haverchuk

At the market

2007-06-03T19:33:00.000-05:00

It's the season again, finally, for buying vegetables from the people who grow them. The East Town Market, in Cathedral Square park smack dab in the middle of downtown Milwaukee, is my favorite local Saturday a.m. destination in fair weather. It boasts not only stalls offering produce and other good things, but also live jazz and a playground for the amusement of youngsters.

It's still way too early for any of the crops that really excite a cook. We can still dream of sugarsnaps, asparagus, corn, tomatoes, squash, melons, berries, even cauliflower and carrots and turnips. But in early June the best we're going to get is radishes, onions, and greens. That's good enough for now, though, after a long winter of nothing but storage crops and imports from Cali and Latin America. These folks from Willoway Farm (their sign says "est. 2007"--is that not awesome?) were offering juicy, spicy radishes, and several varieties of greens.

One was this mizuna, which looks prickly, and which I photographed but didn't take home. We did have their mesclun, which included some rather sassy arugula.

And there are always fresh cheese curds at a farmers market in Wisconsin. They're worth the trip all by themselves, and are best if you can wait to eat them until the chill is gone, which no one can do. Then they really squeak between your teeth as they yield their salty, fresh, cheesy flavor.

It is, as ever, my pleasure to live in the dairy state.

Wanna be my friend?

2007-03-25T18:04:00.000-05:00

If the posting here is too infrequent for you, come check out my twitter, the latest craze in internet communication. I'm updating it all the time, and it even has Important Information about my preparation and ingestion of food. Like just now, I told twitter that I'm making spaghetti and meatballs. You know you want it.

After getting your feet wet with twitter, you will want to check out twittervision, which tracks new tweets (those would be posts to twitter) across the globe. Ease your twittering using Firefox add-ons to post from the search box or from the address bar of your browser, or from a sidebar. If you use a Mac, download twitterific, a fantastic little widget that sits on your desktop.

And as for the meatballs: 1 lb. ground chuck, a microplaned shallot, an egg, about two or three tbs matzo meal, pinches of oregano + thyme + and basil, and salt and pepper. Mix 'em up, brown 'em well, simmer in red sauce for at least half an hour, and serve with spaghetti. Don't let Mario Batali tell you not to eat meatballs with your spaghetti because that's not now how the Italians do it. This is America, baby! We eat meatballs with spaghetti here, and we gotta own it.

No War But Class War

2007-03-14T20:00:00.000-05:00

The sausages that race at Miller Park during Milwaukee Brewers games showed up on campus today. There was a sausage sale on during the lunch hour and I guess they were there to hawk the meat, though mainly they just seemed to be posing for pictures. I first noticed them horsing around through the window of the library-café Grind, where I was sitting reading a book. Everyone I saw who caught a glimpse of them instantly began to smile.

The top photo is the Polish, hot dog, and bratwurst, left to right. The Italian was there too, but chorizo must have flown south for the winter. Maybe he's at spring training.

Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away, the anarchists were selling their books at half price at a table in the Union.

I don't know what the Jolly Roger has to do with their cause, but it sure makes them seem badass.

Racing Cheeses

2007-03-04T07:28:00.000-06:00

You know about the sausage race during Milwaukee Brewers games. But did you know that between periods of Milwaukee Admirals (AHL) games, there is a race held in which Merk's cheese spread tubs on skates speed around the Bradley Center ice? If I'm not mistaken, the flavors are original cheddar, cheddar beer, port wine, and Swiss almond. Port wine won the race on Friday night, the Admirals beat the Hamilton (Ontario) Bulldogs 3-2 in a shootout. After the game, REO Speedwagon played an assortment of forgettable songs from their new album and all their 1980s hits, too. As I have said here before, it is my pleasure to live in the Dairy State.

More pictures at my Flickr.

(Also, "I Can't Fight This Feeling" may be the worst. video. ever.)

Better than the Food Network

2007-01-31T15:05:00.000-06:00

Feed Me Bubbe is a cooking show videoblog. I would embed an episode here if I were more clever. Anyhow, enjoy!

He lives!

2007-01-25T13:04:00.000-06:00

Previously I asked, Does W. G. Sinclair, a reviewer on Amazon.com, exist? The very same Sinclair, alias The Duke of Prunes, has left a comment on that post boasting of his existence and linking to his website.

Now that Amazon reviewers can be tracked using RSS feeds, a whole genre of mock reviews has sprung up. I mention some of these satirists in the Sinclair post. Another is the prolific, absurdist Mister Quickly. MQ has this to say about Joanna Newsome's recent album Ys:

My friend Roger Custom recommended this album to me. I was suspicious, because upon his recommendation I also picked up an obscure album called "Sword Cutting Through Meat" ,the debut by the artist Sword Cutting Through Meat. I can't think of how to describe its content except referring you to the album title. Some time later, Roger Custom played me Sword Cutting Through Meat's sophomore album, "Babies Crying", which is only marginally better than his debut. The third release, "Stepping on Salmon" is an improvement that while sometimes having soothing tactile noises, on the whole is too slippery and falls short of its sporadic promise.

So when Roger Custom recommended this album I felt he no longer had any credibility. Trying to sell me on Ys, he described it as the aural equivalent of barely pubescent girls flying giant swans in heart shaped squad formation across Henri Rousseau landscapes. I listened to it and agreed with him on this, but I'm more a Théodore Rousseau fan which is why I've given Ys 3 stars.

As for me, I have been blogging elsewhere about matters on which I am more expert than ice cream and SPAM. The new blog is called Zigzigger and I hope to see you there. I am not killing off Haverchuk but I don't know that I will have more than the occasional word or two to say here for the foreseeable future. Maybe in summertime, when the farmers markets are back and I feel like making ice cream, I'll be a more regular public foodster.

Errata

2006-12-14T09:50:00.000-06:00

The year in media errors and corrections. The winner in the recipe category:

A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka.

Some of the non-food ones are even better. via

"A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals"

2006-12-12T13:17:00.000-06:00

WorldNetDaily:

There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture. The ironic part is, it's a "health food," one of our most popular.

The culprit? Soybeans. Beware! via

Hair loss, cookbooks, fat people, meat chessboard, fashion

2006-12-05T05:47:00.000-06:00

-Losing hair? (Isn't everyone?) Don't try to hide it.

-Ask MeFi: What are the best cookbooks in regards to technique and theory?

-My responses to the Implicit Associations Test indicate that I have a "a strong automatic preference for Thin People compared to Fat People." But as I would not trust anyone who capitalizes "Thin People" and "Fat People," I remain sure of my own total lack of prejudicial feeling toward anyone on the basis of weight. via

-Meat chessboard:

The steak is cut into 2" by 2" pieces, with 64 pieces cut total, half of them kissed by a frying pan and hence enhanced in color. The meat is then arranged on a 16" x 16" platform of clear acrylic and placed on top of a podium. On either side of the sculpture are LCD panels hung from the ceiling. Each panel plays a 20-minute loop of a butcher contemplating his next move.

-Let's try some fashion blogging: OMG! Shoes!, outfits, t-shirts.

(Some of these links are totally stolen from the excellent best-blogs post at Fimoculous.)

Coming soon to a Haverchuk near you: the new Joy of Cooking!

Culinary Metaphor Watch: Golden Globes Edition

2006-12-01T11:18:00.001-06:00

Yes! GG hopeful Helen Mirren is a leafy green vegetable that might kill you! Or so Variety might like you to think. This image came in an e-mail linking to their Globes preview. When I clicked on Helen's face it took me to an article with this headline: "How do marketers switch from selling tasty tentpoles to fiber-rich fall films?" And a few paragraphs into the article: "In many ways, it's the difference between selling candy and spinach." Tentpoles might sell faster than deep-fried Oreos at the State Fair, depending on what they're dipped in, but I would say the distinction between summer and fall movies is more like the difference between Subway and Così. Both will fill your tummy but at Così you might encounter a few foreign words (does "gorgonzola" count as foreign?) and the clientele will be less likely to spill Sprite on the floor. Neither one is good or bad for you necessarily. Just like movies, food is essential for our survival. Even greasy meatball sandwiches are a suitable cure for hunger.

I give Variety a B- for Photoshopping and a D for culinary metaphors. Better luck next time.

I'm blogging

2006-11-30T08:25:00.000-06:00

-YouTube so funny. via

-20-sided pecan pie. via

-Like Flickr, but without the photos. via

-I am sick of boring food blogs. This is a how-to (also a how-not-to) that encourages would-be bloggers to be...wait for it...original. I look forward to the next entry in this series: how to give would-be bloggers advice.

This lobster is huge!

2006-11-20T07:39:00.000-06:00

Does WG Sinclair exist? He has reviewed three products for Amazon. The review that caught my eye was for a colossal ten-pound New England live lobster. (Yes, it can be yours for $149 plus shipping.)

This lobster is huge!

I bought this for my Aunt's 79th birthday, when she opened the container she go the surprise of her life when she was confronted with this monster. It took ten of us to lift it out of the box, which wasn't easy with all its squirming about but it was all good fun especially when the lobster snipped Jimmy's tie off, he was so surprised, he lost his grip and the lobster fell to the floor. It was a slippery beast to catch but in the end I managed to harpoon it and get it in the pot.

Once it was cooked up this lobster was delcious, once of the best I've ever had. It tasted a bit like a cross between chicken and mutton with some anchovie. I even kept he shell of it and enjoy wearing to about the street, it fits perfectly and the giant pincers terrify kiddies and the ladies simply can't resist them.

I award this lobster five stars and a WG Sinclair double thumbs up.

I like this better than shooting David Hasselhoff in a barrel. But Sinclair might learn a thing or two from the people mocking Amazon's milk. And the best are these joke reviews by Jon Swift, all beginning with the phrase "I have not actually read this book." E.g., on Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary?:

I have not actually read this book but I want Ms. Dowd to know that men are very necessary. Without men, for example, I think we would be losing the War in Iraq. I used to like Ms. Dowd when she was attacking President Clinton for having sex but now she is attacking President Bush and there is no evidence whatsoever that he is having sex so I don't understand what the problem is.

According to Mr. Swift's blog, Amazon has begun to take down these gems, so he has compiled them there. (He also has a brilliant misreading of Battlestar Galactica.)

Coq au Vin

2006-11-14T08:34:00.000-06:00

This pair of birds is a before-and-after like the venison rolls, and from the same source. Same moody lighting, same approach to framing and composition, same startling juxtaposition. I am not really sure what is going on in the background of this one. Is that white plumage trying to escape the fate of being slaughtered, plucked, and braised in Burgundy wine? And should the creature be comforted by the thought that in death it will return to the nest before being consumed by its hungry killers?

One commenter said of the venison shot that it is "provocatively somber." I gather she would say the same of this one, and yet I find both of them to be darkly comic as well. If pictures could talk, I think these would chuckle heartily and proclaim that it's good to be at the top of the food chain.

The New Complete Book of Cookery, (New York: Weathervane Books, 1970), 146. Photo by Ben Ericksson.

foodphotographyofyesteryear

Orange Trifle

2006-11-10T14:04:00.000-06:00

This image is so simply orangey-perfect that my words could not possibly add to its power.

Photo credited to Sunkist Growers, Inc.

June Crosby and Ruth Conrad Bateman, Serve it Cold!: A Cookbook of Delicious Cold Dishes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1968), 179. (previously)

(food photography of yesteryear)

Culinary Metaphor Watch

2006-11-10T13:31:00.000-06:00

In the Nov. 13 New Yorker, Rebecca Mead reviews Alex Kuczynski's Beauty Junkies, a "memoir-exposé" about cosmetic surgery.

Over the course of a decade, starting at the age of twenty-eight, [Kuczynski] received Botox and collagen injections, microdermabrasion, liposuction, an upper eye-lift, and a shot of a mucuslike substance called Restylane, which left her blubbering into a mug of vodka while sitting on her bathroom floor, her upper lip accidentally inflated to "the size of a large yam."

Not just a yam, a large yam. But here's the good part:

A decade or so ago, for about a minute, Kuczynski and I moved in the same circles, and she once gave me a recommendation for a dermatologist, whom I visited for a single consultation. The doctor--possibly the same one who later gave Kuczynski the yam lip--was ten years my senior, and had clear, translucent skin that glistened pinkly, like prosciutto that had been sliced to an inviting, tissue-paper thinness, and she said that if I, too, started undergoing facial peels...

Would you take it as a compliment if someone compared your face to a slice of fatty, salty ham?

***

A little extra: I had a Culinary Metaphor Watch, Election Edition in the works but blogger helped me inadvertently delete it. Is anyone using the new blogger? Is the new blogger less likely to screw things up as the old blogger sometimes does? Anyhow, it was about how the right is associated with manly meat and potatoes and the left with girly-man food. I had a great quotation from a CNN Crossfire episode where Bob Novak talks about how much he enjoys burgers and Paul Begala proudly declares his love of Cobb salad. Then there was a right-wing editorial in the Chicago Tribune about John Kerry's moronic botched joke that contained a derisive line about Kerry existing on a diet of lentils and diet soda. And I was going to talk about the old idea of liberals as the "Brie and Chablis" set and refer to Geoff Nunberg's book Talking Right and Tom Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? Anyhow, I intended to recreate that entry but then the election came and went and the urgency isn't there any more. Now that the Dems have more power, it seems less appropriate to kvetch about Rove-style kulturkampf. Trust me, though, it would have been killer.

"An assortment of international cheeses"

2006-11-08T19:36:00.000-06:00

Since this photo has only the caption in the title above, we are left to play Name That Cheese. The ones in packaging help us out (Breakstone cottage cheese, Oka, Bel Paese), as do the ones with names printed on the rind (the biggest is called Cellasco). You can see the cheeses better if you view the photo large. Where is Parmigiano-Reggiano? Is it (or something like it) next to the pasta and the cheese grater? Where is fresh mozzarella and goat cheese? I'm not saying these things aren't there, I just can't identify them. But it seems possible that in the early 1960s, one didn't often find these items in the U.S. What else is missing?

What I like best in this photo are the little extra items planted among the cheeses. The papaya, of course, and the fondue dish. The open bottle of wine. And the garlic, back when garlic was almost taboo.

Craig Claiborne, ed., The New York Times Cookbook (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), p. 629

(food photography of yesteryear)

"The seven basic ways of preparing fish"

2006-11-05T09:18:00.000-06:00

If this image from the original (1961) edition of The New York Times Cookbook had been captioned "the basic ways of serving fish" then there would have been only four dishes: fish with lemon, fish with parsley, fish with lemon and parsley, and fish with neither lemon nor parsley. The actual description reads, "Top to bottom: baked stuffed bass, breaded haddock fillets, broiled porgy, poached salmon with Hollandaise sauce, trout meunière, sole in white wine sauce, deep-fried smelts."

Everything on that table looks good enough to eat even after more than forty years, though I'm guessing some of you would pass on the fried smelts. It's too bad that they have such a dirty, industrial name. Would they be more tempting to you if we called them something sweet and made-up, I don't know, say, tilapia?

The blustery confidence of suggesting that there are exactly seven ways of preparing fish is utterly charming. Of course fish can also be put in a soup or stew, a mousse or pâté; they can be smoked (hot or cold) or steamed. One might add "grilled" but I think "broiled" was supposed to cover that territory.

Aside from the lemons and parsley, my favorite thing in this shot is the fishnet. I especially like how the haddock plate and the Hollandaise boat are cut off to make room for it. I would like the captain's wheel better if it looked real.

Craig Claiborne, ed., The New York Times Cookbook (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 244.

(food photography of yesteryear)

Béchamel sauce

2006-11-03T15:17:00.000-06:00

Some might regard this as the triumph of tasteful over tasty. Perhaps this includes my new friends from Epifurious, who share my interest in old food photos. (Their Thanksgiving dinner shot from the Mondale Family Cookbook, link, is the sort of thing you might contemplate for hours.) But only ignorance of culinary history and practice could produce a true horror of béchamel (or of mayonnaise, its cold cousin in French white sauciness). Without béchamel we would have no proper tuna casserole, macaroni and cheese, moussaka, lasagne, chicken pot pie, and a hundred other classics I cannot live without. Just because some people make it badly doesn't mean it's always bad.

The photo might not make your mouth water. I don't think you're supposed to fantasize about breaking off a rib of celery and dunking it in. But the effort to show off this essential item deserves a little admiration.

The New Complete Book of Cookery (New York: Weathervane, 1970), page 49.

(food photography of yesteryear)

Penguins

2006-11-02T15:47:00.001-06:00

These Penguin paperbacks published in 1975 (Grigson, Fish Cookery) and 1969 (Hanbury-Tenison, Soups and Hors d'Oeuvres) might at first glance seem simply understated, eschewing the the lush, evocative scene-setting--the fireplaces aglow, porcelain tureens brimming, tables spread with outlandish bounty--of so many food photos of yesteryear. But their restraint is deceiving. These covers have in common with many non-food Penguin editions of the same era the signature sans serif type, a fondness for bold colors (though not the Grigson so much), and a playful sort of geometrical abstraction. Compare with this, this, or this. A whole photoset of Penguin covers is here (thx IW). I don't know if the same person who designed other Penguins did these too, but they certainly share an aesthetic. I would call it sophisticated rather than simple. I like the way the subject matter warms up the modernism of the abstract form.

I can't imagine a book about fish cookery today having so many fish heads on its cover, so many dead eyes staring down the prospective buyer. I was thinking something similar the other day while watching the Bouillabaisse episode of The French Chef. Julia starts with fish heads to make her stock and proceeds as well to cook and serve some of the fish for the stew with their heads on. I can't think of a contemporary cooking show that would spend so much time on fish heads except perhaps for Iron Chef. And thinking about fish heads reminded me of that Dr. Demento chestnut: "Fish heads, fish heads/Roly-poly fish heads/Fish heads, fish heads/Eat them up, yum!"

More:
-An article in the Guardian about Germano Facetti, who was art director at Penguin from 1962-1971.
-Penguin by Design, a book of Penguin covers from 1935-2005 by Phil Baines.

(food photography of yesteryear)

"Let the children cook..."

2006-11-01T08:06:00.000-06:00

The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook, written by the women of General Foods kitchens (New York: Random House, 1959), has a chatty, helpful tone and an Eisenhower-America notion of normative race, gender and class that I would hardly bother mocking. Opening more or less at random I find this on page 49:

When there's a great stack of ironing to do, or you've promised yourself to clean out the closets, do you sometimes just open the refrigerator door at noon, grab the first thing you see, and gulp it down, so you can go on with what you're doing?

You're making a big mistake if you do. With your full and busy schedule, it's important for you to take time off in the middle of the day to relax and simmer down. Those few minutes will mean a lot to you after the baby wakes up from his nap, or the children come whooping in from school, or it's time to start dinner.

Well, who can argue with that?

The book's photos, when they contain human subjects, invariably portray girls and women cooking and boys and men consuming. The general feeling, as in so many of these books, is that taking care of the food is an essential mission that guarantees a person's proper femininity. I don't care for the ideology but at the same time I get a kick out of kids working in the kitchen.

Now the picture. I have always thought of spaghetti and meatballs as a quintessential 1950s dish but in this combination of pasta, red sauce, and meat the meat is cooked as burgers. I would never think of eating spaghetti with hamburgers or hamburgers without buns, but these old cookbooks remind you of how notions of what goes with what change over time. Alternatively, it could be "cute" that the kid prepares a dish that's a little bit funny. Or it could be that the people who wrote this book were wacky.

With the exception of the meat, the meal that the girl has prepared is virtually all "instant" in some way. The peas and carrots surely came from a can, the pudding from a mix, the sauce from a jar, the cookies from the box on the counter. One reason for thinking so is that there are no recipes to accompany the shot. It is assumed that the housewife will know enough about how to make these easy dishes to teach her daughter. I wonder if a cookbook today would get away with that.

There are several details I especially like in this image. One is the grease in the pan, as if to insist that the young model has actually sauted those patties just before arranging them in a circle around her platter of spaghetti. Another is the carving fork used to serve the pasta. And there's the color-coordination of the apron and the pudding, the pitcher of wholesome milk, the kid's rolled-up sleeves, her bright red smile...

The caption next to this photo on page 53 reads, "Let the children cook...its fun for them and a help to you. Start off with an easy menu...and just see them shine!"

(food photography of yesteryear)

Introducing Vintage Retro Old-School Food Photography of Yesteryear: Venison Rolls

2006-10-29T16:22:00.000-06:00

I have decided to begin posting new old food photos on a regular basis, perhaps even daily. I'm not going to stop posting about other things but this should make for more regular content on the blog, which might please those readers who have been frustrated by the lagging pace of my posting. I was going to start a second blog for these pictures but I decided against it purely on a gut feeling that it's better this way. I am too lazy to type in recipes to accompany all of these shots but if you want one just send me an e-mail and I'll take the trouble for you (if you'll be my best friend, natch).

If the point of all this isn't immediately evident from the image above, here's why I'm doing this: I love, nay, lurve vintage food photography, especially in color. I don't think it's kitschy or ridiculous. I'm not into the so-bad-it's-good thing. I love irony almost as much as the next overeducated wannabe hipster, but this ain't the place for it. I wouldn't post a picture of food I wouldn't eat just to show you how outrageous it is. If something is outrageous, it has to be that delicious, impressive sort of outrageous. (For the record, I have no idea when yesteryear ends and the present begins. Feel free to opine in the comments.)

This picture is in The New Complete Book of Cookery (New York: Weathervane Books, 1970), p. 159. I am in total awe of the before-and-after motif, with the mounted deerhead bearing mute witness to a feast of its very flesh. If you think selective focus is some newfangled idea in food photography, this should convince you otherwise. I'm also impressed by how dark and moody the lighting is, a quality shared by many of the shots in this book, which are credited to Ben Ericksson.

(food photography of yesteryear)

Mishmash

2006-10-25T15:17:00.000-05:00

-I am arriving a little late to the party, but is anything on the web better than The Show with Ze Frank?

-We are without an oven until the repairman gets our new oven door hinge ordered and delivered, which is who knows when. At the same time, our toaster oven has always been terrible at toasting. So I'm thinking of buying one of these newfangled countertop infrared ovens, which cook food twice as fast as a conventional oven and without the downsides of a microwave (which heat only water molecules, make things unpleasantly soggy or dry depending on your fate, and can't brown). The customer reviews claim that these make great toast. Anyone ever cook infrared?

In the meantime I hope that the lack of an oven will spur me to improvise and innovate (but I fear it will give me an alibi for laziness).

-I can't decide if I want to continue the GG for Foodies feature. This week's ep was so full of food I will need to watch it a second time to catch all the references, and my time budget might not permit that kind of investment. In case I decide to give up the GG-blogging, let me say here that Emily's observation about pears being great in a salad was obviously written by someone who just knows. My new theory is that the new showrunner David Rosenthal is a serious foodster and that he adds the culinary references to other people's scripts if they need a little help, the same way (in the old days, I guess) Tarantino might be brought in to pepper quips about kung fu and bad TV into your Hollywood action movie. ("The Great Stink" was written by Gina Fattore, whose previous work includes writing for Dawson's Creek, Skin, and Reunion.)

-Lots of videos related to Borat movie film are at YouTube, including the first four minutes and several deleted scenes. When Borat speaks his native tongue it often includes fragments of Hebrew and when he chants or sings Khazak prayers or songs it sounds like Jewish liturgical music. This makes it seem all the more silly that the unwitting subjects of his fakery accept his anti-semitism as genuine. (Speaking of YouTube, I love calling Google "the Google." Unlike calling the internet "teh internets," which I always thought was mean-spirited and too-cool, calling Google "the Google" makes perfect sense since Google is singular and iconic. "The Google" also sounds good.)

Am I bothering you?

2006-10-21T15:36:00.000-05:00

Lately I have been taking pictures of strangers in public places (check it out). Some people call them candids or streetshots. Some other people call them voyeuristic and creepy. There's no law against it or anything and no one has come up to me to say hey knock it off except for when I do it in certain commercial establishments with rules against this sort of thing. Shopping malls, Pottery Barn Kids, Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods. I look the person in the eye when they tell me I can't take pictures and say, "I'm sorry, I didn't know you had that policy." Note that the person telling me not to take pictures is not a person whose picture am I trying to take. And these policies aren't to protect customers from being surreptitiously recorded. The commercial spaces themselves do that with video cameras hanging from the ceiling. These policies apparently are supposed to protect businesses from spying by competitors. That kind of cracks me up. Also, since there are now all kinds of cameras that don't look like cameras in people's blueberries and phones and spyrings, there's all kinds of picture-taking going on that the bosses can't do much about. My sense is that eventually these policies will be so unenforceable as to be withdrawn, but who knows.

There are some other things I do that I know technically aren't nice or right. When someone in a car behind me seems to be in a hurry I like to slow down to piss them off. I would never do this in the passing lane of the interstate or even on a main road, but on quiet residential streets where the limit is 25 or 30 I do it all the time. It gives me so much pleasure, and people trying to go 40 on these streets should slow down anyway.

