Humanity's Kidney Stone

Below are four wildly varying examples of a dysfunction that's become like a kidney stone humanity seems unable to pass. We are obliviously unable to recognize—much less diagnose or resolve—this cognitive problem.

In short: our intelligence has become dangerously clumpy. We are towering geniuses when it comes to Them, and blindly yammering morons when it comes to Us.

Matched Set
There are two toxic, flamboyantly unreasonable women in my life who are like colicky toddlers wearing the glittering crowns of haughty queens. Naturally, they hate each other.

Like all maladjusted children, they've learned to rage to get what they want, which they do frequently because nothing else is real for them. The rest of us out here exist solely to assist or impede the getting of what-they-want.

Having exhausted their surrounding ecosystems, they rarely get what they want. But that's lucky for them, because their desires are uniformly stupid. Delusional superiority long ago smothered any facility for learning (learning requires the acknowledgement of deficiency), ensuring a remarkably consistent level of stupidity.

Yet each could sketch a shrewd and detailed profile of the other. In this one field of knowledge—exegesis of the hated—both are brilliant scholars.

Middle East
Talk to any Israeli and you will hear a long litany of Palestinian atrocities. But any Palestinian could offer an equally horrifying litany of Israeli atrocities.

Shrewdly expert in the moral deficiencies of the Other, each side clutches grievances to justify ever more repugnant behavior as they climb symmetrical ladders of barbarity.

MAGA
America's extremists on both the left and right are cartoonishly repugnant. For a clear-eyed accounting and explanation, just ask the other sides. Unless you're perched directly on the precarious center line, one account will have the ring of deep truth while the other seems like caustic lies.

Moderates reserve their most lavish contempt for moderate counterparts on the other side. How can they so blindly excuse their tribe's extremists? Vision is hyperacute in one direction, and entirely blurry the other way.

Leff's Dictum
Recognizing stupidity doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're observant.


Every profound insight translates, upsettingly, into some impossibly banal cliché. If "Two wrongs don't make a right!" still had some juice to it, I wouldn't need to write this.

Framing

Framing isn't something the world does to you.

It's what you do to the world, which completely changes according to your shifts of perspective.

Framing is contagious. We adopt the perspective of those we pay attention to. Conformity is most obvious in our appearance and behavior, but it stems from adopting a prevalent framing.

Framing is entirely volitional, though we forget our freedom. We have eternally owned our own perspective, which is not driven by circumstance (you've seen countless happy poor people and miserable rich people). We can effortlessly opt in or out of a given framing. It's entirely up to us.

Framing is like a smart phone feature you forgot about.

Framing underpins and explains absolutely everything.

A Treasury of Selected Recent Baked Apples

Pastel de nata is for tourists. Head into the side streets, to the lunch counters where limping pensioners feast for pennies (I've been covering them on Facebook, per this constantly updating list), and it's all about the baked apples.

And so I proudly offer, as a downloadable PDF photo book, "A Treasury of Selected Recent Baked Apples"

Reframing Alcoholism

I spend a lot of time explaining about framing, but not enough time giving real world examples. This isn't navel-gazing Eastern MYSTICISM. This is the key to happiness, to change and growth and learning. It's the key to everything.

Want to be The Messiah? Framing is the only way. Want to escape depression? Depression's when your perpsective (same as "framing") gets stuck. Want to see your family and friends stroll out of a funeral 3000% happier without even noticing what happened, like by magic? Framing! Want to talk meaningfully to someone on the opposite side of the political divide? Framing!

You can't persuade or help anyone by pushing opinions or facts at them, or by arguing with them. But you can kindle reframing. that you can do. It's within your power. It requires effort and polish and deep empathy, and you must bake fresh to ensure a custom-tailored result, but it can help powerfully.

I recently sent the following to an alcoholic friend:

I'm not a temperance guy. If you want to fuck yourself up, I don't judge (though at a certain point I'd imagine it would get boring for you). But here's the thing: putting yourself in that condition is how you say "No!" to the universe. "No, I don't want to perceive you clearly and soberly", and "No, I don't want to contribute helpfully or coherently". That's what drunks and addicts do. That's the mindset. It's a denial of what's going on (and the problem from out here is that we're the universe, so you're saying "No" to all of us, even as you eagerly try to connect and contribute). It doesn’t feel like a party to us out here when you’re slobbering. I'm not sure you get this.

