January 31, 2010

Cooking as ancestor worship

My wife comes from a long line of exemplary cooks. She works the kitchen by instinct, mixing, matching, improvising. She's economical, mindful of but not enslaved to kids' eating schedules, and treats recipes as inspiration rather than prescription. When life gives her lemons she makes lemon meringue tart.

This is no way describes my approach to cooking.

For one, I have no sense of proportion or timing. When I get it in my head that I am going to cook I can rarely tolerate not cooking -- from scratch -- every last damn thing. Call it a sense of cheating. If it can be made rather than poured from a can, I want to make it. It's such a problem that there's even a mild irritation that I can't actually provision the milk or beef or rare vegetables from my backyard.

Which of course means that dinner is rarely served before 10 PM on the nights I cook.

Normally this little mania takes the form of Italian cooking, specifically Southern Italian, usually from the region of Basilicata. Lots of reasons for this, mostly having to do with family heritage (copiously covered previously).

Last week, we made ravioli, with a twist. The particular recipe comes from my great-grandparents' hometown of Barile, a village long-steeped in Albanian tradition. Ravioli alla albanese has been described as "dessert and dinner all in one" because the ricotta filling, called gyuz, is sweetened with sugar and cinnamon. Full ingredients and recipe.

The ricotta was fun and surprisingly easy. One gallon of whole milk plus one quart of buttermilk, heated to 175° until the curds start to separate. You then ladle the curds into cheesecloth and drain. Add your chosen seasoning and the fluffy warm filling is ready to go.

Hand-making ravioli, on the other hand, was an extraordinarily laborious undertaking. We'd made pasta from scratch before -- with an electric machine -- but that won't do for the sheets that form the ravioli pillows.

So we borrowed a friend's hand-crank pasta machine. Problem was, it had no clamp to secure it to the counter which, if you've ever tried forcing dough through a tiny metal slit, was no fun at all.

Well, that's not entirely true. Getting it right was immensely satisfying.

Once you have the sheets you use this fabulous little slicing/pinching wheel specifically for ravioli. This gives you the pillow "casing" into which you put the ricotta. You have to make sure the edge seals firmly as you will shortly be plopping the ravioli in boiling water and don't want filling exploding everywhere.

The recipe calls for meatballs and tomato sauce as accompaniment and here is where the from-scratch obsession shows its ugly underside. These sides ended up being two separate meals entirely. For one, the fist-sized meatballs came from a Neapolitan recipe that includes grated Parmesan, garlic, basil, oregano, and nutmeg (vetoed by wife).

The sauce, however, wasn't really a sauce but a ragù, basically an entire meal in a pot.

You pound pork shoulder flat, line it with pancetta, then fill it with a yummy payload of garlic, parsley, chili powder (hallmark of this region), nutmeg (vetoed), and pecorino or parmesan. Add white wine and canned whole tomatoes and simmer forever.

In a nutshell what you get after simmering this pork bomb is a sauce for pasta and a second meal, which we didn't not even attempt to eat on the night in question.

All in all, a fantastic experience, though perhaps not one best-suited for a weeknight. Let me know if you'd like detail on the ingredients or process. Full photo set here.

See also Spaghetti All'assassino and Lucanian risotto.

Posted at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

September 21, 2009

"The Rock" Irish Red Ale

Last year, on Sept. 29, my wife's grandfather William Burke, the center of her family, passed away. Rocky, as he was known to family and friends, was a larger-than-life gentleman who would enter a room and, on the rare occasions when he didn't know everyone, would make a point of befriending every last person during the course of their encounter. Rocky was a supernode in the world of social networks before we thought of them as such -- and he went out of his way to make sure people's lives were better for knowing him.

Rocky also enjoyed a good libation, several in fact. Growing up in the Irish Channel in New Orleans, Rocky came from a culture surrounded by alcohol. And, while he demonstrated an understanding of the responsibility drinking entailed, he never let that get in the way of heartily embracing the bonhomie it produced. Rocky wasn't a stranger to anyone and he wasn't a stranger to beer.

This is why I recently decided to turn my wine- and cider-making apparatus and technique towards the goal of creating a brew in honor of Rocky.

