March 2007

Alice, Let's Eat and Travels with Alice, by Calvin Trillin
Essays from the New Yorker food writer -- I liked the first one better than the second because it focused more on his bad-ass food writing, but both of them were great. (And we need to try the Crisfeld Seafood Restaurant in Silver Spring, which he recommends.) Let's let him speak for himself:

from "Alice, Let's Eat":
My decision to take a rather elegant picnic along on my no-frills flight to Miami was solidly based on a theory of economics known as Alice's Law of Compensatory Cashflow, which holds that any money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income should be spent accordingly. If you decide, for instance, that buying a five-hundred-dollar color television set would be, all things considered, an act of lunacy and the final step toward complete financial collapse, you have an extra five hundred dollars that you "saved" on the television set available to spend on something else. (49)

I have always found the food in Washington what might be expected of a city dominated by people who are willing to put up with gray meat and spongy chicken of political dinners year after year merely for a seat in the Senate. (128)