But you don't actually have this “No" mindset. There’s stuff in the world that bugs you, and makes you anxious, but, more deeply, you're someone who lives to express, comprehend, and connect. And those are all sober functions. That's not drunk stuff, it's the opposite of that. Those things are about saying "Yes" to the universe, and they all require mental clarity. So you are, by nature, one of the most sober motherfuckers I ever met.

You don’t need to grow or learn or meditate or “change” to do those things. You don’t need to add stuff, just subtract. Just subtract boring stuff.

Hey, it’s an option.

Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 2

Continuing from Part 1...



Vinho e Noz
Vinho e Noz (click title, above, for link), despite being hidden way out of the town center on a scary residential street, was so stuffed with American tourists that the waiter couldn't speak to me in Portuguese—he was 100% in English language mode. But the food is real, traditional, non-pandering. Is it touristic? I'm confused!

Nice shroomy throwaway.

We need to talk about the cilantro. Portugal loves cilantro, but Alentejo worships it. They use more of it, and in mysterious ways. An Alentejan chef does things with cilantro that Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican chefs could scarcely imagine. I tried to capture it in a photo. Behold cilantro as biomass:

I'm digging into a holy grail. I remember açorda from my music tours of Portugal in the early 90s when you'd get a thin soup full of garlic and strewn with some bread cubes, much like Castilian garlic soup. These days, when you ask for açorda you get wet migas—a thick gruel of bready stuffing. I've been trying to score old-style açorda, and a few elderly folks have pointed me to Alentejo. And here I am, doin' it!

This is not a great açorda. It tasted like faded glory. A dish from a past generation. I need to get out into the countryside and find a staunchly traditional village where I might find a more vibrant version, and perhaps even one with fish eggs—the apotheosis of classical açorda.

But I'm awfully glad to have emerged from the gaslighting, having confirmed that my memory of açorda wasn't manufactured by my fevered imagination!


Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira
Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira ("Typical Wednesday Tavern") is the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. They tout their high-concept service: a lengthy tasting menu with many daily-rotating dishes—just show up and eat, no decisions required. They bring course after course of basically traditional Portuguese food, with just enough quirks to sustain the “tasting menu” conceit.

It’s all really good, and a few things are awesome, and far more food than anyone can eat, like fattening hogs. Then they charge 57.50€/person, a king’s ransom in Portugal, even in a presumptuous restaurant town like Évora.

There’s no question that you receive value, both in quality and in sheer quantity. But I felt like someone sold me twelve printer cartridges. I don’t need twelve printer cartridges. Nobody does. And while it might be a fair price for twelve printer cartridges, it’s still a lot of damned money when, again, no one needs twelve printer cartridges.

But it was delicious, everyone left happy, and the staff is lovely. They speak perfect English, as they must—it’s nearly all Americans, because no Portuguese person would spend 57.50€ on lunch. In the end, they won me over with the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. And great food.

Folhada de queijo. About as good as it gets.

Beautiful "black pig" presunto.

Tongue sliders with a relish of chopped pig ear and rabbit. Edgy! But by no means a false note. It's both innovative yet organically Alentejan. No pandering here.

Exquisite calamari, decent bacon-wrapped dates (ala Better Homes & Gardens canapés circa 1965).

Thin sliced slow cooked pumpkin (HOW DID IT NOT DISSOLVE? THIS IS MAGIC!) with onions, oxtail rice, and actually good Belgian-style fries. Still a million miles from pandersville. They're not betraying Portugal by making Belgian-style fries. Fries are everywhere, and they're just doing them right.

Ultra slow-cooked pork neck. The best thing. With spinach migas.

Dessert for four. yeah, as if!

Those shot glasses are "frozen mojito". Again, forgivable. It's not like a Sriracha jello boilermaker. They've managed to be clever without pandering. Évora restaurants have mastered the impossible, none more than these guys. They walk the line with grace and aplomb. It's real. And it's good.

Note: the waiter told me "I don't taste coriander, really." He meant it in the same way that a Thai doesn't taste chili heat. This statement was the essence of Alentejo, and I was honored to receive it. I wear the insight like a medal.

Yikes!


Dom Joaquim

Dom Joaquim is a historical, weighty, dignified old-school place, as you can see from the dining room. Though even here they offer (in addition to a weighty leather bound tome of a la carte offerings no one looks at) revolving plates-of-the-day specials at lunch (catch up on that culture via my explanation).