In hindsight it almost seems preordained. Had to make an Irish Red Ale, of course. But it was anything but orderly. Making beer, while on paper simpler than making wine, is different in important ways -- most notably, the use of more separate ingredients and high heat.

I'd had the components for months but they went unused until my old Atlanta pal Patrick Childress found himself in Chicago on a work assignment. Patrick is a beer-schooled brewmaster and his tutelage was absolutely essential to the undertaking. My family and I spent a fantastic summer Saturday with Patrick as he stepped us through the finer points of beer-making with the deep knowledge and quick wit of a Food Network host.

Here's a video of the day's activities, wonderfully narrated by the brewmaster.

It turned out great, far better than expected and, I'll admit, better than the wines we've made in the past. Helps to have a board-certified brewer in the mix.

If you've never had an Irish Red Ale I'd recommend O'Hara's Irish Red or Great Lakes Conway's Irish Red. (You get a sense of what it should be from Killian's, but as the Sam's Liquors beer ubergeek told me, that really isn't what it should taste like.) Or, get yourself over to my place and we'll crack The Rock.

The label was particularly fun to make, if not an example of exceptional illustration skills. Every year for the New Orleans St. Joseph's Day parade Rocky would don an red and green tuxedo and march with Italians (and Irish), celebrating his neighborhood and their traditions. We have many photos of him in a variety of Leprechaunish garb -- all of which capture in a small way the man's love for fun and embrace of the moment.

So here's to you, Rocky. A tip of the hat, a clink of the glasses. Sláinte! Thanks for many wonderful years.

Full photoset here.

Posted at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 4, 2009

This is your tongue on LSD

Last night at a dinner party our host introduced us to something amazing.

After dinner but before dessert he passed around a box full of small red berries. We were instructed to take one, put it in our mouth, peel it with our teeth, and suck on it for about a minute. It was pleasing, somewhat sweet.

The berry is called the Miracle Fruit. What makes it special is a molecule in it, called miraculin, which binds to the tongue's taste buds and tricks them into mistaking sour for sweet, a synesthetic bait-and-switch that your mind struggles to comprehend.

Among other things we munched whole lemons (tasted like oranges), dill pickles (like huge gherkins, only sweeter), and drank straight vinegar (like Capri Sun). The effect lasted about an hour and had us scavenging the pantry for anything we could sample with our hallucinating taste buds.

It might be the best dinner party parlor trick ever.

Turns out these berries come primarily from Ghana where they were first employed to take the edge off of palm wine (which I can attest is mouth-invertingly sour). They are mostly a novelty in Ghana still; unlike the blister nut, there's no export market.

NPR has a story on the berry from last year.

Posted at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 6, 2008

Brambleberry, the tasting

Last summer my boys and I plucked wild raspberries from my parents' home in Galena, Illinois. We brewed it into a wine that became part of our giftbag for our annual Christmas Party. It looked beautiful, festive. People were very pleased.

That is, until a few weeks post-bottling when all the gift bottles were in various homes and started spontaneously uncorking, spewing red hooch all over living rooms, cellars, and kitchens. Yep, we gave timebombs as our Christmas gift. (Turns out the right-before-bottling sweetening that the recipe called for restarted some latent, mutant yeasties in the bottles, damnit.)

Some bottles did not blow up, however, including my sole bottle. I advised the attendees to wait until Spring to drink it. We waited a bit longer and drank it this weekend up in Galena, mere yards from where the berries were harvested.

The verdict ... mild. Not nearly alcoholic enough, which you might take as a good thing, but it really lacks body. So it certainly won't kill you (like the Applejack), but it isn't all that great. Apologies to those expecting excellence. But it is homemade and it was made with love, so if it didn't explode on you, do enjoy!

Posted at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 24, 2008

Cashew update!

FLASH! There's an urgent addendum to my previous post about the stupendous Blister Nut.

You may recall that the cashew is unique in a variety of ways. Here are some of those ways, as a refresher. (Pay attention for god's sake!)

• There is only one nut per cashew fruit (also known as the apple) and it is outside the fruit.
• The nut itself is surrounded by a highly caustic oil that causes a rash when touched.
• The one-nut-per-fruit and dangerous nature of the cashew is what causes its price to be higher than other nuts.

