cooking for the young, broke and clueless

Halloween 2: Feburary 10 (approximately)

2012-02-17T03:43:00.003-07:00

Because you just can't get enough of a good thing. And some other holidays are just too scary.

The missus and I threw a Halloween 2 party for our and mostly my friends. It was our and mostly my idea, because Valentine's Day is silly, a scam, offensive, fraudulent, and way too pink for a man as butch as I am. So we picked a Friday night because I have to work Saturday nights, invited all the people we thought would come and then some we hoped might. Although we forgot about her cousins- darn. And I made it a pot luck so we and mostly I would not have to cook everything. The day before we whipped up a half order (75 cookies) of gingerbread hippos, dinosaurs, and elephants with my cute cutter shapes, then decorated them with sprinkles and Teresa's fine from-scratch frosting. They were cute. Then we put together a spooky haunted house gingerbread kit I bought on clearance in November and tucked away for a rainy day because you never know when a Halloween might attack you suddenly- just look how many sequels there are by that very name.

For our dinner contribution, I made my famous Chinese slow pork which normally goes on tostadas or fresh-fried tortillas from scratch, but was just a stand alone. Chinese aromatic spices, brown sugar and green diced chiles. It was as usual a big hit and provided left-overs. Goes great in a salad, an omelette, or over pasta or rice. Teresa boiled a box of "Mother In Law's Tongue" pasta I bought at a World Market store- $6.98 a pound- but fun. It was so pricey that I had saved it for 3 years. The best by date was a 2010. Whoops. But it was still fresh. It is dried after all. And a popular hit. Pictured above.

We had 10 total come, and no one else dressed up, but I made them wish they had with my magnificent full-body spandex that only complete confidence can carry off. I told them before changing that I was going to shame them into wishing they were more fun and had worn costumes, despite being so heavily outnumbered. And I did it. Just like I had at work for the 2 day costume contest when I went as hairy, angry, loner with a heart of gold and a high sense of honor, and much baggage of all sorts who has bad dreams, X-Man Wolverine on Day 1 and then a hooded Ninja on day 2 with kitana and the line of my underwear very visible from the tightness of the body suit. And few others dressed up. But I did get a new fake work girlfriend out of it. This one is married with 4 children and has a perfect attitude. She asked me why my friends weren't around much anymore so I said, "well I wasn't going to tell you, and they haven't said anything to me, but they all think we're having an affair and want to be left alone." So she worried for about 5 seconds and then got annoyed for 5 more, then said, "we should egg this on! It'll be fun." With me going on a 2 week vacation we both knew people would really start to talk and wonder so we started inventing stories, and were even finishing one another's sentences: tell everyone I made a pass at you after talking you into carpooling one day...and then I slapped you...yeah!...and you slashed my tires...what a jerk I am!...I know! So you were fired...bummer!...No I'll be the desperate one. I begged you to run away with me...so I used all my vacation time to get away from you and hope it all was better when I came back...that's believable!

Ah good times. She's much better at coping with social attention than my under-aged fake work girlfriend was.

Teresa was a Bandito, though she failed to look menacing with her toy water pistol, tiny guitar that has only one string short enough to pluck and tune (it snapped by the way when she tried to play a one note song), and bright smile. But she pulled off the Guy Fawkes mustache pretty darn sexily, if I dare admit.

Everyone did bring food, good for them. Even if it was mostly all from Walmart. The Twilight Cupcakes were at least in the spirit of the slightly appalled but triumphantly exuberant nature of Halloween 2, which stands boldly in the face of its enemies and such and such. Traditional Halloween 2 decorations can also include a tiny holiday pine tree, preferably fake, and decorated with your favorite ornaments. We put out a big pile of chocolate wrapped in Halloween foil I still had, and still have, and one girl brought a good clam dip and some no bake cookies. Then we watched Looney Tunes mocking Cupids and romance, pitting ducks and bunnies against inferior witches and vampires, and talked pleasantly for 3 hours with a Charlie Chaplin film playing, there when anyone wanted it and in those few moments of awkward silence. The film seemed to confuse most, who did not get that it took place in 1929 so the millionaire was ruined and saved every couple of hours and would change moods accordingly, the flower girl crush was blind and apparently approximately deaf and without any sense of smell, until the final scene, when the whole party stopped and everyone was horrified. Now that is an "anti-Valentine's Halloween 2 movie ending!" I said triumphantly to a few boos and some applause. The other option was "A Brief Encounter" which ends with 2 scenes of the two leads crying after not having an affair because they are already married to good people and have children waiting for them at home. But a silent movie is just more perfectly suited to parties.

Sadly Married Marie from work could not come, as she had to work, along with a lot of my other friends. But a new tradition was started maybe, and it was still better than Valentine's Day.

A Few Belated Dishes

2012-02-17T03:07:00.002-07:00

Various recent successes.

I whipped up a quick and delicious salsa with grape tomatoes- which I love, though about 1 in 10 is a bomb when you bite it- sour and gross. So: grape tomatoes left whole, diced jalapenos and chunks of orange bell pepper. Onion powder, a handful of fresh cranberries, cilantro, tomato paste, olive oil, brown sugar. Chunky or thin as you like. Its different, colorful, a mix of flavors, and familiar enough.

Made a good "Rancher's Pie" today. Been craving "Shepard's Pie", which originally was done with mutton, but in America now is more common with pot roast or ground beef. I kept the same principle which is to layer mashed potatoes and shredded melted cheese atop a base of beef stew. Mine was slow cooked stew beef shreds and chunks cooked in red zinfindel wine, tomato paste, and a touch of olive oil and ground white pepper, touch of onion powder, little garlic, then cooked atop a bed of no-boil lasagna noodles (Barilla's are excellent), mixed with green beans, kidney beans, corn, peas, fresh organic cauliflower (which has more flavor and is about the same price), then topped with my Patriot Potatoes (red, purple/blue, and yukon gold spuds with butter and a touch of chives and dill), and then shredded cheddar, baked to perfection at 375 for 35 minutes. Not life-changing, but a deluxe version of an old dish. So I named it Rancher's Pie, as a humble shephard would be outclassed. It could use some coffee bean grounds in the slow cooker with the zinfindel. Just a few. Really. And go with what you have and like on vegetables. In summer, I'd have had golden squash and zuccini in there.

My new favorite seasoning blend on fish is to use cajun butter and McCormick citrus rub. The rub has lemon and orange but needs a little more pep. So I use my trusty flavor injector (a syringe the size of a pistol which is always fun to play with and which I got precisely to make use of this butter marinade, which I bought in a quaint gas station that only had bathrooms open to paying customers a few vacations ago when my girl really really needed one. So I bought this for $8 and hated it- until mixing it with the fruity rub. I have used this blend on salmon and halibut, and someday soon, catfish. Three lucky people heartily approved. Teresa said it smelled good- for fish- which is the first word she's ever had to say about fish other than eeeeewwww, and she even ate a bite. Her opinion then was eewww, but with a lot less emphasis and eeees.

As for that dehydrator: I still enjoy it, though it is really a harvest tool. But with a two week vacation coming, I dried a celery stalk, a carrot disced, 6 potatoes of 4 colors (red, purple, yukon gold, and sweet) into natural unflavored chips, some kiwis, green beans, a bell pepper, and more of my already stated samples. The carrots and kiwi stay gummy, but are very flavorful. The kiwi is so sour it makes me wince and I cannot keep my eyes open- so this is another in the file of preserved trail mix foods that are sugared or dyed to make them more appetizing in stores. However, I love them anyway. Its like a sour candy slice. The potatoes dry very crunchy and with a touch of oil while hot and any seasonings, would be better than potato chips. Sweet potatoes dry more slowly, stay softer, are harder to slice thin anyway, but are my favorite. So delicious. Green beans and bell peppers shrivel to very crisp stalks and are almost unrecognizable with little volume. They are not preferred drying foods, though they do for travel, and the flavor is still there, mostly, though a little altered. I have not tested them for re-hydration yet. Potatoes should be blanced in a rolling boil before drying, for around 5 minutes to preserve color. I left their skins on. All of this will make for welcome variety on a trip of 12-14 days I am going on. Some weather means I will have to cut dirt road driving I intended out, thus I will not be doing a few hikes I was excited about, though I will be in Arizona and doing what I like and getting a nice little rest from work and the rut. I put together a wild trail mix of dried raspberries, blueberries, cherries, blackberries, craisins, coconut, papaya, pineapple chunks, banana chips, pecans, almonds, walnuts, kiwi, and seeds along with the typical 10 mile trail mix blend of mine. Also I have a fine product called "Just Tomatoes", a mix of freeze dried peas, corn, carrots, tomatoes, and peppers (bell in the mild and jalapeno in the hot: I mix the two varieties to create a mildly hot) which is great in soups or by the handful and a good way to get vitamins while hiking. I added celery, green bells to the red peppers, and also have mushrooms (white and brown), the green beans, and of course, more of the apple chips from the wind storm harvest which should last through June I think. Add them to 19 cent ramen noodles or $1.79 Ready Rice, with whatever else you like- freshly caught fish, or dried venison, or protein candy crappo bars labeled "Meal Replacement Energy" and that's good eating. I have no idea why anyone would pay $6.00 or more for a calorically similar dried meal that takes no less work and tastes no better once they knew how simple and cheap this was. Yes there is the cost of the $70 dehydrator to work off, but I should "turn a profit" (if a penny saved is a penny earned) if my dehydrator, the Nesco American Harvest, lasts more than one year. And that is not accounting my alternative meals at $6.00 per serving, which as an avid hiker, I have never paid. I'd rather starve for two days, and I used to just eat cereal and fresh fruit.

I have no reason to think my American Harvest will not last at least a year -except that after letting my friend and roomate know he could make "SOME" banana chips if he liked, the next day 21 pounds of bananas were on our floor. After a disturbing 7 day binge, 21 more pounds of bananas were on the floor with the promise: "I will make these ones last." 10 days later he asked me to dig out my dehydrator which I had hidden to make "a few more" banana chips before I was out of town. He then after securing the machine, came in with "a few" bananas. I said it looked more like 50 pounds. He said it was actually only 42 pounds. If you are wondering that is about 100 bananas. Which is close to 2,500 grams of sugar (though he still in the same sentence tells me fruit has no sugar because it is full of fructose and badmouths high FRUCTOSE corn syrup, and also says I should stop eating sugar and sweeten things naturally with honey- which is a liquid form of sugar.) As I will have to pay to replace the machine should it break, I told him I was putting it away. So he called his sister to borrow hers which has a 10 year warranty. Mine comes with a 1 year, and I have no reason to suspect the product of defect, but I also cannot anticipate that the motor will run forever. I am quite happy with it and still give it a glowing recommendation. I will try after this spring to only use it with local vegetables. I stored what I could this fall, and finally had to buy non-local potatoes the first week of February after my stash was exhausted. Kiwis of course are never in-season or local, but I only dried 3 of them. And we all have to eat something. If I had an acre I would only eat what I grew, but until then, if I want to eat 3-5 kiwis per year, I'll allow it.

Mean Starts With Me

2012-01-19T02:35:00.004-07:00

Andrew catches up and explains why he has not been neglecting you, his beloved readers, and why you should never ever piss off a bear...or Andrew.

I can now finally say the $400 words I've been waiting to say for 9 months (the day I bought half price backcountry skiis, boots, and bindings): I am a skiier. It only took that obscene amount of time for more than 3 inches of snow to stick on the town of Bountiful for more than 3 minutes. It was lot of fun, and a lot harder than it seems. That is, after I stopped, that mile really burned- knees, legs, and arms. Great whole body workout because you use poles to propel yourself forward, though for gliding, it sure does feel rough on those knees...now I did go skiing once last year. I drove an hour to a cool flat zone right by a ski resort, the proceeded to land on my face for 2 hours, cursing loud enough (almost) to crack the hard ice I was attempted to ski on. That's a bad idea by the way. Though I did get good in a hurry, because it takes an extreme amount of skill simply to stand in one place on skiis on ice, let alone move or stop. I perfected a perfect high-speed hockey stop too, mere inches from trees at approximately the speed of a jumbo jet trying an emergency landing over the ocean. Plus I saw a fox jump out and run from its burrow in the snice (snowy ice stuff). With more storms due now that winter has finally arrived, late like the last 3 years- which I think now signifies that December is not winter in Utah anymore- and that winter starting in January should now be considered normal, I may get to ski a lot more. We have many trails, so let's hope.

My midnight exercise made me feel better, and not just because no bored Bountiful police officers surrounded me with 5 vehicles, lights blazing, to amuse themselves or tell me about good neighbor curfews. I am still on the mend from some food poisoning or a stomach virus I picked up visiting family in Illinois. I am unwilling to say I ate bad food as it is quite possible I merely ate things I do not normally eat and that made me sick. Three straight meals at restaurants is more than I normally get in a month. Now home and making my own food, I got mostly better quickly, and am getting all better now- I hope. I lost some weight by just not eating. Then today I got so starved suddenly that I started shoveling freshly roasted and still scalding red and purple potato wedges into my mouth with both hands the way Garfield windmills lasagna into his huge wide open mouth in comic strips, which drew mocking from the roomie. Then I went at the peanut butter with a large knife and kept it moving down with whole milk. And was still hungry.

Illinois made me realize a few things: one, restaurants are not healthy or very good. I am a better cook. Two, produce is very sad in the midwest in winter. I had a tomato that made me want to hug the whole state...and the toilet bowl. It was never ripe to start- that was clear even through hollandaise sauce- but travelling 3,000 miles did not help. In Utah, we are spoiled, because out of season produce is not that terrible. Though a better solution is still just to preserve in the fall- which is a Utah custom, I am proud to say. For instance, Teresa's gung ho too young and now a bit bummed her husband goes out with the boys and ditches her with the babies he helped make friend who has probably never been out of Utah (or the county?: another Utah specialty that Mrs Ben Franklin shared hundreds of years ago...) stopped by the roadside and bartered for an entire tree worth of apricots from some amused older people who hated the danged things for being in the way of the lawnmower each August. So she canned a whole tree of them with Teresa's help and took a few jars back over as a present. Third,and lastly, what I learned is that air quality in Utah really is terrible. We have brown air when snow is not falling- another reason to pray for snow. When we do not get regular storms, the pollution thickens. I've been joking with other depressed people at work, after my brown commute (air and mountains and grass) that I was taking a vacation to Beijing so I could get some fresh air. No one laughed. They just kind of made this pained sigh type of sound, like an old car's exhaust pipe as the engine warms up. Chicago has way more people and way less pollution. No one connects their complaints with their actions though. The idea the air might be bad because people idle in their cars for 15 minutes each day or have their heaters turned up to 81 degrees F, or leave on a TV for four hours while in another room...nope. That can't be the problem.

While wrapping up my last post, the lights began to flicker and the windows rattled. I thought nothing of it as I do not watch weather reports, and went to bed. Slept great. Woke up and my panicky roomate was being panicky. So nothing new. But turns out, the whole county was devastated by a massive level 2 dry hump (no rain) hurricane, which caused 20 million in damage, shut down the schools, knocked out power for 36 hours to like 400,000 homes, and blew over several thousand trees. Most of them pines. One lesson is that if you are going to terraform an ugly salt-plain desert, you might not want to put non-native tree species on man-made hills. Those fall down and go boom. Sometimes on houses. More on this later. Another lesson is that Utahnians are pansies of the highest order. There are more emergency essential store chains out here than burger joints. People have years of food in big cans, vats of water, Dr Pepper (all the essentials), and basement shelters, bicycle-powered florescenty lights, all kinds of crap. But one little wind storm makes people hyperventilate, call in the National Guard and boo hoo like a big bunch of diabetic babies. I had great fun with the whole thing. It broke up the routine of life. A new adventure. You don't know how funny life can be until with mountains of free firewood on every corner an old woman is buying a bundle of logs at the grocery store. McDonald's being closed- not an emergency. Your blender not working for a day and a half- not an emergency. Traffic lights blown over- not an emergency! Frustrated and chainsaw-wielding postal maniac just kicked in your door screaming, "you damned butterballs! Emergency this!" - that's an emergency. Final lesson: don't piss off Andrew. I have powers. I've mentioned them before. Magical powers. I'm what you might call a real bona-fidey warlock. You make me mad, I'll cut you. Or you'll sprain your ankle, break up with your long-term significant other, have a rock crack your radiator from a strange bounce off the road, or your entire country will be leveled by an 7.9 earthquake 30 minutes after my plane takes off- the last plane to leave the country for 3 days, might I add, Peru? Remember me down there? I bet you do. Don't mess with Andrew. Mean starts with- well you probably read the title.

Teresa also invited this windstorm by mocking it on facebook. People, this is an important message: God hates Facebook. He's on there all the time, wishing He wasn't. So don't provoke him by saying the promised windstorm will be puny like last year's fake blizzard that the forecasters promised days after the economic boom from flu shots fell through because nobody got extra flu shots when the news told them they'd better. Or your 85 year old apple tree planted by your grandma (maybe) will fall onto your carport, ripping it away from the house and down onto your cars, tearing the siding away from your room, leaving you cold and scared, and blaming Andrew and his powers for tempting Heaven.

The only bright side to that story is that due to the late (correction: typical) onset of winter, which became lingering summer snow, and then a late fall, harvest, and November apples still just ripening, your attractive and awesome boyfriend will get to harvest 75 pounds or so of apples and preserve them...the modern way...with a home dehydrator. Now it took me 10 days of cheapness and indecision to whittle my options down to the right one, during which time I lost about 15 pounds of apples to rot and mealiness. Apple pudding at the bottom of the bags anyone? Put on gloves before you reach in...really. So to save you all that time, I will now present some simple reviews:

According to the internet, and Google in particular, the Excalibur dehydrator is the best one ever invented and can outfly many modern flying saucers. Do not believe this. An astute researcher knows companies can simply register their website in ways that light Google up like a Christmas tree when people enter certain terms. Excalibur is good at this. I know not because I ordered one to test it ($200 and its made of plastic?) but because I read every consumer review on large corporate websites I could find. Don't trust vegans, they are used to eating unpleasant food so they are impressed by anything awful after a while- also, mom and pop organic stores can be bribed. But the general opinion of non-bribed people seemed to be that Excalibur builds a completely adequate product. But that is costs $200 and is made of plastic! Avoid too the several super cheap plastic models you can find out there without temperature settings, dials, and so on. Now I am the man who when shopping for a blender wondered why I could not find a single speed blender (think about it now: why do you need 17 speeds? All you need is the top speed- it encompasses everything else by definition; you can't go 99 miles an hour without going 66 miles an hour, can you?), and I do not think you need a timer to tell you when your apples have been drying 10 hours. Poke them. If they're done, they're done. But you will want to be able to control temperature, because jerkey needs to be done at 150+ degrees and that temp will light a leaf of basil on fire. If you want to be cheap, the only good option is the sun. Its free. The cons are that you need a sunroom or large windows, lots of space, your food is exposed to air and will take much longer to dry, and some foods never will. Also avoid any fan on bottom unit- any drip will get in there, overheat it, clog it, or smell bad at least.

So the winner is: Nesco brand. They make basic, simple, affordable plastic round models with a charming design: a base that is just thin plastic, and a top that is a fan and heater with 5 settings for: herbs, crafts, nuts/seeds, fruit/vegetable, and meat/jerkey. Easy right? Not even an on-off switch. Its plugged in or not. You stack it like a sandwhich: 2-8 trays on my model, 2-20 on some (though the trays will be thinner and not hold as thick of items). My model is "American Harvest". It cost me $70. The best seller is "Garden Master" but I prefer mine, for the thicker trays. You get a fruit leather tray, an instruction and recipe book, and several packs of seasonings. Best of all, if it breaks, and the chances are slight as the heater is in top, then you are only out $70. You can run through 3 of these before you will regret not having an Excalibur with its 10 year warranty.

So how does it work? Adequately. But at least I'm not out $200 to learn that. I've done apple slices, banana slices, cranberries, mushrooms, peppers, strawberries, and maybe a few other things I am forgetting. Flavors really do not mix. That is, you can do a mix of different items and they will not taste like one another. This is surprising as walking into an apartment with a load of jalapeno peppers drying will make your eyes water. There is nothing more delicious than the smell of warm apples. I miss it- though not chopping all those mealy bruised windfall terror apples. I am still eating bags of these slices and they are delicious. Much more flavorful than store-bought. And without preservatives. You can throw any dried food in the freezer and it does not get freezer burn or go bad (for all intents and purposes: I suppose on a long enough time line they would). Banana chips have addicted my roomie. He just plowed through 10 pounds of bananas (wet) in one week! That's disgusting, but if I were Nesco, I'd want him on my commercial. He had such a hang dog expression today asking if he could make some more and promising to make them last. At Costco, the store of the large portion size, the cashiers teased him about having a pet monkey because he was buying so many bushels of bananas. Now he's their hero because he explained about the drying process and how much he is saving. Which is true. 3 pounds of bananas cost $1.39 out here at Costco and turn into one quart of dried chips which would sell for about $5 at a health food store. And home made are much more flavorful. Teresa is all about apple chips now and she hates dried apples. Ours are just mouth watering. If I go more than one day without eating one, the next slice I eat makes my eyes go wide every time. So its been nice not to miss apples like I thought I would. Strawberries come out chalky and flavorless. Craisins do not turn out like they do in the store. Sour, crunchy, and pointless. They take 20 hours to finish! Dried mushrooms do not rehydrate so well. I've been putting them on pizzas and they taste good, but are more like gummy mushrooms.

Our electric bill did not jump at all, which is a relief. Apples or bananas take 10 hours, so I thought it would be a disaster power-wise. But no, it seems to be pretty efficient. Though the machine does put out a lot of heat, in our apartment it puts out enough to warm the place so that the furnace does not run at all, and its a net wash. As mentioned, the smell of apples is delicious and a real plus. You'll have to decide merits for yourself. It does use power, and there is something unspeakably vulgar to me about a man sitting on the couch eating piles of banana chips he just dried himself (number 1 they are a convenience food- like you take them on a road trip, and 2; why not just eat the bananas and save the world a bit?- also they come from Brazil to begin with, so bananas are not an environmental friendly choice and there is no such thing as "in season" or "local" to warrant preserving them at all) . As an aside, did you know the first boatloads of bananas to New York couldn't be given away? Carmen Miranda was hired to do banana propoganda radio spots with Bob Hope and to sing in her charming accent about how tasty bananas were and how healthy and then Bob Hope explained banana basics, like what color they should be and why they were delicious. I also have a vintage novelty song named "Bananas have no Bones" from the 1940s that sneakily explains to you why peaches and ham stink compared with bananas (they have stones and bones). I am sure this band was compensated handsomely for writing this song. Now, back to drying: foods have more flavor when dried, apple chips are even better than apples which are even more effective than toothbrushes at cleaning your teeth, and on my coming trip to Arizona for 2 weeks, I look forward to eating very healthy for very little money, with food I can trust not to make me sick.

Sorry to take so long since my last post. Hope you aren't too upset with me. If you are, then I've got a present just for you to make it all better... or fall down and go boom. Its a bright shiny, brand spanking new... Tornado!

100 % All Rational (Even in this Economy)

2011-12-01T01:14:00.005-07:00

Andrew answers the really tough and important questions, from the really tough and important fans. And he does it without any crazy fake numbers like the square root of negative 2.

Well bear with me for one sentence until I've worked in our quota of "even in this economy" phrases (there we go), as just mandated by act of Congress, and then I can get down to answering real questions that are really real and really questions from actual fans of this blog. Even in this economy. (Uh oh, its becoming a habit.)

What's the big deal with this Utah mayor who wrote fake letters to himself and then answered what a great job he was doing? His PR people suck. Why didn't he just say Ben Franklin did it? Did you know Ben Franklin wrote many of the letters to his Pennsylvania Gazette under names like Prudence Do-Good, Anthony After-Wit, and Amanda Adder-Tongue?
-Daniella, Toole, UT

Yes, I did know that. Fraud in journalism is a long and proud American tradition, right up there with reporting fraud through journalism. But I'm not sure why you're asking me this. Even in this economy.

How could Ben Franklin want the turkey to America's official animal? Those lazy things can barely walk and are so stupid, there is a whole phrase- don't be a turkey.
-Clovis, Ireland

Hey, don't sleep on the turkey. Those buggers used to be quite clever and agile for fat flightless birds, certainly they were more of a killer Monty Python rabbit than the common quail ever was. Haven't you ever seen the Looney Tunes turkey? Animals are vicious. If they get half the chance they will certainly shove a load of TNT down your pants and then ride a rocket beside you while taunting you with cool water...but remember Ben Franklin was a wry humorist. He was, if you really want to know, because I'm a reverse psychic and know all about the past, poking a little fun at some of his contemporaries for being more pot-bellied than the stove that bears that name.

And the turkey, it turns out, would have been the perfect choice for today's America. They are lazy, can barely walk, are morbidly obese, and smell bad. Okay, the last one was a stretch. No culture has ever been so obsessively over-clean. And the next time someone from PETA tells you how turkeys are sad because they are so over-fed they can hardly walk without breaking a leg, just sweep your arm to take in the whole of whatever street you are on, and say, and are all these people being forced to overeat? The turkey is probably proud of his girth. The animal brain covets salt, fat, and sugar. A child is a sucker for the stuff, and even as an adult, knowing you are being manipulated with most of the food out there, it still takes a lot of work to break those habits and get over the taste and smell of dripping pizza covered with churros (okay that was just in a dream of mine last night- but it does sound good doesn't it?). This is me being more understanding than usual, I know. It won't last. But in America where we have gollum anorexic actresses staying thin for the whole of us (women are secretly relieved these days if a man gets a celebrity crush for the same reason men have always been; they can pig out and during "relations", with the lights off, your partner can simply close their eyes and see that poster they love), 2/3 of people are still fat enough to disgust me, if not themselves. We don't have enough attractive people left to shame these tubbs into thinning down for their own good. They're here to stay, until the next food shortage, then well they're going to have a hard time. (You might think I and the thinnies would starve sooner, but I disagree; we'll be raiding, looting, hunting, and breaking and entering, using our athleticism to prey the way a snake does while all the chubbos are hiding in the basements like freightened, soft, delicious bunnies.) The fat population is being enabled, and getting bolder all the time. Pretty soon they'll figure out they can control the legislature, and then you'll see only big men getting elected. And brocolli taxes will abound. Luckily we have this obsessive shallow society to keep things in check. But turkeys have no such culture of shame, abuse, hypocrisy, or anything else. They simply feel satisfied in their puny birdish souls, thinking, I am big and beautiful, and I'm winning at life. No famine's ever gonna slow me down. I'm practically invincible. Not like these boney humans. Never figure this thing out. Always giving food away. Suckers. They'll never survive at this rate. And now wasting so much energy. Sharpening that axe, like he was actually gonna swing it, ha ha...

And what's will all the Ben Franklin questions?

Aren't you going to get in trouble for always bad mouthing the Post Office? Aren't you ashamed? They pay you. P.S. Did you know Ben Franklin discovered the Atlantic Current while travelling between England and America as the Post Master General?
-Katie, Kimball, TX

Yes and no. I won't get into trouble. As long as I remind you that all of my opinions are soley mine, and I just happen to be a postal employee. No statements, opinions, or recommendations about cheese, beer, or organic meats come from, or reflect in any way, official, or general Postal Policy, feeling, thought, or tradition. (The Post Office has none of the above. Ha ha, kidding- that is only my opinion about them, not theirs about themselves.) Yes I knew that about Ben Franklin. Is there a convention on right now?

I've only been buying food that says 100% natural on the label, so I'm eating healthy right?
-Chris, Portland, OR

Well, I hate to confuse you further, but probably not. I try to avoid foods that have that label, and I can tell you why with the following thought experiment: You are at a social gathering, talking with a beautiful girl/boy whom you are interested in, and then that interesting, attractive, completely sane-seeming person says in their top flirty voice, while leaning into you lustily, "I'm 100 % all girl/boy, if you know what I mean." What do you do?

I know exactly what I would do. Say, "I know just what you mean." Then nod suggestively. Then laugh heartily. Then wink, and excuse myself to go to the bathroom, which hopefully would have a window I could crawl out of to flee home because I would have no idea what she meant, but it would be ominous enough for me to decide to go back to looking for love the only reliable, dignified, civilized way: reading the personal ads of crazy people and practical jokesters on Craigslist, and maybe even posting my own with a headline like, "Must hate TV, glazed doughnuts, and sex change operations."

Frankly, if a food feels the need to poke me in the chest and say, hey bub, I'm food, then there's already too much doubt in that situation. I will say however, you are eating healthier than you would be buying foods that carried the label 88% all natural, if such a thing exists. What's next: 100% matter: Here at Giant Evil Polluting Corporation that Hires Illegal Immigrants Farms, we don't use cheap fillers or flavors or anti-matters, the way some other leading brands do, but adhere to strict quality guidelines using only the best real and measurable ingredients that obey the properties of Newtonian mechanics because we love you, the consumer... even in this economy.

Did you see this article about Chik-fil-A suing a man for stealing their "intellectual property" by using the phrase "eat more kale"?
-Xiops, Egypt, ID

That was the most disturbing story I read recently, other than the headline, "Norwegian serial killer found insane- unfit for prison." If killing 77 people can't get you into jail, then Western Civilization has failed. No more insanity defenses, unless we're going to let the psychologists free. Then there won't be any more phonies free-riding on easy street after their little spree- shopping, or murder. Ever read a book about early experiments? On animals. Babies. Here is a tidbit from Watson, the father of behaviorism, and his work with infants: Even at a few weeks old, babies will learn to stop reaching for items that cause pain such as a lit candle after 3 or 4 attempts. Um? I don't know what to say about that. Also Watson convinced everyone in America for 20 years that mothers were uneccessary because babies have no emotions or intelligence. Orphanages modeled themselves after this guy's ideas and all the kids died of lethargic, lonely comas. How about Landis's work with dogs: he severed the spinal connections to the brain in several dogs, then gave them nothing to eat except slaughtered dogs, and concluded that since the dogs still showed emotional distress at being offered only other dogs to eat, the emotions could not lie in the body but had to exist in the brain. Well you can't spell psychologist without psycho. Why do countries even torture anyone and risk U.N. Sanctions? Just make sure the state university has a well-funded pyschology program and that all of its professors have really really emphasized tenure. Let em loose. Send them anyone who annoys you. You won't see any political opponents come out alive again. Hey it protects the kids of these doctors too. You don't want a bored psychologist going home to play catch with his kids. Thinking of good experiments while stuck in rush hour...if only he had the subjects to try them on...

Oh yeah, Chik-fil-A- this guy is a patriot to fight back. Also cunning because he got in the paper and his actual company is lame. Apparently 30 companies surrendered at the slightest pressure and threat of bankrupting legal fees and stopped using the phrase "eat more" blank. Cowards! I don't think this fellow's PR people are good enough though, either. I would be really bold. I would go right at Chik-fil-A: the words "eat more" are not your or anyone else's property. Let this crap stand and Donald Trump will put a patent claim on the word "was" or the letter "e", and then where will we be? Also, "eat more chiken" is not intelligent. Its a bad and vaguely offensive ad campaign. I am a little uncomfortable with it, though I can't say why. Its hardly clever and the only thing worse than the "eat more chiken" commercials is the actual food they are promoting. I have some words for everyone in America, a free country: eat more everything but Chik-fil-A. They're evil and ridiculous. But hey at least they're closed Sundays so the minimum-wage workers they subjugate can go to their poor people churches for an hour and forget how crummy their life is, and how their clothes all reek of deep fried pickles even after a wash.

Have you ever seen the movie Soylent Green? Are we going to end up eating each other?
-Chris L (that kid who could put himself into a pretzel while sitting in his chair when the substitute teacher turned around but got more and more shy about this as I started noticing girls and realized they just thought I was a puny freak), Cary, IL

Probably. Because no congressmen has the stones to tell everyone, hey America, none of you are worth 1.2 million dollars, sorry. Its a fact. We don't spend that much on our soldiers, and we sure aren't going to spend it on you. So you'll just have to die of cancer. Yes I know you don't want to. Yes I understand you've been watching TV and eating frozen dinners the past 31 years and only just now discovered how much there is you haven't done and now won't have time to do, and that you want to live, really live. But actually that isn't helping your case. No its doing the exact opposite. I can tell you weren't on the debate team, America. That's why you're out there, and I'm up here at this podium...

Oh its an election year? Again? Man I hate this stinking country- I mean, more health care for all! Yeah America! You're all super!

We're in a war to the death with death. And especially cancer. This insidious foe is attacking our children, our old people, our serial killers on death row! It never sleeps. We need to stamp out dying, in all its hateful forms!

Yeah see the problem with Soylent Green is they went to the trouble of this elaborate conspiracy. Now I know governments like to that because bureaucrats have boring jobs and watch a lot of movies and think you know what would be fun...orchestrating a big elaborate cover up! But then the innate laziness takes over...it would be much simpler to simply propogandize cannibalism. Start running some campaigns about how flea-bitten savages in the dark ages were eating beef and didn't know the pleasures of human flesh. It'll catch right on, especially with kids. Buggers put anything in their mouth. Already eat their own boogers...stuff really writes itself. No animal is good enough for us. Look how easily we enslaved the cow, how poor a fight the wild mustang put up, how easy the blue whale was to eradicate even from the deepest and darkest depths! Only man is a worthy meat for man. Just read Leviticus 11:14. We'll all be on board, because there won't be any elbow room at all.

I'd think you were an 80 year old man if you weren't always reminding us all you are in your twenties. You know how people are wise beyond their years? You're cranky beyond yours. Most people slowly build up a list of pet peeves over say 9 decades, but you just grabbed them all at once didn't you?
-Doug, Phoenix, AZ

Why don't you do some complaining about people who rant about technology on their on-line blogs?
-Wayne, British Columbia

Shut-up that's why.

I can count the number of items I've eaten out of a vending machine in my entire life on my fingers! I produce very little trash and buy foods with as little packaging as possible and cook from scratch, and I can't feel my toes right now and can only keep my fingers warm by typing more and more and more because its December 1 and we still have not turned on our furnace. I sleep in just underwear anyway because I am a rugged wolverine-bear-mountain-goat-lion of a man. M.A.N. I aint no mannish boy. I listen to my Muddy Waters straight- no Paul Oakenfold hip-hop beat sped-up remixes. And I can see Russia from my back porch!

Ok. That was fun. Look, technology really makes no difference in our lives. Without reality TV, you would gossip more and peek out your windows at neighbors, praying for a fight. Without a smart phone, you would be unable to text to your idiot friends how bored you are, or ask "dude what's up?" So you would do what our ancestors did, roll your sleeves up, and go find a coworker or friend to tell how bored you are, or ask, "dude what's up?" In short, the only change Iphones have made, is that your life includes a lot more buttons. Anyone who tells you differently, either in a rant or a commercial, is a crackpot, or a sales man. Probably both. You aren't any happier or sadder than you would be without electronics, despite what you think. You really could live without that phone. In fact, your malleable, sheepish persona would adjust within 10 minutes if the grid went down for everyone at once. You could all complain about cell phone companies together. Doesn't that sound? Around a campfire? I bet it does. I have no reason to despise Iphones except that they are pointless, trendy, expensive, annoying, and that Steve Jobs did not make the world a better place. It does you no good to be able to listen to any song you want instantly any time any place. The soul needs some down time, if we're going to build things like subways we should have to listen to their rumblings as punishment, and also most of the songs you like are bad.

So I apologize to anyone I might have offended. Even though anyone who got offended is clearly too touchy and should work on that, and is a big baby, and also insulted my mother- probably. I can't be sure, because I don't have a smart phone and I'm not connected to all the mainstream chat lines and feeds to check. So I'll just have to assume. You jerks. Please know that I am not advocating that you leave your phone off six days a week like I do, or that you become a fusspot who won't sit in a room with a TV that is turned on like I have started working into my personality (disorder), or that you go and talk to your neighbor about inane and empty things. No, I'm a big believer in solitary confinement. Sometimes I think of committing terrible crimes just so I can get sent to a prison and thrown into solitary confinement. All of my fantasies about getting rich start off with me going to my high school reunion to walk up to various former cheerleaders and say, oh hey, aren't you- and didn't you once not go on a date with me- well I'm rich you- so there! But they quickly advance to the part where five seconds after I am rich I take a vow of silence, then go buy a cabin in the only forest left (and by forest I mean tree) in Utah, with no power and no running water, and sit there shivering through a cold winter laughing to myself creepily that no one knows where I am. If I ever run for president, it will be on a strong anti-neighbor agenda. And my number one policy will be to launch some Soylent Green factories to cut down on the dangerous overpopulation of neighbors preying upon our (your) children.

I'm dating a fan of the Steelers, Lakers and the Yankees, and some of my guy friends said I must have found a real jerk, but he's sensitive and a great guy. Are they just jealous? (I don't even care about sports but it seems to me only an idiot would cheer for bad teams. Shouldn't you want to cheer for winners? I just think this means I've found a man whose practical and has common sense.)
-Joana, Detroit, MI

Your friends could be jealous. I'll need you to send me some pictures to let you know with any kind of certainty. Until they arrive, I will say, that your guy friends are also right. I've never met this guy before and don't know him, but he's obviously a terrible human being. Love cannot exist with sports bigamists, or in places like Florida, where the weather is famously almost always nice. Ever hear of fair-weather fans? People move to warm climates so they don't have to deal with snow. They won't go watch a bad team play any sport and will turn on any team when it starts to hit the skids. A sports bigamist is worse, because he not only turns on a team as it ages or struggles through injuries, but he switches allegiances so he always has a winner to be on the bandwagon with. He doesn't just tune off, he actively cheats on his chosen favorite team. Do you really think a person who packs up and ditches their traditional familial turf because they hate shoveling snow is going to be there for you when you've got a cold? Or that a sports bigamist who says he likes successful, well-run franchises (the typical defense) is going to grind out the tough times with you? As long as you stay cute and the money is there, he'll be that great guy. But first wrinkle, complaint, sniffle, or crying kid, and whoosh, he'll be long gone, telling all his beer buddies what a horrible wife you were and eye-ing someone younger, thinner, and bubblier. You ladies don't think sports "translate" into every day life, but what they say about how a man treats his mother is how he'll treat his wife (and your kids), is true of sports too: know what kind of fan a man is, and you know what kind of partner he'll make. The more jerseys...the more affairs, and if he can't support a team he grew up with when it has some rough patches, do you really think he'll love a son unconditionally who isn't a star on the soccer team? Check. Mate. More men should have interventions to spread the word to their naive female friends in need. Sports bigamists are evil. Don't mate with them. And our next public service announcement not about food is...

Are you going to check in on this Penn State sex scandal like everyone else who isn't qualified to write about it?
-Ryan, College Town, PA

Thanks for the invite. That surely can't have been sarcasm. Yes, yes I am. First, its not a Penn State scandal. Its just a large and disturbing and sad sex scandal that happens to involve Penn State in one instance, out of many. Penn State should not really even be the story, but they seem to be taking more blame than the guy who was you know actually doing the raping, and also the university is standing in for the town on the whole, which is understandable, and defensible, as the town only exists because of the university and none of the townies have any sort of actual life and just live vicariously by screaming at the football team 12 Saturdays per year. The scoreboard provides joy and shame equivalencies: 48-12 win=getting married, 35-27 in double overtime= 1st time parents after a long and grueling labor, 21-20 loss on a missed extra point as time expires= divorce, or your father just died. So you can imagine the trauma of finding out all those old memories are tainted. And its being reported on sports pages like its a sports story. Its not a sports story. Selling it like a sports story with the morale: college football is evil, or: that we need to stop hero-worshipping athletes and sports figures, is crap. To do that means we are still doing it- I mean villainizing a football coach and saying, he should have stopped this...please. He's the only person who could have stopped it? An old, half-blind football coach? Or his boss? Not the local police? Anyone working at the charity where much of this happened? Someone in the accused's family? A parent? A neighbor? No one in the entire town, a small town, ever had any reason to be suspicious over all the years? The whole city is turning on the man they've been idolizing and now are throwing eggs at him, tearing him down- the polar opposite of idolizing. But its equal in magnitude. It means they're still idolizing him, now ascribing him powers of evil he doesn't deserve. And they think they've learned their lesson?

We're taking the wrong lessons from this, that's the lesson I'm taking from this. A truer lesson is that there is no such thing as a perfect little town or a safe haven where bad things don't happen. The people in that community watched evil news stories that were sad and tragic and thought, thank God we don't live there. That sort of thing will never happen to here. And people all over the country are watching this tragic and sad story and thinking, thank God we don't live there! They thought it couldn't happen to them, but they were wrong. Blind. But that sort of thing will never happen here. And they may be wrong too. A feeling of complacency, of safety, allows this sort of thing to happen maybe, but its still better than rampant fear and paranoia, and never letting your kids out of your sight. You have to be dilligent, and still, bad things may happen. It doesn't mean Catholicism is evil or college football is evil or Joe Paterno was just a lesser Hitler this whole time. Closing stories off, quarantining them, is too easy. Its cheap and its dangerous. But the idea that bad things happen and maybe no one can prevent them, or know about them until afterwards, is much less comforting isn't it? We want clear-cut morals to stories. So we can wipe our hands, forget about them, thinking, well that was bad, but it won't happen again. We've learned. Someday a person may come to you and say they just saw someone you know and trust doing something awful. And your first reaction will probably be, that can't be true. And your second reaction will be, That CAN'T be true! You won't want to believe it, you won't be able to believe it, and hopefully it won't be true, but remember to check into it anyway, though no one is guilty until proven so. Joe Paterno, I'll remember you fondly. Sincerely, that one guy not stoning you.

How often do you go to the grocery store?
-Talia, Laramie, WY

Well, I've been practicing not going to the grocery store lately. Whenever I think I am out of food and have nothing to eat, instead of going to the store like I used to, then coming home, and realizing as I move things around on the shelves to make room for the new goodies, that I already had a lot of this stuff and had just forgotten...I just don't go to the store. I make myself get creative for a few days. Bake a pizza with whatever you have on hand, make a quiche or cassarole or stir fry with whatever limp veggies are around. Poke into every corner of the freezer and fridge. Its a good way to become more resourceful, save some money, clean up your storage spaces, and pretend you live in a society where you have to rough it, just a bit. This week though I wimped out and rushed right to the store because I ran out of toilet paper. I admit it, I just haven't learned to live without that stuff yet. I'm addicted to it.

And finally...

Who is going to be our next president?
-Rupert Murdoch, FOX NEWS

Of the PTA? Oh you mean of the USA. Right. Forgot about that. Hardly hear a word about it.

