Pig! Delicious Insults

I met on short notice to share lunch with a friend of mine the other day, and since I already had a sandwich and an apple ready, she picked up Chinese take-out and we sat down to eat and converse. We ate and talked and she gradually started extracting from one corner of the styrofoam clamshell box (that central PA is enamored of) pieces of pork and laid them to the side.

"I don't like this, the halouf. But they gave it to me as an extra."

She's Algerian by birth and spent several years in Paris before coming stateside.

SoE: "That's good. They don't want to leave a corner empty in a take-out box. I like that."

Friend: "Yeah, but I don't like it. Yes, I like the charcuterie and les saucissons but not just the meat."

I didn't ask about bacon. After a moment she asked:

"What is your sandwich?"

SoE: "Halouf", waving it in front of her. A few days before I had baked a pork tenderloin covered in thyme, cumin, coriander, salt and pepper, and made the sandwich with (ostensibly) Vermont cheddar and baby something or other greens with mayo and Grey Poupon. My apple was an Empire from New York State, a variety advocated by my friend Carter up in Brockport. I was fairly delighted by my sandwich, and I shared my apple with my friend, despite her lack of enthusiasm for the halouf.

Pig (as opposed to pork as a material, as it were) carries a lot of negative connotations in many cultures. With my pal here it was not just about halal or other formal ideological prohibitions, though that plays a part.

The exchange we had reminds me of a time when I was on a dig in Spain and we sat down for our 3pm dinner after excavations. After the waiter rattled off the possible dishes in Spanish, all I knew after my on-the-fly translation of what he said was: I wanted the pork dish. So when he turned to me, I simply said, losing the subtler bits of my Spanish culinary vocab:

"Cerdo!"

Which got me a sneer from him and laughs from everybody else. Apparently I had just called our waiter a pig. As far as I can tell, no one spit or shit in my food, but if they did I don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss.

Poor pigs! Even I don't respect them as animals as well as I should, but they taste so good!

DIY and Fermentation

I'm not very inspired by doing Asian bean fermentations now, nor have I ever been. I'm not against them, it's just not what drives me. But this passage at the end of Sandor Ellix Katz's procedure for making tempeh encapsulates what I love about his book, Wild Fermentation (p. 66).

Maintaining a temperature around 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (29 to 32 degrees Celsius) for twenty-four hours can be tricky. Making tempeh when the weather is hot is the easiest method. Other times, I generally use the oven of our propane stove with just the pilot light on, with a Mason jar ring propping the door open just enough so that it doesn't get too hot. I've also incubated larger quantities of tempeh in the greenhouse on a sunny day, then in a small room somewhat overheated by a wood stove at night. Be sure to maintain good air circulation around the incubating tempeh. Innovate, make it work.

The last bit has my added emphasis. Sandor's voice in this book is ... what? Encouraging, reassuring, redoubling? Yes. Compassionate? Yes. He's succinct and direct while acknowledging hundreds of angles of uncertainties faced by his (hers/its/whatever/not-whatever) readers. At the end Sandor is telling folks it's up to them to figure out the process that works for them, where they find themselves. But by telling folks to make it work, the message is that inevitably we can make it work. Not WE, really, each of us can make our efforts produce something that works for ourselves.

It shouldn't be such a revolutionary act to tell people that they have the capacity to consciously change and direct their lives, but in fact, here we are. And this is why I love this book, even if I'm not a fan (yet) of tempeh.  

First Central PA Casualty of Sandy: Wine Supply Shutdown

I left the lab earlyish today as everyone is hunkering down for this epic storm, and figured I'd get a few things that I might need for a few days if things get really bad. I stocked up yesterday on most things, but I thought "I should get a couple of bottles of wine just in case". And of course, because it's all state-run wine and liquor stores here -- and they'll be closed for no reason at all let alone for a good reason -- they're closed by 4pm, if they ever opened today. UGH! I'm an adult, what is wrong with this state? My resentment makes me imagine that there are a bunch of folks on the liquor control board making moral judgments about what things people need and don't need to weather a storm. Like they shut down the liquor stores in State College to reduce the debauchery around "State Paddy's Day" last March. Which Bell is here? What? The LIBERTY BELL? Oh yes. What? Bill of Rights, Constitution? What?

So I manged to get an ordinarily extraordinarily over-priced 6-pack of beer. Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA. This reminds me of California, where you can buy anything you want in a grocery store and people assume you are an adult (behaviorally). Or if not, that's your own business as long as you don't make it somebody else's business.

Egads.

Giving The Happy Whisk the Bird

One of my favorite real/imaginary colleagues in the blogosphere, The Happy Whisk, just celebrated two years of blogging about food and having jobs and a coupon fetish and her dogs and husband and other stuff. I've never met her in real life, but she seems like an all-round cool gal. The anniversary reminded me that I tried out a roasted chicken approach she blogged about while I was suffering in dissertation hell and never got around to posting it on the other blog.

Here's her chicken roasted in a cast iron skillet in the oven, sitting on potatoes, onions, and dosed with Hungarian paprika:

Hardcore. And then there's this close up of some of the onions lounging in the drippings:

Holy shit. After asking her about it in the comments I went out and bought some better paprika (better than I had at the time, not better than hers) and went at it myself while procrastinating on the stupid diss. Not as photogenic but still delicious, and putting cast-iron in the oven just makes me feel good about whatever the hell I'm doing. Probably I should have just left it roasting another 20 minutes.

I had a hard time getting a decent shot of onions in focus with my camera, but either way, they weren't the food-porn quality of browned onions the Whisk pulled off up there.

 
Rending the chicken's very breast and dunking it in its own juices!

You shall not escape my ravaging fork, thou Onion!