Also, in bookstores, at the magazine rack, when an issue of a magazine I want to browse through is wrapped in plastic, I go into a quiet corner and tear off the wrapping so that I can check out what I want to see without paying for the magazine. I know that this means they're not likely to sell the issue, but so what? It's like a store giving free samples. Every store should give you samples of things you might want to buy if it's feasible to do so, and the fact that bookstores are organized so that you can read the books, with comfy chairs or a cafe where you do just that, makes these establishments the very epitome of the free samples environment. The plastic-wrapped magazine violates the spirit of the bookstore so I don't mind tearing it off.

And then there is table etiquette. It's often seen as boorish to eat with your hands, but the hands are such excellent utensils. Take sushi. The term "nigiri" itself means hand (referring to how the clumps of rice are formed, I believe) and this tells me that sushi are finger food. I like chopsticks just fine, especially for eating noodles. But they are nowhere near as effective when it comes to eating sushi (or dumplings for that matter). And when taking from a communal dish many Emily Gilmore types would look askance at someone extending their naked fingers, but if they are clean why not? The cooks used their hands in preparing the food. Have you ever seen a sushi chef waving a pair of tongs around?

Similarly, on Top Chef once I saw a cook get kicked off for dipping his finger into a pot to taste something. Tom Colicchio was all huffy about it, like he's the only one standing between civilization and an onslaught of unsanitary barbarians. But I take it that finger-tasting is not unusual behavior in many professional kitchens. I do it all the time myself. What gives? If the food in the pot is at a high simmer or a boil, any bacteria on the finger (or spoon) will be killed.

Finally, for the sake of balance and fairness, here are some things that do bother me:
-the phrase "x is the new y," as in this article on $40 restaurant entrees: "Forty is the new 30." Please everyone stop. Also, why the hell does the Times write out "forty" but not "30"?
-the term "sucks." There is no less interesting thing to say about something than that it sucks. (sucks, suck)
-people who don't know how to use apostrophes. I'm grading papers this weekend, can you tell?
-TV lovers' enthusiasm for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (for instance)
-the proposed amendment to my state's constitution that would ban gay marriage and civil unions. (more)

And you?

Gilmore Girls for Foodies

2006-10-18T15:44:00.000-05:00

Lots of food in last nite's GG ep ("'S Wonderful, 'S Marvelous") but none of it excited me. It felt like the writers were trying to include the basic elements of the GG formula but without integrating them into an organic whole, without making them expressions of character in the context of the situation. There was a bit with Lorelai expressing her distaste for squash soup, calling the squash festooned around the Dragonfly kitchen gourds and being illogically disdainful. This was the opportunity for Sookie to squeal that the soup tastes like pie, at which point we were supposed to exclaim, aw that Sookie's cute! Nah. This also functioned as one way to indicate the passage of time. In the previous episode it was still early summer; now it's back-to-school season. Another way they established this was by having Lorelai and Chris go to see Snakes on a Plane. But it didn't quite add up in my mind. Snakes was an August release and squash are at the earliest a September crop. A show that is so concerned with the characters' interactions with movies and eating needs to get these things spot on.

The opening scene had Lorelai and Chris divvying up their movie theater candy. Sour Patch Kids, Twizzlers, Milk Duds. This seemed perfunctory. A scene at Luke's had Kirk struggling to decide between a bagel and pancakes, somehow a metaphor for whether Luke would try to please his girl or his mom. I barely understood this and didn't care. Unless he is being obnoxious as he plies some novel trade, I am not interested in Kirk.

In non-food scenes, the strongest material was the scene in which April, Luke's daughter, plugs the virtues of shopping at Target. The comic bit with him thinking "Tarzhay" would be too fancy for them was good clueless Luke humor. The scene with Rory making new friends, two artsy girls she meets at an opening she is covering for the Daily News, had some amusing bits at the expense of contemporary art. But these were easy points to score and not terribly imaginative ones. I was happy to see a veteran of Veronica Mars, Krysten Ritter, who played the mayor's daughter Gia, as one of these characters and I look forward to seeing more of her in coming weeks. The scenes around Emily getting arrested and bailed out of jail were strong but her über-haughty response to being pulled over were a bit too sitcom. On that note, the author of this week's script, Gayle Abrams, is a vet of Frasier and other half-hour laffers.

Elsewhere in the world of television-food connections: tell me you don't want these Battlestar Galactica cakes for your next bd party.

Mustard!

2006-10-18T13:53:00.000-05:00

Take a look at my spicy French-style grainy mustard, shot food porn style with the macro setting on and the camera practically touching the food. That's the way I like it.

I had some brown mustard seeds looking like they had been hanging around too long and I wanted to eat them rather than toss them. So, following Bittman's HTCE loosely, I ground these (1/4 cup) corsely and mixed them with enough white vinegar to make a paste. Then I combined half that quantity of yellow mustard powder (Coleman's, 2 tbs) with enough cold water to make a paste. The Coleman's tin stresses that the water must be cold. The next part only makes sense when you do it: you combine the seed paste and the powder paste and add enough wine, beer or water to make a...a paste. I added dry sherry, which is what was open in the fridge. The recipe warns you to wait a day before eating it. I don't understand the science behind it (the vinegar/water thing, the waiting), but hot damn, it's good and spicy. Goes well with pretzels, Gruyère-style cheese, and probably a thousand other tasty things. One of these little turkey and mustard canapés is enough to clear out the nasal passages but if you have one you will probably have another.

Gilmore Girls for Foodies

2006-10-11T15:52:00.000-05:00

Emily Gilmore returns to prime-time after a cruel summer-plus-two-episode absence to do what she does best: make her daughter Lorelai feel bad about herself and boss people around like she's the Queen of Spain. The door opens in the teaser and instead of the latest in the series of hapless maids, Emily's new domestic slave is a ten year-old girl being groomed for a cotillion. The lucky kid gets the first good laugh line of the night when she tells Lorelai that her mother said she would have a smart mouth. Zing! She then proceeds to take the drink orders and knows to ask if Lorelai would like her Martini straight up or on the rocks. Rory orders club soda, though we know she likes to tipple and indeed, in the ep's final scene her dad remarks on how she has ordered a drink with dinner. GGs would benefit from more drunken Rory scenes, but I can't complain about this installment of the ongoing story one iota. Tonight's was as perfect a Gilmore as ever aired. I have worried that without Amy and Dan, the show might end up losing its signature tone or drifting off into sharkey narrative waters. But the writers (tonight's script was credited to Everwood vet Rina Mimoun) have been ventriloquising remarkably well. Whether this is authentic or ersatz I cannot say, but I subscribe to the solipsistic theory of comedy: if I laugh, it's funny. I am laughing.

The etiquette training bits are clever not just because they give Kelly Bishop a chance to show her remarkable chops, but because they reveal character. This episode is about the possibility of Chris and Lorelai becoming a couple. In classic Gilmore fashion, this theme is not made apparent to us until the final scene, after Chris has dropped Rory off at home and Lorelai appears fresh from Emily's bash. But we realize in this moment that the high society function for moppets was Emily's way of recapturing Lorelai's youth, and that Lorelai's connection with Christopher goes back that far, to when they too were ten and victims of high WASP culture. GG likes to give us the impression that an episode is just slack, goofball fun, that nothing is at stake, and then in a flashy flourish to raise the stakes in a final scene that ends with a pregnant, questioning fade. This one duplicates that pattern of so many episodes from earlier seasons.

When she is tutoring the roomful of girls at the Dragonfly, one is reminded of the scenes in Gigi between the heroine and her Aunt Alicia, especially the one in which the clumsy girl is instructed on the proper manner of eating ortolan. Here eating food is not so much the point as the pretext for showing off one's good grooming. The counterpoint to this scene is the one in Lorelai's kitchen in which she wonders if she really would like Pop Tarts if her mother had served them to her on a silver platter. She is questioning (as with the hairstyle that looks good but which, to her dread, her mother likes) if she is the way she is merely because of her desire to be different from Emily. This is exactly the right scene for this moment: again, it crystallizes the theme of the episode, Lorelai's reluctance to see Christopher as her great love--in part because he is from her world, her past, her parents' milieu. Because being with him would please them. This is one good reason, perhaps, to reject him.

The other foodie moment comes in an exchange between Emily and Sookie. Sookie has prepared samples of food she is to serve the mini-debs at the tea at which Emily is to give them their etiquette instruction. Sookie tries to sub in pb&j for salmon in some canapés, but Emily will have none of it. If she's going to compromise with peanut butter, she might as well just toast them some Pop Tarts.

This ep also had some excellent bits with Rory and Paris tutoring SAT kids and Rory scouring Henry Miller for ideas to use in dirty texting with Logan, but those things have nothing to do with food.

Answers to questions you didn't ask

2006-10-10T11:19:00.000-05:00

-Is there a frying pan that takes up less space? A roll-up frying pan saves you those precious cubic centimeters. Now if they can come up with a roll-up standing mixer or blender I might be interested, but a pan is a flat thing. You can hang it on a wall or store it on its side in a narrow cabinet. The new product does look cool, though, which I think is the main idea. (via)

-Is there some way of adding fat and protein to my cocktail? A-ha! The pork Martini:

In these pomo days, when old formulas are reborn with futile twists for our fickle, fin-de-siècle tastes, the meat cocktail stands out above wobbly, cranberry-tainted attempts at bar trendiness. When one abandons the olive garnish for that of a pork-rind wedge, the pork Martini merges the flavors of the working class with that of wealthier ones, bridging social strata. It has the humanitarian goal of bettering the nutrition of alcoholics, offering protein for those who prefer their lunches liquid: since meat digests longer, it will both inebriate and offer nutrients for longer periods! It will open new markets to pork consumption, adding American jobs to every level of the meat-industrial complex. And, finally, it looks really weird.

I actually hate this kind of thing and wish there were less of it on the internet: weird, dumb shit people do so that other people will pay attention and say, "hey, that's some weird, dumb shit!" Hate, hate, hate it! But not as much as websites that blast open ads that talk and sing to you unprovoked. (via)

-What's going on inside my fridge when I'm not there standing at the open door? A Flickr group reveals the answer.

It's as simple as it is strange. A photo taken with the door closed, using your camera's timer function. The timer is important. Please do not attempt to get in the fridge yourself. Your flash will probably be needed too, unless your fridge light stays on when the door is closed (a good chance to find out!), or you have some of transparent fridge.

-Which celebrity do I most resemble? Find out using facial-recognition software. According to this bizarre website, the celeb I most resemble is David Bowie of the Let's Dance era.

Edible clichés

2006-10-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

I still do prepare meals, you know. Like today, I made fried rice with leftover beef stew. The beef had been cooked in red wine but it went very nicely with the garlic-ginger-kecap manis seasonings and the usual fried rice garnishes of carrots, peas, eggs, and green onions. The key was to shred the beef by pressing it through my fingers so that every bite would have some bits of braised meat in them. Another trick: it helps to have wet hands when adding the cold rice to the pan. It keeps the grains from sticking to your fingers and helps you break up the clumps.

Now some links.

-Epi-log solicits food analogies.

He has some chops; give me some sugar; don't sugarcoat it; hi, honey; honey will get you more flies than vinegar; too much sugar for a dime; don't give a fig; he gave us raspberries; to squash a project; bitten off more than I could chew; he's worth his salt; salty language; take it with a grain of salt; you don't want to see how that sausage is made; now we're cooking...

More in the comments. I was going to start a culinary metaphors wiki but neither my web skills nor my spare time are up to the task. Of course, there is a difference between these phrases and the culinary metaphors I have been writing about. These are all basically clichés. Notice that to avoid sounding like someone who uses clichés many people say things like "you have to take it with a very large grain of salt" or "you have to take it with a mountain of salt," etc.? They're not fooling me. Also, squash or quash? Discuss.

-Language Log reports on Asian salad languages, which are the sort of things we might call Spanglish. Indonesians apparently call this bahasa gado-gado, gado-gado being a kind of salad. I like how salad means "stuff jumbled together," but salads are often more carefully put together than that suggests and the origins of this terminology might betray a prejudice against salad-making if not against food preparation in general. Also, consider the use of "tossed salad" as an alternative to "melting pot" and "salad days" to mean a youthful heyday. There is also a sex talk usage of "tossed salad" which you might have read about in Dan Savage's advice column. Food terms used in sex talk is a big, exciting topic for another day.

-A newish blog (via zp) called Epifurious recently offered this nasty smackdown of one popular food blog, 101 Cookbooks:

Inspired by au courant food photography, 101cookbooks delights in the magic of macro--the food photographed microns away, the shallow depth of field allowing a single fleck of cilantro into full focus, the rest of the dish receding into the blurry, supersaturated distance. As Ulrike pointed out, no one actually surveys their food from nose's distance. This photography is a conceit--an aestheticization of food that has nothing to do with cooking, nothing to do with eating. It is the dish as a dish. In the same way that the ingredients are labored over, exclusive, the photography suggests that the food is outside of the actual act of making, and certainly outside of the act of eating.

I like pictures of people cooking. I like pictures of the process. I like pictures of mistakes. I like pictures of food as a meal, food as a spread. I like the ugly photographs from 1970s cookbooks, a garish array of food presented from a respectable distance, to be taken in as one would a lavish buffet--food as bounty, food as plenty. Food is not a collection of items, a collection of precious bowls. Food is a social act.

My problem with this kind of food photography, which I also admire in some ways (not least because I lack the skill and tools to duplicate it), is not that it takes food away from its social function. It is that it has become a cliché. Shallow focus is an overused technique. (And to be fair to Heidi, many of her best shots are not of the sort described in that quotation.) When you see one of those shots, you don't immediately see the food, you see the mode of presentation. I see that and say, blah, another shallow focus food porn shot. But the idea of aestheticizing food and taking it out of its usual context is not necessarily a bad thing. This kind of photography has the power to show us food in a new light, to allow us to discover it anew. The whole point of avoiding cliché in any endeavor is that clichés get in the way of our enjoyment of things. A photographic cliché is the opposite of showing us things in a new light. One reason macro shots can be good is precisely because no one surveys their food from a nose's distance. And that can be a cool thing to see.

Counterintuition Watch

2006-10-05T08:37:00.000-05:00

Rachael Ray good, Malcolm Gladwell bad. Yawn.

(Updated: The first link is to a reprint. I thought I had read that article before. Hm. Have you seen RayRay's talk show? Her enthusiam may be infectious, but my immune system can easily fight off that kind of thing.)

The Food Tube

2006-10-03T22:31:00.000-05:00

Where am I? Watching television. Too much to watch this time of year and lots of it is good, too.

Last week's Gilmore Girls seemed to me to be written by someone who is not a foodie but wanted to seem like one. (Backstory: there is no program with more references to food than GG. You have Luke's Diner food, Sookie's fancy Dragonfly Inn food, Emily and Richard's Friday night dinner food, and Rory and Lorelai's pig out at home food. I always though Dan Palladino was the food-obsessed writer and that his episodes had the most food talk. Now he doesn't work on the show any more, so I have feared that the food-writing voice would be lost.) Ok, so last week there was the part where Sookie talks about how she insists on whipping cream by hand with a whisk and she goes on and on. Something about struck me as just off, as inauthentic. But tonight's Gilmore Girls had way more food and although some of it was not quite right (Lorelai asks herself WWTBFCD, i.e., What Would the Barefoot Contessa Do? Rory corrects her that barefoot is one word. But seriously, they couldn't find a better Food Net personality than the Barefoot Contessa? Hello, Giada?) But then there was Lorelai inventing new kinds of sushi: meatloaf sushi, pb&j sushi, dessert sushi, oh so good. And there was a scene where R & L discuss how you make fried ice cream. Rory: I guess you fry it in a pan. Ha! And there was a great scene with Luke and his sister Liz and brother-in-law TJ where they drink white Russians but since Liz is pregnant hers is a virgin--just cream. Ha! And Liz is supposed to be cooking Luke a homecooked meal to console him after his breakup from Lorelai and it's...wait for it...tuna loaf! Who the hell makes that?! (Maybe you had to be there.) Finally, the big scene near the end when Luke and Lorelai run into each other and talk is set in the frozen foods ailse of a supermarket! Shot on location! He's holding veggies, she's got a pint of ice cream, which is supposed to help her get over breaking up with him. Sigh. The show is still great.

More brand fans + links

2006-09-29T15:03:00.000-05:00

As a postscript to my earlier discussion of corporate brand fans, consider this Starbucks enthusiast (via) named Winter who dresses only in Starbucks t-shirts and is attempting to drink at least four ounces of caffeinated coffee from every Evil Empire outpost in the Universe. Someone is apparently making a film of this, which might help spread the star's philosophy. What's that? In his words, "I'd like to see an elimination of global conflict." He admits that this is not really a newsworthy philosophy but that's his line.

Meanwhile, on the internet...

-Bacon Press: Why I Don't Read Your Blog.

-Zingfu: do fun things with photos (via).

-Taking pictures in restaurants: the Cod is against it. I'm undecided. I've done it in the past but part of me doesn't like to. Related: Flickr, does anyone take pictures of their meatballs while dining at IKEA? (Also, IKEA groups on Flickr.)

-Degrassi, new season, tonight at 8 pm on television, at 9 on the web. Having no cable is no longer a good explanation for why you don't watch television. Still, watching on a computer screen isn't ideal.

-This op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is the smartest thing I've read in the mainstream press on Whole Foods coming to town. It addresses issues of gentrification and the big guys stomping on the little guys. On a personal note: having shopped there several times now, I am still marvelling at the huge size of the place, the hordes of people always eating and shopping there, and some of the products they sell. Who goes to a supermarket to buy Robeez shoes for their babies?

5767 since the creation of the world

2006-09-22T16:13:00.000-05:00

I am blessed to have married into this cake, which is not unlike Marion Burros's Original Plum Torte (thx chocolate lady). I bake almost no cakes, but my Jewishness demands holiday food preparations and this does the trick.

These are the verbatim instructions from the family recipe, which we have on a printout of an e-mail sent 9/7/1999.

USE A ROUND PAN;
1/2 c BUTTER
1/4 c SUGAR
1 EGG
1 c FLOUR
1/2 t SALT
1/2 t BAKING POWDER
1 t VANILLA
12-14 FRESH PRUNE PLUMS

CREAM BUTTER & SUGAR; ADD EGG; STIR IN FLOUR, SALT AND BAKING POWDER; VANILLA. PAT INTO BOTTOM OF 9" ROUND PAN; ARRANGE PLUM HALVES ON TOP; SPRINKLE WITH SUGAR; BAKE 350 DEGREES; 1 1/4 HOURS

GLAZE TOP: 1/2 c APRICOT JAM WHILE HOT

GOOD LUCK! LOVE, MOM

Shana Tova! Happy New Year!

Stairway to Heaven

2006-09-20T20:39:00.000-05:00

Actually to Whole Foods.

It was too crowded to explore properly but my initial impression of it is entirely positive. Being there gave me the desire to spend large sums of money and consume 10,000 calories of food and drink. But there were too many people swarming around (it was the post-work rush) and I had dinner to cook at home, so I quickly left.

More details to follow (and a few more pictures at my flickr).

Food fans

2006-09-20T14:35:00.000-05:00

Online Fandom reports: "Retailers: the new rock stars." Fans used to cluster around their favorite bands, movies, or sports teams. Now it's also stores like Trader Joe's. After linking to a gaggle of TJ's fansites, OF analyzes the phenomenon:

Fandom has jumped the shark from media products to companies. Trader Joes is one example, but there is much more of this going on. Media companies are used to thinking of customers as fans, and even they are facing more challenges than they can count figuring out how to make the most of what fans do online while protecting their intellectual property and creative control. Companies that have never thought of customers as “fans” before will have even greater challenges ahead. But if retail customers can become engaged enthusiastic proponents in the same way media fans have, there’s a gold mine waiting for the companies that figure out how best to work it. Trader Joes couldn’t buy better online advertising.

This discussion seems to rely on a different notion of "fan" than I remember from my younger days. It used to be that anyone who followed a team was their fan. I was a Blue Jays fan, a Maple Leafs fan, even once upon a time a Toronto Blizzard fan. When I liked Duran Duran I was a fan and all I had to do was buy a cassette of Rio and listen to it a hundred times. Now to be a fan means to be invested in active participatory experiences with other fans beyond just watching television and listening to the radio. Now to be a fan one must get drawn into online discussions, blogging, convention-going. It's not enough to buy the t-shirt; a real fan sports tattoos.

All of this seems particularly relevant to me as I write because today marks the much anticipated opening day for our Milwaukee Whole Foods. I'm hoping to make it over there later. When I visit and perhaps blog my WF experience, will it be as a fan? I suppose I'm a food fan but the idea of worshipping at the altar of a corporate chain makes me queasy. I know that Star Wars is essentially a movie version of a corporate chain and I don't get queasy at the thought of Star Wars fans. But there's a difference in there somewhere. (Also, half of me wants to hate the place.)

While on this topic, I recently came across a reference to TJ's at LA.com that described it as an "indie grocery chain." That is telling. TJ's appeals to the same kind of anti-mainstream sensibility as various forms of culture commonly called indie (movies, music, clothing, games, etc.). But TJ's is part of the German Aldi chain that owns hundreds of Aldi discount supermarkets in the U.S. in addition to hundreds of TJ's stores and an empire of retail in Europe. Its annual global revenue is $37 billion. That ain't indie change.

More:
-Wikipedia TJ's entry.
-Whole Foods Market Vision Day 2005, a YouTube video in which employees of a WF in SF talk about changes to the store. I would so love to see videos of supermarkets from 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
-Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, a book by two Canadian philosophy professors about how anti-mainstream rebellion is often an empty form of defiance that consumer society exploits to sell people more stuff. It's written in a breezy style to appeal beyond an academic readership, so parts of it reduce complex phenomena to glib descriptions in a way that might send you into a rage. But the basic argument is quite convincing. On the marketing of organic food to upscale consumers: "A more perfect example of the convergence of hippie and yuppie ideals would be difficult to find." (306) That sums up my feelings about Trader Joe's pretty well. (This book owes much to both Thomas Frank and David Brooks.)

WF previously [1], [2]

Culinary metaphor watch, politics edition--now with bonus metonymy!

2006-09-18T07:27:00.000-05:00

Clinton left the White House angry, exhausted, and broke. He also had to live with the fact that he had hurt Al Gore in the 2000 election, thereby jeopardizing his Presidential legacy--and, as it turned out, so much else. Not a few people made the calculation that if Monica Lewinsky hadn't been on pizza duty during the government shut-down of 1995 (and Clinton not so predisposed to share the snack) there might have never been a Bush Presidency at all, or a hyped case for war in Iraq, a botched occupation, a skyrocketing budget deficit, a morally and bureaucratically bungled reaction to Hurricane Katrina, and a loss of American prestige around the world. His kingdom for a slice!
David Remnick's profile of Clinton 42 in The New Yorker of 18 Sept 06 offers this bit of fallacious historical reasoning, carefully presented with rhetorical finesse so as not to make the author seem unsophisticated. Remnick doesn't think that Clinton's dalliance with Lewinsky was the root cause of everything that is wrong with America, but not a few have made that calculation. Well not a few have made much worse calculations and so what? Is Remnick suggesting that Clinton torments himself with the thought that his oval office liaisons were the first step along a slippery slope down which we tumble to this day? Do those "not a few people" whose minds this thought crosses give it any credence? Perhaps Clinton thinks his actions were bad for him and even for Gore, but for the suffering New Orleanians and the Americans treated badly abroad because people despise Bush 43? And does he, like everyone who sympathizes with him, not know very well that there are others more culpable--say, the 97,421 Floridians who voted for Nader in 2000, or the five Justices of the Supreme Court who gave the Presidency to Bush, or the preposterous John Kerry who lost an election that any Dem should have won?

As important as Clinton's past personal woes or even those of the republic, though, the future (as far as lefty types are concerned) might depend on the presidential prospects of the would-be Clinton 44 whose reputation is inevitably tied to her husband's. And in Remnick's profile, we are constantly reminded of the double nature of Bill's reputation. He is on one hand brilliant, curious, indefatigable, and charismatic. But he is also on the other an inveterate horndog. Remnick seems to relish those details of Clinton's conversations when sex comes up, as if to remind us: if Hillary runs for president, here's what's coming. When Clinton talks about reading presidential biographies, the detail of them all he seems to find most fun is that John F. Kennedy slept with Jayne Mansfield when she was pregnant. And when visiting a natural history museum in Ethiopia Clinton launches into a description of bonobo behavior. These playful primates like to share food, and when the feast is done they jump each other and have group sex! Take out the "group" and this reproduces the sequence of those government-shut-down-of-'95 events. First Monica and Bill shared a snack, and then they shared a "snack."

What dogs Hillary as a public figure, politician, and candidate is not just that her health care scheme never came together, not just that she blamed a vast right wing conspiracy, not just that she carpetbagged into New York and pretended to like the Yankees, not just that she voted to go to war. It's a public perception that her husband doesn't desire her. Or, as Bill Maher put it (Rolling Stone, 24 Aug 06, 58), "The NASCAR crowd she thinks she can get votes from will never vote for Mrs. Blow Job. Never." Perhaps he gave his kingdom for a slice. Now what about hers?