Tina Fey. I know you weren't expecting that, but I will tell you how it shall come to pass: Listening to Newt Gingrich and biting their fingernails clean off at the thought of running a Mormon against a ni-nevermind, the old creepy racists who control Republicanism, will go and beg Sarah Palin to run so they don't have to run Mit Romney. Even though she's a chick, and an idiot. Then everyone will start to snicker thinking about what a good impression Tina Fey does, and how eager Tina Fey must be for Palin to run, so she can start impersonating her and make a million dollars. Then they all realize Tina Fey is a better Sarah Palin than Sarah Palin ever was- slightly funnier, and also, a little younger and cuter and with more policy ideas. So they decide to put her on the ticket as the VP, then just beg her to run instead- as Sarah Palin and leave the unreliable real Sarah Palin and all of her many ghost writers out of the whole deal. Its really the most likely scenario.

I am pro-Palin too, if she runs. Let's all hope she does. I am so tired of this pussy-footing, dip a toe in slow armageddon, and with loud-mouth idiots with shrill voices, bickering back and forth. Let's get this thing over with already! No presidential hopeful could make armageddon funnier than Sarah Palin. I've talked myself into bemused incredulity for 3 years since the menace first showed its face- like that teaser episode with the Borg on Star Trek the Next Generation where the last line was Guinan saying "be sure of this...they are coming." Man they don't make armaggedons like they used to. I like mine like a bandaid: right off! Go crazy, get freaky, have an orgy, raze the city of Tripoli, whatever. I just can't take the slow agony of any more molasses dripping from the stalactite slow armaggedoning. Let's do this thing and do it right. I'm still a young, strong, amoral, fit, fast, vicious, testosterone-fueled, ambitious male. But I am at the peak of my prime. If there's going to be a collapse to all of established Western society, it could not come at a better time for me. I'm losing a step America. Getting long in the tooth. I can't climb mountains like I used to, and I'm losing my edge. In 5 years I won't have nearly as much potential as a brutal gang leader or Robin Hood (style) highwayman. Let's do this thing now. Don't make me wait!

Fine you don't want to. Well, of course it won't matter who wins. I doubt any economy can work when 2 out of 3 people are in bad health, everyone wants white collar work supervising several of their lazy peers, and every single person has both a degree and the debt that usually comes with it. Everyone having a degree means the same thing as no one having a degree, just if no one was 4 years older, and a lot poorer. The universities are counting on this. Also none of grows our own food, and traditionally like what 70% of people on this earth grew their own food or more than their own share of food. So a lot more people are useless and looking for something to kill time doing. We can't all write software for the three companies left in existence can we?

And I am assuming Tina Fey would want to take a massive pay cut from being a comedian to become president, or would want to risk trying to get laughs in the much harder world of the Republican debate circuit, where every policy spouted by Herman Cain or Michelle Bachman could potently lead to explosive unstoppable hysterics (Oh RIP Whitey, we hardly knew ye. Will I ever live to see an election peopled by mildly mannered, mildly wealthy, white oldish men again? I miss those days. Oh wait, no I don't). I am also, alas, excluding the possibility of a Google Party candidate, or a Facebook Party candidate, or even the Walmart Party candidate. All of whom will be coming to your election in the year 2016, by the way, and that should spice things up a little. For now you are stuck with just the old Republicans and Democrats, who are really pretty similar tools in the hands of bloated, corrupt, international corporations holding America and every other nation hostage. When that corporation wants to deny a problem, they pull out a Republican who harangues on cew: "Global warming does not exist. My great grandpappy's grandpappy's grandpappy was there when the Glaciers attacked in the last great ice age. It was terrible! Frostbite everywhere. They came at our women! They came at our children! If a mother put her baby down near a glacier to pick chestnuts, the glacier would pounce with slow, methodical malevolence. And before that baby could turn 25, it had swallowed him whole! An "Encino Man" if you will. The glaciers devoured our territories ruthlessly. There was no turning them back. They came on and on, arrows bounced right off them. An inch this year, 2 inches the next. Until they had conquered the whole of the Earth! Do you want your children to be slaves to ice? Always cold? And shivering and you powerless to save them? Because if you think those glaciers have me fooled with their humble-pie act, you're a damned dirty communist ape! I will not rest. I am watching these glaciers! And also the Mexicans." And if they want to appease some protestors to make them go away they unsheath a Democrat who says forcefully, "You activists are the life-blood of the future, you are the jedi knights of change. We have heard your powerful, yet supple, melodious chanting voices. We admit, you are stronger than us, smarter than us, and gosh darn it, we just like you. Also you are much more beautiful than any of us. So we give in," then they announce some half-ass change that does more harm than good, because all the do-gooders wipe their hands and say, "we showed them. Problem solved." And they move on to their next cause assuming someone else will carry on the fight they didn't want to last past their coffee/commercial break anymore than their target did.

So trust this hearty reader, have no fear, no anxiety. Don't stress about voting for the right person. The winner of the next election, whoever he, or she, is will have no impact on climate change or the world in general. And am I still the only one who thinks there had to be some con job in getting Obama elected? The cynic in me was certain no black man could get elected and that John McCain would sneak out with a horrifying last second victory when millions of voters suddenly realized with cold sudden and final clarity: wait a second! This O'bama really is a ni-nevermind. But he won. At the worst possible time. His detractors are more vocal than ever but still offer no policy ideas of their own that could actually work. And the sheer zaniness the Republicans are spraying the field with tells me: they have no idea at all what they are going to do if they win this election, and might actually be better off throwing it. You can't lose, if you don't play. And I just can't shake that nagging feeling that some powerful racists thought, hey, if we let a black or a woman win now, they'll look so bad we'll never have to worry about another one becoming president...before the world ends in 50 years, muah hah hah hah hah! Am I a cynic?

Well, here is some cheer for you; a happy ending to global warming. Our increasing pollution causes ever more deadly natural disasters, including, a massive volcano, which will spit so much ash into the air that the sun will be blocked out and the temperature of the earth reduced to that of 1964, at which point all the Republicans and Muslim fundamentalists will join hands and sing songs of peace and love, shouting "thank the Lord that the Lord taught us to build combustion engines and lightweight polymers useful as stretchy grocery bags at just the perfect moment so we could start polluting and raise the temperature just enough to keep us from falling into another ice age when that volcano exploded, so we could defeat our true enemy and the friend of Satan: glaciers!" Though the celebration will be short-lived, as with all that ash up there the smoke from factories will have no place to go and we'll all be sick to our stomachs from black air almost immediately. And we all live happily ever after, but you know, the not very long kind of ever, because we'll all get lung cancer.

Well until next time, happy holidays!!! Get in the spirit. Send 50,000 letters and buy lots of forever stamps because the postage rates are going up in January and the Post Office needs money (to keep paying me) now! Though that's only my opinion, not the Post Office's. They do not care if you send letters or buy postage.

Personality? What are you trying to pull?

2011-11-25T00:12:00.004-07:00

Andrew explains why he is always disappointed by the end of a disaster movie.

I am not a big fan of people. I have learned this over the years about myself. Several roomates have helped. Several hundred coworkers, classmates. A couple dozen family parties. I enjoy my privacy. Which is a bad thing in a world ever more crowded. I have also noticed that in disaster movies and books, I cheer for the disaster. Its always a let down when the aliens about to nuke the earth are allergic to water (and directors keep using this as a surprise ending, even though it hasn't been a surprise since HG Wells), and reading "The Hot Zone", I found myself nodding vigorously and hypnotically when the retired Ebola expert who in cliche cinema style (though this was a true story) retired to fish in Montana after a couple of close calls with his deadly nemesis, Ebola Zaire, when he said, "90% less humans could be a good thing, from a species point of view." When I watch the Towering Inferno, all I can think is "Get O.J.! Catch him! Burn that O.J. Simpson!" Obviously this makes me a bad person. To be cheering for the fire? What did O.J. Simpson ever do to me? But my side always loses. Helen Hunt and one of her shoulder straps always stand over the vanquished twister at the end, bosom heaving...sigh. Another close call, but at the end of the day, man survives.

But do you know who will never be defeated? Iranians. Did you know they once made the wheel illegal during the 17th century because none of the religious experts could say for certain that a Christian had not invented it? Now that's dedication. Riding smelly, mal-tempered camels instead...no we can't beat these people. But before you write them off as mad for that little tidbit, consider that it is certainly less hypocritical than the Christian world teaching our babes in Sunday school that work and pain are the punishments for original sin, and then approving the use of machinery. You have to really raise an eyebrow at any man who would urge his wife to have a "natural" birth, sans pain killing medication, but who would approve such things as the tractor, riding lawn mower, or Iphone. Sure that smart phone is convenient, but if life is a test, and we are supposed to be working our way into Heaven by paying off the debt of original sin, then aren't you more likely to flunk out, the easier you make things on yourself? Ha, now think of that next time you download another app to remember things and organize things for you or turn on the driver's seat butt warming massager in your luxury sedan. One day a religious sect will declare anyone who uses something more advanced than an abacus or a meat grinder will be destined for Hell. You heard it here first.

Also I would like to add that anyone who has an Iphone cannot complain about Wallstreet or big business or big government. And rednecks who shop Walmart cannot vote Republican- you can't be for "small" government (I use small in the modern Republican sense that it is for the small proportion of the people who have billions), and big business. If you push for that than for all intents and purposes the biggest business IS the government. And it will be big. There is no symbol of assimilation, status quo, and servitude in today's earth like the Iphone. It would be pointless to explain why. Either you see that or you do not. Bomb something or shut up. That's my feeling about protestors. Don't occupy, raze. If you aren't prepared to do that, you might as well do nothing, because nobody will even take notice of you. Why would they? There's something much more stimulating happening on the internet...

If you are willing to blow things up, you won't have to. Because people will appease you before you do. Otherwise, I suggest protesting a culture you dislike by not serving it, by avoiding it. Don't buy the latest coolest stuff, don't use credit cards, go live in a van in the desert, that sort of thing. Keep a car until it falls apart. Cook for yourself. Wear clothes that are simple and solid colored. Do not watch ads or television. Does all this work? A little maybe. I've got a touch more sanity than many, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing I am doing more good than whining or whoring it up for news team cameras. If all those protestors stopped buying expensive electronics their voice would be heard more than it is by helping cops get rich by working overtime. I mean, if you hate the post office don't go into the post office and tie up three window clerks ranting and screaming- this idiot army man was doing that last time I had to send a package. He inconvenienced dozens of people, and was demanding the post office stop sending him junk mail and start sorting his important mail for him so he would not miss payments- he made a real jerk of himself and justified those people having salaries for the day, and they had a blast laughing at him. My advice: bub, if you hate the post office, sign up for automatic bill pay, paperless statements, and never buy another stamp. Starve them out. Save yourself some time.

Also, I feel the sudden need to say a few nice things about the post office. They do provide many thousands of Americans with a living wage, though they complain about having to do it- 80% of postal expenses are salaries! (Personally, I'd say if you lose a billion dollars or more 10 years in a row, you ought to stop wanting or trying to lay people off; the best protection the Postal Service has from being dissolved is that if it were dissolved 250,000 or more people would collect unemployment; but like airlines, employ enough un-educated slow-poke bums who will never find a better job and the government will keep bailing you out because nobody wants them on the job market gumming up the works) Also my checks have all been right for 10 straight weeks, which saves me the hassle of arguing with anyone, and no official has threatened me with ominous firing for over a month. What a job! What really made me remember why my job is so completely bearable though (other than not having been there for 3 days- how easy that monotonous typing seems when I am not presently doing it) is talking with someone who had an important sounding bank job. She works long hours, has lots of responsibility, and is paid more than $10,000 a year less than me. So I should complain less. Also I get to listen to many many audiobooks.

Do you ever wonder about supertasters? The people who counter-intuitively do not like anything. Is it not strange to consider that those who can taste foods best like them least? What does that say about eating in general? A dirty habit, a dependency even, like the Terminators will think once we build them...now there's a movie where we all cheered for the disaster: "kill him Arnold! Kill him and him and him- no wait, don't!" He made bad cool, and he knew it. And what I love best about those movies, you know, a series of movies about how building technology and machines that are too smart little by little that will ultimately outgrow and destroy us, is that all the kids who said "really makes you think" about that movie now own smart phones and complain they aren't smart enough...or became software engineers because robots are way cool. But having too many taste buds is a bad thing. Brocolli tastes really bitter. Peppers are overpowering. Teresa is a super taster and can really only stand very bland and very sweet food. Sugar is her best buddy. Me, I don't even notice when it isn't there. Your supertaster never used to worry about gout, or obesity. But today? The modern supermarket is a supertaster's fantasy come true that they never knew they had! Everything is crawling with sugar, and salt that burns off those excess taste buds. Everything tastes pretty similar and is artificially flavored, with few if any vegetables. Most flavors are synthesized the way a jelly belly brand blob of corn syrup can be made to taste like anything from blueberry cobbler to buttered popcorn. Blandness rules. And no one could be happier, except me.

I keep planning to cook less from scratch, so I will have more free time (though however much- or little- free time I have I seem to get the same amount done), but when I am reaching for that frozen mediocre pizza, I see a couple waddling towards me, unable to support themselves without a heavily-loaded shopping cart each to huddle over while panting, and I instead vow to cook more and do away with free time all together. Though I do get in a workout while in the kitchen while waiting for things to boil or bake and one can listen to music or audio books or even radio (I kid I kid)- would the women's right movement have ever taken place had mp3 players been available to the beatnik chicks- and I for my part believe that men were so horrified by the movement because it underlined for them how crazy women really were/are; you want to leave our comfortable home to come to the office and type? You're insane...do you think I work for fun? Or that selling copy machines and joshing with my seedy boss fulfills me?! Teresa loves all kinds of products that I can't even taste. Cereals, granola bars, snack mixes, and my food she often finds revolting. It has all kinds of textures and sensations in it. Yuck.

Flavor is a lot like personality. I told my friend once when she was lonely and depressed that if she wanted to find love she was going to have to be a lot less interesting. Personality never seems decent to those without much. And it is much harder to pair a strong beer with the right meal than a weak one- its why the most popular American beers, pizzas, television sitcoms, and everything, are predictable and mild. Your common human being finds a person like myself rather rough around the edges, in need of some sanding down. Pick up a personality and you might get a splinter in your finger. Take a bite out of a personality and you might have to spit it out. Now normal people- there's nothing to object to. You hardly even know they're there. Small price to pay for knowing you won't get shocked. Very easy to fall in love with, tolerate for a whole lot of years. Make ideal roomates. Personalities are always offending or impressing people. They have opinions, feelings, moods. Yuck.

My Apologies, And The Joys of Excess...tricity

2011-11-24T23:25:00.003-07:00

Andrew is even more coherent and organized than usual. Aren't you excited?

First, I must make some amendments to previous posts. We here at Young, Broke, and Clueless, do our best to bring you the journalistic and culinary standards you expect from a free and casual occassional blog, but some of our contributors are getting old and, well, are slipping as they age. I won't divest any names. Really, I've said too much already. But I must apologize for reviewing a cranberry wensleydale as a cranberry stilton. I feel foolish. I'm blushing, really. Also, for any reader who might have taken me at my word when I said it is not possible to make a bad hummus, I stand corrected. With my great skill and creativity I have discovered the world's worst hummus: it involves lots of basil. Basil does not play well with chickpeas, shall we say. However, if you independently discovered this in the past few weeks and the hummus is still sitting in your fridge because you cannot bear to throw good food away, nor to eat it, then know you can redeem your awful hummus with a good dose of Texas Champaigne. This is my preferred choice of hot sauce. For flavor, Tapatio is the way to go. But if you are mostly in the market for a hot sauce to use as a prop, or part of your home decor ensemble, then you simply must purchase a bottle of Texas Champaigne, the only pepper sauce which will make you smile at every passing. Tabasco Sauce is a distant third. It would not even exist anymore were it not for old Looney Tunes episodes with Sylvester the lisping cat who can't eat Tweety Birds without the proper seasonings. This blog is not brought to you by the fine makers of D.L. Jardine's Texas Champaigne, might I assure you? It is not in fact brought to you by anyone, and if you wanted to send me a donation or two, I might make fewer mistakes in the future...perhaps that has been my plan with typos and spelling errors all along- not to annoy Camila the editor- and I am only now springing it on you, at the perfect time...

Pumpkin Season was a real dud. I lost one giant gourd to pumpkin rot. Would not even risk cooking the seeds. And then my third and largest pumpkin was a thread pumpkin. I know of no way to discern a thread pumpkin from a standard pumpkin. Some pumpkins come apart in chunks and others in threads. Threaders cook slower and are less delectable. It did not help things that I made a wholly original fusion chile pretty much spontaneously with ground lamb, tart green apples, jalapeno and anaheim peppers, 6 kinds of beans, quinoa, tomatoes, potato shreds, and cooked it in my thread pumpkin. The dish was all right so far as my cooking goes. It might cut the mustard at some expensive restaurant where jerks go to be fashionable and their taste buds are burned off by Miller Light beer and intense quantities of salt from frozen dinners, but I did not have much desire to eat it as leftovers. I gave some away...and have not heard back yet. Maybe that is my answer. Well in any case, lamb is vile cold. Truly stomach turning. Hot I have to say this: I know what I hate...and I don't hate lamb...when it is not ground. Ground lamb is hereby downgraded to "cat food" on this blog, into perpetuity, and if I use the last pound of it in my freezer, I shall refer to it as such.

The seeds came out well. My new formula on pumpkin seeds is chile powder, garlic salt/season all, and cinammon. With a touch of olive oil. Delicious.

I have some really explosive hopes for a few books right now, and the reviews will come soon. I know we are all looking forward to my thoughts on "The Diaries of Samuel Pepys", known as history's greatest diarist, who also wrote of the joys of excess- a known gourmand who kept a divine and exotic table. And I cannot wait to crack open my copy of "How Carrots Won the Trojan War: Incredible (But True) Stories About Vegetables in History". Who doesn't want to know how turnips helped George Washington cross the Delaware? The person who just raised their hand is obviously mad. This is the seminal moment in American history as far as I am concerned. It is the moment when the first American (have I mentioned "Wasington's Expense Account?- an incredible book about the interest Washington billed Congress for eventually from all of his own money he used to pay the soldiers and so on?), had an inner Vince Lombardi "just win baby" moment, stood up on Christmas Eve and told his men, "Screw honor and all that. A win's a win. The Redcoats are kicking our butts, and unless we start cheating, we're royally boned. Now let's sneak over there tonight and catch them drunk tomorrow because it has been established custom in Europe for hundreds of years not to fight on holidays, and they still think of us as Europeans. Get your face paint," or something like that. It was the moment America was forged as the independent, mighty, hypocritical nation it was destined to be- after all, why fight toe to toe, and in lines, when the only battle the colonies had fared well in had been done with shady Indian guerilla tactics (Lexington and Concord), and you can always lie afterwards. Washington probably thought there would have to be an elaborate cover up to hide the fact that we turned the war with a sneak attack on a holiday (two no-no s for the time), but instead we are still praising him for it. Would the founding fathers have been mortified to think we would still be emulating them? I expect so. They planned on being replaced, forgotten or condemned for doing too little. They expected their children to be even more enlightened, and active, and to solve the slavery issue quickly for themselves...whoops. Well you know what they (I) say: building Utopia is good for the soul, inheriting it, will rot you. Everything's done: why not get drunk and debauch the girl next door...nobody paints in paradise.

I am still compiling my worst beers list, but Wasatch Brewery will hold a place of distinction. They are quite adept at being motley. Of the 4 beers I've tried, 2 earned single sip dumping status- that is, only swine could swallow more than once, and probably alcoholic swine at that. Polygamy Porter (why have just one?) is not disgusting, but then I've never had a bad porter. The flavor is frankly hard to mess up, if I remember the little I've read about the brewing process is correct. But it is like all Wasatch Beers, thin and weak, compared with others. I do appreciate this brewer for their rank reputation with the LDS Community (who believe marketing a beer as Polygamy Porter gives the LDS Church a bad name- I'd say the polygamy probably had more impact, wouldn't you?), but other than some mischievous marketing, not much is there. But I have reached 300 beers, making me the most expert beery I know.

For cheese, I must give a shout out to Butterkase, by C & W, a soft, smooth, mild, salty, creamy butter cheese of fine quality, and Beecher "Flagship", a potent, cheddery, well-aged, hard cheese with crumbly texture that is the double stout of cheeses- lots of flavor and body, and it will probably put hair on chest. So ladies, beware. But if you've been waiting for a cheese to really sock you in the stomach, this is the one. Supertasters, need not bother. You will hate it.

More Beer, Cheese, and Books

2011-11-14T03:15:00.004-07:00

October Fest ends in Utah in September. You can't make this up.

There are good beers in Utah, and believe me, no one is as surprised as I am. I thought the words "good", "beer", and "Utah" would never fit together. Actually, I never thought "good" and "Utah" could pair up. Ha ha. Nah, Utah, you're great. Love your brown air in winter and your brown air in summer, and the ugly overcrowded valley and the way your residents who have 8 children each, none of whom ever move more than 2 blocks away from home after marrying, blame Californians and Mexicans for the population issues, saying "the secret is out" as if everyone were about to move here.

Uintah Brewery has a few more hits with me. Baba Black Lager (Organic) was a fine standard style black lager. Imagine that. Also enjoyed Wasatch Pumpkin Ale. Second best pumpkin ale I have found. Dogfish Head out of Rhode Island is magnificent. Though I have yet to find a beer by Dogfish that was not excellent. Perhaps their IPA. Uintah misses with Punk, their Pumpkin Ale. Acidic swill piss, which I would not use for anyone even an enemy. Battery acid would be cheaper by the pint if I wanted to poison someone. I might be inclined to try their Polygamy Porter (Why Have Just One?), a Utah staple, which I assumed was just for jerks with no taste. Zion's Brewery has started off decently for me, though I find Stout Virgin to be a tasteless name, and the label has more animated cleavage than I need to see when drinking. I even had a good beer from Sierra Nevada, long considered by me to be one of the most consistently disappointing brewers in the West, despite their sterling reputation. "Tumbler", an Autumn brown ale is delicious. I am nearly up to 300 brews for my life. The next mixed six (pack) will get me there. I thought I would feel accomplished as a beery when I reached that number (and might I add "beery" is not marked by my spell checker but Uintah is- despite being a really and truly mountain range within the greater Rockies), but now I can only think 400 beers...now a man who has had 400 beers would really know his stuff. Out of all those brews I think less than 20 have been distinguishable from the rest, and I have only had about that many twice or more. The number of beers I have drunk 3 times would fit on one hand. Out of all those, the best commonly available brew for me is still "Samuel Adams' Cream Stout", and the beer I most often think about which I cannot find is "Petrus Original". Sweet ale aged 3 years in brandy oak casks. Also would cut a few throats for an "Old Engine Oil: Special Reserve, Extra Sludge"- I forget the brewer. A double dark and double thick stout that really is like syrup. "Guitts" was like an alcoholic soda out of Brazil. Never seen it in the States. Also love Raisin D'Etre by Dogfish. Maybe I will think up a worst beers list for next post. That would be harder. You know what they (my alter ego in the 3rd play I still mean to finish someday after 5 years) say: if you want a challenge don't try to write the Great American Novel. There are so many bad writers in this world. To stand out at stinking really takes skill. The character spends 20 years not publishing a thing after getting sort of big and one groupie who starts stalking him (a younger woman of course because every crush I have ends up being 18, looking 16, and so forth) thinks he needs to start writing again, but he reveals that all of his trash attempts just turn out too decent, so he starts over trying to complete the worst thing ever written and prove his true glorious greatness. I know what you are thinking right now: Andrew let me read these fragments of a play! No wait, actually that sounds truly awful- you're on the right track!

Thank you. I try. I found a terrible gourmet cheese finally. Mango ginger. Took a bite and threw it away. Almost spit it out. $15.99 per pound garbage. Now that's expensive trash bag liner. Sage cheese, bright green and dubious, was delicious. Love it for breakfast to counter some super duper yogurt (now cross bred with a third brand for even more live culture strains and of course, still goat-milk sharp) and sweet jam and organic butter on toast. But it is not as good or as sweet as a cranberry stilton. Tastes like low-sugar cheesecake. Blueberry stilton is only slightly better. I will get both again.

Try reading William Gaddiss sometime. My favorite author. Or "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes." Riveting, spellbinding joy. Can't put the thing down. I'm reading it on every break at work, even though there are piles of babes to flirt with and I have been without a Fake Work Girlfriend for all but 3 days since getting hired back by the Post Office 4 months (39,000 years in dog time or Postal Worker time- approximately) ago. No one even has a bad opinion of me for corrupting the youth right now. I've never been able to feel good about myself when people aren't saying bad things about me. I mean if the masses love McDonald's and Star Wars Sequels, then why would I want them to approve of my every doing? Here is a tip: if a person eats fast food often and says they love you or respect you or whatever, so what. Its like being told you are clever by someone who isn't clever. If they can't tell garbage when they taste it, then you can't feel good about them choosing you. Looking for love? Find a person who can make a pizza from scratch. First thing to look for. They put the time in to that, they'll put the time in to you. Massages and being there for you and blah blah blah.

The Buckle Heard Round the World

2011-11-14T02:27:00.003-07:00

AKA The Buckle of the Century.

This is a long overdue post. But what other kind would you expect from me anymore? I closed out Buckle Season, formerly and commonly designated "summer" in some backwoods regions, with a buckle to end all buckles. A peach and 2 berry sweet cornbread buckle. Wowie. That one was good. I did half corn meal (blue and gold mixed) with half wheat flour, and well, I did throw in some Bob's Mill 8 Grain Cereal Mix (wheatless) too, as I do in all my baking. Used the last of the season's peaches- end of October in Utah this year if you believe it, raspberries and blackberries. Half stick butter and a mere scant 1/8 cup brown sugar for the whole double buckle recipe. Which makes 2 standard pie trays. I do not personally even notice the absence of sugar, as I keep reducing it in all my baking. I go with brown, because it has more flavor and I prefer it. Don't even keep white anymore. Then compensate with vanilla and cinammon. Usually some nutmeg and allspice too. Works in apple crisps, oat bars, you name it. No one else has complained to me either. Buckles turned out to be the only bread/pie I baked all summer. My favorite combos are pear/blueberry, peach/blackberry, and plum/raspberry. But any 2 or three fruits will make for good eating.

I quickly transitioned into fall mode. Stocked up on winter melons as they were once called; spaghetti squash, acorn squash, pumpkins, and butternut squashes. And I whipped up one more apple crisp with honeycrisps and asian pears. I will miss apples, and will probably cheat and buy some "fresh" ones before next summer. Apples and potatoes are just too much a part of our lives. Though I did stock on spuds too. I love fall as well. I spent 2 weeks hiking through the best colors I have ever seen thanks to the late and heavy snowfall, and bought jugs of tangy tart cider, and lamented my lack of a food dehydrator. Would like to make preserves next fall. Really store up for winter like in the old days I never knew existed except in fiction until I was grown up.

Last week I cut into the first of my three huge eating pumpkins: not to the prospective buyer of pumpkin flesh- measure your oven first. I don't know quite how I will manage the last one. I cleaned off the seeds and got them roasting in a toaster oven while I roasted the hollowed out gourd in the big oven, with the rack sagging under the weight. Due to the size and thickness of my pumpkin and my own unusual lack of any economy of movement, I baked the pumpkin empty, then moved it to the top of the range before filling it and using it like a slow cooker. Secured the lid tight and walked away for 2 hours. When I came back the whole was still hot and everything inside was baked and blended. So what did I make? A "turkey" mole (moh-lay- I do not have the spanish tilda on my keyboard to go over the e), which must be put into quotations as my sophisticated palet can assure you that: turkey does not taste like turkey anymore, turkey has an odd spongey texture rather than the rough and dry texture turkey should have, and turkey is mostly flavored with sodium and chicken stock. Also turkeys are raised so fat their own legs break and they are miserable. Probably. But I am going to avoid turkey even more thourougly than I was already after this due to the poor quality of the general turkey flesh. More on flesh later. For now, let us say the turkey mole was good. This mole was seasoned with achiote, chiles, pepper, cocoa, cinammon, and other spices. I poured in 6 cans of butter beans, kidney beans, black beans, pinto beans, and great northern beans, plus diced anaheim peppers, corn, peas, tomatoes, wild rice, and of course, the sides of the pumpkin scraped and shredded. Quite good, spicey and sweet and aromatic, aside from the disappointing calibre of the bird.

Okay, so, I have tested organic chicken, beef, 3 varieties of buffalo meat, milk, and yogurt, and I will now give you the rundown. Organic chicken tastes like chicken. I do not believe I could pick one out from the other blindfolded, despite my honed and attuned taste buds, and the "air chilled difference"- this organic chicken is not stored in vats of shit-filled water that spreads disease and inflates the weight of the poultry so you get less for your money- though I do appreciate the air chilling on principle. Organic beef on the other hand is spectacular. Great smell, taste, obvious flavor difference. You can recognize it too by differences in cooking: the ground patties I formed cooked more quickly and evenly, the fat clung to the pan less as it cooled and was easier to clean. On the whole, I am an organic beef man from here out. No doubt. It still though does not have as much flavor as bison, my meat of choice forever more. I have tried 2 brands of ground buffalo and one of hot dogs. The hot dogs are superior to standard dogs, smell wonderful, but on the whole, are still just ground up testicles and junk meat. High Plains Bison burgers come individually wrapped and pre-formed. I don't like them much. If you are into convenience and don't mind producing a lot of trash, go for them. The flavor though is very pepper and whatever they preserve these with, dulls the taste. Go instead if a connoisseur in hopes, for Great Range Bison, distributed by Rocky Mountain Natural Foods. My very special recipe is included later. Organic milk is magnificent. Shockingly good if you are not a super taster. I remember loving milk once, and now mainly drink it from habit. Its white water, full of protein. But organic is full of sweet, rolling gentle flavor. Teresa made a face and said it tastes like cheese. She was not a fan. But I am won over. You can taste the happy, and the omega 3s animals pick up when their feed is green (as in grass). It is healthier by far and tastier too. Watch for a sale or a clearance as it is about to expire. All of this leads me to believe birds are called "bird-brained" for a reason. They may not be happy, but even happy, how happy is a chicken exactly? You can't notice its misery in the meat. Now cows, they must be a bit clever. I can tell you from a burger if the animal led a good life or not. Pigs, which I do not mention are natural jerks. They would definitely eat you if they had the chance, and they are known to torture smaller live animals by eating them slowly and leaving them half eaten then coming back for more. I do not care if my pork is happy, though I would buy humane pork if I find it. But the guilt is not there. Cows don't hurt anyone, except with methane- and by the way, the next time someone of a Republican nature says to you that global warming is not man made because all the cow farts still account for more greenhouse gases than all our cars put together, counter by saying that the cow is really one of man's first machines; the feral cattle is not an animal that is social, docile, or which could be packed tightly. Steers were territorial brutes. Much tougher and stronger than even modern bulls. They fought like tigers and males did not meet often and both live after. So there would be few cows in the world to fart had they not happened to taste darn good. In fact much of the evil in history has taken place for beef, and wilderness areas are being mauled by livestock rights. Don't believe me? I can send pictures of a herd of cows that surprised the hell out of me by being in the middle of a mountain valley in August, and which nearly felt the need to stampede me. Didn't know they really did that. I can also send you pics of a herd of cows that stampeded for fear of me in another mountain range that is supposed to be "wild" in Utah's desert. Not eating beef would possibly do more good for the world than many hours volunteering for garbage organizations like United Way and Habitat for Humanity, of which I have insider experience and little faith. And to end my soapbox speech for now: giving money to charity is for chumps. Know your neighbors, and your community. Don't send $50 to Georgia, or Malaysia. Find someone who could use it near you. Give it to them. A kid, a mother, whatever. A loan or a present. You do more good in this world by loving a single person well than by getting involved with these giant organizations that get so big they lose sight of what they are doing and just become machines like every other corporation. Big is bad. (And just how do Republicans say big government is evil but shop at Walmart? If you allow big business, you need big government, otherwise the biggest business, is for all intents and purposes, the government. When I see Walmart as a third party, I will worry. Don't give them the idea. They'll get it on their own soon enough.)

Buffalo Burgers:
1 lb ground buffalo
1/4 cup italian seasoned bread crumbs
1/8 cup raisins
ginger, garlic, salt, paprika, (or ideally "Mongolian Ginger Barbecue" seasoning mix sold at World Market Stores and under the name "Urban Accents)

Also you could try lamb burgers, another animal that is not eaten in large enough numbers for it to have lost all flavor yet:

1 lb ground lamb
4 dry mint leaves ground
1/8 cup craisins or raspberries
garlic and other desired seasonings

I prefer buffalo by a lot. Lamb just makes me want stew. Lamb owns stew. Although beef stew is good too.

Well my cooking will stop for a while. I am itching to try my new breads of the world book too. But December is coming and I work for the Post Office. Time to make money so I can coast the rest of the year. I kid. We work, we work. Really. A little. And don't tell me how sweet of a gig I have, because while I'm doing very little, I'm getting psychologically damaged very badly. And I am master of psyching others out. Ask Camila. I'm an evil genius. I can tell you all about people faster than Microft Holmes. But the Post Office- man they make me wanna join the Marines or the SEALs so I can fly through boot camp and have some desperate, furious, exasperated drill sargaent ask me why nothing fazes me. I will say, bub, I worked 5 years for the Post Office. You are an amateur. And he will kiss my boots and weep and ask for pointers on how to arbitrarily break people it should be in your interest to make happy...I stocked up on dry pasta, oats, and Progresso Soups- my favorite "junk" food. Although its really rather healthy compared with fast food, and only has salt that can be held against it. But this is one brand I can crack open and eat straight from the can cold. If I'm ever on death row, a can of Progesso Soup might be my last meal. Wouldn't want to be a burden on the tax payers after eating on their dime through 9 or 16 years worth of pointless expensive appeals. We've gone soft, America. Too damn soft. Visit my last angry man political blog for more of this flavorless ranting.

Whiskey-Banana Oatmeal

2011-10-30T20:46:00.002-07:00

What's this, you say? Is this Camila, writing a post on the ostensible food blog? What madness! I must surely be hallucinating.

Well, my friend, you may be hallucinating, but not about me. This is indeed happening. I have been roused from my blogging slumber by a brilliant invention. An almost-Andrew level of brilliance. It is simple: take oatmeal, add whiskey.

Well, not quite that simple. You also need bananas, cinnamon and brown sugar. And it doesn't have to be whiskey - rum, brandy, pick yer poison. But that's it, and it's amazing. You could also, incidentally, call this breakfast Bananas Foster Oatmeal, but I think it's crucial that the description have the alcohol in question in the name. Truth in advertising and all that.

Here are two ways of making this really amazing cold-wintry-day breakfast:

1. Slice some bananas and throw them in a saucepan with a bit of butter, some brown sugar and some cinnamon. Look, if you wanted precise quantities, today just isn't your day.

2. Let those get nice and tasty and mushy and sweet and cinnamony. Meanwhile, make some oatmeal - for the love of mercy, don't use instant or quick oats. Real oatmeal takes like two minutes in the microwave. Sheesh.

3. Do the bananas look great? Awesome. Grab a bottle and add a couple good glugs. I used Virginia Gentleman, which I'm kind of in love with because it's really amazingly cheap... and totally not bad. It's even quite good. Also it's bourbon made in Virginia, so, state pride, whoohoo.

4. Sorry, got distracted. Let your bananas get to know your booze for a moment. Here's where you would set them on fire, except you just got up and your feet are cold and the coffee's still brewing and who are you trying to impress, anyway? It's 11 a.m. and you only just woke up, you haven't done anything with your life this weekend, you're not that cool, set down the barbecue lighter and look at your priorities. Who do you think you are, Emeril?

5. Dump the boozlicious bananas on top of your freshly prepared oatmeal, stir it up, sit down with your hot coffee and enjoy. Dang, Emeril can go BAM by himself; you just won at breakfast. Weekend already a success.

or you can be like camila and do this:

1. put frozen bananas in a pot. set the temperature too high. wonder for a moment at how you can manage to burn things that are frozen. admire your mad skills. turn down the burner.

2. stare at the melting bananas and think that they look totally unappetizing. Wish the coffee were ready. Wonder why you didn't clean the kitchen yesterday, or two days ago, or the day before that. Add brown sugar.

3. Cheer up when the kitchen starts to smell like brown sugar and bananas. Add cinnamon. Poke the bananas with a spoon; still frozen. Think, "you know what this needs? Whiskey." In the moment which you would normally spend pausing to check if that was a terrible idea, add some freaking whiskey.

4. Become much, much happier when the kitchen smells like brown sugar and bananas and whiskey. Start to get very, very hungry. Add a cup of water to the bananas.

5. Realize there was probably a better way to do this. Watch the bananas disintegrate and think that this looks incredibly unappetizing again. Break the bananas up with a spoon to amuse yourself.

6. Once the banana-sugar-whiskey-water mess is boiling - wasting all the whiskey, you think sorrowfully, add half a cup of oatmeal. Get distracted by emptying the dishwasher so you can look yourself in the mirror, you slob. Come back five minutes later to find the unappetizing mess turned into beautiful oatmeal with banana all mixed up throughout.

7. Add more whiskey.

8. Sit down, and enjoy winning at breakfast. Hey, at least we all got to the same place.

The craziest thing is that nobody seems to have thought of this before. No, wait. I did some more googling and guess who did? The Scottish. A great country, Scotland. Of course, they appear to eat oatmeal and brandy as a dessert, but everybody knows the Scottish are crazy.

Now, you might be thinking, "Camila, only a crazy person would have whiskey in the morning." I'm not disagreeing. But you just might be a crazy person, and you should probably try - just to find out.

Farm Stand Fresh Ideas

2011-09-23T01:01:00.002-07:00

Mango Peach Salsa and Peach Plum Buckles.

I am in a very productive place with produce right now. I am in a zone, as they say in the sports world. I made a second zucchini and eggplant lasagna better than the last one I mentioned last post. I made some spinach and lemon hummus that is so good it nearly drove me mad, which only one hummus ever did to me- and that was one I forgot to mention in my Pacific Northwest Review, somehow. Comic story, which I will save for later. I have made only one mistake in my cooking recently. Just now while simmering up a batch of peach mango salsa from off the top of my head (as in no recipe or even a glance at similar recipes), I stopped at half a peach, and half of my raspberries and tomatoes. I should have used all the peach, and all my other ingredients on stock. Its that good. Mild, but delicious. Here is the recipe, written down for the first time on this earth (you can't beat that deal) and someday to be top secret property of "Ye King's Nostril", my pub that will be named after the Inn in the background of a scene from one of the greatest Looney Tune shorts ever made: "The Scarlet Pumpernickel", starring Daffy Duck.

For a single jar: 6 small or roma tomatoes, 1/2 peach with skin, 1/2 cup rounded of raspberries, 1 anaheim pepper (for mild) or 1 jalapeno (for strong) (I did the mild), 1 clove garlic, 1/3 of a green bell pepper, 2 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp brown sugar, onion powder, several crushed leaves of dry cilantro, 1/8 cup corn kernals, 1/8 cup black beans, a little corn starch at the end for thickening.

Dice it, mash it a bit, boil then reduce to a simmer and let it go for 30 minutes or so on low. Add the corn and black beans near the end. Tinker as you see fit. Serve in any obvious way, with tortilla chips, or make someone's day by serving it in my newest, latest, genius breakfast, Huevos Rancheros Achille.

Its really not such a secret is it? Pretty obvious once you hear the title. The trick is just thinking a bit outside the norm to come up with rare ideas. Is anyone talentless enough to make a truly bad salsa?

Also made my second buckle: an old-fashioned crust-less fruit pie that is easy to make with fruit and basic batter in a skillet (traditionally; cowboys ate them supposedly over their campfires), or a baking pan. My first buckle was made with Cam and was detailed on an old post from several years ago (oh God, I'm so very old...well, not really), a Peach and Blackberry, which was "traditional" in that we; cooked it in a cast-iron frying pan, and used a 1:1 ratio of flour to sugar, with all bleached flour, and used a whole stick of butter for our 1 cup of flour and sugar, making it, very sweet, very evidently a dessert, and not the least bit healthy. This time I decided to do a fake vintage buckle. I coarsened the batter up with whole wheat flour, changed the flour to sugar ratio to 2:1, added an 8 grain gritty cereal mix, ground flaxseeds, wheat germ, oat flakes, and reduced the butter a little by using one stick for 2 cups of flower and 1 of sugar. I also left the skin on the peaches, which Cam was against when we were sharing a kitchen and chef duties. Here is how to try the Peach Plum Buckle:

2 cups whole wheat flour, 1/8 cup Bob's Mill 8 Grain Hot Cereal Mix (wheat free version; which is delicious for baking, though I tend not to just cook it up as it is meant to be used, not that there is anything wrong with it, but I prefer standard old style oat flakes with crushed walnuts, craisins, milk, brown sugar, spices and a dollop of honey), 1 cup mixed brown and white sugar, 3 peaches, 8-12 plums (if organic and small "real" sized; if grocery store goliath plums the size of apples then try 3-4), 2 tbsp or so wheat germ, 3-4 tbsp ground flaxseed, 1 tbsp baking powder (you don't want much rise), 1 stick butter, 1 tsp vanilla, 1 tsp molasses, cinammon, allspice, and nutmeg, 2 whole eggs, 2 tbsp vegetable oil.

Dice the fruit, mix in with your dry ingredients, add your eggs and oil and the rest. Warm your butter and then add that in. Drip in water as you lightly toss. No need to beat, just get everything homogenized. Grease two standard pie tins or a big fry pan or whatever else you feel like using, pour it all in, bake for 30 minutes or so at 350 degrees. Just use the finger pat test to see when its done. Could a "pie" be simpler. Its really a bread pie, and can be served with dinner as a bread, or after dinner as dessert. Unless you add more sugar it is really going to pass with applause as either. A touch more sugar would push it over the edge into a confectionary. Had three "in-laws" try it and all were adamant not to put it more sugar. And they have a "sweet" tooth like the rest of us. Judge it by your produce; if you have good quality fresh fruit, don't add more sugar. If its out of season, then maybe hide that a bit with an extra 1/8 cup of white refined. Or just double the vanilla or the cinammon.

