Feeding the Overeducated and Underpaid

The lore is that Joe Coulombe started Trader Joe's decades ago to serve young people who were returning to the U.S. from fellowships in Europe. What is he going to do for the folks like me who returned to the U.S. from fellowships in Japan?

Salmon Florentine

Rose Cafe in Venice, Calif., makes a tangy Hollandaise sauce that is, in my opinion, too tasty for the eggs benedict and other bland variations of the poached egg dish. Yesterday I tried the salmon florentine, which is a puff pastry filled with layers of spinach, tomatoes and salmon. The Hollandaise sauce provided a nice contrast, in appearance and flavor, to the thin stalks of young asparagus. These pictures were taken by Pork Chop, who sat to my right at the table. But that's Geewee's arm you see in the pictures!

Geewee

I'm adding a photo installation to The Food and Music Club. The section will chronicle my meals before and after they were gobbled up. Assuming the nom de guerre of Geewee, I was inspired by Weegee, the 1940s photojournalist who snapped pix of crime scenes, convicts locked up in paddywagons and society doyennes who were dolled up for the opera's opening gala. I'm taking the photos and e-mailing them to my laptop from my Samsung cell phone. The first entry is a caprese sandwich I ate last night in the cafe of Hollywood's Arclight Cinemas. I thought the cooks doused too much balsamic vinegar on the bread (hence, the uneaten half of the baguette). But the tomatoes, basil and mozzarella formed just the right mix of vegetarian nourishment to get me through a late-night screening of the latest installment in the Wallace & Gromit series. "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."