Search strings

2006-09-14T19:04:00.000-05:00

I haven't shared any of these in a while. I think they're usually more interesting to the blogger than the reader, but this is true of many things. What I love about reproducing these artifacts of the websearching of strangers is how it highlights not only curiosities of the sort that make you go "wha?" but also earnest efforts to unearth vital information. And sometimes you can't tell which of these is producing your search string. In other words, looking at these phrases is an imperfect form of mindreading, like overhearing context-free snippets of conversation as people pass in the street.

What would a meme sandwich taste like? You won't find out here.

Phil Collins anti-semite. No idea how this rumor got started but the reference here came from my brother in the comments and now I'm on the first page of results. (The top hit is a site called Israellycool, which quotes from a debunking of the rumor and contains the heart-stopping shocker that some of Phil's best friends are Jewish.) I have that same sibling to thank for the continuing pitter-patter of Ginsberg and Wong seekers.

Tuna salad without mayo. I say it's a bad idea but if you're looking for some, you still might end up here.

Continuity porn. Still producing a trickle.

Who cares? We'll all be dead Takes you here.

And when you search for I hate the rich, you surrealistically get to see a picture of a duck breast, yum yum YUM!

"Over There"

2006-09-13T14:16:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Coulton is a folk-rock singer-songwriter who encourages people to make videos for his songs. Many collaborators have begun to set the tunes to slideshows of public Flickr photos available under a Creative Commons license. In "Over There," a jokey miserable song about intercontinental travel ("Don't make me go over there"), we see dozens of very literal visual representations of the lyrics. Over a line about taking a train from Amsterdam we see an Amsterdam train station. Coulton croons about eating an Italian meatball and hey, there's one on some Flickring shutterbug's plate. But although the music and the photos and the combination of music and photos aren't really spectacular by themselves, the idea of this kind of collaboration between strangers gets me all excited, and thus you are reading about it now. Knowing that that shot of Brooklyn Lager was taken by someone just like me--I'm the sort of person who takes shots like that and posts them to Flickr, see below--and edited into a YouTube video seen by a thousand people makes me feel like I'm part of something good. That's how I'm feeling today.

More Coulton on YouTube:

IKEA, a They Might Be Giants-style celebration of the place your tables and chair once called home. This is my other favorite of these. "Billy the bookcase says hello/So does a table whose name is Ingo/And a chair is a ladderback birch but his friends call him Karl." An anthem for bourgeois bohemians.

Flickr.mov, the one that got it all started. A bit sincere for my taste but the images in this one are really well chosen.

The Presidents is a dorky list song. "McKinley kicked the Spanish out of Cuba/Roosevelt was handy with a gun/Taft was big and fat and had a mustache/Wilson kicked some ass in World War One."

Mr. Fancy Pants (flash) is the goofiest. It's about fancy pants.

In other online video news, some people think it's all a big waste of time. Check out the hysterical comments to Virginia Heffernan's blog entry about the big lonelygirl reveal.

Yeast reflection

2006-09-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

Here's a little story about eating local.

I ran out of SAF-instant yeast a few months ago. And I decided to wait before replacing it because:

1. To my knowledge, SAF instant yeast isn't sold in any grocery store in Milwaukee.

2. The shipping charge when ordering it from the Baker's Catalog, $5.50, is equal to the price of the item itself.

3. I thought that I would wait until I had something else to buy from the Baker's Catalog so as to maximize the value my shipping dollar. In the meantime I would use whatever yeast one can find at the supermarket.

That was a mistake. As I found out the hard way, the kind of yeast you buy in the supermarket that comes in what Jamie Oliver calls sachets (i.e., packets) is not a good product. The pizza dough made from the sachet yeast (I haven't baked bread with it in years and don't intend to) is harder to work with, not as supple, more likely to tear. The crust turns out less flavorful, less crisp on bottom and less airy in the middle. All in all, sachet pizza is a pretty dull date. I would never have thought that the kind of yeast you use makes a bit of difference when baking pizza but it does. And it is worth spending $11/lb. on good yeast, since that is still much cheaper by the pound than buying the sachets. The only problem is if you are only baking with yeast once or twice a year. Then a pound of yeast is a waste and you have a real problem.

Where does SAF-instant yeast come from? According to the package, it's made in Mexico for a company based in...wait for it...Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To get their product, though, I have to order it from Vermont. Whatevs.

There is one more nice thing about buying saf-instant in the 1-lb. brick: the sound of the vacuum-sealed package taking a breath when you snip it open.

***

I keep coming across recipes for pizza dough that demand a minimum 24-hr rise. Maybe it depends on the yeast, and a long fermentation is the way to go with sachet yeast. If you're using instant yeast, a two hour fermentation (i.e., rise) is fine. I can't believe it could taste better.

Pizza dough
3 cups AP flour
1 tsp saf-instant yeast
1.5 tsp kosher salt
1 tbs sugar
1 tbs olive oil
1 cup body-temperature water
semolina for dusting

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead 5-10 minutes. It should still be a bit sticky but it will come together as a smooth ball. Leave to rise in a greased, covered bowl for about an hour and a half, or until doubled in bulk. Deflate and divide in two, shape these into balls and cover on the countertop.

Heat the oven to 500 with a stone inside. I like to preheat at least half an hour before baking. Flatten the first dough ball with your fingertips pressing in an exaggerated charade of piano playing, stretch it over your fists, toss it in the air, pull the edges out and make it into a circle. Spread it on a baking peel dusted with semolina and top with whatever you like. Jarred spaghetti sauce and supermarket mozzarella are surprisingly good if the crust is excellent. Bake 10-12 minutes, until the edges are dark brown. Then bake the second pie while you eat the first.

Depending on how filling your toppings are and how much other food you serve, this should feed three or more adults. Last evening we had it with a watermelon and feta cheese salad with red wine vinegar, shallots and olive oil. Danny Meyer says this has been the year for "watermelon as a replacement for tomato," but I've been making this salad for at least a couple of years, so there.

Culinary Metaphor Watch

2006-09-08T20:20:00.000-05:00

Our latest installment of CMW finds us in the land of litblogs where this anonymous rant against chick lit has set off a minor litstorm. (Is my snoring bothering you?) This is how it starts.

You know chick-lit novels, those pastel bonbons that have turned your local Barnes & Noble into a gingerbread house of crap writing.

Are you licking your lips? Can you just taste the gingerbread crap?

Pixlinx

2006-09-07T16:03:00.000-05:00

[indexed]

[Ernie Button's Hey, Hot Shot! 1, 2, and yes those are Grape Nuts and Cheerios, kids. via]

[Russ Feingold's map of Wisconsin oven mitt, by marglytta]

Bullshit food

2006-09-05T15:56:00.000-05:00

I begin teaching today, my tenth year at the front of a classroom. Not that much has changed in all that time. I still get excited. The first day jitters, while milder than in the early days, still afflict me. (I'm sure I'm much better at concealing them than my first few times teaching.) One consequence of first-day jitters is that I don't want to eat. There must be some good evolutionary function for food aversion in such an instance. I'll let you know if I discover it.

Anyhow, I am feeling a bit queasy just typing the words "Sicilian Lasagna Pizza" right now, but I'm about to do it again. What do Pizza Hut's Sicilian Lasagna Pizza and the War on Terror have in common? The Cod makes a connection.

Slightly disgusting-looking tomatoes

2006-09-03T15:58:00.000-05:00

I'm sure these taste great.

(At the East Side Open Market.)

Custard fatigue

2006-09-02T13:06:00.000-05:00

Custard custard custard. I love it. I take pictures of it and eat it and when it gives me a stomach ache I don't care. But sometimes I just don't like it. Like the other day, when I tried this orange dream custard at Kopp's. It was ok but it didn't have any wow factor. It didn't taste like real orange. It wasn't as rich and creamy as plain vanilla. It was supposed to be like a creamsicle but it was missing the contrast of the hard shell against soft ice cream. A creamsicle would have been better and this brought on an overwhelming dejection. Maybe you are like me and can understand that a disappointing few spoonfuls of something you were hoping would be so so good can spoil your mood.

A while back I started this Kopp's Frozen Custard flickr photoset. May I remind you that Kopp's always serves chocolate and vanilla in addition to their two daily flavors. To find out what a day's flavor is, you can go to the website or call the flavor hotline, 414-282-4080. I keep the Kopp's website in a toolbar bookmark for quick checks of the daily flavor whenever I feel hungry and also many times when I don't.*

I started the project as a way of coaxing myself to try out the different flavors and open up my palate. I used to track their flavor calendar to choose which days to go for custard so that I could always have my non-vanilla favorite, grasshopper fudge (which is mint custard with chunks of chocolate fudge). Sometimes I would go without even knowing the daily flavor, intending to have chocolate or vanilla. Between these three flavors, my custard needs were being met very well. But I would drive past the flavor-of-the-day sign on I-43 and wonder, maybe I'm missing something by never trying tiramisu or strawberry or German chocolate cake. So when I started taking pictures of custard, I decided I would try as many as possible and having this little project gave me an incentive to keep trying new things.

Turns out I don't like any flavors very much other than the ones I already liked. The only real discovery was mint chip, which is grasshopper fudge with chips instead of fudge. Black raspberry is good too and I like the caramel flavor custard, though it really should be more intense. Most of the other ones I could do without. I don't like ice cream with lots of chunks of stuff in it (like most Ben & Jerry's flavors). And since Kopp's vanilla, chocolate, and mint are all so submile, all the other flavors have a hard time measuring up.

But I keep on pursuing my dream of tasting all the flavors. Now that I'm in the middle of it, the project is like the sun or the seasons, always there. And like when I play video games, I have become focused on completing the task even as the task itself has ceased to have much appeal. I just want to do it, to accomplish what I started. The goal is actually probably unachievable, since Kopp's has more than 200 flavors (so far I have taken pictures of only 19) and occasionally introduces new ones. There is only so much custard a person can consume, even the person with the only Kopp's custard flickr photoset in the entire history of the universe.

*What else is on my bookmarks toolbar? Glad you asked. The Thomas the Tank Engine site, flickr, the New York Times, the site of a professional organization of which I am a member, the page you are reading now, gmail, statcounter, zap2it, the pages of the public and campus libraries, google news, and drop-down menus in categories for links pertaining to various scholarly and not-so-scholarly projects I have been undertaking. To make them all fit, I abbreviate the names, so my Kopp's bookmark actually is just a lower-case k.

Blog Day

2006-08-31T12:51:00.000-05:00

Apparently today is Blog Day. What this means exactly I'm not sure--the blog day website has been down all morning. Isn't it ironic, in the Morisette sense? (Blog Day might be a British thing, but the internet is global, baby, and anyhow, I was born in England.)

I gather from Silverbrow that you are supposed to link like the Dickens on blog day to show your love all over the 'sphere. I like.

Ample Sanity turned me onto Jay is Games and I'm most grateful.

General Hospital of House, M.D. charts references to GH on House and v.v. 380-some blogs link to it, so perhaps it was already a daily read. It wins the Pete Wells exploit-your-niche award.

The Cinetrix has Sam Jackson to help her keep her film students in line and it's only the first week of class.

Finally, some local blogstuffs: Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in an American Suburb is a Franklin, WI blog about "the way we live and why." And Not Be Televised reviews Wisconsin State Fair food. Eating ostrich: "remarkably not like any other poultry I've had in my day." Dane101 reports on Trader Joe's, soon coming to both Madison and Milwaukee. Yes, we are so blessed. And not exactly local, but Food Market Index tracks Whole Foods, especially the one in Framingham, Mass.

In other news, I bought some t-shirts from Threadless to try vainly to recapture my lost youth. I'll be sure to let you know how that goes. L8R.

When in Barcelona, be sure to fill your mouth with broken glass

2006-08-30T07:36:00.000-05:00

In a Dining In video, Mark Bittman nominates a ham sandwich as the greatest sandwich in the world. What's so great about it? Among other things, it's the crispness of the bread: "The bread is like so crisp that when you bite into it it's like glass breaking."

Mmmm, glass.

(Btw, this is not the culinary metaphor watch.)

Kidstuff links

2006-08-28T22:26:00.000-05:00

Wanna waste some time while feeling young, or at least juvenile? Click away.

Kids make claymation movies. I did something similar as a kid animating cardboard cutouts shooting with Super 8. I think it's safe to say that no one does that any more.

***

Play flash animation games, with or without a kid:

-Deko Boko Friends (I've linked to this before)

-Teletubbies

-Thomas & Friends (the house favorite at the moment)

Surprisingly, the Nickleodeon web games I have played are disappointing.

***

Youtube mashups for grownups, most of them exercises in hideous taste:

Blue Velvet Clues

Dora the Mafiosa

ElmoGangsta

Spongeback Mountain

Wasssup Teletubbies?

Before you die

2006-08-28T10:06:00.000-05:00

There's a meme going around: you recommend things to eat before you die. A bit morbid, no? If it were things to eat before being banished to Devil's Island for thirty years, that would really be something to consider. Then you would have thirty years during which to contemplate the moment you ate that cherished morsel of whatever. But what difference does it make what you ate in your lifetime once you're no longer of the living? It's like Bush 43 said when asked how he thinks history will view his presidency: "Who cares? We'll all be dead."*

The point is actually to recommend great foods that other people have to make a point of eating before they die. So I don't actually have to think about my own demise to join in, only yours. These are things to eat before you die. If you wait too long and die you'll miss your big chance so don't blow it, ok?

I was invited to play along by Eat. The meme originated with Traveler's Lunchbox, which spun it off this BBC poll. Here are my picks:

1. Fresh bagels from Fairmount Bagel, Montreal. Poppy and sesame. Great with lox and cream cheese but also all by themselves.

2. Frozen custard from Kopp's Frozen Custard, Milwaukee.

3. Bratwurst, simmered in beer and grilled over charcoal. Served on a hard sausage roll with grilled onions and brown mustard and accompanied by anything brewed in Wisconsin.

4. Fresh cheese curds eaten while walking around the Dane County Farmers' Market in Madison. If they're good they squeak as you chew them.

5. Chinese buns and sweets from the Yung Sing Pastry Shop on Baldwin Street, Toronto. Tofu buns, meat buns, fried sesame balls stuffed with sweet yellow bean paste, all cheap, greasy, and good to eat while sitting on a park bench or picnic table nearby.

*Bob Woodward quotes "We'll all be dead" in Plan of Attack. I took the liberty of inserting the "Who cares?" part just cuz.

Culinary Metaphor Watch

2006-08-26T21:42:00.000-05:00

Martha C. Nussbaum reviews Harvey C. Mansfield's Manliness for TNR and, to quote one MeFi poster, "hands him his ass." The book sounds horrendously stupid and Nussbaum's takedown is delicious reading, but my point here is merely to share culinary metaphors.

#1:

If the author of Manliness is far from being the patient philosophical type for whom we have been searching, who might he be? Plato's dialogues knew the answer: he is a rhetorician or a sophist, one of those theatrical types so admired by the conventionally ambitious men amply on display as Socrates's interlocutors. Far from seeking truth, the sophist seeks to put on a good show. Far from wanting premises that are correct, the sophist seeks premises that his chosen audience will find believable. Far from seeking analytical rigor, he offers a show of rigor in arguments that are riddled with ambiguity and equivocation and logical error. Far from submitting bravely to Socrates's questioning, he slinks away when the going gets tough, or cranks up the volume in order to try to drown out the courageous voice of the truth-seeking philosopher. Audiences love him -- because, says Socrates, he is like a clever cook: instead of promoting true health, he goes after what his audience will eagerly gobble up.

This would seem to describe the whole culinary trade, fast and fancy food alike. That Socrates sure knew his stuff.

#2:

Mansfield's intended readers do not care what modern feminism really says, and they know so little about the subject that they are likely not even to see how little of it Mansfield has described. From their youth they remember the chilling names of Millett, Greer, and Firestone, and they are sure that feminism cannot have had a thought since then. They certainly relish the tasty claim that sexual promiscuity is a central goal of the new feminism. And just to be sure that they are utterly delighted, Mansfield smears all over the top of his dish a thick layer of sneers and jibes, rather like anchovy paste, delicious to some but revolting to others -- patronizing characterizations of women as harboring a "secret liking for housework," or enjoying "the pleasurable duty of henpecking." Or this: "One has only to think of Jane Austen to be assured that women have a sense of humor, distributed in lesser quantities to lesser brains." At this point, I think, even some of the implied readers of this book might turn away. In fact, I suspect that Mansfield underestimates the care and the acuity of his chosen audience (or some of it) throughout his book.

I can't imagine anyone, even a great lover of the salty little fishies, relishing a thick layer of anything "rather like anchovy paste." But since Nussbaum is among the smartest people in the world, I'm not about to call any metaphor of hers bad.

Idol Live in Chicago, August 19, 2006

2006-08-22T20:34:00.000-05:00

After the first song of the Idol concert in Chicago, Mandisa proclaimed herself blessed to have been on "the greatest television show in the world." The audience approved this line with its cheers and applause. I had to think about it for a second; I haven't watched every television show in the world, but upon brief reflection I was prepared to agree with Mandisa. Whether or not we are right that Idol is better even than House and The Sopranos and 24 and Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica and Lost and The Daily Show and the other contenders for the title of World's Greatest, it is undeniable that no other show sells out arena concerts all summer long across the USA. If one important function of TV is to offer a communal experience, Idol maximizes this appeal. The tour is an opportunity for people to commune with thousands of others who watched along with them, to collapse the distance and mediation of the regular broadcast and to come together in a single space.

The crowd was full of kids but also of older viewers, mostly white but not 100%, and very effusive for its favorites. The first real rush of enthusiasm came when Ace took off his jacket and made love to himself, caressing his chest like a gay porn star as he sang "Father Figure." And they were even more charged up for the biggest stars of the show, Chris and Taylor. Only these two have the talent and presence to command the full rock and roll fervor of a huge arena crowd, but the others give it a good shot. (Some, like Elliott, would be better suited to a smaller venue.) One of the biggest roars of the night came during Taylor's set, when the jumbo video screens cut from the live camera feed to a clip package of Taylor's ascent from nobody to star. Just as rock and roll fans cheer for tunes they recognize and love, the Idol crowd went nuts for the familiar images of the television season just past.

American Idol's appeal is straightforward: it combines singing, dancing, comedy, judging, competition, the pursuit of fame, and a ritualized pattern of seasonal and weekly television consumption. That the audience gets a say in who gets to become a star is an added appeal but I think it would be almost as good television without it. The audience votes first by tuning in. The telephone calls are an added element of participation but lots of viewers don't call and their experience hardly seems diminished.

For the hardcore of fans, though, the devotion to their favorite is so intense that they could never miss out on voting. One thing that made the concert unusual, then, was that the audience was there not only to see their heroes, to see them put on a show, to be part of a collective experience, but also to celebrate the kids they made into stars, to exult in their triumph along with them. This was overwhelmingly the case when Taylor, the unlikely grey-haired winner, appeared from a section in the crowd singing "Jailhouse Rock" escorted by a scrum of black-clad security dudes and jogged through the aisles (just a few feet from where we were sitting in the 28th row of the floor!) to the stage. The fans don't just love Taylor; they're proud of him.

There were iffy bits and off notes, bad song choices and lackluster performances, just like on TV. Some of them were hot ones, some just weren't doing it for me; that's the nature of a concert with ten performers. Reality TV has to be raw, has to show us people with flaws, blemishes, quirks, sad stories, funny smiles and odd features. Even if it's scripted and polished like Idol, its payoff still comes from exploiting the realness of the people. Thus even in a contest drawing on the best of as big a country as America, much of the talent is in some way undeveloped. It seems that on Idol they have some contestants with looks, some with personality, some with natural musical ability (pipes), and even some with the ability to perform a song like they really feel the emotions conveyed by its music and words. Few if any ever can claim all of these talents, though, which is what one should do to be a great pop singer. (Kelly Clarkson comes closest of all of the Idols over five seasons.) Katharine, the curvy California girl with a huge voice, never seems like she has a clue what her song is about. She sang "Over the Rainbow" like it's a Hollywood closing-credits ballad rather than a yearning. Even Taylor, who looks nothing like a rock star but has the charisma and the voice to work a room of any size, sings Stevie Wonder's "Living For the City" like it's a good-times anthem (the lyrics are actually quite bleak). Of the 2006 crop of Idols, none has the total package. But that's what makes it good television: Taylor wasn't a likely candidate to become a star, but the people made him one.

The show had two sets; the second one showcased the real talent. There weren't many of the cheesy group numbers we were hoping for. There were a few duets, including Bucky and Kellie singing "You're the One That I Want." Chris, Elliott, Bucky, and Ace sang Guns N' Roses's "Patience." For encores the group (save Taylor) did "We Are the Champions," ironic considering that none of them was the champion, and "Living in America" as a finale. This was preferable to "God Bless the USA," the final number of the concert the Ruben-Clay year, the last time we saw the Idols.

Some parts were earnest but the best parts were just fun. One of my favorite moments in any Idol episode is when Simon criticizes a performance using a negative comparison: too karaoke, Las Vegas, Broadway, theme park, wedding band, hotel lounge, or worst of all, cabaret. How amusing to think there is something he is looking for that's better than these things. What I like about Idol is precisely its cheesiness, but there is good and bad cheese. Bucky singing "Drift Away," encouraging the audience to sing his chorus, "Give me the beat boys and free my soul/I want to get lost in your rock and roll..." was a bad cheese. Chris singing "Wanted Dead or Alive," getting the audience to sing his chorus, "I'm a cowboy/On a steel horse I ride..." was a fine, ripe cheese.

For the most part the performances were the same as on television, only with slightly less bloated arrangements. (The band on tour is smaller.) One welcome difference was that some of the Idols played instruments. Chris, Bucky, and Taylor played guitar, and Lisa played piano. But none of them played well except Chris. Lisa hammered away like a kid in her basement and skipped all the interesting chords in her Elton John numbers. Bucky and Taylor's guitars sounded like they weren't plugged in. Taylor played harmonica during "Takin' it to the Streets." Everyone smiled a lot. Many of the performers referred to the crowd as "Chi-Town" as in "How you doin' tonight, Chi-Town!" I don't think I have ever heard anyone say "Chi-Town" who wasn't onstage at an American Idol concert.

(This set list is mostly from my memory, but I got a bit of help from the American Idol blog.)

Mandisa: "I'm Every Woman," "If I Was Your Woman" (dedicated to all the fellas), and w/Ace (dedicated to God) "I'm Your Angel."

Ace: "Father Figure" (with removal of jacket), "Harder to Breathe." Ace tossed his hat into the crowd at one point, the first of many such tossings.

Lisa: "Signed Sealed Delivered," "Your Song," "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," "Waterfalls" w/Paris. Lisa appeared to be wearing a shirt with Michael Jackson's image on it. Or it might have been a naked woman, hard to tell from as far back as we were.

Paris: "Crazy in Love," "Midnight Train to Georgia." Paris had on the headset mike to free her hands for her dance moves. Her jeans were monogrammed PB on the butt.

Bucky: "Superstition," "Drift Away," "You're The One That I Want" w/Kellie. Bucky's diction is atrocious.

Kellie: "I'm The Only One," "Walking After Midnight/Something to Talk About."

Intermission. The lines at the women's bathrooms were so long that dads were taking their daughters into the men's. These poor girls, they were so mortified they covered their faces in their hands.

Chris: "Whole Lotta Love," "Wanted Dead or Alive," "Renegade", w/Elliott "Savin Me" (I think that's what it's called).

Elliott: "All My Love," "Moody's Mood For Love," "Trouble" (I should note here E's strong feelings for Elliott.)

The boys (except Taylor): "Patience" with Ace taking the lead for the "I've been walkin' these streets at night..." portion and Bucky and Chris on acoustic guitar.

Katherine: "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," "Over the Rainbow." Katherine looked like she had been mixing Vicodin and booze and she wore a long black dress to conceal the cast on her broken foot. The fans dubbed her Ill Diva after she missed the first three weeks of the tour due to whatever was supposedly wrong with her.

Taylor: "Jailhouse Rock," something soulful I can't remember, "Living for the City" "Don't Get Me Down," and dedicated to the troops, "Do I Make You Proud?"

Encore: Taylor, "Takin' it to the Streets" and group: "We Are the Champions," "Living in America."

[For more pictures see my American Idol photoset on Flickr.]

I say tomato

2006-08-16T20:21:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's not news to you, but there is a variety of tomato called celebrity. I thought celebrity was a terrible name for a Chevy but I don't mind it on a tomato.

Apparently, these are resistant to all sort of viruses. Good for them. They look too perfect if you asked me. I prefer something along the lines of this heirloom tomato which I believe is called a German Striped. It's from Cedar Creek Farm in Cedarburg, WI. One source claims:

This tomato has a complex smooth refreshing flavor and texture which will please even the pickiest tomato gourmet.

I'm not the pickiest tomato gourmet, so this one pleases me plenty.

Is there anything useful to say about heirloom tomatoes aside from, Hey these are really good tomatoes? Actually there is, and Barbara says it. These German ones and the Purple Calabash that the same farm grows and sells (at the Cathedral Square on Saturdays and Zeidler Park on Wednesdays) are the best tomatoes I've had this season. The reason I sometimes think there's nothing to say about these tomatoes is that all you really need is a knife and a few grains of salt and you're a happy tomato eater. Of course, two slices of toast, a slather of Hellman's, a few strips of crisp bacon, and a leaf of lettuce wouldn't hurt.

