Fermentation

Everything is building to me making mead this weekend! I have my supplies and tools in place. I'll probably be doing primary fermentation in the airlock-equipped bucket from my beer kit. I won't be doing the five gallon batch that all recipe seem to specify, but I'm going to try a pretty large batch. Looking for a sweet mead, still if possible, with some nice color and depth of flavor. Dry and sparkling don't sound like qualities I'm interested in quite yet. I will report on the findings here and on the fermentation/food blog I'm planning to start.

All lined up

Family is the greatest blessing of all. We are able to be together, all together, several times a year. It feels so good to savor this time, to relax and recreate with my family. To forge stronger bonds that will last throughout the year. It feels good to be home. I feel surrounded by love, boundless love. Cats, food, games, good talks, walks, movies, cookies- these things I cherish and give thanks for.

Creation Myth

Flour + Water + Yeast comes alive.

I gave myself a minor coughing fit by putting cayenne pepper into boiling water and inhaling the vapors.


Wholesome things bring more joy than grocery store cellophane sweets.



We'll need onions, honey, tea, and applesauce.


Early Saturday morning is all potential and sometimes it gets realized.

things we have

A beautiful day in our beautiful nation's capital, Washington, D.C. An unseasonably warm and rich day. A canister of pineapple chunks. Concert tickets. Roasted beets and leftover pizza.

An afternoon spent stewing

The kitchen is heating up gradually and it's on account of me! Stew day is here. We have pounds of carrots, potatoes, cabbage, and broth. We have gas (as of Thursday). We have a drafty, commodious new house to fill with smells of cooking. What better than stew to solve these problems?

The container of Trader Joe's Carrot Ginger Soup in the pantry was calling my name too (and the expiration date was calling 8/9/2012, more pointedly).

The color orange has figured prominently in my life at home of late. It's A's favorite color. Orange is quite visually attractive, I've decided spontaneously after being exposed to it so much. A stew of sweet potatoes, carrots and curry powder; are we detecting a theme here?

In our post-industrial Western democracy,

Cooking as career seems counter-intuitive. Too much striving and slaving for something that ought to be magical and exciting. To prove my point, I'm making curry while I write this post. To wit, I already made rice pilaf this evening. It was simple, enjoyable, and gave me the thrill of the chemistry experiment I never knew how to do. Why beat all the fun out of that activity? This will have to be one of the places where I stand on simplicity.

I was waiting down at the ancient gate

It's when they've announced they're leaving that you see them most. People are motivated by finality, Jack decided without ten seconds' further consideration. The threat of real action, irrevocable consequences, will jolt them, move them, if nothing else will.

On this particular night he was thinking of, they had been sharing ice cream, which he had done at other times with Brandon and assorted third parties.

At this time the phone rang insistently, but he chose to ignore it.

What was the flavor? It was something like cereal milk, flavored with banana, or something else he couldn't remember. They passed the cardboard cup and shared a spoon, being family or close to it. Or maybe there were three spoons, he could not remember. It was a happy evening, with laughter, and the memory was still vivid.

The girls in the downstairs apartment were an infrequent presence in his life. He didn't know much about them except they had cats and parties and liked to gossip at late hours on the front step. Their voices would ring out clearly in judgement on cold nights when he had already been asleep two hours or more. Those nights were shining and crisp.

arming the rebels

Jack stared at the butter. I prefer a cold butter, he thought. Warm butter makes for easy spreading, but it glistens at you. The grease sweats out to the surface. Sweltering butter makes for smaller appetites, thought Jack. The knife traced its course and swiped the butter across the bread. Jack lived on.

No Good With Secrets

Tonight he was the master of salmon. Whirling in the small but uncramped kitchen, pasta was boiled, and fish sauteed a little too long, but with a gentle intent. Lovingly the onions went over low heat with sherry and capers, just enough care given to keep them from burning before the liquid arrived. Crackling skin gave up billows of smoke from the cast iron, but no harm was done. The sweet tangy sauce played against the bedrock fish, lapping at the edges, eroding a little, but not having its way fully.

Rupert, Destroyer of Loaves

The dog has been into the bread, again, and I'm much less angry than amused. He has a fondness for all things that people eat, but for bread especially. He sits there in the kitchen, without any shame, awkward as always, with the evidence in plain sight. Empty paper sacks, or plastic bags with three slices left, and the rest having disappeared into thin canine air. I can't help but laugh in amazement.  What goes through the mind of a dog at times like this?


By the way, check out our new blog:

http://refugeinreason.blogspot.com/

Get a stew goin'

I love cooking, but sometimes the prospect of all those ingredients having to be put together by just me, working against time and hungry bellies, is completely daunting. Daunting enough to make you give up. This is why I always make soups or stews.

Nothing has to be timed or perfected, or cooked just so. Everything just comes together in a big, soupy mess. The soup is the most forgiving dish known to cooks, save grilled cheese. No doubt there's an art to getting the broth to taste good (or appropriate?) and getting the vegetables to have just the right bite, but what tastes better and is so consistently easy to assemble, if not soup. If not soup, then what?

