounter a surfeit of french toast options. As I said in the last post, I'm trying, in the interests of science, to be scrupulously fair in my search for TPFT, to ensure that I am comparing dishes that are, in fact, comparable. Imagine my distress, then, when I encountered a vast variety of french toasts from which to choose. There was normal french toast, french toast made with homemade bread, corn bread french toast, zucchini bread french toast, and more. Reader, I tell you I was in a quandary. I wanted nothing more than to gaze upon and then devour a steaming plate of zucchini-stuffed french toast. But then what of my search? How could I compare what would undoubtedly be the heavenly taste of zucchini mingled with eggs and syrup and sugar to the regular, plane-jane french toast I'd had at Jake's and would undoubtedly have again?

But then a tiny, evil voice inside me said, "Oh, quit being such a stickler! If Stables offers zucchini french toast and Jake's doesn't, whose fault is that? Doesn't Stables deserve extra consideration simply because it had the foresight to include zucchini french toast on the specials board, while Jake's didn't?"

"But what about science?" said the larger, better voice within me.

"Science, schmience," said the tiny, evil voice.

"You make a good point," said the larger, better voice.

"Yes," said the tiny, evil voice.

"..." said the larger, better voice.

And then I recalled that I wasn't alone on this particular morning. Kate was here! Would she save me? The solution seemed obvious.

"What will you have, madame?" I said in my normal voice.

To my surprise and delight, she said, "I do believe I'll have the corn bread french toast, my good man."

It wasn't zucchini bread, but it was good enough. Thus assured that I would at least be able to taste one of the gourmet french toasts on offer, I submitted to the larger, better voice and ordered the french toast with homemade bread (if I were a stronger person I would have ordered the plain old french toast, but even scientists have to allow themselves to be human sometimes). I was thrown briefly off-balance when the waitress asked me if I wanted the homemade cinnamon swirl, chocolate chip, banana, or white bread, but I regained my composure quickly and ordered the white bread, thus ensuring that the playing field would remain more-or-less level.

When our orders came out they looked absolutely delicious. I took a picture, and the waitress expressed surprise.

"You're taking a picture of your food?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "It looks really good."

"That's nice," she said. "That's real nice."

Here's the picture:



Then it was crunch time. Or, um, brunch time. We doused our bread with real maple syrup (at least I'm pretty sure it was real) and started in, munching on brunch. Kate's corn bread french toast tasted like corn bread covered in syrup. We determined that it had been cooked in some sort of egg mixture, but the influence of that mixture was more evident in the crisp shell surrounding the toast than in the taste. And my homemade bread, while nice and thick, was bland. Bland and mushy. The middle of the toast was more like pudding than toast, and even with the addition of copious amounts of real maple syrup and butter it tasted like nothing at all. Or like a slightly sweet air pudding. Yes, that's it precisely.

I was disappointed, but I can't say I was surprised.

I'm glad to have gone to Stables and will happily go back, but when I do, I believe I'll have something other than french toast. The prices were good, the service was friendly if not wholly competent, and they get points for adding a bit of flair to an otherwise pretty basic breakfast menu. And maybe, once the search for TPFT is over and the winner has been announced, I'll be able to relax a bit and finally give that zucchini bread a crack.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Jake's

There is, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, a vast proliferation of brunch spots here in the Valley. In addition to the expected handful of chrome-and-linoleum, dining-car diners (this is New England, after all), there are trendy cafes serving locally grown, organic food; sugar shacks where you can drizzle your food with made-right-there maple syrup; artsy-studenty coffee shops; and any number of kountry kitchens of the sort you'll find in small towns all over America, the kinds of places that presidential candidates like to pop into for photo-ops with real Americans, most of whom, in places like this, will be found wearing feed-lot ballcaps and hearing aids. I'm not sure how to account for this abundance of brunch options - maybe it has something to do with all the students, or all the parents visiting all the students, or the combination of lots of students and lots of old people gathered together in one place - but I'm happy to take advantage of it. Indeed, since I moved here at least half of the meals I've eaten outside the house have been of the breakfast/brunch variety. This is traceable to a number of causes, but the primary one, I believe, has to do with my tendency to get up quite early in the morning, and therefore to eat breakfast quite early. By the time 10:30 or 11:00 rolls around, breakfast is like four hours in the past, and I'm ready to eat again. And what does one eat at that time of day? You guessed it.

