October 31, 2011 | by Mike Kostyo 
A skull under glass in our dining room, crows perched on a shelf in our apartment, our candlelit dining room table and a few eerie pictures on our wall.
October 26, 2011 | by Mike Kostyo 
Really, it's a wonder people aren't constantly dying after eating in restaurants. Last week I took the ServSafe exam, which is the Massachusetts exam for safe food handling. It was 90 questions, 2 hours, covering all manner of kitchen safety and regulation.
Do you know how many ways there are to get sick from food? So many ways. How many bacteria, toxins, viruses, pathogens and parasites are there in the world? More than a couple. There are the classics, like E. coli and salmonella. But are you coughing up worms? Gross. You may have ascariasis (one of the symptoms is a tickle in the back of your throat, but I don't know if that's related to the worms or not). Been forgetting things? If you had shellfish recently, you may have amnesic shellfish poisonic. As in your scallop gave you amnesia. That's just a crazy thing to think about. And it would be even more sad because nobody would believe you that it is a real thing. "Didn't I tell you to take the garbage out?" "Possibly. I had an oyster last week and now I have amnesia." Just an example. Mostly for high school age people, I guess.
That's not all. A strong, oily smell in the kitchen? Maybe cooking oil. But probably cockroaches. One of the fun example scenarios they gave was something like, "Sally has a dry scalp. She's constantly scratching it, which causes dandruff to fall into the food. Is this acceptable?" Hahahaha. Absolutely. "Is it cool to bleed into the food?" And there are so many more ways for metal and glass to fall into food than I ever imagined.
Not to mention the terrorists. You really need to keep the perimeter of your restaurant secure, because of the terrorists. Too many terrorists spoil the soup. Very popular saying.
October 6, 2011 | by Mike Kostyo 
So, over the weekend I graduated from the Culinary and Baking Arts programs that I took over the summer. I got a medal! It's engraved with a chef's toque and a pan and maybe a whisk? I forget. I guess I can just look at it since it's around my neck right now. Just kidding! It's at the polisher's. I drool on it a lot in my sleep.
Mmmm. "Now I am so hungry I cannot wait for the recipe." That's what you are thinking right now. Well, we'll get there. Anyways, so on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights during the summer I went to class after work and learned how to make food. It was great. You would know this if you had read my blog posts about it. I blogged about it after every single class? Yeah, you probably don't know because you didn't read it. My blog hits (that's when someone visits your blog. "Oh, they hit me." That means, "Oh, they visited my blog." Probably.) went way down during those six weeks. Whatever. Fine. I don't care about YOUR life either.
September 30, 2011 | by Mike Kostyo 
Do you know who Seth McFarlane is? No? He is the guy who made Family Guy, which I think is like the poor man's Simpson's. I don't watch any of that, because animation is for babies. Except Pixar. Pixar is for adults I think. (And I'm just kidding about being for babies, animation. Animation can be for anyone. But I still don't watch Family Guy. I tried once and it wasn't for me, just like oatmeal is not for me, but I'll get to that).
Anyways, the other day I saw an advertisement for a new album, well, not really an album - more like the idea of an album, because it's all just MP3s now, right? I mean, they keep making square pictures as if they are the covers of compact disks, but that's just so iTunes has something for you to look at. Well, whatever it is, a collection of digital files, I guess, it was from Seth McFarlane. But I wasn't sure if it really was, because it could have also maybe been a joke. Sometimes it's hard to know the difference between real life and making fun of life anymore, because a lot of times real life is so bananas you hope it's a joke and you are very surprised to find out it is not a joke. (There is a name for that, actually).
So this was a collection of songs sung by Seth McFarlane in the style of Frank Sinatra, complete with a retro-looking "album cover." It has silly song names like they used to have back in the day, like, "You're the Cream in My Coffee" and "Two Sleepy People." See how I thought, "Hmmm. Joke?"
September 27, 2011 | by Mike Kostyo 
Peddocks Island is where the film Shutter Island was filmed. It's about mental institutions and brain experiments and murdering children and ghosts and fires and ridiculous rain storms and an ending that doesn't really make sense. It's basically a promotional video for the real Peddocks Island.
Which is great! Except for the millions of devil mosquitoes. Other than that. Speaking of, have you read about the thing where they are breeding poison nectar plants to kill the mosquitoes? I think that's what is going on, I only read the subhead, because I'm very busy with jobs and school and hanging out on an island all day, but that seemed to be the gist of it. And, on the one hand, I can see how it would be like, maybe that's a bad idea, playing with nature and killing a species and breeding poison plants and Little Shop of Horrors. But, on the other hand, I think I had 40 bites on EACH LEG that day. And they were mutant mosquitoes who were very hungry because they live on an island. And we didn't bring the bug spray because bug spray is unnatural chemicals, just kidding, we didn't even think about it.
So, to get to Peddocks Island you have to take a ferry from Boston to Georges Island. Then you take the Tropic Cat to Peddocks Island (well first you stop at Hull, where you can be jealous of the high school that is on the end of the peninsula - the football field is surrounded by water on three sides). And as you are approaching the island you can play that weird foghorn song from Shutter Island in your head. BWAAAAAA. BWAAAAA. If you want.