I went for ovos rotos ("broken eggs") with mushrooms (self-explanatory from the photos, below):

...and deer and wild boar stew with chestnuts, with migas featuring delicate wild asparagus, a local craze that only appears for a brief few weeks per year.

Staunchly traditional cooking with no shortcuts. Nice.

For dessert, I often fall into the "which of these things is unlike the others", and I'd never had sericá before, which they describe as milk/sugar/flour/cinnamon pudding accompanied by conserved plum. But it turns out I know it under a different spelling, Srikaya, which always intrigued me due to its random and unintentional Thai correspondence. Wikipedia has it as sericaia. Not sure what's up with all these spellings. In any case, you can't get the full vibe from a single portion, so check out this photo from Wikipedia:

Oof!
Padaria Arte Antiga

Quick random bakery stop at Padaria Arte Antiga, which is nothing special but centrally located and had some interesting local stuff.

At 6 o'clock, that's doce de grão, a fried patty stuffed with sweet chickpea filling. If sugar + chickpea strikes you as strange, just remember how in East Asia all beans are prepared sweet for dessert. It works.

At 11 o'clock, a big discovery for me. Argolas de azeite are crunchy baked bread rings, with plenty of olive oil baked in, very much like a number of Genoese and Tuscan bread-stick adjacent items. This really got under my skin.

The bratwursty pastry at 4 o'clock was stuffed with sweetened sweet potato (they also make them with jam or with pumpkin/walnut marmelada). It would be too doughy/heavy anywhere else, but the local bread is so tasty that you could polish off five pounds of these lickety-split. They're called popias (aka alcôncoras, aka poa de espécie). I never saw anything like them, but found this explanation online (translated into English):

At first glance it looks like a dry cake, but then the filling is surprising and delicious, based on honey, sugar and olive oil cooked in the light until it forms a dough. This dough is then wrapped in a thin, sugar-free dough and goes into the oven to bake for about 15 minutes. It's a typical cake from the Odemira area.

I'm lucky; turns out there's a food fair in Odemira in three weeks where selected ancient grandmas converge to bake these. I'm giddy. I'll report back.


Snack Bar Portugal
The ultimate honor is a return visit, and so I lunched again at my proudest obscure find (I actually stumbled into it a year ago), where I admire everything so much. This meal couldn't match the supernal watercress soup and majestic feijoada de choclo, but the caldo verde and cação com amêijoas—dogfish shark with clams and mashed potatoes—was homey wonderment. The caldo verde did not contain the traditional slice of choriço, and the owner declared "meat in soup is disgusting!" Well, all right then!

That was a new dessert for me, farófias. I normally steer clear of the bright orange heritage Portuguese desserts devised to use up egg yolks left over by the hordes of nuns using egg whites to wash their habits. Farófias comes from the other side of the coin, an example of Portugal's meringue-fluffy egg white desserts, this one with crème anglaise at the bottom and a psychoactive quantity of cinnamon atop.


Ginja Gouge

I asked for quality ginja (sour cherry liquor) at a hotel bar. They poured me this 2011 reserva, and it wasn't until they'd rung my card up that I realized it cost an obscene 29€. I later found it online at €44 for a whole bottle. So, yeah, I finally hit the tourism wall full-force. But even so, it was real good ginja, so I couldn’t bear too deep a grudge.

Ruínas Fingidas
These ruins are part of the sprawling public garden (Jardim Público) in the city center. The town describes it as a "folly", having repurposed an old convent and its grounds into quirky civic parkland. In this photo uppity pea hens peer down on their lessers—specifically, peacocks courting from below.

Redux
Even though I hit mostly lesser-known sidestreety places (Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira a big exception), the food was, obviously, expensive. Plus they're filled with American tourists. Yet I ate great, and detected no pandering whatsoever. I was mugged only once, though I'd have made out worse if I'd patronized the main-drag joints with colorful umbrellas (colorful umbrellas places are the sign of death in South Europe) serving as traps for spring breaking kids and groovy middle-aged American couples feeling "adventurous".

Well, here's all I've got: Évora, unlike Setúbal, is "on the map". They have Unesco World Heritage status, which inexorably lures the groovy. It's also not far from the obscenity of "Melides" (don't speak it out loud), the Alenetejan beach community where George Clooney and his shiny pals bask in local culture by turning everything into the French Riviera. But while all world regions are proud of their cuisine, Alentejo is pugnaciously, religiously so, which might make pandering viscerally impossible. The food's got to be real, even as the economic wheels spin.