Now for my story: In Oregon one reason I did not try all the food I wanted at "The Mark" was that there were several appetizing restaurants around, and I talked Teresa into "Mediterranean food", which I had to describe to her- a good enough reason right there to make her eat some. This place seemed authentic, so we thought we could not go wrong. Well, one cannot expect the unexpected- that is what makes it the unexpected. Little did I consider when entering a restaurant that the food might, rather than being good, bad, or okay, it might be, non existent. We found a table. Going good. We placed an order. And things were fine thus far. We sat and waited. And waited some more. And then a little more. 45 minutes pass. No food. There are other people sitting around. No food for them. People who came in before us did not have food. No one was eating at all. Things began to get awkward. I think someone might have walked out. I think it might have been everyone had one person done it first. I think it was about to be me. I only stayed out of pure impotent incredulity; a kind of morbid scientific curiosity. That is, I just could not take my eyes off the clock. Here was a complainer's fantasy! Here was a once in a lifetime chance to find out how long people would go with a gag! So we stayed, but at last, I had had enough. After all, "The Mark" was attached to our charming hotel down the street. The wait staff was excellent. The food was unrivaled, perhaps on the whole of the Earth. The waitress, a cute, but groundhog-like creature hiding in her hole somewhere, must have sensed the danger I represented as a potential leader, and brought us some kind of lemon and chicken cream soup, gratis. Very well, we stayed. The soup was excellent. Then came some free hummus, which was, upon the first bite, so good it nearly drove me mad with mild, rolling, hills of flavor. Teresa had to dip a pita chip at her own risk, because a large platter was half gone and I was in Olympic Diver stance, ready to bathe in the stuff. No one else got these freebies. The descendants of the Romans know a docile mob without a head when they see one...finally after well over an hour, our food came. And we were both full by then. I actually overtipped the adorable little Esmeralda who had avoided eye contact all night. I do not know where the food was. Perhaps they were slaughtering a lamb in the back parking lot, or perhaps their lead cook just sat down, folded his arms, stuck four cigarrettes in his mouth and said, (in a garble) "not tonight". You don't pay me enough, you yell at me, now this is happening. And he had to be replaced or worked around or co-erced with some gypsy potion or tambourine dance. I do not know. It ate up our whole evening, but that hummus has had me tinkering like an alchemist over my trusty Ostler Fusion (still I might add worth the extra money I paid though I normally buy basic everything) all summer long to try to rediscover it like a culinary Shangri La.

Stay tuned for beer news. I am going to get into brewing. We all know this was inevitable. I have several recipes in my head already for unique and delicious brews. I hope to start this fall and into the winter, though my dream of buying a house on the cheap with enough yard to plant an orchard of rare apples and start a cider still, is cooked. Some other people had a much less interesting plan involving a golden retriever, 2.5 children indistinguishable from the general population, and well, they beat me to it. I wish them well, or whatever.

Had one interesting beers recently. Dubbhe is a local to Utah, a beer that should not exist: a black IPA made with hemp, which should not work. I will explain. An IPA is an India Pale Ale, a kind of pale ale made British style, that is to say, bitter. Really it is akin to an English Bitter dulled or made milder with the pale ale. It is a summer drink refreshing in hot weather, that was sent to India during the colonial days. How one can make a black pale ale, I do not know, nor why one would try. As to why one would then adulterate an adulterated IPA further with hemp, well its like starting with an apple pie, but making it an apple crisp instead, and then using peaches instead of apples. I bought this beer out of pre-annoyance, a condition only very advanced individuals like myself can achieve, where one is already annoyed by using powers of prescience. It is a kind of sentiment on credit. One can only verify pre-annoyance, or prenoyance, as it is called in the academic literature. There is only an anti-climactic confirmation, a kind of satisfied, smug, "I knew I would be annoyed by this," when the normal mortal person would just begin to feel their annoyance. However, a strange thing happened. The beer is good. Really good. That is a first for a hemp beer for me, and it disappointed me, in that it did not confirm my theory that I like confirmed to feel secure with my place and role in the world: everyone is an idiot, and they always were, but especially today, and especially (fill in the blank with whoever I am thinking of at the moment, such as an idiot brewing company). I can only conclude that the letters IPA were put on the bottle as a sales point. Few beer drinkers know what IPA stands for, and fewer care. They buy IPAs because they taste good and don't have too much flavor to offend anybody. It is now merely a buzz word that means nothing at all, except that in this case, it means, "please buy this weird beer we made. Its really good, and you'll see that if you just try it. P.S.: I!P!A!!!!!" Good for them, I think. And who knew a good beer could or would ever be brewed in Utah. Put on your best suit, the judgement day may be on the way.

Wonderful cheese as well tonight. A Beemster Holland X-O. Beemster, as far as I can tell, is a brand. This cheese is aged 26 months, with a strange skin that stretches and will not break. Do not eat the skin. The cheese is a mild flavor, buttery and nutty, smooth, hard texture that is more brittle than expected, crumbling easily and melting instantly in the mouth. Hard and soft all at once. Very sweet early and with a complex lingering after flavor, I cannot describe. How hard it is to identify anything without comparison. It is not "like" any cheese I have had. But I like it very much. Bought it reduced to $10 per pound, normally 19.99 in my area. Worth either price.

Summer Emails From Superfans

2011-08-29T01:34:00.004-07:00

Yep, more completely real emails are addressed completely seriously by Andrew. How could a man with so many hobbies make this sort of thing up? And why would he, is a better question, when he already is behind in so many projects?

Do you have a restaurant yet? And can I have free dinner?
-Clint, Beaverton, OR

You can try to eat for free, but I will cut your achilles tendons if you get past the guard dogs. Restaurants take seed money, and partners. I am in the market for both. Which is why I am working at the post office again, to get rich. And you wondered why stamp prices are always rising? Ah really its to pay for all those fancy stamp designs people are so passionate about. And maybe my plan is a poor one, since right now, I can't even get the post office to pay me my regular wages. I have the funniest conversations with them, where I explain basic business principles in baby talk: it is important to pay your workers. Otherwise, you are not even a business. And you are breaking the law.

Oh, they say, nodding slowly, crazy, but I guess it makes a kind of sense. Their counter seems to be that I should love the post so much I don't mind not being paid. They seem to consider me a real brat for showing up every day and demanding money. Kind of: (mock scolding voice) Andrew! You mean you and several of these other crybabies only come to work to get money in return? For shame! I feel dirty just talking to you. If I didn't get paid I would feed my family on wishes and skip to work instead of guzzling up gas in my car!) None of these official manager type people offered me their last paycheck to prove it, however.

Remember this post if you hear the words "Utah", "Post Office", and "exploded" in the same news broadcast soon.

Not particularly in that order. I kid. We're all very calm there.

What kind of restaurant are you going to open? And where will it be located?
-Aro, Oshgosh, WI

A dream one. As in, in my...well we will be open for breakfast everyday, but only with take out items, like my PB-Honey Cereal bars, which slayed another three people on my last hike, and may have been the best batch ever, Oat the Door bars (clever no?) in about 8 flavors, muffins, and so forth. Open on Saturday mornings to sit down with pumpkin pancakes, vanilla hazlenut berry waffles, chocolate-craisin pancakes, huevos rancheros Andres, where you use a premo rice and bean mix instead of just black beans, and several other options. Open everyday for lunch and dinner with lots of vegan options. A rice and beans of the day, patriot potatoes (mashed red, yukon gold, and purple spuds with the skin, left lumpy and loaded with peas, corn, and lots of pepper, plus a rotation of all my fab recipes which you can find here on your favorite blog. Close for a few hours between lunch and dinner. Lots of soups. Cold in summer, hot in winter. Different menu every day, specials announced on a calendar at the first of the month. And we will sell local art on the walls: photos, paintings, murals, collages: if its hanging up, you can buy it. A rack with local poets, and music. Do open mic nights and other cool community projects and themes.

How many Fake Work Girlfriends are you on now?
-Jennie Lynn, SLC, UT

Oh well, if they wouldn't keep quitting for reasons having, I am sure, nothing to do with me, there would not need to be so many. What can I say? I like people to dislike me. I enjoy my privacy. My reputation is undeserved, I assure you. Oh wait...no, I am lying, so you'd better boo and hiss a little louder. I'm a bad man!

Would you come here to cater? Your website is unclear as to where you actually are...we have hippo statues all over town because we were founded by this weirdo, I mean, someone just like you, I mean...love your work. Big fan.
-Melinda, Pflugerville, TX

That's a bit far for my range, but tempting...yes catering to small groups and especially lazy husbands who don't want to go out to eat and also don't know or care to cook themselves, and serving the meal as their maitre-de with a crooked stick-on french mustache is a good idea.

I've heard about these hippo statues. Not sure I believe it. High school mascot is a panther. Hippos stomp panthers by the way, I mean in real life. Hippo is like the rock in rock paper scissor- nothing beats Hippo. Hyenas try because they can take little bits of foot and dart away in packs before the hippos trample them, but crocks and lions won't even mess with baby hippos after like two weeks of swim lessons. And hippos taught the pharaohs of Egypt how to be lazy. They were hard-working and studious like the Kangxi emperors until they started taking lessons at hippos' lazy feet.

The website is a work in progess. Like me.

Have you ever seen those backpacks that are "Picnics to go", and fold out like an accordion to form a little table? Are you going to buy one and work as a hiking guide and serve your world-class empanadas and calzones on top of mountains to your famished clients?
-Rainier, Dusseldorf, GE

That was a mouthfull. That is the two letter code for Germany, by the way. You only get this stuff from an honest-to-god postal worker. Yeah I think those backpacks are lame, and the table is weak, and if I were going to actually take people to most of the places I have been, I would need to carry some of the weight for them, rather than bring up a bottle of sangria they wouldn't want due to severe dehydration and altitude headaches anyway.

Also my calzones need work. They are getting better, but are still a little dull. Can't get them to hold enough tomato sauce inside to not be dry without leaking.

What's the most delicious thing you've made lately?
-Justina, SLC, UT

Probably the EZ Parmesagna Lasagna. Actually, Huevors Rancheros Andres were awesome: homemade masa tortilla with dried onion, cilantro, and peppers, topped with melted cheddar cheese, julienned green peppers, tomato and chile salsa, wild and long grain rice and mixed beans, lettuce, and scrambled eggs. Can also be done with eggs sunny side up. The key is to make masa tortillas but dust your hands and the rolling pin with white flour. You get the best of both worlds. I almost exploded eating these. But both recipes are good. Also did a kale and sweet potato soup for the third time this year. Delicious. Vegetable broth from scratch, then lots of kale, parsley, two diced skinned yams or sweet potatoes, cherry tomatoes, diced bell pepper or chiles, kidney beans, pearl barley, diced bratwurst or mild italian sausage (optional), carrots, olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, and seasonings. Don't forget the sage. Great hot or cold, and its hard to imagine a soup more nutritious. Also orange-cranberry Oat the Door bars with tangerine zest instead of orange zest. Accidental (I can't crack an egg properly or tell a tangerine from a "really weird orange"- but I deserve my own cooking show, I swear- can you name 10 people on this planet more interesting or entertaining than me. You can't do it, can you? Every episode would swell to the length of a Peter Jackson movie, but still- you'd watch! Those hours you were awake...), but the next time will be intentional.

What is something you never cook?
-Jessie's Girl, Palo Alto, CA

My "War of the Roses" deep dish, with a white alfredo pizza hidden beneath a marinara red pizza. Spinach, mushroom and olives on the bottom, raisins, bell peppers, sundried tomatoes and ground sausage (optional) on top. That sucker takes a lot of work. But it is conceptually brilliant and damned delicious.

What is something you really want to learn how to cook?
-Tony, Juab, NM

Tomato bisque. Been buying it in a can and improving it. Campbell's Select, and then adding black beans, corn, peas (in the pod), touch of olive oil, and anything else. Tried it with green beans- love green beans. I think I could save quite a bit of money if I just bought a can of plain tomato soup and bisqued it though. Molasses, brown sugar, touch of red wine, lots of basil, bit of milk and cream should do it.

Also Beef Papperdelle. Even bought a red zinfindel to try it out. Now, one of these months I will go buy that corkscrew I've been meaning to...

How'd that poetry party go?
-Terrence, Ogden, UT

I drove around for an hour looking for a house that looked like it was hosting a party and jumping out of my car asking people if they knew anything about it, or, were it. It was a 134 degree day and the inside of my car was 325 degrees, so I was as baked by the end as my lasagna. Also, I never found the actual party. I think I was expecting more cars to be there than one should really expect at a poetry society party...and an address would have helped, or a phone number. Damn you two-year-old girls who took the last library computer with internet access! Damn your adorable matching outfits! And the way you both fit in one chair while standing and could somehow type with four hands without getting confused! Why didn't I write down the address or a phone number in the six weeks I thought about going to this party instead of stopping at a library on the way, already late? I like to live dangerously. My life makes perfect sense to me, I swear. Have I ever lied to you? That you know of?

The Pacific Northwest and Utah's (North) South Desert

2011-08-29T00:32:00.003-07:00

A very belated food chronicle from my last non-deadly vacation, and a recent semi-deadly one.

Teresa and I hit up Oregon and California for a 9 day excursion in May. Great fun, though as usual, quite the rush. I have preparedness down to a lazy science. I can cram any number of awesome hours into a day, as long as you don't expect to sleep or to find everything open when you get there. I don't go into details like operating hours or map printing. But I usually have directions, and most of what I come up with is fun. Ask Camila. Or Teresa. Sometimes I screw up- oh why did I insist on pushing on to Pendleton when we could have stayed at Baker City in the Geiser Grand?! Oh well. I picked one hotel because it had a courtyard that looked nice and a restaraunt with a fireplace. I looked at an on-line picture, thought, I could eat there, and booked. That turned out spot-on! If a restaraunt looks tacky, the food will be bad. This place looked decent, so the food was: the best food on earth. Yeah, we got lucky.

The restaraunt is named "The Mark", and if you live anywhere near Portland, go there, right now. Stop reading and find it. Our first clue as to the pending excellence was a pat of butter. They brought some "house butter" which was to die for. I have quite a palate and I can tell you this is organic butter with blackberries, garlic, and probably basil. I will make some finally this week. Been meaning to. Just melt some boring organic butter and add in blackberry juice, basil and garlic. Trust me, would I steer you wrong? Teresa had ordered some sides and was very impressed by "Those Potatoes", which must be ordered with air quote motion, or else you pay double. She also loved the adult mac n cheese which was made with toasted bread crumbs and a mix of parmesan, cheddar, and mascarpone. Good stuff. "Those potatoes" are a pure mystery to me. I told her I could make the macaroni and that Camila has done better at home, but I have no idea where to even start with these "Those Potatoes". I've tried finding similar recipes. No luck. I think they are pan fried. That is as close as I can get. My meal was Braised Beef Pappardelle, which is an elegant take on "Beef Tips and Noodles"- possibly the least appetizingly named delicious food on earth- gorgonzola cheese crumbles, candied pecans, fresh herbs, tomato, green onion, and a red zinfindel and espresso-enfused brown gravy. I thought I might die eating it. The waiter was damned impressed with me for ordering it. He almost died just complimenting me for ordering it amongst all these fabulous options. I figured it was the dish that seemed most original and difficult to prepare. It was not cheap. For dessert we split a chocolate layer cake with blackberry coulis- that's a kind of thick syrupy sauce. The waiter approved again, and was well tipped for knowing how to treat a handicapped girl in a travel hoodie like a lady.

Next morning, and did I mention this five-star restaraunt was attached tragically to a hotel where rubes stay with their children, or that we got discount coupons just for staying at the Shiloh Inn Beaverton Conference Center?- I had my opinion forever changed about biscuits and gravy, and got no revelation about Teresa (she's a bore, but I knew this) or pancakes (the same everywhere except where I cook and make my pumpkin pancakes or my chocolate-craisin pancakes or vanilla hazlenut berry cakes). The next morning I got the best Huevos Rancheros on Earth- and I've been to New Mexico. (Also, I now think I make the best Huevo Rancheros on Earth, but that is for another post). They even made them into art I hardly wanted to cut, by melting and molding the cheese into the salsa to make this strange glowing paste that held my black beans. Sadly, due to mistakes of time management like going to the zoo to see some fat hippos and so Teresa could feed a giraffe we had no more meals at "The Mark". I badly wanted to try "Mark's Lobster Bisque" (oh fresh seafood is so much better and I've never liked lobster), and the Veggie Wrap: white bean hummus, grilled zucchini, roasted squash, bell peppers, and tomatoes in a sundried tomato tortilla- although I still think I can make that. Also missed out on; Brioche and Strawberry Bread Pudding, and Chocolate Banana Creme Broulet. What a restaraunt. If I was not travelling with a real prude, I would have used the coupon for a free glass of house wine.

The Portland Farmer's Market also had good food, though due to strange weather patterns for the year, featured mostly crafts. I have never seen so many ethnic food booths. Missed the one for "Koren Twist" though: Korean-Mexican food, only the most promising pairing since my love affair with Arizona's "Chino Bandido"- whose pirate sombrero, gold toothed, corsair waving, eye patched panda is still the greatest logo of all time, though the gay shark with tequila sauce I just passed in South Salt Lake is a close second. I bought a CD of a one-man band who rocked "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" unforgettably on drums and accordion while singing hauntingly above the sound of flushing toilets, barking dogs, and a train station four feet behind him. The CD is just okay. I know you were wondering. His name is Pug!

Along the coast in California we got our next good food. I had some disappointing fish in a fishing town. I blame the downfall of the American diner. Mediocrity is getting a bad name with all this quarter hearted cooking. I want half-heart effort for my $7, you know? But right on the sea, I mean literally, like overhanging it, I got steamed clams, which were marvellous. Even more so because I knew I had to appreciate them more, surrounded by Teresa and four other men eating hamburgers. Crime against nature, and the general cosmic karma! They were in a white wine and garlic cheese sauce, floating with: mushrooms, tomatoes, green onions and herbs. Oregon and California sported some good mushrooms. I had a meal earlier of pesto alfredo noodles with mushroom medly and the whole plate was brown with mushooms, but they were so flavorful I savored every sumptuous bite. Well I ordered "Boston" clam chowder to go from this seaside diner, and also marion berry cobbler- The PNW is obsessed with marion berries. Not sure why, though this cobbler was fabulous. Pretty much just blackberries, aren't they? With a more uppity name? The chowder was even more fabulous. I was still full when I ate it hours later, watching a rainbow-sunset as some fog burned off above a mountain (pictures to prove it), but it totally changed my life. I had a canned clam chowder once and decided I hated the stuff. Now if only I had redeemed crab while on this trip, which I've also only ever had canned and "imitation"...

A recent solo trip took me happily close to a restaurant I forgot I wanted to get to, open for only 5 months each year, and located in the middle of pretty much nowhere- 11 miles outside of one of America's least visited and least famed national parks, Capitol Reef, and 3 miles outside one of the cutest (in season) or saddest/creepiest (winter) towns on the planet, Torrey, UT. Well I hit Capitol Reef on a whim to do a trail I had to pass on during a visit with Teresa, and after ripping through it (amazing by the way- see the latest review post), went and waited an hour for "Cafe Diablo" to open for lunch. They thought it was funny I napped outside their door. I thought it amazing no one else was there. This is one of the best restaurants in Utah, and a rewarding national park, though rugged.

Well, I liked it so much I stopped back on the way home next evening, still sneaking in for lunch. This saved me a pretty penny, but left me fewer options, as the Cafe is a dinner destination mostly. Here I will read from their elaborate and exotic dinner menu: Rattlesnake Cakes, Duck Mariachi, Marinated Loin of Utah Lamb with Casamiento Pie, Asparagus and Pastilla Verde Sauce, Turkey Chimole and Poblano Peppers in Guajillo Mole Cream on Taro Root Pattie, Pumpkin Seed Trout, Mayan Tamale of Eggplant, Poblano Peppers, Roasted Tomatoes, Casera Cheese steamed in Banana Leaf, with Char-grilled vegetables, and Brandied Corn Custard- I could go on.

My lunch options were more limited but both turned out delicious. I had the only vegetarian option one day, a Bruschetta, which was chared hard toast slices doused with a black bean and roasted corn salsa, chopped olive, cilantro, diced tomato, mozzerella cheese, and bell pepper. I can still taste it. A side of citrus salad. Delicious. The waitress approved, as again, I think no one orders this. I also had Beef Tenderloin Wraps- your next best vegetarian option as the two Beef Tenderloin chunks sit on top, and could easily come on a separate plate or be left out for a few dollars reduction in price. The wrap was a decent tortilla filled with spring greens, a house ranch type sauce, black beans, roasted corn, aged parmesan cheese (hard like a cracker and thin; I need to learn how to make this!!; my guess of throw parmesan cheese slices in a tube sock behind the radiator all winter was somewhat confirmed by Teresa's former restaurant-worker of a mother; she said, "well you would use a brown bag or cheese cloth, not a tube sock"- is semi-sarcasm so dead?), and probably tomato, perhaps sundried. Its been too many days to remember perfectly.

For desserts, I went with a 4 nut truffle (another waitress approval, or possibly, she was flirting with me to approve all my choices? She did ask me a lot about my recent activities. I'm not a good judge of flirting.), which my waitress clarified for me, actually contained 5 nuts, if you count the pine nut, which is really a seed, and an unfortunate cheesecake, which was merely pedestrian as far as cheesecakes go, meaning, it was no better than the delicious cheesecakes you can find in a store. You get home-made ice cream with any dessert, and the only specialty option is "Drunk Monkey"- banana and brandy-soaked chocolate chips, which "you can't taste"- their words. Let me promise you this: You can most definitely count on tasting the brandy. There is plenty of it in there. But it was still good. I actually preferred plain vanilla though. There is no such thing as bad vanilla ice cream, but there is just something special about fresh, true bean-made vanilla ice cream. Especially in a charming flower garden patio on a hot day at the North end of Utah's South Desert. However, I must close by saying that "Cafe Diablo", for a restaurant whose schtick is gourmet new-age Southwest-themed fusion cousine, a dessert tray with nine offerings needs to include something more local than the pine nut. How about a prickly pear jelly roll, or a honey sweet Navajo fry cake, paying homage in several ways to the Beehive State?

Review Time (Again)

2011-08-28T23:50:00.004-07:00

Books, Beer, Cheese, and Hiking.

I believe it was the Carthaginians you coined the phrase: you know you're getting a quality beer if the label tells you an ideal temperature to set your refridgerator to. My last bottle of hard cider told me to serve for ideal flavor at 44 degrees Ferhenheit. I did just that with my lovely Samuel Smith's while reading one of the truly most-enjoyable books I have ever come across: "The Making of Victorian Values". What a joy to read. It is at one time, a massive, detail-oriented tome dissecting and aggrandizing a narrow sliver of history from a small island that is already too obsessed with itself and has been since the sinking of the Spanish Armada (done mostly by wind, might I add: more a stroke for the idea that God hates Catholics and popes, than that he favors the British, although one has to feel that whether God wanted the Europeans to slaughter the Indians or not, he did put all the guns on one side: then again, and I apologize for these diversions, dear reader, he did put massive salt-peter deposits along the coasts of Chile, so I guess the Incas could have been ready had they wanted to- (and do you ever think while eating a potato, that Cortez is somewhere standing in a fire screaming: Damn Pizzarro, and still bothered by his low public opinion- consistently low since his own life when he returned to Spain and no one would let him in the house having heard rumors and fearing he might corrupt their sons or abscond with their daughters?- I mean Pizzarro slaughtered the Incas who were a bunch of Mister Rogers level good neighbors to one another compared with Cortez's Aztecs. Montezuma had his priests fire the hearts of Cortez's captured men at the Spaniards as they made one of their retreats, and the bodies, still a little alive, were torn apart by wild dogs in plain sight on high steps- does this sound like a group of sorry doormats we should sob about?- but then again, the Incas (coming back to the potato now I promise) got their revenge: Pizzarro brought the spud back to the European mainland where it did little to alter the economies of the Mediterranean, but helped fuel population booms in the colder, wetter norths, and help to shift the power to the UK especially, thus screwing Spain. Next time you eat a potato, chew on that!)- well "The Making of Victorian Values" also reads like a tabloid. Crim. con. cases galore, divorces, smut, beer halls, drunken protests invoving bare ass cheeks, the militant seizing of Shakespeare plays by amateurs in the audience who think they have not gotten their money's worth, uptight protestants insisting that pianos wear special pantalettes to shield young ladies from any thougts of bare legs, dirty puppet shows in back alleys, dirty puppet shows in parks on the Sabbath, girls being thrown out of house and home as skankosauruses if they fail to faint at a dinner party when someone says "what a delish chicken breast", the hanging of such thoughtless speakers, and oh so much more. I recommend it.

Another fun read that has little to do with food is 1688, a book that takes you around the world (Texas, Japan, Jacarta, Germany, to Versailles, to China, to India, to the aborigines in Australia- you find out what everyone is doing for once) and is written in fine baroque fashion, to use the baroque sense of the word. To find out what that means, you will have to read the book. It is a marvelous concept and goes contrary to the history style of textbooks that always annoyed me: you spend a month studying China and then start all over at the moment a fish crawled out of the ocean with France, and then go to North America the month after. Makes it darned hard to ever make connections. For instance have you ever wondered what was going in France during the American Civil War? A fun read that never manages to go into too exaustive of detail and wear out its welcome.

"Catching Fire" was a magnificent book. Explores different theories of when fire and cooking developed, how they contributed to evolution, and goes into modern anthropology exploring gender roles in cooking around the world. Absolute must read for anyone who likes science, food, or gender studies. Camila I am speaking directly at you here.

"The Invention of Air" is also a good quick read. It touches on a lot of subjects but mostly tells the story of one of Ben Franklin's friends and contemporaries who discovered oxygen and sort of the atmosphere. Interesting to note that scientists and religious men were obsessed with finding the ether for thousands of years and space turned out to be a vaccuum, which broke the hearts and sanity or many great and famous people, while air was believed to be nothing, that is, empty, in its pure state, and only polluted when things were put into it. Yet air turned out all along to contain something to study. That is my extrapolation which you will not get directly from the text. The best point in the book is that coffee may have fueled the Enlightenment directly, and that the coffeehouse has more to do with intellectual growth than the library. This point may be borrowed from "The History of the World in Six Glasses" which I am just starting, another ingenious book that tells world history through the most successful drinks, including of course, wine, beer, and coffee.

Micheal Palin has several great books, but "Botany of Desire" if I have not mentioned previously is my favorite. I mention it because of the history you will get of apples, having mentioned hard cider earlier.

The only exotic cheese of late I have tried was a porter stilton. Excellent, although one could simply buy a good porter (if one is not in Utah, the state that does not believe in any fun, but currently is changing liquor laws to entice more tourists to come: um, so just so we're clear, evil is evil, but not in a bad economy as long as the heathens will leave by the next available flight?), and any kind of cheese. I loved it with crackers for breakfast actually.

Good beer is hard to come by, but Olde Suffulk is a fine blend of ales aged in oaken barrels. Not as good as the ultimate oak-aged beer: Petrus Classic. But very good. Its been a long time since I've had any magnificent beer. I will have to start breaking the law to find a good one. Or slip into a gas station in Portland at 5 am to buy singles while Teresa is sleeping and then chug them warm while she showers to keep the peace on a vacation out of state. Both are good plans in their way.

Have had some fabulous hiking all year. In Utah "Red Breaks" is a superb adventure. You will need a rugged vehicle (or a Toyota Camry if you are a very good and gutsy driver), a hefty rope and a guide, unless you are me or bring me along. I made the whole canyon solo and without rope, but it is challenging climbing and even the professional guide book said not to go alone and that rope would be required. I would go back is all I'm saying...Nearby the mega crowded, and pimped in every book about Utah "Calf Creek Falls Trail" will take you to "Calf Creek Falls". I managed to be there between amusement park shifts, so I had the whole thing to myself. Who know you could nearly get hypothermia on a 104 degree day? Beautiful falls, truly. A better lonelier hike will be found in "Capitol Reef" National Park. Hike some smooth canyon rims overlooking great scenery and rock formations of every color and shape along the "Navajo Nobs" trail. Start 45 minutes before sunrise or you will miss it all. The trail was hot, blinding and blistering on my way down, but I saw fins, spears, towers, domes, and vistas too grand for words in perfect lighting on my way up. Everyone misses the wonder by sleeping in. I have many photos to prove just how great this trail is. The rest of the park you can enjoy just as well from your car, excepting the native deer herd with no fear of humans who will eat almost out of your hand. West Slabs of Mount Olympus overlooking Utah involves very little hiking but offers many climbing options of an easy nature, with glorious views, along a wall that from below seems unclimbable. Getting down is more challenging. Most people will want rope along, and a pal. In Oregon, everything I did in the Redwoods was awesome, so get out of your car and try a short trail or two, and Humbug Mountain has a fun name. Tide pooling in Yachats was excellent, Arizona Beach is a bit of a secret, and most of the mountains whose names I forget at the moment along the coast can be completed in around an hour, if you want to show off or have someone waiting for you in the car. I passed 51 people on one trail and most of them were happy: they were getting quite a show. I was sprinting in my pure goat style down wet muddy rocky slopes during a rain storm. I passed an entire schoolbus of children on a field trip going up another even wimpier Pacific mountain and they thought I was either Batman or Spiderman when the sun goes down. Good times.

EZ Parmesagna Lasagna and GTGB

2011-08-28T23:13:00.003-07:00

Acronyms Aplenty. Fresh Produce Galore. Hummina-hummina-hummus!

I love summer. And also every other season. But summer is a time when I can watch a dry lightning storm while roasting local potatoes, steaming exquisite fresh green beans, and dip them all into a home-mix hummus. I have only ever made one bad hummus, and by bad, I mean, it is only about as good as what you find in a store. This poor hummus was an experiment I tried: honey and three kinds of ground pepper. Honey and chickpeas are not a clever mix. Probably why no one has ever tried it, and lived to tell the tale. Hummus is something you should try though. Its hard to fail, and it takes a mere five minutes to make if you use canned chickpeas. Don't even drain them. Just dump the whole can in. Add a little olive oil, some lemon juice, and either some toasted sesame seeds or some tahini, which is sesame seed oil. The variations are plentiful. I like mixing in some black beans- you could also use pinto- and sometimes, tomato bisque. You can also do the juice from a whole lemon for a very fresh variation. Try bell pepper and olive. Try arugala (I have no idea how to spell that but it goes good in pesto too) and sundried tomatoes. Garlic and pistachio. Try anything, and then let me know about it! Hummus is healthy, delicious, and goes with everything- toast, crackers, raw veggies, cooked veggies, use it to dip a gyro. And people at parties will think you are a genius. And all for much less work than home-made mayonnaise, which if you serve at a party, will make people think you are a deranged hippie- believe me, I know. And here in Utah, we only have dry storms lately: lots of flash, no rain to cool things off. I've never felt so hot as I have this past week. At least in Arizona there are pools everwhere. You drive to work, you jump in the office pool, you do a little work, you go home. Not so bad. Here, its almost as hot, but people try to pretend it is not- me chief among them.

So GTGB: sounds like some bad TV channel, but really stands for green tea green beans. I tried this on a whim as I was snapping green beans and tossing them in the collander and waiting for my green tea to cool on a hot day while swallowing whole jalapeno peppers (don't ask: well okay, I heard you silently ask: I had to detox my blood due to a minor infection and fever relating in some degree possibly with something stupid I might have done involving, perhaps- not saying for sure- hundreds of cuts I got while bushwacking down through a steep narrow canyon full of wet cliffs, loose rock, dangerous slopes, spider webs, an overgrown creek, stinging nettles, waterfalls, hollow melting snow and ice bridges, and overhanging cliffs that were unclimbable- unless you are a genius at getting yourself out of trouble you yourself created on the level of brilliant torreadors- and which I circumvented by climbing down a dead pine tree that was lodged upside down between some big rocks and which came apart in my hands and I wound up surfing down and landing in a two foot pile of dry needles which I found everywhere for a week- possibly, all because I thought the trail looked pretty indirect and would bi-sect this canyon anyway and it would make an interesting and exciting shortcut even though I nearly got my friend (who is not a genius at getting himself out of trouble he shouldn't be in in the first place) killed making this exact same kind of decision two weeks previously while looking down into the exact same kind of scenic-seeming waterfall-cut canyon- who can say?). I really think you will like them, it creates a mystique no one will put their finger on. A subtle smokey, background complimentary flavor. I think it would work for any kind of vegetable, and any kind of tea. Just steam a half and half mix of water and tea, and keep an eye on it, because sister, you don't want to see what the pan will look like if you forget about it and let it go on steaming dry. Trust me.

Another way to seem like a genius is to try EZ Pamesagna Lasagna, which stands for Eggplant Zucchini Parmesagna Lasagna, an acronym I adore, as it is completely misleading. Eggplant Parmesagna is notoriously one of the hardest things to cook- or at least, time consuming. Anyone with several hours can do it well. There are just many steps. So because I like to make myself extra crabby while rushing to get to a party on time, I decided to complicate things needlessly, by making a hybrid with a lasagna, and also putting in zucchini, the greatest breaded food known to man or humanoid extra-terrestial. Here are the steps if you want to attempt this beast: (2 people could whip it off pretty easily with division of labor)

1. chop up a lot of things: one zucchini and one eggplant into discs (leave the skin on), one roma tomato diced, tear by hand 4-5 basil leaves or crumple some dried basil leaves (basil can be easily dried at home: simply buy or pluck some basil leaves, put them on a paper towel, and walk away. Bag them up one to two days later, and also, you may have to flip them once. That's it.), dice a handful of olives, and maybe one quarter of a red bell pepper. Shred some mozzerella and parmesan cheese: 6 oz of each should do nicely. Set aside.

2. Pull out a glass casserole. Lay down a decent layer of tomato sauce, then a layer of lasagna noodles (no bakes are a good choice for this dish). A little more sauce on top.

3. Dip each zucchini and eggplant disc into egg and then Italian-seasoned bread crumbs. Now comes a choice: either fry in oil or lay down unfried in a nice layer in your casserole. Up to you. Fried zucchini is spectacular and will give you a spectacular lasagna. But your lasagna will be very good skipping that extra work. Do you want to be spectacular and very tired or very good and a little tired?

4. Atop your layer of vegetable discs, put a mix of your shredded cheese: 3 oz of each.

5. Repeat and make a double decker lasagna, only this time, in your tomato sauce layer, add your roma tomatoes, olives, bell peppers, and basil.

6. Bake. 400 degrees and for 30 minutes.

Now that is a vegetarian dish anyone will feel full on. And its one of the only ways to get almost anybody to eat eggplant. Dice any leftover eggplant and zucchini you have left and throw it in your next marinara sauce. Or hummus.

You Mean You're A Vege-Traitor!

2011-05-20T01:08:00.003-07:00

Andrew describes the hateful hijinks of Meatriots who love their country, its flag, its boys in arms, and juicy Armor Hot Dogs.

The first thing the Dutch and English ever agreed upon in America was that the Natives were not using the land properly and should be divided from it. They did not improve the land, "improve" being defined by charter law as "to keep livestock on it." Thus, in a nutshell, or perhaps, in a collarbone would be more appropriate, the red men and their pudgy long-haired babies were gunned down first for not eating hamburgers. Don't snicker that I am exaggerating. You can be lynched for the same reason today in Texas and no jury will convict. This is a beef-loving country, strangely, since the more beef people eat, the worse its quality. And since, all non-organic hamburger meat in this nation now contains ash for thickening and fake coloring, and beef is no longer marbled or flavorful. More like tough and stringy and bland. The other day I went to a Mongolian grill with friends and the only difference in the lamb, beef, chicken, and pork, was a slight dye job. None had any flavor. I closed my eyes and did a taste test. My lady slipped in a piece of cardboard and a piece of plastic and a piece of leather, and the only one I thought was actually meat was the cardboard. They were really more like slivers of texture replacement, to appease the teeth. But who can complain when all the vegetables and fruits were refilled before our eyes from huge cans? At least the food was not expensive. I guessed after the first time through the line why the "house" recommended six ladels of sauce per bowl. When people say they like good food or strong flavors or this or that dish, what they really mean to say is: I like the texture and shape of my homogenous salt and sugar to be...

But that is just the usual. What I mean to say is I am not being vegetarian anymore, though I did go nearly two months meat-free at one stretch and I often go a week without meat without noticing. I try to eat organic fowl and meat now, as that is clean (er), more properly treated, and probably ate something it would have eaten 200 years ago and enjoys. It will also taste good and since it costs more, I will eat less of it and savor it more. Thomas Jefferson advised to use meat like a condiment, usually over a dry martini and a suckling pig, if not a dry cocktail of pureed ham and a big meal of ale-soaked tobacco leaves. It was good advice, even if he did not take it himself- well, he had to entertain, and the French would have thought America poor or weak were its president dangling his slippers AND eating mountains of collared greens. "Where's the beef" might have been the slogan the British were sneering as they burned the president's mansion down to its plain white walls. Of course, Jefferson also had the sound policy: there's plenty more where that came from. He believed in riding the land hard and moving west. Hey, if we farmed efficiently, there would be plenty of land for Brits, French, Indians, Canadians, and who knows who else. Can't have that. Torch it and shake a leg. Let's waste our way to the Pacific.

So I eat some meat again. A few problems cropped up when I stopped. One is that I got boring. I just started eating the same things all the time. As I was also avoiding out of season produce, this wound up being rice and beans, pasta with red or green sauce, bread, and oats. That is not a very healthy diet, as it is pretty much pure carbohydrate, with limited nutrient profile, and I have begun to branch out again. The other problem was harder to deal with, and it is that people might be okay with vegetarians, but not with sudden vegetarians. It is like coming out of the closet. People start looking back at old memorized scenes and painting you pink in them. They start to wonder: did he really like my turkey at Thanksgiving? No he must have lied! Now I can't trust him! Or: Ooh he's fickle. He might not love me by next Tuesday! This makes them angry. And too, its like losing a team member. They have some inkling that animals are not treated so well, and probably don't consider our "deal": we take care of you, one day, we'll split your head open with an axe: to be a very good one anymore. They would walk out the gate and not come back, but they don't have many options at this point. Well when someone quits their meat eating team, that makes them feel bad. So they get angry for that too. I got either confused looks, or suspicious ones when I said I was trying out vegetarian eating. Had I just been diagnosed with coronary heart disease, this might have been acceptable- I say might, because many men believe they get their fat trucker virility from a mixture of chaw, naked silhouette mudflaps, contact with the steering wheel of a diesel pickup truck, and steaks. The redder the better! These sort would rather die than eat a stem of brocolli. Of course they also drink bad beer, but what few thoughts they have, they do have loudly, and so pass for our culture around here. Also, even carnivores can tell they are getting lower grade flesh these days, and know it is swimming with bacteria, or maybe more accurately, that they are buying bacteria infested with small quantities of particular animals when they buy meat at the market. It is all the same mess of little amoebic monsters, just with a bit of bird or hog to differentiate it. When I quit eating meat, it makes them feel a bit like a sucker. They want everyone to get conned at the same time. Safety in numbers.

The only person who was positive about my experiment was my little work concubine, a vegetarian convert herself, who was getting hazed by her family, pretending to be supportive. The old: Justina, dinner is ready- oh no, whoops, I forgot you don't like drumsticks anymore, I guess you'll just have to eat a can of corn. No time to make something else now, sorry. And according to several co-workers who labeled themselves as "incapable of reading body language", the two of us screamed silently: you're favorite dimly lit vegan restaurant, or mine? Whatever that means. So she might have approved of any experiment I made, even if it were horrible. I say she was my work concubine because that is how people started looking at her, and she being shy, religious, and you know, caring what people think, this bothered her, despite my appeals and best efforts to have her play along with some scandal-mongering. I for my end of things, tried to look smitten around her (a minor effort) and act possessive, and to dress as "old" as I could around her (she was 18 when we started "work-dating"). One lady really took it too far. She sat down at our table o chat and gave Justina an up and down scan and we could both see the wheels in her head say, "huh I wouldn't have taken you for a whore." Really offended the kid. She quit not too long after, probably out of boredom and because she is young and not dead or dreary enough for government work. If you don't need a job, why keep going? Stay in school, and that sort of thing.

I think vegetarian cooking can be delicious, though I need to learn more meal options before I commit to it fully. And I should try it at peak of summer. I think winter is the time for meat. Eating flesh raises body temperature, puts on "insulation", and used to fill in when plants were not available. People often preferred produce and certainly craved it crossing the great plains and shivering through hard winters without furnaces. For example, Lewis and Clarke and company had to subsist on 9-12 pounds of elk and puppy flesh per day at Fort Clatsop. They dreamt of cabbages. I am going to go to Fort Clatsop in one week's time on vacation with the Missus, to bring this up on the tour. I love social terrorism, and Teresa does not believe me that The West's spiritual and symbolic founders were probably homosexual and puppy eaters to boot. "Where did they get the puppies if they didn't have any food anyway" she asks, naively. "Did they bring them along so they could eat them? Why not just bring jerkey instead then?" Well jerkey does not walk on its own legs and cows scare easy, but they actually bought them from the Indians who wouldn't sell the white men any fish or elk or corn because it was scarce and they needed it for themselves, I explain. And also because they hated the whites secretly and liked to tease them about how only cowards and fools ate dogs and failed to pack real food into the wilderness. They rolled their eyes at those poor starving explorers, and patted their bellies while holding their noses over steaming cauldrons of labrador stew while visiting. We'll see what the tour guides have to say to my quotations from the diaries such as "if there is a more delicious steak than one carved off a fresh young puppy, I haven't found it". I may be thrown out. We'll be visiting on Memorial Day.

But social terrorism and vegetarian inklings do not mean I harbor terrorists, as some of you carnivores were probably muttering under your breath while reading this. No, don't tell me. I like to pretend I have an audience, though when I find out I do, I get squeamish. They say Mark Twain was the same way. He also liked to lie through his teeth as a hobby.

Stromboli Baby

2011-05-20T00:26:00.003-07:00

I have a new favorite word, and perhaps a new favorite food.

Can you tell it is raining, and hailing? Yes we just as of five minutes ago set a new record for latest snowfall in Utah at valley elevations. Five straight weeks of precipitation, and moping, my usual coping method, got old, and I just don't have the young energy anymore to drink hard as a hobby, so I decided I'd better start cooking. I figure I have a lot of hiking to catch up with in June, so I might as well store a lot of good stuff to eat now. Preferably portable. And also I started to make muffins from scratch (3 kinds), am baking more breads, and invented some recipes to try soon, I hope.

Stromboli is an Italian dish defined on Wikipedia as being a calzone with the sauce inside. This tripped me up as I thought I was making calzones to throw in the freezer, but as I was over-ambitiously trying to put tomato sauce inside them without rupturing their thin skins, I learned I was making stromboli. Stromboli can be made in a swirl log shape too though, and I wanted to try that. The pics are above.

To start, just make a pizza dough as you normally would. Throw down a lot of flour on your counter and roll it into a rectangle. Then put down whatever you want, roll it up as you would a yoga mat or a sleeping bag, coat the edges with egg, seal, sprinkle with something good on top, bake, and carve it like a roast with a big bread knife. It is delicious, artistic, structurally sound, stores well in freezer, and will make you seem like you are an actual Italian in a way pizza will not, even when you make it from scratch.

My first roll stromboli was: tomato paste, black olive, red bell pepper, spinach leaves, whole basil leaves, slices of provolone cheese, roast beef, and salomi, mustard, garlic powder and sprinkled with asiago, romano, and parmesan cheese, and oregano on top. My dough was half whole grains- a mix of rye and whole wheat flours with unbleached standard baking flour. I think this is one sturdy food you could get away with all whole grain flour- it doesn't need to rise much, you are coating it with egg anyway, sprinkling it with good things, and stuffing it with sandwhich fixings and pizza toppings. No one will mind.

Some other ideas:

Vegetarian: tomato paste, bell pepper, olives, whole basil leaves, eggplant, squash, onions, provolone, sprinkled parmesan, romano, and asiago.