So by now I've been to quite a few of these places, but by no means have I exhausted the available options. I'm quite a thorough person, and I don't like to visit a place (or live in a place) without having explored its every corner, at least every corner in which something interesting or tasty might be going on. I also work well within a clearly defined set of parameters - set me free in a large grocery store and tell me to buy something, anything, to eat, and I'll wander around helpless for hours in the face of so many options, but tell me to find something for lunch that's yellow, starts with the letter m, and can be found anywhere between aisles 4 and 9, and I'll provide you with the most memorable meal you've ever had - so it helps me to have an organizing principle for my exploring. To that end, I've decided to scour all the brunch places in the Valley for The Perfect French Toast (TPFT). Why french toast? You mean, besides the fact that, when done right, it can be the most delicious breakfast food imaginable? Well, here are two more reasons.

1) It's hard to get right. Most breakfast foods are pretty much the same wherever you go. Scrambled eggs are, with very few exceptions, scrambled eggs. Ditto bacon, sausage links, even waffles and pancakes (with some caveats - see #2 below). With french toast, however, there are a number of variables - involving quality and quantity of ingredients, timing, and so forth - that make it both more difficult to execute properly and more rewarding when done right. How a restaurant does its french toast is usually a pretty good measure of the care and skill with which it executes the rest of its menu.

2) French toast is less susceptible to culinary variations or innovations. Unlike pancakes, say, into which cooks will stuff all sorts of things, from apples to pumpkin to granola, or waffles, which can come in all sorts of different fruity flavors, french toast usually appears in a consistent style from restaurant to restaurant. This makes it easier to compare different restaurants. If I were to order the potato pancakes at one place and the pumpkin pancakes at another, I would have insufficient data with which to form a solid judgment of the two restaurants' pancakes. It would be like comparing apples to oranges, or, in this case, potatoes to pumpkins. Mind you, there are a few substantial variations that I expect to encounter in my search for TPFT - most of which will have to do with the type of bread used - but these variations will be minimal, and I'll do my best to ensure that the search is conducted on a level playing field. That includes refusing to garnish my french toast with different sorts of fruit, an option many places include, for, as much as it kills me to do so, fruit is the sort of variable that could skew the whole project. Syrup variation, on the other hand, I regard as a legitimate point of comparison.

So with these notions in mind, I set out this morning to begin the search. I went to Jake's.



Jake's prides itself on its "no frills" dining ethos, and to a certain extent I agree with their self-assessment. The food is cheap, standard fare - no tofu sausage or spinach wraps here, just eggs and breakfast meat, waffles and pancakes, french toast (with or without meat, eggs, or fruit), and an occasional modest flourish like huevos rancheros or their daily specials. The servers are black-aproned and all female, the cooks, whom you can glimpse over a partition behind the cash register, are tattooed, surly looking, and male, like cooks are supposed to be. The coffee is served from diner-style coffee pots and it tastes like diner coffee - weak, but most amenable to plenty of milk or cream - and is refilled frequently, provided the servers are paying attention to you. There's a counter with stools for solo diners and scarred wooden tables for larger parties, dark wood-panelled walls, and to get to the bathroom you have to go down a dank set of stairs while trying not to hit your head on overhead beams and pipes. That said, there are at least a few frills to be found at Jake's, most notably the black-and-white portrait of Calvin Coolidge hanging above the counter, as well as a hand-painted portrait of the Quaker from the front of the Quaker Oats cartons. These are frills by pretty much anyone's definition.

