Wednesday, June 5th, 2002
I’ve transcribed this recipe after carefully observing a number of German people in my house. This is not a traditional German recipe, although if you follow it, you will end up with a traditional German dish.
- Drive out of town, past three supermarkets, to the organic produce stand.
- Hand-select a dozen of the freshest, ripest, most pure and beautiful organic locally-grown Roma tomatoes you can find.
- Upon returning home, store the tomatoes in the refrigerator.
- After finding that your taciturn son-in-law has moved the tomatoes from the refrigerator to the kitchen counter, move the tomatoes back into the refrigerator.
- After finding that your taciturn son-in-law has moved the tomatoes from the refrigerator to the small table on the other side of the kitchen, where the rest of the keeps-fresh-at-room-temperature produce is kept fresh, move the tomatoes back into the refrigerator.
- At the time of the next meal, realize that the refrigerator has sapped all flavor from the tomatoes. Go to one of the supermarkets you passed in step 1 and buy a large roasted chicken. Ignore the tomatoes. Eat the chicken with your fingers.
OK, I admit it, I’m teasing a little bit. The back-and-forth with the tomatoes really happened. It was pretty funny at the time, an apparent culture clash, like the way some people store bread in the refrigerator (eek!) or peanut butter in the cabinet. But I think my in-laws planned to eat that greasy chicken for lunch anyway.
Here’s what Deborah Madison, one of the heroes of vegetarian cooking and author of the fabulous Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, has to say about storing tomatoes: Keep tomatoes at room temperature or in a cool place, but not in the refrigerator unless a glut makes it impossible to do otherwise. Cold kills everything about them that’s good.
…unless you really like that fresh-from-the-can flavor.
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posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
I bought this book long before I became a vegetarian.
Of course, I was buying it as a gift for my wife. But still, even as an omnivore I could immediately see the book’s value.
This volume is an encyclopedia of vegetable knowledge. For every edible plant you can name, Madison tells how to select, store, and clean it, and then she gives several great recipes, plus a list of recommended “go-withs.”
If you’ve ever found yourself in the grocery, looking at a huge mound of in-season whatevers, thinking “those look really great, and they’re cheap… but I wouldn’t begin to know what to do with them,” go ahead and buy some anyway. This book will tell you what to do.
The index is 18 pages long. The value of this resource can not be overstated; it is the key to the idea expressed above — that I can look up whatever vegetable I have at hand, and immediately learn how to prepare it.
The book itself tops 700 pages, and contains probably 1400 recipes: casseroles, salads, soups, pastas, sauces, sandwiches, desserts, basically everything you can think of that doesn’t have meat in it.
There are about twelve recipes we make frequently. These are my favorite three:
- Pesto (p. 57), the best I’ve ever had.
- Lentil Minestrone (p. 225), my favorite soup in the world.
- Lasagne with eggplant and chard (p. 468). This is a wonderful entree choice for a dinner party (look out, I’m channeling Martha Stewart), because it can be made the day before.
Again, you need not be a vegetarian to find this book useful. Unless you’re on the Atkins diet, throwing back a charcuterie platter three times a day and really believing all that fat isn’t going to give you a heart attack, you probably eat grains and vegetables every day — which means you’ll appreciate this cookbook.
Check out the Amazon link (below) for “look inside” preview pages, and many positive reviews.
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Cookbooks
updated: 2004-05-01 14:07:41
Thursday, May 23rd, 2002
“Hi, this is Ramon calling from Pacific Bell. I’m calling you today to sell you a bunch of crap you don’t need or want. Interrupt me if you want to get a word through, or I’ll just leap right into my sales spiel until, beaten down by the sheer weight of my diction, you’ll commit to another $20/month worth of uninteresting telco services that we’ll later charge you to disable —”
OK, that’s not exactly what he said, but it gives you the idea.
“This sounds great,” I chirp in my friendliest, most gullible voice. “I’m on the other line, though; could you hang on for just a sec?”
The prospect of a sale inflated his professionally cheerful voice to the point of bursting. “Sure!” he gushed. By reflex I wiped the earpiece of my phone on my pantsleg.