Vegetarian 2: tomato paste, eggplant, zucchini, pumpkin strips, crushed red pepper, minced garlic, onions, mozzerella, sprinkled with oregano and parmesan on top

Pink Lady: Ham, mayo, mozzerella, tomato paste, olives, spinach or lettuce, crushed red pepper, a touch of ranch, ground rosemary, sprinkled on top with oregano and parmesan

Hot Italian sausage would be good too. I like parmesan cheese, if you cannot tell.

Now as to calzones, in their crescent shape, they will certainly make better easier to eat stored food, if you are in the habit of keeping tomato sauce around to dip them into, or some other condiment you prefer. They will be dry to travel with though, which for hiking and car trip purposes, is why I wanted them to be complete, with sauce inside, like a Hot Pocket.

I used to consider "Hot Pockets" one of mankind's greatest inventions. Then I got clued in a bit to the way the world used to be, you know, for about 4,000 years until the microwave and massive grocery markets, and realized they were just the corruption of every nation's old lunch pail stand by, the enclosed sandwich, calzone, stuffed na'an, empanada, pasty, etcetera. The coal miners even built a handle into theirs, which they would eat around and then discard, so birds could pick at the filthy black bread stick and die instead of them. Clever. So the original lunch pail was edible, and now it does not decompose for 25,000,000 years- approximately. Now, Hot Pockets are not very good, but I kept buying them in college, on the hopes they would be good, or really, the conviction that they SHOULD be good. I mean they were so convenient and clever and self-contained. Every food good right there, little spillage, eat it hot or just let it thaw as you sleep in class and then eat it coldish.

A better idea: buy a $6 dough press set and just make the things yourself, without preservatives and with a lot more flavor and real ingredients. You could make do without the dough press kit. If you can roll dough into a circle then you can fold it over itself. Paint the edges or lips with a little egg yolk, and press them with a fork if you want that artisan's touch. Almost anything can go in them, and you can make empanadas, mini dessert or fruit pastries, calzones, stromboli, and anything else you want to call them with one kit. The largest size my kit makes is about the size of a Hot Pocket, which I know is good to cut down hunger on the run, but not quite fill me. Simple eh? I have not tried empanadas yet, which I think I will fry in corn oil to make them a bit different, or mix in some masa to my dough. But here are some calzone tips, or stromboli tips, depending on how technical you want to be.

Do not overstuff them. That will be the temptation because everything going in them is good, and you like good things. But overstuffing stretches your dough and creates weak spots. They will leak- no big deal, or explode- which may be.

Use tomato paste, rather than tomatoes or tomato sauce. The paste is drier and will not weaken your dough or add to leakage. Then again, the most delicious part of the calzone experience is peeling that crispy patch of mozzerella and tomato goo off your pan after you lift off your calzones.

Type of pan does not seem to matter. I tried pale and dark metals, flat and high walled. What you want is to work your dough as little as possible. My early calzones in each batch were more stable than the ones I formed from the scraps of left-over dough I re-rolled out. Also, don't grease the pan, put down a little corn flour, it will add to your crust and works just as well, and is easier to clean off. Just shake it over the garbage can.

Coat your calzones with egg even if you don't want any herbs or cheese on the outside. It will make the crust less dry and taste better. I put herbs in my dough, which is a fair idea also. And garlic powder will work better than minced garlic. That too can go in your dough for safe keeping.

Bake around 400 degrees, and watch them close. They finish faster than you might expect. I left mine in the oven for 10-12 minutes. They will cook a bit more even after you've removed them, which is true of meat and any enclosed dish or food too.

Ricotta cheese is great in stuffed shells, but I think it is too hard to find good ricotta with the flavor you need to stand up to the crust of a calzone. Stick with mozzerella or provolone. Parmesan and cheddar in little touches will help to enhance either cheese.

Watch out when hot- they spit!

If you are really ambitious, try selling them. Who doesn't love a good portable meal?

Forty Dollar Lamb

2011-05-18T07:14:00.003-07:00

If you have 40 days and 40 nights to spare, try making this meal.

I exaggerate a little. It is mostly done in a slow cooker. And if you can chop even a little, you can make this delicious, perhaps, even, heavenly lamb tagine. Or stew. Or curry. Stewgine. Well, I combined a fruit tagine heavy on curry powder and a classic tomato and pepper stew recipe together because I could not decide between them, so I am not sure what to call it. I was thinking Miracle Manger Tagine, but Forty Dollar Lamb sounds good too, as you could easily charge that in a restaurant if your table cloth is white enough and well starched and you have a maitre-de with the proper upward tilt to his disdainful and superior chin. I left everything big, because that is a more classic slow cooker feel to me. I thought this collision of flavors would jump and jive well, but it could have fallen on its face and not shocked me. You will need:

1.5 lbs lamb stew meat or shoulder roast
4 potatoes (I used red and left skin on)
4 large carrots
1 green tart apple (leave the skin on)
1 unripe green banana
8-12 oz cut green beans
1/2 can coconut milk
1/2 can tomato sauce (plain)
4-6 mint leaves (fresh if possible, or try peppermint extract, or failing even that, anise extract)
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp cardamom
1.5 tsp black pepper
1 clove garlic minced
1 diced tomato, or 1/4 can diced tomato
3-4 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter
Medium to large slow cooker

Quinoa, cous-cous, rice or barley

Lamb is an excellent meat to work with in today's meat world, because it is not eaten enough to get the full fast-food treatment and have its life streamlined to a short, sad, scary efficiency. The flesh is full of flavor that rolls around all over your tongue, and it melts and still has fat in it. Imagine that: marbling! Beef gets worse all the time. Any slow foodist knows it. Chicken is too disgusting to think about and turkey can be worked with, but only if you hit yourself in the head with a mallet or the bottom half of a bottle of kalua first. You don't want to know what percentage of chicken can be feces legally by weight and volume. Oh wait, I think I told you once already in a blog.

Start by braising or searing your lamb. Use your slow cooker if you have a high setting, by chopping your meat and putting it in along the bottom, alone and dry. Let it brown, but not char. You will want the contrast of well-done lamb in this curry stew. While that starts, chop your vegetables. Use all the fat, it will melt into the body. Don't trim lamb. If a person complains the meat is fatty, they shouldn't be eating lamb. The fat will not be chewy like with some other meats and is part of the delicacy of lamb.

Once your meat is brown and mostly cooked, put in your potatoes and carrots, and coconut milk and tomato sauce. Let go on low for 2 hours or so. Then add your apples, green beans, spices and seasonings, garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, and butter. Let it go another 2 hours or so. Check on the vegetables for desired tenderness with a fork. The butter is optional at any point as a thickener if you need it. Slice half your banana as a last step and put it in for just a half hour at most.

Boil the grain of your choice and put the lamb and vegetables and sauce over it. I used quinoa, and they went very well together. This was one of the best things I have eaten in a long time. One of my favorite dishes. I think a gourmet would have a hard time identifying all the flavors but would approve heartily. It was excellent, delicious, and mouth watering. It would have been perfect had I not put my apples in so early and made them mushy. I corrected that above and suggested to not add them with the potatoes and carrots as I did. Mesmerizing. And if you think I am merely tooting my own horn, try to find other such words in my previous posts. Or ask Camila. Pretty good on my scale is a darn fine compliment. If I tell you your dish is very good, it probably means you should expect me to have diverted a parade route through your bedroom by tomorrow morning.

The above recipe will feed 6 people one full size portion each, unless they are pigs. Though that will leave them wanting more. You could satisfy 4 without a dessert. It does not recapture everything with reheating.

And now for dessert:

Apple Pear Raspberry Granola Crunch

You need:

3 apples (any variety: skin them only if you want to. May I suggest zebra tanning them? That's half skinning)
2 pears (skin them)
1.5 cups apple-raspberry granola or as close to that as you can arrange
1/2 cup whole oats
1.5 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup brown sugar
cinnamon
allspice
nutmeg
touch of lemon juice
8X11 casserole dish

You can reduce your sugar usage a lot by substituting vanilla. This almost qualifies as a health dish, but will be sweet enough for any tooth with some vanilla ice cream on top.

Grease your dish, slice your apples and pears, toss them in a big bowl with everything else. Pour it into the cassarole and smooth and flatten it as you can. You could try a bit of corn syrup if you want it to stick together like bars, but it should hold somewhat together after baking. Use the vanilla and spices to smell: if it smells delicious while you are tossing it, then they are probably right. If your mouth is not watering, shake in a bit more of whatever you fancy. Its hard to overdue vanilla, though a little goes a long way. Cinnamon also. Hold your nutmeg as large doses cause a) nausea, and b) peyote-like hallucinations, and c) vomiting after the visions. Or if you want to have a really interesting game of Pictionary after dessert...

Review Time

2011-05-18T06:21:00.003-07:00

Cheeses, books, exotic fruits- you want 'em, you get 'em here!

A new grocery store opened near the train station by Teresa's house, and since Utah is such a happening place when it rains every single day for a month, not that I am bitter, we could not wait to go check it out one foggy midnight. It turned into quiet the adventure when wild blowfish fruits attacked us, though we subdued the voracious beasts, and distracted a dragon while we stole her fruity eggs, oh and also we plucked down a star from the sky, and it turns out they are only ripe when they glow bright gold.

On the whole, exotic fruits are probably something you should seek out while traveling, if you know they are safe. I have read you can build whole vacations around fruit tourism in Hawaii, the safe weird fruit capitol of the world. Our horned melon was lime-jellyish, and every part of it is edible, so I ate all the seeds. Spitting them out would be very time consuming, as they are everywhere. The dragon fruit was flavorless, except for a few bites in the center, which were located randomly, and frankly, I cannot blame the poor expensive little guy, as he travelled pretty far to sit there for two days until we gasped at the sight of him. Our star fruit was tough but smelled delicious. I wish we could have chewed it. We will try again some other dull midnight on a Saturday. Like when I want to hit the in-produce Chinese buffet while I peruse fruits air lifted from Tanzania and Malaysia.

We did have our first pot de creme though, and I could pronounce it perfectly, which impressed our servor. I only meant to bake one and eat it hot out of the oven for a year, so a chilled deli section one was the next best thing. Raspberry fused and breathtaking for the first bite. Its that semi-crust almost firm on top like a bit of hard brownie and then the thick near pudding inside that gets you. A pot de creme is a mix of textures that don't seem like they should be possible together. I guess that's why they are so much work.

There is a spectacular cheese section at this grocery too. I could have spent three figures on cheese had I not had my designated accountant with me to claw at her eyes as I gasped and picked wedges of cappuccino-dusted white, and cranberry stilton, and bright green pesto cheese, and every other sort from around the world. I settled on only two this trip:

12 month aged Mimolette from France is dark orange, very hard and with a thick tough rind slightly paler and rougher, looks very much like a slice of an orange fruit. It tastes like a super-sharp chedder, but with thicker, smokier undertones. It has a rolling flavor like seemingly everything from France, but must be eaten quickly after opening as it goes stale quickly, though if you don't mind sucking your cheese until it is soft, you can savor every sliver. The rind is not edible so far as I can tell, though you will certainly keep trying to eat it when you remember you paid $28.99 per pound for a cheese that a cheap sharp cheddar could match 85% head to head. Do I have regrets? Actually, not at all. I did after the first taste, but this is a great cheese! That little difference from plain cheddar is like the difference in DNA between a monkey and Tom Hanks- its the last .00000001 % that wins the Oscar.

Goat Cocoa Cardonna from Wisconsin is a more conflicting case. At $23.99, this is not exactly a bargain, but on the sliding scale of gourmet cheeses, it is near the bottom of the slope. The body of the cheese is elegant and smooth beyond satin. It is like a waltz in pale moonlight, with your melting dream girl of ice. (Beat that magazine writers) The flavor is exquisite and delicate and light, unlike most goat products which are like biting into or sipping a petting farm's armpit. However, the speckled auroreal coating of black pepper and cocoa powder does nothing to meld with the body of the cheese. It is like a sheer mesh top on a tattooed girl. It hides nothing and adds nothing at the same time. The cheese is sweet and delicious, but it is without the cocoa. Perhaps this cheese artisan found his or her soft creamy cheese with undertones of shaved ice so cool and perfect that they could not bear to think of it being sampled with strong wines or as an early course in a clumsy meal of hard and competing flavors, but the cocoa freak only helps with sales, not savouring. This cheese for that reason does not approach the ecstatic mathematical limit that cocoa chardonnay was for me years ago, but without the cocoa I would not have bought it, and that would have been my loss. This cheese will keep, so make it last. You paid through your teeth for it, so it keep it dancing on your tongue. (Ah I love magazine writing. Every kind of magazine just goes for broke in every sentence. You can tell we have too many over-educated people in every field. It isn't just the forwards to novels and blockbuster movies anymore that are comically over-the-top.)

Now for some books:

Literary Feasts, Sean Brand: Did I need fashion tips and hor'd'erve advice so I could throw my own Great Gatsby lawn gala? Yes, you can bet your sweet bippy I did. Do I crave to simulate the Cratchet Christmas feast as detailed for me in this little book that will cost you not much over a buck? Oh indeed. I have never laughed so loud as in reading the selections and introductions here in this volume. What a treasure, quick as a casserole, but as filling as a quiche. Learn how to eat sexxxy to arouse that special someone from Tom Jones. And how to cook on the roadtrip with Three Men in a Boat. Need some ambience? Try shouting TS Elliot by loudspeaker "borrowed" from your school's rowing team, to satisfy the Philistines. 11 thumbs up.

The Fruit Hunters, Adam Leith Gollner: I bought copies for myself and two friends who will remain nameless after listening to the audio book. Not just interesting or entertaining, it provides tips on selecting that perfect dragon fruit, and mangostein. Though it only helps if you have it on hand when you come across one of those unexpected beasties. Learn why every college student or Clinton intern should keep some miracle fruit tablets around. Hint: it makes sour things sweet, for you or your special someone. And why miracle fruit was banned for production in the United States. Hint: who is murderous and jealous and covered with white pixie dust? Only your friendly neighborhood crack dealer and sugar lobbyist. Talk to the two of them first. And you will learn how to go on fruit tourism trips to the Seychelles where Eve was formed not from a rib, but a big-ass lady fruit. (Type the words into google if you don't think a fruit seed could weigh over 100 pounds or look like a woman grabbing her- well I'll let you read the book).

Botany of Desire and In Defense of Food, Micheal Pollan: All his books are great actually. I think I discussed Botany of Desire once or twice. The history of the world told from the perspectives of its four most successful species, other than humans. Potatoes, apples, canubis (marijuana), and wheat (I think). Its been a while, but a great book, if you think early Cromwellian era prejudices towards Satan's tubers are fascinating. The other book is "an eater's manifesto", and provides advice on how to eat. Mainly food. He suggests avoiding foods with unpronouncable ingredients or more than 5 ingredients. Policies I am adopting, a little at a time. He also talks omega 3 fatty acids better than any professor I ever had. Our ancestors did not get them by eating huge piles of salmon, walnuts and flaxseed from the mouths of their inland mountain caves, by the way, as supplement companies would have you believe. They got them from everything they ate. Omega 3s are in all plants, or they were, until we started using fertilizers heavy on nitrogen, and feeding livestock corn and other grains they aren't used to, which we grow with fertilizes heavy on nitrogen. Those plants, such as corn, are high in omega 6 fatty acids, not bad guys, but the polar opposites of omega 3s, and those animals then have 6 fats in their flesh which we get instead of 3 fats. The ratio is probably what counts. I have read that before reading this Pollan book, so it is probably a good theory. If you eat organic, you don't need to count omega 3s. You are getting them. That makes a good case for organic butter, milk, and meat and eggs, which I have been switching to on a kind of instinct or suspicion, not really knowing why, already. Chickens are force fed flax seeds now to make the eggs full of omega 3s, but any organic or local farmer market egg will have more in it than the doped fetish products. Pollan is against nutrients and nutrition on the whole. He says eat foods, not what they contain. Lettuce is lettuce, a leaf, a plant, and good for you. Don't eat it to get this or that amount of iron. If you eat mostly foods, you will probably be fine. The book is solid, and I'll leave the rest to him.

Slow Food, Seasonal Living

2011-05-18T04:59:00.004-07:00

Andrew outlines the manifesto of his new secret society/social club.

Well, I am not sure I am young anymore, nor am I broke, and clueless, well perhaps we should say curious instead. But I am back none the less. I approach food with a scientific method that is based on trial and error. Yes I could open a cookbook and read a recipe, and yes I could look up cooking times and temperatures, but then where would be the fun in that? I never would have wound up with pumpkin cheesecake slop, which by the way, was the most delicious dessert soup ever slurped from a soggy crust. And I would never have come up with apple and pear raspberry granola spice crunch from my last dinner party, the one with chili from inside a pumpkin that rocked the world of people age 25-52 from two continents. That one could also be nicknamed Told You So Crumble, as Teresa kept criticizing me through the entire process: "you can't just make up recipes while you slice apples! That is going to be disgusting! No one will eat it!" For the record, it was delicious. Way delicious, and no one ate it faster or insisted more sweetly and loudly that the guests already bloated with chili and looking like they were now re-assessing my chefing skills as one of my sneaky vicious streaks instead of a kindness than Teresa did. She did the LDS church girl equivalent of holding a gun to these poor gorgers while they mmmmmmmed politely, looking sicker with every delightful bite. So I won that one. And would you believe the next month when I was making dinner "on the bounce" thinking only one shake of seasoning ahead of the next and inventing turkey burgers with crushed wheat thins, apple chunks, craisins, cinnamon, ginger, garlic and parsley, she did the same thing? Thinking on the fly is how great things happen sometimes. You want to get outside of the box? Well you have to elude the box- by not knowing where you'll be, so it can't find you there. Think about it. Pretty much a perfect analogy. Am I worried right now about my triple berry cheesecake which is currently rising faster and higher than any loaf of bread I ever made (not saying much sadly)? A little. Did I overadjust? Perhaps. There-in lies the game.

Now, onto my little social club. It is shall we say, a full-blown foodie society for snobs and the few of us with tastebuds who can really appreciate too the story of Nelson Mandela, who was an immature, irrational, irresponsible, and probably dangerous young punk before he went to prison. Did he have a right to be? You bet. Was the anger righteous? Probably. But he would never have made a good leader had he not seasoned for a long time in the slammer, where all that anger couldn't escape and had to be conquered. My point? Human beings are meant to suffer a bit. That's where my club comes in. Slow Food, Seasonal Living, is an adaption from a French group I heard of: Slow Food. They are a team of card-carrying superheroes who have sworn to fight for truth, justice, and the death of microwaves. Or something like that. They might just be some frogs who enjoy a good laugh around a good bottle of wine and a table of fine food. Also they hate McDonald's. A lot. Well, so do I. But I believe human beings are unhappy in general for more than getting too much salt, too many calories and too little flavor and variety. I think we are out of touch with our world too.

If reading the books of DH Lawrence and Brian Jacques and the poems of Robert Frost, to name a scant few examples off the top of my head, has opened my eyes to anything, it is first and foremost that food brings people together (or tears them apart), and that life in the country may be slow and boring sometimes, but there is a lot to look forward to. Namely: seasons. There is a harvest, which means work, feasts, and festivals. There is winter, which gives you time to relax, get fat, rest your knees and back, and to have a good time, go to a dance, spend time with family and friends, and strap on the skiis, or go for a sleigh ride. Or it did. Spring, well, warmth, flowers, growth. Summer, lots of work, lots of sun, more heat than you can stand, drought, but, long days, staying up, the sound of cicadas, sleeping under the stars. The problem with modern living, is we've reduced winter to an inconvenience. When you spend all summer in air conditioning and licking popsicles, you wonder how anyone ever put up with being cold. And when you spend all winter being too warm in a blistering dry house, streaking from the front door to a car with yet another strong heater, you never shiver enough to look forward to sweating. But not so in my group. Last summer, I never once thought, its too hot. Even on 90+ degree days. And it isn't because I grew up in Arizona, it is because I spent four solid months shivering. I was cold from October through March, and when the sun finally came out to stay, it took me halfway into June to warm up all the way through my bones. That might sound crazy, but I didn't mind, because the summer and fall before, I hiked so many bright afternoons in the mountains, that I was diving into dirty snowpiles when I found them lingering. I was taking ice showers when I got home just to stop my temperature from continuing its ascent. In short, sparing further examples, when you let yourself experience the seasons, you are in tune with the world, the world we have been a part of for a very long time. And I have been much happier since I got back into step with the seasons. Have you ever thought about why Christmas is such a special time of year? Is it the presents? Maybe, in part. But it also is magical because you count down to it, you look forward to it as the hap-happiest time of the year. Well, in a poetry group I go to at times, made up of mostly older ladies, every spring meeting these women would bring dry poems about strawberry picking or baking a cherry pie, and would water out of their mouths, and gasp, and clap one another on the back, and even wipe away tears, then trade stories about berries. This confused me, as there are berries in the freezer section, fresh and plentiful, every day of the year, as well as bad out-of-season berries. Plus I mean, its just berries- what is that to a chocolate chip cookie you know. (Bear with me.) Well, reading a Willa Cather prairie novel, I suddenly got it. They canned a whole orchard worth of peaches and apples, and that was it. They got buried by deep snows and only left the "burrow" for church one day a week, and didn't go to school and had no fresh fruit, vegetable, and few sweets of any kind for months. Did they look forward to spring in that novel? You bet. And I understood why these older ladies had when they were young too. Sarah Lee and the girl scouts didn't keep their larders full. Your body can tell you what you need if you are in tune with it. You will crave an orange when you are low on Vitamin C, you will drool dreaming about strawberries if you don't give in constantly to impulses at the grocery and buy those cardboard and plastic out of season ethanol-colored tomatoes and apples. Is it a struggle to learn to ignore what is right before your eyes for half the year, waiting for a farmer's market? Yes. But there is a big reward too. All you have to do to taste the most delicious meal of your life is fast for a week. For the best apple of your life? Wait until the first one falls from your own tree, and even if its a crab, it will taste astoninishingly sweet. Just like the first hop in the pool every summer after school lets out is the best two seconds of your life. You might find the same to be true, should you join my club, which anyone can join, if I tell anyone about it. I might not.

Now I know you are thinking, Andrew, you start clubs all the time. Remember your book club that you bitterly abandoned to die by exposure after the first meeting when only 8 out of 40 overworked college students failed to read slender little "The Old Man in the Sea" in their spare time, and when that one god-banger kept saying everything was a metaphor for Jesus. (Here is an actual transcript from the meeting to discuss the book: God-Banger: "I think the old man, was a metaphor for Jesus." Group leader: "Yes, that's one interpretation- I suppose. Now back to the shark." God-banger: "The shark was Jesus too." Group leader: "Aaaaaalllll right, how about we talk about the young boy then." God-banger: "You mean Jesus?") You are thinking: Andrew, you are an anti-social, judgemental, smoldering perfectionist who won't even hike a mile with most people because they don't walk right enough for you, and you are nearly impossible to be around for very long. If you are to yourself at all how you are to others, then its a wonder you can sleep at night and waking up must be miserable. Those are valid points, I grant you. But I am still going to found this club. It needs founding. Though perhaps, not other members. For now, we are getting along just fine with a president. Participation at each meeting is 100%, with all the good suggestions we can handle at this time.

But if you like the sound of my society, you can found a chapter in your area. Here are the doctrines of membership:

I will be cold in winter. I will be hot in summer. I will eat in season as much as possible. I will buy local and organic whenever I can. I will learn to appreciate craving things. I will learn to put up with and ignore things, and eventually, to not notice or mind them. I will can and freeze my own stores.

I will grow whatever I can, even if it is only herbs on a windowsill, or sprouts in a jar. I will be a producer, even if it is only to ferment my own yogurt or beer. I will take part in a harvest, even if it is only to pull my own pumpkin off the vine in its patch.

I will ween myself off the microwave, if I own one, and use it only for the most basic of tasks, like warming water or melting butter. I will prepare leftovers in a toaster oven or eat them cold. I will do everything the hard way at least once, so I know how. I will prepare my own meals whenever possible.

If I do not prepare my own food, I will at least have to wait for it, sitting down, to come to me. It will require skill to prepare. I will avoid chain restaurants. I will seek out dining experiences from cultures new to me, and maybe even scary to me.

I will eat socially at least once a week, and this does not include talking to my television or texting, even if it means inviting over a neighbor I think is weird or rude. I will gaze into the eyes of a person across from me as if I were Walt Whitman, and into the eyes of my food, as if I were Henry the Eighth. I will savor my food, and enjoy it.

I will eat to be happy, and to add to my life. If I exercise regularly, seriously, and even competitively, I will think about nutrition. If I do not, then I don't care about health anyway, and do not need pills, powders or expensive water.

When I crave something at the store or in a vending machine, I will not buy it. I will wait, and go home that night, and try to make it. I will find a friend who knows how, read a book, or search the internet, or failing that, will take a wild stab in the dark at it. If it turns out all wrong, then I will go and buy it the next day.

I will learn to make everything I can for myself, such as soda, seeking healthier and more individual alternatives, such as baking and freezing calzones or empanadas rather than buying "Hot Pockets," or baking oat and granola bars instead of buying them. I will make my own sauces and snacks and spreads.

I will resist ready-made bag and box meals. I will oppose the word "instant" in all its carnations. I will not eat like an astronaut, because they do not, when they have better options.

I will host one or more dinner parties per season. I will contribute a dish to every holiday celebration I go to. I will share recipes and ideas with anyone who wants them.

I will cook and shop green. I will eat and drink organic, when possible and practicle. I will not drive three times farther to a grocery store to save 50 cents. I will buy organic if I can. I will question every chemical that has been presented to me as a natural part of life, as to why I really need it. I will warm the smallest surface or space possible. I will use lids.

I will stop to smell or pluck a flower in spring, I will sunbathe or swim once every summer, I will ride in a haycart or build a scarecrow or carve a jackalantern, I will play at least once in the snow, each year. I will seek out new activities which cannot be sustained all year.

I will waste as little as possible. I will compost if I can. I will find uses for disposable parts of fruits, such as making zests to keep in the freezer from the rinds of many fruits, and baking the seeds of squashes for snacks. I will wear clothes until they evaporate, and cling to old electronics rather than buy the latest thing. I will resent technology in spirit even as I utilize it. I will be out-dated and pretend as much as possible that I am living in the 19th century or any other era. This means limiting television, radio, and computer usage. To do otherwise would be hypocritical and people would be right not to take me seriously.

I will shy away from meat when there are plants in abundance and the weather is warm. I understand that meat raises body temperature, digests slowly, and tends towards weight gain, which are desirable qualities only for parts of the year.

I will be on the lookout for crime, vice, red dye number 40, and potassium sodium benzoate. I will avoid food products with ingredients I cannot pronounce or buy individually. I will read food labels, especially the fine print. I will ignore health claims.

I will not hold anyone to be a bad person if they choose to live differently than me. I will remember that we are as a society out of touch with ourselves and with our food. I will try to be a positive example to others. I will try to influence others because it is good for them as individuals, and not just because it is good for us all. I will remember there was a time when I could not tell a difference between real food and processed impersonations and was helpless in the kitchen. I will rue that time.

Well, that about covers it. Though that was all off the top of my head. It isn't too hard to join is it? No quotas, few specifics, few thou shalts. Oh and I also am starting a local tennis club, because the hiking conditions have been bad so far this year and I could not bring myself to give away my racquet while cleaning out the closet. I will probably recruit for that club. And that cheesecake I was watching? Well, its not half bad. And it did not fall apart.

In Praise of Pistachios: A Midieval Ballad

2010-09-10T03:31:00.005-07:00

Is Andrew going vegetarian?

I might be going vegetarian. For now, I am giving it a pseudo-try. Partly because I do not want to eat meat right now, and partly because I am still traumatized by "Eating Animals". It is a well-written book in that it's goal was to educate me in a way completely polar to what my parents always said: oh what you don't know can't hurt you, or what you don't know isn't your fault, or they're just chickens, who cares? That sort of thing. Now I don't want to be one of these PETA type A-holes but I do think it would be fun to join PETA and wreak some social terrorism of a bloodier kind than I have to this date, and also, while this is a PETA type statement I'm going to say it anyway: Isn't that kind of thinking the same kind of thinking that allowed lots of Jewish people and lots of other nationalities since to get targeted for genocide? Now okay, it is just chickens, and pigs, and cows, but I do have a hard time accepting the grizzly details of their lives and deaths. I am also against genetic engineering and cloning, pretty much entirely, even though that puts me in league with the Republican jerks at work who say things like "Because of Obama! (his name for them must have an exclamation point, but a blood dripping vampire sharp exclamation point at all times), your health care benefits are taxable next year. (And I know dear readers, that you hate my asides, but do you know that I write only for myself and do not expect anyone to actually look at this and find it mildly alarming when I learn someone is reading it or anything else I have written? But I must go into this one little aside is all, just one honest, in this paragraph from here on out.) Isn't complaining about Obama! for screwing them over a little but not complaining about George W Bush (comic 1950s radio sock-hopper girl swoon sigh, as per required by Utah law) trying to screw everyone in America over by basically derailing the attempt since WW2 by all "developed" nations to provide health care and retirement benefits to all by privatizing social security (something the oil sleezebags have been after since Eisenhower: funny quotes from Eisenhower's diary regarding the oil men who thought he was in their pocket, might wanna check into it sometime) a little insane? I mean so basically they think Obama! is a terrible president for being a good enough president to be able to wrangle through his legislation, and Bush (dreamy nostalgic sigh) is a great president for being so ineffective and clueless and despicable in his second term that he couldn't bang through his legislation and agenda even though his party largely has ruled the world for several decades? Reason Number 2 that I might join a time share condo cult in Colorado. Yeah.

I do feel bad for chickens too, and the book "Eating Animals" was devastatingly well-written in that it might have made me become vegetarian, or at least to give it a whirl the last two weeks. But it was badly written in that it was so graphic and depressing and relentless that I felt the author was trying to hold my head under a pool of blood at the end not with the aim of saving animals but with punishing all of mankind and especially me even though he admits he regularly gets off the vegan bandwagon to pop a cheeseburger. So someone without my shall we say, 17th century macho and masochistic attitude and tolerance might just wind up killing themself if they listen to the whole audio book without break, falling into a depression they will never kick. Right, chickens. I do feel bad for them. I would not want to wake up from a taser shock to find myself hanging upside down by the ankles and an automated throat slasher bluntly and badly hacking my throat so that I slowly and painfully bled to death while then being boiled alive and having my skin peeled off again while still alive before my head was torn off- or worse. I assume that must make a chicken who isn't already crazy from its confined life go crazy, and it would make me go crazy to see my former neighbors and well the whole city of Chicago say being gutted and blood everywhere and so forth, on endless horrid sharp saw-toothed assembly lines, but then again, and here is the rebuttal: aren't they just chickens or cows? I mean I was just at the state fair and I have to be honest maybe the growth-hormone pumped cows were lumbering and breathing heavy and covered with sores but throw them some hay and they seem content to just poop all over themselves while eating at the same time, and do they really have it worse than Americans anyway? In "Eating Animals" the author argues that livestock and poulty are in constant pain from being so overweight and pumped full of drugs. Um, did he just not notice the irony or is he not paying attention while driving around? I have coworkers who waddle and need a candy bar from the overpriced vending machines every hour and a jolt of coffee every other break and a cigaratte every break period and most of them are on at least one kind of anti-depressant. And I do feel bad for turkeys too bloated to have sex who need to be artifically inseminated but again, I mean in our society nobody is too keen on blimp people, so don't ever more Americans decide, you know, rather than an athletic and active life including nights in the boudoir with rosepedals and gymnastics, I'm going to go ahead and bury my face in this gross salty fast food deep dish pizza that tastes like styrofoam and make myself so unattractive no one will touch me then complain that I am lonely and that Sandra Bulluck or Leo DeCaprio is shallow and doesn't want a penniless obese diabetes-riddled slob like me. And zoos and factory farms are awful, I am sure, and confined. But don't people spend several hours a day by choice in cars? And eight hours in cubicles? And most of the rest of their time under a roof with doors closed? Man I'm not so sure the animals we eat have it worse than us, it seems more like the deal always was we ate them and they shared our life, and we fed them and protected them until the time that we ate them. No foxes, just us. We used to have acres of land, so did they. Now we are boxed up in cities and apartments, so are they. I am not a fan of my own modern life, and hey sure I could try moving to Montana but you don't have to move to the city, the city will move to you (the great Modest Mouse wrote that). I think most animals would eat themselves to exploding if they could and I've personally had lots of friends who eat when bored or will keep stuffing chips in their mouth without noticing until they get sick. Its pretty gross.

No the more convincing argument that got me, and here it comes for you too, is this: that 30 foot deep piles of manure are horrible polluters, that these companies exploit immigration and guarantee no one will ever solve illegal immigration because they need a workforce that can be kept afraid, be made to disappear and that cannot talk, that it is possibly producing the next super killer epidemics (did you know all flu viruses come from birds originally?), and provide such an inferior contaminated product that they inject their meat with colored dyes and broths (not sure where these master broths come from if the meat we make everything including broths comes from is no good anymore) and huge amounts of salt to create something like flavor, or at least, to hide the smell and taste of feces that they fail to wash off. Actually chicken is all stored in vats of water to cheat you further and to make sure every piece of every cut is contaminated as much as possible (oh wait the second part is an accident). See chicken will soak up waste water and feces that then do not have to be dealt with as you will eat it and effectively store it for the company. Cute huh? As long as the meat or poulty is less than 11.5% total feces and fluid, its all legal. Having your angry disgrunted exploited workers urinate on the chicken also causes it to soak up water which then inflates the price, since it is sold per pound, P.S. So its more like the opposite of washing off, instead they pollute and contaminate it more to increase their margins. Oh and we foot the bill for cleaning up all these problems so the real price of meat is just hidden, it isn't cheap at all. But you knew that one. I bet you did not know that specifically Smithfield, the biggest slaughterhouse there is had 7,000 envionmental violations in one single year which they happily paid out in total fines of 12.7 million dollars. These environmental damages will probably cost we, the tax payers, somewhere closer to 12 billion. Good deal for both sides right. Man am I glad I can get that Wendy's 99 cent chicken-like substance sandwhich though.

So for now, I am not missing meat. We will see if that continues or not. I have always missed it in the past, but I baked some breads this week- lemon poppy seed zucchini bread with slivered almonds on top and cucumber-apple-rye-and oat bread with crushed walnuts on top- and made my first pesto (lacklusterly delicious. In that it was delicious but not nearly as good as Pasta Jay's's pesto I had the other week), and my first hummus (disgusting mostly, but then maybe I don't like hummus. I'm not sure. Either that or I did something wrong.) I also fried zucchinis and ate plenty of my favorite, three colored roasted herb potatoes. I am still drinking milk, and I am less clear on how to get that from dairies I know are not evil. And I did put eggs in the bread and supposedly those are not evil since I paid $3 for a dozen of them and they are brown, but I don't trust company labels anymore so I am reading up about egg companies out here right now. I think maybe meat cheffery is just lazy though. Did I touch in my last ramblings on how there ought to be a few cooking shows at least that don't use meat or resort to, here is some sapon, it tastes like meat, recipes? You would think some chefs would want to step up to the challenge and really get creative to fill a whole season of shows without any roast ducks or veal cutlets. I am finding there is a lot of variety one can begin craving simply by creating the void I have by deciding, I'm not going to defrost that pork loin to cover the weekend. And its exciting that the next time some sheltered Mormon says something to me like (I swear to the Mormons' God: you can't make this stuff up: "oh no I've never seen a silent movie but I've wanted to. I've been meaning to break out of my comfort zone and try new things", as if you just asked them, "would you like to watch a porno with me" or "would you like to have a threesome with me and that mountain goat over there?" or they think "Charlie Chaplin" is a mostly forgotten slang term for a man's shall we say masculenity?) you drink beer?! With a sneer as if I just said I didn't think Obama looked like a monkey or was a terrorist or cracked open coffins at night to violate the dead (lot of racists out here in Utah- enough to make one want to move to Colorado, the first state to ban "gestation pens" for hogs and "veal boxes" (look them up or watch the South Park episode about veal for more information- as fast as possible, even if you have to join a time-share condo cult to do it) I can reply yes I drink beer, do you meat!? And then I can go on a tirade right back at them about how they personally torture baby animals and are the devil. And then what can they say to that, other than Hitler was a vegetarian? Oh man with all the beers and wines in the world would you really miss meat either if you decided to drink more to make up for your non meat eating?

The thing is, I do not want to be a vegetarian. I do not want to be defined by my eating at all. I don't like that I was a "health nut" at work in my group right away because I pack my own snacks such as trail mix. Maybe I just don't like Little Debbie cupcakes at 4 am. And I do not want to be a vegetarian when I meet people. I try to avoid all definition. This is Andrew. I am not even into that when people introduce me as such. Its a bit specific isn't it? I certainly do not want to be This is Andrew, he's a vegetarian. That will lead to a lot of annoying conversations that must be dispensed with before I can become a person or say something clever. And I see myself as a lot of things before a potential or even investigative or contemplative vegetarian, but none of them as attention-catching and so none of them as attachable to my introduction. So maybe I will just be an omnivore who does not eat meat except at Christmas or something. I mean is anyone going to keep tabs of me at Christmas? People are doing their own thing. Also, I shouldn't probably be talking about this yet, on Day 13 of sort of not eating meat for a while because I haven't felt like it, because I will probably now wind up going to bed (well floor, I go to floor as I do not have a bed) and dreaming about dripping red london broil, although that sounds gross at the moment (a good sign in being a vegetarian if I am going to be one). Well its like a baseball hit streak. The record is Joe Dimmagio's 56 game hit streak. It is considered the most unbreakable of baseball records by many. And I think it becomes more unbreakable all the time. A lot of people get to 30 games without anyone noticing, but once half way, the oppressive, scavenger media comes in huge droves demanding press conferences after every game with the player in question to pound him with stupid questions like "Do you think you'll beat Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hit streak next month on such and such a date?". These are stupid because if the streak continues they just ask it again the next night and the next night and the next night after that until he just wishes he was dead and because the most famous superstition in baseball is never talk about a hit streak or a no hitter with the hitter or pitcher until its over. It jinxes them, it makes them unable to just do what they have been doing and puts extra magnitude on each pitch. The player in the zone is no longer just going about his business but is pressing to keep the hot streak going. Lots of guys get to 30 games, and few get much farther. The pressure and attention is too much. A guy can't just avoid the newspaper anymore. There is no chance of not being assaulted constantly with his own success. Joe Dimaggio's hit streak is safe. And the parallel to myself is I don't want to try to be vegetarian. I want to just eat what I want. If I don't want fish or meat, that's kind of great isn't it? But I don't want to mark days off my calendar as if detoxing, or get constant questions from anybody, like "did you go fry up some catfish yet?" I don't want pressure of trying to make it some distance like there was a goal in mind from the beginning or I am carrying Ghandi's torch. So I should not be talking about this, at least, until I'm 55 days into not eating meat, if I go that far. Even though 13 days is the longest I ever mostly went without meat or animal stock cubes or anything in my spoiled middle-class American life and that is sad to me for a lot of reasons. And also I probably won't because there is a lot of frozen meat around I will need to use eventually. I am not going to have let some poor animal's life be in vain. Although I could give it all away, with little cards that read things like: "Here is three pounds of ground beef I decided I did not want because the typical e-coli count in ground beef in this, the safest country in history ever in so many ways, is ____ and that is too many zeroes for me to be comfortable with and also it is probably by volume around 4% fecal matter and 10% re-constituted ash and there is a 20% chance this beef comes from a cow who's legs were sawed off at the kneecap while it was still alive after having been skinned alive in a 15 minute ordeal so read into whether I like you or despise you as you please from my giving you this tasty present and if you decide you don't want it either pass it on to some big loud-mouth redneck you know will love it either because you love him or hate him as you see fit, but don't let this poor animal's life go in vain. Thanks." That might be fun, I'm not going to lie.

Now onto the pistaccio part of the blog. You know I love pistaccios in a good sweet marinara sauce, and with goat cheese or just as a snack. How fun to peel them. But they can also replace very expensive pine nuts in a pesto. I used pistaccios with arugala and basil and olive oil to create a basic decent first crack at pesto sauce. And they go deliciously in a blend of wild rice and vegetables and lentils and beans. They are just soft enough to add crunch and a little pop when you bite them without hurting your teeth, and will hold their flavor and do not absorb others. So they are like an exotic visitor in any dish. But what does not go good in rice? Brown rice with cinammon and cardammon and apricots or mangos. White rice with cinammon and raisins and baked with a hint of vanilla. Long grain and wild rice with anything, like corn and tomatoes, and carrots and so on. No I have not missed meat yet, though still freshly picturing it as disease-carrying torture cutlets helps I am sure. But honestly, with a diet rich in cereals and with staples like rice and pasta at your disposal, would you miss meat much? Ugh I've become the kind of convert who is over-diligent and tells everyone how much they ought to love Jesus even though he still is sore from all the lot loving Jesus he did for twenty-five years before finding Jesus while in the gutter trying to get over a hangover or the pulled hamstrings from not loving Jesus so religiously and so recklessly. I hate those guys. So this will be the last sneak attack against meat for a while. Oh yeah and fish are mostly farm raised in water so filthy they often have their faces eaten off by bacteria and water lice and are probably in much more pain and suffering than land animals, but, they don't have expressive eyes or faces so nobody cares. And even deep sea fish go through hours of pain and trauma when caught, though I have my doubts as to fish intelligence and thus, how far fish pain can go.

And I am not really against meat or fish, so long as you know the food pyramid is a crock and the USDA is charged with protecting consumers in a way that promotes industry, which is certainly a conflict of interest not in your favor, that you don't need meet at all, and that there are better options for the environment and animals. I decided a few hours after being pushed to the ledge to jump by the author of "Eating Animals"who ended his book by pointing out that Bill Neimen, the founder of the only national chain of food that promised ethical treatment of all their animals, was forced out of his own company so his former friends and partners could start instituting the more profitable and less ethical methods used by factory farms, that is I say, I decided to use the powerful research tool of the internet to see if I could find a meat source I approved of in a much more hopeful and resilient mood than the book tried to leave me in (or did he want to push me to the edge of sanity and exhaustion so I could rise like a phoenix?) and it only took about 30 seconds. I looked up local businesses and quickly found several options that promise you can come look at their farm and view their animals and the pens and habitats anytime and promise no hormones, mistreatment and so on. And they promise it will taste better than any meat you can get elsewhere, which I believe. Although, like I say, and as I have heard several vegetarians including Camila tell me, I just don't miss meat so far. We'll see how long that continues. Let's tab this up as entry one in an experiment and not a preaching show. I do think everyone needs to know what they are eating and I am ever less patient with the attitude I get at work and from friends of, oh I can't do anything about it, so I don't want to know. Number one, we can all do something about it. Its very easy. Number 2, the first thing you can do about it, is know. "Food Inc" spread that as one of its final messages too. Once you know, tell someone else- I was raised eating meat every day and was told food was safe from the grocery store. The pictures on the label show cartoon farmers and cartoon barns and cartoon smiling cows. Had I been told at say age 8, you can go on eating meat but you have to watch this video of where it comes from if you do, I think I might have gone a different way early on. Had I known 4 years ago that food comes from a few evil companies and there are few farmers left, I might have begun changing then. I feel a little bitter towards my parents for not knowing what they were feeding me and not caring, and towards the whole system and towards myself for not questioning it, but don't we accept the world we are presented? Who would assume that food is really polluted and cruel and full of chemicals and so on. That's what the FDA and USDA are supposed to be for. It feels natural to trust that until someone clues you in not to. So clue someone in, perhaps, if you feel like it. Anyway we're back on the soap box, so that's enough for this week.

