DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Focaccia is the quintessential party food: completely self-contained, visually appealing, easily handled. Consumers of focaccia need no plates, forks, or dips. Unlike, for example, chip-and-salsa consumers, they need not hover near the food trays when grazing (although they tend to hover near the focaccia anyway — but this is a limitation of the consumer, not the bread).

There is a world-class recipe for focaccia in Peter Reinhart’s Crust & Crumb. If you’re a fan of focaccia or if you’re looking for that perfect appetizer or side dish for your upcoming barbecue, track down a copy of Crust & Crumb and then check back here for the rest of this series: I’ll present a companion to the official recipe, to provide a layperson’s perspective on Reinhart’s “master formula.” The recipe, as published, is clear and accurate, yet I’ve found a few ways to push and pull it to create superior results.

The series will mimic the baking schedule:

• Day 1 - make the poolish (starter)
• Day 2 - make, scale, and shape the dough
• Day 3 - top and bake

By way of preview, here are the three focaccias I made last week:

• roma tomato, caper, mozzarella
• potato and rosemary
• sun-dried tomato and mozzarella

I read a lot, and I re-read a lot. I keep books pretty much forever, and I refer back to them often, e.g. six to ten months after the first or second read when I finally get around to writing a review.

Probably because they didn’t spent so much time with their noses in a book, the in-laws of a good friend of mine have somewhat recently become wealthy — they sold a company or two and retired to a place that’s usually warm. And another place that’s always warm. And a boat. And to a place in Sausalito, which if not consistently warm at least has numerous other redeeming qualities, as would any coastal town on the tip of the Marin peninsula just across the bay from San Francisco.

I recently visited this house, which sports multiple-million-dollar views of Angel Island and the San Francisco Bay. It’s a beautiful place, filled with tasteful art, gorgeous furniture, and interesting architecture, none of which you’d actually notice until you’ve torn your eyes away from the windows, which look down on lots of other somewhat less wealthy people and a gaggle of tourists who aren’t wealthy at all but like to hang out in the fancy neighborhoods as if some of the apparent local good fortune could be found in the souvenir shops near the water.

Anyway, I was wandering through the house, going through the drawers, etc., when I noticed a couple books on a shelf in the study. That’s when it really hit home, what wealth means. I’d already had the realization that owning three homes means shopping for three beds, three kitchen tables, six to nine stereos, 1.5 acres of tile, and of course three drum kits. I’d realized it and filed it away without analysis, because if you buy multiple homes of course you’d have to furnish them all. That goes without saying.

The sight of the book hit me harder, though, because I imagined myself in one of my hypothetical other properties, thinking or writing about something and needing to look up a passage or citation in my library, and realizing, Damn, I left that book in my other house.

Location, location, location: $1M for one-half acre

When offered the choice of spending a weekend with Pamela Anderson or a Porsche, nine of 10 German men chose the car.

This is not as surprising as the article’s author seems to think. I don’t know anybody who would honestly want to spend a weekend with Pamela Anderson. I wouldn’t even want to spend a weekend with the Pamera Anderson / Tommy Lee sex video, because that’s the image I already have playing in my mind every time I hear her name. I mean, this is a video that should come with a free pair of rubber gloves.

So, yeah, I’d definitely go for the Porsche. For that matter I’d probably go for a 1976 Pacer — a pink one. With a Confederate flag painted on the roof, and a horn that plays “Oh, Susanna.”

I went to the plaNetwork conference in the Presidio today. It was pretty interesting, as you’d expect if you could get a couple hundred left-leaning technology geeks in a room to talk about how to remake politics, culture, and social responsibility through creative Internet applications.

If I could sum it up into one word, the one word would be: blogging. No, wait, it’s RSS. No, wait, it’s targeted email. Well, maybe it’s not possible to boil 20 hours of conference into one word. Or even a single blog entry.

The organizers contracted with GreenHome to “green” the conference. This meant using compostable cups and forks, and providing many recycling bins throughout the conference center. These few small changes made it easy to do the right thing after lunch — although there was still some confusion about whether paper plates (bleached, ech) should go into the compost or the paper recycling. Anyway, I appreciated the effort. It would be lame to spend the morning discussing how to make the future ecologically sane and socially just if at lunchtime we’d generate 200 lbs of landfill garbage to be trucked to Alameda.