i know i have good judgement, i know i have good taste
6/14/24
Butler’s Soy Curls and Bon Appetit’s “Very Good Vegan Tacos”
I’ve been lurking around plant-based Instagram accounts and finding joy in the 100% mentally well people who post on the r/vegan subreddit. I’m just trying to accumulate tricks of the trade and live my best meat-free life. I’d heard rumors of this magical ingredient called Butler’s Soy Curls, but I hadn’t taken the initiative to seek them out. I already go to several grocery stores every week, and I figure if gorgeous Jeff Bezos doesn’t want to stock them at Whole Foods, I couldn’t have been missing much.
But then Bon Appetit published a recipe dubbed Very Good Vegan Tacos, and Butler’s Soy Curls is the star ingredients. It’s like one of those things where you hear about something once and then all of a sudden it’s everywhere. I was getting a bit sick of my usual tofu, tempeh, lentils protein rotation, so I went to St. Jeff’s virtual bazaar and bought a three pack.
Calling your product “Butler’s Soy Curls” is an alpha move. There’s no euphemism, no Millennial cuteness or tech-bro gloss. It’s an absolutely unappetizing name, confident that the quality of the product can stand on its own two legs. The Wikipedia “history” section is short. I’ll repeat it in full: “Soy curls were invented in Oregon by Butler Foods around the year 2000.” Succinct, direct, a bit mysterious. The Dr. Bronner’s-like packaging had me thinking this was a ‘60s-’70s 2nd wave health food, but Soy Curls came out the same year as Oops!… I Did It Again.
They look like those dehydrated pigs ears you give your dogs as a treat. But after you hydrate them — remember Magic Grow Capsules — they turn into objects relatively indistinguishable from fajita sized chunks of meat. They are a clean slate, an empty canvas to add whatever spices or flavors you want. No matter what you do to tofu, its texture is never really going to approximate animal flesh. Soy curls are much closer (though a bit softer than chicken breast), and these Bon Appetit “very good” tacos are exactly as advertised.
The recipe developer, Emma Lapperuque, has us hydrate the curls in vegetable broth (I used vegetarian Better than Bullion) spiked with nutritional yeast. We rinse and drain and add our spice mix (cumin, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder — you honestly could just use a regular taco seasoning mix).
Fry the seasoned curls in some neutral oil (avocado has a better omega 3/6 ratio according to the online anti-seed oil freaks, who I still trust with my life) and assemble on your tortilla of choice.
I chopped up some white onion and cilantro, and finished them with salsa (Tacodeli medium salsa roja — recommend) and a spoonful of real sour cream (Clover, because the Silverlake Whole Foods was out of Straus, a small crisis.)
Mushroom or cauliflower tacos are great, but soy curls open up the possibilities of vegetarian cooking in a whole new way. I’m going to venture into the indie vegan blogosphere and figure out how to use them to make Chinese beef with broccoli.
I love this type of cooking, but I did hit an energy wall last week and realized I hadn’t eaten any animal protein in days. I’m making sure now to have both seafood and eggs at least once a week, and I’ve started taking an occasional B12 supplement. Right now, that seems to be the right formula (for me) to keep feeling good while cutting out meat.
Holger Rune
I watched tons of Roland Garros (the French Open) over the last two weeks. I could have written about eventual champions Iga Swiatek or Carlos Alcaraz, the newly injured Novak Djokovic, the almost retired Rafael Nadal, or the resurgent Naomi Osaka. But I felt like writing about Holger Rune, who lost a close fourth round match to eventual runner-up and credible domestic abuser Alexander Zverev.
This little twerp first burst onto the tennis scene a couple years ago when he beat Djokovic to win an important indoor tournament in Paris. Tennis obsessives of course already knew about the cherubic cheeked, thick thighed teenager from Denmark, and we all had an opinion about him. Either he’s entitled, he’s argumentative, he’s immature, he’s undisciplined. Or he’s exciting, he’s talented, he gets crazy because he wants it so much, at least he has personality.
I, of course, fall into the latter camp, thrilled by watching Rune’s tantrums almost as much as his tennis. To me his anger is ridiculous rather than threatening — a Botticelli head on a Tom-of-Finland body is funny, even when he’s not arguing with a chair empire or claiming (uncorroborated, publicly on twitter) that his Norwegian opponents are threatening him in the locker room.
