schmindigo

I’m cheating. That up there is yesterday’s date. The 3rd Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Silent Poetry Reading was yesterday, but I spent all of yesterday in bed, no exaggeration. I seem to have been struck with a flu-within-a-cold, because yesterday felt like a whole different type of bludgeoned misery than the painful throat of earlier this week. Anyway, through the indulgence of Blogger I shall date this post with the proper Brigid date, even though it’s a big fat lie because I’m posting a day later.

This poem is from the tantalizing Kim Vaeth, who published one beautiful collection & then disappeared into other activities that are even more obscure than poetry, like musical scores that get performed only rarely, & always in faraway places.


Pencil and Blue Crayon

Let the last drawing I make with pencil and blue crayon be of you in the bath.

Let the weather be fine in February and August.

Let all of us belong to the sunlit now and move from surprise to surprise.

Let the yellow dining rooms where we drink wine have red tablecloths and balconies.

Let all I cannot say open me in your arms.

Let me sit in an old beachchair touching the green present.

Hey, look what I found! House numbers meet the Evil Chinky Font! Or, perhaps more accurately, house numbers sprang from an ECF. Truly I never would have figured this out on my own, because as the designers point out, the house numbers have “gradually softened” to the point that they don’t seem to resemble any ECF at all, but inhabit their own house number world. My pal the Triathlete has been obsessed with house numbers lately, so I’ve been looking at them more, & wondering where the hell they came from, because they are so typographically odd. Mystery solved, & who ever woulda guessed the answer would strike so close to home?

I can’t help but draw a parallel between the house numbers &—wait for it—“American Chinese” food (aw, you saw that one coming). They both started out as weird misinterpretations of something Chinese, then evolved into their whole own reality, becoming ubiquitous & integral staples of American culture. Arguably the house numbers travelled much farther than the food; the numbers started as racist caricatures (not designed by Chinese typographers, we can safely assume) & are now no longer recognizably Asian in any way at all, racist or otherwise, whereas the food started through gradual adaptations by Chinese cooks themselves trying to figure out what white people wanted to eat, & can still be described the same way.

I love smart type designers. I love them even more when they explain things so clearly.

In cold news, today my throat was still sore enough that an apple was too hard & lumpy to swallow comfortably, but I did have enough energy to make applesauce, which felt quite soothing, both to make & to eat.

About those lemons? Forget it. I realized the lemon juice was actually irritating my throat more, so I switched to a vile red syrup called Tylenol Extra-Strength Adult Rapid Blast Liquid. Could I make this stuff up? Who exactly comes up with these names? It’s like they want you to think you’re taking a shot of some sports drink or Red Bull or maybe even some nasty form of alcohol that I wouldn’t actually know about (cause I’m sheltered like that). Oh, & it’s supposed to be “cherry-flavored”—don’t even get me started. It does seem to be working though; I was able to swallow solid food for dinner, even though it still felt a bit odd going down.

Do I not do my best to entertain & enlighten you, dear reader?

I’m sick. I have that disgusting wretched cold. All those Meyer lemons I was planning to make lemon meringue pie with? They go straight into hot water with honey & garlic for my miserable throat. Meanwhile, whenever I am not asleep or moping around in a foggy stupor, I’ve been surfing the type blogs (don’t ask me why), which eventually led me to this endlessly amusing timewaster P22 Music Text Composition Generator. Check it out, they have many instrument choices, including some of my favorites: banjo, accordion, bagpipe… the acoustic bass doesn’t sound very convincing though. Anyway it’s much more suited to my current condition than trying to appreciate the fine differences between various Garamonds.

Nostalgic Americana fetish of the day: packaged, ready-to-bake pull-apart dinner rolls. Seems like these don’t get nearly as much play in the retro-kitsch imagination as Pillsbury tube biscuits, which, of course, have that inspired, nay, genius packaging going for them. Plus, the tubes & their satisfying twist/burst/pop persist unto the present day, whereas the pull-aparts have fallen by the supermarket wayside. Or have they? If you know, do tell! (Thanks to Miss Peace Broccoli for jogging these memories; she was telling me about pull-apart rolls she likes from Andronico’s.)