This week I was with a colleague who served in the Peace Corps years ago as a farmer planting, yes, cashew trees in Ghana. Score! Here is what I learned.

The skin of the fruit is not caustic like the nut. In fact, many people use the fruit, which is high in sugar, to ferment into booze. (Seems like I have next year's boutique homebrew!)

But there's more. The skin around the nut is not caustic either (which I misunderstood initially). It is the oil inside the skin, between it and the nut, which is harmful. Thus animals are attracted to the fruit -- mmm, juicy -- and end up eating the nut too. The skin does not digest and the nut passes intact out of the animal with the rest of the poop. And here is the evolutionary awesomeness: the poop is almost certainly at some distance from the place of ingestion, thus ensuring wider and wider propagation of the cashew seed. Not unlike the way pollen spreads through the external agency of birds and bees.

Isn't that fascinating?

Posted at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 30, 2007

Raspberry hooch

This year's batch of homemade brew is complete and I am sure you are full of questions about it. Fear not, curious tipplers. There's a FAQ just for you.

What's a brambleberry?
A wild raspberry found in thorny underbrush, basically. In this case the brambleberries were black raspberries, known as Rubus occidentalis.

Why did you make wine from the berries?
Making wine from handpicked fruit has become a bit of a tradition.

What's the alcohol content?
Very low.

Will this kill me?
Depends on what you do with it. If you ingest it, death is unlikely.

Why do I have to wait until spring to drink it?
Because it will taste better. It's fine now, but by March it will be much more balanced.

What were the steps involved in making this?
See this photo strip for more details. Or this gallery at Flickr.

Isn't there lead in the ground where the berries grow?
Yes, there is. Or rather, was. Most of it was mined away. And anyway lead leached into groundwater doesn't make it through the cellulose membranes of plants.

I'd rather not attempt this unaccompanied. Do you have any recipe suggestions?

Sure. The best one is to pour a bit of the wine into a wheat beer, like you'd do to make a Kir. You can also make a nice punch with it.

Tell me an interesting fact about this wine.
The berries were picked in a single day in Galena, Illinois by John, Nathan, and Andrew Tolva on their property.

OK, tell me another one.
A photo of the "racking" process of the wine is currently the only image on Flickr to be tagged "ohmygoditisinmymouth".

Posted at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 22, 2007

How to cook a turkey

From Andrew, age 4:

"I make it at the fire station.* We buy it at the Speedway.** Cook it at home in the microwave. Cook it like 100 minutes."

From Nathan, age 6:

Ingredients***: Tootsie Rolls, White Milk, Ketchup, Mustard, Salt, Pepper, Apples, Turkey

Directions: Put the white milk in a bowl, put ketchup on top. Then take the turkey and with a knife cut a hole in the turkey. Put the apples inside. Then with the mustard use it like glue and glue the turkey hole back together. Take the salt and pepper and put it on the turkey. Decorate the turkey with Tootsie Rolls.**** Then put in the oven at 90 degrees for 100,000 days. When you take it out you should put it on a frying pan. And then wait for 3 hours and then after the 3 hours you can take it off the pan and eat it!

* Kitchen safety saves lives, you know.
** He's not altogether kidding here. We shop at a gas station. This is a source of great family shame.
*** From most to least important, presumably.
**** Details like this are what separate mere food from art.

Someone needs to actually cook some of these kid recipes and post photos. I would give thanks for that.

Happy Turkey Day, America.

Posted at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 1, 2007

What's better than a donut?

Why, a donut infused with homemade hard cider of course. We were nearing the end of last year's batch of cider (made from only the choicest hand-picked apples, you may recall) when I stumbled across this recipe. A perfect, autumnal ending to a fine hooch.

We woke early yesterday for Halloween, which is also my son Andrew's birthday, in order to have fresh donuts. My thinking was that there is no better way to start a day (much less a holiday or one's birthday) than to be greeted by the enveloping smell of deep-frying dough. Or deep-frying anything, really.

So, the batter is made with the cider as is the glaze. You can certainly taste it, a bit like rum cake. One does wonder what it would have been like with some of the paint-thinning Applejack from last year. The 90-proof donut. Some key moments in the donut assembly line here.