That's my theory, anyway.

Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 1

There is an evil genie aspect to life in Setúbal. I'm a huge booster of soulful grandma cooking. But when that's all there is, months of unremitting peasant fare will leave a hound yearning for precision, refinement, and even mild pretension. One needs some goddam yang to counterbalance the smothering yin.

My desperation has driven me as far as London (which is like Pittsburgh from here - $75 round trip flights), but it turns out that I just needed to drive an hour south to the neighboring state of Alentejo—which I could practically spit at from my balcony—and to its capital, Évora.

The Évora food scene is like night and day. The menus are similar (Alentejo has a distinct cuisine, but, like Punjabi food in India, it's worked into the national consciousness). The difference is the profusion of restaurants that are actually restaurants, not grim lunch pots run by cigarette-dangling wizardly grandmas who can't be bothered to skin the fava beans or core the apples. There are captivating winkles and touches. There is care and subtlety. It's The Answer to My Prayers.

It's also expensive. In Setúbal you can't eat well above 15€ (pricier places exist, but they're clip joints). But if you want a special occasion meal, there's no need to fly to London (aka Pittsburgh). Just head south to Évora. I've never been so happy to fork over €30 or €40 for a meal. You get solid value...at least if you choose good places.

But it's not easy! The most anonymous lunch joint in Setúbal is damned good, but in Evora, you must choose wisely. Let's start with a high note.


Sal Grosso
My top find: Sal Grosso (click the titles, e.g. above, for links) was like manna to my tears. Lemonade for a sleeping bee. It's every mixed metaphor rolled into a giant soufflé.

Sal Grosso is a restaurant restaurant. This may sound like nonsense for those who haven't spent months eating grandma pot lunches, but Sal Grosso has pace, bustle and excitement. The staff knows it's bad-ass, and the customers feel lucky to be there, and the chalkboard menu (largest I've ever seen) is packed with enough choices to stoke anxiety—the good kind. I'd almost forgotten what that's like (normally, I trudge through a dank doorway grunting boa tarde, and a sea of limping pensioners moans back indistinctly while harried Grandma hip checks me out of the way to rush stew to someone's table).

I'm eating meat here, obviously. Pork cheeks, to be specific. And those are migas alongside. No one translates it as "stuffing", but it's moistened seasoned bread crumb, so...yep. This one's tomato flavored and colored, and the acidic sharpness cuts like a knife, perfect counterbalance to the unctuous cheeks.

Big takeaway: Setúbal is for fish—Évora natives envy the quality our grilled fish—but Évora's about meat, further heightening the yin/yang aspect. If you ever visit Portugal, hit Setúbal for fish, Evora for meat...and let Lisbon be your souvenir shop.

Bread's great everywhere in Portugal, but better in Alentejo, and better still here. Yeah, the yellow one is broa de milho, the Portuguese cornbread that is, alas, mostly found in the north.

This was the first salad I've had in two years that didn't come with greasy bottles of oil and vinegar for self-dressing. Fancy!

Pudim de água. "Water pudding" might not sound exciting, but just look at that! Those almond flakes are not throwaway. They're super fresh and careful.

Dangerously high prices compared to my €8 complete lunches back home. But entirely worth it.


A Choupana
Right next door to buzzy Sal Grosso, give or take a century, is A Choupana.

You figure this is the quintessential cozy Portuguese lunch room, right? Straight out of our collective unconscious! Ah, Portugal!

No. None of that's true. Nothing like this exists, aside from this one unicorn. Counter seating is unknown here. The hobbit hole coziness is aberrant. This is not, at all, what Portugal is like.

I desperately want to come back and eat here. My eye is very much on the ensopado de galinha do campo, country hen stew. Not a normal offering, but totally Alentejan (for more on all things hen, see my trip notes from El Salvador). I love counter seating. Table seating makes me feel like I'm on display. For many people, that's a feature, not a bug. But, me, I'm in it for the food. I am not a decor element.

Menu shots:

Recanto
I actually started the trip at Recanto, which I did not fully trust despite its sterling reputation. Online photos had sent up warning flares. But I figured they'd know what they're doing, having earned senior status in a solid restaurant town.

Nyuh-uh.