So yeah, I just stood at the stove eating right from the skillet. Then I'd cover it up and then walk back to it 10 minutes later and resume the orgy. I live alone, so that's what it means to cook a dish like this just for the hell of it. Solo food orgy!

Thanks to The Happy Whisk for the inspiration and the know-how! You rock!

Barley genome breakthrough = better beer? Bullshit.

I'm a scientist. That's how I make my money. I am not anti-science, therefore, but I AM anti-bullshit.

Today I see this blurb from Reuters about some Scottish geneticists that have mapped the barley genome and then expound upon all the benefits that will ... or may ... result. The usual line from folks doing this sort of work: greater food security, more efficient and focused breeding efforts (presumably meaning old-fashioned breeding through plant sex rather than sticking genes into stuff, but that will happen as well), and new breeds that will withstand environmental change. Fair enough. You got a grant to do this, you need more money to keep doing this kind of stuff. But the public doesn't know anything about barley, other than beer. So they say their breakthrough may even improve beer.

"This research will streamline efforts to improve barley production through breeding for improved varieties," said Professor Robbie Waugh, of Scotland's James Hutton Institute, who led the research.

"This could be varieties better able to withstand pests and disease, deal with adverse environmental conditions, or even provide grain better suited for beer and brewing."

Grain better suited for beer and brewing? IT'S BARLEY! Fuck off, Robbie, leave beer out of your mad quest for fame and glawr. Yes there is a lot of worthless, shitty beer in the world, but it's not because the available barley isn't well-suited to beer and brewing. It's because people want cheap crappy beer. Your genetic work will more likely only make crappy beer cheaper or cheap beer crappier. No one who makes decent beer will want to have anything to do with a modified barley. But yes, you'll save starving people everywhere, just like all the GMO corn in the world is saving starving people.

Dr. Waugh has spliced himself with potato genes.

Well, I'll have a look at the Nature paper (Nature 2012; A physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome; The International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium. doi:10.1038/nature11543) and see how much of this sort of stuff is there, and report back later.

Update: I scanned the article, and in fact there is very little reference to any fluff in it. They note in passing that 20% of all barley is malted for alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. There is a pretty cool map:

Track a gives the seven barley chromosomes. Green/grey colour depicts the agreement of anchored fingerprint (FPC) contigs with their chromosome arm assignment based on chromosome-arm-specific shotgun sequence reads (for further details see Supplementary Note 4). For 1H only whole-chromosome sequence assignment was available. Track b, distribution of high-confidence genes along the genetic map; track c, connectors relate gene positions between genetic and the integrated physical map given in track d. Position and distribution of track e class I LTR-retroelements and track f class II DNA transposons are given. Track g, distribution and positioning of sequenced BACs.

Gravy

I'm having a wearying week, and so to forestall the descent into despair let us ponder gravy.

This is me making gravy during Thanksgiving 2010. Check out those pan drippings from the turkey. Damn! The pot behind had the giblets and neck that I simmered with onions, carrots, etc. all day for a stock. The roux was made with tons of butter and Wondra flour, as mom used to do it.
 

And the finished product. Gravy, cast iron skillet, wooden spoon. Awesome. I can carry on one more day.

Welcome to Coup de Gras

Ahoy there.This is a blog about food and other things that pertain to what are for me elements of the good life. Mostly food and drink, and then probably also science and bitching about the way things are that oughtn't to be as they are. As a general rule I will try to adhere to the Joesky Rule when I get bent out of shape. You've all got better things to do than listen to my crap (as delightfully written as I assure you it will be.)

Here's the deal. I used to be a Romantic (capital R) back in the day, and I used to want to be a hippie in college, but I was an extraordinarily angry person. I wanted peace and love and tried to be them, but I could never make it fit. After continuing to see evidence of ignorance and cruelty and everybody-fucking-everything-up (I grew up in Fresno and went to college at UC Santa Cruz) I grew disillusioned with Romanticism, found greater meaning in deconstructing bullshit, and became more cynical and acid-tongued as time went by. I was disillusioned early on with the RC church, then with the Romantic disattachment, then the pseudo-science and pseudo-psychology of New Agers in Santa Cruz, and with politics of many kinds, the people that followed the Dead, Phish and Dave Matthews (in succession), and so on.

A bleak world presented itself to me in the late 1990s, thus. But amid all this antagonism for everything around me, its fakeness and faddishness and bullshit, I began to teach myself how to cook food I wanted, and began to learn how to make food I wanted to eat. The upside of living around all sorts of fad vegan/vegetarians is that there is at least a surface level of appreciation for the value of food, as politically indoctrined (as opposed to hedonistically driven) as their appreciation may be. And among such folks there is plenty of experimentation and willingness to circumvent mass food production to get fed. That can't be scoffed at, other than by assholes.

And so, as I kept working at my thing -- feeding myself, figuring out what I wanted and needed, the foods that made me HAPPY (to this day a difficult quality of life for me to accept), locking onto some classic cooks, and learning how to prepare food as if it didn't come from A Million Gallon Pot -- I eventually realized that of all the things I had become disillusioned of, good food and its growth and preparation was something I had not ever become cynical about. Yes, I understand and recognize the utter mechanization and redistribution of food that exists today. But, for whatever reason, foregoing the so-called "mangoes" imported to December North America -- as hard and starchy as could be -- doesn't bother me, and their availability (to suckers or the desperate) doesn't make me hate all produce. I turn to look for better food, and do the best with what I can find. Yes, I also know that the world is absolutely fucked. I've seen plenty of evidence that it is. I don't hold great hope for the world, but I do know that making good food and sharing it with others is about the best thing left in it.

And so, good food is a constant ally and friend to me, whatever else happens. No matter what you want to do you've got to feed yourself first.

On to the blog, folks.