The apple crop this year was pretty bad, so no cider in 2008. But the wild raspberries were many. We're only a month away from bottling the brambleberry wine. Say, I wonder if there's such a thing as Raspberryjack?

Posted at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 21, 2007

The Goblin Cock

Continuing the finest set of post titles in years, I now give you The Goblin Cock. It is, perhaps -- nay, back up -- it is certainly the finest culinary concoction I have ever come across.

Some background. Thelovelywife and I pawned the midgets off on my parents in the 'burbs, so we had a “free” night. Said wife had been hungover all day after sailing through the perfect storm of girl drunkeness the night before: lots of girlfriends sitting in a circle bitching about others where wine was plentiful. She was hurting 24 hours later and desperately wanted a burger. So my brother, who makes a career of going out and sampling what the city has to offer, informs us that the best burgers in the city are just a few blocks away at a bar called Kuma's Corner.

The menu is a vegetarian's nightmare. Consider only the Slayer: fries on top of a half-pound of beef with chili, cherry peppers, andouille sausage, onions, cheese, and anger. Presumably this last ingredient is actually a description of your digestive tract's reaction to the dish.

All the burgers are named after heavy metal bands (death, nu, thrash ... I'm not a student of the sub-genres). And this is all the bar plays, loudly. The waitstaff clearly loves it, though I'll say now that it did not exactly help my wife's pounding headache. Yet the promise of the food kept us there, despite the sonic assault.

So, back to The Goblin Cock. Read that chalkboard again. A half pound burger slapped together with a quarter pound hot dog (which is huge), pickles, peppers, cheese, bacon (!), pick de gallo, relish, onion, tomato and a side (in case you're picky) of mustard. True to Chicago form, ketchup is not allowed since the monstrosity has a hot dog on it. (In fact, they can't even spell ketchup correctly the thought of it on a hot dog is so troubling.) No Blister Nuts, alas, but if one were to suggest it to them I bet they'd not be averse.

Encased meat as a garnish. Does it get any better than that? Perhaps not, but I was not man enough and merely got a burger with a fried egg on it. Even now though, hours later as I wrestle with the consequences of such a gut bomb, The Goblin Cock beckons me back.

This bar is not for everyone. They have an angle and they grind it. An enveloping blanket of noise, no mass-produced beer (except PBR, bless their hearts), and food prepared angstfully. But the bartenders and waitstaff were very personable and attentive. Highly recommended.

Tags: bar, burger, chicago, hotdog, metal

Posted at 2:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 19, 2007

The Blister Nut

I love cashews. Eat 'em daily. And, truthfully, I have never wondered why they are so much more expensive than other nuts. Nor have I ever wondered why you never see a cashew in its shell. But others have and it turns out the answers are related.

Botanically, the cashew fruit is related to poison ivy and the shell (though not the nut itself) contains a substance called cardol which is extremely caustic and will cause a nasty rash. This is why the cashew is also known as the blister nut. (Why god why does that not have an entry in Urban Dictionary?)

It is also why they cost so much since harvesting them is inherently dangerous and there is no good mechanical way of shelling them. Shucking is done by (presumably glove-wearing) manual laborers who have to deal both with the possibility of contact and the fact that the cashew fruit is just damn ugly, lewd even.

So you got two options if you really want to eat a cashew shell. The first is to say screw it, eat it, ulcerate your mouth and swell up. The second is to roast the hell out of the cashew. This boils off the poison, but be careful: apparently even the smoke can cause severe reactions.

But it isn't all bad. Apparently the oil can be used as rocket lubricant. Oh, and I really enjoy saying blister nut. Blister nut. Blister nut. Try it, you'll agree.

It is a damn good thing this little bit of trivia was not delivered to me earlier in the day. I'd have wasted even more time fascinated by it. (But thanks Juan!)

Tags: cashew, poison, shell, trivia

Posted at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 17, 2007

Do you kill people for hire?

If so, you might like this dish.

Spaghetti All'assassino (Spaghetti of the Assassins) is possibly the best pasta dish I have ever eaten. On our last night in Matera, we had dinner with friends and they introduced me to this devilish concoction.

