there is something inherently wrong…

…with vegan jerky

i mean seriously.

jerky is supposed to be made of meat.

not… um… vegan… stuff

unless of course it's made of real vegans

in whichcase, someone at my store is getting arrested.

this is the sort of thing that only an affluent society could spawn.

vegan fair that maybe looks and maybe tastes like the food they foreswear for ethical reasons.

hell… these ethical reasons wouldn't exist if there wasn't enough to eat in this country.

in the northwest territory, they eat raw freshly killed seal because that's what's for dinner up there.

there is no disaffected teenage Inuit saying, "ah hay ma. I don't eat seal. that shit is unethical and cruel to the seal."

you know why, because there is no fucking vegan seal substitute.

that said, if you wanna be an ethical vegan, the bastard can direct you to a dosa shoppe. but if you are going to buy vegan meat substitutes, you're fooling yourself.

meat meat meat meat meat meat MEAT.

that is all

—the bastard

…on winging it

the bastard has some generous friends at the office.

and once in a great while some wild game falls into his lap.

sometimes it's just being in the right time and place for it too.

this time around, I had some pheasant I needed to get out of the freezer before it became a thing. which would then become a thing wasted.

and the bastard hates wasting things.

so when I found a recipe for pheasant banh mi in the "other" magazine's February issue I decide this was how the pheasant going to get done.

truth to tell it was more prep than cooking.


took some meats. don't get squeamish on me jerks. meaT isn't something that comes in a styrofoam container all the time.


added a jalapeño but I would have preferred a scotch bonnet.

zip zip zip. scare the crap out of the baby with the sheer screaming power of the food processor

make patties.

30 minutes at 300° and it's all good in the hood.

I also hooked up a sriacha mayonnaise to go with. 3-5 tablespoons to a half cuppa mayo.


and boom goes the dynamite. turns out that this bird while short on meat was the gift that kept on giving in the portion department.

on a side note, i've been keeping up with Sherman since the korilla truck day and I think I'm going to be picking his brain about food things asian with game. might be an inneretsing endeavor

the bastard is thinking about venison bulgoggi now. tah

—the bastard

there is a place in our fair city...

…where the bastard found himself a frikkin elk burger



yeah

that's right bitches!

while walking to dukes the other night the bastard came across an awning he had never seen which promised three things the bastard loves that aren't whiskey

burgers

shakes

beer

so he said to himself, "self, we will eat lunch there right fucking soon".

so in his sooner than expected fashion, the bastard came home too drunk to make lunch.

such is the style of drinking with the old hood.

so next day there he was reeding up a bacon cheeseburger with onion rings.

and then he heard the magical words

"what kind of meat do you want?"

"what?!?"

"what kind of meat do you want guy?"

overtaken by options of this magnitude was almost too much for my dukearita riddled head to handle

"whatcha got", hoping to hell human wasn't an option as I might have taken it

"beef, bison, lamb, ostrichch, turkey, elk…"

"that one"

"what?"

"that one. and a black and white shake", cause if you don't go big, go the hell home.


and it was glorious.

elk is a magical meat that doesn't taste like chicken.

it tastes like elk.

it's kind of like beef…

but not like beef…

and better.

it's the bastard's favoritest of all the meats.

that and caribou.

go out and get some. now. not later.

—the bastard

get in the van…

…in which our hero raises his own bar on street meat




ok, here's the situation,

may parents went away for a weeks vacation.

but I digress. the bastard has gotten into paying attention to food again.

mobile food.

street meat.

part one, piqued: this comes from checking out no reservations after it had gotten popular.

the bastard didn't like it first time around. it seemed too forced and I though the "a cooks tour" show that food network dropped was a littler more sentimental at the time.

and at the time, the bastard wanted sentimental, not forced lou reed of the food set stuff.

but these days, I was looking for something else in this age of crap economics and lack of vacation fun.

and bourdain spoke much about street food.

part two, the seed: there's this guy I went to junior high school who I'm friends with on foursquare.

he kept checking in at this truck called korilla BBQ.

at the time, I had been going to the wafel truck and have been loving it. but I needed to see about this korilla truck.

Korean BBQ.

no.

Korean BBQ burritos my friend.

picture this. Korean BBQ pork on a wrap with

bacon kimchi fried rice

with veg, cheese, sauce.

and that's your burrito.


part three, opportunity: another old friend of mine from small times was working in manhattan this week. Sherman. and he did some time on the Korean peninsula. and he has three kids to show for it.

we were looking to meet up anyways so I suggested the korilla truck so we could at least chat while online.

hashed out some smalltalk while waiting on a line that ran around the corner on park and 24th until it was our time to get our repast… the porkinator.

it was glorious.

so much so, I burst into my editor in chief's office over it.

we haven't had big talks of late but he was there so he looks up mildly curious and inconvenienced and asks what's up.

"totally unrelated to the book, I just had the greatest burrito ever".

now he cracked a smile because he was on board with this.

and I told him of my lunch.

and apparently, he's a big fan of kimchi.

asked me to let him know if I was going next Friday and to hit him up for it.

hell, not a bad way to kick off the weekend.

—the bastard