Fashionable Food

I was completely charmed by Thu Tran's succession of shiny, shiny '80s prom dresses (I have three of my own) in the fourth episode --the one in which she romances, and accidentally, murders a cigarette-smoking puppet baguette-- of her once web-based, cardboard- and laserdisc-decorated Pee-wee Hermanesque cooking show Food Party, now on the Independent Film Channel. From the opening "Hello, friends and lovers!" and the odd accessorizing of her often nonsensical dishes to the giant dodo kitchen helper and the fucked-up paper-doll story of rice farming, I so wanna go this party!



And, for some crazy reason, I did not know until now that La Carmina, of the world-famous Gothic Lolita style blog, also made her own videos of "cooking cute" (or kawaii, as it were). (A precursor to her forthcoming recipe cookbook called Cute Yummy Time.) In the second video, she wears little lace hats and a corseted black ruffled dress while making a Nintendo-style cheese ball blowfish. I hadn't ever seen a cheese ball before moving to the Midwest --an undergraduate brought one to the end-of-semester class session-- so I'm a little bit fascinated by the concept of a ball of cheese, which honestly sounds super-gross to me, made "cuter" with endive spikes and radish cheeks.