Like many traditional Lucanian dishes it is simple with a twist. In this case the twist is heat -- of all kinds. Basically you undercook a bunch of spaghetti then throw it into scalding hot oil olive. (Stand back, it pops.) This chars the outer “nest” of pasta and cooks the inner pasta to completion. As this is happening you dump in cooked tomatoes and peperoncino in powder. That's it. A fiery combo of crunchy on the outside and al dente in the middle.

I cooked the dish last night and screwed up approximately half of it. The tomatoes burned and I got the outer shell a bit too hard. But this is how we learn.

Here's the recipe. It serves four.

400 grams of spaghetti
300g fresh baby tomatoes
virgin olive oil for frying (at least a cup)
peperoncino in powder to taste

1. Cut the baby tomatoes in half and fry in very hot oil for about 6/7 minutes, they should get a bit mushy but not brown, add salt. You need to do this in a large deep frying pan.
2. Cook the spaghetti until really 'al dente' - if it says 8 minutes on the pack, take them out at 5.
3. Drain the pasta really well and pour into the tomatoes and boiling oil (if the oil is hot enough it will make a big noise). Add peperoncino and stir a little to get oil around all the spaghetti.
4. Leave for about 2/3 minutes before stirring/moving around/turning the burned parts around and then leave again for another 2/3 minutes. If you stir continuously the crusty brown bits don't get formed.
5. DON'T add parmesan.

Thanks for Mikaela Bandini for introducing me to the dish and for the recipe.

Tags: basilicata, pasta, italy, recipe

Posted at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 2, 2007

Brambleberry

What did I do right after getting an iPhone? Took a quick day-trip to the only cell reception black hole I know about in these parts: my parents place in Galena, IL. No reception whatsoever. Let me say that a VOIP app on the iPhone would truly be killer (and would stick it to AT&T).

But I digress before I've even started.

My parents' place is in rural Illinois, near the Mississippi. Their land is covered with wild raspberries. Technically they are called bramble raspberries, smaller than store-bought (of course) and black when ripe, though they are not blackberries. These little buggers are super-tasty.

The window to get them is very narrow, though, since birds and chipmunks snatch them up. My uncle told me a story about how he was sitting on his porch one day late in the ripeness cycle of the berries and the chipmunks were gorging themselves. Apparently if the berries become too ripe their natural sugars will begin to ferment from airborne yeasts and they become little alcohol bombs. He said the chipmunks were actually staggering around. Not sure if I believe this, but it did give me an idea. Raspberry wine! Following on the success of the apple cider we made at Christmas, we're embarking on the next fruit-based alcohol concoction.

They're called bramble raspberries for a reason. They grow in dense, thorn-strewn foliage. After a short while it was hard to know where the juice stains ended and the bloody micro-cuts began. In a few hours we had a couple pounds. Here are some tips for you budding (yes!) raspberry hunters.

1. The only ripe berries are the black ones. The red ones look good, but they don't taste so good. Obviously this does not apply to wild red raspberries.
2. A ripe raspberry takes nearly no effort at all to remove. If you have to tug, it ain't ready.
3. Unfortunately the ripe berries are so tender that trying to remove more than one at a time will likely cause one to burst. Go single.
4. The berry bushes seem to prefer direct sunlight so look for places in the scrub that get good light at least part of the day.
5. I found tons of ripe berries along a small creek bed. Not sure if they liked the water or the well of light access that the creek carved into the forest.

We won't get to actually crushing/fermenting until after Italy. Luckily you have to freeze the berries and then let them thaw before crushing to prevent the seeds from spoiling the juice. So we have some time.

Tags: galena, homebrew, raspberry, wild, wine

Posted at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 22, 2006

All it takes is one bad apple

Luckily we found that one bad apple and removed it from the bushel before embarking on this weekend's adventure to make hard apple cider.

It was a lot easier than making wine. And yet, so much more work than I anticipated. For one, it is difficult to find detailed information on cider-making. Sure there's the Intarweb, but the info is suprisingly scarce, nearly always tacked on as an appendix to beer-brewing how-to's. For another, virtually no cider recipe begins with actual apples which I suppose follows from the first point. I mean, how many beer brewing recipes instruct you on how to harvest your own barley and hops? (This is the biggest difference with amateur winemaking. People love starting with actual grapes.)