Also today at the market, fresh okra for my gumbo. Is there a vegetable with a more intriguing shape than okra?

Summertime

2006-08-13T20:58:00.000-05:00

Canada is a lot like America, which is why Canadians get anxious about their national identity, and also why Americans have such a vague idea of what Canada is aside from a vast expanse of cold, empty space between Minnesota and the North Pole. I like to think of Canada as the accumulation of a thousand little differences. Different signage, currency, lingo, holidays, patterns of speech, etc. All of these things give me a warm, familiar feeling when I'm back there. And while Canadian cuisine doesn't bring to mind the same kind of fully formed idea as French or Italian or even American cuisine, there are many foodstuffs that are distinctly Canadian. One is the Nanaimo bar, which you can find in the States but which is always better when eaten in Canada. (It is named for the city in British Columbia where it might have originated in the 1930s, or not.)

This one was from Thyme & Again, a cafe in Ottawa. The essence of the Nanaimo bar is the contrast in textures between the chewy coconut-chocolate cake layer, the smooth and soft vanilla cream layer, and the top chocolate layer (which ideally would be hard and crisp). Nanaimo bars are best cold and they really should be cut in rectangles, but this specemin was a square and it didn't bother me much.

Another Canadian food is the bagel. This might sound off, but it's true. Many Canadian bagels are different from American ones. There are the Montreal bagels, which are their own special topic for another day. And there are Toronto bagels, like the ones below (a regular bagel and an enormous twister) from Haymishe Bagel Bakery on Bathurst Street near Lawrence. Unlike New York bagels, which are dense and heavy (and wonderful), Haymishe's bagels (and also those of Greyfe's, also in Toronto) have a light-textured crumb. Haymishe calles these bagels fluffy, which is apt. (The twisters use a heavier dough.) And yet the crust, as you can see, is dark and very chewy. The essence of bagelness is a shiny, chewy crust, and Toronto bagels are as good as any in this department.* And the contrast between the fluffy interior and the chewy exterior makes for happy eating. Contrast seems to have become the theme of this post.

While staying with my parents in Toronto, the little man had his first taste of Froot Loops. Also his second, third, fourth, fifth... I loathe the smell of these things and the colors are just preposterous. But he couldn't get enough. When asking for these, he said, "I want toucan cereal." All week long he ate little aside from toucan cereal and bagels. I guess it's good to be two.

Today, home and rested, we made our way to the Wisconsin State Fair.

Last time we were at the fair we decided to wait and have our cream puffs, the signature Dairy State fair food, on our way out. But by then we had filled up on sausages and frozen bananas and the like, and there was no way we were going to eat any more. E was pregnant, the day was scorching hot, and the whole fairground smelled of either livestock or stale frying oil. No cream puffs for us. Indeed we swore we would never return to the fair. But parenthood changes everything, so we were there at 9:30 am, before the crowds had amassed, and went straight for the cream puff pavilion.

One person can finish a cream puff in about two minutes; they're mostly air. But what a mess. I picked it up to eat it like a burger and the cream went everywhere. The best way to attack one of these, I decided when I was done, is to take it apart like an Oreo and eat it in two pieces.

For lunch we ate corn dogs. The little man took one bite and put his aside, but I devoured mine. I watched as the corn dog kid dipped the wieners impaled on sticks in the corn batter and then dropped them in the fryer. It's pretty exciting to bear witness to that kind of magic. After careful consideration, E and I determined that neither ketchup nor mustard is preferable on a corn dog. They're great all by themselves.

The high point of the day was surely the pig race at Hogway Speedway. There must have been five hundred people in the packed stands to watch the little swine scurry around the track. We sense that our young fairgoer will be talking about that race from now till next year's fair.

*Why are bagels are so good? Because of their shape, which maximizes their surface-to-mass ratio and makes them fun and easy to eat (easy to break pieces off/easy to put in your mouth). And because they have a unique shiny, chewy crust (the result of boiling them before they go in the oven), which helps them exploit the benefit of their high surface-to-mass ratio. That they are often dense and heavy also makes them good, but this quality is not part of their essential bagelness.

Eat Canada:

Thyme & Again
1255 Wellington Street West
Ottawa, Ontario
(613) 722-6277

Haymishe Bagel Shop
3031 Bathurst Street
Toronto, Ontario
(416) 781-4212

Frozen heroin juice

2006-08-04T11:53:00.000-05:00

So it turns out they won't let a fella cross the border with his minor child unless he has his baby mama's notarized consent. They will keep him from boarding his flight. They will tell him the next flight leaves in nine hours. They will tell him that their website notes the policy, blah blah blah. They might even say something along the lines of "yelling at us isn't going to help, sir," even as he is only contemplating yelling at them. The moral of the story is, don't go anywhere. Just stay where you are and the people will come to you.

Anyhow, my bonus day here affords me the time to harvest some links. I heard a talk once by a guy who promotes films at festivals. (He would probably describe his work using other words, but that was the jist of it.) He summed up his job like this: "I come with my muffins and I say, 'Here are my muffins. If you don't like them, I'll be back next time with some other ones.'" This is a culinary metaphor I can get behind.

-Tom Waits has a novel way of getting around scalpers: you pay for your ticket at the door and then you have to go straight in.

The only way to tout, I suppose, is to establish your fleecing price, then stand in line with, and enjoy the show with, your prey. That seems to be a sufficiently weird prospect. Sure enough, there's not a tout in sight.

(The language is English in case you were wondering.)

-Seva Café, in India, asks for a gift but doesn't demand payment.

...an experiment in the joys of giving and of selfless service. Run mostly by volunteers, our wholesome meals are cooked with love and served with love and offered to you as a genuine gift. To complete the full circle of giving and to sustain this experiment, we leave it to you to pay from your heart. All profits are used to support social service projects.

There used to be a vegetarian cooperative restaurant and gallery in Montreal called Cafe Phoenix run by a collective of artist-owners. The service was atrocious and the food unpredictable but the vibes were always really good. It didn't stay open long. (via)

-If our documents are in order, we will not be in Toronto quite long enough to enjoy the fake prom.

-Sleater-Kinney are dunzo. Is it "the death knell of feminism itself"?

-Los Angeles: Good yogurt, bad customers.

"The bottom line is the customers that go to Pinkberry don't mind paying $68 for a tub of yogurt," said Huntley Avenue resident Oliver Wilson, handily adding the price of a parking ticket to the $7.45 cost of a large yogurt. "It's all Escalades and Mercedes and BMWs. You tell them, 'Don't park here,' and they do. They can afford it."

Authors

2006-08-03T08:32:00.000-05:00

For months I tried to ignore those orange TimesSelect links on the NYT page. If everyone else gets along just fine without it, why can't I? Punish the Times for their wrongheaded attempt to charge readers for web content. Ignore them until they give up.

Well so much for that. We subscribe to the paper so there isn't any extra charge. And I wanted to read Douglas Coupland's blog (I'm skipping the link; if you have TS you can find it easily enough).

Today Coupland is writing about the book tours and readings.

I've been to only a few book readings other than my own. The reason is that once I hear an author'svoice reading his or her own work, I can never read that author again without that voice replacing my own inner narrator's voice. I love Margaret Drabble, but it's so hard to read her now. I heard her read from "Radiant Way," and that was over 20 years ago, but I can't shake her voice, and it's a very nice voice, too. I once went to a Michael Chabon reading, and he pronounced the word, "saxophonist" to rhyme with "sarcophagus." and to this day, if I read his stuff, a voice in the depths of my subconscious shouts out every 10 seconds Saxophonist! Saxophonist! Kurt Vonnegut is one exception to this rule. I can't imagine reading him without his signature doomsday croak bouncing about my cranium. The best live reader in the world, bar none, is Irvine Welsh. In person he's almost mute, but put him on a stage and he electrifies, and his profanities sound more like onomatopoeias than profanities. The New York Times won't allow me to offer examples.

This is an odd position for an author to take--you might like hearing me read, but if I were you, I wouldn't. I like going to readings, not only because I like hearing authors' voices, but also because I am interested to see authors in person. I feel at home hanging around bookstores. I am curious to see who turns out for these things. There's always some kind of surprise: an unexpected huge crowd or a cluster of alternakids or grannies. It's good to know that there are others out there and to participate in a public gathering. And I'm always happy to be entertained for free. The thing I reallly don't like about readings is the overeagerness of the audience to laugh. People laugh at stuff that's not at all clever or funny at these events. At the more literary ones, some people laugh at the mere mention of television programs and consumer products. This is tension-defusing laughter: it seemed this event might be all serious; what a relief that it's not. But it's still irritating.

I don't see the point of waiting around for an author to sign my book. I don't usually buy books at these signings, but if I did that signature would add no value to my reading experience. And I don't get excited by the thought of meeting famous people one on one. Who gains from this exchange? The author might rather be elsewhere. If they seem cheerful it often comes off as an act and if they don't you feel like they're doing you a favor. I would much rather hear an interview with an author on npr than meet him or her when I get to the front of the bookstore line.

Now for the good part.

Video! Pelé signing books with the grace you would expect of him.

Better yet! Book signing gone wrong.

And more! Ali G: "People has been reading books for millions of years..."

***

Setting off for Canada tomorrow, so posting here may be light for a week or so.

The self-timing egg

2006-08-02T09:02:00.000-05:00

The Times (UK), npr: the British Egg Information Service will introduce eggs with an ink printed on them to tell you when they're ready. The radio story has a lovely bit of cultural mixup when the American host doesn't understand what the British guest means by "soldiers."

Meanwhile, CBS is going to run ads on eggs. All those DVRsters who ffwd past network promos will learn that Survivor is on at 8 on Thursdays one way or another.

All this is fine with me. I have no snarky reply, no jokes, no rants, no resigned cynicism. Writing on eggs: I'm for it. Indeed I do it all the time, marking the cooked eggs in the carton to distinguish them from the raw ones.

Brisket kippa

2006-08-01T23:14:00.000-05:00

For vegetarians, presumably, grilled zucchini.

(Hats of Meat, via)

Also, Wikipedia kippa. Way too much information but you've gotta love it.

Whole Foods, Milwaukee files

2006-08-01T19:01:00.000-05:00

OnMilwaukee.com has seven orgasms just thinking about WF:

Milwaukee has been waiting with bated breath for the highly anticipated Whole Foods Market -- which specializes in selling natural, organic and gourmet foods and is currently celebrating its 25th year of operation -- to open its doors.

Well, the public won't have to wait too much longer since the store's scheduled to open Sept. 20.

Located at the corner of North and Prospect on the East Side, Whole Foods will act as the anchor store for Columbia-St. Mary's Medical Center, which opens in 2010.

"Milwaukee residents have been patiently waiting [sic] the opening of Whole Foods Market, and we are eager to share our passion for truly delicious, fresh, all natural foods with them," said Jon Gass, Whole Foods Market Store Team Leader. "Whether they're seeking the largest selection of organically grown produce, all natural and organic meats, fresh artisanal cheeses, or simply an enjoyable shopping experience with outstanding customer service, we look forward to opening our doors and being a part of the Milwaukee community."

[...]

But the Milwaukee location has a few firsts in store for foodies, shoppers and hungry people alike.

Most notably: a first of its kind beer and brat station with flatscreen televisions, six beers on tap and comfortable seating; a taqueria bar, freestanding brick pizza oven, made-to-order sushi and panini stations; and a state-of-the-art open kitchen area, viewable from the store floor.

"We want people to enjoy the store and see it as an excellent meeting place," said Whole Foods PR specialist Kate Klotz, who added that the Milwaukee Whole Foods will have three times the beer selection of any other store in the chain.

Oy.

I usually refrain from picking on local media boosterism--you know, local bloggers/journalists who believe that if you don't have anything nice to say, say something super nice. Boosterism is probably good for the economy and makes people feel pride for their town. My policy is usually to ignore these people on the theory that denying them publicity is better than giving them the business (in every sense). But this article is more pernicious than your ordinary boosterism, for at least two reasons.

1. WF is competing with local business; it's a giant from outside appropriating our beer-and-brat culture to sell it back to us at a premium.

2. This article doesn't even bother to filter the corporate ~~horseshit~~ PR statements. It quotes them as though they were news.

One more thing:

Whole Foods has scheduled a Job Fair for Aug. 23 at the Midwest Airlines Center.

My Canon A620 and I will check that out if we get the chance.

(previously)

Food person

2006-07-31T20:16:00.000-05:00

The Cod proposes a new word in place of f***ie to describe those with a passion for eating.

Allow me to propose "foodneck" as an alternative. I'm not making a big push, just give it a test drive:

"My sister's staying with us on Friday -- she's a real foodneck -- where should we take her for dinner?"

Give it a try, and let me know how it works out for you.

Foodneck. Food Neck. Foodneck.

A commenter (commentator?) named Hugh responded:

As for "foodneck" , how about foodnik? "foodneck" sounds like a cross between redneck and some sort of clam.

To which the Cod replied:

As for "foodnik," I think it sounds too much like a faux Yiddish insult.

I added:

I too was wondering neck/nik and thinking redneck. Mulling it over. I like that it sounds unusual. But I do want a term I can feel comfortable using to describe myself.

My dining companion suggested "fooder," making an analogy to Star Trek fans. We might call them Trekkies, but apparently they prefer to be called Trekkers--they're on the trek too. I have also considered "foodist," which would be better if it didn't sound so much like nudist. El Fooderino?

You may recall that I earlier floated the term foodinista with reservations expressed that it might sound too feminine. I had in mind the Sandinistas and Zapatistas (both of them dudely -istas as far as I know) more than the fashionistas, which Doug seemed to sense in his comment:

"Foodinista" sounds to me like a term of derision an opponent might use to describe an obese Nicaraguan Marxist.

That's a good one.

So, I'm prepared to use foodneck if others will go along with it but I don't want to be the lonely soul saying "aubergine" in an "eggplant" culture. I don't really think it's very likely that we will invent a word since it almost never works that way, but the power of the internet is potentially magnificent.

(Other terms occur to me: foodophile, foodster. I'm not going to start now with words beginning gastro-, eat-, aliment-, grub-, nosh-, and chow-.)

MORE: Jam Faced doesn't have the answer either.

Foodie. "Oh you're a bit of a foodie are you, ho, ho, ho". I'd love it if that last "ho" was cut off by the sound of one of my Global knives being stuck into speaker's solar plexus. It's like, having made a conscious decision to like my food, instead of pouring pig swill down my gullet like some deranged goose destined for a Frenchman's lunch box, I am somewhere between a vegetarian and someone who is into crystals or, in the minds of most of fellow male Englishman, probably just gay.

Bad culinary metaphor watch

2006-07-31T13:32:00.000-05:00

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate on the Jessica Cutler case (she had sex with a guy and blabbed on her blog; he's suing her):

In the short term, Steinbuch's suit has only added buttercream frosting to the cake of humiliation Cutler baked him. It's hard to fathom how his privacy interests are being protected by a pleading that recycles every salacious detail from her blog. But he is clearly angry and embarrassed and in search of some justice, and he has thus sued her for the tort of "public disclosure of private facts."

"Buttercream" is a wonderful touch, but I would have dragged my cursor over "cake of humiliation," thought for a second, and hit delete. The image of this man eating her cake is de trop.

"A vast vault of our common human culture..."

2006-07-30T08:07:00.000-05:00

Dear You Tube,
I surrender. You win. I am your humble servant. All hail you.
May I have at least a portion of my life back now?
Meekly,
mzn

***

-PT Anderson talking to Henry Rollins about his current film project based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil. At 3:15 he talks about being Robert Altman's understudy shooting Prairie Home Companion. HR's tattoos are a distraction. They should put long sleeves on him for this gig.

-Jorge Luis Borges from 1976, in Spanish (no idea what he's talking about).

-Noam Chomsky debates Michel Foucault in 1971 (parts one and two). Foucault listens to Chomsky with his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. Both men speak in paragraphs.

-Leonard Cohen in 1966 plugging Beautiful Losers. "By writing a pornographic novel in a sense you're forced into the role of a very minor hero."

-Francis Ford Coppola on film preservation for the LoC. "Technology is a servant. It's not a master." Years before You Tube, Coppola describes the internet as a future "vast vault of our common human culture, the real wealth of the human race."

-Daniel Dennett. "Of course there is no God, but so what?" Later, "Very few people behave as if they really believe in God. A lot of people behave as if they believe they should believe in God."

Rather tedious. If you have a negative impression of academics, this video will not cure you of it.

-Jacques Derrida on suffering anti-Semitism as a child in Algeria. For someone notorious for his academese, he speaks plainly, directly, and with great feeling.

At 1:37 he makes air-quotes with a single pointing index finger on each hand rather than the two-fingered hopping-bunny gesture that itself now comes off as deadly ironic.

At 2:17 he strikes a classic "thinker" attitude, thumb and two fingers against his forehead, as though pressing on his skull will help the thoughts form.

At 2:48 you can see that he's holding a pink bic cigarette lighter in his hand. Details, details.

-Fellini directing Satyricon, his voice on the set at once gentle and authoritative. The director as God.

-Richard Feynman first in 1965 standing at a blackboard in b&w, then in 1983 sitting on a sofa in color, explains why they gave him the Nobel Prize. He smiles a lot, and it seems there is nothing he would rather be doing than talking physics in front of a camera. He talks with his hands and his accent sounds Brooklyn (Wikipedia: Far Rockaway, so I'm not far off), and these aural and visual cues are remarkably engaging and persuasive. The curl of his fingers and pitch of his voice seem to make you understand properties of light as it bounces around the room.

-Malcolm Gladwell responds to a sycophantic question (Has the internet reached a tipping point?) with an unconvincing attempt at self-deprecation.

-John Irving: "I don't see myself as an intellectual. I don't even see myself as an artist. I think of myself as a craftsman."

-Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show from 1959. It might seem like nothing if you were a TV viewer in the 50s, but to me it's quite odd that Allen played piano while interviewing his guests.

-Yves Klein, "Anthropometries of the Blue Period and Fire Paintings," 1960. Woman as paintbrush, as stencil. Then out comes an enormous phallic blowtorch. Probably NSFW.

-David Lynch with mesmerizing body language. "I'm looking for a certain kind of fish to translate into cinema." In context it makes more sense, but out of context it sounds more Lynchian.

-Russ Meyer. "Her breasts were so huge..."

-Errol Morris identifies with the topiary artist in his film Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. This clip makes you realize how important style is even in something as seemingly plain as the talking-heads documentary. If Morris himself had shot this clip it would a thousand times more interesting.

On his desire for immortality through his art, which he addresses obliquely by describing a visit to a dinosaur exhibit: "It's only the privileged few of us who get to be fossils."

For comparison's sake, here is Morris's tribute to the movies from the 2002 Oscars. Lots of famous faces here. I count two chefs, Rocco and Alice. She says, "Movies are like food. They're essential to your life." Lots of faces I recognize but without being able to match them to a name. I caught Susan Sontag, Donald Trump, Laura Bush, Philip Glass, and a bunch of others.

-Salman Rushdie on The O'Reilly Factor. Rushdie survived nine years of the Ayatollah's fatwa, so O'Reilly should be nothing.

He seems not to know O'Reilly's reputation. He reacts to the blustery questions about Islamic fascism and people trying to kill him (posed sympathetically) like someone being interviewed by Ali G: earnest, trying to find common ground.

-Jonathan Safran Foer on being a vegetarian. When he says he doesn't think his non-veggie friends are "unethical" you can kind of tell that, actually, he hasn't made up his mind about it. Why promote the virtues of vegetarianism if you don't think this is an ethical choice?

-Jean-Paul Sartre.

-Charles M. Schulz becoming misty-eyed as he describes putting Peanuts to rest. "That poor kid, he never even got to kick the football," he says, laughing through his tears.

-Kurt Vonnegut on The Daily Show. Don Rumsfeld: "He is so dumb!"

-Tom Waits on The Mike Douglas Show in 1976. After performing "Eggs and Sausage" (is there any better food song?) from Nighthawks at the Diner he submits to the interview (beginning around 4 minutes). I always thought Waits's hipster persona was pretty authentic, but here as a young man he seems like a poseur and Douglas pretty much calls him on it, calling him middle-class and asking how he came by his voice. Waits calls himself a "curator," an apt if surprising description of his songwriting.

Asked if he considers himself a poet or a singer, Waits replies, "I'm a Methodist." I think he has used that one more than once.

(Cf. Harmony Korine on Letterman.)

-Wim Wenders interviewed, seems like a press junket setup. Wenders is amused when the reporter's cell phone rings during the interview.

-Slavoj Zizek begins by answering the question, What is Philosophy? But within 45 seconds he is talking about a deadly virus from outer space.

At 1:39 we cut to Zizek pontificating from his bed in what appears to be a hotel room, the covers pulled up over his tummy but his bare hairy chest exposed for the camera. "Philosophy is a very modest discipline" comes off sounding less than sincere from this position. At 2:57 he pulls the covers up a bit and repeats his line about philosophy being very modest, oblivious of his double meaning.

After 3:00 we see a series of fake ads on a vintage television screen pointing out ostensibly devastating contradictions of postmodern life: cream without fat, beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine. For this you need philosophy? "Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint." But not yesterday's? His best example to epitomize the condition of late capitalism is chocolate laxatives. "Do you have still constipation? Eat more of this chocolate." Does chocolate even cause constipation? (I search Google; some claim it does.) An offscreen audience laughs a bit but without a reverse shot we can't hope to tell if they're laughing with or at.

DIY Coke

2006-07-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

The Guardian:

Kate Rich and Kayle Brandon are bar managers at the Cube Multiplex, an "alternative" cinema in central Bristol. Opposed in principle to the business and environmental practices of the Coca-Cola corporation, the Cube bar has never served Coke. That doesn't mean there isn't a demand for it. "We'd tried Pepsi and Virgin Cola and various others too," says Brandon, "but they weren't really a positive alternative. They were acceptable, but they weren't Coke. And people really want Coke."

After conducting various taste tests, they felt the preference had less to do with flavour than the power of the brand. Any alternative they were going to offer had not only to taste almost identical but overcome the incredible pull of Coca-Cola's marketing. "Given that most of the Cube's customers come because they like the place's DIY attitude," Brandon explains, "one way of doing that was to make the cola ourselves."

The ingredients include:

Using food-grade essential oils, assemble 3.75ml orange oil; 3ml lime oil; 1ml lemon oil; 1 ml cassia oil (nb. reduce cassia content for next production); 0.75ml nutmeg oil; 0.25ml coriander oil (6 drops); 0.25ml lavender oil (6 drops); 0.25ml neroli oil (optional/removed due to high cost).

Using a measuring syringe, measure out the oils into a glass or ceramic container. Keep covered to avoid volatile oil fumes escaping. Then dissolve 10g instant gum arabic (equivalent to 22ml) in 20ml water (low calcium/low magnesium, Volvic is good) with one drop vodka - Cube uses Zubrowka. (Be aware that total quantity of vodka will be 0.0007ml per litre of Cube-cola).

It goes on. It's well worth reading start to finish. (via)

I hate the rich!

2006-07-28T08:07:00.000-05:00

My non-blogging pursuits are taking just about 24 out of 24 of my hours lately, but I haven't forgotten about you. There will be more food etc. in these pages, and maybe even a new blog subtitle (perhaps food etc.?). In the meantime here are some things I've been reading/doing.

***

Duck breast, you know you want it (unless you're a vegetarian in which case...). Scored through the skin and sautéed in the cast iron to medium, about four minutes per side. Now here's the beauty part. While the breasts rest, you toss some parcooked fingerling potatoes in the hot rendered fat and warm them up, then add salt and chopped parsley. Uh huh.

***

I've been reading all kinds of books about alternative/indie cultures and I may post something comparing food and music "fans" if my act gets together. Can one be called a food fan? Obviously, I'm looking for a substitute for foodie. Maybe foodinista, which I would like better if it didn't sound so feminine. In case you're still wondering, I am of the male persuasion. Anyway, I really liked Stephen Duncombe's Notes from Undergrond: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. If you have a thing for Marxism or zines, you'll love Duncombe.

***

This essay by Jay Weinstein, the author of The Ethical Gourmet, asks you to forego bottled water for the stuff from the faucet. He writes: "Beautiful presentation can elevate humble tap water to the fine dining level." I don't care for the essay's didactic tone or the snobby tang of the phrase "fine dining," but he does seem to be onto something. "Didactic but onto something" bascially sums up my feeling about the book too, which of course I haven't read. On Malcolm Gladwell's blog he has been talking about whether or not most blogging is "derivative," by which he means feeding off MSM material (the less kind way to put it would be "parasitic"). And along the way he mentions how many bloggers pronounce judgment on books they haven't read, as though this is a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing. People trying to sell books find it advantageous to give much of them away for free in interviews and published excerpts, and you can learn lots more from reviews, which often contain material unimaginatively paraphrased from publicity copy. Better yet, you can read a genius précis like John Crace on Buford (chocolatelady=source of all wisdom). Presumably publishers do their best to give an honest representation of what a book contains (if they don't, shame on them), and so people have a right to discuss this public discourse. And unlike MSM outlets, few bloggers get free review copies of books. Finally, who has time to read all the books they want to talk about? And why would you bother with, say, Caitlan Flanagan or Ann Coulter or James Frey? You rant about how much it pisses you off and move on to the next thing that drives you up the blog. I understand why, as one who writes books for a living, Gladwell wishes people would buy new books. But he must also understand that smart people wait until a book comes out in paper or until they can get the library's copy. Why wait to participate in the public discussion until you can get a copy you can afford, at which point no one's talking any more?

