DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

According to the RayOVac FAQ:

How and where can I recycle my batteries?
Answer: No general household battery recycling system exists in the USA.

This is false. Here’s a general household battery recycling program: http://www.batteryrecycling.com/

Furthermore, many large grocery and hardware store chains offer community battery recycling programs. If you call the three biggest chain grocery or drugstores near you, you’ll almost certainly find one that accepts used household batteries in bulk.

Even rechargeable batteries can be recycled easily. There’s a great resource at the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation — find a battery recycling location near you. The list contains US and Canadian collection points. Kudos to the RBRC.

(This is part 2 of a 4-part series on world-class focaccia. Just to confuse you, it’s “day 1”, unless it took you 24 hours to read the introduction.)

Great focaccia starts two days back in time, with a bucket of slop called poolish.

Reinhart’s official recipe for poolish calls for a 50/50 mix of water to flour, by volume. That is, it calls for 4 cups of flour and 4 cups of water. It has been my repeated experience that a poolish made this thin will separate and look nasty by the time I need it, the next day. For this reason I often leave 1/4 of the water out. This gives me more control over timing, and results in a poolish less likely to separate.

The thicker poolish will take longer to ferment, so if you do this, allow additional fermentation time. I have successfully left this thicker poolish at room temperature for 6-8 hours (overnight), rather than the 3 indicated in the recipe, prior to retarding. (The retarding step is still necessary; the most important ingredient in this or any great bread is time.)

Then, before mixing the dough, stir the ‘missing’ water into the poolish to get it to the hydration rate assumed by the recipe.

If you’ve never made focaccia before, I would encourage you to follow the poolish recipe as written, at least the first time. Your focaccia will turn out even if the poolish separates.

To help prevent separation, mix the poolish well — a few simple turns with a spoon won’t be sufficient. If you have an electric hand mixer, use it.

This November I’ll spend a weekend recording music with my two JAR bandmates. It feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, except that it has happened once already, but you get the idea: joining three people from different parts of the country with the right gear and the right intention and the right preparation takes a lot of work — about 10 months’ worth in my case because I committed to write two songs.

Writing songs is easy for some people. I think Paul Simon can write a song faster than I can write my name. And then he goes on to sell the song for a million dollars, whereas I flip to the next page of the ledger and sign yet another check for, I don’t know, the latest Paul Simon album.

Writing songs is hard for me, because until recently I didn’t play a melodic instrument. (Some would say I still don’t play a melodic instrument.)

Anyway, I’ve completed basic tracks for my first composition, “Ode to Soup.” This is a preproduction demo featuring me on drums and on hammer dulcimer, which is a melodic instrument well-suited to drummers because only two notes can be played at a time.

Ode To Soup demo (May, 2004) (Copyright © 2004 matthew mcglynn.)

“Preproduction demo” means the song isn’t finished. It has been shipped off to a man with many basses (with an average of 4.75 strings apiece) for some low-end attention and possible arrangement changes. Following that it will be shipped off to a man with a glow-in-the-dark slug on his guitar in hopes of acquiring — dare I say it? — a melody. Oh, and a big-assed guital solo. Following that we’ll re-record the entire thing, top to bottom, with better recording gear.

Will the song have lyrics? It probably should. One would think I’d be able to string a few words together, but so far this has turned out not to be the case.

As unfinished as it is, this demo is actually the second version of the song I’ve made. The first was composed and recorded in sections, then stitched together in ProTools. I was able to clone and repeat sections to see how they fit together.

This second version brings a big improvement in the quality of the performance and recording. It contains no loops; it’s so sparse and repetitive already, I couldn’t bear to copy and paste entire choruses (as I had the first time around).

The drums on this version were recorded with an electronic drum kit on loan from a friend, who deserves a good musical citizen award for loaning out a percussion instrument (!) to a drummer in need. Using an electronic kit rather than acoustic was easier in some ways and harder in others; I’ll revisit this topic in a future post.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this proto-song grows up. I’ll post additional revisions here over time, and if all goes well, I’ll have a final version in December.

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.