Variations on a theme, continued:

About 1/2 a bag of arugula, 3 fat endives (sliced), a Fuji apple (cut into wedges & then sliced crosswise), pine nuts (toasted), Orangette’s red wine mustard vinaigrette.

While eating, we improved it with thick shavings of Pecorino (using the veggie peeler) & snips of dried plum (using the kitchen scissors):

Meanwhile, I’ve been knitting, a few rows at a time, & finished the left side of Dashing in a nice periwinkle color. Devoted readers of this blog will note that this represents significant hand progress! I have been very careful not to overdo it. Ice after knitting helps. I’m so excited to be knitting again that I have 2 hats, a scarf, & Dashing all in progress at once—& since I still can only knit a few rows at a time, this means not much is actually getting done. One of the hats is Yarnharlot’s unoriginal hat, which theoretically goes really fast, but Dashing is distracting me so much I haven’t touched that hat (or the other one, which is going to take forever anyway) in a couple of weeks.

That earthquake pasta the other night got me into some kind of mood. The next day, we went on one of those rare grocery shopping extravaganzas where you just go crazy & pile up the cart—at the bottom of the very long grocery list I had written “actually, EVERYTHING”. Fridge & pantry are busting at the seams now, but lunch today ended up strangely earthquakey nevertheless. I think it’s got to be some kind of winter hibernation mentality, cooking & eating as if you’re holed up in some little cabin in the snow with lots & lots of Mason jars of preserved foods.

Okay, well, not quite.

This here is simply polenta (which I always keep in the freezer), topped with buttered corn (also from the freezer), Pecorino, & a few leaves of fresh oregano just to remind me that we have green food in the fridge. I got the basic idea from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, but of course hers involves fresh corn & more finessing of the polenta than I can handle right now.

Boil about 1-2/3 cups water, whisk in 1/3 cup of polenta, turn down to very low simmer & continue to whisk frequently, for approximately 20-30 minutes. At some point I sprinkled in salt. Meanwhile, melt some butter in a pan & cook about 1/2 cup of frozen corn kernels. When the polenta is ready, pour it in a pasta dish, top it with the corn, & microplane Pecorino on top. Garnish with oregano leaves & serve to one cold person, still premenstrual as all hell. Don’t worry too much about me though, I had fresh arugula for dinner.

I appear to be some kind of magnet for Bakesale Betty gossip. I was on the phone with Cooking Show, discussing hot water bottles & amaryllis bulbs, when she gave me the dish she got from Mr. Betty himself: soft serve ice cream is coming to Bakesale Betty’s! How fabulous is that? I love that it’s soft serve; that is just so Betty. Apparently they did their research down at Sketch, which boggles my mind because I didn’t even know that Sketch had soft serve, & I call myself knowing about ice cream around here? For shame. Hopefully my timely reporting of this here rumor will redeem me as a reliable info source on Berkeley/Oakland ice cream procurement.

But wait, there’s more: there will be a second Bakesale location opening in Oakland (in the neighborhood I refuse to call Uptown—don’t even get me started), with more baking space, which means an improved flow of the necessary pies in both new location & old. This is a damn good thing because the last two times I tried to get my hands on a chicken pot pie, they’ve been out of them, thus driving me mad with desire & longing, &c.

Let us pray that this expansion will not damage the goods—or the spirit—as has befallen other, once-lovable enterprises.

What to do when faced with the early-January depleted larder? (What exactly is a larder? Does it mean the same thing as pantry? Don’t I really mean “empty fridge”?) As if the holidays weren’t horrifying enough on their own, the end of the year further tests my already-fragile sanity by depriving me of both farmers market & regular swimming. After all that, throw in a few days’ torrential rain & the worst PMS in memory, & the world should be relieved I barely left the house all weekend. Is it any wonder there was No Plan, no ingredients, no real prospects of any kind for dinner last night? Worse, we had already used our Go Out Instead card the night before.

But fear not! The spirit of chop suey is alive & well around here, & after having moped around the house all day I rose to the challenge.