"Derivative" is such a bogus term anyway. Aren't Gladwell's articles derivative of social psychology and retail science and dog whisperology?

***

Most of last season's Gilmore Girls is still on our surgically-enhanced TiVo. Since the Palladinos will no longer be running the show, I feel an extra attachment to these last episodes from their years creating it. Last night we watched much of ep 6.05, originally aired 11/6/05, "We've Got Magic To Do" (script by Daniel Palladino). This is the one where Rory organizes the USO-themed DAR shindig and enlists Paris to help in the kitchen. I'm really going to miss Dan's voice writing these characters next season.

PARIS: Hey, boss! It's interesting, you know, Karl Marx has come alive for me today. I never understood what he was yammering about before and now it just seems so obviously wrong that those who control capital should make their fortunes off the labor of the working class. What's wrong with you?

RORY: Shira Huntzberger is here!

PARIS: Logan's mom?

RORY: She showed up with no warning! No RSVP, no donation to the cause that I know of. Just sashayed in expecting everyone to fall at her feet!

PARIS: I hate that!

RORY: I hate her! Hate. Strong, unadulterated, blind, argh!

PARIS: Wow. You're always so Desmond Tutu-y. This is refreshing.

RORY: I should tell her to leave. I should march up to her and tell her to grab those arrogance-dripping petulance-oozing surgically cosmeticized bims she brought along and hit the bricks!

PARIS: I bet they all have money, too. Every one of those commodity fetishists.

RORY: How can she expect a table? The tables are for the people who are polite enough to respond to an invitation in the proper manner!

PARIS: I bet the Romanovs never RSVP'd either. They got theirs, capitalist scum.

RORY: I hate her!

PARIS: I hate the rich! A hard rain is gonna fall, you know what I'm saying?

RORY: I really hate her!

PARIS: They should die.

RORY: I should probably give her a table.

PARIS: What?

RORY: Well, we have a spare table. I kept it open in case of something like this. I should give it to her.

PARIS: But she doesn't deserve it!

RORY: I know, but this is business! It's not personal. I should give her that table.

PARIS: Fine. Whatever you think. You're the boss. Hey, boss, how much are you being paid in this job of yours?

Volume 1

2006-07-25T00:00:00.000-05:00

This little blog is one year old today. In its honor I have compiled this index. The alphabetization is lackadaisical and the categories are a bit arbitrary, but everything I care to remember is here. Entries marked with an asterisk are those I decided to mark with an asterisk.

Bad food
Bialy*
Bill Buford in the NYer on learning to butcher pigs
Body Worlds, the plastinated people at the Museum of Science & Industry
Bookstore w/little man
Dad's pancakes
The Da Vinci Code
Del Posto's breadcrumbs
Eggs poached and scrambled, an anti-NYT mag recipe rant
Elliptical, the word
Flickr interestingness cities
Flosters, the fresh-local-organic movement that some think isn't elitist
Food memoir, some conventions/clichés
Food porn, about an article in Harper's comparing the Food Network with pornography, filthy dirty*
Foodie, a stupid word*
Gilmore Girls, food and drink in
Green tree, on the little man's food lingo
Harold McGee speaking in Madison
Henderson, The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating
Homaru Cantu profiled in Fast Compay
Jeni's ice creams, 9 pints of 'em, and an update
Julie Powell, with observations on bad blog photography*
Kugel by my father
Leftover pasta*
The little man's food lingo
Little sister: Canadian in the U.S.
Little sister: on teaching 2nd and 3rd graders
Little sister: a rant about celebrities and Kabbalah
Martha Stewart as adjective
Michiu (Chinese rice wine)
Milwaukee Art Museum w/little man
Monkfish, w/dramatic photo
Music nostalgia (Billy Joel, Genesis, The Police)
Nancy Franklin, against
Old food*
Ordering in restaurants*
Park w/little man
Playground w/little man in chilly April
Podcasts about food
Potlucks, against*
Porn as metaphor (including continuity porn)*
Random, a vexing word*
Royale w/cheese, a hamburger served at The Social
Sarah Lucas (UK artist who uses food in her work)
Schmaltz and multi-cullti kidlit*
Square bagel*
Squash galore
Stravecchio cheese
Stupid kitchen appliances including the Rival chocolate fountain*
Television at mid-season with notes on Commander-in-Chief, Book of Daniel, Idol, Arrested, the CW
TiVo and the little man
Toilet training infants
Toronto eating, Christmastime
Tripe*
Turkey, for
Vinegar
Vitamin water
Whole Foods, Milwaukee
Workout playlist i
Workout playlist ii

Farmers market i
Farmers market ii
Farmers market iii
Farmers market iv
Farmers market v
Farmers market vi
Farmers market vii
Milwaukee public market i

Five food memories
My sister's five food memories
My favorite foods (also pictures of the kitchen here)

Baba ganoush
Bacon-wrapped chicken livers
Barbecue
Beans, greens and sausages
Beer can chicken
Buttermilk pancakes
Caesar salad
Carbonades Flamandes (beef braised in beer)
Cashew chicken
Cherries Jubilee*
Chicken a la King*
Chicken salad i
Chicken salad ii
Chicken soup, "Chinese"
Chicken stock
Chicken vesuvio
Chopped liver
Cincinnati chili
Cuban sandwich
Cure for the winter blues (Champagne cocktail)
Duck breast salad w/cherries*
Duck legs
Eggplant parmesan*
Eggs in aspic*
Eggs w/cheese and onions a la Bagel World
Eggs, devilled*
Eggs, scrambled with morels
Fish tacos
Fried rice i
Fried rice ii
Fried rice iii (this one with SPAM)
Frittata w/carmelized salmon and goat cheese
Gefilte fish/Pacific NW variation*
Green shrimp burger
Habanero vodka
Hamburger*
Hash (noodles and beef)*
Hoppin' John
Israeli couscous
Matzo balls
Manhattan cocktail, among my end-of-year reflections*
Martini
Mayonnaise*
Mussels w/garlic, chiles, and wine
Pasta with clams alla vodka + pizza margherita
Pizza fontina
Pork butt braised in Bass Ale
Pot roast
Ribs
Salade niçoise
Sesame-crusted tuna w/wasabi mashers
Short ribs, braised in Belgian ale (from the Zuni cookbook)
Shrimp chowder
Shrimp cocktail*
Skate w/beurre noisette
Spinach salad w/bacon, cherries, and a fried egg
Split pea soup
Steak frites
Steak au poivre
Steamed fish (escolar w/ginger and black beans)
The tuna casserole
Tuna salad, a statement of principles or something*
Turkey burgers
Turkey meatloaf
Turkey pot pie, cornbread crust
Summer veggie stew

Fortune Chinese Restaurant
Harlequin Bakery
Jake's Deli
Kopp's Frozen Custard, and again
Lakefront Brewery fish fry
Leon's Frozen Custard
Speed Queen BBQ

Apples and honey ice cream
Berry buttermilk sherbet
Black sesame ice cream *
Caramel ice cream*
Cardamom ice cream
Egg ice cream
Green chile mint ice cream*
Mango cream cheese ice cream
Mint chocolate chip ice cream
Mocha ice cream
Mojito cream cheese ice cream
Oatmeal raisin ice cream
Peach frozen yogurt
Rice ice cream
Sour cream anise ice cream
Strawberry ice cream
Watermelon sour cream sherbet

Stylish

2006-07-20T10:14:00.000-05:00

If you read with your eyes open you'll often find in odd sections of the NYT nuggets of food journalism that should make the Dining In/Dining Out crew watch their turf. These days I scan the DI/DO section on Wednesdays hoping to see articles I can feel fine to ignore, but I regularly prowl through the other pages in search of my bonus vittles in addition to the more general enlightenment one always finds in the pages of the Gray Lady.

We proceed to the links, all from today's Styles sec:

-Ice cream served at a funeral graveside. Great photo of the ice cream truck surrounded by somber mourners. The article itself combines creepy rich people (a standard Styles topic) with a morbid subject. I see now that this article is on the most e-mailed list, so you didn't need me to tell you about it.

-Just-add-water meals for outdoorsies:

From 2002 to 2005, sales of dehydrated meals rose to $14.3 million from $12.5 million, according to the Outdoor Industry Association. “Dehydrated food has come a long way,” said Megan Davis, a spokeswoman. “The offerings are more diverse, flavorful, with ethnic options and food-allergy-sensitive choices.”

Excuse my mouth for not watering. The accompanying slideshow of options has mostly photos of packaging, which seems to concede that the food is as bad as you fear.

-Alex Kuczynski shops fair-trade in the Hamptons. The article begins with irrelevant details and offhanded wealth-flaunting but eventually gets to a description of a shop selling products made by offshore workers who are supposedly fairly compensated for their labor. Then this:

Because the Hampton Bays market is sponsored by a Catholic organization, one will find, along with the coffee, tea, jewelry, clothing, musical instruments and housewares, a few items of a distinctly Catholic bent. My favorite was the Bible Bar, a health bar that “contains the seven foods of Deuteronomy,” which are wheat, barley, raisins, honey, figs, pomegranates and olive oil. (The same company also sells bars called Noah’s Nuggets, Seeds of Samson, King David’s Treat and a diet book titled “Moses Wasn’t Fat.”)

You'll wish the whole article had been about Catholic candies but a moment later you'll realize that if the Times ran such a thing it would be totally unreadable.

Retro food: Cherries Jubilee

2006-07-17T20:27:00.000-05:00

In Jeremiah Tower's California Dish, the most over-the-top of the culinary memoirs I have been reading (Tower quotes himself in an epigraph!), he includes numerous menus, documents of meals he had or read about. He says he started saving these around 1970 after seeing them in Cecil Beaton. Tower's editor didn't understand what they were doing in his writing so he composed a chapter he calls an interlude to explain them, the way they invite the reader to probe their suggestions of preparation techniques and ingredients and to infer details of the social event at which they appeared. It might come off as pretentious to write down a menu, especially for a casual and modest dinner, so if this sort of pretentiousness makes you want to barf you may skip ahead.

Here is what we ate Sunday evening:

Summer Rolls

Shrimp and Corn Chowder
Blue Star Great American Wheat Beer

Cherries Jubilee

Oh do I love the centered list. Just right.

We were six at the table but two of us were wee youngsters so this was all served in rapid succession and with many interruptions for turning on the television and such things. Meals enjoyed in the company of toddlers tend to start and end early and this might seem, if you are unfamiliar with the modern breeding lifestyle, like a heartbreaking cramp in your style. Well, you get used to it. There is an upside: getting the kitchen clean by 8 pm is nice. It gives you enough time to watch a Galactica and two Lagunas before turning in, which is a big help if you are trying to see all the good television shows before you die.

Another thing I love about Tower's menus is the spareness of their language. The restaurant menu of today is linguistically atrocious, cluttered with frivolous descriptions, ill-chosen verbs, and meaningless ingredient provenances. Chefs are too eager to show off what they're doing even before you have had the chance to taste the food. But the traditional continental menu is elegant in its subtlety and directness. Sometimes a dish is described in a single word like pâté or sole. According to setting and context, one can figure out how it would have been prepared. Often this depends on the reader having some knowledge of French cuisine nomenclature, but even if I don't exactly know what it means I would rather see a simple and straightforward name than a long-winded narrative.

As it happens, those summer rolls contained carrots, cukes, and mint leaves acquired from area farms, in addition to noodles and rice paper from the Far East and peanuts from the Planter's can. Likewise, the chowder had corn from around here, coconut milk from Thailand, and seafood from God-knows-where. The beer is the new wheat brew of North Coast Brewing Co., whose Red Seal Ale has long been a favorite.

And the cherries! This was my virgin Jubilee. My sense is that this is one of those many continental dishes that died at the hands of American country club cooks and fine dining establishments of the Maison de la Casa House variety. In the standard bastardization (so I have read), Cherries Jubilee is made of overly sweet and thickened canned cherry pie filling and cheap brandy. I made it using fresh sour cherries from near Green Bay and good bourbon, and the ice cream was homemade. The temperature approached one hundred F this weekend, so ice cream went over well. (Chowder might not seem like a summer dish but in fact, when my family vacationed in Cape Cod in the summer of 1978, I ate chowder at every opportunity, hoarding saltines to crumble into my bowl.)

Cherries Jubilee has several things going for it.

1. It contains cherries, "one of the most refreshing fruits and the most highly thought of." (Larousse, 243). Granting that cherries are widely thought of very highly, is this not an insane statement?

2. You set it on fire. Dining room theatrics keeps the dish on menus. Kids and grownups alike are thrilled to see things aflame (not dining room curtains, mind you, which I'm told were occasionally the casualties of the 1970s craze for flambé).

3. It's fun to say jubilee. Queen Elizabeth's silver jubilee in 1977 might not have been Canada's answer to the U.S. bicentennial, but it was the occasion for much fun in my kindergarden class.

4. It is made with ice cream.

The web is crawling with recipes for this dish and it hardly needs one from me. Basically, you pit the cherries, mix them with syrup (sugar and water in equal parts), add a bit of lemon juice, cook until they ae cooked, and squirt in some more lemon if it needs it. I thickened with a bit of corn starch slurried with some of the cherry juice/syrup in the pan and then, just before serving, added a tbs or two of bourbon. I set this on fire and when it went out spooned the hot cherry mixture over scoops of ice cream.

Sour cream vanilla
The sour cream is hardly noticeable but it does balance the sweetness and goes well with a dish made with sour cherries. Using vanilla sugar and vanilla extract makes for an intense flavor.

9 oz vanilla sugar
8 yolks
3/4 cup heavy cream
3 cups half and half
1/4 cup sour cream
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Warm the half and half up. Whisk together the yolks and slowly incorporate the sugar. Temper into the cream, heat to 170, then add the heavy cream and sour cream, whisking to incorporate. Add the vanilla extract. Chill, churn, freeze, scoop, top with cherries.

More cherries:

The Chocolate Lady's Pitted Black Cherries for that Aching Midsummer Sadness:

Remove stones from about a dozen sweet black cherries with your fingers or the nifty gadget of your choice. Put them all into your mouth at the same time. Grasp the possibility that the pain can end.

David Lebovitz likes cherries too.

Eat your links

2006-07-14T10:35:00.000-05:00

-Eating lavender makes you girly.

-NYT sneaks extra grub into the business section: rich people like to eat fancy French food for the fancy, not just for the eating. Actually, it's about economists studying food, and they adopt the stuffy name "Society for Quantitative Gastronomy."

PERHAPS the French complain about McDonald's because they find it so hard to buy their best food at affordable prices. A meal in a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris can cost $300 or $400 a person, not including wine.

How could food become so expensive? To answer this and other questions, the inaugural meeting of the Society for Quantitative Gastronomy was held in May in Bordeaux, France. The society, founded by a group of young French economists, is bringing scientific measurement to bear on food markets. Their message is that status and image--not just food--play an increasing role in high restaurant prices.

(A disclosure: I am a longtime advocate of ethnic dining--see my discussion at www.tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com--and spoke at the society's conference in May on "How Did American Food Get So Bad?" So the results presented at the meeting confirmed my belief that many of the tastiest meals are entirely affordable, at least if we know where to look.)

(A disclosure would be "I spoke at the conference." That's not a disclosure; it's an editorializing plug for the author. Via Kottke.)

-The Food Avant-Garde's Enabler: a Pete Wells story about a French Culinary Institute project to set up a lab for the development of molecular gastronomy ideas (via foodite). Equal time for the other side: epi-log is against the whole technofood movement: "I feel--and hope--it will go the way of the eight-track cassette." Put that in your thermal circulator and heat it to 135!

-Hungry: why Montreal is better than Chicago. Oh, Canada.

-For Bastille Day today, a local French bistro, Elliot's, is giving a complimentary glass of Champagne to anyone who sings the French national anthem. No word what they give you for running a few steps ahead of an Italian, turning on your heels, and ramming your head into his ribcage as he strides toward you. (Local food news as always via the dish.)

Finally, some television:

-Come Witness Our Grand Gesture!!!. Everwood fans have set July 21 as the date of the ferris wheel extravaganza. If you're in L.A., go and shame the suits at Warner Home Video into releasing the rest of this excellent show on DVD.

Market minute

2006-07-13T22:10:00.000-05:00

What's good so far this season? Carrots and potatoes have been best. The carrots have been not only sweet but also tender, they cook beautifully, and make a very nice puree. And the potatoes, the fingerlings and other new potatoes, have been outstanding. After blanching and shocking they're fantastic eaten just as they are, but they play well with others too. I served them early in the week cold with a cucumber raita made with Fage Total full fat yogurt, a pinch each of salt and sugar, and a bit of cumin. Another time I roasted them, already cooked, in a medium oven with olive oil and salt. Once they're already cooked they just need to heat up and develop a bit of a crust, and there no worrying about when they're done.

Radishes have been nice too. These multicolored ones are spicier than the all red bunches, says the farmer who sold them to me. For a snack the other day I made a radish sandwich on wheat bread with a thick schmear of butter and a big sprinkle of salt.

Raspberries (black and red) and strawberries have been appearing for a few weeks. They are superior to the ones flown in from Cali in every way, but still all have been brighter in acidity than they have been warm in sweetness. Am I wrong to want them to taste like candy?

I sense that the peas are past the peak of their season here, as the big heaps of two weeks ago have been replaced with medium and small heaps. I could be wrong and often am about these things. We have had barely any great peas this year. Many were good, but some were starchy and some of the sugarsnaps had stringy, fibrous pods. My favorite of the whole family of peas lately are the snow peas. A few meals back, I sliced these in julienne and sautéd them in olive oil with similarly cut carrots, fennel, and red onions. I placed this cooked mixture on parchment paper and laid on top filets of Copper River salmon seasoned with salt, pepper, ground fennel, and coriander. Wrapped snugly with a glug of dry white wine in each pouch, these cooked in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes and we ate them over couscous. Everything about this dish was good but my favorite part was the julienned peapods.

I sometimes wish we belonged to a CSA. I love the idea of buying a share and supporting the local farmers, and I would relish the Iron Chef aspect of having to cook whatever's in the delivery each week. This would certainly improve my chops when it comes to things I rarely cook--Swiss chard, kohlrabi. But I'm also selfish. I like the markets too much to commit to the box.

Food lit

2006-07-10T11:23:00.000-05:00

I've been consuming Cheesecake Factory portions of contemporary first-person food lit in my spare time (Reichl, Pépin, Ruhlman) and hope to post something of more substance and insight after I have a few more of them in my pocket. For the time being here are some notes on the form. If you want to write one of these dine-and-dish books, post this over your desk.

-Europe is the source of authenticity; Culture comes from over there. You can't skip it if you're going to make food your living. Ideally the writer gains familiarity both with the provincial pleasures of local meats and cheeses and with the fancy metropolitan restaurant world.

-When the food memoirist drinks, watch out. Wine is taken in litres and barrels and no one bothers with cocktails or beer (cognac is ok though, presumably b/c it's the fruit of the vine). Ideally, the memoirist commits every grape and vintage to memory but one does sometimes sense that these details are fudged à la "I Remember It Well." Anyhow, wine talk to me sounds like the space flight jargon on Battlestar Galactica. I accept that other people find it meaningful but I listen only for the most important information.

-A professional kitchen is run by men and to succeed you earn their respect. Exception: Chez Panisse, which is lovely and feminine and welcoming like a home. (I'm eyeing Jeremiah Tower's book to see how this characterization holds up.)

-When the author describes someone for a paragraph before giving his name, you had better be impressed by the big reveal, especially if it turns out to be someone with his own entry in the encyclopedia (Pépin meets Jean Genet, Reichl Orson Welles). You expect to meet Craig Claiborne and Marion Cunningham (the cookbook author, not Richie and Joanie's mom) in these pages, but when Joe Torre and Bob Costas turn up for dinner at a restaurant in Cleveland (Ruhlman), it's like, OMG!

-Everyone in America would still be eating Jell-O mold salads and TV dinners if it weren't for James Beard and Julia Child. (Actually, millions of people in America still are eating these things, but that's beside the point.)

-A "revelation" is always just around the corner, usually unexpectedly (calf's brains are a revelation for Ruhlman). Surprise is a key ingredient in the food memoir recipe.

-Fois gras is to food lit as "baby" is to rock n roll songs. Too much is not enough.

-When you're young you might not have much money but if you're lucky you'll meet some rich friends and they'll take care of you in high style. How to Cook a Wolf notwithstanding, food lit loves the luxe.

-Nouvelle cuisine cannot be described. You had to be there. (This isn't to say that writers never attempt to describe it.)

-The story isn't really about food, it's about something else--enlightenment, understanding, finding yourself, learning how to live, connecting with the people you love, that kind of thing. This always comes across to me as an alibi for writing about a supposedly frivolous topic, or for devoting one's life to a supposedly frivolous pursuit. I want to say, I don't give a shit about your self-discovery--I'm here for the food. Pépin is least guilty of this, and his is the book I like best of the ones I have read so far. And of all of them, only Pepin's contains a recipe I have tried, his mother's egg dish les oeufs Jeanette, which are basically garlicky deviled eggs, browned in a pan, and smothered in a sauce made of the leftover egg stuffing and olive oil. Great homey food.

Random

2006-07-07T09:20:00.000-05:00

E and I are trying our damndest to understand what has happened to the word "random." It used to mean something like arbitrary, as in "random acts of violence." It has a more precise scientific meaning; some would say that violent acts aren't random in a strict sense. Wikipedia prescribes: "The term Random is often used in popular culture in place of the correct word arbitrary." This kind of pedantic correctophilia gets in the way of understanding, though, since different words have different shades of meaning, especially when some words are clearly prefered over others in given contexts and by certain speakers. The kids on Laguna don't say, "That's like just arbitrary." Egotastic woudn't caption a photo of Selma Blair and P. Diddy holding hands on the beach as "File this one under abitrary."

Often it seems to be a rather bland term of praise: "I liked your video....it was random..." (This describing a video of a cooking memoir.) Random often seems to come with a positive connotation, though it can also be used to express skepticism or as a putdown. You hear it on MTV but people as old as I am (I was born in the...early seventies!) also say it all the time. A dear friend of my own vintage called me random awhile back, and I didn't understand why. Did he mean eclectic? Unpredictable? Incongruous? Surprising? Arbitrary? When I asked him why he called me that, he said, "You know, you're...you're random." Why does everyone else seem to grasp its meaning intuitively? What is its special appeal?

I like to think that some of the avant-garde sensibility of John Cage comes with this usage, that random can mean aleatory, that it embraces chance and resists the strictures of order. But part of me doesn't want give the linguistically lazy this much credit. Random sometimes just means, here's a bunch of stuff. That seems to be what most of these these flickr users have in mind.

***

Links, perhaps random:

Screens, Virginia Heffernan's NYT blog on online video.

Malls of America contains vintage photos of shopping centers. Addictive.

Paste has a listicle of the top 100 living songwriters, as chosen by a bunch of middle-class American white guys. 11. Randy Newman. 25. Chuck Berry. 47. Sufjan Stevens. 72. Michael Jackson. 92. Alejandro Escovedo. You hate it but you can't look away.

Cronenberg meets Warhol in Toronto. On my to-do list for next month.

The Emmy nominations could hardly suck worse. Industry insiders apparently think the new voting system, which was supposed to make for better choices, isn't working.

***

Me: That book I got out of the library? It has a recipe for Chicago-style hot dogs, you know, making them from scratch.

E: [skeptical]

Me: Come on, they'd be good.

E: [even more skeptical]

Me: They might not be the same but they'd be good.

E: You've hit on a key point.

Bad culinary metaphor watch

2006-07-05T13:45:00.001-05:00

LAT coins a phrase, "sausage casing girls," and isn't afraid of extending the metaphor:

THE Sausage Casing Girls are everywhere this summer, their muffin tops hanging over their hip-skimming jeans, clothes shrink-wrapped around fleshy bodies that look as if they've been stuffed — like forcemeat — into teensy tops and skintight pants.

[...]

One is tempted to applaud the Sausage Casing Girls; after all, Southern California is an epicenter of body consciousness, and here they are thumbing their noses at the idea that they must be whippets or Lindsay Lohans to wear the current styles, which for the last several seasons have been exaggeratedly body-hugging and skin-revealing. Perhaps all that self-esteem building has finally paid off.

