Pizza for breakfast

I like making pizza dough, at least I think I do, because it is inexact. Imprecision is allowable in its making. The product of the effort will be more yeasty, a little light on flour, more bubbly, too salty, or overly sweet, but the imperfections are expected in the homemade version. A wide breadth is allowed from Cook's Illustrated perfection to the time I mistakenly used self-rising biscuit flour, or topped it with American cheese. Mistakes in the recipe could even become a source of pride over time, with guests commenting on the particular twist that the cook accidentally gave to his now-specialty.

It also brings the joy of chemistry, melding unlike things in varying amounts of powders and liquids to produce a warm, pleasant, rising growing mass that is almost alive. The ball of dough is expanding as I write, softly inhaling and pushing upwards towards the kitchen towel ceiling. It's difficult to leave it alone for the time it needs to rise. I can't wait until the dough is ready to be eaten as pizza, but I cherish the process of putting it together and my central role in its parenting.

Found exactly where I left it

Machine-Age Espresso

The changes effected affected us. The coffee machine was taken away to avoid ambiguity and duplication. Coffee is dark, ideally faintly smoky. Medium roasts are said to have subtler and more complex flavor profiles, but this is not universally agreed upon. Coffee is good on ice, but it is not candy and should not be mistreated by the addition of pumpkiny treacle. Coffee can be consumed hot, ideally not boiling.

habitual consumption may contribute to osteoperosis


Coffee is sometimes avoided in the mornings so that I can deceive myself regarding my dependency upon it. Coffee is prepared by the cup in the K cup machine at work. K cup != K Street; Coffee is not a conspiracy of powerful Washington lobbyists.

recent studies suggest that these may be the result of relieving the initial symptoms of overnight caffeine withdrawal!


French cooks were the first to Westernize coffee brewing techniques in the mid-1700s. Coffee is decaffeinated sometimes which is to say denatured and disemboweled, without being too dramatic.

wooden shoes

Orange shirts, orange shirts, orange neck ties, orange pants, orange socks, orange cuff links, orange waistcoats, orange shirts, orange shirts, orange shoes, orange suits, orange skirts, orange belts, orange cravats, orange shirts, orange shirts, orange blazers

Voici

I want to collaborate with people.

For the French, the word collaborate must be politically charged, even now.

I had conjured an image for Maréchal Pétain, that perhaps his experience in World War I had scarred him so much, he had been cut so deeply that he felt it necessary to take any and all measures as to be totally insured against another war as senseless as the first one. I'm mostly sure now that I was mistaken. Pétain was, from all appearances a petty junior Fascist, who was eager for the appurtenances of power. I want to know more, but this is the summary judgement.

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]

This Year's Model

I feel crazy today, thought I should write it out

Last night I

drowned in a sea of tapioca and tequila

Usually do not feel scorn

Ashamed, unwed

Do not have a kinship with the job,

fall in love with a cubicle

The blown-out umbrella on a platform in Salem had aimed to break

my heart

but it had no claim after we

laid eyes on

stacked railroad ties

* * * * *

I loved her I love her I will love her I have loved her It's her I love I can't not love her I am loving her usually do not feel this way, maybe that's a lie, I tend to love, Allan forms strong attachments with people that is the hallmark of him. He has to love others and bring them close to exhale into their ears twenty years of talk love breath fear anger beauty. This specimen talks too freely it wants to captivate people and inflict on them its oversized useless brain.

People laugh as they please to, People all want to be writers, People know everything there is to be known child please

Drifting

Do you ever have that sensation of wishing that it was the beginning of the weekend again, when there was so much potential, such a chance of monumental things happening?

I believe in the sand beneath my toes

Do you ever worry that you're not getting anywhere, and then realize that maybe it doesn't matter anyway?

Sometimes you have to laugh, or you’ll cry. You might just have to resign yourself to the fact that fate has you in its grip, and you don’t have much of a choice. Might as well enjoy it, it might be lovely after all. Maybe this is all just a game. Don’t be sad.

Sometimes I email myself stuff from work. Ideas and all. I never do anything with them, and they're almost always bad in hindsight.

Hi Allan:
I have no idea when we will be back - he should be coming out of
customs and all by about 4:15 or 4:30 I imagine, that is if the plane
is on time. Then it's about a 5 hour drive home.

Rice of Viet Nam - www.khoinguyen.com - We are big supplier rice from Viet Our factory packing standard HACCP



these are just thoughts

Alex Trubitsyn to Allan, Alison, Maria

show details Jun 30 (2 days ago)

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Why do people like that one so much?? Is it cause it's thin an everyone had to read it in school????

