DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Wired covers TV “superchef” Alton Brown in The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking. The subtitle sums up Brown’s appeal: “Food Network superchef Alton Brown is part MacGyver, part mad scientist. Welcome to his lab.”

On the topic of kitchen science, the article relates an odd story from the history of oven design:

In the late 1700s, Benjamin Thompson, aka Count Rumford, repurposed tombstones from a Long Island graveyard to build an enclosed camp stove. His invention had the dubious distinction of producing bread crusts that bore the names of the deceased.

Ashland, OR is just north of the California border. It’s about a six-hour drive from the SF Bay Area, and a neat place for a weekend retreat. We weren’t retreating this time, but rather passing through en route to elsewhere. But we’ve retreated here before.

The town is famous as the home for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, an annual event that has been expanded to run for a solid eight months per year. I have not personally attended a Shakespeare event here; I had enough Shakespeare in high school to last me a looong time. Also, there are enough cheesy Shakespeare references in the downtown shopping area to tide me over until, basically, my next life. Examples: The Bard’s Inn, CD or Not CD, and if I had to guess, Henry IV’s Septic Pump, The Merchant of Venicecream, Seven-11 Ages of Man, Burger King Lear, etc.

The downtown area is a mecca of interesting shops and appealing restaurants. Most of the shops seem to be closed a lot of the time, despite the fact that foot traffic is relatively heavy until late in the evening. But I enjoyed the creative signage — in addition to the typical “Closed” signs, I saw several that said “Nope” and one, my favorite, that announced simply “Shut”.

Should you go to Ashland, make time for dinner at the Standing Stone Brewing Company. The food is consistently great. The beers are, too. Note the big wood-fired pizza oven in the kitchen; it turns out excellent breads and sourdough-crust pizzas. If this restaurant were local, I’d eat there every weekend.

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.