But this phenomenon does not appear entirely to be about self-acceptance and the conscious abandonment of repressive physical ideals. It is far more complicated than that. Yes, there are plenty of young women who can confidently say that they are happy with their less-than-svelte shapes — and that is to be applauded. But there are many others who in the rush to be fashionable are unable to admit that they are larger than they wish to be, or that their bodies just don't look good in the clothes they are choosing. Instead of reveling in their big, beautiful bodies, many girls instead are deep in denial, pouring themselves into clothes that are putting them in a python squeeze.

Nice to know that since they can't think for themselves, California girls who are big as well as beautiful have the Times to tell them not only how their clothes should fit, but also how to feel about their bodies.

some more:

Here's a passage on Knackwurst in Ruhlman & Polcyn's Charcuterie:

Our friend Marlies Bailey, a native of Germany now living in our heartland, smack in the middle of Oklahoma, and a great fan of sausages, wrote this in response to our question about the name of the sausage: "'Knacken' means to crack, in the literal sense. Knackwurst thus means that when you bite into it, it gives you a good crunchy sound, an explosion of flavor and juices. If you see a woman with a nice firm butt, we say she has a knackiger Asch. Ha-ha! Does that give you the feel of the word? It's a specific kind of sausage that is always boiled or steamed, never fried, and it's often larger in diameter than your basic sausage."

All this reminds me a bit too much of that old chestnut of the the food-politics literature, The Sexual Politics of Meat. Remember this?

The ice cream project: strawberry ice cream

2006-06-29T15:00:00.000-05:00

As a rule I avoid strawberry ice cream. My most frequent encounter with it over the years has been in cheap Neapolitan scooped out of paper boxes at birthday parties, cold culinary proof that 0x3=0. But the other day I went shopping twice, first at the supermarket and then at the farmer's market. I bought a pound of California strawberries at the former--on sale, the kid likes them--and then another pound of Wisconsin strawberries, smaller, redder, softer, brighter, sweeter, cuter, and a thousand times juicer, at the latter. They're the ones you see above. After noshing on a few of these while I canvassed the market for fresh peas, the little man's arms had bright red rivulets running almost to the elbows and his fingernails were stained.

Because I hadn't planned ahead with this ice cream I had to go with the ingredients on hand. Thus I used reduced fat milk instead of half and half. I added sour cream because I like to balance the sweetness of the fruit with some acidity. I always add sour cream to my whipped cream when I'm going to be dipping fresh strawberries in it and I thought it would work well here.

I would not make this recipe with anything other than the freshest local crop on the far side of ripe. If it means having strawberry ice cream only once a year, that's what it means.

Strawberry ice cream
10.25 oz. fresh strawberries (measured after being rinsed and hulled)
4 egg yolks
5 oz. vanilla sugar
3/4 C 2% milk
3/4 C heavy cream
1/4 C sour cream

Puree the strawberries in a food processor. Whisk the yolks in a bowl, slowly adding the sugar until pale and quite thick. Warm the milk and cream in a saucepan just to a simmer, then temper in the egg-sugar mixture. Heat to 170, stir in sour cream, whisk to blend, and pour into a bowl. Strain the fruit puree into the custard (I know what you're thinking but I would never skip this step) and mix well. Chill, churn, freeze, eat, smile.

Mishmash is my favorite dish

2006-06-28T01:05:00.000-05:00

-Woody Allen's Nietzsche Diet:

In a scene cut from the "Ring" cycle, Siegfried decides to dine out with the Rhine maidens and in heroic fashion consumes an ox, two dozen fowl, several wheels of cheese, and fifteen kegs of beer. Then the check comes and he's short. The point here is that in life one is entitled to a side dish of either coleslaw or potato salad, and the choice must be made in terror, with the knowledge that not only is our time on earth limited but most kitchens close at ten.

Woody writes now exactly as he did more than thirty years ago. Is that good or bad?

Also, Woody claims that Scarlett Johansson is wittier than he is (and that she is "sexually overwhelming" and how's that for a one-two punch).

-TNR: The Stultifying Blandness of Conservative Cuisine. Among the various tidbits we find that, apparently, Republicans don't like fish. Or rather, they make a show of not liking fish because it might make them seem all effete and liberal. Warning: includes a description of the Veep's Chicken Florentine.

-Russ Parsons on cooking with smoke:

Smoke tastes like smoke and that is the dominant flavoring. If you're expecting dramatic differences from one variety [of wood] to the next, you may be disappointed. It's not a mustard and ketchup thing, but more like the differences between different types of mustard.

But there are differences, even if they are nuanced, and they do affect the way the smoke flavors the meat.

If the different woods are only nuances, I take this as license not to care. But I did keep reading because I will read anything Parsons writes.

-An appreciation of Aaron Spelling z"l, America's Trashmaster Flash.

Leon's Frozen Custard

2006-06-27T18:00:00.000-05:00

Leon's is a midcentury custard stand on the south side where you eat standing around the parking lot, leaning against a railing, or in your car. I have heard for years that it was the inspiration for Arnold's, the diner in Happy Days where Fonzie kept his office in the men's room. The girl who dishes your vanilla seems happy to spread this story, as do Wikipedia, The Village Voice, and AOL Cityguide. But an article in OnMilwaukee purports to debunk this:

If you're from Milwaukee -- or Wisconsin, for that matter -- you're probably aware that the sitcom "Happy Days" was set in Brew Town (although it wasn't actually filmed here). But what you may not be aware of is that viewers everywhere were actually getting a fairly accurate peek into 1950s Milwaukee.

To make the show authentic, series creator Garry Marshall modeled Arnold's Drive-In -- the official hangout of the Fonz and crew -- after two Milwaukee restaurants, The Milky Way and the Pig 'n' Whistle. Both establishments have since closed, with the Pig 'n' Whistle (1111 E. Capitol Dr.) becoming the Riverbrook Family Restaurant, and The Milky Way (5373 N. Port Washington Rd.) being remodeled and opening as Kopp's Custard in 1978.

The current manager of Kopp's in Glendale, Scott Borkin, tells the story: "The creator of 'Happy Days' used our original building as the idea behind the exterior of Arnold's because, at the time, it was a real drive-in with carhops. But the interior was inspired by the Pig 'n' Whistle because it looked more like a diner inside."

(Why the current manager of Kopp's gets the last word I cannot say, but I don't care enough about getting to bottom of this to put a call in to Garry Marshall.)

Everything about Leon's is a throwback, including the portion sizes. If you order a single scoop in a cup, which costs $1.03 including tax, you can finish your custard in about the length of time the live studio audience would spend applauding Henry Winkler when he burst through the Cunninghams' front door. The servers wear white paper hats and the flavors are strictly traditional, vanilla, chocolate, and a special that changes daily. Today's was butter pecan.

The nuts are roasted and mixed in at the last minute so that they're not ice cold, and the custard is a subtle butterscotch. Life is good when you have one of these in your hands.

I don't really care which diner or custard stand was the model for Arnold's--although Milwaukee was supposed to be the setting for Happy Days, there wasn't much regional specificity in its representation of 1950s America. I don't even know if Leon's was typical of its time, assuming it has been preserved in its original state (minus the carhops, of course). What appeals to me and others now is that it fits our stereotype of a vintage custard stand, and this pleases us. I like to believe that Arnold's's inspiration exists just south of Oklahoma on S. 27th St. in the year 2006. Like the man in the John Ford movie said, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Leon's Frozen Custard
3131 S 27th St
Milwaukee, WI 53215
414-383-1784

***

More Milwaukee custard: Kopp's in Greenfield, Kopp's in Glendale, and a Kopp's photoset.

I used to think Kopp's is better, but because it's closer to home I go there more often. After today, I'm on the fence.

Whole Foods, Milwaukee update

2006-06-22T18:58:00.000-05:00

As previously reported, Whole Foods is coming to town in the fall, and this week's Milwaukee Mag Dish on Dining* fixed a date on it: September 13. If you're local and have "Thorough knowledge of Whole Foods Market products, quality standards, food philosophy, and company mission," they're looking for an in-store educator. One does wonder how someone living in a WFless town would possess such knowledge, but anyhow...

Unlike, say, Pittsburgh (hey, zp!), Milwaukee has not wanted badly for upscale foodie consumer culture. We have thriving co-ops and a whole bunch of gourmet grocery stores called Sendik's which are (incredibly confusingly) not all part of the same chain. We have a Public Market with good fish and seafood, organic produce, grass-fed beef, and locally made corn tortillas. We have not only Penzey's (two locations!) but also The Spice House. I can't think of a single foodie foodstuff that we used to get at WF that we can't find here. Among the small cadre of grocery shoppers I've talked to about it, what excites them most about WF is that competition from the chain might bring prices down at these other places. This seems like the perennial issue: when WF comes to town, everybody starts to notice that food at the co-op costs a ton. But rich people who wish their organic bananas would be 20% cheaper don't get my shoulder to cry on.

What I like most about WF is what I like about the Apple store. I walk around in a state of wide-eyed wonder. But this wears off after a short time and the notion that good health, eating, and virtue can be bundled up in an appealing corporate brand and sold to status-seeking yuppies and hipsters starts to stink.

The Milwaukee store will offer something that the other branches lack. Here they are taking the notion of Whole Foods as healthy foods and synergizing the brand with a hospital. The new WF is going to be on the first story of a medical office building, the Columbia St. Mary's Prospect Market Commons/Whole Foods Market Here is the hospital's hype:

Columbia St. Mary's is pleased to partner with them to introduce the natural food market to the hospital setting - the first of its kind in the nation.

"This is another perfect opportunity to reinforce the importance of healthy lifestyles through great food," said Karol Marciano, Executive Vice President of Business Development at Columbia St. Mary's. "We look forward to sharing this special experience with our patients and the rest of the community."

In September, Whole Foods Market will occupy 50,000 square feet on the first floor of Prospect Medical Commons, a medical office building that will be occupied primarily by Columbia St. Mary's Community Physicians. The collaboration between the natural grocer and Columbia St. Mary's complements the hospital's emphasis on creating a healing environment and advocating healthy lifestyles. Once the market opens, Columbia St. Mary's and Whole Foods Market will work to provide community classes to further educate residents and patients about food, cooking and overall healthy living.

"Whole Foods Market is pleased to become part of the Milwaukee community and to have the opportunity to partner with Columbia St. mary's," said Patrick Bradley, Whole Foods Market Midwest Regional President. "Just like Columbia St. Mary's, Whole Foods Market has a passion for people, and we're eager to demonstrate this passion through our natural, organic and gourmet products, free in-store tasting, events and cooking demonstrations. Our partnership with Columbia St. Mary is really a unique and innovative relationship."

Is this not appalling? Doesn't the hospital-supermarket connection seem too close to an Onion spoof?

There are lots of reasons to be happy that WF is coming to town. If they raise awareness about where food comes from and what it does for you, that can't be all bad. But there are also lots of reasons to be suspicious of WF. The company is anti-union (follow the Pbg link). Many believe it is favoring a big-business model of organic agriculture over one that promotes local and sustainable food production. (There has been some back-and-forth on this between WF CEO John Mackey and Michael Pollan.) And as the Cod has been following closely (more, more, more) the chain's recent decision to stop selling live lobsters seems to confuse issues of ethics and economics, making the company seem less than straight in its public demonstrations of good citizenship. One must be ever wary of the self-sanctifying corporation.

I hope to have more to say about this come September, if not sooner.

*The Dish, written by the magazine's food critic Ann Christenson, would be great as a blog with an RSS feed.

Smokin'

2006-06-20T22:14:00.000-05:00

To get from the kitchen to the grill chez Haverchuk takes a few dozen paces, through a small hallway past the linen closet and the bathroom, across the length of the dining room, past the couch and the telly and the toys in the living room and down the front steps to the porch. This shlep is one reason that I often avoid cooking out of doors but there are others. I think steaks and burgers are just as good cooked in cast iron and grilled fish can be a real disaster. But for some special things, I heed the call of the smoke and fire.

Smoking on a charcoal kettle grill is easier than it might sound. For barbecue, which means smoking at very low temperatures, you need only about a dozen briquettes or the equivalent in volume of hardwood charcoal to get enough heat. I have tried both briquettes and the real stuff over the past couple of weeks and for this job I prefer the briquettes. They don't burn as hot and they last longer. It is essential to have a hinged grate with flaps that lift up on the ends so that you can add fuel without taking everything off the grill. Other than this no special equipment is needed. When the charcoal is grayish, no longer glowing red, you add a handful of soaked woodchips (I have been sticking with hickory but I'm open to new things) and cover the grill with the vents (open of course) on the side opposite from the heat. This way the smoke has to pass the food on its way out of the grill. I drop the probe of my thermometer through a vent hole to monitor the temperature in the kettle, which I want to be between about 200 and 240. I do wish I had one of those wireless remote thermometers so that I wouldn't have to scamper down to the porch to check in on my cooking, but the scampering keeps me moving and physical activity can't hurt when dinner is going to be barbecue. When the temp goes too low, you add charcoal and chips.

Cooking times for low and slow cuts like brisket and ribs depend on temperature and on the dimensions of the food, but rough guides can be helpful. Ribs take half a day. Briskets or pork shoulders take all day. I started a brisket too late in the day a couple of weeks ago and it was cooked through but tough at dinnertime. So I wrapped it in foil and put it in a 190 degree oven overnight. The next day it was perfect. It had picked up plenty of smoke in an afternoon of outdoor cooking, so it didn't taste like I had cheated. The problem with judging cooking times with these things is that you're not cooking them to temperature, you're cooking them until they're tender and falling apart. If it's time to eat and they're not there yet, it's best to find something else for dinner and keep on cooking into the night.

The worst excesses of grilling and barbecuing are the seasonings, the rubs and sauces. I have been finding that when it comes to smoking, "less is more" doesn't quite capture it. Less is simply appropriate, more can be a travesty. You are cooking very flavorful foods with hardwood smoke, but it is possible to obscure these assertive flavors with heavy doses of sweet gloop or with macho hot sauces that numb your tastebuds. In cooking baby back ribs the other day I rubbed on only salt and brown sugar in equal quantities and a moderate amount of black pepper. After four hours in the smoke we were not wanting for flavor. I did dip the ribs in some Sweet Baby Ray's original doctored with a few dashes of Tabasco, but this was strictly condiment and sparingly applied. No slathering. E didn't go for the sauce at all. When I made the brisket I used Texas seasonings in a rub--ancho and cayenne chile and cumin in addition to the salt, pepper, and sugar--but it would have been just as good without them. Regardless of the cut, it helps to rub on the salt and sugar at least a couple of hours ahead of time.

My other revelation has been that white meat chicken, a lean cut suited to grilling over high heat, is also great smoked at low barbecuey temperatures. If it's been salted or brined ahead of time (my brine is 1/3 cup table salt to 1 quart water, and my brining time is about three hours) and cooked with its skin and bones, it's not likely to dry out, and if you keep track of the chicken's internal temperature you can keep it from overcooking. If I'm going to spend the afternoon cooking I might as well make enough for several meals. So if there's just a brisket or a rack of ribs in there, there's also room for some chicken pieces or even a whole bird, standing up impaled on a half-full beer can. Like ribs and brisket, smoked chicken is good enough to eat all by itself, without any sauces or condiments. But it is nice to serve it cold with some spicy mayonnaise mixed with lemon juice, shallots, cornichons, capers, and anchovies.

Don't think I buy any of that malarkey about men cooking outside being the expression of some fundamental connection to our Pleistocene ancestors. That's the patriarchy speaking. But smoked foods are good to eat, and that's the God's honest truth.

More: Cooking With Fire in Slate.

I love you so bad

2006-06-18T20:07:00.000-05:00

In his spanking fresh music blog, my brother has been talking about bad music. He is more interested in how particular kinds of music come to be deemed bad than in identifying badness as an intrinsic aesthetic value. He actually likes bad music, or at least some kinds of it.

In the comments to his post there is some discussion of the inadequacy of "bad" to describe the various products to which it is attached:

it includes "guilty pleasure" type music (like rock musicals), well-made but trite music like Kenny G, underdog commercial music, and just plain weird stuff of different stripes. I do, however, like the use of "bad" in journal titles like "bad subjects," which suggests uncooperative, mischievous, or subversively anomalous. Do you think there is a way to retain the term "bad" if these connotations are stressed?

I am especially intrigued by the first two categories in this taxonomy, the guilty pleasure and the good-but-bad. These seem like the mirror image of each other and both suggest to me parallels to bad food. Bad food, much of which I do love, can be bad in various ways, some of which don't really have a musical equivalent. Bad food can taste bad because it's badly prepared; it can be made of bad ingredients like margarine or saccharine; it can have bad cultural connotations, e.g., "white trash" food like pork rinds; and it can be bad for your health according to the prevailing wisdom of the day. I'm most interested in those subcategories of bad that are partial or ambivalent, like the guilty pleasure, because these seem especially revealing of contradictions in contemporary thinking about food and culture.

1. The guilty pleasure is something that we admit to liking despite a collective negative judgment of it. For the guilty pleasure to "work" as bad, the person who likes it has to buy into the cultural consensus of its badness. Thus the guilty pleasure is always a product of hierarchies of taste. Guilty pleasures are things you both like and dislike. This reminds me, the other day I was shopping for greeting cards and you know how they come in the various categories like "birthday" and "father's day from dog"? There were some cards there in the category of "almost funny." Guilty pleasures are almost pleasures. But they may also be intense pleasures because of the subversive element, the charge one gets from defying the taste consensus.

Guilty food pleasures are problematic because as taste democratizes, more and more foods shift from the bad to the good column. In the 1970s, Calvin Trillin's stories about eating squirrel in rural Ohio while trying his best to avoid the official good food of the day, the revolving restaurants that he dubs "Maison de la Casa House," was part of a large-scale inversion of the traditional hierarchy. It becomes hard to find pleasures to feel guilty about when barbecue and hamburgers and chili are recognized as national treasures, but I suppose today's reigning ideology of fresh-local-organic-sustainable-slow food makes eating at fast food restaurants and more upscale corporate chains like P.F. Chang's into a guilty pleasure for some. You know you should eat someplace local, someplace with real rather than focus-group food, someplace with a chef rather than a "kitchen manager," someplace with a soul. But like Hollywood movies, corporate American food can be so...good. Foodie culture seems to make membership contingent on the denial of this, which is why the Bruni fast-food-a-thon was such fresh air.

(I haven't seen it but I'm sure that some of the appeal of Super Size Me is that most people, even indie documentary audience type people, really do like McDonald's. They judge it, condemn it, despise it even, and still they want it.)

Related perhaps: the so bad it's good notion familiar to all hipsters. I have a strong negative opinion of this cynical posture. If it's that bad it's can't be good, and if it's really good it can't be that bad.

2. The good but trite is an interesting one that I hadn't thought about quite in that way. My brother is saying that Kenny G is good in the sense of technically skilled, but bad in the sense of having low aesthetic value within a community of connoisseurs. Important distinction from #1: if you think something is bad because trite then it's hard to like it, whereas with the guilty pleasure you recognize that by liking something you are defying the taste consensus that you are supposed to buy into, and this is intrinsic to the pleasure.

Good but trite food might be what you find in expensive restaurants that are more interested in wooing an affluent clientele than producing fantastic food. Every decent-sized town probably has too many of these places. They serve dishes like filet mignon encrusted with gorgonzola, grilled salmon, and créme brûlée. The more ambitious ones might include some trendy items like raw seafood and short ribs. While the chefs are well-trained, the ingredients are of good quality, and the food comes out the way you order it, the cooking is overly fussy and depressingly unoriginal. Typically the prices are 30% too high, but sometimes it's more like 100%. These restaurants are the Maison de la Casa Houses of our time.

I would almost always prefer to eat at P.F. Chang's than at one of these places and not just because P.F. Chang's is cheaper. It's because I don't like the context of affluence, the aspiration to tastefulness, the eagerness to impress, the parade of "quality" that this kind of fancy restaurant represents. Sure the upscale casual places have some of all that too, but it's offered up in a context of populist, democratic American culture. (I don't know, maybe I'm giving PFC too much credit as an alibi for my hankering for some kung pao shrimp.)

As for the just plain weird stuff of different stripes, who doesn't love that?

Swiss cheeseheads

2006-06-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

What do Green Bay Packers fans and Swiss World Cup soccer fans have in common? Both wear "triangular [hats] in the shape of holey cheese." (Still seeking for a photo of this.) link

Wiki

2006-06-15T12:55:00.000-05:00

Savory New York is an NYC restaurant wiki with videos, potentially an incredible timesuck. Every town needs one of these. (Via Off the Broiler).

The ice cream project: mint chocolate chip ice cream

2006-06-13T19:42:00.000-05:00

Two things in this one that I want to tell you about:

1. Santander Colombian chocolate, 53% cocoa, one 70g bar chopped into chips with a big knife and folded in just at the end of the churning. These chips draw you back to the freezer for just another bite, and another, and another, until you have eaten twice as much as you otherwise might have.

2. Green food coloring, seven or eight drops added when the mixture was cool. Unless you are blind, mint tastes better green.

The recipe is the same as green chile mint but with just the things left out and added in that you would figure.

I'll spell it out for you:
fresh mint, a big bunch
half and half, 3 cups
heavy cream, 1 cup
egg yolks, 8
sugar, 9 oz.
chocolate, 70g/2.47oz.

Happy summer.

Drink your vitamins?

2006-06-12T11:01:00.000-05:00

Marion Nestle interviewed in Salon:

What about vitamin water? If you drink vitamin water, are you actually getting vitamins?

Oh, sure, if it has vitamins in it. You won't absorb all of them, but you'll absorb some. But why not take a vitamin pill, or eat something? I don't get it, except that they come in a classy bottle. They look gorgeous.

You're buying status. You're buying status and the aura of health. The ones with vitamins have to be sweetened; otherwise they'd taste terrible.

There's lots more good stuff in here, though Nestle's solutions to our food problems (including outlawing cartoon characters on food packaging) don't all seem practical. (Btw, she was interviewed on npr the other day; l learned then that her surname is pronounced like the verb nestle, not like the corporation Nestlé.)

I've been trying these various cola alternatives that present themselves as virtue in a bottle. Over the past few weeks I have drunk Honest Tea, Soy₂0, and Vitamin Water (fantastic website). The tea is ok but I could just make tea myself and much more cheaply. The other two taste like what they are, sugar and artificial flavor, but the packaging is pretty and the clever, chatty Vitamin Water label copy is just my kind of thing. I love how high concept this brand is, how effectively it appeals to its target market. The drink itself is unremarkable, even insipid. Perhaps I would like these things more if I were a girl; I cannot fathom trying the boy versions, the rockstar drinks in the thin aluminum cans with ingredients I don't recognize and twice the carbs.

It really all comes down to this: if you are thirsty, drink water.

From all over

2006-06-11T20:41:00.000-05:00

I can get as excited about eating local as the next guy. Much more, probably, though I don't like to make of it an advertisement for virtue. Regardless of the political, social, economic, environmental, moral, or culinary benefit of eating the meat, dairy, and produce of nearby farms, I'm also a bit chauvinistic about Wisconsin. I feel warm and fuzzy about my adoptive state and am pleased when it makes good things.

My duck breast salad was the beneficiary this weekend of some locally-grown greens, red leaf lettuce from the organic produce vendor at the Public Market. The rest of it came from farther afield. The duck was from Indiana (another Market purchase); the Montmorency cherries, Yukon Gold potatoes, cream cheese (more on that in a moment), and salt were from elsewhere in the U.S.; and the port in which the cherries macerated was from Portugal. As for the vinaigrette, we had mustard from France, vinegar from Spain, oil from Italy, and black pepper from India. I cannot state the provenance of our shallots. If I were competing in the eat local challenge I would probably lose badly; all that was local was the lettuce. But what a lettuce, let me tell you. Crisp, a bit sweet, a hint of bitter, bursting with moisture. And I'm not one to get off on lettuce.

The cream cheese was a late replacement for the chèvre that had gone off. I needed something cool, dairy, tart, and rich. So I made little pebbles of Philly and froze them for about twenty minutes. They held their shape, didn't melt into the dressing or get smeared all over the greens or anything. On a similar topic: the other day I wanted to make beurre blanc to go with some fish and had to choose between room temperature and frozen butter. So here's my kitchen eureka of the year: you can make a perfect beurre blanc using small cubes of frozen butter. Indeed, I believe using frozen better increases your margin of error, but I haven't tested this with any kind of rigor. Maybe every chef knows this secret, but I am not a chef.

Cooking duck breasts is ridiculously easy. I score the skin in a diagonal cross-hatch pattern, careful not to cut into the meat, salt liberally, and cook in cast iron over very high heat (skin-side first) about four minutes a side for med rare. The pan needs no fat because so much renders from the skin. I used to think of duck breast as one of those foods you eat only in restaurants but after making this dish a couple of times I have scratched it from that list. Now it will be a food I never order in restaurants because I can make it just as well myself and for a whole lot cheaper. (The Market price here is $10.99/lb., which would be enough to feed three or four in this kind of preparation.)

It's good to dress the salad with all of the ingredients in it except the duck, then to lay thin slices of it over the top, and then to drizzle on some more vinaigrette.

***

Can anyone explain what this list of food blogs is and why mine appears in it twice?

Stravecchio etc.