Here is what I rescued from the forlorn, echoing chambers of the fridge:

half a red onion, the cut surface shriveling with dehydration
3 shallots in good condition
the middle of a celery bunch, still reasonably stout
4 endives, also fine
a bag of bulk lemon fettucine, keeping the faith from our last trip to the Bowl
1 small Meyer lemon from the garden
a tiny nub of Pecorino

We also had about a quarter loaf of the famous Tartine bread, but, I kid you not, it had to be more than 2 weeks old. (Don’t worry, I wouldn’t ever serve this to a guest, except in an earthquake situation.) I started by aggressively trimming off all the crust & dried-out edges, then stuck the salvaged middle of the bread in the Cuisinart to make crumbs. I did similarly aggressive editing on the onion, then chopped it & the shallots & celery into some vague approximation of a mirepoix. (Did you know that Trader Joe’s is selling mirepoix in a plastic container? It’s actually labelled Mirepoix, & the carrots & onions & celery are arranged in these cute layers in the plastic—has “mirepoix” entered the general vocabulary all of a sudden?! I saw that right after a server in a restaurant used the word while describing a dish to me. She totally expected me to know what it was. I feel like I only happen to know what mirepoix means. Do all of her other customers know? Are we all expected to know mirepoix now? Does Rachael Ray have something to do with this?!)

Breadcrumbs went into the pan with olive oil & melted butter, & were joined by a generous handful of pine nuts from the freezer. When they were all nice & toasted I set them aside in a dish. Into the hot pan with more oil went the wannabe mirepoix. When that was done, I dumped in the just-cooked pasta along with the sliced endive, mixed it all around until the endive seemed to disappear (it’s that cooked translucence thing), gave it another generous drizzle of olive oil, & served it up. Crumbs & pine nuts on top, & then microplaned lemon zest & Pecorino on top of that.

Not bad for a scavenged dinner.

Too late, I realized we also had a few capers knocking around the bottom of a jar; I woulda chopped them up & added them to the mix too.

Department of Missed Opportunities, also Novelty Hybrid Chinese Restaurant Department: Chino Bandido in Phoenix. Doh! I was just in Phoenix last month. Too late, found out about this restaurant via email from David Chan. Check out the weird panda sculpture. I think this may be the first time I’ve had a Chinese restaurant offend me with a Mexican stereotype instead of the more usual Chinese stereotypes (yes, the Evil Chinky Font is a typographical stereotype). Further randomness: I notice they have snickerdoodles on the menu. Snickerdoodles?! I don’t think they’re Chinese or Mexican, but snickerdoodle is one of the all-time great cookie names. Obviously a visit is in order next time I go to Phoenix. The things I do in the name of art. Sheesh.

As much a salad queen as I am, I used to have a hard time with salad in the winter. It felt too cold, too light… too summery. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out, but the key, of course, is to adapt saladmaking strategy to the season. Duh. Thus, arugula transitions me through the late fall, & chicories of all kinds are now getting me through the winter. Problem solved! Chicories feel hearty & earthy to me. Their bitterness plays well with winter citrus & cheese in bigger chunks (don’t know about you, but winter definitely makes me want more fat). Lettuce-oriented salads get to remain happily in the warmer part of the year, where they belong—an entirely personal thing, since excellent lettuces are plenty available (around here, at least). They do still make it into the salad bowl, but mainly in a supporting role.

Or, in this case, not at all:

This is Treviso (or something close) from Riverdog, tart oranges from our friend Cooking Show’s backyard tree, Satsumas & walnuts from Kaki farm, plus some cheap goat cheese from Trader Joe’s. Red wine & mustard vinaigrette courtesy of the famous Orangette, whose spring salad was instrumental in starting me down the path to chicory salads. This photo is a little misleading because I actually added a lot more citrus to the bowl halfway through eating this salad. I’m not above making corrections & adjusting ratios mid-meal. Hey, it’s my kitchen & there’s a ton of fruit sitting right over there, so why suffer, even a tiny bit?

I think I have finally nailed the latkes. It’s not that I remember having problems with my latkes in the past, but this time, baby, this time we ate some killer latkes! The latke aroma permeated the house, wafting memories of Hanukahs past. As our latke co-conspirator Cooking Show pointed out, the measure of our success was the way her clothes smelled the day after. Not only the clothes she wore in our kitchen, but even other clothes took on the delightful latkeness. All of this might seem like a bit too much latke funk for some of you, but maybe that’s because you aren’t eating the right latkes, hmm?