And then I pressed the “hold” button on the telephone, and put the handset back into the cradle. I had no intention of picking it up again. I wanted him to rot in hold hell, without even sappy music to keep him company. Let him wait that first minute, expecting me to return at any time, maybe filling out the order screen with my personal data, optimistically checking off a full complement of revenue-bearing services… and the second minute, wondering what’s taking so long, but still sure of a pending sale… and a third minute, beginning to believe I’ve forgotten about him, seeing the sure sale fade away, fingers still poised above the keys and the order form half-filled-out… and the fourth minute, starting to sweat, falling behind his quota, watching the clock… and the fifth and final minute, anger welling up as he backspaces through all the data he’d entered into the order form, realizing I had no intention of ordering anything and that with a few simple words I’d tied him up for over five minutes, preventing him from bothering the next half-dozen victims on his list in a timely fashion.
Thanks for playing along, Ramon. Good luck with that quota. Call back anytime!
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posted to channel: Privacy
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
It’s vast, or I guess “ambitious” if I were a lit scholar. Either way means the same: 600+ pages with frequent detours into microbiology, art history, and music theory. It’s fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The writing is brilliant, obviously so even to a pedestrian pop-fiction aficionado like me. The text contains dozens of instances of subtle wordplay that will delight the language geeks in the audience. Here are two examples:
A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor’s cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler’s area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering’s side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. (p. 248)
Our happiness was pathetically outscaled: forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of contiguous squalor, a deep brown demographic smear, a disappointment per square mile that left the three of us several digits to the right of significance. (p. 292)
In construction, this story is similar to Cryptonomicon, which is also long (err, “ambitious”) and peopled by memorable, complex characters. Both stories span 50 years. Both stories contain detailed and intelligent forays beyond the narrative. Both recently appeared in a Jon Carroll’s list of “brainy, pyrotechnical novels” (along with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which I’ve added to my reading list for the summer).
At the heart of Powers’ story is the obsession of one character with DNA (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from very few base compounds) and with Bach’s piano composition “The Goldberg Variations” (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from a simple base melody). While the discussions of biology and life science did not appeal, the analyses of Bach’s music did, so much so that I wished I’d had a copy of the music handy, as a soundtrack to the text. (For reference, the recording that captivated Ressler is Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording, catalog #BWV 988.)
This book is challenging, but challenge has its rewards. I recommend it.
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Fiction
updated: 2004-04-19 05:53:31
A surfer once told me that surfing isn’t a sport or hobby, but a way of life. He became philosophical about it: the majesty of the ocean, the power and beauty of the wave… (and then, true to form, he lit up a big fat doobie.) The surf-buddy movie Point Break illustrates the same connection between wave riding and introspective analyses of consciousness. “You’re not going to start chanting, are you?” asks Keanu Reeves. Patrick Swayze laughs. “I might!”
Allan Weisbecker doesn’t chant, but he can put into words exactly what it feels like to ride a wave. He also puts into words what it’s like to captain a ship loaded down with a couple million dollars’ worth of pot into someone’s front lawn, for lack of a suitable offload dock, near Long Island Sound.
He has created, in this autobiographical adventure, a fascinating and eminently readable journal of his 2-year odyssey into Central America, a search both for a long-lost surfer friend, and the perfect wave. It’s at once a road story, a travelogue, and a nonfiction fantasy. There is a maturity, or an honesty, to the storytelling that makes Weisbecker a sympathetic character even when he’s violating international law as well as the ocean he loves so dearly. I laughed a lot. I also felt like I began to understand the lifestyle that is surfing.
Weisbecker finds both of the things he sets out to find. In the process, he also creates a wonderfully entertaining story. I recommend this book. I so enjoyed it, I’m planning to read the author’s earlier novel, Cosmic Banditos.
(The Amazon page for this book contains more positive reviews, one of which reads so much like what I’ve written here that I wish I’d seen it first, and saved myself the arduous process of composition.)
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Non-Fiction
updated: 2004-03-19 19:41:18