Welcome to fricking Instagram.

Behold overcooked duck with unrendered rubbery fat strewn with molar-busting pretzel salt, plus a multilayered vaguely Frenchy potato slab reheated to the puckered point, served with a zippy raspberry sauce with strong shampoo vibes. Ugh.

You can fail here. This isn't Montreal (where even crap restaurants are like blessings from some benevolent god).


Snack Bar Portugal

I was here on my one previous visit, and Snack Bar Portugal remains my proudest Évora discovery. No one here knows about it outside its small die-hard clientele, all Portuguese. By contrast, literally every other restaurant was full of Americans, which we'll ponder in an upcoming installment.

This is one of Évora's humblest restaurants, but it's a great restaurant. Cheery, clean, the owner and his family are full of positivity and kindness, and the food has both the grandma soul you'd expect in a humble lunch room, but also some magic.

This watercress soup tasted like saffron. Which makes no sense, because it's not often used here, and certainly never in a cheap canteen. I asked the waitress, and the older Portuguese wife sitting two feet from my right elbow, who'd just eaten an entire meal without saying a single word to her husband, broke in to explain the culinary alchemy that yielded the saffron flavor via a 2000 word soliloquy I 40% understood. None of this would happen in Setúbal, where I don't think anyone even knows what saffron is, and where the wives stay home.

In any case, this was one of the great soups of my life.

Then feijoada do choco. Beans and cuttlefish. Kicked the ass of the versions I've had back home. This was downright magisterial.

Finally, bobo de caramelo, caramel custard. Nothing deep or refined, but all balances nailed. What a meal. I left glowing.


To be continued...

The Underpants

One floor below me lives my neighbor José and his unnamed wife ("never mind her name"). They are not a fun couple. This apartment of mine, which cost like a rat-infested fourth-floor walk-up in a bad nabe of Queens, is top-drawer for here, which means I live among the local aristocracy. And I always need to be reminded that aristocrats rarely brim with good humor and joie de vivre.

Horror of horrors. Recently, a pair of underpants fell from my line, splatting directly atop Nameless Wife's undergarments. I slid this note under their door (here's an English translation):

Good evening, José and family!

I hope you enjoyed my generous gift on your laundry line! I assure you, it’s perfectly clean!

I was planning to buy new underwear next week anyway, so it’s fine to throw it away if you don’t want it!

I hope you are enjoying the beautiful weather!

The next morning, I opened my door to find my underpants in a shopping bag. A thick one, carefully chosen to steer clear of full snideness yet clearly alluding to the potentially noxious condition of said underpants, though they were, as I pledged, 100% copacetic. No note. The bag had been hung from my door knob. Silently. Neutrally. "Here's your underpants."

I imagined the up-to-the-elbows rubber cleaning gloves she'd used to deposit them into the thick-but-not-too-thick bag. And the many additional wash cycles she'd given not only her adjacent undergarments, but every last item hanging on her line.

Flash forward two days.

I leave my apartment and find yet another thick bag dangling from my doorknob. It contains a pillow case I hadn't even known had dropped. I went directly to the supermarket, bought a spool of shopping bags, and left them dangling from José's doorknob. The unspoken point, of course, was "Expect more drops!"

I imagined José's pinched grin, wryly amused by the gesture, while she-who-must-not-be-named ran through nasty scenarios. "Does he think we can't afford shopping bags?" "Is he giving us gifts in order to obligate us in some way?". If José won, there would be no response, and no returned bags, and the arc would be smooth. If Wife won, I'd find the bags back on my doorknob. And I get the vibe she normally prevails.

One thing was for sure: she'd find it unthinkable that her neighbor was expressing irony as a whimsical gesture to stoke joy. Because life ≠ joy. The notion of burning a single calorie for shits and giggles would be mind-boggling and paradigm-shaking. I had to be up to something malevolent or taunting or ugly and the bags would be sent back. Note-lessly. In an even thicker bag.

A player of long games, I plotted my next step: If the bags came back, I'd heighten the absurdity by buying a fishing pole, attaching an oversized gleaming metal hook, and lowering the line with underpants hanging from the hook right to her eye level.

The escalation proved unnecessary. The bags were not returned. My joke appears to have landed. I have bullied—with wit and consummate politeness—the encounter onto my terms, even in their building in their country, and even being the shmuck who keeps dropping underpants and whatnot into their midst like space debris.