So we had all these apples. And they're something like 93% liquid. But getting all that juice out is nearly impossible without a good masher and press. We had neither. So we sliced up all the Empire apples (which by sheer luck turned out to be good for cider-makin') with one of them corer doodads. It was handy for sure, but every slice tossed up a reverse shower of apple juice into my face. By the end my face had hardened into a sweet citrus-encrusted mask.

The goal is mash up the apples enough so that squeezing the juice from them is easier than trying to squeeze a whole apple. (This is why apples are called a hard fruit. Yes, just got that.) We had a grape crusher from our stint as home vintners ten years ago which we thought would work perfectly. It did not work perfectly. Indeed, it did not work at all. The few slices that did get mulched in the gears merely created a slurry coating that prevented other slices from entering. So we abandoned that idea.

Ultimately we put the slices into a food processor with the grater blade in. This worked wonderfully, though it kinda technologized the romance out of the process. Just for a bit, though. The real manual labor commenced when we had to hand-wring the mashed apples through cheese-cloth to get the juice out. My kingdom for a fruit press! Imagine wringing several hundred delicate washclothes out. Our hand muscles were basically useless when it was all done.

Now, there's only so much juice you can extract without the using of a simple machine. I tried to fashion a crude press from a cutting board and a pan. This failed miserably too. So we had no second run. Ultimately we had to add some fresh apple cider from local orchards to top off the carboy. Then we just added some yeast and sugar. It is cloudy but certainly looks like apple cider. In a few weeks we'll apparently have hard cider.

At one point in this process my wife asked nonchalantly "Is there any possibility that this will kill us when we drink it?" I answered no of course. Potentially lethal apple-based liquor awaits the next step: applejackification. But that's another post.

Full photo gallery here. Bottoms up.

Posted at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 18, 2006

A stroll through the Night Market in Beijing

America's Chinatowns have plenty of crittermeat, but they just don't offer the diversity of skewered (and fried!) insects that you can find in China proper, you know?

I'd advise you to put down that snack you're munching at your desk and view the full set of yummies!

Posted at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 7, 2006

Culinary turntablism

Does anyone remember the scene in The Golden Child -- maybe I should first ask, does anyone remember the movie The Golden Child? From 1986, with Eddie Murphy? Not one of his best. There's this scene where he enters a Nepalese temple and encounters a ceremonial pillar that rotates around its vertical axis. Not knowing what to do, he scrubs it like a turntable DJ, making a scratching noise. Laughter ensues.

I think of that scene when I eat out in China because of the mechanism known as the zhuan pan at the center of the table. Known in the west as a lazy susan, this rotating platter is a fixture at traditional tables in China. It is both an efficient delivery mechanism and a wonderful social lubricant. Everything is communal and by definition participatory as the platter rotates forth and back. You just reach in with your chopsticks as a dish you like comes by. If you can get beyond the sanitary issues of this particular disease vector it becomes clear that the zhuan pan is a marvelous thing.

There's something musical about the whole process. The zhuan pan is a DJ turntable set up.

Consider it this way. The dishes are notes/chords/samples -- discrete musical units of some kind. They appear at a point in time on the platter and rotate more or less consistently until they are removed or moved (more on this in a moment). So you have discrete units repeating in time from the perspective of a fixed point which in this case is me, the eater, but metaphorically is the armature of the phonograph. Units are added in time, layered in so to speak, and repeat at the same interval. Dishes leave the table periodically -- their particular musical loops end. But the dishes return, smaller this time (the waitstaff transfers uneaten portions to smaller plates to make more room on the table) and they are placed closer in to the center of the rotating platter, allowing people easier access to the newer, fuller dishes at the periphery. In other words, the loops return in a changed state and with new, quicker intervals (rotating more quickly since their radial distances are now shorter). The zhuan pan rotates backwards too, but only quickly, a "scrub" if you will, to let someone grab a morsel that made its way by too quickly. The overall motion is forward.