KoS installment 4

"I know of only one way to walk," she declaimed lustily, "And that's with my feet on the clouds, and my head in the ground, as if I were an ostrich."

who killed my daughtaaa

The day Mel Gibson attempts a Boston accent in a movie is the day is the day I pack up shop and move to Djibouti. Wait a sec....

As time goes by

And never can I remember such happiness about so little. There's happiness everywhere I look. In every corner, in every passing tree sunlit this morning. Another day has come for me to live. There it is for me to grasp and wring life from. I yearn for more life. There is happiness in the little tender sadness that spills over into the edges of my life from pop songs and memories. My life to do with as I please. To go to work each day, to thank my lucky stars, to love people as hard as I can, to log another 40 hour week and never forget that my whole life has been a blessing, a reward beyond reproach that I may never have known until this moment.

Majority sports ramblings

-First real snow storm waited until December. A sign of the shape of things to come?

-Two different Minnesota Vikings players arrested for driving over 100 mph within a week of each other. Ever heard of cruise control, guys? Set it on 70 mph, you're golden.

-Mark Mangino is nearly spherical, it seems.

-Brett Favre's childlike enthusiasm, unlike the swine flu, is not catching.

-It looks like the mime robber from television's Nip/Tuck is back!

-As Michael Jackson said: "And we gon' ride the boogie". What does that mean?

-Beginning both your first and last name with the letter J will get you far in life. Witness Johnny Jolly, Jimmy Jackson, Julio Jones, Jim Jefferies.

-MTV's Jersey Shore: Everything you hoped for, and more.

-The horoscope said my luck would turn today. Is that bad or good? I usually consider myself a pretty lucky guy.

-Please, no singing in television commercials. Please.

doublethink

The amount of information that google can and does collect about users of its services is staggering and frightening. I don't mean to scare you, o estimable reader, but through the magic of google Analytics I can find out what city you live in, what Internet browser and Operating system you use, and what language your computer is set to. Big Brother, anyone?

I'm not really making any comment, just putting it out there. I know far too much about who may be reading these very words. Spooky.

It Just Is

I like seeing things for what they are, but also not trying to see in them what's not there. I read David Foster Wallace and find that there is rich humor throughout. Do I ask why? I do not. I would like to advance the notion, perhaps forgotten, that enlightened people can enjoy art, music, literature, food, or anything else, without knowing the minutiae of its underpinnings.

The chicken is free range from southern Alberta, raised on handpicked rye and winter wheat as well as organic tulip bulbs. It's marinated in a Sonoma Valley white made with 100% sustainable Chardonnay grapes pollinated by ladybugs, along with some basil I raised from seed and ginger from Sichuan province in China. Of course, I don't need to mention that, really, a civilized person wouldn't use anything but Sichuan ginger. Would anyone like some more pesticide-free fetal asparagus?

Thank you, I really didn't need to know that. If something tastes good, maybe that's all there is to it. That's why we say it tastes good, rather than saying, oh, it's made out of fresh local ingredients derived from sustainable farming techniques and I know every stinking detail down to the chicken was born on a freaking Wednesday. If you saw an attractive person, you wouldn't start guessing about which side of her family the Roman nose came from, or whether the steely gray eyes are a recessive trait. No, you would say, that is a suitably attractive person for me to mate with, or something less creepy-sounding along those lines. We seem to have an unhealthy obsession with analyzing things, so that we can't see the forest for the trees.

Just let it be.

I wish I was only a bust, all head

Where are we headed?

I have rarely felt more pessimistic about the fate of the world, and yet worried so little.

We'll survive.

The fast-food chain doth protest too much, methinks

"I like not fair terms and a villain's mind"

The idea that McDonald's is trying to tell me what a real New Englander is, and how such a person feels, disgusts me on a level that I cannot express in words.

And by the way, fools, a real New Englander would never say the phrase "real New Englander". You sicken me with your pathetic attempts to connect to people. Your so-called restaurants are dehumanizing assembly lines for disgusting, nearly inedible food, which people only eat because it is cheap, and likely addictive. It is clear to any impartial observer that our society would be much better off without the influence and presence of McDonald's. Begone!

(Obviously I'm on some kind of little Shakespeare run here)

Stop up the access and passage to remorse

I foresee a future state of the National Football League that is centered around injuries. The games take twice as long because there are multiple serious injuries on every play. The rosters are twice as large because of the need for replacements due to in-game attrition. There are several deaths due to injuries sustained in games every year, which, while bemoaned as tragic, are tolerated. The year? 2025.

It's not too far away from today's game. There is an upper limit on how big and fast football players can get before very serious injuries become more and more frequent, eventually leading to the first in-game death. It will happen, someday, and don't be surprised when it does.

Mark my words.