But it just occurred to me that I'd never have left them a bunch of bags if this were Brooklyn or Chicago. I opted for it here because it's keyed in to Portuguese sense of humor. Among my puny superpowers is the ability to play to the humor sensibilities of different people and cultures (it's a framing thing), and I realize that's exactly what I did here, unconsciously. It was a joke custom-designed for Portugal.

The Value of Rapport

There's a guy I met online years ago who is a brilliant programmer and a joy to work with. The harder the problem, the more he likes it. If he wasn't so busy with his day job, I'd make up projects just to prod him into action and watch him overcome adversity.

Over the years, he's quietly helped me with a number of endeavors, always refusing compensation. Most recently, he worked on my smart phone app, "Eat Everywhere", and, per usual, he saved the day with some clever, elegant tech that did the equivalent of building a stable bridge between a mountain peak in Peru and one on Alpha Centauri. He handled the sprawling, deal-killing technical nightmare like folding a napkin.

I told him I had a cool apartment in a great town in Portugal, and invited him and his family to take over the place for a week or two, since I hardly need an excuse to travel (I moved here in part for €50 round trip flights to Milan, Budapest, Berlin, etc.). I left him, naturally, copious food tips, and overlapped for a couple days to show him my haunts and secret treasures. I also left him my bank card, because foreign credit cards often don't work here. I told him he could Paypal me when the bill comes in.

To my surprise, he was flabbergasted by my "generosity", since we'd never actually met. And I've been struggling to make sense of this. Was I missing something here?

If someone clearly demonstrates kindness, brilliance, and solid dependability, is that mere trivia compared to the vivid in-person evidence of personal style and presentation? If he'd had a pimple on his nose, would that have lowered his stock?

I get that rapport matters. But when competent, kind people recognize each other, that's a deeper rapport. Working eagerly and selflessly to build cool stuff without ego or acrimony. How does that compare with the shallow rapport of being fun to hang out with? I don't hand my apartment and ATM card over to lively conversationalists. It's a fine trait, but it doesn't stoke trust.

Social rapport—as every con man knows—can easily be faked. Tell someone they're awesome, and they'll open their hearts and their lives. This planet is a psychopath's delight; fakery gets bought, hook, line, and sinker.

Someone who contributes meaningfully to your life, is never unkind, and asks nothing in return? That's the good guy! Such qualities are not fakeable (at least not over the long run), so that's who you trust, no?

Well, it makes sense to me. While I enjoy a lively hang—and admire dermatological savoir faire—such factors strike me as a very poor basis for establishing trust or extending generosity. But I'm apparently in an extreme minority. And as I mull it over, lots of mysterious weirdness here on planet Earth suddenly makes sense.

Apartment Feedback by Status Level

I've lived in every status level (currently an aristocratic pad in a Portuguese town which cost less than a 4th floor rat-infested studio in a bad nabe in Queens). So I've experienced friends' reactions to every level of dwelling. Heres how it pans out:

Hellish: "It's nice!"

Dull: "You can fix it up nice!"

Normal: "So how's Shirley's gall bladder?"

Nice: "It's nice!"

Very nice: "So how's Shirley's gall bladder?" (with surreptitiously darting eyes and barely concealed sneer)

If no one ever says a kind word about your home, it means it's either 1. completely normal, or 2. impressive. Either way, don't be alarmed. You're doing just fine.

This also applies to everything, of course.


See also:
"Jealousy"
and "Jealousy Redux"

Non-Aspirational Lunches

I've been running weekly photo essays on Facebook sharing non-aspirational lunches in anonymous Setúbal restaurants. I'm keeping a running index, updated weekly, here, if you want to bookmark. Don't miss the captions.

October 18, 2024
October 25, 2024
November 3, 2024
November 12, 2024
December 1, 2024
December 6, 2024
December 14, 2024
December 22, 2024
December 28, 2024
January 5, 2025
January 10, 2025
January 18, 2025 (bad week)
January 24, 2025
January 31, 2025
February 8, 2025
February 13, 2025
February 20, 2025
February 28, 2025
March 8, 2025
March 15, 2025
March 20, 2025
March 27, 2025
April 4, 2025

And here is a downloadable 23mb PDF showing all the outstanding Bengali food I ate last year at Setúbal's Leiteria Montalvo in chronological order (the olives in the second shot are hilarious. She's trying hard to fit in in Portugal!).