Sometimes the solution to a problem comes when you take a step back and realize that you’ve been working too hard, and a radically simpler approach is called for. The solution to the bucatini all’amatriciana problem didn’t go like that.

It sounds so delicious and so easy. Amatriciana is a sauce that consists of my favorite things: tomatoes, onions, and bacon (or pancetta, or guanciale, but I think smoked bacon is best). It’s usually served with bucatini (which is like thick spaghetti with a hole down the middle) and topped with grated pecorino romano. How could this possibly go wrong?

Every possible way. Watery tomatoes. Sauce too chunky or too smooth. And above all, the sauce never seemed to get intimate with the pasta. I’d tried it a dozen times. I’d tried recipes from Cook’s Illustrated and The Italian Country Table and god knows where else.

Then, last Saturday, I made the ultimate amatriciana. It took several hours and created a pile of dirty dishes worth of one of those moundbuilder cultures. I didn’t come up with this myself, of course. It’s from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

Here’s how it works. You buy a big hunk of slab bacon. I got mine at Bavarian Meats, at Pike Place Market. I asked for a pound of slab bacon, and the woman said, “I don’t know how much is a pound. It varies in thickness too much.” She held the slab up on the counter and indicated her best guess with the knife. I said, “Maybe a little more.” She gave me a little more, and it was 1-1/4 pounds. Next time I’m accepting her guess, not that excess bacon is a problem.

Then you braise the bacon. Put it in the oven with some mirepoix, white wine, and chicken broth, and leave it there for about 2-1/2 hours. I’ve done many things with bacon before, but never this. Braised meats tend to give up most of their flavor to the sauce. Braised bacon stays bacony.

One the bacon is braised, you cut it into lardons, crisp it up in a pan with some onions, and stir in some roasted canned tomatoes and olive oil. Top with freshly grated pecorino romano.

The leftover braised bacon ended up in beef bourguignon, and it made the most silky and salty lardons you can imagine.

Three items from the vast category of things I just don’t get.

* Every Seattle apartment we’ve lived in has had a 30-inch electric stove. But until we moved into this place, all of them (four different stoves) have had three small burners and one large burner. Why do they make stoves with this configuration? And why does anyone buy them? Geometrically speaking, there’s always room for a second large burner diagonally opposite the first one. Could this possibly save more than $2 per unit? If they’re really looking to save money, why not make a stove with just three burners?

* Some of our dishes are marked “chip-resistant.” Far from being meaningless marketing, these items really are essentially impossible to chip. Others chip if you drop them from a height of six inches, over the rug. But it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with price. Our expensive dessert plates are chip-resistant, and so are some bowls we got for $1.25 each. There’s nothing unusual about the appearance or feel of the chip-resistant pieces. *So why don’t they just make all ceramic chip-resistant?*

* My local supermarket started carrying parsley root a few months ago. I’ve never bought it. I’ve never seen anyone else buy it. But they keep getting shipments in. Do supermarkets carry items that no one buys just so they can maintain an image as the kind of place that caters to the parsley root crowd?

Not that I have anything against parsley root, mind you. I just haven’t gotten around to it. I hear it’s something old Russian women put in soup. If they’re lucky, they cook the soup on a stove with big burners and serve it in chip-resistant bowls.

**Warning:** This post might get techy, but I encourage you to read on anyway even if you don’t know MIPS from bean dips.

I hope you’ve noticed the new Upcoming Dinners feature over in the sidebar (if you’re reading this post via RSS, please click through to the real site and have a look). I put it up yesterday. It looks pretty snazzy, I must say, but it barely required any work. The data comes from my calendar on [30 Boxes](http://www.30boxes.com/) which is by far the best web-based calendar of the jillion out there (and believe me–I’ve tried Trumba, AirSet, SpongeCell, Kiko, Planzo, and some calendars with *even stupider names*.)

How did I do it? I added some upcoming dinners to my calendar (which is also full of exciting things like meetings and babysitting), gave them a tag (“dinner”), and then created a custom badge showing the next five events with the “dinner” tag. Then I edited the HTML a little bit. It took less than ten minutes. It was fun. The future is now.

Why did I do it? I figured if the whole world was watching me plan meals, it would (a) deter me from trying to come up with dinner at 4pm, and (b) push me to try more new stuff for dinner rather than always falling back on old favorites like salmon cakes and sausages and grapes, tasty as they are. Oops, we had sausages and grapes this week, along with some toast that I brushed with olive oil and let Iris scrape with a clove of garlic.