Data visualization geek that I am I started considering the possibilities -- which of course weren't visual at all but more like data sonification (a field to be sure but not one much popularized). What would this meal sound like if the zhuan pan were a recording?

zhuanpan.mp3 | 1.4MB | 1 min, 1 sec

So I recorded each dish as a separate track in GarageBand. Each measure corresponded to one minute of the meal starting with the arrival of tea, which is the downbeat bass drum that remains constant throughout, the engine of the entire affair. Each new dish comes in more or less as I recorded it on a timeline in my notebook during the meal. (My hosts graciously obliged my notetaking as the curiosity of a unaccustomed Westerner.) Some dishes are single notes, some are short phrases, and at least one, the fish "flower," is a constant note modulating in time with the rotation of the table. Each unit repeats with a period of five minutes. This is an average based on the number of revolutions of the table, but it is almost exact for at least the first two rotations of the 50 minute-long meal. With the exception of the tea-beat, volumes fade out for each track based on the consumption of the dishes. As noted above, the period of at least one dish, West Lake soup (represented by the piano), speeds up midway through the meal as it was transferred to a smaller plate and move closer to the center of the table, rotating faster. The two vinyl scratches correspond to an extended counter-rotation of the table. At 60 BPM one second correponds to roughly one minute of elapsed meal time. I think the time signature is 5/4, but I'm rusty on my Brubeck so who knows.

It is not what I'd call a chart-topper, but it isn't cacophonous, though at quicker BPM's it does get a bit muddy. I clearly could have done more. Instrumentation could be made to correspond more closely to the food type. (But what does "silver agaric" sound like?) Discord could be used to suggest tastes I did not care for. But the general idea is clear. Maybe on the next trip I can videotape the whole thing for the time-lapse music video this cries out to be.

In China you often encounter a circular jade plate known as a bi. It is ancient in origin and its purpose is not completely understood. The bi is flat and usually has a circular hole at the center. Movable type, gunpowder, paper. The recordable disc?

Posted at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 9, 2006

Pasta as pastime

I am able to screw up cooking a meal even when I follow the recipe precisely so it was particularly foolhardy of me to get a jump on my new year resolution to cook more by trying to put together dinner Saturday night based on a short narrative passage in a travelogue. But since I had the kids without wifely backup I decided to at least fill the time with enough potential for mess and chaos as to keep them interested.

Tip: if you have kids and a pasta machine, use it. My boys loved it. Making pasta is hard to screw up in a machine*. Just pour in flour, some eggs, optional dry ingredients and then watch it ooze out of the template you screw on. It looks somewhat excretory or vermiculate or both, which of course is nothing but fun for little kids. Pulling the strands and cutting them off with scissors also scores high marks. How often do you get to use arts and crafts supplies in the kitchen? Next up: Elmer's Glue.

We made the pasta, called lagane, a type of wide strand noodle from the Basilicata region, out of wheat flour for inclusion in a simple sauce also from the region. Actually everything from Basilicata is simple. It is the most poverty-stricken part of the country (which is why so many of its people emigrated, thanks great-grandpa!) and so recipes are always simple, if sometimes unfamiliar. Great for a guy trying to learn to cook. The sauce was comprised of olive oil, garlic, chili peppers (always in dishes from Basilicata), tomatoes, walnuts, and basil. Turned out wonderful.

The other, riskier dish culled from the travelogue mentioned above is called ciambutella, a kind of omelette of Italian sausage (and pancetta, but we had none), peppers, zucchini, potatoes, onion, tomatoes, olive oil, herbs, and of course eggs. You eat it on cross-sections of crusty bread, like bruschetta or crostini. My guess is that I should have doubled the egg quantity as it seemed to be little more than cooked veggies with sausage. Not bad, of course, especially with the pasta dish, but still.

Lastly, a real crowd-pleaser (remember my crowd): R2D2 Treats. Half of a banana covered in melted white chocolate and chopped peanuts and flanked by two pieces of Kit Kat. This is the droid you are looking for.

Please note: my new year resolution did not include cleaning up the kitchen after cooking.

[*] Unless the machine fails to turn on. At which point I considered panic as the children were all geared up for pasta and the only way to do it was manually. Hand-cutting pasta is only slightly more fun than peeling a carrot with a fork. A Fonzie-like thwack on the side started the unit, thank god.

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