2006-06-09T20:19:00.000-05:00

This cheese from Antigo, WI, is more crumbly and moist than the king of cheeses and not quite as salty; the local product is better, I daresay, for eating just as is. The brick I bought the other day fell apart as I was beginning to take its picture and boy was I happy. All those pebbles of cheese crumbling off the side found their way in short order onto my eager tongue. I also liked the way the wounded cheese resembled a rockface alongside a TNT-blasted road. Wisconsin produces enormous quantities of cheese and almost none of it is as good to eat as this. More pix at my Flickr.

***

Because I am a sucker, I would see any Pixar film and any culinary romp set in Paris and any film named for a Provençal vegetable preparation, so it's just my luck that next summer's Pixar release is comedy about a Parisian foodie mouse in search of good eats and is called Ratatouille. It took me about an hour to get the pun. Here's the trailer (via BB.)

***

Staying in southern France: I missed Bittman's travel piece in last weekend's NYT, but I caught up on it reading Language Log. The nut: niçcois gnocchi are also known as merda de can, which is Provençal for dog shit, and served with gorgonzola, pistou, or tomato sauce. (LL calls Bittman out for claiming that merda is unprintable.)

Take-out/make-in

2006-06-07T22:59:00.000-05:00

I make no apology for trying to duplicate Chinese take-out food at home. The sad fact is that Milwaukee offers almost no edible Chinese food of any sort, northern, southern, fancy, homestyle, whatever. So if you want it done right or even just passably, you do it yourself.

I have been using my new pan, a 12-inch cast iron skillet, quite obsessively. It's like when you get a new pair of Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars and you wear only them for weeks on end to give them that lived-in sneaker look. Seasoning a pan is a continual effort and the more you use it the better it gets. There's still a spot off to one side that hasn't gotten black yet, and I will not rest until it's slick and inky.

I might as well state for the record that I don't believe in woks. I certainly haven't tried every kind, still it seems quite unlikely to me that in the absence of the searing heat of a commercial kitchen, a home cook can get the same effect. Stovetops are flat and flat pans pick up their heat; they're designed just for that. I refuse to believe that, absent the BTUs the pros have, the shape of the pan makes any difference. Having said that, I meekly await your crucifixion. If I recall, Barbara, whose picture is in the current issue of Time magazine (yes, that Time magazine) accompanying an article on the virtues of eating local, insists on woks even at home and she knows worlds more than I do about Chinese cookery. (Yes I have seen today's Times article about pans and I don't have much to say about it. I have enough pans.)

Now a word about recipes. M.F.K. Fisher writes in With Bold Knife & Fork, pp. 20-21:

A recipe is supposed to be a formula, a means prescribed for producing a desired result, whether that be an atomic weapon, a well-trained Pekingese, or an omelet. There can be no frills about it, no ambiguities...and above all no "little secrets." A cook who indulges in such covert and destructive vanity as to leave out one ingredient of a recipe which someone has admired and asked to copy is not honest, and therefore is not a good cook. He is betraying his profession and his art. He may well be a thief or a drunkard, or even a fool, away from his kitchens, but he is not a good cook if he cheats himself to this puny and sadistic trickery of his admirers, and no deep-fat kettle is too hot to brown him in.

I don't think I like to write recipes of the sort Ms. Fisher prefers. I like to write descriptions of how I cook but I don't believe that recipes really function as formulas or that cooks tend to follow recipes faithfully. If I were making an atomic weapon, I would use exactly what the cookbook said. But when I make salad or stew or cashew chicken, I prefer to make things up as I go along, to "feel" my way through it. And I tend not to measure ingredients even when following other people's recipes. But she's right, as ever; any cook who omits an ingredient does deserve to fry.

Cashew Chicken

For the chicken/marinade:
The breast meat of a 4 lb fryer, cut into bite-size pieces
a few drips of soy sauce
a few drips of mirin
a pinch of salt
a pinch of white pepper
about a tbs of corn starch

(Some people think Chinese cooks use soy in place of salt. It ain't necessarily so. Soy can be a strong flavor, so I often use a little bit of soy and also a little bit of salt.)

The rest of it:
3 stalks of celery, cut into diamond shapes
1 medium yellow onion, sliced in broad strips
two cloves of garlic, minced
an olive-size piece of ginger, minced
half a cup of cashews (authenticity be damned, I used Planter's roasted and salted nuts)

A sauce:
half a cup chicken stock
2 tbs or so Shaoxing wine
a big pinch of sugar
2 tbs soy sauce
2 tbs oyster sauce
half a tsp white pepper
1 tsp corn starch

peanut oil for frying

Marinate the chicken an hour ahead of time (you can add the corn starch at the last second since it's not a flavor ingredient).

Heat a pan or wok until very hot. Drizzle in a small amount of oil, let it get hot. Dump the chicken in, spread it out so every piece is touching the pan, and don't touch it for at least 45 seconds. Then turn the pieces that have browned nicely. This whole step shouldn't take more than two minutes. When the chicken is almost fully cooked (it's ok if there are still pink spots here and there) remove to a plate.

Let the pan get hot again and add another drizzle of oil. When it's shimmering, add the garlic and ginger and as soon as you can smell them, perhaps ten seconds, add the celery and onion and cook over high heat, stirring continuously to avoid burning the garlic. If it seems like it's too hot in the pan, add a splash of water. After a couple of minutes, when the veggies have softened a bit, return the chicken to the pan, add the cashews, mix to combine, then pour in the sauce. Mix well, turn down the heat, and cook just until the sauce is thick and coating all of the pieces of meat and veggies and nuts.

Serve with plain white rice.

***

Links!

Interview with Anthony Bourdain at Bookslut: "It's the death of pleasure when your waiter takes ten minutes to tell you the bloodline of your tomato."

Sara Dickerman reviews Buford. Very positive. I'm not going to read it, though, as I've already seen much of it in the NYer and didn't love it.

Mayonnaise, a video, probably NSFW and definitely in bad taste.

Picture time

2006-06-04T22:03:00.000-05:00

On those weekends we are fortunate to spend at home doing not much, the little man's nap (usually about two hours sometime between noon and 3) is our spare time for catching up on television, reading, going shopping, talking on the phone, making ice cream, and of course blogging and Flickring and being online. But it is also potentially work time. In the academic life, all time is potentially work time, and when I am caught up in a project or facing a deadline I will devote every available moment to scholarly pursuits. Right now I am trying to get into full-on scholarly mode and today's naptime might have been spent on my writing project. But it wasn't. What I really wanted to do was go to the bookstore to buy a guide to using Photoshop, which I haven't done a good enough job of teaching myself. That is exactly the wrong way to spend time: seeking an aide to squandering even more time in the future. Instead I stayed home while E went shopping, and I pleased myself more than just a bit by figuring out enough to produce this Photoshopped documentation of our lunch, a Caesar salad (the idea for which I got from reading about a meal at Zuni in San Francisco), for my Flickr:

It isn't such a fancy bit of work, I know, but I'm not so quick to pick up these high-tech skills (thus the ordinariness of this blog's design).

I think I might be happy to spend the rest of my life taking pictures of eggs but I really do have other things to accomplish.

Market

2006-06-03T14:21:00.000-05:00

Opening day today at East Town Market and not much on offer. The fat white turnips were the prettiest things for sale. A few stalks of rhubarb, scattered lettuces, nothing nearly as tempting as a sugarsnap. One farmer told me her peas are at least two weeks off.

Many of the produce vendors didn't come this morning. I passed the empty spaces where I expected to see their tables, their trucks, their faces, hoping to recognize them from last summer and the summers before it.

Plenty of shoppers turned up, though, with their kids and dogs. Vendors too with various things I'm not looking for in a farmer's market. Aside from the flowers and plants, the bakery items and coffee, there were ceramic fish, magnets made of buttons, and revolving copper lawn sprinklers. One woman set up a glass table under a tent to sell her self-published novel, a romance-mystery called Mixin' It Up! Too bad you can't eat literature.

August should be livelier.

Flickring cities

2006-05-31T20:08:00.000-05:00

I've been noticing something unusual lately on Flickr. After I post photos with tags (descriptive terms like "mushroom" and "playground") I sometimes search by those tag terms to see what groups my pictures fall into. Each tag can be organized either by recency or by interestingness, which Flickr calculates on the basis of some mysterious formula. I have been noticing that the Milwaukee photos highest in interestingness are almost all of one subject: the Quadracci Pavilion of the Milwaukee Art Museum designed by Santiago Calatrava. I cannot find another city whose interestingness is so dominated by a single edifice. Neither cities famous for a building (Agra, Chartres) nor cities with other prominent Calatravas (Seville, Valencia) have interestingness pages that are virtually all one thing. (A few days ago Milwaukee's page was completely Calatrava; today there are two photos among the top twenty that are of other subjects: one the lake and one of the river.)

These are the first interestingness pages for the other cities I have inhabited:

London (1972-1973) is a hodgepodge; fewer than half have architectural subjects.

Toronto (1973-1990, 1995-1997) has few shots of buildings, a bit surprising for a city with such a distinctive array of downtown skyscrapers.

Montreal (1990-1994) is eclectic; my favorites are the shots taken at the hippie Tam Tam Jam (Anglos like me used to call it Bongo Park) that convenes at the foot of Mount Royal on weekends.

New York (1994-1995) has lots of architecture and two shots of Christo's Gates. (New York City offers much of the same.)

Madison (1997-2002) includes some images of Madisons that aren't in Wisconsin, and several of the capitol dome.

I can think of at least two reasons why photographers love our museum so much. The other photogenic buildings in Milwaukee are mostly old. And there aren't many buildings like this one in North America, not yet anyway. If you haven't seen it in person, you really must come to Milwaukee.

***

Want food in every post? Ok: check out these Flickr recipes.

The ice cream project: egg ice cream

2006-05-30T21:01:00.000-05:00

In general, we might think of ice cream having two different kinds of appeal.

1. A cold, sweet, rich confection to make you feel good.

2. An uncanny flavor experience. Uncanny is Freud's way of capturing a paradoxical concept that means at once familiar and unfamiliar. In dreams, sometimes we have an experience of the uncanny in which something we recognize is present in an unexpected form or in which something we think of as strange is revealed to be something we know intimately. At once we feel comfort and alienation. This is what I think many of the avant-chefs I have blogged about before are after in their flavor/texture/temperature experiments. Perhaps if you say WOW when you eat their food (and I do mean you; I have never tasted it) it's because it tastes like something you have had a thousand times, and yet also tastes like nothing you have tried before. This is speculative, of course. What I know of this grub is second-hand.

The uncanny appeal of ice cream is that it presents a regular flavor, like sesame or Serrano chile, in a new guise, with a new temperature and texture. This kind of appeal need not be at odds with #1, though I suspect it sometimes is, especially in the case of very odd concoctions like Stilton or garlic ice cream, both of which exist at least in recipe form.

I stole the idea for egg ice cream from the chef of The Fat Duck in London, Heston Blumenthal, who makes a bacon and egg ice cream that captivates everyone who tries it. When I first heard about this I thought the egg part was just fanciful, since ice cream often contains eggs (my regular recipe calls for eight yolks per quart of dairy). But upon further research I learned that HB actually makes the ice cream taste especially eggy by using lots and lots of egg--24 yolks in Chef Heston's recipe--and by overcooking the custard. Ordinarily you stop cooking a custard at 170 F/77 C, but if you keep heating it up it will curdle and...curdled eggs are eggiest. HB heats his mixture to 85 C/185 F, which causes them to thicken considerably. Then he whizzes in a blender and passes the mixture through a sieve. The blender step might actually be to pulverize the bacon but I included it anyway.

The results are an ice cream that tastes only of egg and sugar, like the Platonic ideal of egginess. Chinese egg custard tarts are similar in flavor, completely different in texture and temperature. Making custard with a high proportion of yolks also ups the fat content and adds emulsifiers, which gives the ice cream a texture I do not hesitate to call sublime.

Egg ice cream
Yields about 1.5 pints.

2 cups/1 pint/480 mL half and half (which is half whole milk and half heavy/double cream, so substitute away)
4.5 oz./128 g sugar
9 yolks of large eggs

1. Heat the cream to a bare simmer in a saucepan.

2. Whisk yolks until pale and thick, then add sugar slowly, whisking continuously, and keep going until it has increased slightly in volume. Blumenthal says it should be white but I think he means pale.

3. Slowly whisk the warm cream into the eggs, then dump them back in the saucepan and heat, stirring, to 185 C. Keep them at this temp for 30 seconds, then pour into a blender and liquidize (or skip this step, see if I care). Chill, churn, freeze, eat.

Anticipating your questions...

Q: What would you serve this with?
A: A spoon.

Moka etc.

2006-05-27T15:49:00.000-05:00

This is my favorite home coffee maker, though I usually use the more convenient drip machine. Every time I use the moka I wonder why I ever bother with filter coffee, which is inferior in taste and temperature, but every time I wake up at six a.m. I think, it's easier to use the machine. You have to go to the stove to turn off the gas when the moka is done, but the drip waits for you. Sometimes I drink the moka coffee straight, from a demi-tasse (with a bite of dark chocolate if there's one around), and sometimes I mix it with boiling water, which Italians derisively call an Americano. Even a few hours old, a shot of moka coffee topped with a few ounces of fresh hot water is a fine thing.

***

Because you are dying to know...I ate:

1. An olive oil tuna salad sandwich at Harlequin Bakery. Since I blogged tuna, many a searcher has found this site using terms like "tuna salad without mayo." At first when I saw these search strings I would rub my hands together in glee proclaiming, "Suckaaaz!" But after awhile I started to think that I should at least give it a try the trendy healthful newfangled way.

Mayo is better.

2. A Royale w/Cheese at The Social, an emporium of hipness that vexingly tries both too little and too hard. Too hard because they lavish too much attention on cutesy details of décor (a showy, retro room divider of large oval disks on thin rods of metal separating the tables from the bar) and gimmicky menu lingo (see below). And too little because the food, clever and fun as it is made to sound, still doesn't feel like the product of a kitchen in which people are totally passionate about cooking.

The Royale is one of the fancy-pants hamburgers that are sweeping the upscale enclaves of urban America (there was a whole segment on these gourmet burgers on the May 13 Good Food podcast). The patty, ground up from a cow named Kobe, is as thick as you would make it yourself. When you order it medium rare that's how they cook it. It is topped, as all such things apparently are, with a blue-veined cheese (Stilton) and a caramelized onion condiment (I don't remember if it's a confit, a relish, a chutney, a marmalade...ok the menu online reminds me that they call it simply "caramelized onion"). On top of that they slather perhaps eight ounces of a "red wine 'ketchup'" that has a consistency reminiscent of Thanksgiving gravy.

Aside: the use of quotation marks in restaurant menus has become unbearably pretentious and vapid. Originally, this nouvelle cuisine affectation was supposed to indicate the chef's sense of humor, a kind of antidote to the sanctified tenor of haute cuisine. But this condiment really was ketchup made with red wine.

Back to my dinner: the burger oozes juices, makes a stupendous mess, and despite its name betrays no trace whatsoever of cheese. As I suspected, the use of ground Kobe beef is a stunt to impress naïve, status-seeking diners. My sense is that the point of Kobe beef is that it is tender, but all ground meat is tender. What can I say? It was everything a person might want in a hamburger, and it came with a side of excellent shoestring fries, but I don't think I can taste a difference between Kobe and supermarket beef when presented in burger form.

I loved this food despite my attempt to maintain a cool, critical distance from it. And I even don't mind that they named the burger for Pulp Fiction, which wasn't exactly in need of homage.

Morels

2006-05-25T12:28:00.000-05:00

I learned a new word today at the co-op. It's "wildcrafted," and it describes the morel mushrooms mixed in with my eggs. For $24.99 you can take home a pound of these locally wildcrafted superfungi and with that many you can make about twenty lunches. Morels are one of the few seasonal produce items that come around this early in the northern Midwest, when elsewhere there seems to be such enviable bounty. It's still early for peas and lettuces here, even.

I chopped two morels into bits, sauteed them in butter (with a big pinch of salt) over high heat so that the butter browned a bit, and then stirred them into my scrambled eggs just a few seconds before they were done. To make the eggs I beat two grade A large with salt and a drip of heavy cream and cooked them in butter over medium heat, stirring constantly, until they were just right. I like them soft and fairly wet.

This was my first taste of morels and they lived up to their billing. As I was eating this I kept thinking about how great they would be atop a thick medium rare hamburger. Hope their season lasts long enough for me to give that a try.

What to do with 110 blueberries (or $6)

2006-05-22T12:38:00.000-05:00

Wired/Forbes reports on a new way of selling healthy snacks under the headline "Exotic Food Packaging Fights Rot":

Lucia Klansek wanted her teenage son to tote an apple or a banana to his basketball games, but fruit tended to get mangled in his bag, and containers of juice had to stay cold. The boy is lucky that his mother is a packaging expert. She designed her first soda bottle at age 12; it's still on store shelves in her native Slovenia.

So when she saw a package based on a design developed by Japanese scientists for NASA, she knew it would be perfect for her latest creation. Into a soft, 11-ounce pouch with a screw cap she packs a purée of 110 blueberries, six raspberries, half a banana and one and a half apples. The flash-pasteurized smoothie, which Klansek dubbed "e4b," contains no preservatives, and the package's seven-layer lining locks out air to protect nutrients. It can last on the shelf unopened for a year. Klansek, 48, and son Niko, now 22, used $2 million from the sale of her Slovenian beverage company to start a company to manufacture the fruit purées.

In January, Kings Super Markets started carrying the product in 27 stores and sold 187 pouches in its Short Hills, New Jersey, store during one four-hour promotion. The price is steep -- $6 per pouch, $1 more than a small Jamba Juice. But QVC wants in, as does Whole Foods Market.

Slovenia, Japan, Short Hills. Age 12, 11 ounces, 110 blueberres, six raspberries, half a banana, one and a half apples, "e4b," seven layers, Klansek 48, Nico 22, $2 million for the soda bottling operation, 27 stores, 187 pouches, four hours, $6 per pouch, $1 more than a Jamba Juice. How many bluberry smoothies were going to St. Ives? Does Jamba Juice really charge $5 for a small? There must be some mighty tasty Femme Boost™ whizzing in those blenders.

("e4b" turns out to stand for "easy for busy" and its website is about as annoying as you might expect.)

Senses of nostalgia

2006-05-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

I remember being annoyed when an English prof in my undergrad days opined that there must be a circuit in the brain programmed to switch off at age 25, making it impossible for a person to appreciate new styles of music, but as I age he is seeming more and more to have been onto something. It's not that I have no appreciation for new music, but I respond to the sounds of my youth with more passion and intensity than I do to anything more contemporary. In my year of iPodding I have been constantly borrowing CDs from the public library to rip and upload, many of them albums I either used to own on LP or tape (my LP collection has languished in Toronto since I moved away in 1997--actually since my record player died a few years before that--and my tapes have gone to magnetic heaven) or that I never owned but knew very well because friends had them. I have also been listening to new music, mostly indie rock, and old music that is new to me, like Townes Van Zandt, but for the most part I've been on a blinding nostalgia trip, getting wrapped up in songs that I had not heard in fifteen or twenty years that I used to listen to every day. One thing that makes my personal experience of music particularly nostalgia-prone is that the CD was introduced just late enough in my adolescence that I already had a big collection of cassettes and records when I got my first CD player (I was fifteen). For me this means that there are thousands of songs that were basically gone, that never entered my mind any more.

The first popular songs that I loved were AM radio hits of the early 1980s. After Neil Diamond's Jazz Singer soundtrack ("Everywhere around the world/They're coming to America!"), the first records I owned were the K-Tel compilation Rock 82 (Juice Newton, Rush, .38 Special, REO Speedwagon, Huey Lewis and the News, Billy Squire, Kim Carnes), then the real breakthrough, Billy Joel's Glass Houses, which was once my favorite album in the whole world. In the few years after that my collection grew. Much of it was music I learned to like from watching videos on Canadian music shows like The New Music (hosted by J.D. Roberts, who as John Roberts has become the new Aaron Brown) and Toronto Rocks. There was Duran Duran, Culture Club, The Police, Genesis/Phil Collins, and Michael Jackson (my brother always liked him better than I did). Eventually my taste became more sophisticated, under the influence of a Rolling Stone subscription and many smart and musical friends, and by the time I started buying CDs instead of LPs or cassettes I had outgrown the top 40 songs and albums of the early part of the decade.

When I listen to this music now, especially to things you never hear any more like Genesis's self-titled album of 1983 ("That's All," "Mama," "Illegal Alien," "Taking It All Too Hard," and "Home By the Sea") I feel immensely satisfied. The pop-rock style is passé and Phil Collins's romantic persona can be a bit much, especially when he cackles lustily after the choruses of "Mama," but I don't care. One thing I love about this record now (and also its followup, Invisible Touch) is how much it sounds like the Police albums of the same vintage, a similarity I never noticed before. Hugh Padgham produced both bands and you can tell that they came from the same shop . As different as they seem, "Synchronicity II" and "Illegal Alien" are almost the same song: "Synchronicity II" has a minor chorus and "Illegal Alien" is mildly offensive, but both songs have the same tempo and rhythm, the same synth, guitar, and drum sounds. Until the past few weeks I always felt more affection for The Police because I liked them better in the 80s. I never owned Genesis; I just listened to my friends's copies and heard the hits on the radio and at dance parties. But I bought Synchronicity when it came out and listened to it like crazy. After Genesis broke up and Phil Collins became a huge pop star we all decided that he was an obnoxious poseur; it took about six or eight more years to get the same feeling about Sting, whose late-80s solo albums are mostly pretty great (that song about the Russians loving their children too, which my friends and I thought was profound, is now unlistenable). To an extent, I love Genesis because I used to listen to Genesis all the time. It was part of the soundtrack of my youth. Genesis was the first band I saw live in a stadium, in 1986, when I was fourteen and had never smelled marijuana. It was fun but it was really my friends who worshiped the band, not me. Now I can't get enough. Nostalgia isn't rational.

And it seems to work differently with different senses. Lately I've been trying to make the same kind of trip back in time through my tastebuds and it isn't working. At the movies I tried Milk Duds and they were disgustingly chewy, sticking in my back teeth and making my mouth feel all tense and weird. So I had some Junior Mints instead and they were sickly sweet and artificial tasting. I used to love Milk Duds and Junior Mints. At a burger and custard place I had a cheeseburger and a chocolate malt and the combination, which I had been dreaming about for weeks, seemed idiotic. The malt was too sugary and the dessert-with-your-main-course thing was so unappealing. I didn't even finish the malt and I felt a bit silly to have ordered it at all. Then the other night we went to Boston Market, which reminded me a lot of a Canadian restaurant chain called Swiss Chalet that also serves rotisserie chicken. The poultry was juicy and well seasoned, but, well, too well seasoned. It was salty and the skin wasn't crisp. The sides were plentiful but amped way up on salt and fat. I loved this kind of meal in the days when I used to listen to Genesis, but the distance in time has made me accustomed to a very different kind of eating. The old kind of food no longer appeals to me even as the old kind of music really does.

Why today do I like to listen to "That's All" over and over again but not to have a burger and a chocolate malt? It seems counterintuitive but I think it might be because post-sell-out Genesis is actually good and a burger and a malt is actually not. Feel free to spread the word.

More music: my brother on indie rock and racism.

Memes and things

2006-05-17T22:03:00.000-05:00

This one comes from Helen, the authority on fish and other sea creatures that you eat. It's called "meme around the world."

Please list 3 recipes you have recently bookmarked from foodblogs to try:

I almost never use the bookmark function in my browser. I try to remember things that looked good and I search for them when I need to. But since the point of this seems to be to flag the good things that other bloggers have cooked, I'll give props to a few dishes that have been in the back of my mind:

-Sesame miso soup from In Mol Araan.

-Pork rilettes from Toast.

-Rhapsody in Rhubarb from The Candied Quince. This last one made me think: Yes, I will buy that pretty fresh rhubarb even if it's not on my list. Now it's sitting on the counter waiting for the right moment. My problem is that this recipe is basically cake filled with rhubarb and I don't want to bake a cake. I might just make the filling.

A foodblog in your vicinity:

A tip from Yulinka introduced me to Undelicious, which promises ranting and raving about local food and drink. I'm still getting to know it, so I won't characterize it any more than that.

A foodblog located far from you:

Culiblog, The Netherlands. Every post is intriguing in some way.

A foodblog (or several) you have discovered recently (where did you find it?)

Jay McInerney (that Jay McInerney) is blogging for House & Garden magazine's website. It's about eating fancy and drinking a lot, mostly in Manhattan. I found it through a link from Epi-log, the blog of the editor of Epicurious, and I read about that a couple of weeks ago on the Gurgling Cod.

Any people or bloggers you want to tag with this meme?

Not really. I have said before that I like these memes but I think I prefer the system in which people just do them if they look like fun and leave them alone if they don't. If this looks like fun, have yourself some fun.