Why does this fill me with emptiness even as I am filled with sausages, grapes, and toast? Because it’s only the first step in fulfilling a dream that may never come true. The name of the dream is Meal Bandit.

I’m curious about what people eat. Not just memorable meals, but day to day stuff. I can’t be the only one. People are buying Tucker Shaw’s book, Everything I Ate, which chronicles everything he ate in 2004. With photos. Here’s what Shaw told Gothamist about why he did it:

> Food magazines are like fashion magazines: They celebrate what’s beautiful, new, or unusual, but very rarely report on what people really wear or eat. If people in the future rely on current food-related media, they’ll think that we eat nothing but ramps and pork bellies all day. Or McDonald’s and Chips Ahoy and low-carb cupcakes. The truth is much broader.

Actually, I could eat ramps and pork bellies all day, but that’s beside the point. Aside from the purely voyeuristic element, hearing about what other people are making for dinner gives me ideas for what to cook myself.

And if _Everything I Ate_ is a niche item, Hungry Planet is a legitimate bestseller. If you haven’t seen it, the idea is simple. A photographer travels the world and talks families into setting out a full week’s worth of food so he can take a picture. It’s an utter page-turner. I believe the mother of the Greenlandic family said her favorite food was fermented narwhal. I’m serious. One of the things I noticed is that the dietitians may be right: to me, the most appetizing diets are the most colorful. The families I really felt sorry for, rich and poor, were the ones that didn’t display an assortment of fresh vegetables. Now, could you please pass the narwhal?

Another way to see what people are eating for dinner is to look at the mighty eGullet dinner thread, the most popular thread on this food discussion site by several orders of magnitude. It was started in 2002 by a user named Priscilla, who wrote, “I am (perhaps inordinately) interested in what folks cook in their own kitchens.”

She got an answer or two. Actually, as of this writing, she has 13,679 answers. People post their dinners on the thread (which runs 456 pages) every single day. Just yesterday, someone named Nina C. made her very first eGullet post, about her dinner of spinach ravioli with goat cheese and green onion with black olive butter sauce and pecorino romano from Mario Batali’s latest book.

The trouble with the eGullet dinner thread (which, don’t get me wrong, is awesome) is that it’s extremely hard to navigate. If you want to see only the dinner-related posts of a certain user, there’s no easy way to do that as far as I know. It’s also skewed toward the kind of food-savvy people who post on eGullet.

##### Enter the Bandit

Meal Bandit, a product I invented, a product that doesn’t exist, provides another way to plan and share what you eat. Simply put, it’s a specialized sharable web calendar. You can plan out future breakfasts, lunches, and dinners (or, if you’re not the planning type, you can enter meals after you eat them). You can then, if you like, tag your meals like you tag your photos on [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/). If you’re making samosas (or getting them for take-out), you can tag them as “indian, fried”. If you’ve entered your city or zip code in your profile page, your meals will automatically be geographically tagged. That means if you want to find out what kind of Thai dishes people are cooking in 98102, you can easily search for that. (Answer: larb.)

Meal Bandit will not be a way to exchange recipes. There are already tons of sites like that. You will be able to specify the source (URL or name of a book or magazine) of a dish, though, and leave comments on other people’s meals asking for more information. There will also be a way to give props to meals that sound great, and then see popular meals. If you are a guy, getting your home-cooked meals onto the Meal Bandit top ten list will be a guaranteed way to meet women.

Of course, there will be ubiquitous feeds. Every search will return an RSS feed, like on Craigslist. There will be webcal feeds so you can put your own meals onto Apple’s iCal or any other calendar that supports the iCalendar format–including 30 Boxes. And like 30 Boxes (and many other sites), Meal Bandit will produce HTML or Flash badges that you can put on your blog or Myspace page. Like this one, from Australia:

As with Flickr, if you don’t want to share with the whole world, Meal Bandit will allow you to keep your meals private or share them only with your friends. But if the last couple of years on the web has taught us anything, it’s that people are willing to share *everything* online. I guess once the masses understood that it was safe to pay by credit card on the web, it was a short line from there to uploading naked pictures of yourself. Sharing what you eat for dinner is pretty tame compared to the average LiveJournal.

In principle, you could do pretty much all of this stuff with a site like [Eventful](http://www.eventful.com/) or [Upcoming.org](http://www.upcoming.org/). But those sites are really geared toward public events, so a site that filtered out all the non-meal noise would be more fun.