Some Food Reviews

2010-09-02T22:40:00.004-07:00

If you're ever in Moab or Santa Fe, how does the rest of the song go?

If I have a failing, it is trying to do too much. And holding myself to impossible standards that even a robot couldn't maintain. And trying to be perfect in every way. And being lazy even while trying to be perfect in every way, so that I do not put in enough work and yet still hate myself for not being the fastest reader, greatest mountain climber, chef, and music lover in the world. And also I sleep too much, and eat too much, and am a crummy selfish person who should volunteer more. And I am too positive and it allows me to go whole months without trying to improve. And I can never focus, and also, I am a bad boyfriend and am too moody and am a hypochondriac and baby myself too much. If I have a failing.

I tried to do way too much while Camila was around and only tonight lamented again how we did not get to bake any blue cornbread or make a fine pizza with many kinds of flour so she could tell me if my pizza crust that I wrote about months ago is indeed too bold, too audacious, too much of a good thing, or if it is the best thing ever. Other than cocoa-chardonnais cheese and apple smoked gouda and provolone cheese and blueberry stiltons and fine green soft roqueforts. And October ales and vanilla porters and hazelnut waffles and oh well a lot of things. I also like too many things, which is another of the things that is wrong with me. If anything is wrong with me. We did eat out at some fine restaraunts though, which I should do more often, even though I am cheap, and a simple peasant at heart, for at least six days a week, and it literally gives me gray (not literally gray but you know, lighter chestnut brown or Scottish-peat-ale-red or whatever color my hair is) hairs to eat out at ordinary restaraunts. I need a place that is really top notch and also won't cost an arm and a leg. And since we found a few of those places on our recent roadtrip, I am sharing the information here on your trusty favorite food blog so you will know where to go when following the itinerary step by step while acting our our travels in the soon to be released "Bountiful Fun from Arches and Ice Caves to Fried Zucchini: Or How Andrew and Camila learned to love Pedialyte and Smile Two Miles Above Sea Level on the way to Santa Fe: A Polygamist's Guide". Look for it on Lulu.com.

If you are in Moab, there is only one place to start, and that is "Pasta Jay's". Now okay, Moab is the only town in Utah where you can get a beer and not be treated even by your waiter before you give the tip like the next Hitler, and where your waiter won't throw the beer in your face when she or he brings it to you and there are lots of mediocre breweries and pubs all around. But "Pasta Jay's" is a very good Italian restaraunt. The red potato gnocchi are seriously to die for. I mean if you eat it all you will die: did you know there was something better than a good thick creamy terrible-for-your-heart alfredo sauce? There is. A perfect pesto stirred into that same alfredo sauce to make this creamy, bubbling, baked miracle and to bury your round potato dumplings in after hiding them beneath shivers of mozzerela and hard flakes of parmesan cheese. The fact that these are red potato gnocchi is inconsequential of course, since the skin is removed and inside red potatoes are just white potatoes, and since the sauce, so rich and mesmerizing and perfect that you won't care what other flavors it hides, will hide the taste of the gnocci, but dip that crusty cut of garlic toast in to that sauce and try not to moan with pleasure in a way that will convince the other patrons your girlfriend has a hand under the table where it probably shouldn't be with children at every table around you. The stuffed shells are passable, but should be passed up. For one, the spiced beef, ricotta and spinach are not to die for, and two, red sauces can be mastered at home with ease by almost anyone, and three, you only get three shells which is not much pasta after a day of hiking and sun trust me. Any pizza will come on a crisp, thin, perfect crust and with fine thin layers of cheese. You cannot go wrong. For a first visit sampler, the Linguine Neopolitan comes looking like Italy's famous flag, with healthy dollops of green pesto, red sweet marina and in the middle where it belongs, a fine white alfredo. Oh Saint Alfredo, if it is wrong to kiss your feet every time I pass the totem of you atop my fridge, then I apologize, but I will not stop. Baked Lorenzo is divine too, crispy and warm baked noodles and sausage and sauce. We haven't even begun to cover the nightly specials, and did I mention that "Pasta Jay's" is the restaraunt that merely by my reading the menu inspired my "Eggplant Domonoske" and my "Maroonara" sauce? Or how about how this is a restaraunt where you can spend as little as $10 for a gourmet meal and where almost every item on the menu is vegetarian unless you choose to pimp your ride with chicken?

Canyonlands by Night will please the carnivore in you. This company will take you down the river if you like after a sumptuous (what a word) meal of Dutch oven specialties. Or just get the dinner. All you can slow roasted beef and pork and chicken, potatoes with carrots, onions, and spices, baked beans of every color- thick and hearty. This is a "rib-sticking" cowboy meal as the ad says, you know, if cowboys ever existed outside of movies. Technically you can get a vegetarian meal, but for the price, I do not advise it.

There are several other restaraunts I have wanted to try in Moab. Some of the finer establishments are open only in summer, such as "Center Cafe". This is a restaraunt that knows how to serve up creative gourmet southwest food, but it is expensive and their entrees will not appease any vegetarians. I find the contempt the gourmet industry seems to have for vegetarianism strange. As much as they enjoy overcharging for fish and chicken, shouldn't they be embracing the idea of very-over charging for green beans in hollaindaise? Why are they so protective of carnivores? Also, have the right company because $23 a plate is a lot to pay when you're sitting with someone who will complain the whole time they don't offer hamburgers even though she has ordered a f***ing hamburger three times that week already and does so in every kind of restaurant you go to and who cannot appreciate the appropriate elegance of a pumpkin-seed crusted baked trout flank. You will find all kinds of food anytime you go, though. Avoid Eddie McStiff's, and hey, did I mention the reason people go here is for the 2 National Parks and not for the town itself? But what a town.

Santa Fe disappointed me. I must be honest. I found the prevalence of seafood confusing and also, there was little embracing of southwesness except for a lazy option to put green chile on everything. Where is the flank of scorpion in habanero sauce? Why was my catfish in jalepeno sauce at Atomic Grille really a decent, even fine, adequate fillet breaded and fried with parsely with a cup of jalapeno mayo next to it? Jalapeno mayo is lazy. It is not a jalapeno sauce. It is not tasty or southwestern. Why does not a single restaurant (finally got that spelling right) have a fry bread hamburger? I can get white bread buns anywhere. I can get it at McDonald's. Offer me something unique Santa Fe.

Now, Bumblebee Cafe was Southwestern. Everything looked good. Camila's vegetarian tortilla was huge and oozing all kinds of nice things. The chicken tostadas come piled high with pico de gallo, guacamole, cabbage and lettuce, and plenty of white and dark meat chicken. After years of being force fed white meat chicken only, let me tell you, those juicy unexpected bites of moist thigh are very welcome. I cannot recommend these enough. The steak taco looked small. This won't break your bank.

Santa Fe Baking Company was a good breakfast option. Quick and painless, the only downside to their huge menu is that they took away blue corn tortillas. Still, you can't complain much when you can get an apple and raisin breakfast pie and tangerine juice freshly squeezed at the same place you can order huevos rancheros with both red and green chile sauces. The breakfast potatoes are dull and dry. Go ahead and skip them. And if you order pancakes you are a bore. I mean make them at home. They're the same everywhere.

If in Albuquerque, and you find yourself famished at say 10,378 feet above sea level, your best option other than licking the undersides of rocks for the slime and moss beneath, is "High Finance". Watch the sunset- sort of- from the comforts of a basic table where there are no illusions and plenty of allusions in the name of the joint about how much you will be paying. An appetizer or two is sure to make the foodie in your group orgasm loudly while sucking down her balsamic mussels with crusty pita chips. Don't double dip no matter how good the pairing of fried zucchini and blue cheese dressing are. Oh yes, you can do appetizers at home, but the wind on mountaintops is always in the plus 20 mph range and the air gets cold fast in the evenings. And that tram ride down from Sandia Peak might seem more graceful if you are swanned full of champaigne or zinfandel.

Between Moab and New Mexico, don't bother eating out. Just find a good campsight and break out your geniusly cheap bag of ramen noodles and dried vegetables and 6 species of mushroom or a fiery blend of potato slices and quinoa with dried vegetables and savor them in your tent. You'll feed 3 for less than $2 each and can rightly damn anyone around you with "Mountaintop" brand flimsy skinty dry boil in a bag dinners as a "bassBOWL" for paying $6 for a single serving of crappo oversalted food with no flavor.

Until next time my several fans, keep on trucking.

Are you a peasant or a nobleman?

2010-09-02T21:59:00.003-07:00

Click the link to take a quick survey and find out.

I am sometimes an aristocrat, and often a snob. I am regularly an afficianado, and routinely move beyond mere fan. I am an aristocrat about beer, and I am a connoisseur of cheese. And yet, at heart, perhaps I have been a true, blinking Irish peasant all along. I see nothing wrong with the simple fare for dinner of some herb roasted potatoes with a glass of milk, and I find nothing lacking for a supper of a few ears of fresh corn, a handful of steamed green beans and a cut of soft buttery triple cream cheese or some sharp Red cheddar. Not only does it take no work, but it is delicious. Oh yes I still enjoy the exotic and strange, but I more and more often sit for a simple, quiet platter of what most people would call side dishes. Perhaps being a peasant in the old Jeffersonian or Jacquesian agrarian ideal is more than people give credit for.

I shouldn't be surprised. My ideal of life comes from two main founts of my youth: The Redwall books and the shire veterinary travels of James Herriot. Who wouldn't want to sit down with kings of the earth bumpkins around a fine bottle of home brewed nut brown? To visit farm neighbors and discuss their fine pigs and relate tales of clever goats and the meanest duck in these parts who ever lived? And what could be more idyllic than a kind community where every creature contributes heartily in their own way and to their own strengths, then celebrates every season and birthday and random happenstance with a feast of candied chestnuts and yams, shrimp and hotroot soup, tankards of October ale and dandelion and strawberry cordial and fresh fruit pies, cobblers, baked tubers and leeks and carrots, bowls of herbs and wild rices, and every color and shape of hearty, fresh bread? Friends and peace, ah that is the good life. And still, to be ready on a whim to break out a bow staff and glittering sword and crack open the heads of any scoundrels who try to hurt your dibbins (the community children). Peasant and quiet life is best. I felt this through all the books I read in these series, longing for a quiet Kinkade-farmhouse near a peacable stream, where beasts of all ilk could come visit for some fresh jam and scones and cheese all home-made. Mmm mmm. And I never wondered how these mice and moles had cheese when no cows were ever mentioned and they are small. Details details, you only notice the laziness inherent in a writer when you go back as an adult, and it is only then too that you begin to think wait maybe not everything can be answered with steaming pots and cauldrons of mashed potatoes with peas and beets and smoked lentils with oysters. Maybe there is more to life and the young rebel teens you know will see the error of their ways by the end of the book are right in a way to want adventure outside the abbey walls, to want more than fresh vegetables and an afternoon nap. Or is just me?

So here's some book reviews. James Herriot is wonderful, but rather than read all of his largely redundant books, at least, in a row. Start with "All Creatures Great and Small", with its haunting (in a good way) opening scene of a calf delivery in a snowstorm, and then if you want more, try "Animal Stories", a great!! short collection of stories. Brian Jaques writes Redwall books to this day, but don't bother with most of them: The first "Redwall" (the later books all have :A Tale from Redwall tacked on) is an introduction but is not essential. I say "Mossflower" and "Salamandastron" will fulfill your life. And the rest you can enjoy but hey, there are a lot of good books out there. Just see if you aren't more open to the idea of knitting your own clothes if it means a little peace from that cell phone you think you love afterwards.

Another good book I am working through right now is "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Foer, which after an odd introduction where the author tells you many reasons why he is not qualified to write a book and you shouldn't read his book (I paraphrase and take some liberties to simplify his Freudian stances), writes eloquently with humor and horror at the meat industry and the history of meat consumption. You support fishing of giant sea tuna he asks, then why not go swing a pick axe into the face of Lassie the family dog and roast her with this Hawaiian recipe (yes recipe is provided and sounded good to be honest, and yes I am paraphrasing again a little). I also learned some devastating things: Vegans produce 7 times less carbon dioxide than meat eaters. The factory farm system accounts for 40 % more climate change than all travel in all forms in all the world combined. For every one pound of shrimp caught, 27 pounds of "bi-catch" are thrown back. Bi-catch is other sea creatures undesired and thrown back, usually dying from various traumas and hardships which include many endangered species, from dolphin and sting ray and eel to seahorses. "Cage Free" means usually "a de-beaked, de-clawed chicken confined in a non-cage enclosure no larger than the cages caged chickens get, and only access to fresh air need be provided- as in if a chicken can see sky through a window at the end of a giant factory, and you open that window and let the chicken out of its enclosure at the same time but do not let the chicken go out that window, it is cage free or "free range". So basically the terms are cop outs that allow people to think they are doing good, and to help corporations con us again and shut us up so more of us won't join PETA which apparently is the most terrifying word these scumbags who run the various giant exploitive corporations of the world can hear because they are considered insane enough to do anything- you know like throw blood in the face of men who order their illegal immigrant workers to torture the animals regularly so they will be easier to control.

Which brings me back to my original theme about peasants. Peasants ate chicken and pork, but because pigs and chickens don't grown on trees, they ate them sparingly for special occassions, as a treat, and with reverence. Which is something we should all probably go back to. Americans have way too much everything and I hate that about America, but what I hate most of all is our relationship to food. I hate that my baby boomer parents think, having never gone more than 4 hours without a snack in their easy spoiled indolent wasted adventureless lives on suburban couches watching HGTV and other mild cable programs and baseball games, will argue with vehemently that I need to eat every 4 hours even while hiking or else I will starve myself. I hate that there has to be some huge cut of meat at every meal and that potatoes with a glass of milk is seen as eyebrow-raising we need to invite this poor practically homeless essentially third world boy over for dinner and fatten him up stuff to most people. I hate that Americans claim they care more for animal rights than cheap meat and then buy their garbage half rotted hormone dripping meat at Walmart and rant to each other at work about how Walmart has been raising their prices lately and was just trying to offer low prices to hook everyone and put everyone else out of business (um Rockefeller? 1900 through 1920- every business. TR and the trust-busting: "great now that damn cowboy is the president. God help us all" as said by the tyrant kingpin who pushed him into the vice presidency to make him disappear: why do we even have schools?). I hate the softness of a people who can satisfy every whim, I hate instant gratification, and I hate that there are no frontiers or deep forests left for me to disappear inside where I can knit my own clothes and brew my own October ale and dandelion and strawberry cordial and that pesticides are so pervasive that I cannot pick dandelions and make dandelion tea at home without fear of you know dying, and I hate fast food and that even when I began paying extra money for cruelty-free or at least less cruel eggs, I was being conned yet again and that there seems no way to not be implicit in animal torture and exploitation and engineering short of going vegan. Which I do not want to do. I'm hungry enough all the time as it is. And don't send me food vouchers, and if you think its a bad thing and not a strength to be able to go three days without a real meal ask Camila how much ground I could cover in that time if I had to. That's strength baby. That's why I don't eat sometimes and why I take almost no food or water on hikes and camping trips and why in my argument with people about how that time I was out of money and I just didn't eat for a few weeks and I saw it as a good life experience and they saw it as crazy macho stuff and a time when I should have gone calling home to Momma who I haven't called in eight years for help even though I hate the kind of people who go off to be independent and then come calling when they need something and the kind of bankers who demand to be left alone by big government and then demand they be bailed out (not that that would ever happen) when they screw up and could never be that kind of person, I was right, not everyone else. Because the peasants have a power too. Don't you just wanna plow through some blue and red herb roasted potatoes now with a tall glass of Double Wheat Bock and then go to bed? I bet you do.

OMG I LOVE CHEESE

2010-08-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

Andrew and Camila are reunited again!

After a fabulous, hula-hoop-filled visit to the Salt Lake City farmers market, we picked up fresh fruits and veggie and started working on dinner... which is:

- Corn on the cob dressed with butter, salt, lime juice and a hint of chile powder
- Beans, carrots, brown rice and a variety of grains - the tastiest, healthiest whole protein around!
- Deep-fried zucchini and eggplant
- Home-baked bread and crackers
- 8 kinds of cheese
- Fresh fruit punch (fresh-squeezed cantaloupe, peach, apple and pineapple juice mixed with sparkling water)
- Chocolate-tofu pie with raspberries.

LIFE IS WONDERFUL

A Mailbag?! I'll believe it when I see it

2010-06-02T22:38:00.004-07:00

Zombie Andrew is back from the dead to answer real foodie questions from real foodie fans.

Have you ever noticed the direct correlation between new "Sports Guy's Mailbags" on ESPN.com and your own mailblogs? -Shane, as in the guy from the movie "Shane" needlessly refilmed almost scene for scene by Clint Eastwood with the same camera angles and everything and which helped to set a lot of the Western standards

Yes. Yes I have. Let's just say his bags inspire me. Feed a good comedian material and great things can happen. You can also accomplish this with me at any party by feeding me names of people to psycho-ansultisize (not as good as Tobias's anal-rapy: as in I'm an a-nal-ra-pist, it means analyst and therapist- you should watch "Arrested Development" don't make me beg like everyone else, just give it a try, its cancelled and on DVD, doesn't that sound easy?) Or by feeding me words at a party, any words, like "love", "clover", "pteradactyl", "ho-down-erate" after shouting a general theme (Proustian contemplative- is that general?) and style (Poe-drunk- as in my wife is dead maybe I should drink some more and write some rhymes about her being green underground and decomposing and how lovely she was and then cry myself to sleep) and seeing what kind of spur of the moment poem you get. I think this if fun with any poet ps. So grab any one you know and try it. And it would of course be a silly gimmic to make up fake questions, so I am dependent on my fans to give me a lot of good hooks to jump on. Moving on.

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing, I mean really? Can one put too much flavor into a meal is why I ask. I've been told my food tastes like too many things. Also that my **** is too ****. I mean I'm like, "Come on!"
-Gob Bluth, "Bluthton" CA

I think flavors can conflict and there is no easy way to address that here. It is largely trial and error although a lot of cookbooks will tell you not to mix say this spice with that. I honestly cannot think of anything right now that is a surefire bad combo. Like modern classical music, and 24-7 news channels, cooking is always trying to push things farther, to break new ground. With so many people in the world, and so much information out there, to do this anymore, you have to do crazy things sometimes. Like atonal symphonies (ergh), lead stories that haven't happened yet (still no change in the status of gun laws/ war might break out any day now in Iran), or combine ingredients you wouldn't think belong together. The only alternative is to accept that maybe we don't need new things constantly. That maybe its okay to just make a classic pizza. You could try a new audience. I find myself constantly surrounded by "that's not how mom made its", a special class of picky eater who can't remember what mom made or how she made it and so cannot offer suggestions on what they want to eat or how you should cook some vague "genre" of dinner, like "meat-loaf" (only about what 50 ways to make that and all of them disgusting except for 2 or so- even the name sounds like a bad idea and yet I like both of those things in their natural forms. Some combos really are bad I guess, are way less than the sum of their parts to reverse an old addage, like Three Stooges (good) and novel (good) give one Three Stooges-novel (very bad). ), but when you are finished and they take one bite, they scrunch up their face and don't even have to say, mom never made this, and so, they just malaisically flick it around their plate and go hungry no matter how good it is. I'm not going to name names like Teresa though. I also have a problem I find, with burned tongues. Sugar, and especially corn syrups and sugar substitutes act like super-sweets- they trigger an ungodly and unknown to nature number of the sweet tastebuds on the tongue, so that nothing else tastes sweet. Fruit even twenty years ago was a dessert. Now it tastes bitter to too many kids. Without most modern treats, it would still be a pleasure and the problem would be kids eating too much rather than too little. Remember, fruit is good for you, but only the parts that aren't pure sugar, which is a small part. Salt has a worse effect. You know the types who salt everything and keep killing their tastebuds, so they just add ever more pepper and salt year by year until you might as well serve them a fried slab of garbage because how would they know that from gourmet delicacies? Yet try and serve one of these (usually) men a bean pattie and they will suddenly see a new light in the gun control issue and weep with rage that they were never wise enough to buy a box of armour-piercing cyanide tip elephant mini-V2 rocket brand bullets to kill you with slowly over several days, not that this has happened with me. I mean they can't taste the thing anyway so they must fear the estrogen-stimulating effect of soybeans, but looking at them, you wouldn't expect them to know that one's body will spike in estrogen 12 hours after eating soybeans in large amount (as in not a single meal, but getting all your protein from soy), which is actually more of a problem for women as high estrogen causes increased cancer risks and can lead to moodiness, no offense. We're off subject. Oh yes, so I find these people also do not like flavors- the subtle undertones and background wafting gentle spicings and anise seed pockets go right over their head, or over their barren charred tongue, and yet, they will take offense to say rye flour instead of bland white flour as they can actually notice it and this offends their routine, and well, theologically wrong, lifestyle choice of tasting only salt and pepper. And black pepper only, not even white or red or green. So yes I do have people with no culinary sense feel that my food is both bland and affronting when it is really layered and deep, and if this sounds like sour grapes, I acknowledge that but have to refute it because I've seen the people and eating habits of those I am stuck serving food to and I have served food to people who make everything from scratch and know where the fresh produce section is at the store and they have the same opinion of my cooking as others. I mean its pretty good. Usually.

But just tonight, I myself might have put too much of a good thing into a pizza. My crust was the specific culprit. I made a perfect light, whole grain crust out of kamut (an egyptian wheat with extra vitamins and a husky moist flavor), spelt (a duram with extra protein and vitamins and like a pasta in the way a sweet potato relates to an Idaho potato), and millet (mmm a good substitute for bleached flour in its behavior and color, but very healthy). This was a good crust, but I found it overpowering the top of the pizza. I mean when I could taste cheese, sundried tomato, shredded chicken, or spinach it seemed out of place, not necessarily in conflict, but like my tongue could not handle so much flavor. This is possibly a sign that when making a style of food like pizza which already includes every foodgroup that the reason boring bland white as possible flavorless crusts have developed and taken hold is that you just need a platform for all the vegetables and sauce on top already, that you need to showcase them and to have something to hold onto, not more flavor. I mean a basketball team needs a Micheal Jordan to win, but a team of Micheal Jordans would lack the glue guys willing to be berated and bullied in the huddle by the Micheal Jordan, would never have ball movement or floor spacing because each one would be capable and would need to show they were capable of scoring the most points and taking the last shot. Maybe the crust of a pizza can't be the star and that's why its on bottom. However, as I munched and speculated this alternately thinking mmm this crust is perfect and why can't I taste my feta and mozzerella cheeses, I then mused that perhaps the reason this crust seemed to be too aromatic and complex and deep for a pizza and not as a stand alone bread or in a lightly seasoned batch of crackers is that I am used to boring white as possible crusts and my brain was now having to focus more, to commit more cells to the processing and appreciation of this pizza crust, the way the first bolt of lightning makes a baby practically crap itself and jump through the roof of a car but every bolt after that is just a little flash. I think we have to presume that there is an evolutionary, biologic logic to tasting new flavors and foodstuffs more vibrantly. Taste is, perhaps, this is sad to break it down in such a way, merely a holdover, it is not meant to add to life but to allow it. We explore and push the bounds of taste and the Chinese classify it into the five flavors and build a philosophy of life and marriage around it, but really, taste physiologically at its most basic allows us to scratch a leaf in a forest, then to touch it to our tongue, and without ingesting or breaking down potentially deadly toxins and compounds, to decide if this is food, roughage, or a way to painfully curl up and vomit for two weeks before choking to death with an asphyxiated throat completely stripped of lubricant. Once you get past the idea that brocolli is not poisonous even though it is bitter, tasting brocolli is uneccessary, and the brain no longer needs to make it a primary task. Now I find it interesting by the way that children only socially learn to eat brocolli (one of the most bitter and poison-resembling foods in the world not poisonous) as a social thing. If mommie eats it, they figure that two minutes later they can eat it too. But it is supposedly in almost all humans an acquired taste, which is why it remains the primo example of what kids do not want to eat. It is also much more offensive the younger you are, as more tastebuds commit to every tasting (similar to the way rattle snakes have to learn not to inject all their venom in every bite. It isn't instinct to plan on a second predator, a second hand reaching in, its more satisfying to fire all your bullets and damn tomorrow's high noon; thus baby rattle snakes are deadlier, also (and yes we are already hopelessly lost in asides (have you ever heard that the difference in writers is in their asides- in their breaks from common language and ordered step by step linear story telling and thought patterns, that if editors had their way and removed all asides, fiction would be text book (we already know text books are fiction)), but do you know rattle snakes do not rattle much anymore, that as their primary predator became man as he moved West, those which rattled and made their I'm a bad man call were easily picked off and turned into boots while the quiet shy cowardly types survived and hid in fields for another day of attacking toddlers and making a bad name for themselves; so if step near a snake and it isn't rattling, it is probably a rattler, if you hear a rattle, it is probably a squirrel- these little guys have learned to protect their acorns by pretending to be rattle snakes as this makes other squirrels run as well as people, it made me jump a few times in the mountains but now I can tell a squirrel from a well not a rattle snake because I've never actually had a snake rattle at me but anyway moral is silent snakes with rattles are only possibly the pretender mock kind anymore and might be real so don't try to pet the mock rattler to show it you know its a phony trying to pass itself off for a bad mofo- yes I go through 3 nonfiction audio books a week at my dull data entry job that grants me headphones and I am aquiring a staggering amount of knowledge and have no one to share it with). How sad I then became to realize that the first time you eat something exquisite, like Eggplant Domonoske, by yours truly, is the only time you will really be able to commit yourself to it fully, the only time you will be on high alert and in a kind of internal red alert fight or flight status that is a kind of protective mega tasting. This could explain why my own recipes no longer thrill me. I made my wonderful pea soup and it was still wonderful but I couldn't really excite myself with it after the first few mouthfuls. Sad no, perhaps my poetic line "its more fun falling in love, than being in love" really is true. Now this is just a theory and I would have to make this wonderful crust several more times to compare it with other pizza toppings and with the same toppings over time, to see if once the toppings and new grains in the crust have been assimilated into my "okay" to largly ignore file of food substances, if they would be in better balance and the pizza would then find a holistic interconnectedness and grace. You see these are the very kinds of stimulating thought missed by people who burn their tongues off with processed salty high-cal snacks. Perhaps I should go back to university life to explore this taste theory, but would it be the kind of thing I would feel proud to be the one to document? And I was already semi-thinking of going back to write a marvellous paper on how Marxism can be looked at as a new religion in the mode of Jesus' sermon the mount; a new way of attempting to move beyond what Nietsche identified as the will to power, or societies of herds, into a true communal mentality, where we would evolve (wrapping in Darwin now) beyond survival of the fittest and the need to show off and (well a deer can't try to be an average deer or it will get eaten or starve, it has to try to be a kick ass top of the charts deer and every deer is doing the same so that the herd is just an admission that not all can be best and yet in a society all these herd animals are trying to pretend they are for the team when really the mindset is more well I can hide in numbers and pick my spots and try to dwarf all these guys (this is a bit of an interpretive dance version of the Nietsche I admit but not as bad a paraphrase as the Nazi policies which derived themselves badly from the original formula)), Marxism then is the next stage where people really would see themselves as one cell of the human species, would have evolved past the idea of survival, the first-person relation to reality and would be willing to sacrifice themself for the good of many, a state of biologic and philosophic altruism. Perhaps it would be a dumb paper and I should do the tastebud thing.

Oh man I get angry all the time, and dare I say, I like it? Why is that?
-Micheal Cerra, Hollywood

Hmm I must admit I like being angry too. There are more magnitudes to anger than happiness if you know how to experience them. No one at work seems to understand this. But I think as a man, getting angry is like going Incredible Hulk, or eating one of those power balls in Pacman then eating those ghosts who are chasing you. Pac-MAN is a true title. Piss him off, he will rip an entire office apart and kick through a wall before he notices his hands hurt and sees blood everywhere. Why do you think in the old days warriors were said to "see red" or go mad with "bloodlust" ala the badger kings in the Redwall books? Its kind of fun, then of course, you feel silly afterwards. Testosterone is a strange little hormone ladies, believe me, but it also is treated a bit too much like a martinin in hand. When someone with martini in hand insults everyone in a room, people wait till the jerk leaves and say "what a mean drunk". Well maybe he or she is just mean and the drinking is an excuse to be mean and not be condemned for it, to still have a separate "nice" sober life, the way people can be sex fiends and loudmouth judgemental Republican senators at the same time, a whole congress of Batmans.

I try to play fight with the Missus a lot, but she has no empathy for my needs. I will semi-shout at her about how she did this or that and she'll get offended (but without a rise in her voice) or look like she's going to cry at the injustice of such brutery and then I have to comfort her and say no no its okay I'm not mad really we're just play fighting because my day has been boring. And then instead of asking okay what do I do now, for lack of instinct in confrontation, she just blinks a few times as if thinking well let me know when you're finished play fighting so we can talk about our boring days in boring quiet sensible tones to one another. I mean you just can't work with some people. If you get angry while cooking, it will probably ruin the food, if you believe in the holistic interconnectedness of all things and that chakra or karma or other mystic forces can enter your fried zucchini slices.

I'm attracted to a co-worker and a I have a girlfriend, can you make me feel better about this. Oh also, um what is your opinion about ah fiber. There now its food related. Also, I will not kill ye, prostitute or no. (I am filled with self loathing)
-Micheal Bluth

I can relate. I have had a 19 month fling with a coworker and have only exchanged 6 words with her in that time. "Whoops" when we almost ran into each other, and "oh excuse me, I'm sorry" when we almost ran into each other a second time. All six were hers as I was too busy having a heart attack each time to get out the practiced "red button emergency" suave words I intended to say and had rehearsed over and over just hoping for such occassions, such as "Oh no, my fault I'm sure. We really should stop meeting like this" (punctuated with light puff of casual fake laughter on one or both's part). Now I don't know how to make you feel better except to say that I really believe with the whole "a sin in the mind is as bad as a sin in the body thing" that God was trying to get across for us a need to prosecute attempted murder (Sideshow Bob's rebuttal: "attempted murder? Oh honestly what the hell is that? Do they give out Nobel Prizes for attempted chemistry?") because if we don't and just say well okay he's a bungler so we've got nothing on him, the would be killer now has practice and will probably get it right, and was not saying that if you find a co-worker irrestably attractive but resist her that you are still evil and have cheated on your life or romantic partner (I mean isn't that the whole point of life, to struggle, to learn, to make an effort and to face temptations? Theologically speaking as if were in a Christian universe), and unless you admit you have an addiction and start avoiding her with a superhuman effort ala my latest coordinated martial plan. I know exactly where she will be at any moment during my eight hour shift each night, and I am never within 50 feet of any spot of air that she might be filling at any time anymore. I even avoid supervisors who might tell me to sit in a section of the building that she likes to sit in, which takes some skill to do, as one is a not allowed to seat oneself or "avoid" supervisors. I don't even know if she is in the building usually, and yet I still try to look nice each night in case we see each other for more than one half of consequative second which we haven't in about three months now. It is helping because one does feel like a cad to be dating one person while being attracted, even superficially and usually harmlessly, to another. I spend a lot of time trying to determine where the blame lies, with me, her, or both of us. I think a good case can be made for all those options- since we are both awkward and uncomfortable around each other (me because I find her attractive and being attracted to women makes me awkward and uncomfortable, and she because I find her attractive and am so awkward and uncomfortable around her that she cannot help but feel awkward and uncomfortable around me) it is easiest to blame us both, but I would like to suggest the fault is all hers. Now I know you will say but Andrew if you didn't find her attractive then neither of you would feel awkward, but we need to stop such shallow and lazy rhetorical argument and dig deeper. I guess it really drives at where one thinks beauty lies: in the eye of the beholder (then the fault would be mine as beholder), or intrinsically as a thing unto itself (that is, is she beautiful and everyone thinks so, or should think so). Because if she is beautiful and not simply beautiful to me, than it is obviously her fault for being beautiful. If she were not attractive, I would not be attracted to her. As a runty, dyed and tattooed super-pale brunette without a lot of carriage in a Barbie way, I admit the universal argument is not on my side. Were she a busty blonde bubbly type I would have millions of men with me (what is appealing about bubbly types- I think we must turn to Sartre, who said, (for all you know since you are not well read enough to argue with me on this), that as man naturally sags, knowing of nature and gravity and aging, he seeks for that which is airy, that which uplifts. He turns his face to the sky, to gods, to heavens, and his Heavens tell him, be as little children. Jesus told man try to cling to youth, at least, that is what we have kept of a cryptic statement. Bubbly blondes (paraphrasing now), those who seem naturally optimistic and perky and happy, are a natural anti-depressant. We like them because they take our hand when we want to sob and say isn't that cloud cool, it looks like a teddy bear oh my gosh cute chipmunks! Politics are boring, let's talk about how nice it is to feel happy! They carry the team, they spritz out nice orange-cinammon scent from an industrial auto-timer box in the corner of the airport bathroom. (Okay I didn't say it was a close paraphrase) I think that's why even pessimists like bubbly types- they assume being with someone annoyingly happy all the time will make them forget to be angsty or glum and have fun a few times a week, and fun people think, if we're both fun and bubbly, everything will be twice as fun, who likes to frown and think about things or notice when the president lies or steals all the tax money that was supposed to go to the orphanage! Lets go sing to old people!

I also do not believe a single other male in the building knows she is there or has ever been there, except for her runty dark haired super-pale tattooed boyfriend, so that is strike two. However, as much as I like the romantic ideal of man searching for meaning and striving for beauty, inventing it where it is not, almost as a need, so that it simply becomes flexible, a kind of top of the bell curve ideal and small percentile, (we can only covet what we can see; in a closed environment someone must be most beautiful) I cannot accept that there are as many senses of beauty as people as this would remove from the world the single concept of Beauty with a capitol B. Not all people agree on all beauty, but as people have different tastes yet there remains a single overlying sense of taste and tasting, with basic rules (some like bitter, some like sweet, but everyone tastes bitter and sweet and nobody tastes farfinneugen), then there must be some basic rules of what makes something beautiful. If people stop appreciating nature is it no longer beautiful (don't answer that because if you even suggest it is not rhetorical anymore I might scream louder and farther than that Gulf oil spill can spread)? Does not beauty exist as a grand idea above our heads the same way sky does? Maybe bubbly blonde cheerleaders are the ocean and gothed out scrawny shy girls are mountains, both are beautiful though more people enjoy oceans. And since this co worker has "birthing" hips and an hour glass shape that defies the convention of hour glass shape, that is, takes it to new and unimaginable heights, I think it more likely I am simply drawn to her for an ancient 40,000 year instinct to procreate rather than something in her eyes or because we both decided several times to enact very similar avoidance plans on the same day (like we both one day seemed to figure out we could use this far dark corner back of the building bathroom to avoid one another and then came out of the bathrooms at the same moment with dual freaked out wait do you think I stalked you here or did you stalk me here looks on our pale night-shift faces, or how without ever discussing it we both agreed she had sections of the building she would steer her boyfriend to sitting in all the time and I would take the other opposed sections, whenever possible and divided the bathrooms and shared breaks equitably) and that this procreative urge would have been lessened by now were I a father or had I sewn wild oats in high school ala all the males I hated in high school, and also everyone knows 40,000 years is long enough to absolve me of blame. Its like insanity defense. I am not responsible for my own attractions. Isn't that the definition or at least one of the underlying tenets of "instinct?" So try avoidance, it is working for me. My basic assumption of: I can't find her attractive if I never see her again, is proving true. I would say she is on the same page with this plan and adopted it the same basic day I did, but who can say?

So if my crush is merely reactive, like man before mountain, and not generative, like Leonardo or Cezanne finally completing a painting they do not instantly despise and condemn and try to light on fire before some friend jumps in front of the lit match and takes one for history so a disgusting stupid oil man like Alger Meadow can buy it in the future, stuff it in a private gallery in his Texas mansion and keep it from the world after sinking a bunch of wells without any knowledge and just getting lucky, than it is her fault for being beautiful. But if I am drawn to her because of a lot of imagined psycho-analysis I may have done when we used to sit in the cafeteria together, by analyzing her posture while reading and the size of her steps around corners, creating a kind of imaginary dream girl cover sticker that I now see instead of the real thing, than its on me. I'm not sure where all this has gotten us, except that I do feel better having petered through that.

To take the fiber part, I have a little theory right now which I call "poop theory", I know not a great title. But it basically states that if you using toilet paper, your diet is not balanced. Seen animals in nature? The waste comes out, they move on. Anything stringy, runny or which clogs them up occurs when they eat something poisonous, plastic, or are stuck eating too much of one kind of food due to say winter conditions, but even this is rare since most animals have very narrow diets. Why do people go all the way around the board? Because we can tailor food, we have at our hands much greater power than any God could have when it comes to food. We can make things that are fully edible but not really digestible (olestra) and we eat a lot of things that should not be eaten. We also have nice clean bathrooms so no one minds being in there for a while. Insert TV sitcom with standard since Jackie Gleason Jackie Gleason type fat guy who is always coming out of bathrooms having read and folded the entire Sunday morning paper. There really shouldn't be any trickery to the process. Remember people were pooping long before toilet paper, and leaving streaks or tracks or having a scent clinging to you in nature means come and get me at your leisure T-Rex, I'm edible and I can run but not hide. Yes I know man and T-Rex never really met, not even within 50 million years but its fun to take liberties with history and science and its not like I just made a Mel Gibson-sized alteration. So it is largely due to fiber, but also to fat (too much fat in the diet tends to make things runny) and other factors (sodium can throw things off by screwing with water movement into and out of the intestines. If you have any cramping regularly try cutting sodium and I think you will feel much better.) Fruit is also a bad culprit for runs and gas, maybe more than beans. Beans cause gas because the body, not getting beans very often, doesn't bother producing a special "unzipping" protease enzyme for special tangled protein structures found only in, beans and legumes. If you eat beans regularly, the body WILL see a point in keeping up production of this enzyme in face of demand for it and the gas will go away. Fruit however is the opposite. I know someone who eats 7 pounds of it daily. Now this is being a sugar junkie. Remember how earlier we said fruit does not taste sweet if you eat candy and soda, well if you do not eat candy and soda, fruit becomes a treat, a kind of candy and soda. 7 pounds is too much. Trust me. Not only does that come out to an incredible 500 grams of sugar daily (I am tracking this person's diet for science)- the equivalent of say a 12 pack of soda daily, which ruin teeth and contribute to a possibility of late onset diabetes (fructose is not too much of a risk here though even in hugh amounts, though this might be a special case), but it produces so much gas and so fluid of a stool that this person wakes up in the middle of the night farting and practically pooping in his or her sleep. This is poop theory at work- the body is meant to run on certain things. It is not meant to run on protein powder, it is not meant to run on pistaccios and strawberries because hunter-gatherers did that, it is meant to run on a balance of grains and carbohydrates with some of everything else put in there. Agriculture has been around a long time, our bodies are adapted to the idea of living off a field of grain and a pig for a whole year. So if you think you are healthy and eating perfect, the bathroom should be in and out, and a roll of toilet paper should be lasting you a long time.

Do you think you'll ever stop eating meat entirely? What about the world on the whole?
-Anonymous, 3rd century BC

Probably only when the only meat available is people, and it still be a person to person thing in that case. But I am eating less meat (until this week when I made a 5 pound old fashioned pot roast like grandma used to make, I think), and I feel better and more at peace. I can't say I would be comfortable at a Texas style barbecue with a whole cow on a spit charring and turning and everyone drooling over it and saying oh man that is one good looking stag!! That seems cruel to me, but I could go out and shoot a deer if I had to, with the knowhow and if I could do it in a way that would not waste the meat. I think we should appreciate life and with all the grains available to us and cereals and wild rice mixes and cheese varieties, there isn't much reason to be packing away the pork. I haven't done that since high school when I had the false and common American idea that one must eat huge amounts of animal protein to upkeep muscles. When someone says that they are selling you something, namely, animal flesh or protein powders. I grow faster and leaner on a carb diet. Its what we are meant to be eating, remember. So I have been going whole weeks at a time without meat or with only a few ounces. And I do believe one can be totally healthy, and probably in this age of hormones, healthier, with cheese and eggs and milks, sustainable animal products. We could all keep a goat to mow the lawn and it would be happy and we would be happy. Veganism I am more conflicted on still. It is a noble attempt to do as little harm as possible, in an extension of the Hippocratic oath to all people in all walks of life, yet our teeth are clearly of omnivorous design so to me being Vegan but still having say, sex, and trying to argue that sex is necessary or beautiful but eating meat is a biologic habit to avoid, is a bit of a double standard. Now one can live how one likes, but don't tell me not to enjoy a cut of fish unless you are willing to have me preach the abstinence styles of Leonardo DaVinci (flexible, bend but don't break) and Isaac Newton (strict, one strike and you're out, all or nothing) to you. Vegan mothers as one nutrition professor told me and you can take this how you like should be prosecuted for child abuse as they are pretty much guaranteeing their son a life of being bullied, short stature and early immuno deficiencies from a nutrient gulf that takes years to close and never is fully recovered from (since the baby will then be fed with vegan formulas most likely), and a daughter a life of being super thin, brittle and well okay maybe a girl is better off since society expects her to try to disappear into herself and to even feel fat if she has enough skin to have to buy clothes even size zeros. Be a negative 1 girls, you will be so beautiful inside out in another dimension trust us!

