Tighten Up: Prodigal Remix At Home

REM with a Sense of Humor and Archie Bell and the Drells. For the lo-budge enthusiast such as myself, open these in two tabs, and start Archie Bell and the Drells at 0:34 into REM. Mildly psychotropic for those sensitive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlRl-70_2NE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wro3bqi4Eb8

Or try to work off these links:
REM

Original, Archie Bell and the Drells.

Now make it mellow!

Don DeLillo, Gravy, and Mashed Potatoes

In White Noise (Penguin 1986, p. 175), our protagonist describes his teen-aged son Heinrich's dinner table demeanor in the midst of a discussion about toxic waste spills:

We watched him use a spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

"This is the big new worry," he said. "Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It's the things right around you in your own house that'll get you sooner or later. It's the electrical and magnetic fields. Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines? What makes these people so sad or depressed? Just the sight of ugly wires and utility poles? Or does something happen to their brain cells  from being exposed to constant rays?"

He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he'd scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.

An apt metaphor!

Kim Chi Madness

A few years back I got somewhat obsessed with making kim chi. I'm not sure what triggered this since I wasn't eating a lot of Korean food back then ... but now that I think of it I was watching many Korean films at the time like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and some other one with two girls at a lake house and a mean step-mother. The latter film I associate with giant jars of kim chi, fermenting underground for years. The idea of home-based mass production fills me with a particular lust. Perhaps this was the trigger.

I found a basic kim chi recipe on the website of a certain Dr. Ben Kim*. It's a simple recipe, and kim chi is an easy self-fermenting DIY type of pickle that is delicious and therefore awesome. Obsessed as I was, over the next several years I recorded the variations and results of many batches in a text file and the proportions used in an Excel spreadsheet (called Kim Chi Quest), so I could eventually standardize and replicate my ideal standard kim chi. Here's my version adapted from that recipe:

A Napa cabbage - about two pounds
Brine of 2 tsp salt (not iodized) per quart of cold water, at least 4 quarts for starters
5-6 cloves fresh garlic, minced or pressed
A thumb of fresh ginger, minced
8-10 fresh scallions, moderately chopped (incl. greens)
2 tsp dried red chili pepper flakes
2 Tbsp paprika
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt or to taste

Assume a 2 lb cabbage will fit into a quart jar and a pint jar, and a 1.5 lb cabbage may go into a quart jar. I put ~5lbs into a half-gallon jar recently.

Half gallon of Kim Chi next to a quart jar for scale.
This is how you deal with a 5lb Napa cabbage.

Separate, wash, and chop cabbage leaves as desired. Sprinkle 2 teaspoons salt evenly on this in a non-reactive (glass or ceramic) bowl and add water to cover. Weigh this down with a CLEAN plate or similar to keep the cabbage submerged. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next day throw all this in a colander and rinse well. Back in the bowl or whatever, add the other ingredients and mix this together to coat evenly. I typically use a slotted spoon for this -- I have one that fits into a wide-mouth Mason/Kerr jar and is very convenient for packing the mix into the CLEAN jars: which you will now do. Pack that stuff in there with force to get out any air pockets and add any liquid from the bowl as well. Ideally there's a layer of liquid submerging the kim chi.

Give yourself an inch or two of headspace, close the lid (tight but not white-knuckling tight), and let it sit in a room-temperature place for 3-4 days. Each day I check this and use the CLEAN slotted spoon to compress it and expel CO2. If it's hot and/or the lid is too tight and/or there's not enough headspace and/or you've forgotten to vent it for a few days, expect it to erupt like a warm carbonated beverage: i.e., take it to the sink FIRST and vent it slowly. I've cleaned trails of kim chi brine off my counters, cabinets and floor enough to now take this precaution seriously.

Kim chi stores well in the fridge, becoming more sour over several weeks, and the rate of fermentation slows to non-catastrophic levels. That's it. You have your own basic kim chi. I like adding kim chi to noodle soups, and I wrote a good deal of my dissertation eating ramen with a dashi stock and this kim chi on top. I have been thinking about a cabbage salad with sesame oil/rice vinegar dressing that includes a ton of kim chi as well. Kim chi is down-home, good stuff. It will probably make you happy when you make it yourself and eat it.

Rock!

_______________________________________________________________________
*I don't wholeheartedly endorse his site because he's always going on about superfoods and Omega-3 fatty acids and this sort of crap that I hate.

Col. Sanders Ebola

From this blog.

Mental Preparations for Thanksgiving 2013

I'm heading back up to New Hampshire in November for Thanksgiving to be with some dear friends who really love food. I am getting excited about cooking the bird, and part of me is slowly, subconsciously working up to the event, rehearsing it and turning it over in my head ... because Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and cooking a whole animal for people I love is unmitigated pleasure for me.

The turkey will be a Bourbon Red from the farm of a brother of one of these beautiful people. His farm's motto is EAT FREE OR DIE! Only a hardcore mutherfucker will say that.  

Wikipedia says Bourbon Reds look like this in life pose:

 

I was told they are fairly athletic compared to standard "meat birds", roosting in trees, for example. On the trip that included the Milford Fish Market orgy of food love, I roasted one of these birds. I learned that it wasn't a super-gigantic like a Butterball.com; the ossified tendons in the drumsticks are more pronounced; and there's more variety of texture, moisture, and fat in the flesh. Bringing the whole bird out of the oven, you could sense the animal's activity and lean quickness. The flavor reminded me of the difference between "local chicken" in Maya villages in Belize and the commercial death chickens back at home. More subtlety and variation in the meat. So I'm pondering about changing the heat or cooking time to account for this. But these are wonderful problems for me to think about. It's like winding up a long, slow punch of bliss for the glass jaws of my best friends.

An Observation from John Lennon

Maybe it's because I'm reaching the age when John Lennon recorded "Nobody Told Me" just before he was shot, or maybe it's just because at this age we are more relaxed about pointing out the general ambiance of pointless bullshit that we're all engaged in, but either way I've been fixated on the song. With respect to food, he nails a couple of nice cliches in juxtaposition:

There's always something cookin'

But nothin's in the pot

They're starvin' back in China

So finish what you've got

 Strange days indeed, and we're still in them.

.

Olive Garden ....

It shouldn't have taken me this long to realize that there is no such thing as an olive garden, I grew up in California's Central Valley. The restaurant should be called Olive Orchard.

Or if you just want to embrace the absurdity, Pasta Garden.

But no, again, this would have to be a Pasta Orchard. To wit (starts at 0:30):