***

Today was sunny, then rainy, then sunny again, then rainy again, then sunny again briefly before the sun went down. I took this picture

through the mesh of the kitchen window right after taking this one

of raspberry frozen yogurt that I made only because I had things in the fridge and freezer that I wanted to get rid of: vanilla yogurt that I bought by accident when I was in a hurry (I always buy unsweetened plain); some extra heavy cream from my last ice cream; and a bag of raspberries that had been in the freezer for just about too long. This fro-yo is cold, sweet, tart, and fruity, but it's not good. Its texture is slushy, not creamy. The recipe is on my flickr (click on the pic).

***

Here's a wacky one from my sister-in-law.

When did you last die?
Every time we say goodbye, I die a little. Crazy question!

What gets you out of bed in the morning?
The little man.

What became of your childhood dreams?
There was one in which I was naked and being chased by a gorilla, or actually, a man in a gorilla suit. I stopped having it.

What sets you apart from everyone else?
Nothing. I'm just like everyone else.

What is missing from your life?
Charcuterie.

Do you think that everyone can be an artist?
Everyone can be an artist, but not everyone wants to be.

Where do you come from?
I'm thinking this one over. My mother and father.

Do you find your lot an enviable one?
Yes. Most people have it bad.

What have you given up?
Femme Feral said "shrinking." Ambiguous! I have given up diet Pepsi, and I'm a better man for it.

What do you do with your money?
Fold it up in my right pants pocket. The change falls out when I sit on a low couch.

What household task gives you the most trouble?
The bathroom floor.

What are your favorite pleasures?
Food and drink, reading, music, film and television, other people. Not in that order.

What would you like to receive for your birthday?
Ice cream. Coffee table books with arty photography are nice too. We could also use one of those very large televisions that you can hang on a wall.

Cite three living artists whom you detest.
David E. Kelley, Kevin Smith, Rick Moody.

What do you stick up for?
I don't do much sticking up but if I did, I would stick up for equality and justice.

What are you capable of refusing?
Fresh fruit. Most of it makes my mouth and throat feel icky.

What is the most fragile part of your body?
No part of my body is fragile.

What has love made you capable of doing?
Early to bed, early to rise.

What do other people reproach you for?
Not doing what I was supposed to do.

What does art do for you?
Makes life worthwhile.

Write your epitaph
Have some more.

In what form would you like to return?
I would not like to return.

***

New Yorker tables for two on Momofuku, which sounds too obviously like a word you can't say on television:

Momofuku Ramen begins as a bed of noodles; Chang and his fellow-chef, Joaquin Baca (a meat-loving Texan), add pig shoulder and belly and top it with their signature poached egg. The tiny green peas in the bowl--easy to drop with chopsticks--are so robust they bounce. Even Brussels sprouts, which come in a hot kimchi purée, are amped up with thick chunks of bacon.

In a place where the veggies are this loud, the music is bound to be important, and Chang and Baca play everything from Wu-Tang Clan to Ozzy Osbourne, with two firm exceptions: no Springsteen and no Kenny Loggins. No wine, either; just beer and sake. The line cooks, anyway, are the real entertainment. Slamming and sweating their way around an open galley kitchen, they manage to make noodles look dangerous. (The backward hats and skull-and-bones tattoos don'’t hurt.) The other night, one of them threw some squirming crawfish in a pan and lit it on fire, like a pyrotechnic effect at a heavy-metal show. The flames sizzled, and a waitress, squeezing past the stove, reapplied her lip gloss and coyly bumped him with her butt.

Signature poached egg? Bouncing peas? Hot kimchi purée? Loud veggies? Kenny Loggins? Slamming and sweating? Coyly bumped him with her butt? So many things to make me go, Yech.

***

Someone was directed to this blog after searching Yahoo for pictures of tripe. The #2 hit is my entry here. #1 is the official site of Gigli.

The ice cream project: black sesame ice cream

2006-05-12T16:34:00.000-05:00

The consensus among my ice cream tasters is that this black sesame ice cream is interesting. No one proclaimed undying love for it. No one said that if they are ever sentenced to death, they want black sesame for the final course of their final meal before facing the great beyond. No one vowed to name their next child Black Sesame, or even their dog or goldfish. But interesting is better than blech, so I'm happy enough. It is both a virtue and flaw of my ice cream project that I make each one once, that I don't tinker with quantities and substitutions. A virtue because I focus on getting it right the first time and because each batch of ice cream is a total discovery, a new and fresh idea. But a flaw because none of them seems to come out quite perfect. Imperfection can be an end in itself but perfection would be nice once in awhile. If I weren't blogging ice cream it would be more tempting to try it again, but I don't want to write about black sesame twice. E says of Jeni's ice creams (which we sampled a few months ago) that each one overwhelms you with its intensity of flavor and captures the essence of its ingredients. Somehow I haven't accomplished that feat, but I'm just one amateur and I don't do perfection, so that's just how it is.

My immediate inspiration for making this flavor came from Robyn (blog, flickr), aka The Girl Who Ate Everything, whose adventures in New York eating are astonishing and whose efforts to document them constantly amaze me. She blogged recently about black sesame ice cream that she had at a parlor in Chinatown, so that put the idea in my head to try it out. (Mine is much darker in color; I'm eager to taste other renditions of black sesame to see if the intensity of sesame flavor is in proportion to darkness of color.)

Black sesame is a familiar flavor from dim sum confections (they're a filling in sesame balls, which also sometimes contain sweet bean paste). The black seeds taste the same as the white ones, as far as I can tell, but the Chinese love color contrast in their foods and this might explain why they prefer black sesame seeds as a filling inside a pastry made of white glutinous rice. Sesame is used as a flavor in sweets far and wide, not only in China but also in the Middle East and Europe (halva; honey sesame candy, a kind of sesame brittle that I used to eat all the time growing up). I first heard of black sesame ice cream when reading about Il Laboratorio del Gelato in NYC, which is on my short list of places to eat as soon as possible.

To make this ice cream I began by toasting and grinding seeds. I toasted them in a hot iron skillet and ground them in an electric spice grinder, which is actually a Mr. Coffee grinder in which I don't grind coffee. I remember the first time I heard Martha Stewart say that I need to buy two coffee grinders, one for coffee and one for everything else. I thought she was crazy, and maybe she is, but she was right about grinders.

(I have been using my spice grinder for all kinds of unusual tasks lately, including grinding medium bulgur into fine bulgur to make dal kibbeh, little red lentil balls with bulgur, onions, and spices which I have been cooking and eating just about all the time for two weeks. I got the idea from Mumu, and she got it from The Hungry Tiger. The recipe calls for cumin, garlic, fresh tarragon, and hot pepper paste. On the principle of if/then, I have been adding coriander (if cumin, then coriander) and ginger (if garlic, then ginger). I have been omitting the tarragon and following Mumu's substitution of gochujang for the hot pepper paste. And I have been serving them dipped in a raita made of full-fat yogurt, coarsely grated cucumber, finely chopped fresh mint, and a pinch each of salt and sugar.)

I started with two tablespoons of black sesame seeds but this seemed like too little, so I toasted and ground another two. This makes a quarter cup if you're keeping score at home. I thought that they might become tahini in my spice grinder but although they are a bit wet, they didn't turn to butter and it wasn't a bitch to clean. They did smell good. Perhaps I should mention that I buy black sesame seeds in large bags from the Asian Mart, that they're pretty cheap if you buy from an ethnic grocer (I don't care to know what Whole Foods charges), and that they don't seem to go off as quickly as white sesame seeds. I guess this is because they are lower in fat or moisture, but I can't say for sure.

After grinding my seeds, I added them to 3 cups of half and half and brought it to a simmer, tempered in my eight yolks whisked with 9 oz. of sugar to the ribbon stage, brought the mixture to 170, killed the heat, added a cup of heavy cream, and then tasted. It was like halva, like sesame candy, like dim sum, like everything I hoped it would be. I love to taste ice cream when it's warm, a sweet creamy soup in a state of becoming.

It's just as good frozen, but I suppose that the sesame flavor could be even more intense. If I were after perfection I might try a third of a cup next time, a half a cup the time after that. I might see just how far you can push the sesame. I might try a longer infusion in the cream. I might try melting halva down into the mix or adding toasted sesame seed paste.

My favorite thing about this ice cream is its color, but its flavor is excellent if a bit odd and its texture has some of the pleasing granular quality of halva. I'm not going to make it again anytime soon, but I'm looking forward to eating the pint of it still in my freezer

This post is for Barbara's monthly Spice is Right event. This installment is called "Sweet or Savory?" and asks you to cook with a spice that you grew up with as either sweet or savory and to cook with it the other way. I grew up with sesame as sweet and savory--sesame oil on broccoli and sesame candy from the corner store--but I have certainly encountered the majority of my sesame seeds on bagels, which I consider a savory food, and I think it's fair to assume that most North Americans see them that way most often. According to McCormick (and they should know), sesame seeds "may be the oldest condiment known to man." I would love to have been there when man first used a condiment. It was all downhill after that.

My other ice creams:

Egg ice cream

Green chile mint ice cream

Rice ice cream

Cardamom ice cream

Sour cream anise ice cream

Caramel ice cream

Apples and honey ice cream

Watermelon sour cream sherbet

Mojito cream cheese ice cream

Peach frozen yogurt

Oatmeal raisin ice cream

Mango cream cheese ice cream

Mocha ice cream

Berry buttermilk sherbet

Gingersnap ice cream

For the ears

2006-05-11T21:34:00.000-05:00

I know they've been around for at least a year or two, but I'm just getting into podcasts now. Here are a couple of food ones.

1. The Los Angeles radio program Good Food on KCRW begins each episode with a farmer's market report recorded live at a market. I was having intense tangerine envy the other day when they were describing the different kinds you can get in Santa Monica. Delicious juicy ones that peel really easily, and some that are even sweeter but thin-skinned and trickier to eat. You have to use a knife and the juice ends up all over your hands. I was drooling on my iPod and I don't even like tangerines.

This had me cursing, as I was listening last week, because the market season here wasn't even underway yet. But it is now. If you're local, here are two that I recommend:

West Allis Farmer's Market, corner of 65th and National, Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays beginning at 1 pm. I would have been there today but it was raining and really windy. This is my favorite place in metro Milwaukee for buying local vegetables and early in the season it has lots of flowers, plants and other garden things that I almost never buy.

Brookfield Farmer's Market, 2000 N. Calhoun Rd., Saturdays 7:30-noon. This is a very well attended market (I hate empty ones) adjacent to Brookfield City Hall that sells all the regular foodstuffs and also plenty of crafty stuffs. They also have live music on many market mornings and people love to bring their dogs.

The others in the area aren't open this weekend, so I'll let you know when they are and what to look for.

Back to the podcasts:

2. Eat Feed (I found it through Silverbrow's sidebar), is thoughtful, literate, and full of passion. I was listening to a show of theirs from last summer, "Ice Cream Through the Ages", which has an interview with Jeri Quinzio that oozes historical curiosities and novel ice cream ideas. Quinzio is the author of Ice Cream: A Cook's History of Cold Comfort, which has me smacking my forehead (how could I not own that book? how great is that title?).

One of the Eat Feed ice cream ideas that I'm eager to try is white coffee. You steep whole beans in cream and you end up with a subtle flavor and a light, whitish color.

I started something ice-creamy today that's much different from that, but you'll have to stay tuned to find out more.

Cheesecake and Ice Cream

2006-05-10T14:55:00.000-05:00

If you're in the mood for hype, consider this profile of Chicago avant-chef Homaru Cantu in Fast Company mag, full of the kitchen genius's wild and wacky ideas for food and utensils. Cantu is doing things in the same aesthetics-of-gastronishment mode as Achatz, Adrià , Blumenthal, and Dufrense. For example, a dish he calls Donut Soup is "an elegant espresso cup containing a few ounces of liquid that tastes exactly like the inside of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, chemical aftertaste and all." But he is best known for his edible paper made of vegetable-based proteins and inks; at his restaurant Moto (warning: annoying website), the guests are apparently invited to eat the menus.

All this would be fine with me if he didn't have a plan "to change the world for the better" with his edible paper by shipping it off to feed the hungry masses of the Earth's poor nations. Problem: although the paper is light, small, and nutritious, eating it doesn't make you feel full. For this Cantu is contemplating inventing foods that expand in your tummy. Here's the money quote: "if you have time-release pills, you could have time-release cheesecakes." Surely there is a better way of helping the starving children of the world than by sending them boxes of time-release cheesecakes, but I guess you never know. Also, someone should send a memo to the Factory to let them know what tomorrow's competition is up to.

(Here's some more about experimental food.)

***

Ice Cream Vans Face Total Meltdown, puns the Times of London (via A&LD). A great article full of details I was glad to learn. Such as:

-British ice cream trucks play "Greensleeves" and "O Sole Mio."

-Local authorities in the UK are setting up "ice cream free zones" to protect children from the health hazards of the frozen treat.

-British ice cream vendors have a trade group called the Ice Cream Alliance to promote their interests. (I want to form an Ice Cream Alliance. Who is with me?)

-Gangs used to fight over ice cream turf:

By the 1980s the business had become so lucrative that gangs fought over the right to sell to certain streets. In 1984 a row between Glasgow-based gangs led to the murder of six members of the Doyle family, who had run the Marchetti ice-cream company.

Cinematic!

-I don't know what this means, but I am delighted by it:

Depending on whom you believe, "99's" were first made by Cadbury's in the 1930s as a tribute to the King of Italy's bodyguard, traditionally composed of 99 troops; or a tribute by Italian café owners to Il Ragazzi del 99, a band of soldiers who fought in the Battle of the Piave River in the First World War; or named after the address of the Edinburgh-based Arcari ice-cream dynasty at 99 Portobello High Street

I guess it's not Gretzky or Nena, then.

Derby Day 2006

2006-05-07T08:37:00.000-05:00

I attended my first Kentucky Derby party yesterday and I hope it won't be my last. The hosts, one of whom is a proud son of Louisville, served mint juleps, a chocolatey Derby pie with walnuts, and benedictine, which is what you see in the top photo. Next year, I hope to know all the words to "My Old Kentucky Home."

Labels round 2

2006-05-06T14:34:00.000-05:00

Since last week's entry on critter labels I have become a bit obsessed with taking pictures of bottles and cropping them just right to get rid of any giveaway words. It's undoubtedly because I'm the kind of person whose choices of wine and beer are too much influenced by label design that I have become fascinated by what these things look like. I know enough about my beverages to be able to tell the difference between porter and pilsner, Cabernet and Chardonnay, but I don't speak the language fluently. So even though I know I'm supposed to hate cutesy shit that looks like the product of a corporate marketing department or a focus group study, I'm pretty easily taken in by the same clever tricks that get me to buy "vintage" Polo shirts at Old Navy and Choxie chocolate at Target. I like consumer products that say to me, mzn, this is just the kind of thing a person with your good taste would like, but that say it without seeming to be selling class distinction, without snob appeal. It's all about making the consumer feel comfortable and smart, and neither intimidated nor self-conscious. It bothers me, but only a little, that my resistance to this is quite weak.

Part deux includes both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages (including beer, wine, and fancy soda) but no spirits. You've probably seen the C mascot more often than any of the others. I don't know if this helps you at all, but I took most of these pictures at a Cost Plus World Market store. Answer or just guess in the comments. Or bitch about consumer capitalism!

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

F.

G.

H.

I.

Tuna

2006-05-04T21:04:00.000-05:00

I've been working on something like a theory of tuna salad, a set of general principles that accounts for all of the various ingredients and techniques one might need and also those that should be avoided. I'm not positive that I have tried every possible permutation of this classic, but the state of my knowledge is now sufficiently advanced to share some of my findings with you.

I offer this up not because I don't think that you already know how to make tuna salad but for two reasons. First, gourmet sandwich places and cookbooks seem to have decided that it's a virtue to make tuna salad without mayonnaise. Thus one menu (probably many, actually) offers "olive oil tuna salad," basically advertising that it's not made with mayo. This is wrongheaded, trendy nonsense. Mayonnaise is delicious. Second, the most basic preparations, like Martini cocktails and grilled steaks, are often deceptively hard to perfect. I think this is true of tuna salad, which is easy to make but not as easy to make well.

So without further ado:

1. The fish. White (albacore) tuna packed in water is always preferable for tuna salad. Light tuna, which is a whole different species (skipjack, tongol or yellowfin) is cheaper and stronger tasting. The exception is the kind packed in olive oil, which is more expensive (sometimes much more) but this stuff doesn't mix well with commercial mayo and since it's more of an investment, it's a waste to use it in tuna salad. Put this good stuff in salads dressed in vinaigrette or in pasta sauces. Albacore tuna is said to be dry in comparison with other kinds, but since you are going to mix many moist ingredients with it, dryness doesn't matter.

1. a. Solid or chunk? Solid. A can of solid white tuna contains a product that actually looks like a cooked piece of fish. The visuals inside a can of chunk tuna are not pleasing. Exception: the tuna packed in pouches instead of cans can't be solid because it gets smushed in packaging. Even smushed, it still looks more like solid than chunk. Pouch tuna is an excellent product. It requires no draining and takes up less space in the pantry.

2. Crunchy bits. Celery, destringified with a veggie peeler and finely minced, at a ratio of half a rib per sandwich. This works out to one rib for a regular-size can (yield two sandwiches) or one and a half ribs for one large pouch (yield three sandwiches). By finely minced I mean that the pieces of celery should be minuscule.

2. a. Sour bits, which may also be crunchy. Here you have two options: prepared sweet pickle relish (the iridescent green relish, easily obtained in Chicago and environs and always a condiment on Chicago hot dogs, is very good), about one teaspoon per sandwich; or minced cuke pickles. If using minced pickles, you can't do better than French cornichons, two-to-three per sandwich. Trader Joe's sells these at a nice low price but they're not quite as good as Maille. American gherkins or "midgets" are ok. Big fat dill pickles are your last choice because they contain too much water and affect the tuna salad texture adversely.

2. b. Hard cooked egg: no. My opinion is that hard cooked egg is a filler ingredient used to stretch the quantity of the tuna salad. It doesn't contribute a desirable flavor or texture. If eggs are what you want, make egg salad.

3. Dressing. Three options: Hellman's mayonnaise (apparently called Best Foods in the western U.S.); another brand of mayonnaise; homemade mayonnaise. I don't love using homemade mayonnaise in tuna salad because it lacks sweeteners and preservatives and, seriously, it doesn't taste the same. It's good, it has its place, but it's not the same.

I don't support lowfat mayo. If you're looking for something very low in fat, don't make tuna salad.

I cannot tell you how much mayonnaise to put in your tuna salad any more than I can tell you how often to gaze into the eyes of your beloved. Only you know how much.

(Yes, there is a condiment that starts with "M" that you'll find near the Hellman's in the supermarket. Let's not mention its name.)

3. a. Additions to the dressing: I like to drizzle perhaps half a teaspoon of pickle juice (any kind) into the mix and I always add a pinch of salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Alternatives here would include lemon juice (subbing for the pickle juice), other hot spices (cayenne pepper, wasabi powder), mustard, or prepared or fresh horseradish. If you have leftover tartar sauce (homemade I hope) you could use some of it. Herbs? I don't know. The pickles and their juice are flavored with tarragon or dill but I wouldn't go adding those things fresh to the tuna salad. Chopped capers are acceptable but not my thing. My preference is simplicity: mayo, pickle juice, salt, and pepper. I still haven't tried shallots or anchovies. Maybe they're good too but I doubt it.

4. Mixing. It doesn't matter what order you add ingredients but one thing is crucial. You must press with the tines of a fork against the flakes of fish to break them apart and amalgamate them into the other ingredients. I do this for a good minute or two. Press, mix, press, mix, press, mix. Flex your muscles. It should be well blended.

5. Bread. Obviously, freshness is vital. We almost always have our tuna on some kind of whole wheat but the bread above is sourdough from the Milwaukee Public Market, which sells good breads. Their challahs are even surprisingly acceptable.

5. a. Additions to the sandwich. Not necessary. Properly made tuna salad served on fresh bread needs no additional spread, vegetable, or condiment, but a leaf of crisp lettuce is nice.

5. b. Variation: the tuna melt. Best open-faced on an English muffin. Toast a split muffin halfway, just until the surfaces are no longer soft but before they take any color. Top with tuna salad, and then top that with grated sharp cheddar (or Gruyere, or whatever). Heat until the cheese has melted.

(In case you were wondering, the chips in the picture are Kettle brand sea salt and vinegar and I think they taste like detergent.)

Dreaming of DQ

2006-05-03T09:23:00.000-05:00

The often nostalgic blog Our Time on the Edge is the work of Daphne Supergirl, a fellow Wisconsin-dwelling Canadian expatriate. Her Dairy Queen appreciation is making me hungry.

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Oedipus as an eight-minute movie dramatized by vegetables. Brilliant widescreen compositions and the nastiest broccoli chopping you've ever seen. (Via Biomes.)

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Bottled water for dogs makes sense in the age of dog psychologists. But bottled water for dogs in beef, chicken, liver, and lamb flavors is making my brain hurt. (Via MeFi.)

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Abbie Making Gefilte Fish is exactly what it sounds like. Abbie Hoffman is the man who once said, "Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger." (Thanks for passing this my way, FF.)

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So why is there an avocado on the cover of the new Pearl Jam album? link link

I ate the New Yorker?

2006-05-01T19:40:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker-hating niche of blogland is being exploited just fine, but I thought I'd pay it a visit anyway to reflect on a recent article by Bill Buford in which he butchers pigs. First Buford goes to Tuscany to learn how to cut up a hog from the pupil of a butcher called Maestro. Does anyone else think that this stuff reads like a rehash of his article about cooking in the kitchen at one of the Batali restaurants? I don't think it's all that charming to read in two different articles about the New Yorker's fiction editor screwing up some kitchen task much to the exasperation of a suffering expert Italian. Once was enough. Then Buford buys a pig in New York, shleps it home on his Vespa (this image made me cringe), and makes hundreds of meals out of it. No explanation of the circumstances in which he hosted this many people in his New York apartment or if there were other arrangements for the feeding of these--one hopes grateful--pig eaters.

This article is narrated in a back-and-forth pattern: an episode from New York, an episode from Italy, NYC, Italy, and so on. This device made it a bit more arty than it needed to be and seemed like the sort of thing they ought to teach you not to do in a creative nonfiction class. Don't just jumble up the time-frame to make it arty. For all I know, jumbling is exactly what they teach. Maybe that's what makes the non-fiction creative, but it struck me as artificial.

I am envious of Buford's whole hog experience. I must have a pig of my own. I also wouldn't say no to a Vespa.

Buford should really get himself a blog to compete with the going whole hog blog. This article should have been blogged. Everybody should have a blog.

Also on the subject of food in the New Yorker, see zp on the Donner Party article in the Journeys issue (Apr. 24). Somehow she manages to avoid the c-word.

The ice cream project: green chile mint ice cream

2006-04-29T06:44:00.000-05:00

The serrano chile in this recipe doesn't make the ice cream taste very hot. It gives it an underscore flavor of green chile to set off the ice cream's predominant mintiness but it doesn't assault the mouth. Mint ice cream made with actual leaves of mint is a totally different species from ice cream made with mint extract or, worse, artificial flavoring. The mint leaves taste much brighter, livelier, and I daresay, mintier. Even straining the leaves out of the custard mix, as I did here, their fresh taste is instantly recognizable.

I would love to claim originality for this combination but I'm hardly the first to think of it. Southwestern cooks pair green chiles with more or less everything, including sweet stuff like chocolate. There is a recipe for serrano-mint ice cream that I found here that is pretty much what I decided to make. There used to be a place in Madison called Chocolate Coyote whose signature ice cream flavor was a combination of chocolate, cinnamon, and cayenne. Of course, the mint-green chile combination is also familiar from southeast Asian cooking, as is the combination of hot and sweet flavors as in pad Thai and mango/papaya salad. These two dishes were my introduction to Thai food (Thai Shan Inn, Eglinton West, Toronto, early 1990s) and I'm sure that the hot-sweet combination, which I had never before tried in such an intense form (Big Red chewing gum might be the nearest thing), was what sold me on it right away.

The procedure I followed is the same as many of the other ice creams I have made: steep the flavoring ingredients in cream, then use the flavored cream to make the custard. Cook, chill, churn, freeze, eat.

I used one big handful of mint leaves, chopped, and one serrano chile, seeds included, minced. The rest of the ingredients were my standard French custard mixture: 9 oz. sugar, 3 cups half and half, 1 cup heavy cream, and eight egg yolks. I steeped the mint and chile for about twenty minutes, bringing the half and half to a simmer and then killing the heat. I strained the green stuff out and proceeded as usual from there. You could leave it in but I prefer not to have little bits of chewy, vegetal, green stuff in my ice cream spoiling the smooth texture.

I'm thinking about making ice cream one of these days that has a lot more heat, that really makes the snot run from your nose and the tears from your eyes. I don't love or crave that crazy hot food experience but I do kind of get off on it once in awhile.

My other ice creams:

Egg ice cream

Black sesame ice cream

Rice ice cream

Cardamom ice cream

Sour cream anise ice cream

Caramel ice cream

Apples and honey ice cream

Watermelon sour cream sherbet

Mojito cream cheese ice cream

Peach frozen yogurt

Oatmeal raisin ice cream

Mango cream cheese ice cream