So modern life, we don't need much of any meat, though societies fed on meat tend to be more aggressive, virile, strong, generally warlike and successful (I was going to say in ancient times when societies tended to be agrarian or nomadic hunter types, but thought about how many kinds of butcher shops they say there are in Germany and Austria and remembered that whole 2 World War thing). But was this due to nutrition- meat gave them something more than early natural grains which had not been fully tamed and cross-bred to enhance benefits? Or, cultural: hunters have to hunt while farmers have to sit and wait for months learning patience and meekness while their crop grows only at its own behest and in reaction to uncontrollable forces like weather? Reactive and proactive mindset? Thrust and parry? Ah the lofty questions one can get onto with food. Like this related one: mythologies generally talk of a time of giants before civilization (think most commonly of the Jews killing the giants and taking over the promised land). Now were these people giants because of a barbaric and spartan need for muscle flexing and physical labor because they had not developed the tools and tricks to make civilized life run well (they carried heavy loads instead of inventing the wheel?) or might it rather parallel the setbacks of early agriculture. Hunter-gatherers hunted and gathered because food was there for the picking. As they became too successful, they hunted and gathered everything and had to begin cultivating food, that is, to settle into agriculture. Population explosion was part of the reason- food was scarcer and with more hands reaching territoriality and tribal mindset would have kicked in. Well the early years of farming required a huge input of labor (no plows, no threshers, no know how) and trial and error, and a huge amount of time, all for a little nutrition, certainly less than they had gotten hunting and gathering. With less protein and a lot more exertion, the first farmers were shrimps compared to neolithic man (fossil records I have read assure us of this- we shrank and then slowly over 5,000 years improved and lessened the work load and figured things out and didn't really take off and restore that 5'9 average human male height until nitrogen fertilizers in the 20th century and deisel machines made it possible for most of us no longer to be on our feet all day), so perhaps when the Jews said, we killed the giants, maybe they were just clearing out a few hunter gatherers still picking berries and pecans off the trees next to the elephants, or they introduced a new culture, they instilled agriculture. And too, they began the era of improving, tinkering, of making gadgets and pottery and niceties and ever better homes and making life comfortable, directing rather than reacting to life, a dawn towards eggheadism, a world of nerd accomplishments even if we do not still sing of the nerd. So remember that Olympic hero you cheer is a primitive hallmark back to paganism and naked shivering in caves. If you were evolved, you would despise the athlete and marvel at the way new bathing suits are sculpted in a way that literally can break a world record every week if the leagues do not keep up with them. After all in Genesis, Adam and Eve are the first farmers, after they get kicked out of Eden (the paradise where food was plentiful, but in learning of good and evil, of taking of knowledge (agriculture) their punishment is pain and well, agriculture.) Another interesting point as again, farming was hard and bitter compared with hunting gathering but had become a necessity. I think mythologies probably do reflect truths and get bigger over time as they are passed down orally- I mean every town in the Gulf after Katrina had to outdo everyone else for having had the scariest most horrible experience. I was in several towns they were in direct competition with each other. So perhaps the flood was the end of the ice age. Wouldn't the waters have seen to come from everywhere and to never stop rising? This is my own theory as far as I know though the "New Science" of Giambatista Vicco is quite interesting and inspiring and runs along similar ideas though with less research since he was from the relative Dark Ages of the 1700s compared to what we have at our fingertips these days. I reccommend the book, a mere $12 from Penguin Classics.

Steve Holt! -Steve Holt, the OC, CA

Uh, Andrew "my parents should have named me Jackson so I could go by Jack (my favorite name as a small boy) or Jackson" Hodgson! Also, I love your work, and you should never stop saying your name all the time. And I love people with two last names or two first names like Jackson Hodgson. Now that would be a name. People wouldn't know what to do with it. Like when I'm typing up Change of Address Forms and people with a name like Steve Drew have filled out the card in a way that I cannot tell which is the first and which is the last even though the form very explicitly has a First name line and a Last name line. You'd be amazed how many people rush through these forms in two minutes- a form which determines if they will get their mail for the next year or not- when they could patiently and Canadienly fill it out for 4 minutes and have no problem. I mean terrible handwriting. (Did you know that for 60 percent of people 5 and S are the same thing- they count 1,2,3,4,S and write 5 at the front of the name Steve. Its amazing. And bizarre choices like turning in a change of address form but being so paranoid they refuse to provide their new address. Ummm....Also Houston, why do you have streets like Q and a half street? I would think the Q would be enough. Did you really burn through all 26 letters and then not have any ideas for where to go from there? How many streets do you have? And how few heroes? Borrow some from other places. How about Czar Nicholas the Second Street. I'm pretty sure they don't even have any named after him in Russia. One of my new favorite leaders ever, and I normally lean towards the maniacs more than the fatalists or nihilist type.

Admit it, you know now that the Catholic Church was right all along.
-Your father, LITH IL

Well I have to say the birth control thing was surprising to find out- that being of course that birth control pills interfere with a woman's internal chemistry which once directed her towards a mate (pheremonally?) with a complementary immune capacity/experience. That is, a woman while thinking she thought oh he's handsome he's nice to me, was really drawn like a magnet to him because while she had simply survived small pox and rubella he had gotten over a slight bubonic plague, kicked the crap out of a militant attempt by polio and navigated seventeen strains of flu- these things apparently (who knew) pass on to a child, so that each generation was bred more resistant to pathogens which we didn't even know were there and called demons and the wrath of god. We are locked in a bit of an arms race with pathogens after all, they adapt, we adapt. A fine book on the matter is titled Triple Helix, which suggests the old Darwin thinking of linear evolution was a fine step into understanding evolution but is too simplified. Its like phoenix as opposed to what we know now being advanced linguistics. Environment fights back. (Uh oh is that a Star Wars sequel prequel?) When a bird with a longer bill breeds and survives and is very adept at shredding a kind of plant with short spikes to protect its precious nectar, those plants with longer spikes will survive and over time the plants will have longer spikes and longer spikes and be too hard to eat unless the bird gets a longer bill again (but what if a longer bill makes the bird too front heavy and it falls over and is eaten by crabs), or figures out something else. We get stronger immune systems, viruses and bacteria become faster and more viscious. Then it starts all over. But with birth control pills, opposed so seemingly pointlessly by the old men of the Catholic Church on simple fuddy duddyist reasoning, we may have disarmed ourselves, have disrupted another of the breeding patterns that got us this far thanks to societal or pharmaceutical means and while we simultaneously use antibiotics for more and more because that makes the drug companies richer and we are sheep in that regard, we are basically gifting a health center to our opponents to beef up and improve their game enough to wipe us out the way the Spanish flu took out a World War's worth of kiddies in the early 20th century. We've given them training wheels and a push down the block and shackled our own ankles. What else might the Catholic Church be right about? Maybe they are right to be old fashioned and sticklers for tradition- haven't I myself made very strong arguments as to why governments should be as reactive as possible, be set up in a way that only near unanimous decisions change anything? The alternative is constant new legislation no one can keep up with and that isn't working well. And maybe I should have made a pheremone case in my defense of my work crush. I mean I am opposed to having a crush on her. Have been since day one. She's probably releasing pheremones that due to my clean pharmaceutical-free internal chemistry are attracting me because of some as yet unidentified breeding compatibility, which again, absolves me of any fault, unless you spin it around that since I have internal chemistry I must answer for it, as a man attracted to children can't just say oh I can't help it, because that doesn't help the children does it? (For more on this try the movie "M".) Oh well, we are breeding ourselves extinct anyway since intelligence in male children comes from the mother only, meaning that our male propensity for trophy wives is setting us back at least a generation. An intelligent rich man's only hope is that daughter he didn't want and who thanks to unequal education will not be fully stimulated and will have no societal rewards for intellect but a lot of backlash should she try to think or study, who will carry his dormant brain gene and pass it onto any of his grandsons. So George Bush the Third's coming presidency (don't laugh have you seen how we've all turned on Obama), should be at very least, a bit more like George Bush the First's (who would have ever thought that were a rainbow or a silver lining). Now a country like China or India where parents pay a small fee to the midwife to accidently smother any daughter born (its practically listed in the phonebook "I don't do daughters (wink wink)", uh that could lead to a problem beyond skewing the natural 50-50 approximate split between the genders, couldn't it? (Have you ever thought that a species with say three genders would think in philosophies without opposites? Our religion has to be good-evil, God-devil. We have two magnetic poles to our earth, and two genders. We were destined for it.)

The only other thing I have is that memory in part works by its flaws. Was this in the last post? If you remembered everything, you would effectively, remember nothing. It would take so long to peruse this vast detailed repertoire of events and experience that you would be eaten or have to pee before you could cite precedent or decide if you should open the door at night because someone is saying little pig little pig let me come in and you wouldn't remember to say not by the hair on my chinny chinny chin in time- the same way a computer that never compresses old files would fill its hard drive and slog to a crawl and not be worth typing on anymore. Those with overdeveloped memory lobes can find themselves effectively impotent, afraid to change anything or take any new step, because the potency of memory makes them feel that anything new is bad, would be trying to replace something (it isn't to these people taking a new spouse 10 years after the other died, it is like taking a new spouse while your spouse is right next to you- they still seem alive because the visions/memories are using as many or more neurons than actual sights before your eyes and so struggle for priority). I know I know stop with the audio books or else my ability to remember any more facts could make my head explode. I should have worked this memory thing in with the taste buds. That was what I kept telling myself to do.

And also I do need to say as of this moment that pineapple and mango chunks go very well in Camila's green curry served over quinoa.

Corn and Pumpkin Chowder

2010-04-22T01:41:00.003-07:00

Without any of my usual nonsense, here is a recipe.

I am going to assume everyone is as tired of my own act by now as I am. So here is a good recipe from my first ever chowder without further delay.

Add 2 cans of corn plus 2 cans water to a pot and turn on some heat. Dice 1 lb or so of blue potatoes if you can find them, or your favorite variety and add. Dice two carrots into circles and add. Throw in the guts of one half of a pie pumpkin if you have them (I had some bagged in the freezer since November for just such occassions. I don't think canned would work.) Pour in 4-6 oz of cooking sherry or red wine. Add 3 oz olive oil. Get this to a boil and keep it there for 30 minutes. While doing that, julienne one half of a red bell pepper, and shred 1 large or 2 small kale leaves. Add these along with a half can of black beans to your pot and lower to a strong simmer. For spices you will wan t: 2 tsp white pepper, 1 tsp black pepper, 2 tsp onion powder, 1 tsp garlic, 1 tsp of chef's seasoning mix (just a blend of salt and lots of other stuff). Simmer for say 90 minutes.

Lower the heat to very low simmer. Add 2 cups milk and 4-6 oz of chedder or colby cheese. Stir until blended in. Add corn starch to thicken and that is a very fine corn and pumpkin chowder- colorful, healthy, somewhat low fat and flavorful. The pumpkin disintegrates and just adds color and flavor, nothing stringy. I liked it so much I made a second batch days later.

Juicing, Iron, Sodium

2010-03-25T03:33:00.003-07:00

A new gadget, and yet another nemesis.

Cheese has turned against me. Cheese and I used to be good friends. I made sacrifices of wine and crackers to the gods of cheese, I said only good things about cheese on this blog and in other places, and I used cheese in everything. So why the sudden villainy on cheese's part? We got along, we made great sauces and soups. Now when I make "Magi" sauce, the three cheeses clump together into a disgusting rubbery ball and the milk separates out and thins and the flavor is there, but no texture, no body. Brocolli cheese soup curled into little hairy clump things with milk again separate. I asked many people what could have gone wrong and they all shrugged and looked confused. "I've never seen cheese do that," they say to me in brawny voices. "Cheese shouldn't do that." Yes I know this. This is why I forced you to stare into a deep ladle of cheese soup in the first place. "You must have pissed off the gods of Cheese," another co-worker told me ominously. Well, I don't know why. All I'm good for cooking any more is noodles, and rice and pizza. Cooking was a nice little hobby. I even thought about going to school to improve at it. Now, I just wish I had the old competence back. I fried chicken legs. They were raw inside and sopping wet and not crispy on the outside. So I baked them to try to make them edible and sanitary. They came out still raw inside. How is that even possible? Does fry coating prevent convection from passing through? I threw up my hands to microwave the chicken legs, and just kept going till they sizzled and popped and danced. Before hand, I even stabbed them repeatedly with forks to make sure heat and water could move in and out. Result: rubbery burned on the outside and mostly raw on the inside. They were not frozen when I tried cooking them. Again, this sort of thing should not be possible. Do I have altitude madness and I have forgotten how to turn a heat dial on the stove? I am now done for life with home deep frying (except zucchini, which isn't all that deep of frying), and with chicken legs- possibly chicken all together. One bite of raw chicken can do that to you. Yuck.

In brighter news, I have a juicer. This I thought would be a life changing, liberating purchase. Its not quite that. Its more like something you shouldn't pay a lot for because owning a juicer is a mixed bag. The good: juicing is easy, healthy, colorful, and will help you get fiber and get sodium out of your diet, and you virtually cannot waste produce no matter how much you buy. The bad: it creates a lot of pulp which you have to usually throw away (its not really all that desirable to freeze huge quantities of pulp to bake with like the informercials suggest: this pulp is all fiber, so you are losing most of the fiber in the vegetables by juicing, though not all), the parts are a pain to clean each time and use a lot of running water, not all vegetables juice well or at all, the skins of fruits and vegetables and husks and rinds that they say to just shove on in in the commercials and ads and right on the box and which they demonstrate doing, you actually need to remove and discard unless you want to get salmonella (as the booklet inside this same box tells me right as I open the package), and fresh juice does not keep- like at all- for more than an hour or so. Even in a refridgerater. So my grand scheme of making a big batch of vegetable juice per week and one batch of fruit juice is now making small batches when I want them and then cleaning up a lot more. That said, having a juicer is nice. Here are some good mixes discovered so far:

Apple, kiwi, celery, carrot juice. Who'd have thought?

Carrot, canteloupe, apple

Carrot, ginger, celery, apple

Mango, grape

V8: 4 roma tomatoes, 3 leaves lettuce, 2 sticks celery, 1 carrot, 1/2 bell pepper, 3 radishes, some parsley, 1/2 in block of ginger

I'm still perfecting the V8, but it came out my second try a lot like the store-bought, but without the sodium burn on your lips. Roma tomatoes do not need to be cut up as they fit down the shoot which is nice. Spinach does not juice at all- I tried. Haven't tried cabbage yet. I want to give turnips a try as I have never in my life touched one. I want to juice things I do not enjoy eating per say, like celery and carrots and radishes, rather than things I like eating on their own, like brocolli, green beans, peas, and so forth.

Bananas and avacados do not juice so to put them in anything you have to blend them and then mix.

All in all, I am in a big cooking slump and am not in the mood due to some art projects, a lot of movie watching, and several early injuries (how does one get injured three times in two hikes when an experienced, fit individual? and the hikes are not that hard?), but I can still eat healthy in part thanks to my fancy juicer, which I wish was a basic juicer since my main motivation to buy a $100 fancy juicer was that I could shove rinds and skins and everything else in and the shoot was claimed to be extra wide so I would not have to chop. Both were clearly false by the end of a single juicing. Oh well, basic ones are about $60 anyway so I'm not out that much money. And we do use it quite a lot. I am looking forward to using some of the pulp to make carrot ginger muffins and V8 wheat thins (hopefully) with some cheap locally produced millet, kamut, and spelt flat bread and cracker flours I purchased recently. Jealous? Millet goes very nicely to make a pita-like puffy whole grain pizza crust. I think rye would go good in crackers too. And my hikes were not that easy, actually- did you know the Wasatch Mountains are the statistically most avalanche-prone and avalanche-deadly mountains in the US, often causing more avalanches and deaths than every other mountain range in the country combined? I guess a lot of people are misinformed like me and think since they are only 11,000 ft tall they are wimp mountains, but that is still pretty tall and makes them a nice mess of "dry" snow (apparently this is what you want for skiing, is it like a dry martini, or dry wit laced with irony?), rapid melting, and strong warm afternoons. I was misinformed, and by misinformed I mean, I chose not to believe avalanches were dangerous (at least to me) or common here in Utah in my wimp mountains and made no effort to look into the matter. Now I guess I have to be more nervous when I go out, because I don't feel like stopping. I'll probably be fine, even though 75% or more of avalanche deaths are 20 something males in good condition who think avalanches can't touch them. They're all stupid, but nothing bad will happen to me.

Especially now that I know I was iron deficient, or possibly all the way to anemic last year. I should do much better at high altitudes on my new iron pills. I stopped taking iron vitamins and switched to "male one a days" because my professors assured me as a male I would eventually become iron toxic. However, I have nose bleeds daily, do high impact big time hiking which causes corpuscular breakage, and I do not eat very much "enriched" flour products or red meat and I go to high altitudes a lot which employs more iron into heme cells and increases turnover. So I take in little iron and go through it at a rate closer to what one would expect with women and their large menstral losses. Pans these days do not provide us with iron either (cast iron pans bleed into the food which is how people got a lot of their iron for many years), and our produce does not come straight from the ground to provide fresh minerals. So even though I knew better, I let myself get depleted and kept telling myself it couldn't be iron. Until I got so mopey and lazy I could hardly get out of floor (my bed is the floor with a blanket). Now I feel energized.

Some basics on iron: Iron is heme or non-heme. This means more or less animal or vegetable source. Animal heme iron absorbs at a higher rate. The daily value recommendations take the absorption factors into account, so don't think if the food label says 50% of the daily value, and it absorbs at 40% percent, that you need to do complex math to figure out the real amount you'll get and utilize. Oxygen in the body needs a taxi to get it around the blood. Iron forms these taxis. The more iron taxis you have, the more oxygen you can move. Athletes tend to have more taxis, as long as they get enough iron. Altitudes have thinner air with less oxygen. To compensate the body will create more red blood cell taxis if you have the iron available. Iron is stored in the liver and blood. Red blood cells live about 90 days on average so blood iron storage has quick turnover. That is, if you go to a high altitude and put more taxis into service, they don't stay there forever- only about 3 months. Liver iron only gets turnover when it goes into the blood- picture the liver as the depot. So if you consume too much iron, the liver will eventually get overrun and toxicity kicks in. This is why if men eat too much red meat or fortified cereals or vitamins, they are told to donate blood regularly. Get the taxis off the roads and more have to pull out, otherwise, traffic jams. Women lose blood during menstration and so tend to get depleted, which tends not to show up in blood tests, because your blood is not deficient until your liver runs out of iron- you always see the same number of taxis on the road until the depot can't deploy anymore to replace the ones that crash or disappear or break down. Most women get assessed with a problem after having children because a lot of iron they don't have to spare goes to the babies. So a minor shortage becomes a crisis. But quickly enough, you can take iron pills and be fine. If you are healthy otherwise, ladies, a multivitamin should be enough. If you feel depressed, male or female, you may want to try iron pills before going to a doctor for all kinds of mysterious anti-depressants that come with bad side effects. The symptoms of all stages of iron deficiency tend to be fatigue (rapid onset during exercise especially), lethargy, and a mild depression- not sadness but a kind of weariness about starting anything or getting up. You can look into it more elsewhere if desired. Men usually do not get iron deficient, though activity type and level have a lot to do with this, as I demonstrate. Some people, men and women, can have trouble absorbing iron even though they consume plenty. If this is your trouble a doctor usually prescribes larger pills. But there are tricks you can do. If you think you may be low in iron stores, cut back or get off of caffeine- tea and coffee included as these prohibit iron absorption. At the very least, do not take your multivatimin or iron pill with a swig of hot joe. That is true with many nutrients. Vitamin C is a big booster of iron absorption. An iron pill with some orange juice is a good pairing. There are several other factors which you can research easily if you want to.

I think I promised some info last time about sodium so here it is: You do not need 2000 mg per day of sodium. There really is no single right number, this one like 8 glasses of water, was just made up because food labels need to say something or people obviously cannot read them. The amount of sodium in our food is staggering and if you cann't taste the sodium, it is usually more dangerous- that is, a little salt on the suface of a cracker or a potato chip seems like a wopping amount, while breakfast cereals and sliced bread actually provide much more. You are now making that scoff face because you trust your tongue- but go look at the labels. Sodium inside food sneaks past the taste buds. When you exercise, you lose vital salts. But on a typical modern diet, you don't need to do anything to replace these. Gatorade or Pedialyte after a workout are fine, but not essential, unless you are doing major workouts. Hot conditions and sunlight make you sweat more and lose more sodium. Again, I wouldn't worry about adding more to the diet as long as you are eating. Everything has salt in it. Table salt is okay but use it sparingly. Still I believe table salt accounts for way under 10% of all dietary intake in the USA.

Basically, sodium and water are friends. They want to hold hands. When you eat sodium you get thirsty and drink more. Does this mean sodium rehydrates you as I have had argued to me? No, it makes you feel the need to hydrate, but it dehydrates you, since sodium can only pass through the skin in a porous liquid way- urine, or sweat. Either steals your body fluids too. The more sodium you eat, the more water you must drink. Most people never quite drink water, instead going with sodas which are bad for other reasons but also are not so good at rehyrdating, either because of caffeine which is a diuretic and forces water out of the body in urine, or because thanks to all that sugar they are "denser" and raise blood pressure and so forth. Sodium raises blood pressure by making your blood thicker or denser too. Picture a glass of water. Clean and clear. Add a lot of salt and stir it up, and though it is not pushing out on the glass, your veins are less sturdy than a glass and there is a slight difference made. Over the course of a lifetime, having a lot of sodium always in your veins is one more way to make your heart work harder.

So how can you avoid sodium? Well if you do your own cooking, that is a good start. You may add a bit to season your dinner, but that is nowhere near the level of preservative sodiums in frozen, canned, and box dinners. If it is not fresh, it has sodium. Doing your own baking will help too since bread will not last on shelves past a few days without that 200 mg of sodium per slice in there to make it keep. But this would be time consuming. A juicer can help. Low sodium label snacks do not make much difference over high sodium ones. If you are snacking on store bought stuff, you'll be very sodium heavy and that is that. When you cook use spices instead of salt and seasoned salt.

So is it something to stress over? Probably not, though keep sodium in mind before its a problem and it may never be one. If you have high blood pressure, then you'll want to try eating more fresh things and watching food labels. 2000 mg was picked largely because that amount is known not to be harmful. Getting half this amount would be wonderful, though probably not possible anymore unless you are vegan and doing everything from scratch- including soaking your beans overnight. That's a lot more work than most will want to do or have time for. And people have gotten pretty far with too much sodium. I think it a bit of a myth when people say oh well modern diets are too sodium rich. Its true, but incomplete. All diets have probably been too sodium rich, at least in the history of meat-eating cultures. Meat preservation used to be to salt it very heavily. Cold was not available all over. Smoking was better, but not always used. So its not potato chip companies and fat cats in Washington who are conspiring to give people high blood pressure. Your body is always a balance of in and out. There was never much problem with the out until modern times- people worked, people sweated, people had good hearts to the exent of being able to do their jobs. The trouble was with what went in. Our diets now are wonderful in providing variety, nutrients, taste and plenty of calories. Just don't sit on your butt and you'll be fine. People are better-off and do not have to do hard labor anymore. That is why blood pressure is high and we have too much salt sticking inside us.

For more on salt, there is a book I have been wanting to read for 2 years titled "Salt: A world History". I am all about books that jump around and give you great knowledge in an informative isolated way. I just have not bought the audio book yet.

Here is a book review though: "An Edible History of Humanity" by Tom Standridge. Great book which starts with the first time food was genetically engineered: 10,000 years ago when farming begain. Standridge says all food we've cultivated via enforced mutation, controlled breeding (the stupidest, blindest animals were kept alive to produce stupider, lazier, slower, blinder, more fatalist livestock that would lay there quietly while you cut its throat- picture the selective breeding of the most depressed, heaviest, teenage girls they bring out on Oprah and you've got the idea. He then moves through some military food stories, such as how Alexander the Great and Napoleon won their success by mastering the concepts of food as war and how supply lines have effected war throughout the ages. None of the chapters bog down much, and the end could inspire an epic poem. He also argues that simple solutions advocate groups offer such as everyone has to go vegan tomorrow or let's be organic only by next Tuesday are impossible and uninformed. Are we doomed in a few years? Let's hope not. The audio book is good, but the voice actor drones on a bit and emphasises the word "food" a little too annoyingly. A short read well worth your time. Dare I call it essential and lucid if you like food reading- much more so than I ever am here on these pages.

Cheers, and don't piss off the cheese gods. I'll write something again sometime I'm sure.

(Poison?) Pumpkin Soup

2010-01-28T21:42:00.003-07:00

More soup, high altitude bread, "juicing" your food.

Its been a while. I went hiking a few times up into the snow- man is that fun. Trails are easier too- less rolling of ankles on smooth snow than rocks and gravel and mud. I went up to my knees through snow at one point- a bit tiring. As for cooking, I think maybe, I have gone too far with the whole let's only cook new exotic things and bake bread without recipes by tapping into the intuition of the universe thing. Because the other day I realized its been a year since I made a beef stew. And I love beef stew. And while I can remember the urge that made me want to invent four new soups instead of sticking to my favorite stand-byes, I kind of just want to eat my potato and cheese soup again. But this week, I slaved through many steps of making pumpkin soup. I wanted to see if it would be good. I chopped, baked, pureed, boiled, and seasoned a pie pumpkin- my least favorite form of squash as of now- the thing was a rock. Possibly it was stale and possibly even poisoned. I was a little sick when I cooked the soup and ate it, and then a few hours later, got deathly cold and had to pile several feet of blankets on top of myself, then stripped them off as a fever cooked me and I poured out sweat- the worst fever I had since the one that made me delirious and think I was going to die. Teresa tried to sleep next to me so she could keep close watch but wound up on the floor for the night without any blankets because I was like a radiator- I even broke out all over in hives from my skin overheating. I probably should have been in the hospital, but you know my opinion about medical treatment. So this one was possibly bad and hopefully is not due to poisoned pumpkin soup- I will know after my next bowl of it.

The soup is decent. I thought as it was cooking that the idea was horrible, then it smelled delicious and I thought I was a genius, then it was mediocre and I shrugged. Oh well, you can't win them all, and I did invent this soup pretty much by thinking of every type of soup I could think of and then listing off fruits and vegetables not already used as the stock base of a soup. Pumpkin seemed like the best candidate. It is not as sultry or flavorful as a butternut squash soup, and is even more work. But similar. I made mine with corn, peas, pasta bowties, pearl barley, and grilled chicken. I seasoned it with brown sugar, cinammon, nutmeg and lots of chile powder. The last new soup I want to make is a corn chowder with lobster. Then I can get back to my favorites, which now include one of my newby soups, the whimsically charming Italian Semi-Formal Event.

I got a meat injector for Christmas, which is supposed to help with marinades. I'm not so sure it does, as you could just jab meat or fish with a fork a bunch first and get the same effect, but its fun to juice a cut of tilapia with cajun butter. I made some bread too, which did not rise. Either I beat it too much or not enough. Possibly the high altitude affected it. But as I told myself while munching it, you can't make bread without a recipe and without instructions and then expect it to be perfect the first time or get mad when it doesn't do what a professional baker's loaf does. Its either a process or if you can't accept that, then do a step by step instruction off the internet. Makes sense right? Speaking of beating, I recently killed at work by joking that one of my friend's sister's husband should just do the old fashioned thing after she had an affair with her ex boyfriend after he got home from the military in their laundry room while he was at work by beating her up a little and then forgetting it. Everyone actually agreed this would be a better idea than divorcing or just being bitter forever. The friend's sister since telling her husband about the divorce now feels better again with it off her conscience and has began secretly (or not so secretly I guess) talking to the ex boyfriend on the phone again after avoiding him since the laundry room thing. The moral is one I strongly believe in: never apologize. And never accept one. It just lets people wipe their hands and act like everything is square when it isn't, and this thinking they can just move on after a cheap, easy apology gives people the sense they can do more wrong, because hey, I'll just apologize after. No you need to keep the guilt inside you, festering. Now excuse me for a moment while I go tend this ulcer I have for some reason.

A lot of women at work are dieting. Several are my friends and all are making me crazy. They know I have a degree in nutrition, they know I could give them a sensible, smart, balanced diet and I even tell them it would be easy to follow and they wouldn't know they were dieting and they would slowly and steadily lose the weight and get to their goal and be able to stay there. And for that very reason, they all refuse to consult me. One lady is injecting herself with what is supposedly HCG, a hormone released during pregnanancy that spares muscle tissue and illimates hunger- according to the sleazy gray-market home HCG dealer she buys her stash from. The diet is 500 calories per day! (As I pointed out to her: starvation diets on work details of Jewish Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany were 1800 calories per day.) And when you stop losing weight for more than 3 days straight, you eat only 6 apples for the day! (You stop losing weight pretty quick when you don't eat as your body goes into panic mode that the food supply is gone and preserves its fat stores for the long haul.) These companies and gurus just make these things up arbitrarily. The rule of any successful diet is: it must be simple and hard. Simple as in: eat nothing but greens on Thursdays and your body's clock will reallign with the zodiac to astronomically shed the pounds. Hard as in: you're getting older, fatter, and your feet are a size bigger after a pregnancy (one woman bitterly sneered this to the table in general like an accusation against her new baby- and I smiled inwardly having already in my Sherlock Holmes (the NC 17 version) game where you deduce things from people by studying them closely while they walk, sit, eat, talk and from what they wear, assessed her as a foot fetishist for all the "shoe slipping and dangling" she does and because she never wears socks. This game is epically fun by the way. At work I have found an obvious whip and leather lady, a strawberries and once in a while lady, the role player and dress up woman, a "pamper me and call me Cleopatra", and the man who has to have a mirror on his ceiling so he can watch himself and play with his hair while finishing- the only trouble with it is it gets hard not to crack up as you pass these people who have no idea who you are and whom you've never talked to- and also that when you do Sherlock Holmes tricks people don't want to say anything to you for fear you'll be analyzing and solving their inner fears). Tie this simple hard diet into ancient Egyptian wisdom or claim that our ancestors (whoever they are) got 5 grams of vitamin C per day from eating fresh cabbages and raw hedgehogs- spikes first- and that just lends credibility. (Oh well if the Assirians injected HCG with porcupine quills than I guess this isn't insane.) People want diets to be hard. They think diets have to be. If they aren't suffering, they think the diet cannot be working and that they are not pushing hard enough. They think, I could be losing weight faster! And these women do not want to work with their body, to be healthy and trimmer, they want to batter it, to hold it under the water while it kicks and thrashes, to slap it in the face and make it plead around a mouth of blood. They are getting older and they do not want to. They can't punish anyone for the futility of aging and a tedious life so they take it out on their own body, then lose resolve, quit, and rebound. Ah, the circle of fat. Also they diet for a number. I had a friend who got too crazy to deal with who was beautiful at 125 pounds, but for some reason in her mind, beautiful women weighed around 105 pounds, so she starved herself and went from a curvy healthy active thing to a stringy, shapeless shell. She couldn't have been happier. She had reached her number. And one lady at work wants to weight 127 pounds. She weighed that at 19 and has convinced herself she was happy at 19. Heck 19, was the garden of Eden, even though she has lots of stories about how unhappy she was when she was younger. But again, all she can see is the number. I think its impossible to be happy chasing that kind of goal.

These ladies do not like my scientific mockery either. I offer them helpful tips. When the HCG diet lady is on a rant about how she's so hungry she could eat her own baby (I kind of made that up) or how her baby tried to shove his chopped hot dog bits in her mouth because he never sees her eat and was worried about her- I suggest that maybe instead of paying for fake injections and insulin needles that don't work she should just eat large quantities of cheap guar gum. What's guar gum? she will ask. Then I say, guar gum is an indigestible, non-toxic food byproduct that will sit like a lump of tar in your digestive track for weeks before passing out slowly as waste, effectively shrinking the size of your stomach to make it impossible for you to eat more and stopping the body's hunger pang response. Then she will look at me like I'm a devil sent to harass her off her heavenly mission of completing a month long cycle on this insane and arbitrary HCG diet which was probably written in like 30 minutes. She tells me these rules and I tell her which one are nonsense and how they even contradict. Then the devil look again. And when another lady on Nutrisystem complains that her month supply of foil-wrapped individual packed meals are too small and cardboardy and the treats like candy for example only contain 10 M and Ms, I say, why keep paying for the diet? Why not just buy a bag of regular M and Ms and only eat 10, or just push one half of whatever you put on your plate away and use a little free willpower. And she looks at me like I'm an insensitive person and she hopes a safe falls on me in Looney Tunes fashion.

These diets are stupid and expensive and ridiculous and unhealthy. Because I like to some extent these women, I have to try to make them see this. The diets work, the ladies tell me. My friend lost 100 pounds on the brocolli diet, and mine lost 50 on the Atkins. And I say, they limit something. The key isn't in their "science", its in limiting something. The something can be anything. If you cut out soda and make no other change you could lose a few pounds. It can even be something good- if you cut out yogurt and don't replace it with something else you will lose weight. Its arbitrary what you limit. Then I start inventing diets they could go on like the "rubber band" diet- if you eat something you like, you have to snap your wrist with a rubber band you wear to associate the sugary fat snack with pain. Again, evil stares. I'm working with madwomen, I tell you. This rubber band diet invention was inspired by the "spit out" diet one woman was considering- you have to spit out anything you taste if you like it, but can eat anything you don't like. Mine is much more sanitary.

Now for some brief notes on blue and purple potatoes: blue and purple potatoes contain similar nutrients and anti-oxidants as blue berries, and are probably a healthier choice, as blueberries and berries in general tend to absorb and retain quite a lot of nasty pesticides and chemicals. Blue potatoes are natural and ancient, one of 3,000 varieties native to Peru and famous to the Incas, mostly lost to the world when those flea-bitten sleaze-bag conquistadors went in and killed everyone with small pox. Consideration of the conquistador success despite being on the "home court" of the Incas (home teams in sports tend to win), which includes altitude of 12,000 feet (very hard to deal with), a supremely better diet and a hostile humid climate, led me to postulate in a poem that humanity should convince its geniuses to be slobs- since the dirtiest, stinkingest, foulest, crudest people like the spaniards tend to build up immunity to disease, while the clean Incas had no immunity thanks to a lifetime surrounded by healthy plants and rainforest flowers. Its a more clear theory in the poem. Rose potatoes, sweet potatoes, red potatoes and yukon golds are all more healthy than Idahos- keep in mind, color is usually signified by nutrients. So anything without color, is not very healthy. If you skin an Idaho potato, you are left with rubbish. That being said, the old peasant Irish diet of potatoes and whole cow's milk is very potent- they lived healthy happy lives on it for years until the potato famine, with a treat of Christmas ham or Easter pork thrown in. The English overlords meanwhile on a rye and barley and beef and chicken diet were much less healthy on the whole. It doesn't always pay to be rich. Potatoes come from Peru, and if not for the conquistadors, they could not have spread from Portugal and Spain to Italy during a war, to France, and finally the Scandinavia and Ireland areas. Potatoes were a popular crop with peasants as they grow underground and invading armies might miss them while they were pillaging your cow, all your field crops and fowls and dried vegetables. So you still have potatoes and wouldn't starve to death if they didn't rape and kill you on the way through.

And here is a note on B vitamins: B vitamins are known generally as the energy vitamins due to their role in ATP production: basically during mitochondrial respiration the B vitamins are precursors needed to get stored carbohydrate chains (glycogen) to be broken into their elements which can be reassembled into ATP. Or some such thing. They do not provide any energy in themselves. I say this because my work friends keep offering me B vitamin pills and assuring me they keep them awake all night. One went so far as to scoff at me judgingly for drinking coffee one night because she is a Mormon who only uses healthy B vitamins in "5 hour energy" drinks to keep awake. I then informed her that "5 hour energy" is a product with an active ingredient of caffeine. When she disagreed I asked her if she was using the "caffeine free" version. Then she blinked at me in self-flagulating horror as she should. The caffeine is lot listed first on the label because they don't want you to notice it. The B vitamins listed in there only work if you deficient in B vitamins, at which point your body could use them to produce more ATP from glycogen as well as metabolize any carbs in your digestive system or blood. In no way can any vitamin provide calories, or direct energy.

This brings me to my next info point which is on food labels. Read food labels as if they are a legal trick, because they are. My roomie told me snootily he only buys low sodium soup when I came home with some canned soup. So I compared the labels- his was "low sodium" because the serving size was one third of a can instead of one half a can. The two products had the same amount of sodium. Also, "unbleached wheat flour" is white flour, or more accurately, it is yellow flour. There is no such thing as white flour. People like white things and think anything white must be clean (see females in wedding dresses), so companies run chemical dyes over the flour to "purify" it. Enriched flour is actually better for you than unbleached wheat flour. The reason there is such a thing as enriched flour is that the majority of people in modern cities and the industrialized world were getting sick from eating the nutrient stripped bleached flours they so admired for being white and clean and of fine texture, free of all that grit and trash in whole flour. Improvements are not always better- so the government came in and mandated the vitamins removed by not using the whole grain to make whole wheat flour be added in artificially as "enriched flour". This is still no where near the health of whole wheat flour, which you probably knew. But did you know that 1/2 (estimated figure) of all dementia cases in those old straight-jacket padded cell style mad houses in England were due to simple B vitamin deficiencies that could have been corrected by using whole flour instead of bleached flour?

Coming up next time: a discussion on sodium in the modern diet and human history and how it relates to health. And refined sugar verses honey: its healthy as long as it comes out of a bee's butt right?

Let's See How Brief I can Be

2009-12-23T05:28:00.005-07:00

(Don't hold your breath: recipes, cookies, holidays, ducks in space, poetry on cd? Yes all this and coconut yogurt.

I am running out of cute ideas to use with my yogurt maker. I finally got around to trying coconut milk yogurt- it tastes like coconut milk, which just made me want to eat curry. So I made curry. On the whole, my least favorite yogurt so far. Buttermilk yogurt is a whole other beasty. This stuff came out sour! And it for some reason turned into curded cottage cheese. I invented sour cottage yogurt cream. After a run through the blender, it was delicious, but remained so tart behind honey or maple syrup that its like a heavily fermented beer- front of the tongue, mmm mmm good, back of the tongue, way bitter. A complex flavor I think I like. I'm still not sure though. Yogurt makers are fun. I would like to buy a juicer, but those things cost a lot. Its hard to earn back your savings as a single with wuss picky eaters in your life. If I were to offer Teresa or her family some form of wild beetroot parsley and plum juice I nutritionally designed to be perfect against the flu, they would turn their noses up and say eeewww until they knew they were safely sure to hate the thing, then sip it, hate it, and refuse to drink anymore, saying being sick isn't that bad. If you hear of me on the news for beating up my poor sweet long suffering girlfriend and think what a horrible person, just remember it was for one of three reasons: she got sick and I tried to force her to eat sprouts so she would recover, she got sick and I tried to force her to eat yogurt so she would recover, or she got sick and I forced her to drink some sort of parsley plum juice to recover. Or four, the post office made me insane to the point of needing to punch someone in the teeth, but I was so insane I didn't know whose teeth to punch. That one is equally likely after their most recent antics this December- as both employee and customer.

Recipe time: Here are two options I was happy with lately.

Dinner Design: Spaghetti Squash with Thai Marinara Sauce

Spaghetti squash intimidated me for a month, sitting there and waiting to be used. Finally, I boiled the thing after chopping it in half. Very easy, and very tastey. Sweet and flavorful, way less calories than true spaghetti- also though, less filling. But if you don't tell someone what it is, it will look enough like spaghetti they will think its only as exotic as like oat pasta or something.
I was very pleased with this marinara sauce:

Tomato paste, a clove or so of chopped garlic, few tablespoons olive oil, vermouth cooking wine, lots of whole leaves of italian parsley, and thai seasoning. At the last few minutes of simmering, add one or two fresh diced tomatoes (hot house hold together well in heat) to give a crisp extra zip. Thai seasoning may need to be approximated if you are vegetarian. The real stuff is available at World Market stores and possibly your grocery and should contain: sesame seeds, chile pepper, coriander, cilantro, basil, onion, red pepper,ground shrimp (optional), garlic, cinammon, nutmeg and lemon oil. A tangy wholly original red sauce. My best tomato project since the Maroonara.

And here is a recipe for Italian Semi-Formal Event Soup. A soup dressed up with plenty of bow tie pasta, italian parsley (I am all about Italian parsley right now), meatballs, tomatoes and vegetables, but without quite the class of Italian Wedding Soup.

Start with vegetable or chicken stock. Boil for an hour or so with carrots, bow tie pasta, pearl barley, quinoa grains (optional and uncessary as they nearly dissolve, but nutritious), celery. Simmer then with tomatoes, italian parsely, black olive, olive oil, garlic seasoning, onion powder, and seasoned salt added in. Also add your meatballs. Did you know you can make amazing meatballs with hamburger meat, italian-seasoned bread crumbs, onion powder, garlic powder, and a pinch of white pepper? Mix it all up good, then roll into balls, bake and serve or add to a soup. Use 1/3 cup bread crumbs per pound of beef. Easy. Once finished, your soup will need lots of parmesan cheese to round out the flavors. Not a meal, but a healthy low calorie starter. One I teased William with the idea of over a year ago and finally got around to.

Which is good, as my winter goals include 4 new soups (1 down), going sledding for the first time in 10 years, and 10 new forms of bread- 3 down- (gingerbread as a loaf!, blind oatmeal bread, and persimmon bread). Ginger bread as a loaf is amazing. I love the stuff. Way more hearty than cookies. Mine is called "Crackle Gingerbread". I added a decent amount of blue corn meal to hearty things up. It came out so black you'll consider your stout beer a pale ale. I used all rye and corn thus making Teresa say eeeeewww until she had convinced herself she would hate it, then take a bite of this delicious bread and say "its okay" politely while pretending to gag from grossness. Remember that talk we had earlier about punching.... Well at least her bread afficianado parents liked it. Let's see other winter goals: I'm doing very well on learning yoga. I like yoga now and that helps. I got a book with some great positions in it and they help with strength and flexibility and calm temperament. What is not to like? Also, I have to learn two songs on guitar, which is half a scheme to get Teresa to teach me something. I think she should be a good teacher but is convinced she isn't so she gets nervous when she tries and then says nnnnoooo whenever I suggest this. I should go calm down with some yoga. Oh and another one is to get into my best condition ever by mountain season- which would be going better if I didn't have such a steady burning self hatred that expresses itself in pulled muscles at the rate of one every other workout. I mean who would think a 14 mile bike ride in 30 minutes followed by an hour of weights and rock climbing and then a couple of miles in the pool with as little time to breath as possible would be hard on the body? I do try to go right to the edge of passing out to simulate high altitude oxygen dearths though. So that one is coming along.

The last one I'll mention for now is cold training. As in, getting my body ready to fall asleep half way up Mt Rainier in two years at subzero temperatures it is a two day climb). To do this, I have been walking to the grocery store through the snow at 2:30 am (the coldest possible time) without a jacket, and while fasting (most bodyheat is produced by the food you ate within hours- fat store conversion is a slower fuel and not an efficient one in say -5 ferhenheit). Apparently, one good lesson to take is that carrying cold milk in your hands on such a cold night can overwhelm your system to worry only about the core. So I almost had frostbite in my left middle finger, which would have been tragic, because I use that baby all the time. For a tight purple hour there, I couldn't bend that finger. But it all worked out. Frostbite can set in fast. T and my roomate both looked at me with incredulous disbelief that anyone could be so clueless as to walk to the store at night on at -5 or so and carry milk. They both told me it was -5 or so, as if I hadn't noticed from some poetic lack of common sense. I did not mention my cold training to them. It would only add to their worries over my growing insanity. If you want to add to their worries about my growing insanity then you tell them. What can I say, I don't have -25 so I have to maximize what I do have. I am inflating -5 to a greater intensity to simulate things. I feel its clever. Also, people are too soft in America. I even wrote a poem where Genghis Khan is in an upper middle class lady's home when she gets home from work and she starts ordering him around. So he starts trashing figurines and TVs and slashing bellies and throwing babies at walls. I mean what would Americans do in any kind of hardship?