I started with some really good taters, about 5 fist-sized Yukon Golds from the Temescal Farmers Market (which is not my usual farmers market, so please forgive my forgetting the farm’s name) & then 2 enormous Russets (from, er, Whole Paycheck) that were about a pound each—the very picture of robust, hearty tater health. I peeled em all, grated em in the Cuisinart, & dumped em straight into a cold water bath. After a few minutes I pulled them out & set them to drain in a colander. After the first big puddle of water drained off I salted the taters, mixed them around & then let them keep draining for a good 2 or 3 hours.

Then I made applesauce, adding a squeeze of Meyer lemon juice to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market Cookbook recipe. I washed some salad chicories; you need something crunchy & a little bitter to balance the latke grease. Sliced satsumas in the salad help too. You can’t see em in this photo but they’re in there.

I grated a huge yellow onion (from Catalan Farm, growers of amazing onions) & left it in the Cuisinart bowl. When the time came, I threw the onions (minus the juice in the bottom of the bowl) in with the taters, squeezed everything gently to get more liquid out, then poured the shredded stuff into a big bowl with 4 beaten eggs, salt & pepper. Then I began to debate with myself, flour or no flour? Cooking Show arrived & I asked her opinion, but she put on her tough-love act & insisted that I must arrive at my own cooking decisions. I decided to try a couple without, & then add flour if necessary. Turned out there was no need.

Rule #1 about frying latkes: DO NOT FEAR THE OIL. It is all about the oil! As I was repeating this like a mantra, Donna & I agreed that both of our mothers would fail miserably at latkes because they fear the oil. (Cooking Show’s mother never had this problem.) You have to just bloop it into the pan unstintingly. All told, we ended up using about 1/3 of a bottle of safflower oil. Cooking Show got involved despite herself (she isn’t called Cooking Show for nothing) & pointed out that it’s best to add oil & let it heat up properly between batches of latkes, as opposed to introducing cold oil when they are in the midst of frying. So you must be bold & add the right amount of oil (that would be “a lot”) all at once between batches.

Rule #2 is that the first few latkes are just warm-up, & they improve significantly after that. Donna took over the frying duties & the latkes got very very good. She raised the temperature a hair & figured out some tricks to correct for the unevenness of the flame, rotating the latkes strategically for perfect browning. Latke perfection sent us into a frenzy of greedy latke-eating! We were barely able to restrain ourselves & save enough for Plastic Lam, who was arriving late because she was busy whipping up yet another batch of her famous ice cream. By the time she got here, I felt that I myself could keep a temple lit for months.

We ate teeny tiny spoonfuls of rich roquefort ice cream.

Hey, how do ya like my new look? We should see some improvement in functionality around here now, which was the main instigation for the change (some odd things started to happen after Blogger migrated to Google), but of course I couldn’t resist cooking up a new color scheme while I was at it. Don’t hold your breath for the rest of the site, though. Other than that whole frozen in time thing, it’s still working. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Also, I will be gradually adding more links, so don’t go feeling neglected prematurely!

Please indulge me as I jump on the Thanksgiving bandwagon… people are giving me some very nice things. Plastic Lam dropped off a quart of lusciously custardy ginger ice cream she’d made with honey instead of sugar. Then the Astrological Yodeling Gardener said she had a couple pairs of ostrich cowboy boots to give me if they fit. So she came by—arriving early & compulsively weeding in front of our house while waiting for me to come home—& I fed her a dessert I composed out of Plastic Lam’s ice cream & Fuyu persimmon shavings sprinkled with Maldon sea salt & walnuts. (In case you can’t tell, I’m pretty pleased with myself for coming up with this one, & with Plastic Lam & her ice cream for inspiring it.)

Then Astrological Yodeling Gardener pulled out the boots, which turned out to be twin pairs except one had a beautiful wine-colored foot & the other was butterscotch. The identical brown tops sported a magnificent 8 rows of stitching. I tried on the wine ones & they fit like a good old-skool cowboy boot should: surprisingly comfy. (Why am I always surprised?) As for the butterscotch, I’ve never been much for wearing that color, & AYG said she wore those more anyway, so I said she should keep them & then we could be boot twins. Giggling over this idea, we sat at the kitchen table each wearing a pair & admiring them while she told how a friend had given them to her many years ago, & they were custom-made but her friend had back problems & couldn’t wear them anymore.