I want to know what people are eating in Ireland, India, and Iceland. Don’t you? Let’s have a look at the current state of Meal Bandit:

[http://www.mealbandit.com/](http://www.mealbandit.com)

It’s kind of sad that the holding page was smart enough to figure out that the word “meal” is in there, but not the word “bandit.” Are there really no good bandit-related searches? Anyway, it turns out my web programming skills are stuck in 1999. Anyone need a CGI script written in Perl? Didn’t think so.

I bought a book about Ruby on Rails, which is the hippest web programming environment of the moment, but there’s just no way I’m going to code this puppy up myself. So I’m asking for your help. Are you the kind of person who wants to work on a fun web application in your spare time for no pay? Join the Meal Bandit team. I don’t care where in the world you are, as long as you love food and can code RoR. I will head up the UI part. We will get a [Basecamp](http://www.basecamphq.com/) account and go to town. Let’s slap this together and get bought by Google (or Epicurious) at the end of the summer.

If you think Meal Bandit sounds like fun and have any feature ideas or think I’ve gotten part of it wrong, please leave a comment.

Oh, incidentally, here are some names I rejected: Foodpad, Dinner Demon, Eatpad, Dinnr.

Two weeks ago I told you the story of a much-improved burger:

Back to the Zak

Today, there’s an abbreviated version in the Seattle Times:

Second Helping: Zak’s reacts, with juicy results

Now, as long as the universe is paying attention and taking burger tips from me, I have a few more requests. First of all, slotted head screws. What is up with these things? The screwdriver always falls out. Let’s ban them. Next, those corkscrews with the wings that fly up…

On second thought, maybe I’ll stick to burgers.

It’s been quiet around the Roots and Grubs corral because I’ve been working on two long posts simultaneously. They should both appear this weekend.

Last night I made Crunchy Shrimp, also knows as sesame-orange shrimp, from an old issue of Everyday Food. Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood, so there’s a ton of misinformation about it, possibly pushed by unscrupulous shrimp-brokers. Okay, I have no evidence for that, but “unscrupulous shrimp brokers” conjures up a great image, doesn’t it?

The worst shrimp myth is that all shrimp are the same. The second worst shrimp myth is that “black tiger” shrimp are the best kind. So here’s a two-minute shrimp primer. If it helps, picture me as a guy dressed up in a six-foot shrimp costume and making hilarious jokes about how “jumbo shrimp” is an oxymoron.

* Fresh shrimp, as in never-frozen, is extremely rare outside the gulf region. Occasionally we get it in Seattle at Mutual Fish, flown in from the gulf. It’s worth buying and cooking it the same day, if you see it.

* Since nearly all shrimp is frozen at sea, you should buy it frozen, too, and defrost it at home. Until a few years ago this meant buying a solid block of frozen shrimp in ice. Luckily, this is no longer the case, and you can get excellent individually quick-frozen (IQF) shrimp in one- or two-pound plastic bags.

* Generally, the best species of shrimp are Mexican and Gulf Whites. If what you’re buying isn’t labeled “black tiger,” it’s probably some kind of white shrimp and should be fine. Not that black tiger are necessarily bad; the whites are just better.

* Look at the ingredients on the bag. It should read “shrimp, salt.” Don’t buy shrimp preserved with sodium tripolyphosphate (STP). It’s gross. The easiest way to avoid it is to buy shrimp at Whole Foods or another place that is dogmatically against preservatives.

* Peel-on shrimp have more flavor. And peeling shrimp is really fun, one of the most enjoyable menial kitchen tasks. Of course, I say this never having worked in a restaurant. I’m sure if I’d been nicknamed “shrimp guy” at some point I’d feel different. Actually, there are many good reasons not to be nicknamed “shrimp guy.”

* Frozen shrimp can be quickly defrosted in the sink. Toss them in a colander and run cold water over them for ten minutes, rearranging them occasionally. Then peel.

Finally, don’t overcook your shrimp. I tend to buy shrimp in the 21-25 or 26-30 size (meaning number of shrimp per pound), and they cook fully in two or three minutes at the absolute most.

Last week on Top Chef, Harold made *tom kha goong* (Thai coconut milk and shrimp soup) to be reheated the next day in the microwave. He put the shrimp in raw, figuring the hot broth would cook them sufficiently when reheated. The gamble paid off–he was at the winners’ table at the end of the show, although Tiffani and her escolar dish took the crown.

Tiffani is so mean!