Well this isn't very brief is it, but at least if I only write once a month, I save time that way. Now that I am in the late renaissance of my poetic mega-productive period, pumping out several poems per week, it is hard to justify putting a lot of hours into frivilous and yet entertaining, but on the whole, too easy blogging. Sure I contribute to food knowledge and the humors of the internet, but let's be honest, its less likely after I freeze to death atop Mt Rainier in two years that you'll find a volume of my collected food blogs and marinara recipes than of my collected poems. When you're dead, your poems don't even have to be good to be creditable. Although now that pop music is poetry (Bob Dylan's dangerous Nobel Prize designed to stir things up) maybe I will never contend with Avril Lavigne and the messages of 55 year old teen demi-god "Pink". So, poems, I even wrote some about food. I would post one here but there seems no way to get one to post.

Ooh a cheese review: marscapone, which is italian cream cheese is smooth, delicate, mild, and delicious with garlic herb wheat thins, and trust me, delicious is not a word I ever thought I would put near garlic herb wheat thins in my life. I only kept the box to remind me not to buy any more, as each time I looked at them I felt nauteous. Way too much garlic. Amish gorganzola is also good, and supposedly is sustainable, although I have my doubts as it comes in a plastic container with a sticker label and a seperate plastic lip inside.

So at my small poetry club we listened to Mary Oliver read her own poems on cd and I immediately went from considering her poems, shallow and dull, to deep and subtle. So I have begun making cds of my poems, including original artwork covers based on surrealist draft clashes of several of the poems. A fun little project. I haven't drawn anything in like 10 years so I am a little rusty, but my favorite cover so far incorporates my poems "Albino Alligator", "Let's Live Inside a Kiss Goodbye", and "Robespierre" (leader of the reign of terror with the guillotine). I'll let you imagine how it might look. Hint: it includes rocket packs. I discuss the poems as well as my crackpot theories such as the true moral of Cinderella being: nice girls finish last, or how loose poor girls can rise to the top. It involves a new angle on the crystal shoe as a metaphor.

I want to add finally, that I hate Christmas, in all its insidious forms, musical or commercial. I also hate missionary work, which comes up now that an incredibly arrogant clueless spoiled eighteen year old who has never washed a dish and owns forty video games is about to ship out to the Amazon to tell some "savages" how to be as happy as him by wearing a tie, chopping down a few trees to build a church and a basketball court and singing hymns in english. And that the only good thing about Christmas is gingerbread bread and cookies, in the shape of dinosaurs and hippos, preferably. Oh and did you know you can get cutesy rubber duckies in space bubbles out of those machines that take quarters at the front of some grocery stores? Not that I have an unhealthy obsession trying to add "Pirate Duck" and "Ninja Duck" to my life or anything.

I Can't Believe I Wrote the Whole Thing

2009-11-05T00:19:00.006-07:00

Everything-but-fish Soup. Business ideas. Mountains and clouds and the usual spontaneously combusting prose.

First, I have no idea why my whole posts show. I want them to just be a summary. Much cleaner look that way no? But the whole thing always sits there, hulking and in the way. Second, would you believe I'm saving money on food of all things? Honest. I haven't bought any artisan cheese since July and my hiking madness began, and I am cooking mostly pasta, rice, and Kitchen Sink soups- basically a glut of water and everything. This week I made Everything-but-fish soup, which had this time around: pasta, rice, red beans, black beans, lentils, peas, carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, olives, tomato sauce, ground beef, cooking sherry, brocolli, cauliflower, canned corn, crushed red pepper, all day everyday seasoning, seven kinds of vegetable sprouts, bay leaves, garlic, onion powder, and probably two or three other things I forget right now. So it isn't quite everything, but you will note the lack of fish. It came out good and will last all week. It also fits with Jeff, my roomate/friend, and my's scheme- he gave me carte blanche to his larder of canned everything and big bags of produce, and I use his goods and then offer him the finished soups and food. Again this works great as he doesn't like to cook, and I am nail bitingly teeth chatteringly cheap and afraid to spend money. How I suffer to spend money! Unless its on fabulous things from Switzerland like Mocha Vanilla Chocolates individually wrapped (against my policies actually) with pictures of Alps and Matterhorns on the front of them, and Wenger hiking shoes which shine themselves at night. Then I just cringe later when I get the bill.

I have decided not to one day spend all my savings on climbing Mount Everest or K2, which is good for me, since I was already mad at myself for doing so someday in the future when I hadn't even begun planning it yet. Mt Rainier in Washington has more prominence (I finally know what this means, thank you Wikipedia) than K2 and there are many mountains in the US. And my dream mountains in- wait for it- Switzerland. The Alps. I would be quite satisfied to go climb an Alp or two as my dream, non-Ghanese-Hippo-Sanctuary-related vacation overseas. Have I mentioned there is a Ghanese Hippo Sanctuary? Or was, who knows how long it will last in Africa, no offense to their chaotic continent. So I listened to an audio book about Africa and was scolded by the author as a non-African for thinking Africans tribal still. She says the continent simply contains millions of micronations, which she then defined as basically, small family units who have lived and worked together for thousands of years and think of themselves as a small unit and not a part of some Western invention of a country like Kenya and so often fall into wars, tantrums, and slaughter one another for pretty much no reason. Umm...I'll let you decide if I am a racist for using the word tribe instead of micronation. Isn't that just semantics- whatever those are? Back to food.

So tonight I made some persimmon bread. Persimmons, according to the ad Teresa read which enticed our interest, are a tangy sweet fruit which will remind you of a cross between pumpkins and plums. Now this is fairly accurate. The recipe I used treated them like a pumpkin (allspice, nutmeg, brown sugar, cinammon), yet they were tangerine colored and sized and inside are like an orange plum. The skin is an odd plastic tomato type feel. You discard it. The bread is decent and part of my Winter Goals. My Winter Goals list is an ambitious and tiring scheme to utilize the extra fifteen hours per week I have gained from hiking season being over. I will no longer be hiking fifteen hours per week and want to avoid sliding into last winter's habit of putting that time to sulking about mountains being too snowy to hike, sulking about it being cold and smelly in the stale air of my apartment, sulking about how someone I live with who will remain unnamed watches- I kid you not I used a formula to slice this person's hours per week up and found a conservative estimate to be- between 55 and 65 hours of television per week!!! and so I am trapped in my own bedroom unless I want to get sucked into watching "news" broadcasts about how I am apparently dying of a flu I didn't even know I had, watching Looney Tunes and other cartoons, and sleeping longer hours like a fat lazy bear. So I came up with many outlandish goals, including starting a home business or five and preparing for Farmer's Market season, figuring out a formula to make my oat bars veganly without butter but still tasting good to improve their marketability, writing much more and finishing some open projects, learning to cook several styles of new foods (we'll get into these hopefully as the winter unfolds), and learning to cook 10 new styles of bread (this can include pastries and cakes). Number 1 can now be checked off. Persimmon bread.

While I think of it, I want to recommend Reay Tannihall's wonderful passive voice infused book, Food in History. A treasure full of wonders, jaw dropping facts, wild speculation (prehistoric man probably enjoyed the taste of spring herbs with wild mastadon in 10641 BC when there might have been a thaw briefly on October 17 of that year for three hours and they discovered the first strawberries and an early prominently thistled basil (a bit of an exaggeration)), Roman welfare plans (Corn for Clunkers), Greek changing landscapes, vampirism, cannibalism, and too many more anectodes and interesting facts to even try to list. I love a good old fashioned, warm, fuzzy, down by the hearth, passive voice book too. Call me old fashioned or the dirty sleeze covered devil dog who deserves to be slaughtered, cloned back to life, and slaughtered again that all my english professors assured me anyone who uses passive voice even once in an essay assuredly is, but I enjoy passive voice. Not in a poem, and not all the time, but I do not feel that every sentence of a historical work needs to crackle with vibrant action verbs. I am not against the words was, is, has, or were. I believe Camila also read this book and that I read some of the same while her mother was over visiting one day at her and William's apartment in Arizona. However, I may be making this up. But the cover looks familiar. My imagination is quite potent though and I also remembered recently when discovering that Jiffy uses animal lard in their muffin mixes that: I knew this or thought to myself, "didn't I know that?", that I could then remember Camila at a time when I was serving her oatmeal bread by Jiffy mmming profusely, asking for the box, hmming curtly, telling me that there was animal lard and so this was not vegetarian, then shrugging and not holding it against me (thanks for that pal, and for the time I made apple brandy tofu which I have been craving, although I may find it not as good as when I served it to you swimming in rendered duck fat because I baked it on the same tray as the duck breasts (whoops and again, sorry)), and proceeding to rebury her face in the delicious oatmeal bread. Though again, I might have made all this up. I can picture it all quite vividly though, including my many many beer bottles which I miss and know that scoundrel Gabe is claiming as his own down in Arizona right now, you know, if he's alive, and not dead in his room and nobody noticing because his huge piles of trash already reeked and were attracting fruit flies- the same piles of trash he would then miss if you went in to clean them out while he was away or passed out- only to go storming up to a female roomate with a bare knife to her throat and wild-eyed threatening death to her if she ever went into his room again- and me all the while wanting to go pick a knife fight with him by saying I did it but I had just finished the whole bottle of brandy and then sucked the brandy and apple marinade dry from the plastic bag in desperation because there was no more liquor in the house- not that ever happened and I digress.

But I do wonder these days if I was an alcoholic while in college. Yes I did once give a speech while drunk and fell asleep multiple times in class from drinking and I will even admit that I drank vodka mixed with orange juice during my early morning classes, and that all of the alcoholics I lived with were quite insistent to me when I was awake briefly between benders on my way to the bathroom or the liquor store or to work amongst the rafters of some Habitat construction project twelve feet above concrete that I was an alcoholic, but you can't trust the judgement of alcoholics, so I disagreed. But in looking back, maybe I was. I have been joking that I simply replaced repetitive swallowing with repetitive steps up rocky mountains, and really, I am not sure which is healthier. I look a lot better now and am apparently on the Man Candy or Eye Candy or some such list at work, which feels nice to be on. (I am one of nine members. Apparently this is why I now sit with a table of all women who invited me over, and would you believe I never noticed there were no men in the group except me until the other day when Man Candy or Eye Candy lists came up for the first time and one girl apologized for such talk and said they couldn't include me since I was a friend now and the other girl then shyly and blushingly admitted I was on the list and that was why they had begun talking to me and then didn't show up for work the next night for me to tease her with the rest of them.) And I am happier although that might be because of a better job and living near my girlfriend and having a better living situation and not the large quantities of empty brandy and beer bottles to trip over. But my several injuries this year question whether long term liver damage is more hazardous than muscle strains and boulder crushings and broken feet. As to that Man Candy or Eye Candy list, maybe Teresa is correct and I am wrong in our ever evolving circular debate. T's position is that women talk to me because I am attractive and desirable. I counter it is because I am there and they are bored. T says she should get jealous and worry about other women wanting me, I remind her I have lived my entire life on two basic premises: I am hideously ugly, and nobody likes me: and that it is too late to bother changing now. Probably she is right. Sometimes I look at photos and think before my inner mechanics begin turning, wow I look good. Then I correct this with something like, no I am hideously ugly, I cannot look good. This really all began at age 7 when I went from being an adorable baby to an awkward child. At six I was a lady killer, and would walk into large groups of girls, or women and announce while holding out some story book, I can't read yet, who wants to read me this story? They would then slap at each other and eventually agree all to read me the story book in turns by surrounding me. I remember this distinctly. My brother hated it, he being the age of these girls often. Then at seven, my teeth became horribly yellow and wide apart and my hair frizzed, my freckles went rabid, then acne mixed in at some point, I had gangly and clumsy feet, was stick thin, with a pot belly, terribly pale, and was despised so much by all females in my classes for liking Star Trek, being too smart, and an affront to the concept of vision, that I hid in dark corners moving as little as possible and never opening my mouth. After six years of braces, lots of testosterone, gaining eighty pounds, mixing Hobbits and space ships with mountain climbing, old movies, six packs of abs, learning how to cook, and becoming all around somewhat interesting, perhaps I and the girls in my classes should have agreed I was not completely undesirable? But by then it was habit and I was halfway through college before any of us noticed and its too hard to change at some point. So even though there has been mounting evidence I am not hideously ugly and that everyone does not hate me, I tend to push this evidence away as it does not compute with those established premises. So I food blog and write poems and have only asked out I think two and one half women and half proposed marriage to one (the half is a half asking out not a half woman- half women being something I tend to avoid)- all without a single yes if you would believe that and only one possible yes (this being T who responded to my epically casual and cool pick up line "if you didn't live 2000 miles away I would probably ask you out" with "if I didn't live 2000 miles away I would probably say yes"). And am now on Man Candy or Eye Candy or whatever they are lists, although I checked the mirror several times since, and still just don't see it.

Now in a way not likely to lead to me rebecoming (possibly) an alcoholic (although as I proved by stopping I could stop whenever I wanted (have I mentioned only three beers since July and only swigging whiskey when I start to feel sick- nature's finest medicine?)), I might begin brewing beer, despite Camila never having suggested it to me. I am reading a book on the subject and would you believe chemistry is actually good for something? I wish I had paid more attention and hadn't thrown away my home town water report listing mineral contents. Now I know I have said I would not brew home beer as one needs to make 5 gallons at a time- but I do not believe this to be true any longer. A terrible Chinese-constructed project known as "Mr Beer" is now available for under $40 and makes 2 gallons, and may be a good way to start. Also I think if I just buy raw materials, I could make as little as I wanted. It would just be days of work for not much gain, but until I can find an outlet (local bars?) for my bathtub moonshine and "Hippo Kiss" (chocolate rasberry stout) beers, I should probably not produce 60 bottles of beer. It wouldn't be so much temptation as a pressure to either lushly drink or waste a lot of edible foodstuffs starving people could have used. This is one of several fermenting ideas I have.

Another is to ferment sodas naturally and then make 4-5 interesting varieties (Winter Goals project) for sale once perfected at the farmer's markets. Another is to cook large vats of one hot item each week (4 bean buffalo chili, chedder brocolli potato and wild rice soup and so on) for sale at same markets. Also to produce calendars with the photos I get while hiking and with T (flowers of the West, Rock Stars (high altitude rock formations), Wasatch Hiking), and children's books I will finally get around to illustrating myself (already written in poem form) and self publish although that is a risk of a thousand dollars or so and I am not sure I believe in myself or my abilities enough to risk that (see above paragraph about everyone hating me). I can also sell sprouts and oat bars, and pass out fliers for my by-then established catering company, and sell my line of Evil Christmas Cards (expanding and modernizing to include Santa giving out swine flu to the naughty list) and newly spawned list of Evil Birthday Cards. I think these would sell well, to people with a sense of humor. And uptight Mormons might buy them all just to burn them so no one can have any fun. Its their way. And I'm not judging as long as the checks clear. So lots of ideas. I even have a side scheme of starting a nutrition advising service- weight loss, weight gain (for high school would-be athletes) and sport specific diets. And what if I had a company called Wasatch Hiking, which would be me, and when tourists came I would set up and guide a hike for them into the Wasatch mountains, based on their hotel location, free time, fitness level and such, and they could pick from a few lunch items and I would cook it and pack it along. I'm sure lots of travelers look up at the mountains and have no idea if trails exist or how to find them or if they are fit enough to do it. And I enjoy hiking, and cooking. But not people. So two out of three isn't bad. And for next year with my insane Mountain Club, I am hoping to lead some Packnic Hikes, where we hike to a mountain peak and then do a pot luck. As some of you know food tastes exponentially better the higher up you are. This is all part of my new plan not to plan on ever having a corporate job again since the way of the world seems like it will have to revert to local businesses and self-employment and since I hate working and most people, places, and things. And maybe it will lead to me being entrepeneurial enough and experienced enough to open a pub and restaurant and publish a culinary and artsy magazine (does anyone do the whole lets talk Joyce verses Woolf in the middle of a recipe for persimmon bread and then question a scientist and a rabbi about the pros and cons of purple potatoes and brocoflower angle yet? I'm thinking no right?) and possibly to sell art right off the walls (restaurants always have motifs and paintings then get sick of them and freshen up by changing it all- why not just sell local paintings or my own photography- come for the food, notice its a gallery halfway down your breadstick) and use the same space to a double purpose? Is this legal or a zoning issue? Probably depends on the city and zone I suppose.

Until next time.

Violetatoes

2009-10-02T03:23:00.004-07:00

Check out photos of my new favorite produce: blue or purple potatoes. I have a better name for them. Oh and a few reminders for your pumpkin adventures.

Well I wanted to do summit two more mountains and I had I figured 2 weeks until the average first snowfall. After that I would just do what my mountain club friends do and go up into canyons, and up short mountains all winter. Well winter came two weeks early and is bombing both spots I wanted to go. So to ease this pain and distract myself (and keep myself awake all night so I would be too tired to try walking through several miles of up to 12 inches of snow and guessing where the trail is all the while tomorrow), I swung into full scale winter cooking mode. (PS Do you see the size of this home grown chard leaf above? I almost saved it to cut eye holes so I could be lettuce for Halloween) I bought 2 large pumpkins, hollowed one out in about five minutes, then baked it at 450 while boiling split peas on top of the stove with some carrots and pearl onion. While doing this I listened to the classical radio station and dug out every seed in the guts. Then I put my peas, along with some blackeye peas and chickpeas into the pumpkin after pulling it from the oven, and added my usual 13 seasonings with an supplement of black pepper- lentils and peas will really only shine at their best when they have claws: so the coarser the better. This all went back in the oven. Here, I would like to make a slight suggestion: be sure to remember that pumpkins dry out as they cook and mush and burn especially on bottom and will sag and sink, so if you do not want your bottom to become ooze and the whole very heavy "bowl" to drip down onto your oven floor, use a pizza tray underneath. The thinner and lighter the better frankly because even before the soup we're talking about 5 pounds or so of food here. Also I do suggest precooking your pumpkin and don't count on anything inside it boiling or meat cooking through- so brown beef, whiten chickn and boil before. Other than that pumpkin cooking is wonderful and simple. Dinner guests will think you brilliant, and you can use almost all the pumpkin. The seeds bake easily and need only one flip at 200 degrees- up to 75 minutes- just keep checking every 15 minutes. I like them with olive oil and garlic or seasoned salt. Scrape the sides as you serve bowls of your ever improving pea soup or turkey soup or anything else, and scrape the sides of what is left to cold store them- these shavings can then later be boiled in a bit of water and mashed when very soft, mixed with butter, brown sugar and nutmeg and allspice and be served as a side dish. Every part of a pumpkin is ripe with vitamins, minerals, fiber, and protein. It is sad that one of the healthiest fruits in America is used only for a mostly silly holiday, as if Halloween had to be invented so we would have something to do with all these da---d pumpkins. Pumpkins will keep probably into December if you buy your last couple near the end of October. They will also keep your food hot- if you don't keep pulling off the lid to look inside and see if the food is still hot- for hours. And I am talking hit you in the face with scalding steam hot, not luke warm. Put the guts in your composter.

My pea soup really did improve with the violetatoes and pumpkin scrapings. It doesn't get much heartier or healthier. On the side I had thick slices of buttered oatmeal bread made in a mini loaf- William and Camila's favorite thing I cook maybe. One of mine too, although as I always tell everyone in the hopes it will create a demand for Jiffy Oatmeal Muffin mix so that I can find it at a store not called Walmart- it is just Jiffy Oatmeal Muffin mix baked in a mini loaf pan. Just add an egg and a swirl of milk. (And flaxseed or buckwheat to be healthier(did you know buckwheat is a fruit and not related to wheat at all or that wild rice is a tuber and not a rice at all?)) I put no creativity into it. And no skill.

So I baked bread, made thick delicious original soup, cooked in a pumpkin, toasted seeds, and for good measure, toaster ovened some violetatoes in my favorite manor: garlic salt and schzeshwan seasoning. Delicious. I love having a toaster oven, especially a used one which came to us free. It is especially useful for radiation free plate warming and potatoes- if you like fluffy insides and crisp skin- and who doesn't? I need to stash away many pounds of these potatoes if I can find more. I am hoarding my last one right now just in case I have to shove it into dirt and grow my own plant for the winter- which I probably will try anyway. Violetatoes are a big part of my burgeoning scheme to form a catering company on the side/ health food company. I want to do it slowly and see how things go- investing no money and seeing if I can just break even while building up some customers. It will be something to do if nothing else.

Also Eggplant Lombardi as I make it is not Eggplant Lombardi. Eggplant Lombardi entails hollowing out an eggplant, shoving ricotta cheese and spinach inside and baking it. The breaded slices layered with several cheeses and spinach and chard is my own thing. And after trying Eggplant Andrew, Eggplant Achilles, Eggplant Hodgson, and Eggplant Etcetera and Eggplant Something, I have two finalists: Eggplant Dentino and Eggplant Domonoski. My step family is Italian and named Dentino and it was invented at the Domonoski household and Domonoski sounds Italian and cool coming after eggplant. So I will keep you all posted. I know one does not generally name something after someone else (the doctor who discovered Lou Gehrig's disease must have been pissed when it became the only disease of all time not to be named after the discovering doctor), but well, I've been trying out alter egos and psedonyms all my life trying to get rid of a bit of a drab name, so I can do what I want- unless the Domonoskis uniformly object via expressed written anti-consent.

I think I will save most of my other witty thoughts for another post which may include more revelations from festival and fair season, and Fry Bread Tacos and Fry Bread Cheeseburgers- the best food of all time, at least at Julia's in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Or it may not. I will say though that everyone always snickers when I say I leave the oven door open after I turn off the heat, but this makes great sense. In winter you pay to heat the following two kinds of air: air in your oven, and air in your apartment/house. Why would you pay to heat air in your apartment/house and then let air you paid to heat in your oven go out through a pipe into the cold night? Conserving the one means you pay for less of the other. Now in my apartment tonight on a night in the low 30s, we did not run our furnace, but when my roomate Jeff went to bed at 9 pm it was 63 degrees and when he got up at 3 am it was close to 68. Again, we were not running the furnace. A house will see much less benefit, but still, it makes sense even if it doesn't show up as noticeable. I suggest you try it and stop snickering at me. Also this means we may be in store for a cheap winter. The people above us are already cranking their furnace and we are half sunk under ground, by about 3 feet on all sides. The people on the other side of my room are running their furnace too. So we may not even have to. Or only minimally. I am sure in Jan and Feb we will need to at least light the pilot. But I almost took off my sweater and wore no socks while outside it froze. And again, no furnace. So we picked a good apartment. I wish more houses were half sunk in the ground- basements don't count since they just make things colder usually by being unfinished and way open.

Oh I forgot! Teresa and I went to a fall apple and cheese tasting for free and our favorite apples are as follows: Honey Crisp- tart, but sweet, and yes crispy: a perfect potent flavor with excellent skin and body and by the way if you find them anywhere they cost about $6.61 for 4. Not that I bought four of them for that price or anything. Ozark Gold: A great golden apple with firm texture and sweet flavor, that rolls. Pink Lady: Teresa's delight is to my taste too mushy. But they will make a great pink apple sauce, which I am craving right now. Good thing it is cooking season.

Alligators and More

2009-09-22T17:53:00.003-07:00

Fall is coming. Fairs are here. Mountains become smaller.

I love a state fair. It represents the highest pinnacle of American culinary achievement. You can get anything you want to eat, shoved onto a stick, then deep fried. Peanut butter sandwhiches, twinkies, oreo cookies, cheese- alligator. Yes, I did eat alligator chunks. A crowd formed around me to ask if it tasted like chicken. Yes I said, like chicken that had been swimming its entire life in putrid bog water. It manages to be both very tough and very fatty. So I wouldn't eat it again unless I were lacking in other vittles. But I can now say I've eaten alligator. And seen two large men from Florida wrestle one for the amusement of bratty nose picking American children. And hold its jaws shut with their chin muscles so both hands are free to tie it up!

I also bought some discount kitchen stuff at the fair, as well as several miniature hippos carved from Peru and Rocky Road fudge. One item was the "Tri-pan" (as seen on TV- apparently). This was $5 and seemed like a risk free purchase. I mean I paid $6 for a sandwhich at a barbecue stand that depressed me for a week it was so lifeless and tasteless, even with sauce added. $5 isn't much. The pan is of poor quality, coming from China. It is thin, and the kind of non stick where your food sticks to it even before adding heat. However, if you use a bit of oil or butter, it is servicable. The gimmic is you can cook three seperate foods and the juices are kept apart. Photo coming in the next post, if I don't die on a mountain before posting again (fall is here I just heard a crow!). So its not an everyday thing, but I like it for breakfasts, and I think for vegetarians like Cam, it might be good, because they can cook their Williams bacon without the juice touching their say hash browns. Don't pay more than $5 for it. And set your expectations right.

Yeah fairs are great. They also had bears dance on balls to country western music. Although during this show I kept thinking how you could never get a hippo to dance on a ball to any kind of music for honey or any other food (or with a whip or by lighting the ground on fire). The hippo would just blink at its trainer and then yawn and go to sleep, or if it wanted the food, bite the trainer in half and eat the food, and maybe the trainer if it was still hungry. That's why hippos are the best animal ever. Lazy and mean. Just like me.

I have been a bit lazy with my cooking the past few weeks, trying to catch up on my mountain hiking after losing much of the summer with that broken foot. Teresa made fun of me for not hiking on it anyway. I can't win. Well her point was I never let broken bones stop me before so why change now? I am almost caught up. A few more mountains and I will be stopped until next May and my ice axe climbing class. The last creative thing I made was a plum pudding cheese cake as pictured above. It was a good combo and achieved my difficult goal of making a cheesecake that I seem to have invented myself. I still eat decent. Though I did actually resort to making hamburger helper on a particularly exhausted day (the proof is above). The thing with mountains is at this point, I never return to feeling rested. I stop hurting but there is like an attritive tiredness so that even though I go up the mountains much easier and now am beginning to scoff at those not 11,000 ft or higher (we're approximately two years away from me doing the inevitable and cliche hike up K2 or Everest with my life savings), I am walking around work every night as if there were a backpack of bricks on my shoulders and people keep asking me if I sleep. Yes actually about eight hours a day- ten last week while my swollen leg was still blue and sucked out all my energy and took all the nutrients I put in myself to try healing, but I feel like I don't. Hamburger helper was good actually. It was the Stauffer's brand which is cheaper and has a less synthesized glue flavor- and I cut up some tomato (speaking of which check out the cool zebra watermelon tomatoes I bought above), threw in frozen peas, and added 11 kinds of vegetable spouts. So it was even a bit healthy. Sprouts I am hoping will help me stay healthy and strong all winter too- lots more fresh home grown produce than I've ever had off season. Rice A Roni isn't bad either as far as preservative filled slop food products go. It helps me after a hike because its slopping over with sodium which I need to replace and is pretty easy, and it comes with only a cardboard box and brown paper bag for the seasoning powder- no wierd plastic bag that isn't necessary inside the cardboard, and no foil-like papery bag thing.

I feel Rice A Roni has done as much to be recycleable as any company can. So they are helping me to keep my waste down. I actually don't produce much even to be recycled. I am doing good trying to buy food which comes in little or no wrappings. Of course this doesn't matter at all because everyone else is trying even harder to destroy my precious earth and sky by continuing to buy bottled water for reasons other than emergency preparation and then complain about how broke they are when there is free safe water in their tap. If it were up to me I would even get rid of the post office, newspapers, and advertisements in the mail. They are all uneccessary when we only get junk mail and credit offers, and everything can be on line. But thanks for employing me post office. Keep the checks coming.

I keep having problems eating on the go during my hikes. Something about sweating, being overheated, wheezing, and pushing at a fierce pace makes me have an upset stomach. Any suggestions? I am taking fruit now: grapes and an apple which go down easy, and oatmeal to go bars- which are now only $2.70 per box instead of the old ridiculous price of $4.00. So I guess no one was buying them. But oats are easy on the gut and for me, they make a lot more sense than mostly gross energy bars which are like $1.50 each or more and basically are the same thing with a sprinkling of soy protein powder. Frankly I don't need the extra few grams of protein anyway. I also take jerkey for the way down, which helps with protein and salt replacement and is very light. My own glorious trail mix with butterscotch, and sometimes a turkey sandwich. If you ever want an energy bar, buy Odwalla, the best tasting and best formulated bar out there. By far. I sometimes take one of these for a long hike too. And I am trying some tofu blocks which fruit and seeds and chocolate in them which are okay. I want to learn to make them on my own. But if you have an idea, I'd love to hear it.

Would you believe the first few cold nights have made me excited? I know my commute will be longer and scarier and slipperier, and hiking will be mostly over. But well, my body wants to hibernate. The thought of lounging for a whole week even seems superb. And pumpkins are here! Seasonal living really is the right way: I think electric lights and TV and all these comforts have put off our kind of biological clocks. We try doing the things we love year round and they become a drag. I haven't been inside the gym I like all summer. I am really looking forward to swimming in the warm pool, hitting the steam room, and lifting a few weights. And the indoor walking track on a day when the parking lot is purple with sparkling ice and cold snow. And for four bean buffalo chili in a pumpkin, and smoked turkey soup in a pumpkin and three pea soup in a pumpkin and roasted garlic pumpkin seeds and hot cider and shivering with a special someone under six inches of blankets while it snows lightly outside. And sledding, and resting. And baking lots of wonderful breads. Winter will be good- hiking yourself into the ground for ten weeks before the leaves change is a good trick to become open to it.

Lastly I am against the President's health care plan. First I think it is wrong to force people to have health care. I have not gone to a doctor in like 8 years, why should I have to pay monthly for the right to? Also I don't think I should pick up the slack for overwhelmed parents because I am single. I choose not to have children, if you choose to, you pay for them. I do not want to be expected to be a male role model to any brat living near me or in extended family whose father is in Iraq or have to pay for some little girl I never met to get a flu vaccine. Its not my responsibility. I think health care should be free or close to it, but until we stop paying for men to get viagra and for obese idiots who refuse to stop eating hamburgers to stay alive for a few more years on incredibly expensive stetsons, health care reform is pointless anyway. Even with reform, the system can't work when more than half of America has diabetes whether they know it or not. I am all for supporting those with weak immune systems and health problems through no fault of their own- those who have met my girlfriend know this. People who are disabled or fall on hard times should be given a good life if we can and a helping hand. But for those who smoke or drink huge amounts of soda or eat nothing but fried crap- well, I don't care if you die. Obviously, you do not either, at least you did not, until that first x-ray showing cancer or the first time your chest clenches up on you. Your troubles are your fault, and I would say no one should have to take care of you, but since as a healthy person I am in the minority, I know I will as usual be shouted down as a commie nazi psychopath completely lacking in human feeling who should probably be locked up or deported to teach me a lesson- just remember, once I'm gone that's one less person adding to the piggy bank and not taking from it. Money for these plans doesn't come from magic: it comes from the taxes of the healthy being spread out to the sickly. Now, if I have to become a Christian Scientist to prove I will not be going to any hospitals and so I have a right to not pay for health care beyond what is already taken out of my check for Medicaire, a system which continues to shortchange Teresa who eats healthy but was born with health issues, and offers expensive and useless drugs to the depressed, lazy, stupid and obese, I will. I guess. I mean since Canada is too cold and Europe wouldn't take an ex pat American anymore.

The Its Cool to Be Square Jam Session

2009-08-21T03:45:00.005-07:00

That's right- your questions answered. A two month catch up YBAC Mailbag. As always, these are real questions to Andrew from real readers. Why would I make these up, that would be a very deranged waste of a lot of my own time.

Why are pizzas round?
-Shawna: Sheboygan, IL

They don't have to be. If you watch Garfield cartoons, you know its because the first pizza chef baked them so hard that they inspired the frizbee. I made a cool square pizza the other night and will now make my own pizzas every time. Its too easy to make one to buy preservative-rich shipped from who knows where possibly due for a recall not nearly as tasty pizzas from the store. The one pictured is a simple crust with 1/4 of the flour rye, and lots of oregano and herbs de provance right in the crust. Also, you can put a bead of mustard around the edge before folding over for a more rewarding last bite of each piece. This one had mushrooms underneath- which were almost as fresh as the day I bought them two weeks after I bought them, wrapped tight in a brown paper bag in the crisper- a trick that apparently does work. And with soft mozerella beneath a crispy browned layer of parmesan. Oh and spinach.

Staying lazy? You don't hike, you don't blog, what do you do?
-Mitchel Prince: North Salt Lake, UT

I have been busy! I made my first zuccini bread batch (delicious) and need a heartier supply of zuccini as I fry them very well too. It is fairly easy, although I suggest using less than the 2 cups of sugar many recipes call for (better if you go half and half brown and white) because it just isn't necessary. A cup and a half will do it I think. I also made 2 batches of pumpkin pancakes with white chocolate chips and walnuts in them, and a new feature to my repertoire: buttermilk pancake syrup. I am even including the recipe for it. I love it with both pumpkin cakes, bars, and my coco craisin pancakes, which also have walnuts. I have never been a big maple person, although mainly I just think pancakes and crepes can do so many things, they deserve more than one sugary sticky goo to smother them in. I also now firmly believe that the wetter and oranger your pumpkin pancakes- the better. The trouble with pumpkin is you can only buy huge cans of it year round. At Thanksgiving Time this year, I am going to buy 10 single pie cans instead of these double ones, because I get pumpkinned out by the time I go through 32 oz of pumpkin in a week. Although, I do love pumpkin. This time I made the cakes really slopping over with it- and they were much better as more pumpkin than flour. Not that there is anything wrong with typical pancakes slightly flavored with pumpkin either. And pumpkin is very good for you- its absolutely slopping over with vitamins and especially lutein and Vitamin A, both of which are good for the eyes. Anything orange or red by the way is good for your eyes: carrots, tomatoes, red bell peppers. Its why a rainbow diet can be such a simple way to know you are healthy: pigments tell you what you are getting because they are created by particular compounds we need. Vitamin C makes things dark red/purple. As does lutein and Vitamin A (or orangey). That's your nutrition tip for the week.

So buttermilk syrup: 1.5 C sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 3/4 cup buttermilk (I use the buttermilk powder with 3/4 cup water), 2 tbsp corn syrup, 2 tsp baking soda, 1 whisked egg. Heat this to boiling for 7-10 minutes, then take off the heat and add 1 tsp of vanilla. If you don't like it, send it to me and I will post a picture of myself eating it.

I also have been hiking- creeks and canyons instead of mountains right now while I get strong again and wait for 99 degrees to go away- my roomate now goes out some times with me, which is great because its nice to have someone to talk to. I spent hours looking up shoes to try that might make my feet break less. I even posted a personal add for people interested in being my hiking friend on the employee board at work. That's not desperate right? Right!!!?

What could be simpler than fresh jam?
-John Miller: Logan, Utah

Finding fault with the idiotic Cash For Clunkers: or the idea that America is now completely sink or swim with the auto industry, the jumbo bank industry, and the same Can't The Government Do It For Me Mentallity- all three of which can't possibly work anymore. I no longer think America needs to eat its Barackoli and will not be printing those t-shirts with his smiling mug on the head of a big hunk of green vegetable. Why not just sink 2.1 billion into say Smart Cars, which are actually environmentally friendly, or any random industry- bean bags. i would rather support someone new and even someone pulled out of a hat than the worst run industries in the history of the modern world. With a 2.1 billion dollar give away program, I am pretty sure Smart Car could produce and sell several hundred thousand units- and create many jobs to replace those Detroit would lose. So auto workers would have to migrate- umm have you seen Detroit? I don't think they would mind once they realized the sky wasn't black everywhere. Why exactly can't anyone envision life without Ford? I once read that when bicycles became big, people stopped buying hats because they spent their free money on their bike (wasn't much flexible income in those days), and the hats blew away while on a bike, and lawmakers at the behest of hatmakers nearly passed a law requiring everyone to buy at least 2 hats per month to protect the jobs of hatmakers. However, eventually, they decided the hatmakers could learn a new skill or starve. Now that is the American way. I either need to get a cut of any future profits or I want my taxes to be withheld from bailouts. I see no reason to be slightly poorer to keep a bunch of frauds and sleezes at the top wealthy. At least give me some CEO heads on a platter and put young hungry people in charge. These guys caused the problem- since when has any American learned from a mistake? Or why not public transportation? Horses and buggies went away, so can cars. If public transportation were not terrible, I would use it. Basically this is just the bad end of Soviet communism isn't it? I support companies and never see the benefits. All for the good of the nation. If you hear about car dealers in Bountiful Utah getting fire bombed with home made lye-based incendiaries, forget we had this talk. Oh yes, and a quick other point: electricity is very cheap in bountiful with an "in-house" plant that produces enough for this town only- and I found out why it is so cheap. Instead of buying and then burning coal, they have paper and cardboard recycling bins everywhere and burn this! Isn't that clever. And Utahns who contemptuosly snear that if God wanted us to recycle he would say so through one of his living phrophets (all currently old white men who are too busy hating on gays and lesbians and Jews and so forth) are willing to recycle to save money. Now it isn't glass burning which I would prefer since few cities even try to recycle glass in Utah, but what a clever plan for a city. I am so proud to live here. Especially with a darling farmer's market once a week, at least, during summer. What was your question again?

Oh- nothing- I am ashamed I have not made home jams sooner. I made a batch of blackberry and raspberry the past two nights and am delighted with the results and process. Here are the steps: 1)Put berries in a pan and poke them with a fork or knife, 2) Put pan on low heat, 3) When you begin to see juice, add a little under a 1:1 ratio of sugar (so say 3/4 cup sugar to 1 cup berries), 4) Stir on low heat then up the heat to boiling, 5) Boil for about five minutes, stirring twice- if berries were large or firm, mash them a bit, and run a jar under hot water while you go, 6) Put berries in jar, let jar sit on counter for 30 minutes, then refridgerate. I think you will find that fresh jam is bursting with flavor much more so than storeboughts, and its fun and makes you feel smart. You can add pectin in the form of apples, any fruit with a crisp skin, or store bought pectin to make sure you get a solid gel, as berries will leave things a bit watery, but nature will make the jam thick enough to spread and stick to bread. Process should be about the same for peaches or any other fruit you want to add (peach rasperrry? Peach blueberry? Apple cranberry? Hmmmm...)

Do you think your feet might hurt because you wore those damn wrestling shoes with duct tape for 6 years?
-Various members of my family: 3 states

No, I do not actually. I think it is from walking down 10% grades and climbing 80% rock walls for miles and hours. Holding the heel of my sky blue wrestling shoes on with duct tape obviously helped, since my feet hurt more now that they are gone. Which is why I just bought some wrestling shoes- its like wearing no shoes at all, and some Wenger Swiss Army Knife shoes: they stretch with each step, and have temperature-treated grip rubber, and anti-fungal insoles and are perfectly balanced to hold up to the Alps and every kind of arch- and fulfill my need of good footwear and mantastic gadgets. Sadly none are not sky blue, but the wrestling shoes are red and yellow and look like Superman shoes and my Matterhorn hikers are sunset colored: orange, gold, and pink. I found some similar sky blue wrestling shoes to my old pair but realized it wasn't the color of them, it was the memories. I had been walking on memories. Sometimes those can be the only thing you are comfortable in, and you just have to give it time until the memories start causing you pain in your knees, back, and heels before you are ready to move on. And by the way, dear family of mine: offering me new shoes and hundred dollar bribes, and trips to Tahiti if I would only stop embaressing you by showing up in Illinois every other year for my two day hi I'm still alive wow who is this teenager and where is that baby you used to have? trips home did not speed things up. You ought to know by now I just like to egg people on until they froth at the mouth and shriek obsenities at me in grocery stores or chemistry classrooms and also should know I am more stubborn than a statue of a sleeping mule and that I loved those shoes and did not want a new pair. Also, I think things should last. I am opposed to buying new shoes all the time and new cars, and new everything. Why do we need to manufacture hundreds of cars? Leaders have so little imagination: if people keep old cars, then there will have to be more parts, and repair shops, and repair men. I'm not saying do nothing, but when you get a hole in your floor from throwing money at it until the boards cave in and your leaders decide, well if we throw enough money at the hole in one big honey-coated ball, it might clog the hole and hopefully won't make it bigger- that's just frustrating. Anyway I got six years out of those shoes and when I threw them out, I am pretty sure people in the Dominican Republic with no shoes would have even thought, you know, maybe my feet will just get hard over time and put them back in the dumpster. I am doing my part world. Ouch my feet hurt.

What are you wearing right now?
-Alexis Bladell, Hollywood

Shoes with ducktape, and an apron with a picture of Beanie and Cecil taped to it. And a bit of beet juice sadly. So right now by the way I am fermenting goat yogurt. That stuff if $6.79 at the store by the way. I paid half that for goat's milk. Now if I just had a cow and a goat I would really be self reliant. So how's about you new Number 1 Hot Celebrity Crush Who I Would Never Want To Meet Or Try Talking To Because She Is Probably Vain, Stupid, Or Otherwise Uninteresting, But Enjoy Looking At Immensely. How's the view from the top? I know you aren't wearing an Oscar for a neckless. Keep starring in movies though- now if only you had a cool internet nickname like ScarJo does. ABlad? Lexell? ADel? Nothing will top ScarJo.

I get discouraged. Do you ever cook anything that flops?
-Kristy: Cactusville, NV

This past week I cooked lamb for the first time. It came out good, but the tagine all around it (fruit-sweetened stew) was sub-par. I used too many cinammon sticks and too much tomato sauce so that my apricots got drowned out. But the lamb was delicious and I took it to a party for my poetry group and everyone thought I was brilliant and now is convinced I am a real 100% juice chef. I told them I was not and thought back longingly to the first tagine I made months ago. So yes, I often am disappointed with my food, but as I told Teresa the other night: quit complaining about your dinner, its good- hating everything you make is only cute when I do it. A good trick is to make something that nobody knows how it should taste: like a lamb tagine. When you say its a lamb tagine, most people don't know what that is so they say okay and take a little and then are impressed. They have nothing to compare it to. Mom didn't make lamb tagine every Tuesday when they were growing up. I even got several people to eat lamb thinking it was beef and that I was joking about it being lamb, and that thinking that they hated lamb. Now the know different. Just stay positive. I am trying that at work now too. It does no good to get mad at your hands and slam them into walls until they nearly break while shouting barbarically if they don't type as fast as you want: stretch them, massage them, put headphones on your fingertips at night so they can listen to Mozart (not that I do that), do fingertip pushups, practice typing. Try to think about what you do and how to improve it. Do you taste one ingredient? That's a good sign to put less in. Could it be sweeter? Maybe a sprinkle of sugar. Too dry? Cook the meat a little less, or sprinkle it with some lemon or lime juice next time. You can usually analyze anything and at least make a deduction of what went wrong (if anything) and improve every time. It leaves your hands less sore and your voice less hoarse.