I asked who had made them, but AYG said she didn’t know. I pulled off a boot to look inside, & nearly fell over: Paul Bond! Dang, that shit is the real deal! I still can’t believe that I just got a pair of vintage ostrich Paul fucking Bonds handed to me, & they fit! That was yesterday & I’m still in shock. Thank you, Astrological Yodeling Gardener! I’m honored to be a Bond Girl with you! I sent her home with some of my granny’s famous sticky rice Chinese tamales (thanks Granny!), but I think we know who got the better end of the deal.

fyi… this website, & my email, will go on a little overnight vacation this weekend.

Here’s the notice I got about it: Beginning this Saturday, November 10th at 6pm Pacific Time, The WELL will be moving our servers to a more modern and disaster-resistant colocation site. All servers will be powered down, moved, and brought back up at the new location. Barring unforeseen difficulties, we expect to have everything back before noon Sunday.

Modern & disaster-resistant? Quite intriguing!

Oh my gawd the Carolina Chocolate Drops! You know sometimes when you go see a band based on nothing more than a hunch, & then you turn out to be so right? I had torn out an article about these folks waay back when, buried it in a scary giant pile on my desk, then unearthed it just a couple weeks ago during major excavation of my desk. (You can actually see the desktop now! It’s blue.) Article in hand, I found the website & listened to a song, which I liked enough to then see where they were playing. Serendipity called; they were coming to Cafe Du Nord in just a few days.

So, there we were, with pumpkin soup & a big spinach salad, hard pear cider & no particular expectations. The opening duo was pleasant enough, obviously locals with friends in the audience. So far, so good. They finished playing & we finished our food. Then the Drops got on stage & gave us that sneaky stringband trick of a sweet, moderate-paced preamble before dramatically kicking it up to superhighspeed, large & in fucking charge, authoritative, sinus-clearing, hair-raising, fierce playing. Wow! The temperature of the place shot up about 10 degrees. I was instantly in love. & it didn’t stop. They got everthang: showpersonmanship, talent, brains, dedication, humor, analysis, energy, & looks & youth (oh yeah, I did say energy) to boot. If I wasn’t so thrilled just to be in the same room with them I’d go ahead & be jealous. The wacky Dom Flemons plays any & every instrument he feels like, including bones, jug & guitar, & just when you think he’s shown you everything he’s got, throws some throat-singing into the mix too. Rhiannon Giddens does everything too, including Charleston & clogging—barefoot! Justin Robinson may seem like “the quiet one” in comparison but is a mean player & singer himself & a fully worthy, equal member of the trio.

Everybody loved them. Toward the end of one song, someone in the audience moaned, “Don’t let it end!” When they were done with us we made them come back for two encores, then stampeded up to the CD table with fistfuls of cash, crying out, give us one of everything! They graciously signed their CDs for us & we went home with joyously rearranged brain cells. Do I need to say it? Go see them! They’re everything you never knew you wanted in an African American oldtime stringband. If you think you don’t like oldtime, well, they’ll make a convert outta you.

The one that got away… sometimes (like on the way to the airport) you just can’t stop the car, get out & Holga a place. Instead, you gotta settle for quick digital reflexes (pun intended) & hope you can come back someday, while the restaurant is still there.

Look, Eastern Bakery has a mooncake order form on the web now! But you still have to mail a check the old-fashioned way. I love it. They also have an oddly unlinked page explaining why theirs are superior to mooncakes from China.

I have this dilemma every year where I overenthusiastically buy a whole box of 4 mooncakes, & then like 2.5 of them end up going stale in the back of the fridge because the stuff is so dang rich—even if you invite friends over, everybody eats just a couple of slices. I guess a better tactic would be to go to the bakery itself & buy just 1 or 2, but that’s a bit of a slog for me, especially right now when it’s still hard for me to walk up & down hills. (Remember the pelvis? Well it’s the knee on the other side that hurts now, from all the compensating, aka weird moonwalking moves on one leg.)