His mother (and until recently his manager and coach) Aneke Rune is one of the great tennis parent characters of the current generation. Kohl eyed, chain smoking, prone to meaningless philosophical statements — she claims Novak Djokovic is so great because he doesn’t “play the point, he is the point.” Any questions?
Their closeness veers into Lucille and Buster Bluth territory. She beams when she tells interviewers that she does Holger’s laundry and makes his bed, arranges all his meals and his travel accommodations. This isn’t totally out of the ordinary when it comes to tennis, but there’s an energy between them that plays into obscene, only half-serious rumors that I won’t repeat here.
Rune was on his way to being one of the top players on the ATP. After the win in Paris he shot into the top 10, threatening to beat everybody, a worthy wrench to his generation’s projected great rivalry, Carlos Alcaraz vs. Jannik Sinner. Alcaraz the physically gifted, feisty Spaniard, Sinner the Alpine cool guy with a mind boggling forehand and a Gucci campaign? Sound familiar?
I do think younger tennis writers can’t think about the game without framing everything through a Federer-Nadal lens. A lot of the time it feels reductive and historically inaccurate, but it’s impossible not to see the parallels when thinking about what the next 15 years of the game will look like. If Sinner is this generation’s Federer, and Alcaraz is this generation’s Nadal, Rune was positioned as this generation’s Djokovic. A spoiler, an anti-hero, a coarse, unlikable, working-class (this is rarely mentioned but true in both examples) foil to the two chosen ones.
But over the past year, while Alcaraz and Sinner have been winning Grand Slams and shooting to the top of the game, Rune has been struggling. He’s out of the top ten, he’s been losing to scrubs, and he hasn’t been to the second week of a slam since last year’s French Open.
Maybe things are turning around. The fifth set tie-break between Rune and young Italian Flavio Cabolli was the most thrilling 15 minutes of tennis I’ve seen this year. Rune was down 0-5 and turned it around with a series of shots (most notably, two down-the-line backhands that had me screaming watching in bed on my phone) that make me think we’re in for a Renaissance. I hope he disrupts the perfect but simplistic Fire and Ice duality of Sinner/Alcaraz, just like Djokovic disrupted the gentlemanly Fedal rivalry.
Maybe Rune’s antics will diminish with maturity. He hired, and fired, and hired again a big time coach (Serena’s ex-coach and rumored lover Patrick Mouratoglou). His mother’s even stopped coming to his matches. Word on the street is he’s even doing his own laundry.
Please Please Please — Sabrina Carpenter
I like Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso as much as the next middle-aged white gay, but it was unclear until this week if she could follow up her breakthrough hit with something worthwhile. Carpenter’s been banging around the pop minor leagues for years and dabbled in different types of music, so I shouldn’t have been that surprised that her Espresso follow up is 1. really good, and 2. a ballad. I love when ascendent pop stars release a ballad for their second big single. It’s also, much like the Butler’s Soy Curls name, a sign of confidence. She knows how to pace herself. We’ll get the next club banger when she’s good and ready.
Please Please Please has charmingly janky Casio production, an Abba-like sweet/sad melody, and simple but slightly off-center lyrics. The song is about a girl begging her boyfriend not to cheat on her — classic girl group material — but Carpenter’s delivery isn’t self-pitying at all. She sounds (pardon the ableism) crazy. Like she’s singing about how sad she would be if her boyfriend (the video stars real-life beau Barry Keoghan) slept with another woman, but the subtext is that if he does cheat he’ll die, not her. It’s the way she emphasizes the R when she sings “don’t embarrass me motherfuckeRRR?” It’s unsettling and really funny. There are other bonkers lyrics to compete with the already classic Espresso “I’m working late, ‘cause I’m a singer” line.
“I tell them it’s just your culture and everyone rolls their eyes.” He fucks around because he’s Irish.
“I know you’re craving some fresh air, but the ceiling fan is so nice.” Did she lock him in a motel room?
“If you don’t wanna cry to music, don’t make me hate you prolifically.” Prolifically? Ok Mariah.
I got to the end of the song and saw that Jack Antonoff is credited, along with Carpenter and Amy Allen, a songwriter who’s worked with Selena Gomez, Harry Styles and Halsey. Just when I thought this guy had run out of ideas.