Are your tortillas round yet?
-Blain: The Future

Some people obviously have an overactive sense of humor. Yes they are almost as round as store bought ones. This week I made a third batch and it went very smoothly, with slightly less muttering curses under my breath. I am good with a rolling pin now. And I melted some good cheese and then folded them around some hoisin-tamari soy Asian sticky rice. I still miss Chino Bandido. And Superstition Mountain. Other than that, Arizona can melt for all I care.

How's that cheese cake coming?
-Asuka: Osh-Kosh, Wisconsin

Shut up I'm totally going to make it soon. And then I will serve it with a delicious plum topping and hot fudge on top of a mountain while school children play delightful kazoo concertos I will write now that I am going to learn about music and composing- and you won't be invited.

How would you fix the world?
-Sarah: Vermouth, Alaska

I am glad you asked, since I so rarely take the time to speak out with my many crackpot theories about everything. My plan is an eight fold path.

Plastic Bags: I hear Oregon has banned these, which I love. What I would love more, is a very American-friendly (as in sure you can do what you want its a totally free country but...) $1 mandatory envirnmental repair fund tax per plastic bag at every store in the country. So you forget a bag and ask for one from the store for your Gatorade Easy-grip bottle of vitamized water- that's a buck added onto your 89 cent sale. You need 14 plastic bags at Walmart- $14 bucks. I am pretty sure people would bring their own bags at that point- either the same paper or plastic ones every week or expensive personalized hand woven custom hemp ones that could kick off a whole new industry since Americans love to buy things. I go rock climbing once a year I need $1000 dollars worth of gear, but no Andrew I don't want to die on the Grand Teton with you. Yuppies. Also last night a guy put bananas in a produce bag. I should have spat on him and then slapped him. They're bananas! They come wrapped! You stupid sleeze bag. When I am president of the world, anyone who puts bananas in a bag will be shot at dawn- firing squad: 8 jobs created.

Glass Powered Plants: All power plants will be converted to run on melted glass or burned paper. I know at least the paper is possible. Maybe melting glass requires heat and does not produce it- which seems likely as I type this- in which case, glass would be melted at the same plants and then reshaped and resold to companies or stores. Towns should be encouraged to construct local power plants. This would be better than Utah paving every still smooth road in the state right now because they weren't sure how to seize any of the free Government Fun Money being passed out right now other than road construction and repair grants- I never see any construction workers by the way so I guess not too many jobs were created.

Farmers Markets: There should be more of these. I see no reason why every city and town can't build a good modern green house using all the environmental control knowledge and tools we have and sell fresh produce year round with a minimal staff of gardeners to keep taxes down and help reduce emissions- sales reps could be volunteers, and community service penalized drivers. Of course grocery stores would complain, but suck it up and sell more cereal. This would also allow year round fresh local produce.

Store size limitation: Why is it legal to meddle in business in many ways but people would flip out about communism if a limit of say 50,000 square feet was put on stores. This should have been done a long time ago, but I guess no one saw Walmart coming. It snuck up on everyone with a hick Arkansas accent so no one took it seriously until too late. Some cities in Utah try to keep Walmart out- after they let one developer buy and zone a massive plot of ground for commercial use, who then sells it to Walmart. Um what did you think would happen? You can't swim in a pool with sharks and then wave them at the other guy and think it will work. Limiting store size would do a lot of good in keeping grocery stores and furniture stores and Ace hardwares from getting dwarfed and undersold by enormous warehouses- and it isn't really anything but a more grounded form of trust busting and 50,000 feet is still a pretty big store. This would also eat up free time, aiding my eighth and final fold- oh just wait till you get there.

Grass: Another thing I love about Bountiful. There is no grass requirement. There are ten houses I drive past that halve half their lawn fenced in with a cute white picket and dedicated to gardening. They then put up a sign with what they produce and what is fresh that day, and are listed on a cool website called Utah's Own which is dedicated to how to buy local. You ring the bell and some live-in grandparent or stay at home mom or kid on summer break earns their keep by helping you pick out your own produce right off the vine and then weighing and taking your cash. What a cute and wonderful idea. Seriously Bountiful is bursting with these, and some then load the back of a pick up truck, back up the sidewalk and sell from the truck bed at the weekly farmer's market. Having watched people in Illinois and Arizona spend hundreds of hours a year and immense amounts of water during drought seasons to make a vile weed-friendly, pest-rich trash herb or whatever it is like grass look good all summer, I imagine it takes little more work to keep a garden instead and make use of the land. The same yard with a single large tree or some trellissed fruit trees or grape vines could make a lot of products for sale and private use. (Trellis fruit trees are very cool- we saw some at Red Butte Gardens in Salt Lake. They grow like vines into arches over your head and still produce apples, pears, peaches, and so forth. There are also dwarf trees which never get big but produce lots of fruit.) Grass is a horrible idea. Which is why I have never taken care of it and never will. I despise it, and yet most places ban anything but useless ugly grass and have been since the horrible baby boomers took over. And there is less and less farm land so that a famine is coming, and here every private land owner is devoting their soil to grass.

Grass Root Giveaways: No more free money for failed massive industries. Why create jobs for people? Companies offer less and less and will never stop doing so now that there are too many workers in the field and the advantage is with the hirers. You want to start a business, here's some money, straight from Uncle Sam at this percent. Oh that would destroy the evil banking and credit industry? Good. Good riddance. People should create their own jobs. I don't want to work for someone else, and I don't want to have to go beg Chase Bank for money. I want Chase Bank to go to He- never mind. No more Applebees, no more cookie cutter same as in Iowa as in Montana menus. Variety, local owners. Although the same people who start their own small business then go shop at Walmart.

Culture change: Obviously this all won't work if we keep selling people on the idea they can have a huge mansion, tons of expensive toys, should not have to pick out their own produce (didn't grocery stores get started because people could pick out their own goods and make sure their cans weren't dented, their apples weren't bruised and their sugar wasn't leaking?), that we should fix every law not by rewriting it but by taping a new one over it and adding a footnote to see amendment, page 3600 volume 29, version 4, that the outdoors are expendable and icky, that its a waste of time to look out the window at birds or trees on a windy day but not to watch the Batchelor, and that the best possible thing that can happen to you is to be famous and if someone isn't watching you do something, you should probably find something else to do. Americans take pride in laziness and greed, buying on credit, grass, and other useless and stupid practices. Everything should be easy. The ideal life is to sleep and lie on a couch all day: the more minutes of free time you can sqeeze out the more we have arrived. Well I say that's crap: we must be busy. I would rather slave sixty hours for myself than loaf forty hours for you or some creep who lives in New York. Shoes with duct tape should be the fashion trend I tried to make them. Fast food should be looked down on, (no more propoganda "field trips" to McDonaldses), anyone on food stamps who has a plasma TV should be deported, recycling should be taught in schools, along with buying local etcetera. Sneer at people who don't bring their own bag to the grocery store. I'm pretty sure we can't go back. There isn't enough land anymore for everyone to have a big single family house, and we won't let this swine flu gets its feet wet and thin out the ranks.

Woman, make me a Sandwhich: There are too many people in the job market. Let's say every woman was suddenly back in the kitchen. With half as many employees, these massive corporations would have to start treating people well the way they did for the baby boomers who now say, well I did good, I didn't have a college education, I own a house and two cars and put my kids through college, America is great. I hate you baby boomers. See Generation X, the novel, for more on this subject. A fine book which helped to invent that term. Every family needs to keep one person at home. This shouldn't be legislated, but if we went back to the shame of the 1950s through 1970s every man felt to have to admit his wife worked, then maybe we could get somewhere. And with a limitation on store size, instead of the little woman going to Walmart and spending $300 in two hours and being finished and being bored the rest of the week- she'll be running around all day between kids and check out lines. It doesn't have to be the woman- that was just to get you all to froth at the mouth and shriek about me in offended riled up tones. In face, I hereby volunteer my services as house husband. I promise to keep the sheets folded and you full of cheese-cake- when I make it next month for real. Why did women ever think going into the job market would make them feel fulfilled? What about their man scuffling in every day bent over like hideous customers had ranted at them and demanded to be treated like a prince and like some jerk they work for harassed them repeatedly for not giving 110%, and them then slugging back a few beers and not talking for two hours then seeming to shake out of it for a few minutes before bed and then hearing the sigh as they wake up every morning and realize its a work day made women think, he looks so fulfilled while I am stiffled here unable to show my creativity- I need to go get a job too. We are a society of Marie Antoinettes: playing on a model farm because we don't get to work on one like all the lucky peasant girls. Poo hoo. Of course I'm no better dreaming of little agrarian Tommy Jefferson societies that could never have worked and probably can't now. But's let's try something else, can't we?

ice cream sandwiches

2009-08-12T16:34:00.003-07:00

I made ice cream sandwiches the other day; as a pastime and as a source of deliciousness, I highly recommend it.

I will confess, I was lazy and bought the ice cream (on a great sale, too) rather than making it myself because I did not feel like making ice cream. THERE I SAID IT. I am on vacation and had plenty of time, but I felt like buying it (full of all kinds of preservatives and "chocolate flavored chips" even) rather than making it myself.

Also, the freezer bowl wasn't frozen. So there's that.

Anyway, they were delicious! And quite easy...

I just made Smitten Kitchen's oreos (which I have also made as actual oreos, which were a hit among people who like oreos... which does not include me) but, of course, without the filling. I would also recommend undercooking them a bit, for extra chewiness and less crunchiness.

I filled them with mint chocolate chip ice cream -- softened, of course, by letting it sit in the fridge for a while and on the counter for a while -- squished down, wrapped in wax paper and froze 'till solid.

We then carried them in a cooler onto a river, where we ate them while floating along in tubes. Again, as a wonderful summer experience... highly recommended! I will posit that just while food is more delicious the higher up a mountain you are, ice cream is also more delicious the farther from ice cream trucks you are.

But even if you don't have a river to float down, make some ice cream cookies! they are quite delicious, AND very fun to squish together!

why I am not a vegan

2009-08-09T09:53:00.003-07:00

So, I am a vegetarian. For lots of reasons - environmental, health, moral and also, to be totally honest, because I really just don't like meat that much. It was a completely logical and natural decision for me to give up meat.

Why not just eat less meat? Why not stop eating meat, but without any fuss? Why bother to identify as a "Vegetarian?" Answer: it's easier. It's easier to not eat meat if you have made the unilateral decision not to -- easier to explain to people why you're passing over the main course. "I don't like meat" is an insult to your host. "I'm vegetarian," much more of an exonerating explanation. And it's easier to resist eating the occasional chicken salad, which at this point, might make me sick.

I understand there's a certain amount of baggage to picking up any label - for vegetarians, stereotypes about crazy evangelical types, or delusional "oh-i-couldn't-hurt-any-creature" types. If you eat meat, you really ought to check out your local farmers market to see if you can buy some chicken or beef that was raised humanely and sustainably -- that's about as evangelical as I ever get. And personally, I firmly believe that animals raised for human use should be treated decently, allowed to grow up healthy and be killed painlessly - but I wear leather. I kill flies without guilt. And I am not a vegan.

Sometimes I think I should be a vegan. Especially when you consider the sheer awfulness of commercial egg production, and the difficulty of obtaining local dairy (basically impossible to make a living with small- or medium-scale milk production these days). And I don't really like drinking milk at all, and while I enjoy the occasional poached egg, I'm not a huge fan of boiled, scrambled or sunny-side up. And I have absolutely nothing against vegans or veganism. It seems completely legitimate and reasonable to me, as long as your soymilk is B12-fortified.

But:

Life without CHEESE? life without YOGURT???

life without.... heavy cream??? and butter?

You can't see me, but I am basically swooning at the thought. Look, I completley understand those of you who say, "yeah, sure, I see why you want to be a vegetarian, but I could NEVER give up steak." Because me, I could never give up cheese, not of my own accord.

Goat cheese. Cheddar cheese. Brie. Gruyere -- oh, gruyere! Stilton, jack, creamy ricotta... what would tiramisu be without marscapone? What would pasta be without parmesan? And what, I ask you, what would pizza be without mozzerella? The horror!

Vegan cheese? That's like those people who consider carob an acceptable substitute for chocolate. Look, I'm trying, world. I want to do this right. But I am not, in my heart, an ascetic. I believe in pleasure! In flavor! In taste! I BELIEVE IN CHEESE!

And it's not just cheese. Having tart yogurt with fresh berries on a bright summer morning seems to me a valid reason to be alive. (Speaking of which, I think I need a yogurt-maker. Andrew's math is quite convincing me that it would be a good investment).

And heavy cream and butter... well, there's a bit of a paradox. Savory-food-wise, I'm all about the healthiness. It seems to go hand in hand with flavor; brown rice, wheat bread, lots of fresh vegetables, lightly-dressed salads, fruit. It's tasty, it's good for you, life is wonderful!

But when it comes to desserts... well. Don't get me wrong, fresh fruit for dessert is good, but by all that's holy, there's nothing to beat tarts, cookies, pies, chocolate, ice cream, crepes, chocolate, cakes, mousses, chocolate... and with the singular exception of sorbet, I simply cannot bake, freeze, chill or fry a great dessert without butter, cream or eggs. I'm sorry, vegans and the lactose-intolerant. Ya'll have some pretty good desserts. I've had some quite tasty vegan cupcakes. But I can't give up heavy cream and butter. I won't!

And speaking of reasons to justify human existence, I nominate ganache. In fact, I nominate ganache as one of the most incredible substances on earth. Totally delicious, wonderfully textured, the perfect filling, frosting, topping, or base -- and nothing but chocolate, heavy cream and heat. I make mine with a bowl, a measuring cup, a microwave and a fork. It is a primary reason for my joy in life

The best substitute vegans have for ganache is tofu mixed with chocolate. Which sounds tasty and all (actually, yeah, it does -- I like tofu, I really do). But. No substitute. Nowhere close.

Anyway, the whole point of this epic post was actually supposed to be how much I love cheese. It's a lot, in case you missed that. In honor of cheese, here are a couple of dinners I made this last week. Actually, I could have just put these recipes here under that title, and it would have made about the same point. Oh well.

Goat Cheese and Tomato Tart.

This is SO easy and delicious. Tarts, I have discovered in my last month of frantic tart-baking (I shall have to describe my epic tart pan quest sometime) are greatly undervalued as a food type. They are much easier than pies, and look very impressive, which is also a plus.

1 savory tart shell, unbaked (try this recipe for pate brisee)
1/2 log of goat cheese
Olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
Spices of choice (I used dried basil and oregano)
Really delicious tomatoes of choice (I had a great big yellow one and some red cherry tomatoes)
Fresh basil (I used green and purple)
Salt and pepper

Tart shells are really easy to make if you have a food processor, and pretty easy even if you don't, Make yours, and chill in the refrigerator for an hour or more to make your life easier. Of course, I just stuck mine in the freezer for 15 minutes, because how often am I thinking that far ahead?

Roll out the chilled dough between two sheets of floured wax paper. Make sure the paper isn't sticking -- sprinkle flour on the dough as necessary. When thick enough to cover your tart pan, lay the dough round over your pan, press in and trim/press off the excess dough.

Your hardest part is over. Now, take about 1/4 cup of goat cheese and soften it in the microwave. Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, the minced garlic and dried spices. Mix well and spread on the bottom of your tart crust (this will keep your tomatoes from making your crust soggy). Spread a layer sliced tomatoes on top of this. Dot generously with goat cheese. Add more tomatoes, and if you really like goat cheese -- like me! -- dot generously again. Top with some salt and pepper.

Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes, or until the crust is browned and the tomatoes look deliciously soft. Remove, top with sliced fresh basil, and serve with a salad.

Say "AHHHH I love goat cheese! I'm so glad I'm not vegan!"

Summer Vegetable Frittata

1 baby yellow squash, sliced
1 baby zucchini, sliced
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium bell pepper, diced
A few carrots, sliced (what? I can't remember how many it was!)
2 cloves garlic, minced
Olive or canola oil
5 eggs
3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
A few tablespoons of milk or cream
1/8 cup fresh parsley, chopped
Salt, pepper and any other spices your heart desires (I used a pinch of dried oregano)

Prep your veggies -- or better yet, recruit somebody else to. In a bowl or large measuring cup, beat your eggs with a fork, then mix in the cheese, milk (okay, yeah, I used heavy cream here... maybe I love the stuff for things other than desserts), parsley and spices. You should end up with at least a cup and a half of gooey, unvegan delight. I was closer to 2.

In a medium cast-iron (VERY IMPORTANT) pan over medium-high heat, saute your vegetables in a generous amount of oil. You want to make them all almost-but-not-quite done.

My advice: start with the minced garlic (it will brown away to nothing by the end, but the flavor will be wonderfully dispersed) and the carrots. Stir for a minute or two, then add the squashes. Stir for a minute or two, then add the onions and pepper. Keep stirring for another 3 minutes or so, then sample them. Nothing should be mushy, but nothing should be crunchy. Don't you love my technical terms?

Add a bit more oil, because you don't want your frittata to stick, then pour your gooey goodness into the pan. Stir until everything seems will-dispersed, then STOP STIRRING. Turn the heat down to medium, and let your frittata sit for a while. Something like 7 minutes, maybe? At any rate, it should firm up so that when you shake the pan, it seems to jiggle, not slop.

The top will still look firmly underdone. There's a solution! Put the whole thing in the oven under the broiler. Broil for a few minutes, or until the top looks nicely set up. Don't wait until it browns, though -- firm and yellow is good enough.

Remove from oven. Slice in the pan. Do try not to burn yourself in the process. Personally, I am convinced that my fingers will eventually turn into asbestos and this won't be a problem someday.

Serve to delighted nonvegans with crusty bread and a potato-feta salad! Or, you know, whatever salad you like. That's just my recommendation as a clueless cook.

Yogurt Maker

2009-08-06T22:38:00.003-07:00

You can indeed make yogurt from yogurt.

I'm not kidding you this time. I am saving $2.80 per week on yogurt now and eating a lot more of it. And 16 weeks from now I will begin eating the profits after paying off my $40 yogurt maker. Yes I bought a yogurt maker. The main reason is that I have an awful lot of hobbies: hiking in the hikeable seasons (at least in theory), writing, and cooking to name a few. With work, its hard to find time for it all and sleeping. I bake my own granola, cereal, and oat bars, bake some breads from scratch, am getting into pastries, do a lot of long slow recipes, and have a girlfriend too. I have a half-hearted scheme of starting a company called Hodge Podge Health and marketing preservative free frozen calzones (sausage, olive, and mozzerella, or the vegan ricotta with spinach), health food bars and artisan breads, natural yeast-fermented sodas and keffir sodas, custom sprout mixes, and so forth and working the Farmer Market season next year. Hey Camila want a job in Utah for three months? So, I pretty much decided that while I could boil milk and then pour it into glass jars and put the jars in a hot water bath maintained at 120 degrees for eight hours- that this is not how I want to spend my time. I have better things to do, so I bought a very cool yogurt maker I love which is super lazy. I buy a quart of any milk I want, then put the cardboard container right in the maker, plug it in, and come back like 12 or so hours later. I just save a bit of one batch of yogurt to start the next and need to switch out my starter every 15 batches or so- so three or four times a year, I need to buy yogurt. Now I can make goatmilk yogurt, soy yogurt and potentially interestingly, coconut milk yogurt. I enjoy it, though it does come out very sour if you want it as solid as store bought. That's where honey comes in, and it uses way less electricity than a single night light or probably only about as much as a microwave with a clock display left plugged in all day.

So I am now one gadget more complicated, but life is simpler than trying to do everything from scratch. Oh yeah and I bought a candy making set and once it gets cooler, I can also start making my own candies. I am forming ideas for unique centers right now. And for Christmas I can send out lots of homemade stuff. If this product sounds like a good idea to you it is called "The Miracle Yogurt Maker" by Miracle Exclusives. I bought it from a local nutrition store I like a lot because they are anti cell phones and kick people out of line until they finish their conversation and because they never pay any attention to me: I don't like high school kids asking me if I need any help- I want to stumble around on my own, and if I have a question I will come find you. They give me shopping autonomy, or ignore me- whatever its what I want.

And one last thing I hope I did not mention yet: if you have a World Market near you I recommend the made in Holland World Market label chocolate caramel spread. It is swirls of rich milk chocolate and rich golden caramel way beyond what Nutella offers. I love the stuff. Its opened up a whole new world of bread for me as a dessert.

Repeats and Festivals

2009-08-06T21:54:00.003-07:00

Hiking season collides with Festival Season and Fire Season while Andrew heats up the kitchen with some old favorites.

Hiking season has not gone very successfully. I spent a lot of my energy walking back and forth with box after box of poetry book, pan set, and hippo everything during two moves in a two month period, then had a slightly foot-cracking experience with a rock on my first mountain, then put my weight on the right foot so much for a month it started hurting. I even pulled back the reins last week and stayed home- I'm not a hold in the reins kind of guy. Some horses you have to whip and spur to get to lope at all and others are only good for rodeos because they want to kick and buck and well, I'm a rodeo horse. But I did the sensible thing and kept myself at home cooking to rest up. Now this week, I had to cancel a sunset/full moon hike due to a storm front that blocked out the sun and thus, its set, and now a practice hike to get my mountain legs back to all day shape for the big boys due to a fire in the vicinity of that hike. Yeesh. Well at least I've got other hobbies to eat up my time. Like cooking.

My friend Sarah Pfeiffer was in town and sadly, her patent officer exam was on the day we were going to hike a mountain named the Pfeifferhorn- stealing a perfect opportunity to scale a peak with the ideally named companion. She did come over for dinner though and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to make my eggplant lombardi, which is good, by myself, even though it took about two hours with Camila in the VA and even though I also was making beet maroonara and the chocolate pie I love so much made out of tofu. So that was a lot of work. It did come out good though and I wound up with more than a full jar of delicious royal rich beet and tomato Maroonara. It goes great on Wacky Mac pasta. I could also buy the same stuff as "Neptune's Dream" for about three times as much at the health food store. A sauce so good needs a special kind of pasta. The pie was also delicious again, this time with raspberries on top and with my first creative crust: almond cookies! Almond cookies make a delicious pie crust that is a little bolder than graham crackers without overpowering your pie. All I did was mash up a package of cookies with a potato masher, then squeeze them even finer with some water and a smidge of melted butter, then pat it into a pie tin, and bake it for five minutes to correct for the too much water I put in. Sarah was impressed and could not get past chocolate when naming ingredients. She eats tofu regularly and was amazed it was in there: so there you go, a true blind taste test. I liked that she asked where I got the recipe for the pie and the sauce and was surprised one can just make up recipes, as I said I mostly did.

Sarah and I are ODAY best friends- that's one day a year for those of you not in the slang. She lives in Boston right now so we see each other once or twice a year. I wish it was more, but at the same time, it is nice to have some out of state friends because when they come over its like an extra holiday; you break out the good recipes and laugh till late in the evening with no holding back. Sarah, like me, is usually described in a way such as "well she's an experience". So when she told me about how hard it is to find anyone to date, I unveiled my two crackpot theories on the matter: the Mormon Baptism process inspired "Milk Before Meat", which basically suggests you provide favorable information first and then wean your target onto odder things as they get accostumed or hooked on you- its a rather sinister way of baptizing people. Or dating them I suppose. But it is kind of how I reeled in Teresa. I acted normal and conned her to keep coming closer then slowly revealed a massive hippo collection, rolling eccentricities like not stepping on cracks on full moons which fall on Wednesdays, and my evil side, which is starting to rub off her. Every month or so I would just introduce her to some new aspect of me and she never knew what hit her. This theory goes with my "World's Greatest Beer or Pizza" theory. This one goes like this: say you made a plain mozzerella cheese pizza with a little bland pulped tomato sauce and no spices. No one could pick it up and take a bite and go yuck! This is true of a boring flavorless beer too. If you are Michelob and want to appeal to everyone, the way to sell is on the everybody drinks Michelob are you a communist kind of McCarthy empty hand method- if there is no taste, then no one will hate it and will accept that they ought to like it if you tell them they should and that other people do. But a great beer, with say 20 ingredients, or a 12 topping pizza with a very bold marinara sauce and three cheeses and 10 herbs ground over it, well a lot of tongues are going to be offended and not like it. I mean if you like 9 flavors and hate one and get a blend of equal amounts, most people would notice the one they hate and not want to eat or drink this beer or pizza. We notice things we hate more strongly. Just like if I am out hiking next to someone, who is walking at the same pace naturally, we will probably keep together and chat a bit- unless he starts say smacking his lips. The more generic he is, well why would I go out of my way to speed up or slow down and get away, but if he's got five sounds he makes while hiking, there is a pretty good chance I might like 4 and hate one, and that one will ruin the others for me. So, the more intense a beer is, the less number of people will like it. No two people agree on the world's greatest beer. I have had over 220 expensive brews and only really wanted about 20 a second time. Does this mean they were no good or that I have poor taste? No just that a sensitive tongue and a sophisticated pallet of flavors will be hard to match together. Dating is like this is my mind: bland common people who just want to fit in and who sit around doing normal things like watch sitcoms and drink Michelob can find love easily because they are plain cheese pizzas. Nothing to offend the tongue with. But a person like Sarah, who has a lot of personality going on; a lot of hobbies, and phobias, and dreams, and eccentricities, well when she finds the right person she'll experience a much better, deeper love than one can ever get with a dull beer, but it will take a lot of sampling to find- hopefully not more than 220 brews, but a lot before she finds someone who meets her needs or even some of them while having his met by her. Anyway so I told her love will be more rewarding to find but take longer to find and that is my crackpot theory, as very laboriously explained.

I also finally got around to cooking poullet au vin this week, or coq au vin, which is chicken, or cock, with wine. Though since one cannot go out and just buy a cock in America, I call it the chicken and wine. This dish I saw on some cooking show back in Illinois and looked delicious. I looked up several recipes, picked and chose what I liked about each and then did my own thing. First I fried some bacon, pearl onions and mushrooms in a bit of wine, then fried some lightly floured chicken in the grease with a bit more wine, then put them all in a big pot with red potatoes, barley, big hunks of celery, bigger carrot cuts, a bit of chicken stock, bay leaves, thyme, seasoned pepper and an Every Day seasoning and a lot more wine. Then I boiled it (three hours total counting simmering time after) and for a while, it smelled like hot wine, which didn't smell too great. Then after an hour the color had gone from purple to yellow and as it thickened it smelled better and better. The dish comes out like a thick sweet stew, faintly purple. It is delicious. The wine I used was a pinot noir which seems to be standard- I got a bottle for $4.99 and used the last cup of it with dinner when Sarah came over. So you do not need a great bottle of wine. I found the best part of the meal to be these potatoes, which became soft, and wonderfully flavorful. I think you could do everything but the meat with some vegetable stock and the wine, and get a great dish too. A great vegetarian dish, maybe with some spiral pasta or vermicilli or more vegetables. I'm not a wine drinker either but I will probably make this dish again.

I have also been enjoying German pumpernickel, which I found at a World Market store. It is dark, heavy, dense, cut thin and absolutely slopping over with molasses. It, like a strong good beer, will not be for everyone, but if you can find it, give it a try. There is certainly no other bread quite like it. I love it with sprouts, a bit of miracle whip or mustard and a breaded chicken patty or under three fried eggs which I like to leave in one big circle as shown above. The proper way to fry eggs by the way is to remove them from heat while they still run on top and let them carry over cook on the plate, which they will do in about two minutes- otherwise the bottoms will burn and your yolks will solidify. This way, sunny side up anyway, the yolks are runny and flood out over your whole plate. Its always been my favorite way with eggs. May I suggest a pinch of lemon pepper for an out of the ordinary?

The Enchanted Afternoon...

2009-07-24T08:24:00.003-07:00

I had a tea party a little while back, a dresses-mandatory, midafternoon little-sandwiches-and-all tea party. I did one last summer (or was it two summers ago?) as well, so I had a little bit of experience. Was that enough to keep me from making WAY too much food?

No. No it was not.

This was the menu:
-bread, cheese and fruit platter
-strawberries and slightly sweetened whipped cream
-scones (plain and raisin)
-lemon curd
-tea-time tassies (mini pecan tarts)
-two tarts, a peach-and-pastry cream one and a lemon-curd-and-raspberry one
-a rhubarb coffee cake
-cucumber sandwiches (with butter or with mint chutney)
-turkey and cranberry-mustard sandwiches (open-face)
-cheese-and-nut sandwiches
-watercress-and-egg sandwiches
-shortbread cookies with chocolate ganache and whipped cream
-cream puffs
- sorbet (which we didn't even eat at the party, because there just wasn't room)
-and, of course, different teas (hot and cold), lemonade, juice and water.

(And may I say that I couldn't have made all these wonderful things without the assistance of my marvelous sous-chefs... I have very tolerant friends!)

Excessiveness is a pretty essential part of any tea party, I think... I mean, the whole thing is completely ridiculous and over the top, and you just sort of have to embrace that. However, the above menu (for about 14 people) is definitely over-the-top. As a two-time tea party host, here is what I've learned about the essentials and superfluities of a tea party:

First of all, the ABSOLUTE essentials:
- Tea. duh.
- Scones. They're just... so tea-party-esque.
- The tea-time tassies. They are small, they are adorable, they are not very hard to make, and they are DELICIOUS.
- Fresh fruit. Easy and a nice, light break from the heavier foods.
- The sandwiches. I mean, it wouldn't be a tea party without them.
- And finally, a fancy dessert. So far, I've done tarts and a trifle, and I think they were both excellent options.

The optional touches:
- Strawberries and whipped cream -- turns the fruit option into something much more desserty.
- Cream puffs. I think they're super-fun to make, and they definitely seemed like a big hit.
- Flavored spreads. I had these at the last tea party -- honey-orange butter, herbed butter, etc. They're really easy (soften butter and blend in the add-in) and they're great on the plain scones.
- Lemon curd. SO good. And not too hard to make, if you heed my super-secret advice. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? Here it is: USE A MICROWAVE. Yeah. Last time I was up until 2 a.m. waiting for my lemon curd to thicken. The microwave can do it in minutes, guaranteed -- you just need to check every 30 seconds to make sure it doesn't overcook.

And the absolutely not needed:
- Coffee cake. It was delicious, but man, what was I thinking? Coffee cake is a great breakfast item, a wonderful snack on it's own -- but too heavy and large for a tea party. Scones fill the carb slot pretty perfectly.
- Bread, cheese and veggies. I set these out because I thought there wouldn't be enough food... again, what was I thinking? Also, clearly much too healthy for a tea party. Although certainly tasty.
- Shortbread cookies. They were just too much. I think they could be perfect for a tea party, but I just had too much food and these weren't bringing much, flavor-wise.
- Sorbet. It was chocolate sorbet, very delicious, totally unnecessary.

So there's my advice, in case you're ever planning on throwing a tea party. Here are a few easy recipes, for good measure:

Sandwiches: (These come from my Tea and Teatime Recipes book, so thanks, Maggie Stuckey!)

Cucumber sandwiches:
Slice cucumbers, sprinkle with a few tablespoons of mild vinegar, salt, and pepper. Toss, and let drain in a coliander for half an hour. Spread softened butter thinly on fresh white bread, then layer cucumbers. Top with another buttered slice of bread, cut off crusts, and slice sandwiches into small rectanbles or triangles.

Cheese and nut sandwiches (these are my favorite!)
Soften 1 brick of cream cheese in the microwave for 15 seconds, then add 2 tablespoons milk and beat until smooth and spreadable. Add 3/4 cup celery, diced, and 3/4 cup walnuts, chupped. Spread thickly on whole wheat bread, top with another slice of bread, remove crusts and slice sandwiches into small rectangles or triangles.

Turkey and cranberry-mustard sandwiches:
Mix equal parts Dijon mustard and cranberry sauce. Spread on sourdough bread and top with a deli slice of turkey. Cut off crusts and either slice sandwiches into small rectangles or triangles, or use a sharp cookie cutter of your choice.

Egg and watercress sandwiches:
Boil eggs and rinse watercress. Butter rye bread, cover with watercress and overlapping slices of egg, then top with another buttered piece of bread. Trim off crusts and cut into small rectangles.

Lemon Curd (also from Tea Time book):

In microwaveable bowl, beat together:
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt

Stir in:
1/4 cup buter, softened
1/2 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons grated lemon zest.

Heat on high in microwave for 2 minutes, and then for 30-second intervals, beating each time removed from microwave. When it thickens (you'll be able to tell, I promise! it will become more spreadable and less pourable, and start making fun gloppy sounds when you stir) stop microwaving and refrigerate until cold. The curd will be even thicker when it cools.

Tasty and really fancy-seeming desserts:

Tart:
Make a pate sucree and bake in a tart shell. (That recipe is far more simple and helpful than anything I could write up! If you are having troubles, consult my favorite online pastry expert: Joe. He's got great articles on making, rolling and baking tart shells.)

Let cool completely, then cover the bottom of the tart with cold lemon curd. Dot artistically with fresh raspberries... or just throw them on, it'll taste the same. Chill, and serve cold to ooohs and ahhhs.

Raspberry Trifle:
You will need:
- Cake
- Raspberry liqueur (what a funny-looking word)
- Apricot preserves (my Tea Time book says you can also use baby food pureed fruit. So, maybe try that if you are less weirded out by that than I am).
- Frozen raspberries, thawed to pleasant mushiness
- Fresh raspberries
- Vanilla pudding and lemon pudding
- Whipped cream.

Cut the cake into little pieces. (This is a great way to save a cake that fell apart when it comes out of the oven! I made a chocolate trifle out of a chocolate cake disaster, chocolate ganache and whipped cream, and while it was a dense and intense pile of disguised failure... it was delicious. And nobody will know unless you tell them!)

Cover the bottom of a trifle dish (a clear, straight-sided bowl will do... or lacking that, any clear and bowl-like container) with a layer of the cake. Sprinkle with liqueur, then spread on a thin layer of preserves -- it might help if you heat the preserves so they are pourable. Add half your frozen raspberries, then one of your puddings.

Otra vez! Repeat the above. Top with anything that's left over (if you have more cake, say) and then whipped cream and the fresh raspberries. This makes a HUGE and beautiful and delicious tea party dessert.

Tofu or not Tofu That is the Question

2009-07-24T03:31:00.004-07:00

"Healthy" pies, postscrips to the Smelly Dog House Era, A Signed and Legally Binding Document in which I agree to be less of a sour old crank, Farmer Market Paradise, A Red Review of A Red Cheese from a Red Kind of Guy, (How do you like me now McCarthyites?), My Favorite brands of spices revealed by a David Letteran show guest, and Mexican Rolling Pin Roller Derby, all here free for only $19.95! Simply provide your phone number and your parents will be charged- for free!

What is more impressive? That I made the above pie all on my own in under 30 minutes or that I made the above delicious looking rich dark chocolately gourmet pie in under 30 minutes with 1 pound of tofu? That's right: a tofu pie! I blended 1 pound silken tofu with about 9 ounces of melted Ghirardelli chocolate baking chips, and a quarter stick of butter, then put it in a graham craker crust, sprayed it with whipped cream (alternate choice was a checkerboard pattern with a leftover dark chocolate chip in each square or even different colored chips to look like a game of checkers) and I promise you it does not taste like tofu and no one will know if you don't tell them. Then when your vegan friends come over and complain about how hard it is to get protein you can mention that each slice of their dessert has 15 grams of it. They will think you are very inspired when you explain it to them. And now I am issuing the first ever YBAC reader challenge: who can come up with another good tofu pie recipe? I would love to do a key lime pie type recipe with it. All right fans, get to it. You can top this pie, I am sure.

I have been enjoying a bit of Red Leicester Cheese, and think you might too. It is very similar to a sharp chedder, both in texture and taste, though a bit of a change up. I like it on crackers and with bread. An excellent breakfast cheese.

Farmer's Market season is now alive and kicking. There is one within 3 miles of my house in the afternoons on Thursdays where I can get almost everything. This past week I picked up a pound of apricots and some delicious blackberries. I combined these to make a cornbread buckle: flour, sugar, butter and corn meal, mixed with the fruits and baked. Similar to what Camila and I did in Virginia although not nearly as sweet or fattening. I went with 3/4 of a cup of flour, sugar, and meal, and would suggest just a tablespoon or so over on the sugar. Also, using half a stick of butter left me wanting a bit more. So maybe 3/4 stick? A half is fine though, I mean it wasn't like it was bad. The fruits were wonderful. There is a daily farmer's market run by a CSA Farm in a nearby town where Teresa lives. So I can start going there soon too and they will have peppers and eggplants coming in any week now. Teresa's parents are already harvesting green beans by the barrel, chard, basil and sage and mint, and are getting their first red tomatoes, and are seeing some good prospects with their corn. They've also got mellons and zuccinis coming up so I won't even need a farmer's market its looking like. I am trading them sprouts and breads right now. Teresa's father is quite a gardener. He should have been a farmer I guess. I am thinking my ideal would be to hide on a plot somewhere and grow a whole lot. It would be hard work but there's so much more reward growing your own food as opposed to typing up reports for an insurance company that you know is evil or whatever. I am jealous in a good way of people who have good gardens right now. I wish I could, but maybe this winter I will be able to make potatoes and strawberries grow indoors. I think I will try as those two are pretty good staples and supposedly, grow easy. We'll have to see how warm Bag End stays here in a Shire Winter.

I am enjoying seasonal living. Its a lot easier when you have seasons. That's not to say I like negative 2 or anything, but being a bit cold in winter and a bit hot in summer just feels natural. I am against living in constanst 71 degree climates. I think it is right for some people, but I like the change. And as I make little alterations to my diet to follow what is natural to eat at certain times- winter squashes in winter, mellons in summer- I find I am more happy. Life is meant to be cyclical. And I am just an old fashioned guy.

I have a new hobby I am enjoying which is rolling tortillas. I use two sheets of wax paper and a rolling pin to flatten out masa into tortillas. It is not perhaps as fun as the Camila method of jumping on a pan and takes longer than using a press, but its cheap and its sure a good way to hone your rolling pin skills. Plus, frying them one at a time on my skillet means even with a press, I would still be in the kitchen the same amount of time, as I can now turn ball into tortilla in the same time it takes for one tortilla to fry all the way through. It is somewhat amazing how cheap they are too. A bag of 10 tortillas will go for as little as $2, which is amazing in itself but I think these tortillas I am making are only costing about 2.5 cents each which is stunning when you know how long corn takes to grow and harvest and then think of milling it or pressing it or grinding it. We really are out of touch with food when we complain about prices. People will pay hundreds of dollars for electronics that probably cost a few cents to make because they seem like magic- and frankly a disc player is magic to me. I just listened to the audio book of "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" and kept thinking if I were back in time, I would just have to fit in. I couldn't make dynamite, or a pot bellied stove or a steam boat. Its like that with most people- we can't make food either, but it seems like ape work, just sweat. Not magic. Toil. Kind of like Caliban's rage at seeing he's made of molecules and elements in the mirror and not playdough. Like God had to do the best he could, wire us, and not just wink us into being, so that instead of being how intended, maybe we are messy rough drafts, maybe freckles and dimples really are hitched DNA with little burrs or loose threads. Maybe all our beauty is just the best someone can do and nothing like the original vision, a failed canvas. Food seems so simple- I think everyone assumes they could grow all their own stuff easily if they wanted to. That farmers are just drones who can't cut it as worker bees in a nice cool office where everyone is everyone else's superviser and everyone shares the title of manager as required by recent Constitutional Amendments to make sure the American Dream applies to everyone. But people flip out about the price of a loaf of bread because they don't think hey that's three hours of someone's work, or that's not something I could do. Or maybe that's off and its just because we are enlightened enough to feel that if we aren't finding pleasure for more than half or our waking lives we aren't getting a good deal, that we shouldn't have to toil because we've gotten past that and should just listen to news feeds (and be a news feed) and listen to hot new songs and such. Anyway, corn is amazingly cheap. I mean I don't want to put half my life to growing it just to survive.

I'm not sure if I have discussed spices or not, but my favorite brands are:
Spice Hunter- available in a lot of stores, they have some great mixes like Schezwuan Pepper and Mexican Blend
Urban Accents- I have only seen these at World Market, they have curry powder, Mongolian Barbecue Ginger, Korean Stir Fry, the All Day Every Day blend I love, and Sonomon Pepper to list a few, which is a lemon pepper with orange zest and garlic
World Market- I am pretty sure these are Urban Accents with a generic label. Cheaper and similar blends, including Greek Mediterranean, which I talk about often. Also only at World Market.
Colonial Kitchen and Spice Supreme- These two are at a lot of dollar stores out here and offer huge variety of single spices for a dollar. They are fresh and just as good as the expensive brands. Dollar Tree and Honks carry them out in Utah and I buy all my basics with these brands. No one will know you're not a snob while eating your gourmet spiced dishes.

Just for kicks I thought I would provide an actual transcript from one of my daily conversations with the Smelly Dog from Smelly Dog House as insight into why I moved again (as if the name Smelly Dog House didn't give it away)

Dog (outside the glass patio door looking into the dirty smelly kitchen): Hey is someone in there?
Me: (no answer)
Dog: Oh now I see you. Hey come on how boutcha let me in? Oh that's right I'm sposeda sit. Hey how's this, I'm a good sitter huh? Man's best friend.
Me: Come on dog, we both know we go through this every day can't we just skip it?
Dog: Fine. I'm leaving, see if I come around wanting to be your friend anymore. (two seconds pass as dog takes one step away and then pasues, and swivels) Oh come on! I'll be good. I sat and everything! That's what you humans want.
Me: (sighing) Its not happening.
Dog: Oh yeah. Well what if I do this? Bark. Bark! Bark! You know what that means? It means I'm a big dog and I get what I want and what I want is for you to open this door. Now open it and we're gonna be friends. Or else I'll tear this door down and kick your butt!
Me: (ignoring it, mixing in my bowl)
Dog: Yeah I'm almost as tall as you now (standing against the door and punching at it with one paw- its a Boxer). Now you let me in. Bark! Bark. Bark? Please? Oh god I'm so lonely and my master hates me. He only wants me for ten minutes a day when he's lonely before bed. Oh god my life is terrible. I'm out here all day and when I come in I get in trouble for chewing things and jumping on people even though that's what I do. That's what I'm meant to do. And I promise not to climb up onto the counter and climb in your bread this time. I know you don't want my help just please be my friend. Please love me! I need love! (Whining profusesly)
Me: No. I'm almost done. And you say that every time and then you ask if I need any help and climb into the mixing bowl and jump on me and act like a jerk. You're just a jerk by nature and since I dont' want to punch you in the face to get your respect you gotta stay out there.
Dog: Fine see if I ever come back and look at you again! You're dead to me. Do you hear? Dead. DEAD!!!!! D- uh- e?- Dead! We are enemies and you watch your back because when you least expect it I'll be coming like a freight train right for your throat and hey is that a dog over there? Bark! Bark! Bark bark bark!
(Next day)
Dog: Hey is someone in there?
...