The nice thing about Jake's is that you can almost always get a seat there without waiting. Other, trendier spots in town often have large crowds gathered outside their doors, especially on weekends, and at least one of them (Sylvester's) actually prides itself on its notoriously long waits, much as Jake's prides itself on its lack of frills. This morning was a typically mellow scene at Jake's, the only real excitement coming from a group of four local businessmen and politicians who'd gathered to gossip about real estate and the perilous state of the corporate franchises in the area. Home Depot in West Springfield, I gather, is not doing nearly as well as it was when it opened, while the strip mall that houses Old Navy and a now-defunct Linens 'N Things is in pretty dire straits. Things, it was agreed, will probably get worse before they get better.

Anyway - the french toast. I decided to inaugurate this search for TPFT at Jake's because, way back in September, I'd had an order of french toast there that completely blew me away. It was crisp, hearty yet flavorful, unlike any french toast I'd ever had. In the several times I've been there since, however, the french toast has never come close to that initial taste of heaven - it's been soggy, under- and unevenly cooked, and fell apart easily under the weight of the syrup. It was quite depressing, actually, and illustrative of my earlier point that french toast can be transplendent when done right, but very difficult actually to get right.

This time the french toast was... pretty good. It was evenly cooked on both sides, with a nicely browned shell that gave a tiny snap when I bit into it. The bread - which, I suspect, was simply store-bought white bread - held the butter and syrup well, without getting soggy or mushy in the middle (the soggy, mushy middle is the most common lapse one encounters while eating french toast). The butter was light and whipped, but the syrup wasn't "pure" maple syrup - for that you had to pay extra, and I didn't want to pay extra - but simply supermarket "maple-flavored" syrup, and so less than memorable. It was, in short, a solid but by no means exciting french toast experience, a good baseline, perhaps, for future excursions. It looked like this:

SnoHo

It snowed here yesterday, and this made me pretty happy. Before you get all "What!? How can you be happy about snow at this time of year, it's frigging March!" on me, let me 'splain. The snow was welcome because a) I had a thing to do on campus yesterday - a forum on violence involving me, my fellow fellows, and however many students our faculty sponsors could bludgeon into attending - that I wasn't really feeling up for (headachey, snoozey), and the snow initiated a chain of events that culminated in the postponement of the forum until next week; and b) the Valley's gotten really, really ugly lately - like monster-from-Pan's-Labyrinth ugly - and the fresh snow did a wonderful job of covering up (however briefly) all the crusty, gritty piles of ice and gravel that have accumulated on the lawns and parking lots like so many hideous tumors on an otherwise beautful face. Tumors that get all runny and melty in the sunshine, and that you have to walk through in your boots and end up tracking all over your entryway. Blech.

So it snowed, and the Valley looks pretty once again, and I don't have anything pressing to do until next week. And that means that I was able to go out today during my usual coffee-shop-and-grocery rounds and snap a few photos. They're here. It also means that I had one last (at least I hope it's the last) opportunity to wear my longjohns and my Dick Cheney coat, which meant that I was really quite warm out there while everyone else was freezing, which meant, in turn, that I was able to feel just the tiniest bit superior to all those suckers who weren't as well-layered as I was. And that made me feel even warmer inside. Self-righteousness, I find, is a wonderful cure for the winter blues.

What's a Dick Cheney coat, you ask? It's a big, green, puffy coat that looks like the one our former VP wore to a 2005 ceremony at Auschwitz. This was a fashion faux pas for which he was mercilessly, if briefly, ridiculed, since he looked completely ridiculous alongside the somber, black-clad dignitaries who also gathered for the occasion. As someone pointed out at the time, while everyone else looked (appropriately) like they were going to a funeral, Cheney looked like a guy who was going out to shovel his driveway. It's the one and only time, to my knowledge, that Dick Cheney has ever looked ridiculous in his life, and it fills me with great joy just to think about it. Like I said, self-righteousness is a wonderful cure for the winter blues.