I will spare you the answer. It's soup or nothing. The joy of the warm, savory broth. The satisfaction of adding some arcane ingredient which won't actually figure in the taste, but makes you feel like an expert all the same. Soup, which nourishes our bodies and contains enough salt, when done right, to pickle our organs. Soup, the signature dish of fall, the autumnal enterprise of slightly shivering city-dwellers. It does a body good.

[Also, a good part of the conception of this post was how much I like to hear my fingers clattering on the keyboard while the words simultaneously appear, marching ahead on-screen. Strunk and White advise that you should delete or heavily edit things you write for these reasons, but they were writing before the existence of blogs. So I will have my cake and post it too.]

[Brackets are so much more entertaining than parentheses]

Lift up your hearts

I've decided at last that I like seltzer. If this comes as a shock to you, please don't be offended. I've only just arrived at the conclusion myself; there's no way you could have known. Think of it this way: every time God closes a window, he opens a bottle of seltzer.

Peace be with you.

And also with you.

semi-tongue-in-cheek

They line up for

McDonald's.

They crave a drink of

Grease.

They crave a glance at their

Death:

The 400-pounder unloaded
from a bench seat by the paramedics.

Je me fous du passé

All you need:

-gas bill included in the rent

-sturdy pyrex roasting pan

-root vegetables on the cheap

Roast and eat well

If there were an All-Madden team for name-dropping gourmands, I tell ya, you'd be on it

Isn't Thanksgiving really about overeating, after all?

As a red-blooded American, I was worried, as anyone would be, that I wouldn't be able to overeat to my heart's content in Canada.

I was wrong. There was more than enough food, and I ate more than enough of it. And it was great. It always is. Am I supposed to apologize for eating too much? It was delicious. I'm sorry that there are people who don't have enough to eat. I would like to help them. But at Thanksgiving, you stuff yourself. It's what's done. I can't turn the tide back from the shore, and I can't help but eat too much at Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving. Feel free to stuff yourself. And give some thanks.

Thanks.

ramblings again?

* There is the mundane, there is the banal, and then there is the conversation on the T with an acquaintance from some previous phase of your life that you used to know and haven't talked to since. And then, in the next circle of hell below that is secondhand listening to one of these conversations that someone else is loudly carrying on.

* We should totally hang out some time!

* Have you considered, while eating, whether a juicy steak is worth the future high blood pressure and heart disease, and the attendant increase in healthcare costs overwhelming an already dangerously strained American healthcare system?

* Don't you just love looking for things to get angry about and rage at with righteous ire? Things like reality television. And righteously angry conservative television commentators who bemoan the rise of reality television.

* I never turn down the chance to have my back to a wall. It's just safer that way.

* A sausage is only a sausage, unless it's andouille. That stuff is spicy!

* The Journal of Economic Entomology: real or fake? That depends on how you feel about apiaries.

Again, I oppose fast food

This guy in the Phoenix said it better than I am currently able to:

"Watching folks eat at national fast-food outlets depresses me. Not only are they paying for advertising, but they're getting so little give-a-damn in their food."

Can we stop eating at these places already? Obesity will kill you! Yes, it will.

the seedy underbelly of the pizza business in Ipswich

This is too funny. I was looking for the phone number of a local pizza place, Theo's, tonight, and I stumbled upon what appears to be their website. The front page looks like it's about the place in Ipswich, has a little information specific to Theo's, a correct address, you know, the usual. But click on over to the reviews page, or 'About Us', and it's a whole different story. There you'll find that this site isn't about Theo's at all, but rather about Vinnie's Pizza, in good old Anytown, USA.

That's right. Someone out there thought it would be a good idea to create a form template on which to make a website for a local pizza place. Any local pizza place. Furthermore, someone at Theo's who was responsible for their web site forgot to finish filling out the template! This gives us gems like "Soon after graduating high school, Vincent began making pizzas at The Corner Pizza Place, in Northern Anytown." The story doesn't end there, though. "Although he had an affinity for The Corner Pizza Place, Vincent knew that greater challenges and opportunities awaited him in the heart of Anytown." Look you can take the fictional pizza maker out of Anytown, but you can't take Anytown out of the fictional pizza maker.

Sure the front page is up to date and includes some Theo's-specific information. But how am I supposed to believe anything Theo's says about their pizza when elsewhere on their site Gomer Pyle of the Anytown Gazette raves that they have "Simply the best pizza in Anystate. If you are looking for a delicious pizza, quickly make a trip to Vinnie's Pizza."?

Would it be too simplistic to say that this encapsulates everything that's wrong with American culture today? Instead of taking the time to jot down a few sentences for a web site, people expect that someone will have already created a template for them where they can just fill in the blanks, and presto, there's your web site. Basically it's Mad Libs for small businesses. No thanks.

My kingdom for some horseradish

It was a cold winter. I can't say it was a total loss, but it was cold.