Neither Hard- nor Soft-Boiled Egg

I found this picture from Fall 2011, where I guess I was trying to make a soft-boiled egg and ended up just barely over doing it. Apparently this warranted a photo. I suppose you don't hold such a specifically cooked egg in your hand everyday.

Leftover Vegetable Soup of Doom!

Just before I left for Fresno for the holidays (so called) I checked the fridge and saw that I had accumulated a variety of vegetables. I envisioned two alternate futures for them:

1) I could just leave it all and let it funk out while I was gone, and then throw it all away when I returned, or

2) I could chop it all up and cook it in a big pot and then have several quarts of soup in the freezer for the coming winter months.

What hung in the balance on the purely material level, you ask? Dear reader, you should know that I had carrots, celery, a parsnip, two crowns of broccoli, and three Russet potatoes. I also had a half head of garlic and an onion that probably would last another week without much harm (they weren't in the fridge though). Luckily, I was carried along by a slowly building agitation and excitement by the idea -- and the clear prospect of mass-production awesomeness -- and I went for option 2. In the alternate PKD universe there is a very depressed person blogging his regrets about leaving good food to rot over the holidays, and probably vowing to not waste food and to not be so lazy in the future, and writing a hollow but emphatic manifesto about improving his quality of life from a behavioral perspective. But none of you have to read that blog. You are in the beneficent parallel universe thanks to my bold actions, and you can leave praises to me in the comments as is your wont.

Leftover Vegetable Soup of DOOM!
I pureed this at the end, so broad strokes in prep and cooking are all that's required. Peel as necessary/desired and chop up into more or less medium/small pieces and throw into a big old pot, mine being a cheap-ass ersatz (cf. PKD) lobster pot:

4 carrots (organic, whoop-de-doo)
6 celery stalks
9 cloves of garlic
1 big old parsnip
2 broccoli crowns (stalks were roughly peeled and the cores were chopped into the soup)
1 big yellow onion
3 Russet potatoes
Not chopped:
2 bay leaves
12 whole black peppercorns
2 Tbsp canning salt (NB: This was slightly too much. I say 1-1.5 Tbsp or salt to taste only at the end.)

Add 4 qt of water and bring to a steady boil for about 30 min.

Add (all dry):

1 Tbsp basil
1 tsp tarragon
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp dill
1/4 tsp cumin

Stir in and turn down to a simmer/low boil for 30 min or so. Remove bay leaves and puree it all in a blender in batches and remix it. Salt, etc., to taste.

This made about 5qt, which mostly I froze in ~1 qt increments. As I note above, this was a bit too salty, but not to the point of being inedible, to my taste anyway.

Frozen quanta of soup, in situ, next to quanta of Amish chicken.

I'm pretty happy with the mix of herbs here, since I always have a hard time getting the distinctive dill, sweet tarragon/basil and earthy cumin flavors to have any balance. Probably the mix of sulfurous brassicas, sweet roots, and smooth alliums make a complementary set of contrasts to them. Anyway, Rock!   

A Reflection on Guinness

Yes, I've been away from the blog. The holidays took their toll.

But fresh on my mind since I was trying to drink it today is Guinness. I went to a local sports bar, The Westside Stadium, to watch the 49ers play the Falcons, of course hoping to see the reemergence of the good-old days of Montana or Young. It's pretty obvious the whole structure of the game has changed since the 80s and 90s, so I won't dwell on that. But I started with a pint of Guinness since it was the afternoon.

It sucked. Overcarbonated. It ended up tasting like Coke ... no, Pepsi.

The last couple of times I was around Dublin (Ireland) I drank some stout with a much older cousin of mine in his 70s. He told me both times that the pub we were in had good Guinness, and you'd never go wrong with it. Allegedly they sent their people out to clean the pipes and so no mold ever grew in the Guinness taps. Fair enough. But they also get their Guinness from the St. James's Gate Brewery itself, not from afar.

Since some time in the last decade or more, all the North American Guinness is brewed in Canada. It was first Labatt's in Montreal, I believe, and now since the whole thing was bought out by Diageo, it just says "Product of Canada" on the label. And of course it's okay, but not all that great. Very carbonated.

When I lived in Santa Cruz, CA, in the 90s, I often went to The Poet and Patriot pub. They were so Irish they had a separate tap of Room Temperature Guinness. All the people in the know drank that. It took longer to pour since the keg was kept at room temperature, whatever that happened to be, from January to August and back again. Wanting to be authentic I always asked for that, even in the summer.

I was in Dublin (Ireland) in the summer of '98 drinking away at my favorite bar there, The Quays -- which is now more cleaned up and corporate, like everything in Temple Bar and Grafton Street and the rest of the fucking town -- and asked the proprietor about this "Room Temperature" Guinness, does he serve it, did they used to in the rare auld times, etc.?

"Room temperature? No. It's undrinkable like that." And he went on dealing with other stupid foreigners. When he came back I explained the Poet and Patriot to him and he still just wrinkled his brow and shook his head. Then he said:

"Back in the days, there was no carbonation. Everything was pulled from the casks and they were down in the basement. So they stayed more or less cool year-round." Then he diverged into stories about when he was a teenager  he had to wrestle the casks off the wagon and down the stone steps and into the cellar in the rare auld times. The final analysis was that "Room Temperature" probably meant cellar temperature, not the heat in the room where you're drinking. And so room temperature Guinness in August in California is not only nasty, but inauthentic.

Which of the two crimes you consider to be the greater will tell you something about yourself, it seems.