Last night’s food-delivery surprise came through an offer on the Grubhub delivery service: for El Camaron RWC in Redwood City — which provides seafood dishes from the state of Sinaloa, plus tacos and (surprise!) Mexican-style sushi (the menu has a Sushi Sinaloa section). I went for the Mexican Japanese items: an aguachile roll and Sinaloa sashimi. Just fabulous, with enough left over for at least one more meal.
Archive for the ‘Language and food’ Category
Sushi Sinaloa
March 29, 2026The black service window in space
March 28, 2026In yesterday’s (3/27) Zippy strip, our Pinhead recognizes a dark service window in a generic roadside fast food place as an astronomical black hole:
(#1) Zippy between two worlds, ordering food in space
Two things: the service window; the black hole.
Tomatoes and spices and clams, oh my!
March 27, 2026In my posting yesterday (3/26), “A fortuitous cold soup” Safeway’s house-brand tomato bisque combined with plenty of chopped clams (and some sriracha sauce for spiciness), served unheated (eventually, actually chilled): a (cold) clam-tomato bisque. With a bow to the movie The Wizard of Oz: tomatoes and spices and clams, oh my!
Which I will build up to by starting with bisques, and then running through
tomato juice, tomato soup, tomato bisque
clam juice, clam soup, clam bisque
and going on, at the urging of Tim Evanson on Facebook, to another meeting of clam with tomato, the commercial product Clamato, created as the basis for cocktails.
A fortuitous cold soup
March 26, 2026Doing a regular grocery order yesterday,* the Safeway page for their excellent house-brand tomato bisque happened to show, among other things I’d ordered previously, small cans of chopped clams (which I used to use for pasta with white clam sauce, when I still actually cooked), and it occurred to me that I could combine the soup and the clams, with some sriracha sauce added for a bit of heat, mix it up, heat it in the microwave, and get myself some nice tomato-clam soup. (I don’t cook, but I microwave up a treat.) [*If you kvetch about this example as a glaring dangling modifier, I will throw discourse-organizational stones at you, and try to educate you in the ways of non-default SPARs (subjectless predicational adjuncts requiring a referent for the subject — non-default when they don’t obey the Subject Rule, that is, when they don’t pick up this referent from the subject of the main clause; see the Page on this blog about my dangler postings here).]
I gave the spoon a lick to check the spiciness level. And found that it tasted wonderful, just as it was. It didn’t actually need heating. So I had it half of it for lunch, as a nice cold soup, and put the rest in the refrigerator, to produce a truly wonderful chilled soup for my lunch today. It might be nice with a bit of dill, maybe a dollop of sour cream, but I don’t have those in stock, so I was content with what I had.
And I got a nice, botanically oriented, walk around the block with Isaac, answered mail reconnecting with my old friend the philosopher Bill Lycan (see my 3/12 posting “The Vishnu of philosophy”), and then (for dinner) scored some bibimbap from a Korean restaurant, just because I was seized with a desire for it. An excellent day.
The illegal trade in baby seals
March 24, 2026Coming by me yesterday (3/23) on public radio, a feature on, as I heard it, the illegal trade in baby seals. (referring, apparently, to the seal hunt on Canada’s east coast, in which thousands of harp seal pups are clubbed to death for their fur) But the story was actually about baby eels (elvers). Mishearing strikes again.
Meanwhile, the actual story was alarming, but not as distressing as what I heard, since baby eels are astronomically less cute than baby seals.
The breakfast walk
March 16, 2026From 722 Ramona St., between Forest and Homer (my house) to 566 Emerson St., at the northwest corner at Hamilton (the Palo Alto Creamery, a standard place for Saturday breakfast with my daughter Elizabeth in the old days), along a route fixed in its details (there will be a map, with commentary). Now notable in that the Creamery is the only business or office on that route that has been there all the time since Jacques and I came to Ramona St. in 1986. This is urban life, with everything in flux.
March 15th
March 15, 2026Today: a significant day in my personal life for many years, and also a significant day in world history.
— March 15th was spring Removal Day — Higashi (East) removal — when (for about 10 years) Jacques and I left Palo Alto (after winter quarter at Stanford) to drive the 2650 miles east to Columbus OH (for spring quarter at Ohio State); the winter Removal Day — Nishi (West) removal — in the opposite direction was December 15th
— March 15th is also the Ides of March, the day of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C.E.
Reptilian fruit couplet
December 24, 2025Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
A Vermont portmanteau and a net-naive Santa
December 16, 2025Two cartoons from the New Yorker issue of 12/15/25: Michael Maslin with a phrasal overlap portmanteau tribute to the state of Vermont (land of covered casseroles, for covered-dish socials, and rustic covered bridges); and Roz Chast, showing us Santa’s alarmed helpers when he can’t resist falling — once again — for clickbait.
The fortuitous guest gift
December 15, 2025The sinus-infection background, from yesterday’s posting “Chair-ridden”:
The [long-running, like for weeks] sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting junk I cough up constantly, and is, alas, not much affected by nasal saline sprays. Mostly, it’s unbelievably tiring. Hence, my being chair-ridden (the analogue of bed-ridden).
Now I’m going to amble discursively through the rest of this story. Walk with me.